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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Linda Condon, by Joseph Hergesheimer
+
+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: Linda Condon
+
+Author: Joseph Hergesheimer
+
+
+Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7171]
+This file was first posted on March 20, 2003
+Last Updated: June 12, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LINDA CONDON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Anne Folland, Tiffany Vergon, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LINDA CONDON
+
+By Joseph Hergesheimer
+
+
+
+_To_ CARL VAN VECHTEN
+
+_This, Linda Condon's Gravest Bow._
+
+
+
+The Works Of Joseph Hergesheimer
+
+The Lay Anthony
+
+Mountain Blood
+
+The Three Black Pennys
+
+Gold And Iron
+
+Java Head
+
+The Happy End
+
+Linda Condon
+
+
+
+
+LINDA CONDON
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+A black bang was, but not ultimately, the most notable feature of her
+uncommon personality--straight and severe and dense across her clear
+pale brow and eyes. Her eyes were the last thing to remember and wonder
+about; in shade blue, they had a velvet richness, a poignant intensity
+of lovely color, that surprised the heart. Aside from that she was slim,
+perhaps ten years old, and graver than gay.
+
+Her mother was gay for them both, and, therefore, for the entire family.
+No father was in evidence; he was dead and never spoken of, and Linda
+was the only child. Linda's dresses, those significant trivialities,
+plainly showed two tendencies--the gaiety of her mother and her own
+always formal gravity. If Linda appeared at dinner, in the massive
+Renaissance materialism of the hotel dining-room, with a preposterous
+magenta hair-ribbon on her shapely head, her mother had succeeded in
+expressing her sense of the appropriately decorative; while if Linda
+wore an unornamented but equally "unsuitable" frock of dark velvet, she,
+in her turn, had been vindicated.
+
+Again, but far more rarely, the child's selection was evident on the
+woman. As a rule Mrs. Condon garbed her flamboyant body in large and
+expensive patterns or extremely tailored suits; and of the two, the
+evening satins and powdered arms barely retaining an admissible line,
+and the suits, the latter were the most, well--spectacular.
+
+She was not dark in color but brightly golden; a gold, it must be said
+in all honesty, her own, a metallic gold crisply and solidly marcelled;
+with hazel-brown eyes, and a mouth which, set against her daughter's
+deep-blue gaze, was her particular attraction. It was rouged to a
+nicety, the under lip a little full and never quite against the upper.
+If Linda's effect was cool and remote, Mrs. Condon, thanks to her
+mouth, was reassuringly imminent. She was, too, friendly; she talked to
+women--in her not overfrequent opportunities--in a rapid warm inaccurate
+confession of almost everything they desired to hear. The women, of
+course, were continually hampered by the unfortunate fact that
+the questions nearest their hearts, or curiosity, were entirely
+inadmissible.
+
+Viewed objectively, they all, with the exception of Linda, seemed alike;
+but that might have been due to their common impressive setting. The
+Boscombe, in its way, was as lavish as Mrs. Condon's dresses. The main
+place of congregation, for instance, was a great space of white marble
+columns, Turkey-red carpet and growing palms. It was lighted at night
+indirectly by alabaster bowls hanging on gilded chains--a soft bright
+flood of radiance falling on the seated or slowly promenading women with
+bare shoulders.
+
+Usually they were going with a restrained sharp eagerness toward the
+dining-room or leaving it in a more languid flushed repletion. There
+were, among them, men; but somehow the men never seemed to be of the
+least account. It was a women's paradise. The glow from above always
+emphasized the gowns, the gowns like orchids and tea-roses and the
+leaves of magnolias. It sparkled in the red and green and crystal
+jewels like exotic dew scattered over the exotic human flowers. Very
+occasionally there was a complacent or irritable masculine utterance,
+and then it was immediately lost in the dominant feminine sibilance.
+
+Other children than Linda sped in the manner of brilliant fretful tops
+literally on the elaborate outskirts of the throng; but they were as
+different from her as she was from the elders. Indeed Linda resembled
+the latter, rather than her proper age, remarkably. She had an air of
+responsibility, sometimes expressed in a troubled frown, and again by
+the way she hurried sedately through drifting figures toward a definite
+purpose and end.
+
+Usually it was in the service of one of her mother's small innumerable
+requests or necessities; if the latter were sitting with a gentleman on
+the open hotel promenade that overlooked the sea and needed a heavier
+wrap, Linda returned immediately with a furred cloak on her arm; if the
+elder, going out after dinner, had brought down the wrong gloves, Linda
+knew the exact wanted pair in the long perfumed box; while countless
+trifles were needed from the convenient drug-store.
+
+The latter was a place of white mosaic floor and glittering glass, with
+a marble counter heaped with vivid fruit and silver-covered bowls of
+sirups and creams with chopped nuts. Linda often found time to stop here
+for a delectable glass of assorted sweet compounds. She was on terms of
+intimacy with the colored man in a crisp linen coat who presided over
+the refreshments, and he invariably gave her an extra spoonful of the
+marron paste she preferred. When at lunch, it might be, she cared for
+very little, her mother would complain absently:
+
+"You must stop eating those sickening mixtures. They'd ruin any skin."
+At this she invariably found the diminutive mirror in the bag on her
+lap and glanced at her own slightly improved color. The burden of the
+feminine conversations in which Mrs. Condon was privileged to join,
+Linda discovered, was directed toward these overwhelming considerations
+of appearance. And their importance, communicated to her, resulted in
+a struggle between the desire to preserve her skin from ruin and the
+seductions of marron paste and maple chocolates.
+
+Now, with an uncomfortable sense of impending disaster, she would
+hastily consume one or the other; again, supported by a beginning
+self-imposed inflexibility, she would turn steadily away from
+temptation. In the end the latter triumphed; and her normal appetite,
+always moderate, was unimpaired.
+
+This spirit of resolution, it sometimes happened, was a cause of
+humorous dismay to her mother. "I declare, Linda," she would observe
+with an air of helplessness, "you make me feel like the giddy one and
+as if you were mama. It's the way you look, so disapproving. I have to
+remind myself you're only--just how old are you? I keep forgetting."
+Linda would inform her exactly and the other sigh:
+
+"The years slip around disgustingly. It seems only yesterday I was at
+my first party." Usually, in spite of Linda's eagerness to hear of that
+time when her mother was a girl, the elder would stop abruptly. On rare
+occasions solitary facts emerged from the recalled existence of a
+small town in the country. There were such details as buggy-riding
+and prayer-meetings and excursions to a Boiling Springs where the
+dancing-floor, open among the trees, was splendid. At these memories
+Mrs. Condon had been known to cry.
+
+But she would recover shortly. Her emotions were like that--easily
+roused, highly colored and soon forgotten. She forgot, Linda realized
+leniently, a great deal. It wasn't safe to rely on her promises.
+However, if she neglected a particular desire of Linda's, she
+continually brought back unexpected gifts of candy, boxes of silk
+stockings, or lovely half-wilted flowers.
+
+The flowers, they discovered, although they stayed fresh for a long
+while pinned to Linda's slim waist, died almost at once if worn by her
+mother. "It's my warm nature, I am certain," the latter proclaimed to
+her daughter; "while you are a little refrigerator. I must say it's
+wonderful how you keep your clothes the same. Neat as a pin." Somehow,
+with this commendation, she managed to include a slight uncomplimentary
+impatience. Linda didn't specially want to resemble a pin, a
+disagreeable object with a sharp point. She considered this in the long
+periods when, partly by preference, she was alone.
+
+Seated, perhaps, in the elaborate marble and deep red of the Boscombe's
+reception-rooms, isolated in the brilliant expensive throng, she would
+speculate over what passed in the light of her own special problems. But
+nothing, really, came out to her satisfaction. There was, notably, no
+one she might ask. Her mother, approached seriously, declared that Linda
+gave her the creeps; while others made it plain that it was their duty
+to repress the forwardness inevitable from the scandalous neglect of her
+upbringing.
+
+They, the women of the Boscombe, glancing at their finger-nails stained
+and buffed to a shining pale vermilion, lightly rubbing their rings on
+the dry palm of a hand, wondered pessimistically within Linda's hearing
+what could come out of such an association. That term, she vaguely
+gathered, referred to her mother. The latter evidently interested them
+tremendously; because, she explained, they had no affairs of their
+own to attend to. This was perfectly clear to Linda until Mrs. Condon
+further characterized them as "busy."
+
+The women, stopped by conventions from really satisfactory investigation
+at the source, drew her on occasion into a laboriously light
+inquisition. How long would Linda and her mama stay at the Boscombe? Had
+they closed their apartment? Where was it? Hadn't Mrs. Condon mentioned
+Cleveland? Wasn't Linda lonely with her mama out so much--they even said
+late--in rolling chairs? Had she ever seen Mr. Jasper before his arrival
+last week?
+
+No, of course she hadn't.
+
+Here they exchanged skeptical glances beneath relentlessly pulled
+eyebrows. He was really very nice, Mr. Jasper. Linda in a matter-of-fact
+voice replied that he had given her a twenty-dollar gold piece. Mr.
+Jasper was very generous. But perhaps he had rewarded her for being a
+good little girl and not--not bothering or hanging about. "Why should
+he?" was Linda's just perceptibly impatient response. Then they told her
+to be quiet because they wanted to listen to the music.
+
+This consisted in studying, through suspended glasses in chased
+platinum, a discreet programme. At the end of a selection they either
+applauded condescendingly or told each other that they hadn't cared for
+that last--really too peculiar. Whichever happened, the leader of the
+small orchestra, an extravagant Italian with a supple waist, turned and
+bowed repeatedly with a grimacing smile. The music, usually Viennese,
+was muted and emotional; its strains blended perfectly with the floating
+scents of the women and the faintly perceptible pungent odors of dinner.
+Every little while a specially insinuating melody became, apparently,
+tangled in the women's breathing, and their breasts, cunningly traced
+and caressed in tulle, would be disturbed.
+
+Mrs. Condon applauded more vigorously than was sanctioned by the others'
+necessity for elegance; the frank clapping of her pink palms never
+failed to betray a battery of affected and significant surprise in eyes
+like--polished cold agates. Linda, seated beside her parent, could be
+seen to lay a hand, narrow and blanched and marked by an emerald, on
+the elder's knee. Her pale fine lips moved rapidly with the shadow of
+trouble beneath the intense black bang.
+
+"I wish you wouldn't do it so loudly, mother," was what she whispered.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The jealously guarded truth was that, by her daughter at least, Mrs.
+Condon was adored. Linda observed that she was not like an ordinary
+mother, but more nearly resembled a youthful companion. Mrs. Condon's
+gaiety was as genuine as her fair hair. Not kept for formal occasion, it
+got out of bed with her, remained through the considerable difficulties
+of dressing with no maid but Linda, and if the other were not asleep
+called a cheerful or funny good night.
+
+Their rooms were separated by a bath, but Linda was scarcely ever in her
+own--her mother's lovely things, acting like a magnet, constantly drew
+her to their arrangement in the drawers. When the laundry came up, crisp
+and fragile webs heaped on the bed, Linda laid it away in a sort of
+ritual. Even with these publicly invisible garments a difference
+of choice existed between the two: Mrs. Condon's preference was for
+insertions, and Linda's for shadow embroidery and fine shell edges. Mrs.
+Condon, shaking into position a foam of ribbon and lace, would say with
+her gurgle of amusement, "I want to be ready when I fall down; if I
+followed your advice they'd take me for a nun."
+
+This brought out Linda's low clear laugh, the expression of her extreme
+happiness. It sounded, for an instant, like a chime of small silver
+bells; then died away, leaving the faintest perceptible flush on her
+healthy pallor. At other times her mother's humor made her vaguely
+uncomfortable, usually after wine or other drinks that left the elder's
+breath thick and oppressive. Linda failed completely to grasp the
+allusions of this wit but a sharp uneasiness always responded like the
+lingering stale memory of a bad dream.
+
+Once, at the Boscombe, her mother had been too silly for words: she had
+giggled and embraced her sweet little girl, torn an expensive veil to
+shreds and dropped a French model hat into the tub. After a distressing
+sickness she had gone to sleep fully dressed, and Linda, unable to move
+or wake her, had sat long beyond dinner into the night, fearful of the
+entrance of the chambermaid.
+
+The next day Mrs. Condon had been humble with remorse. Men, she said,
+were too beastly for description. This was not an unusual opinion. Linda
+observed that she was always condemning men in general and dressing for
+them in particular. She offered Linda endless advice in an abstracted
+manner:
+
+"They're all liars, Lin, and stingy about everything but their pleasure.
+Women are different but men are all alike. You get sick to death of
+them! Never bother them when they are smoking a cigar; cigarettes
+don't matter. Leave the cigarette-smokers alone, anyhow; they're not
+as dependable as the others. A man with a good cigar--you must know
+the good from the bad--is usually discreet. I ought to bring you up
+different, but, Lord, life's too short. Besides, you will learn more
+useful things right with mama, whose eyes are open, than anywhere else.
+
+"Powder my back, darling; I can't reach. If I'm a little late to-night
+go to sleep like a duck. You think Mr. Jasper's nice, don't you? So does
+mother. But you mustn't let him give you any more money. It'll make him
+conceited."
+
+Linda wondered what she meant by the last phrase. How could it make Mr.
+Jasper conceited to give her a gold piece? However, she decided that she
+had better not ask.
+
+It was like that with a great many of her mother's mysterious
+remarks--Linda had an instinctive feeling of drawing away. The other
+kissed her warmly and left a print of vivid red on her cheek.
+
+She examined the mark in the mirror when her mother had gone; it was,
+she decided, the kiss made visible. Then she laid away the things
+scattered about the room by Mrs. Condon's hasty dressing. Her own
+belongings were always in precise order.
+
+A sudden hesitation seized her at the thought of going down to the crowd
+at the music. The women made her uncomfortable. It wasn't what they
+said, but the way they said it; and the endless questions wearied her.
+She was, as well, continually bothered by her inability to impress upon
+them how splendid her mother was. Some of them she was certain did not
+appreciate her. Mrs. Condon at once admitted and was entertained by
+this, but it disturbed Linda. However, she understood the reason--when
+any nice men came along they always liked her mother best. This made the
+women mad.
+
+The world, she gathered, was a place where women played a game of men
+with each other. It was very difficult, she couldn't comprehend the
+rules or reason; and Linda was afraid that she would be unsuccessful
+and never have the perfect time her mother wanted for her. In the first
+place, she was too thin, and then she knew that she could never talk
+like her dearest. Perhaps when she had had some wine it would be
+different.
+
+She decided, after all, to go down to the assemblage; and, by one of
+the white marble pillars, Mrs. Randall captured her. "Why, here's
+Linda-all-alone," Mrs. Randall said. "Mama out again?" Linda replied
+stoutly, "She has a dreadful lot of invitations."
+
+Mrs. Randall, who wore much brighter clothes than her mother, was called
+by the latter an old buzzard. She was very old, Linda could see, with
+perfectly useless staring patches of paint on her wrinkled cheeks, and
+eyes that look as though they might come right out of her head. Her
+frizzled hair supported a dead false twist with a glittering diamond
+pin, and her soft cold hands were loaded with jewels. She frightened
+Linda, really, although she could not say why. Mrs. Randall was a great
+deal like the witch in a fairy-story, but that wasn't it. Linda hadn't
+the belief in witches necessary for dread. It might be her scratching
+voice; or the way she turned her head, without any chin at all, like a
+turtle; or her dresses, which led you to expect a person very different
+from an old buzzard.
+
+"Of course she does," said Mrs. Randall, "any number of invitations, and
+why shouldn't she? Your mother is very pleasant, to be sure." She nodded
+wisely to the woman beside her, Miss Skillern.
+
+Miss Skillern was short and broad and, in the evening, always wore
+curled ostrich plumes on tightly filled gray puffs. She reminded Linda
+of a wadded chair. Mrs. Randall, after the other's slight stiff assent,
+continued:
+
+"Your mama would never be lonely, not she. All I wonder is she doesn't
+get married again--with that blondine of hers. Wouldn't you rather have
+one papa than, in a way of speaking, a different one at every hotel?"
+
+Linda, completely at a loss for answer, studied Mrs. Randall with her
+direct deep blue gaze. Miss Skillern again inclined her plumes. With the
+rest of her immobile she was surprisingly like one of those fat china
+figures with a nodding head. Linda was assaulted by the familiar
+bewildered feeling of not understanding what was said and, at the same
+time, passionately resenting it from an inner sensitive recognition of
+something wrong.
+
+"How could I have that?" she finally asked.
+
+"How?" repeated Miss Skillern, breathing loudly.
+
+"Yes, how?" Mrs. Randall echoed. "You can ask your mama. You really can.
+And you may say that, as a matter of fact, the question came from us,"
+she included her companion.
+
+"From you," Miss Skillern exactly corrected her.
+
+"Indeed," the other cried heatedly, "from me! I think not. Didn't you
+ask? Answer me that, if you please. I heard you with my own ears say,
+'How?' While now, before my face, you try to deny it." It was plain to
+Linda that Miss Skillern was totally unmoved by the charge. She moved
+her lorgnette up, gazing stolidly at the musical programme. "From you,"
+she said again, after a little. Mrs. Randall suddenly regained her
+equilibrium.
+
+"If the ladies of this hotel are afraid to face that creature I--I--am
+not. I'll tell her in a minute what a respectable person thinks of
+her goings-on. More than that, I shall complain to Mr. Rennert. 'Mr.
+Rennert,' I'll say, 'either she leaves or me. Choose as you will. The
+reputation of your hotel--'" she spluttered and paused.
+
+"Proof," Miss Skillern pronounced judicially; "proof. We know, but
+that's not proof."
+
+"He has a wife," Mrs. Randall replied in a shrill whisper; "a wife
+who is an invalid. Mrs. Zoock, she who had St. Vitus' dance and left
+yesterday, heard it direct. George A. Jasper, woolen mills in Frankford,
+Pennsylvania. Mr. Rennert would thank me for that information."
+
+They had forgotten Linda. She stood rigid and cold--they were blaming
+her mother for going out in a rolling chair with Mr. Jasper because he
+was married. But her mother didn't know that; probably Mr. Jasper had
+not given it a thought. She was at the point of making this clear, when
+it seemed to her that it might be better to say that her mother knew
+everything there was about Mr. Jasper's wife; she could even add that
+they were all friends.
+
+Linda would have to tell her mother the second she came in, and then,
+of course, she'd stop going with Mr. Jasper. Men, she thought in the
+elder's phrase, were too beastly for words.
+
+"After all," Mrs. Randall was addressing her again, "you needn't say
+anything at all to your mama. It might make her so cross that she'd
+spank you."
+
+"Mother never spanks me," Linda replied with dignity.
+
+"If you were my little girl," said Miss Skillern, with rolling lips,
+"I'd put you over my knee with your skirts up and paddle you."
+
+Never, Linda thought, had she heard anything worse; she was profoundly
+shocked. The vision of Miss Skillern performing such an operation as
+she had described cut its horror on her mind. There was a sinking at her
+heart and a misty threat of tears.
+
+To avert this she walked slowly away. It was hardly past nine o'clock;
+her mother wouldn't be back for a long while, and she was too restless
+and unhappy to sit quietly above. Instead, she continued down to the
+floor where there were various games in the corridor leading to the
+billiard-room. The hall was dull, no one was clicking the balls about
+the green tables, and a solitary sick-looking man, with inky shadows
+under fixed eyes, was smoking a cigarette in a chair across from the
+cigar-stand.
+
+He looked over a thick magazine in a chocolate cover, his gaze arrested
+by her irresolute passage. "Hello, Bellina," he said.
+
+She stopped. "Linda," she corrected him, "Linda Condon." Obeying a
+sudden impulse, she dropped, with a sigh, into a place beside him.
+
+"You're bored," he went on, the magazine put away. "So am I, but my term
+is short."
+
+She wondered, principally, what he was doing, among so many women, at
+the Boscombe. He was different from Mr. Jasper, or the other men with
+fat stomachs, the old men with dragging feet. It embarrassed her to meet
+his gaze, it was so--so investigating. She guessed he was by the sea
+because he felt as badly as he looked. He asked surprisingly:
+
+"Why are you here?"
+
+"On the account of my mother," she explained. "But it doesn't matter
+much where I am. Places are all alike," she continued conversationally.
+"We're mostly at hotels--Florida in winter and Lake George in summer.
+This is kind of between."
+
+"Oh!" he said; and she was sure, from that short single exclamation, he
+understood everything.
+
+"Like all true beauty," he added, "it's plain that you are durable."
+
+"I don't like the seashore," she went on easily; "I'd rather be in a
+garden with piles of flowers and a big hedge."
+
+"Have you ever lived in a garden-close?"
+
+"No," she admitted; "it's just an idea. I told mother but she laughed at
+me and said a roof-garden was her choice."
+
+"Some day you'll have the place you describe," he assured her. "It is
+written all over you. I would like to see you, Bellina, in a space
+of emerald sod and geraniums." She decided to accept without further
+protest his name for her. "You are right, too, about the hedge--the
+highest and thickest in creation. I should recommend a pseudo-classic
+house, Georgian, rather small, a white façade against the grass. A
+Jacobean dining-room, dark certainly, the French windows open on dipping
+candle flames. You'd wear white, with your hair low and the midnight
+bang as it is now."
+
+"That would be awfully nice," Linda replied vaguely. She sighed.
+
+"But a very light drawing-room!" he cried. "White panels and arches and
+Canton-blue rugs--the brothers Adam. A fluted mantel, McIntires, and a
+brass hod. Curiously enough, I always see you in the evening ... at the
+piano. I'm not so bored, now." Little flames of red burned in either
+thin cheek. "What nonsense!" Suddenly he was tired. "This is a practical
+and earnest world," his voice grew thin and hurt her. "Yet beauty is
+relentless. You'll have your garden, but I shouldn't be surprised at
+difficulties first."
+
+"It won't be so hard to get," she declared confidently. "I mean to
+choose the right man. Mother says that's the answer. Women, she says,
+won't use their senses."
+
+"Ah."
+
+Linda began to think this was a most unpleasant monosyllable.
+
+"So that's the lay! Has she succeeded?"
+
+"She has a splendid time. She's out tonight with Mr. Jasper in a rolling
+chair, and he has loads and loads of money. It makes all the other women
+cross."
+
+"Here you are, then, till she gets back?"
+
+"There's no one else."
+
+"But, as a parent, infinitely preferable to the righteous," he murmured.
+"And you--"
+
+"I think mother's perfect," she answered simply.
+
+He shook his head. "You won't succeed at it, though. Your mother, for
+example, isn't dark."
+
+"The loveliest gold hair," she said ecstatically. "She's much much
+prettier than I'll ever be."
+
+"Prettier, yes. The trouble is, you are lovely, magical. You will stay
+for a lifetime in the memory. The merest touch of you will be more
+potent than any duty or fidelity. A man's only salvation will be his
+blindness."
+
+Although she didn't understand a word of this, Linda liked to hear
+him; he was talking as though she were grown up, and in response to the
+flattery she was magnetic and eager.
+
+"One time," he said, "very long ago, beauty was worshiped. Men, you
+see, know better now. They want their dollar's worth. The world was
+absolutely different then--there were deep adventurous forests with holy
+chapels in the green combe for an orison, and hermits rising to Paradise
+on the _Te Deum Laudamus_ of the angels and archangels. There were black
+castles and, in the broad meadows, silk tents with ivory pegs and poles
+of gold.
+
+"The enchantments were as thick as shadows under the trees: perhaps the
+loveliest of women riding a snow-white mule, with a saddle cloth of red
+samite, or, wrapped in her shining hair, on a leopard with yellow eyes,
+lured you to a pavilion, scattered with rushes and flowers and magical
+herbs, and a shameful end. Or a silver doe would weep, begging you to
+pierce her with your sword, and, when you did, there knelt the daughter
+of the King of Wales.
+
+"But I started to tell you about the worship of beauty. Plato started it
+although Cardinal Pietro Bembo was responsible for the creed. He lived
+in Italy, in an age like a lily. It developed mostly at Florence in
+the Platonic Academy of Cosomo and Pico della Mirandola. Love was the
+supreme force, and its greatest expression a desire beyond the body."
+
+He gazed at Linda with a quizzical light in his eyes deep in shadow.
+
+"Love," he said again, and then paused. "One set of words will do
+as well as another. You will understand, or not, with something far
+different from intellectual comprehension. The endless service of
+beauty. Of course, a woman--but never the animal; the spirit always.
+Born in the spirit, served in the spirit, ending in the spirit. A direct
+contradiction, you see, to nature and common sense, frugality and the
+sacred symbol of the dollar.
+
+"It wouldn't please your Mr. Jasper, with his heaps and heaps of money.
+Mr. Jasper would consider himself sold. But Novalis, not so very long
+ago, understood.... A dead girl more real than all earth. You mustn't
+suppose it to be mere mysticism."
+
+Linda said, "Very well, I won't."
+
+He nodded. "No one could call Michelangelo hysterical. Sometime in the
+history of man, of a salt solution, this divinity has touched them.
+Touched them hopefully, and perhaps gone--banished by the other
+destination. Or I can comprehend nature killing it relentlessly, since
+it didn't lead to propagation. Then, too, as much as was useful was
+turned into a dogma for politics and priests.
+
+"You saw in the rushlight a woman against the arras; there was a
+humming of viola d'amore from the musicians' balcony; she smiled at you,
+lingering, and then vanished with a whisper of brocade de Lyons on a
+sanded floor. Nothing else but a soft white glove, eternally fragrant,
+in your habergeon, an eternally fragrant memory; the dim vision in stone
+street and coppice; a word, a message, it might be, sent across the
+world of steel at death. And then, in the last flicker of vision, the
+arras and the clear insistent strings, the whispering brocade de Lyons
+on the landing.
+
+"The philosophy of it," he said in a different tone, "is exact, even
+a scientific truth. But men have been more concerned with turning lead
+into gold; naturally the spirit has been neglected. The science of love
+has been incredibly soiled:
+
+"The old gesture toward the stars, the bridge of perfection, the escape
+from the fatality of flesh. Yet it was a service of the body made
+incredibly lovely in actuality and still never to be grasped. Never to
+be won. It ought to be clear to you that realized it would diminish into
+quite a different thing--
+
+"'_La figlia della sua mente, l'amorosa idea._'"
+
+His voice grew so faint that Linda could scarcely distinguish articulate
+sounds. All that he said, without meaning for her, stirred her heart.
+She was used to elder enigmas of speech; her normal response was
+instinctively emotional, and nothing detracted from the gravity of her
+attention.
+
+"Not in pious men," he continued, more uncertain; "nor in seminaries of
+virtue. They have their reward. But in men whose bitterness of longing
+grew out of hideous fault. The distinction of beauty--not a payment for
+prayers or chastity. The distinction of love ... above chests of linen
+and a banker's talent and patents of nobility.... Divine need. Idiotic.
+But what else, what better, offers?"
+
+He was, she saw, terribly sick. His hands were clenched and his entire
+being strained and rigid, as though he were trying to do something
+tremendously difficult. At last, with infinite pain, he succeeded.
+
+"I must get away," he articulated.
+
+Linda was surprised at the effort necessary for this slight
+accomplishment when he had said the most bewildering things with
+complete ease. Well, the elevators were right in front of him. He rose
+slowly, and, with Linda standing at his side, dug a sharp hand into her
+shoulder. It hurt, but instinctively she bore it and, moving forward,
+partly supported him. She pressed the bell that signaled for the
+elevator and it almost immediately sank into view. "Hurry," he said
+harshly to the colored operator in a green uniform; and quite suddenly,
+leaving a sense of profound mystery, he disappeared.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Linda decided that he had told her a rather stupid fairy story. She was
+too old for such ridiculous things as ladies in their shining hair on a
+leopard. She remembered clearly seeing one of the latter at a zoological
+garden. It had yellow eyes, but no one would care to ride on it. Her
+mother, she was certain, knew more about love than any man. His words
+faded quickly from her memory, but a confused rich sense stirred her
+heart, a feeling such as she experienced after an unusually happy day:
+white gloves and music and Mr. Jasper displeased.
+
+A clock chimed ten, and she proceeded to her mother's room, where she
+must wait up with her information about Mr. Jasper's wife. She was
+furious at him for a carelessness that had brought her mother such
+unfavorable criticism. Everything had been put away before going down,
+and there was nothing for her to do. The time dragged tediously. The
+hands of the traveling-clock in purple leather on the dressing-table
+moved deliberately around to eleven. A ringing of ice in one of the
+metal pitchers carried by the bell boys sounded from the corridor. There
+was the faint wail of a baby.
+
+Suddenly and acutely Linda was lonely--a new kind of loneliness that had
+nothing to do with the fact that she was by herself. It was a strange
+cold unhappiness, pressing over her like a cloud and, at the same time,
+it was nothing at all. That is, there was no reason for it. The room was
+brightly lighted and, anyhow, she wasn't afraid of "things." She thought
+that at any minute she must cry like that baby. After a little she felt
+better; rather the unhappiness changed to wanting. What she wanted was
+a puzzle; but nothing else would satisfy her. It might be a necklace of
+little pearls, but it wasn't. It might be--. Now it was twelve o'clock.
+Dear, dear, why didn't she come back!
+
+Music, awfully faint, and a whisper, like a dress, across the floor.
+Her emotion changed again, to an extraordinary delight, a glow like that
+which filled her at the expression of her adoration for her mother, but
+infinitely greater. She was seated, and she lifted her head with her
+eyes closed and hands clasped. The clock pointed to one and her parent
+came into the room.
+
+"Linda," she exclaimed crossly, "whatever are you doing up? A bad little
+girl. I told you to be asleep hours before this."
+
+"There is something you had to know right away," Linda informed her
+solemnly. "I only just heard it from Mrs. Randall and Miss Skillern."
+Her mother's flushed face hardened. "Mr. Jasper is married," Linda said.
+
+Mrs. Condon dropped with an angry flounce into a chair. Her broad scarf
+of sealskin slipped from one shoulder. Her hat was crooked and her hair
+disarranged. "So that's it," she said bitterly; "and they went to you.
+The dam' old foxes. They went to you, nothing more than a child."
+
+Linda put in, "They didn't mean to; it just sort of came out. I knew
+you'd stop as soon as you heard. Wasn't it horrid of him?"
+
+"And this," Mrs. Condon declared, "is what I get for being, yes--proper.
+
+"I said to-night, 'George,' I said, 'go right back home. It's the only
+thing. They have a right to you.' I told him that only to-night. And,
+'No, I must consider my little Linda.' If I had held up my finger,"
+she held up a finger to show the smallness of the act necessary, "where
+would we have all been?
+
+"But this is what I get. You might think the world would notice a
+woman's best efforts. No, they all try to crowd her and see her slip. If
+they don't watch out I'll skid, all right, and with some one they least
+expect. I have opportunities."
+
+Linda realized with a sense of confusion that her mother had known of
+Mr. Jasper's marriage all the while. But she had nobly tried to save him
+from something; just what Linda couldn't make out. The other's breath
+was heavy with drinking.
+
+"You go to bed, Lin," she continued; "and thank you for taking care of
+mama. I hope to goodness you'll learn from all this--pick out what
+you want and make for it. Don't bother with the antique frumps, the
+disappointed old tabbies. Have your fun. There's nothing else. If you
+like a man, be on the level with him--give and take. Men are not saints
+and we're better for it; we don't live in a heaven. You've got a sweet
+little figure. Always remember mama telling you that the most expensive
+corsets are the cheapest in the end."
+
+Linda undressed slowly and methodically, her mother's words ringing
+in her head. Always remember--but of course she would have the nicest
+things possible.... A keepsake and faint music. She thought, privately,
+that she was too thin; she'd rather be her mother, with shoulders like
+bunches of smooth pink roses. In bed, just as she was falling asleep, a
+sound disturbed her from the corridor above--the slow tramping of heavy
+feet, like a number of men carefully bearing an awkward object. She
+listened with suspended breath while they passed. The footfalls seemed
+to pound on her heart. Slowly, slowly they went, unnatural and measured.
+They were gone now, but she still heard them. The crashing of her mother
+into bed followed with a deep sigh. The long fall of a wave on the shore
+was audible. Two things contended in her stilled brain--the mysterious
+feeling of desire and her mother's advice. They were separate and
+fought, yet they were strangely incomprehensibly joined.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+In the morning Mrs. Condon, with a very late breakfast-tray in bed, had
+regained her usual cheerful manner. "The truth is," she told Linda, "I'm
+glad that Jasper man has gone. He had no idea of discretion; tired of
+them anyhow." Linda radiated happiness. This was the mother she loved
+above all others. Her mind turned a little to the man who had talked to
+her the night before. She wondered if he were better. His thin blanched
+face, his eyes gleaming uncomfortably in smudges, recurred to her.
+Perhaps he'd be down by the cigar-stand again. She went, presently, to
+see, but the row of chairs was empty.
+
+However, the neglected thick brown-covered magazine was still on the
+ledge by which he had been sitting. There was a name on it, and while,
+ordinarily, she couldn't read handwriting, this was so clear and
+regular, but minutely small, that she was able to spell it out--Howard
+Welles.
+
+It disappointed her not to find him; at lunch she observed nearly every
+one present, but still he was lost. He wasn't listening to the music
+after dinner, nor below. A deep sense of disappointment grew within her.
+Linda wanted to see him, hear him talk; at times a sharp hurt in the
+shoulder he had grasped brought him back vividly. The next day it was
+the same, and finally, diffidently, she approached the hotel desk. A
+clerk she knew, Mr. Fiske, was rapidly sorting mail, and she waited
+politely until he had finished.
+
+"Well?" he asked.
+
+"I found this down-stairs," she said, giving him the magazine. "Perhaps
+he'll want it." Mr. Fiske looked at the written name, and then glanced
+sharply at her. "No," he told her brusquely, "he won't want it." He
+turned away with the magazine and left Linda standing irresolutely. She
+wanted to ask if Mr. Welles were still at the Boscombe; if the latter
+didn't want the magazine she'd love to have it, Linda couldn't tell why.
+But the clerk went into the treasurer's office and she was forced to
+move away.
+
+Later, lingering inexplicably about the spot where she had heard so
+many bewildering words, a very different man spoke to her. He, Linda
+observed, was smoking a cigar, a good one, she was certain. He was
+smallish and had a short bristling mustache and head partly bald.
+His shoes were very shiny and altogether he had a look of prosperity.
+"Hello, cutie!" he cried, capturing her arm. She responded listlessly.
+The other produced a crisp dollar bill. "Do you see the chocolates in
+that case?" he said, indicating the cigar-stand. "Well, get the best. If
+they cost more, let me know. Our financial rating is number one." Linda
+answered that she didn't think she cared for any. "All right," the man
+agreed; "sink the note in the First National Ladies Bank, if you know
+where that is."
+
+He engineered her unwillingly onto a knee. "How's papa?" he demanded. "I
+suppose he will be here Saturday to take his family through the stores?"
+
+She replied with dignity, "There is only my mother and me."
+
+At this information he exclaimed "Ah!" and touched his mustache with a
+diminutive gold-backed brush from a leather case. "That's more than I
+have," he confided to her; "there is only myself. Isn't that sad? You
+must be sorry for the lonely old boy."
+
+She wasn't. Probably he, too, had a wife somewhere; men were beastly. "I
+guess your mother wants a little company at times herself?"
+
+Linda, straining away from him, replied, "Oh, dear, no; there are just
+packs of gentlemen whenever she likes. But she is tired of them all."
+She escaped and he settled his waistcoat.
+
+"You mustn't run away," he admonished her; "nice children don't. Your
+mother didn't bring you up like that, I'm sure. She wouldn't like it."
+
+Linda hesitated, plainly conveying the fact that, if she were to wait,
+he would have to say something really important.
+
+"Just you two," he deliberated; "Miss and Mrs. Jones."
+
+"Not at all," Linda asserted shortly; "our name is Condon."
+
+"I wonder if you'd tell her this," he went on: "a gentleman's here by
+himself named Bardwell, who has seen her and admires her a whole lot.
+Tell her he's no young sprig but he likes a good time all the better.
+Dependable, too. Remember that, cutie. And he wouldn't presume if he had
+a short pocket. He knows class when he sees it."
+
+"It won't do any good," Linda assured him in her gravest manner. "She
+said only this morning she was sick of them."
+
+"That was before dinner," he replied cheerfully. "Things look different
+later in the day. You do what I tell you."
+
+All this Linda dutifully repeated. Her mother was at the dressing-table,
+rubbing cream into her cheeks, and she paused, surveying her reflection
+in the mirror. "He was smoking a big cigar," Linda added. The other
+laughed. "What a sharp little thing you are!" she exclaimed. "A body
+ought to be careful what they tell you." She wiped off the cream and
+rubbed a soft pinkish powder into her skin.
+
+"He saw me, did he?" she apparently addressed the glass. "Admired me a
+whole lot. Was he nice, Linda?" she turned. "Were his clothes right? You
+must point him out to me to-night. But do it carefully, darling. No one
+should notice. Your mother isn't on the shelf yet; she can hold her own,
+even in the Boscombe, against the whole barnyard."
+
+Linda, at the entrance to the dining-room, whispered, "There he is." But
+immediately Mr. Bardwell was smiling and speaking to them.
+
+"I had a delightful conversation with your little girl to-day," he told
+Mrs. Condon; "such a pretty child and well brought up."
+
+"And good, too," her mother replied; "not a minute's trouble. The common
+sense of the grown; you'd never believe it."
+
+"Why shouldn't I?" he protested gallantly. "Every reason to." Mrs.
+Condon blushed becomingly.
+
+"She had to make up for a lot," she sighed.
+
+An hour or more after dinner Mrs. Randall stopped Linda in the hall
+beyond the music. "Mama out?" she inquired brightly. "I thought Mr.
+Jasper left this morning?"
+
+Linda told her that Mr. Jasper had gone; she added nothing else.
+
+"I must look at the register," Mrs. Randall continued; "I really must."
+
+Obeying an uncontrollable impulse Linda half cried, "I'd like to see you
+riding on a leopard!" A flood of misery enveloped her, and she hurried
+up to the silence of her mother's deserted room.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+It was on her fourteenth birthday that Linda noticed a decided change
+in her mother; a change, unfortunately, that most of all affected
+the celebrated good humors. In the first place Mrs. Condon spent
+an increasingly large part of the day before the mirror of her
+dressing-table, but without any proportionate pleasure; or, if there
+was a proportion kept, it exhibited the negative result of a growing
+annoyance. "God knows why they all show at once," she exclaimed
+discontentedly, seated--as customary--before the eminently truthful
+reflection of a newly discovered set of lines. "I'm not old enough to
+begin to look like a hag."
+
+"Oh, mother," Linda protested, shocked, "you mustn't say such horrid
+things about yourself. Why, you're perfectly lovely, and you don't seem
+a speck older than you did years ago."
+
+The other, biting her full underlip at the unwelcome fact in turn biting
+a full lower lip back at her, made no reply. Linda lingered for a moment
+at her mother's ruffled pink shoulders; then, with a sigh, she turned to
+the reception-room of their small suite at the Hotel Gontram. It was a
+somber chamber furnished in red plush, with a complication of shades and
+gray-white net curtains at long windows and a deep green carpet. There
+was a fireplace, with a grate, supported by varnished oak pillars and
+elaborate mantel and glass, a glittering reddish center-table with a
+great many small odd shelves below, a desk with sheaves of hotel writing
+paper and the telephone.
+
+The Gontram was entirely different from the hotels at the lakes or
+seashore or in the South. It was a solid part of a short block west of
+Fifth Avenue in the middle of the city. Sherry's filled a corner with
+its massive stone bulk and glimpses of dining-rooms with glittering
+chandeliers and solemn gaiety, then impressive clubs and wide entrances
+under heavy glass and metal, tall porters in splendid livery, succeeded
+each other to the Hotel Gontram and the dull thunder of the elevated
+trains beyond.
+
+The revolving door, through which Linda sedately permitted herself to
+be moved, opened into a high space of numerous columns and benches,
+writing-desks and palms. At the back was the white room where, usually
+alone, she had breakfast, while the dining-room, discreetly lighted,
+was at the left. It was more interesting here than, for example, at
+the Boscombe; people were always coming in or going, and there were
+quantities of men. She watched them arriving with shoals of leather bags
+in the brisk care of the bellboys, disappear into the elevator, and, if
+it was evening, come down in dinner coats with vivid silk scarfs folded
+over their white shirts.
+
+The women were perpetually in street clothes or muffled in satin wraps;
+Linda only regarded them when they were exceptional. Usually she was
+intent on the men. It often happened that they returned her frank gaze
+with a smile, or stopped to converse with her. Sometimes it was an actor
+with a face dryly pink like a woman's from make-up; they were familiar
+and pinched her cheeks, calling her endearing names in conscious echoing
+voices as if they were quite hollow within. Then there were simply
+business men, who never appeared to take off their derby hats, and spoke
+to her of their little girls at home. She was entirely at ease with the
+latter--so many of her mother's friends were similar--and critically
+valued the details of their dress, the cigar-cases with or without gold
+corners, the watch-chains with jeweled insignia, the cuff-links and
+embroidered handkerchiefs.
+
+If her mother approached while Linda was so engaged the elder would
+linger with a faint smile, at which, now, the girl was conscious of a
+growing impatience. She'd rise with dignity and, if possible, escape
+with her parent from florid courtesies. This sense of annoyance
+oppressed her, too, in the dining-room, where her mother, a cocktail in
+her hand, would engage in long cheerful discussions with the captains or
+waiters. Other women, Linda observed, spoke with complete indifference
+and their attention on the _carte de jour_. Of course it was much more
+friendly to be interested in the servants' affairs--they told her mother
+about their wives and the number of their children, the difficulties of
+bringing both ends together, and served her with the promptest care; but
+instinctively Linda avoided any but the most formal contact.
+
+She had to insist, as well, on paying the tips; for Mrs. Condon, her
+sympathies engaged, was quite apt to leave on the table a five-dollar
+bill or an indiscriminate heap of silver. "You are a regular little
+Jew," she would reply lightly to Linda's protests. This, the latter
+thought, was unfair; for the only Jew she knew, Mr. Moses Feldt, an
+acquaintance of their present period in New York, was quite the most
+generous person she knew. "Certainly you don't take after your mama."
+
+After she said this she always paused with tight lips. It was charged
+with the assumption that, while Linda didn't resemble her, she did
+very much a mysterious and unfavorably regarded personage. Her father,
+probably. More and more Linda wondered about him. He was dead, she knew,
+but that, she began to see, was no reason for the positive prohibition
+to mention him at all. Perhaps he had done something dreadful, with
+money, and had disgraced them all. Yet she was convinced that this was
+not so.
+
+She had heard a great many uncomplimentary words applied to husbands,
+most of which she had been unable to comprehend; and she speculated
+blankly on them in her mother's connection. On the whole the women
+agreed that they were remarkably stupid and transparent, they protested
+that they understood and guided every move husbands made; and this
+surely gave her father no opportunity for independent crime. She was
+held from questioning not so much by her mother's command--at times she
+calmly and successfully ignored that--as from its unfortunate effect on
+the elder.
+
+Mrs. Condon would burn with a generalized anger that sank to a
+despondency fortified by the brandy flask. Straining embraces and tears,
+painful to support, would follow, or more unbearable silliness. The old
+difficulties with giggling or sympathetic chambermaid;--Linda couldn't
+decide which was worse--then confronted her with the necessity for rigid
+lies, misery, and the procuring of sums of money from the bag in the
+top drawer. Altogether, and specially with the fresh difficulties of
+her mother's unaccountable irritation and apprehensions, things were
+frightfully complicated.
+
+It was late afternoon in November, and the electric lights were on;
+however, they were lighted when they rose, whenever they were in the
+rooms, for it was always gloomy if not positively dark; the bedroom
+looked into a deep exterior well and the windows of the other chamber
+opened on an uncompromising blank wall. Yet Linda, now widely learned in
+such settings, rather liked her present situation. They had occupied the
+same suite before, for one thing; and going back into it had given her a
+sense of familiarity in so much that always shifted.
+
+Linda, personally, had changed very little; she was taller than four
+years before, but not a great deal; she was, perhaps, more graceful--her
+movements had become less sudden--more assured, the rapidly maturing
+qualities of her mind made visible; and she had gained a surprising
+repose.
+
+Now, for example, she sat in a huge chair cushioned with black leather
+and thought, with a frowning brow, of her mother. It was clear that the
+latter was obviously worried about--to put it frankly--her face. Her
+figure, she repeatedly asserted, could be reasoned with; she had always
+been reconciled to a certain jolly stoutness, but her face, the
+lines that appeared about her eyes overnight, fairly drove her to hot
+indiscreet tears. She had been to see about it, Linda knew; and returned
+from numerous beauty-parlors marvelously rejuvenated--for the evening.
+
+She had been painted, enameled, vibrated, massaged; she had had electric
+treatment, rays and tissue builders; and once she had been baked. To-day
+the toilet table would be loaded with milkweed, cerates and vanishing
+cream; tomorrow they would all be swept away, given to delighted
+chambermaids, while Mrs. Condon declared that, when all was said, cold
+water and a rough towel was nature's way.
+
+This afternoon, apparently everything, including hope, had failed. She
+was as cross as cross. From the manner in which she spoke it might have
+been Linda's fault. The worst of it was that even the latter saw that
+nothing could be done. Her mother was growing--well, a little tired in
+appearance. Swift tears gathered in Linda's eyes. She hadn't been quite
+truthful in that reassuring speech of hers. She set herself to the
+examination of various older women with whom she had more or less lately
+come in contact. How had they regarded and met the loss of whatever good
+looks they had possessed?
+
+It was terribly mixed up, but, as she thought about it, it seemed to her
+that the world of women was divided into two entirely different groups,
+the ones men liked, and who had such splendid parties; and the ones
+who sat together and gossiped in sharp lowered voices. She hoped
+passionately that her mother would not become one of the latter for a
+long long while. But eventually it seemed that there was no escape
+from the circle of brilliantly dressed creatures with ruined faces who
+congregated in the hotels and whispered and nodded in company until they
+went severally to bed.
+
+The great difference between one and the other, of course, was the favor
+of men. Their world revolved about that overwhelming fact. Her mother
+had informed her of this on a hundred occasions and in countless ways;
+but more by her actions, her present wretchedness, than by speech. It
+was perfectly clear to Linda that nothing else mattered. She was even
+beginning, in a vague way, to think of it in connection with herself;
+but still most of her preoccupation was in her mother. She decided
+gravely that a great deal, yet, could be done. For instance, lunch
+to-day:
+
+Her mother had given her a birthday celebration at Henri's, the famous
+confectioner but a door or two from their hotel, and at the end, when
+a plate of the most amazing and delightful little cakes had been set on
+the table, the elder had eaten more than half. Afterwards she had sworn
+ruefully at her lack of character, begging Linda--in a momentary return
+of former happy companionship--never to let her make such a silly pig
+of herself again. Then she got so tired, Linda continued her mental
+deliberations; if she could only rest, go away from cities and resorts
+for a number of months, the lines in turn would soon vanish.
+
+The elder moved impatiently, with a fretful exclamation, in the inner
+room; from outside came the subdued dull ceaseless clamor of New York.
+Formerly it had frightened Linda; but her dread had become a wordless
+excitement at the thought of so much just beyond the windows; her hands
+grew cold and her heart suddenly pounded, destroying the vicarious image
+of her mother.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+"I wish now I'd been different," Mrs. Condon said, standing in the door.
+Her dress was not yet on, but her underthings were fully as elaborate
+and shimmering as any gown could hope to be. "And above everything else,
+I am sorry for the kind of mother you've had." This was so unexpected,
+the other's voice was so unhappy, that Linda was startled. She hurried
+across the room and laid a slim palm on her mother's full bare arm.
+"Don't say that," Linda begged, distressed; "you've been the best in the
+world."
+
+"You know nothing about it," the elder returned, momentarily seated, her
+hands clasped on her full silken lap. "But perhaps it's not too late.
+You ought to go to a good school, where you'd learn everything, but
+principally what a bad thoughtless mama you have."
+
+"I shouldn't stay a second in a place where they said that," Linda
+declared. A new apprehension touched her. "You're not really thinking of
+sending me away!" she cried. "Why, you simply could not get along. You
+know you couldn't! The maids never do up your dresses right; and you'd
+be so lonely in the mornings you would nearly die."
+
+"That's true," Mrs. Condon admitted wearily. "I would expire; but I was
+thinking of you--you're only beginning life; and the start you'll get
+with me is all wrong. Or, anyway, most people think so."
+
+"They are only jealous."
+
+"Will you go into the closet, darling, and pour out a teeny little sip
+from my flask; mama feels a thousand years old this evening."
+
+Returning with the silver cup of the flask half full of pale pungent
+brandy Linda could scarcely keep the tears from spilling over her
+cheeks. She had never before felt so sad. Her mother hastily drank,
+the stinging odor was transferred to her lips; and there was a palpable
+recovery of her customary spirit.
+
+"I don't know what gets over me," she asserted. "I'm certain, from what
+I've heard of them, that you wouldn't be a bit better off in one of
+those fashionable schools for girls. Woman, young and older, were never
+meant to be a lot together in one place. It's unnatural. They don't like
+each other, ever, and it's all hypocritical and nasty. You will get more
+from life, yes, and me. I'm honest, too honest for my own good, if the
+truth was known."
+
+She rose and unconsciously strayed to the mirror over the mantel where
+she examined her countenance in absorbed detail.
+
+"My skin is getting soft like putty," she remarked aloud to herself.
+"The thing is, I've had my time and don't want to pay for it. Blondes
+go quicker than dark women; you ought to last a long while, Linda." Mrs.
+Condon had turned, and her tone was again almost complaining, almost
+ill-natured. Linda considered this information with a troubled face. It
+was quite clear that it made her mother cross. "I've seen men stop and
+look at you right now, too, and you nothing more than a slip fourteen
+years old. Of course, when I was fifteen I had a proposal; but I was
+very forward; and somehow you're different--so dam' serious."
+
+She couldn't help it, Linda thought, if she was serious; she really had
+a great deal to think about, their income among other things. If she
+didn't watch it, pay the bills every three months when it arrived, her
+mother would never have a dollar in the gold mesh bag. Then, lately, the
+dresses the elder threatened to buy were often impossible; Linda learned
+this from the comments she heard after the wearing of evening affairs
+sent home against her earnest protests. They were, other women more
+discreetly gowned had agreed, ridiculous.
+
+Linda calmly realized that in this her judgment was superior to her
+mother's. In other ways, too, she felt she was really the elder; and her
+dismay at the possibility of going away to school had been mostly made
+up of the realization of how much her mother's well-being was dependent
+on her.
+
+Mrs. Condon, finishing her dressing in the bedroom, at times called out
+various injunctions, general or immediate. "Tell them to have a taxi
+at the door for seven sharp. Have you talked to that little girl in the
+black velvet?" Linda hadn't and made a mental note to avoid her more
+pointedly in the future. "Get out mother's carriage boots from the
+hall closet; no, the others--you know I don't wear the black with coral
+stockings. They come off and the fur sticks to my legs. It will be very
+gay to-night; I hope to heaven Ross doesn't take too much again." Linda
+well remembered that the last time Ross had taken too much her mother's
+Directoire wrap had been completely torn in half. "There, it is all
+nonsense about my fading; I look as well as I ever did."
+
+Mrs. Condon stood before her daughter like a large flame-pink tulle
+flower. Her bright gold hair was constrained by black gauze knotted
+behind, her bare shoulders were like powdered rosy marble and the
+floating skirts gathered in a hand showed marvelously small satin-tied
+carriage boots. Indeed Linda's exclamation of delight was entirely
+frank. She had never seen her mother more radiant. The cunningly applied
+rouge, the enhanced brilliancy of her long-lashed eyes, had perfectly
+the illusion of unspent beauty.
+
+"Do stay down-stairs after dinner and play," the elder begged. "And if
+you want to go to the theatre, ask Mr. Bendix, at the desk, to send
+you with that chauffeur we have had so much. I positively forbid your
+leaving the hotel else. It's a comfort after all, that you are serious.
+Kiss mama--"
+
+However, she descended with her mother in the elevator; there was a more
+public caress; and the captain in the Chinese dining-room placed Linda
+at a small table against the wall. There she had clams--she adored
+iced clams--creamed shrimps and oysters with potatoes _bordure_,
+alligator-pear salad and a beautiful charlotte cream with black walnuts.
+After this she sedately instructed the captain what to sign on the back
+of the dinner check--Linda Condon, room five hundred and seven--placed
+thirty-five cents beside the finger-bowl for the waiter, and made her
+way out to the news stand and the talkative girl who had it in charge.
+Exhausting the possibilities of gossip, and deciding not to go out to
+the theatre--in spite of the news girl's exciting description of a play
+called "The New Sin"--she was walking irresolutely through the high
+gilded and marble assemblage space when, unfortunately, she was captured
+by Mr. Moses Feldt.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+He led her to a high-backed lounge against the wall, where, seated
+on its extreme edge, he gazed silently at her with an expression of
+sentimental concern. Mr. Moses Feldt was a short round man, bald but
+for a fluffy rim of pale hair, and with the palest imaginable eyes in
+a countenance perpetually flushed by the physical necessity of
+accommodating his rotundity to awkward edges and conditions. As usual
+he was dressed with the nicest care--a band of white linen laid in the
+opening of his waistcoat, his scarf ornamented by a pear-shaped pearl
+on a diamond finished stem; his cloth-topped varnished black shoes
+glistened, while his short fat fingers clasped a prodigious unlighted
+cigar. At last, in a tone exactly suited to his gaze, he exclaimed:
+
+"So that naughty mama has gone out again and deserted Moses and her
+little Linda!" In what way her mother had deserted Mr. Feldt she failed
+to understand. Of course he wanted to marry them--the comprehensive
+phrase was his own--but that didn't include him in whatever they did.
+Principally it made a joke for their private entertainment. Mrs. Condon
+would mimic his eager manner, "Stella, let me take you both home where
+you'll have the best in the land," And, "Ladies like you ought to have a
+loving protection." Linda would laugh in her cool bell-like manner, and
+her mother add a satirical comment on the chance any Moses Feldt had of
+marrying her.
+
+Linda at once found him ridiculous and a being who forced a slighting
+warmth of liking. His appearance was preposterous, the ready emotion
+often too foolish for words; but underneath there was a--a goodness, a
+mysterious quality that stirred her heart to recognition. Certain rare
+things in life and experience affected her like that memory of an old
+happiness. She could never say what they might be, they came at
+the oddest times and by the most extraordinary means; but at their
+occurrence she would thrill for a moment as if in response to a sound of
+music.
+
+It was, for example, absurd that Mr. Moses Feldt, who was a Jew, should
+make her feel like that, but he did. And all the while that she
+was disagreeable to him, or mocking him behind his back, she was as
+uncomfortable and "horrid" as possible. While this fact, of course, only
+served to make her horrider still. At present she adopted the manner of
+a patience that nothing could quite exhaust; she was polite and formal,
+relentlessly correct in position.
+
+Mr. Moses Feldt, the cigar in his grasp, pressed a hand to the probable
+region of his heart. "You don't know how I think of you," he protested,
+tears in his eyes; "just the idea of you exposed to anything at all in
+hotels keeps me awake nights. Now it's a drunk, or a fresh feller on the
+elevator, or--"
+
+"It's nice of you," Linda said, "but you needn't worry. No one would
+dare to bother us. No one ever has."
+
+"You wouldn't know it if they did," he replied despondently, "at your
+age. And then your mother is so trustful and pleasant. Take those
+parties where she is so much--roof frolics and cocoanut groves and
+submarine cafés; they don't come to any good. Rowdy." Linda studied
+him coldly; if he criticized them further she would leave. He mopped a
+shining brow with a large colorful silk handkerchief. "It throws me into
+a sweat," he admitted.
+
+"Really, Mr. Feldt, you mustn't bother," she told him in one of her few
+impulses of friendliness. "You see, we are very experienced." He nodded
+without visible happiness at this truth. "I'm a jackass!" he cried.
+"Judith tells me that all the time. If you could only see my daughters,"
+he continued with a new vigor; "such lovely girls as they are. One dark
+like you and the other fair as a daisy. Judith and Pansy. And my home
+that darling mama made before she died." The handkerchief was again in
+evidence.
+
+"Women and girls are funny. I can't get you there and not for nothing
+will Judith make a step. It may be pride but it seems to me such
+nonsense. I guess I'm old-fashioned and love's old-fashioned. Homes have
+gone out of style with the rest. It's all these restaurants and roofs
+now, yes, and studios. I tell the girls to stay away from them and from
+artists and so on. I don't encourage them at the apartment--a big lump
+of a feller with platinum bracelets on his wrists. What kind of a man
+would that be! I'd like to know who'd buy goods from him.
+
+"Sometimes, I'm sorry I got a lot of money, but it made mama happy. When
+she laid there at the last sick and couldn't live, I said, 'Oh, if you
+only won't leave me I'll give you gold to eat.'" He was so moved, his
+face so red, that Linda grew acutely embarrassed. People were looking
+at them. She rose stiffly but, in spite of her effort to escape him, he
+caught both her hands in his:
+
+"You say I'm an old idiot like Judith," he begged. This Linda declined
+to do. And, "Ask your mother if you won't come to dinner with the girls
+and me, cozy and at home--just once."
+
+"I'm afraid it will do no good," she admitted; "but I'll try." She
+realized that he was about to kiss her and moved quickly back. "I am
+almost afraid of you," he told her; "you're so distant and elegant.
+Judith and Pansy would get on with you first rate. I'll telephone
+tomorrow, in the afternoon. If the last flowers I sent you came I never
+heard of it."
+
+She thanked him appropriately for the roses and stood, erect and
+impersonal, as a man in the hotel livery helped him into a coat. Mr.
+Moses Feldt waved the still unlighted cigar at her and disappeared
+through the rotating door to the street.
+
+She gave a half-affected sigh of relief. Couldn't he see that her mother
+would never marry him. At the same time the strange thrill touched her;
+the sense of his absurdity vanished and she no longer remembered him
+perched like a painted rubber ball on the edge of the lounge.
+
+In the somber red plush and varnished wood of the reception-room of
+their suite he seemed again charming. Perhaps it was because he,
+too, adored her mother. That wasn't the reason. The familiar rare joy
+lingered. It seemed now as though she were to capture and understand it
+... there was the vibration of music; and then, as always, she felt at
+once sad and brave. But, in spite of her old effort to the contrary, the
+feeling died away. Some day it would be clear to her; in the meanwhile
+Mr. Moses Feldt became once more only ridiculous.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+In the morning she was dressed and had returned from breakfast before
+her mother stirred. The latter moved sharply, brought an arm up over her
+head, and swore. It was a long while before she got up or spoke again,
+and Linda never remembered her in a worse temper. When, finally,
+she came into the room where the breakfast-tray was laid, Linda was
+inexpressibly shocked--all that her mother had dreaded about her
+appearance had come disastrously true. Her face was hung with shadows
+like smudges of dirt and her eyes were netted with lines.
+
+Examining the dishes with distaste she told Linda that positively she
+could slap her for letting them bring up orange-juice. "How often must
+I explain to you that it freezes my fingers." Linda replied that she
+had repeated this in the breakfast-room and perhaps they had the wrong
+order. Neither her mother nor she said anything more until Mrs. Condon
+had finished her coffee and started a second cigarette. Then Linda
+related something of Mr. Moses Feldt's call on the evening before. "He
+cried right into his handkerchief," she said, "until I thought I should
+sink."
+
+Mrs. Condon eyed her daughter speculatively. "Now if you were only four
+years older," she declared, "it would be a good thing. He was simply
+born to be a husband." Horror filled Linda at the other's implication.
+"Yes," the elder insisted; "you couldn't do better; except, perhaps,
+for those girls of his. But then you'd have no trouble making them
+miserable. It's time to talk to you seriously about marriage." The smoke
+from the cigarette eddied in a gray veil across her unrefreshed face.
+
+"You're old for your age, Linda; your life has made you that; and, like
+I said last night, it is rather better than not. Well, for you marriage,
+and soon as possible, is the proper thing. Mind, I have never said a
+word against it; only what suits one doesn't suit another. Where it
+wouldn't be anything more than an old ladies' home to me you need it
+early and plenty. You are too intense. That doesn't go in the world. Men
+don't like it. They want their pleasure and comfort without strings tied
+to them; the intensity has to be theirs.
+
+"What you must get through your head is that love--whatever it is--and
+marriage are two different things, and if you are going to be successful
+they must be kept separate. You can't do anything with a man if you love
+him; but then you can't do anything with him if he doesn't love you.
+That's the whole thing in a breath. I am not crying down love, either;
+only I don't want you to think it is the bread and butter while it's
+nothing more than those little sweet cakes at Henri's.
+
+"Now any girl who marries a poor man or for love--they are the same
+thing--is a fool and deserves what she gets. No one thanks her for it,
+him least of all; because if she does love him it is only to make them
+miserable. She's always at him--where did he go and why did he stay so
+long, and no matter what he says she knows it's a lie. More times than
+not she's right, too. I can't tell you too often--men don't want to be
+loved, they like to be flattered and flattered and then flattered again.
+You'd never believe how childish they are.
+
+"Make them think they're it and don't give too much--that's the secret.
+Above all else don't be easy on them. Don't say 'all right, darling,
+next spring will do as well for a new suit.' Get it then and let him
+worry about paying for it, if worry he must. If they don't give it to
+you some one smarter will wear it. But I started to talk about getting
+married.
+
+"Choose a Moses Feldt, who will always be grateful to you, and keep him
+at it. They are so easy to land it's a kind of shame, too. Perhaps I am
+telling you this too soon, but I don't want any mistakes. Well, pick
+out your Moses--and mama will help you there--and suddenly, at the right
+time, show him that you can be affectionate; surprise him with it and
+you so staid and particular generally. Don't overdo it, promise more
+than you ever give--
+
+"In the closet, dearie, just a little. That's a good girl. Mama's so
+dry." She rose, the silver cup of the flask in her hand, and moved
+inevitably to the mirror. "My hair's a sight," she remarked; "all
+strings. I believe I'll get a permanent wave. They say it lasts for
+six months or more, till the ends grow out. Makes a lot of it, too, and
+holds the front together. If you've ever had dye in your hair, I hear,
+it will break off like grass."
+
+Linda pondered over what she had been told of love and marriage; on the
+whole the exposition had been unsatisfactory. The latter she was able to
+grasp, but her mother had admitted an inability exactly to fix love.
+One fact, apparently, was clear--it was a nuisance and a hindrance to
+happiness, or rather to success. Love upset things. Still she had the
+strongest objection possible to living forever with a man like Mr.
+Moses Feldt. At once all that she had hoped for from life grew flat and
+uninteresting. She had no doubt of her mother's correctness and wisdom;
+the world was like that; she must make the best of it.
+
+There was some telephoning, inquiries, and she heard the elder make an
+appointment with a hair-dresser for three that afternoon. She wondered
+what it would be like to have your hair permanently waved and hoped
+that she would see it done. This, too, she realized, was a part of the
+necessity of always considering men--they liked your hair to be wavy.
+Hers was as straight and stupid as possible. She, in turn, examined
+herself in a mirror: the black bang fell exactly to her eyebrows, her
+face had no color other than the carnation of her lips and her deep
+blue eyes. She moved away and critically studied her figure; inches and
+inches too thin, she decided. Undoubtedly her mother was right, and she
+must marry at the first opportunity--if she could find a man, a rich
+man, who was willing.
+
+Her thoughts returned vaguely to the mystery, the nuisance, of love.
+Surely she had heard something before, immensely important, about it,
+and totally different from all her mother had said. Her mind was filled
+with the fantastic image of a forest, of dangers, and a fat china figure
+with curled plumes, a nodding head, that brushed her with fear and
+disgust. A shuddering panic took possession of her, flashes burned
+before her eyes, and she ran gasping to the perfumed soft reassurances
+of her mother.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+In a recurrence of her surprising concern of the day before Mrs. Condon
+declined to leave her dearest Linda alone; and, their arms caught
+together in a surging affection, they walked down Fifth Avenue toward
+the hairdresser's. There was a diffused gray sparkle of sunlight--it
+was early for the throngs--through which they passed rapidly to the
+accompaniment of a rapid eager chatter. Linda wore a deep smooth camel's
+hair cape, over which her intense black hair poured like ink, and her
+face was shaded by a dipping green velvet hat. Her mother, in one of
+the tightly cut suits she affected, had never been more like a perfect
+companion.
+
+They saw, in the window of a store for men, a set of violent purple
+wool underwear, and barely escaped hysterics at the thought of Mr. Moses
+Feldt in such a garb. They giggled idiotically at the spectacle of a
+countryman fearfully making the sharp descent from the top of a lurching
+omnibus. And then, when they had reached the place of Mrs. Condon's
+appointment, stopped at the show of elaborately waved hair on wax heads
+and chose which, probably, would resemble the elder and which, in a very
+short while now, Linda.
+
+There was an impressive interior, furnished in gray panels and silvery
+wood; and the young woman at the desk was more surprisingly waved than
+anything they had yet seen. M. Joseph would be ready almost immediately;
+and in the meanwhile Mrs. Condon could lay aside her things in
+preparation for the hair to be washed. She did this while Linda followed
+every movement with the deepest interest.
+
+At the back of the long room was a succession of small alcoves, each
+with an important-looking chair and mirror and shelves, a white basin,
+water-taps and rubber tubes. Settled, in comfort, Mrs. Condon's hair was
+spread out in a bright metal tray fastened to the back of the chair, and
+the attendant, a moist tired girl in a careless waist, sprayed the short
+thick gold-colored strands.
+
+"My," she observed, "what some wouldn't give for your shade! Never been
+touched, I can see, either. A lady comes in with real Titian, but yours
+is more select. It positively is Lillian Russell." While she talked
+her hands sped with incredible rapidity and skill. "The gentlemen don't
+notice it; of course not; oh, no! There was a girl here, a true blonde,
+but she didn't stay long--her own car, yes, indeed. Married her right
+out of the establishment. There wasn't any nonsense to her.
+
+"So this is your little girl! I'd never have believed it. Not that she
+hasn't a great deal of style, a great deal--almost, you might say, like
+an Egyptian. In the movies last night; her all over. It's a type that
+will need studying. Bertha Kalich. But for me--"
+
+Already, Linda saw, this part of the operation was done. The girl
+wheeled into position a case that had a fan and ring of blue flickering
+flames, and a cupped tube through which hot air was poured over her
+mother's head. M. Joseph strutted in, a small carefully dressed man with
+a diminutive pointed gray beard and formal curled mustache. He spoke
+with what Linda supposed was a French accent, and his manners, at least
+to them, were beautiful. But because the girl had not put out the blue
+flames quickly enough he turned to her with a voice of quivering rage.
+
+It was so unexpected, in the middle of his bowing and smooth assurances,
+that Linda was startled, and had to think about him all over. The result
+of this was a surprising dislike; she hated, even, to see him touch her
+mother, as he unnecessarily did in directing them into the enclosure for
+the permanent wave.
+
+The place itself filled her with the faint horror of instruments and the
+unknown. Above the chair where Mrs. Condon now sat there was a circle
+in the ceiling like the base of a chandelier and hanging down from it
+on twisted green wires were a great number of the strangest things
+imaginable: they were as thick as her wrist, but round, longer and
+hollow, white china inside and covered with brown wrapping. The wires
+of each, she discovered, led over a little wheel and down again to
+a swinging clock-like weight. In addition to this there were strange
+depressing handles on the wall by a dial with a jiggling needle and
+clearly marked numbers.
+
+The skill of the girl who had washed her mother's hair, however, was
+slight compared with M. Joseph's dexterity. The comb flashed in his
+white narrow hands; in no time at all every knot was urged out into a
+shining smoothness. "Just the front?" he inquired. Not waiting for
+Mrs. Condon's reply, he detached a strand from the mass over her brow,
+impaled it on a hairpin, while he picked up what might have been a thick
+steel knitting-needle with one end fastened in the middle of a silver
+quarter. The latter, it developed, had a hole in it, through which he
+drew the strand of hair, and then wrapped it with an angry tightness
+about the long projection.
+
+At this exact moment a new girl, but tired and moist, appeared, took a
+hank of white threads from a dressing-table, and tied that separate lock
+firmly. This, Linda counted, was repeated fifteen times; and when it was
+accomplished she was unable to repress a nervous laughter. Really, her
+mother looked too queer for words: the long rigid projections stood out
+all over her head like--like a huge pincushion; no, it was a porcupine.
+Mrs. Condon smiled in uncertain recognition of her daughter's mirth.
+
+Then Linda's attention followed M. Joseph to a table against a
+partition, where he secured a white cotton strip from a film of them
+soaking in a shallow tray, took up some white powder on the blade of
+a dessert knife and transferred it to the strip. This he wrapped and
+wrapped about the hair fastened on a spindle, tied it in turn, and
+dragged down one of the brown objects on wires, which, to Linda's
+great astonishment, fitted precisely over the cotton-bound hair. Again,
+fifteen times, M. Joseph did this, fastening each connection with the
+turn of a screw. When so much was accomplished her mother's hair, it
+seemed, had grown fast to the ceiling in a tangle of green ends. It was
+the most terrifying spectacle Linda had ever witnessed. Obscure thoughts
+of torture, of criminals executed by electricity, froze her in a set
+apprehension.
+
+The hair-dresser stepped over to the dials on the wall, and, with a
+sharp comprehensive glance at his apparatus, moved a handle as far as it
+would go. Nothing immediately happened, and Linda gave a relaxing sigh
+of relief. M. Joseph, however, became full of a painful attention.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+He brought into view an unsuspected tube, with a cone of paper at its
+end, and bent over her mother, directing a stream of cold air against
+her head. "How do you feel?" he asked, with, Linda noticed, a startling
+loss of his first accent. Mrs. Condon so far felt well enough.
+Then, before Linda's startled gaze, every single one of the fifteen
+imprisoning tubes began to steam with an extraordinary vigor; not only
+did they steam, like teapots, but drops of water formed and slowly slid
+over her mother's face. If the process appeared weird at the beginning,
+now it was utterly fantastic.
+
+The little white vapor spurts played about Mrs. Condon's dripping
+countenance; they increased rather than diminished; actually it
+resembled a wrecked locomotive she had once seen. "How are you?" M.
+Joseph demanded nervously. "Is it hot anywhere?" With a sudden gesture
+she replied in a shaking voice, "Here."
+
+Instantly he was holding the paper cone with its cold air against her
+scalp, and the heat was subdued. He glanced nervously at his watch, and
+Mrs. Condon managed to ask, "How long?"
+
+"Twenty minutes."
+
+Dangerous as the whole proceeding seemed nothing really happened, and
+Linda's fears gradually faded into a mere curiosity and interest. A
+curtain hung across the door to the rest of the establishment, but it
+had been brushed partly aside; and she could see, in the compartment
+they had vacated, another man bending with waving irons over the
+liberated mass of a woman's hair. He was very much like M. Joseph, but
+he was younger and had only a dark scrap of mustache. As he caught up
+the hair with a quick double twist he leaned very close to the woman's
+face, whispering with an expression that never changed, an expression
+like that of the wax heads in the show-case. He bent so low that Linda
+was certain their cheeks had touched. She pondered at length over this,
+gazing now at the man beyond and now at M. Joseph flitting with the
+cold-air tube about her mother; wondering if, when she grew older, she
+would like a hair-dresser's cheek against hers. Linda decided not. The
+idea didn't shock her, the woman in the other space plainly liked
+it; still she decided she wouldn't. A different kind of man, she told
+herself, would be nicer.
+
+Her thoughts were interrupted by a sharp, unpleasant odor--the odor of
+scorched hair; and she was absolutely rigid with horror at an agonized
+cry from her mother.
+
+"It's burning me terribly," the latter cried. "Oh, I can't stand it.
+Stop! Stop!"
+
+M. Joseph, as white as plaster, rushed to the wall and reversed the
+handle, and Mrs. Condon started from the chair, her face now streaming
+with actual tears; but before she could escape the man threw himself on
+her shoulders.
+
+"You mustn't move," he whispered desperately, "you'll tear your hair
+out. I tell you no harm's been done. Everything is all right. Please,
+please don't cry like that. It will ruin my business. There are others
+in the establishment. Stop!" he shook her viciously.
+
+Linda had risen, terrorized; and Mrs. Condon, with waving plucking
+hands, was sobbing an appeal to be released. "My head, my head," she
+repeated. "I assure you"--the man motioned to a pallid girl to hold her
+in the chair. With a towel to protect his hand he undid a screw,
+lifted off the cap and untwisted the cotton from a bound lock of hair;
+releasing it, in turn, from the spindle it fell forward in a complete
+corkscrew over Mrs. Condon's face.
+
+"Do you see!" he demanded. "Perfect. I give you my word they'll all be
+like that. The cursed heat ran up on me," he added in a swift aside to
+his assistant. "Has Mrs. Bellows gone? Who's still in the place? Here,
+loose that binding ... thank God, that one is all right, too."
+
+Together they unfastened most of the connections, and a growing fringe
+of long remarkable curls marked Mrs. Condon's pain-drawn and dabbled
+face. Linda sobbed uncontrollably; but perhaps, after all, nothing
+frightful had happened. Her poor mother! Then fear again tightened about
+her heart at the perturbed expression that overtook the hair-dresser.
+He was trying in vain to remove one of the caps. She caught enigmatic
+words--"the borax, crystallized ... solid. It would take a plumber ...
+have to go."
+
+The connection was immovable. Even in her suffering Mrs. Condon implored
+M. Joseph to save her hair. Nothing, however, could be done; he admitted
+it with pale lips. The thing might be chiseled off; in the end he tried
+to force a release and the strand, with a renewal of Mrs.
+Condon's agony--now, in the interest of her appearance, heroically
+withstood--snapped short in the container.
+
+Rapidly recovering her vigor, she launched on a tirade against M. Joseph
+and his permanent waving establishment--Linda had never before heard her
+mother talk in such a loud brutal manner, nor use such heated unpleasant
+words, and the girl was flooded with a wretched shame. Still another
+lock, it was revealed, had been ruined, and crumbled to mere dust in its
+owner's fingers.
+
+"The law will provide for you," she promised.
+
+"Your hair was dyed," the proprietor returned vindictively. "The girl
+who washed it will testify. Every one is warned against the permanent if
+their hair has been colored. So it was at your own risk."
+
+"My head's never been touched with dye," Mrs. Condon shrilly answered.
+"You lying little ape. And well does that young woman know it. She
+complimented me herself on a true blonde." The girl had, too, right
+before Linda.
+
+"You ought to be thrashed out of the city."
+
+"Your money will be given back to you," M. Joseph told her.
+
+Outside they found a taxi, and sped back to their hotel. Above, Mrs.
+Condon removed her hat; and, before the uncompromising mirror, studied
+her wrecked hair--a frizzled vacancy was directly over her left
+brow--and haggard face. When she finally turned to Linda, her manner,
+her words, were solemn.
+
+"I'm middle-aged," she said.
+
+A dreary silence enveloped them sitting in the dark reception-room while
+Mrs. Condon restlessly shredded unlighted cigarettes on the floor. She
+had made no effort to repair the damages to her appearance, and when the
+telephone bell sharply sounded, she reached out in a slovenly negligence
+of manner. Linda could hear a blurred articulation and her mother
+answering listlessly. The latter at last said: "Very well, at seven
+then; you'll stop for us." She hung up the receiver, stared blankly at
+Linda, and then went off into a harsh mirth. "Oh, my God!" she cried;
+"the old ladies' home!"
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+With her mother away on a wedding-trip with Mr. Moses Feldt, Linda was
+suddenly projected into the companionship of his two daughters. One,
+as he had said, was light, but a different fairness from Mrs.
+Condon's--richly thick, like honey; while Judith, the elder, who must
+have been twenty, was dark in skin, in everything but her eyes, which
+were a contrasting ashen-violet. She spoke at once of Linda's flawless
+whiteness:
+
+"A magnolia," she said, in a deliberate dark voice; "you are quite
+a gorgeous child. Do you mind my saying that your clothes are rather
+quaint? They aren't inevitable, and yours ought to be that."
+
+They were at lunch in the Feldt dining-room, an interior of heavy
+ornately carved black wood, panels of Chinese embroidery in imperial
+yellow, and a neutral mauve carpet. The effect, with glittering
+iridescent pyramids of glass, massive frosted repoussé silver, burnished
+gold-plate and a wide table decoration of orchids and fern, was tropical
+and intense. It was evident to Linda that the Feldts were very rich
+indeed.
+
+The entire apartment resembled the dining-room, while the building
+itself filled a whole city block, with a garden and fountains like an
+elaborate public square. Linda, however, wasn't particularly impressed
+by such show; she saw that Judith and Pansy had expected that of her;
+but she was determined not to exhibit a surprise that would imply any
+changes in her mother's and her condition. In addition, Linda calmly
+took such surroundings for granted. Her primary conception of possible
+existence was elegance; its necessity had so entered into her being that
+it had departed from her consciousness.
+
+"I must take you to Lorice," Judith continued; "she will know better
+than any one else what you ought to have. You seem terribly pure--at
+first. But you're not a snowdrop; oh, no--something very rare in a
+conservatory. Much better style than your mother."
+
+"I hope you won't mind Judith," Pansy put in; "she's always like that."
+A silence followed in which they industriously dipped the leaves of
+mammoth artichokes into a buttery sauce. Linda, as customary, said very
+little, she listened with patient care to the others and endeavored to
+arrive at conclusions. She liked Pansy, who was as warm and simple as
+her father. Judith was harder to understand. She was absorbed in color
+and music, and declared that ugliness gave her a headache at once.
+Altogether, Linda decided, she was rather silly, especially about men;
+and at times her emotions would rise beyond control until she wept in a
+thin hysterical gasping.
+
+The room where, mostly, they sat was small, but with a high ceiling,
+and hung in black, with pagoda-like vermilion chairs. The light, in the
+evening, was subdued; and Pansy and Judith, in extremely clinging vivid
+dresses, the former's hair piled high in an amber mass and Judith's
+drawn severely across her ears, were lovely. Linda thought of the
+tropical butterflies of the river Amazon, of orchids like those always
+on the dining-room table. A miniature grand piano stood against the
+drapery, and Judith often played. Linda learned to recognize some of
+the composers. Pansy liked best the modern waltzes; Judith insisted that
+Richard Strauss was incomparable; but Linda developed an overwhelming
+preference for Gluck. The older girl insisted that this was an
+affectation; for a while she tried to confuse Linda's knowledge; but
+finally, playing the airs of "Orpheus and Eurydice," she admitted that
+the latter was sincere.
+
+"They sound so cool," Linda said in a clear and decided manner.
+
+There was a man with them, and he shook his head in a mock sadness.
+"So young and yet so formal. If, with the rest, you had Judith's
+temperament, you would be the most irresistible creature alive. For see,
+my dear child, as it is you stir neither tenderness nor desire; you are
+remote and perfect, and faintly wistful. I can't imagine being human or
+even comfortable with you about. Then, too, you have too much wisdom."
+
+"She is frightful," Pansy agreed; "she's never upset nor her hair a
+sight; and, above all else, Linda won't tell you a thing."
+
+"Some day," Judith informed them from the rippling whisper of the piano,
+"she will be magnificently loved."
+
+"Certainly," the man continued; "but what will Linda, Linda Condon, give
+in return?"
+
+"It's a mistake to give much," Linda said evenly.
+
+"No, no, no!" Judith cried. "Give everything; spend every feeling, every
+nerve."
+
+"You are remarkable, of course; almost no women have the courage of
+their emotions." His name was Reynold Chase, a long thin grave young
+man in a dinner coat, who wrote brilliant and successful comedies. "Yet
+Linda isn't parsimonious." He turned to her. "Just what are you? What do
+you think of love?"
+
+"I haven't thought about it much," she replied slowly. "I'm not sure
+that I know what it means. At least it hasn't anything to do with
+marriage--"
+
+"Ah!" he interrupted her.
+
+Her usually orderly mind grew confused; it eddied as though with the
+sound of the piano. "It is not marriage," she vaguely repeated her
+mother's instruction. Reynold Chase supported her.
+
+"That destroys it," he asserted. "This love is as different as possible
+from the ignominious impulse eternally tying the young into knots. It's
+anti-social."
+
+"How stupid you are, Reynold," Pansy protested. "If you want to use
+those complicated words take Judith into the drawing-room. I'm sure
+Linda is dizzy, too."
+
+The latter's mental confusion lingered; she had a strong sense of having
+heard Reynold Chase say these strange things long before. Judith left
+the piano, sat beside him, and he lightly kissed her. A new dislike of
+Judith Feldt deepened in Linda's being. She had no reason for it, but
+suddenly she felt absolutely opposed to her. The manner in which Judith
+rested against the man by her was very distasteful. It offended Linda
+inexplicably; she wanted to draw into an infinity of distance from all
+contact with men and life.
+
+She didn't even want to make one of those marriages that had nothing to
+do with love, but was only a sensible arrangement for the securing
+of gowns and velvet hangings and the luxury of enclosed automobiles.
+Suddenly she felt lonely, and hoped that her mother would come back
+soon.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+But when her mother, now Mrs. Moses Feldt, did return, Linda was
+conscious of a keen disappointment. Somehow she never actually came
+back. It wasn't only that, after so many years together, she occupied
+a room with another than Linda, but her manner was changed; it had lost
+all freedom of heart and speech. The new Mrs. Feldt was heavily polite
+to her husband's daughters; Linda saw that she liked Pansy, but Judith
+made her uncomfortable. She expressed this in an isolated return of the
+old confidences:
+
+"That girl," she said sharply, "likes petting. She can talk all night
+about her soul and beauty, and play the piano till her fingers drop
+off, but I--I--know. You can't fool me where they are concerned. I can
+recognize an unhealthy sign. I never believed in going to all those
+concerts and kidding yourself into a fever. I may have shown myself a
+time, but you mark my word--I was honest compared to Judith Feldt. Don't
+you be impressed with all her art talk and the books she reads. I was
+looking into one yesterday, and it made me blush; you can believe it or
+not, it takes some book for that!"
+
+At the same time she treated Judith with a studious sweetness. Mr. Moses
+Feldt--Linda always thought of him as that--was a miracle of kindly
+cheerfulness. He made his wife and her daughter, and his own girls, an
+unbroken succession of elaborate and costly presents. "What's it for
+if not to spend on those you love?" he would remark, bringing a small
+jeweler's box wrapped in creamy-pink paper from his pocket. "You can't
+take it with you. I wasn't born with it--mama and I were as poor as
+any--you'll forgive me, Stella, I know, for speaking of her. I got
+enough heart to love you both. 'Oh, mama!' I said, and she dying, 'if
+you only won't go, I'll give you gold to eat.'"
+
+Curiously, as Linda grew older, the consciousness of her stepfather
+as an absurd fat little man dwindled; she lost all sense of his actual
+person; and, as the influence of her mother slipped from her life, the
+mental conception of Mr. Moses Feldt deepened. She thought about him a
+great deal and very seriously; the things he said, the warm impact of
+his being, vibrated in her memory. He had the effect on her of the music
+of Christopher Gluck--the effect of a pure fine chord.
+
+Pansy she now thought of with a faint contempt: she was rapidly growing
+thick-waisted and heavy, and she was engaged to a dull young man not
+rich enough to be interesting. They sat about in frank embraces and
+indulged in a sentimental speech that united Judith and Linda in common
+oppression.
+
+There were, not infrequently, gatherings of the Feldts at dinner, a
+noisy good-tempered uproar of a great many voices speaking at once;
+extraordinary quantities of superlative jewels and dresses of superfine
+textures; but the latter, Linda thought, were too vivid in pattern or
+color for the short full maternal figures they often adorned. But no
+one, it seemed, considered himself ageing or even, in spite of the most
+positive indications, aged. The wives with faded but fashionable hair
+and animated eyes in spent faces talked with vigorous raillery about
+the "boys," who, it might have happened, had gone in a small masculine
+company to a fervid musical show the evening before. While they, in
+their turn, thick like their brother or cousin Moses, with time-wasted
+hair and countenances marked with the shrewdness in the service of which
+the greater part of their lives had vanished, had their little jokes
+about the "girls" and the younger and handsomer beaux who threatened
+their happiness.
+
+At times the topic of business crept into the lighter discussion, and,
+in an instant, the gaiety evaporated and left expressionless men
+and quick sharp sentences steely with decision, or indirect and
+imperturbably blank. A memorandum book and a gold pencil would appear
+for an enigmatic note, after which the cheerfulness slowly revived.
+
+The daughters resembled Judith or the slower placidity of Pansy; while
+there was still another sort, more vigorous in being, who consciously
+discussed riding academies, the bridle-paths of Central Park, and the
+international tennis. Their dress held a greater restraint than the
+elders; though Linda recognized that it was no less lavish; and their
+feminine trifles, the morocco beauty-cases and powder-boxes, the
+shoulder-pins, their slipper and garter buckles were extravagant in
+exquisite metals and workings.
+
+They arrived in limousines with dove-colored upholstery and crystal
+vases of maidenhair fern and moss-roses; and often, in such a car, Linda
+went to the theatre with Judith or Pansy and some cousins. Usually it
+was a matinee, where their seats were the best procurable, directly at
+the stage; and they sat in a sleek expensive row eating black chocolates
+from painted boxes ruffled in rose silk. The audience, composed mostly
+of their own world, followed the exotic fortunes of the plays with a
+complete discrimination in every possible emotional display and crisis.
+
+Lithe actresses in a revealing severity of attire, like spoiled nuns
+with carmine lips, suffering in ingenuous problems of the passions,
+agonized in shuddering tones; or else they went to concerts to hear
+young violinists, slender, with intense faces and dramatic hair, play
+concertos that irritated Linda with little shivers of delight.
+
+Sometimes they had lunch in a restaurant of Circassian walnut and velvet
+carpets, with cocktails, and eggs elaborate with truffles and French
+pastry. Then, afterward, they would stop at a confectioner's, or at a
+cafe where there was dancing, for tea. They all danced in a perfection
+of slow graceful abandon, with youths who, it seemed to Linda, did
+nothing else.
+
+She accepted her part in this existence as inevitable, yet she was
+persistently aware of a feeling of strangeness, of essential difference
+from it. She was unable to lose a sense of looking on, as if morning,
+noon and night she were at another long play. Linda regarded it--as she
+did so much else--with neither enthusiasm nor marked annoyance. Probably
+it would continue without change through her entire life. All that was
+necessary, and easily obtained, was a sufficient amount of money.
+
+Her manner, Pansy specially complained, was not intimate and inviting;
+in her room Linda usually closed the door; the frank community of the
+sisters was distasteful to her. She demanded an extraordinary amount
+of personal privacy. Linda never consulted Judith's opinion about her
+clothes, nor exchanged the more significant aspects of feeling. Alone in
+a bed-chamber furnished in silvery Hungarian ash, her bed a pale quilted
+luxury with Madeira linen crusted in monograms, without head or foot
+boards, and a dressing-table noticeably bare, she would deliberately and
+delicately prepare for the night.
+
+While Judith's morning bath steamed with the softness and odor of
+lavender crystals, Linda slipped into water almost cold. This, with her
+clear muslins and heavy black silk stockings, her narrow unornamented
+slippers, represented the perfection of niceness.
+
+There were others than Pansy, however, who commented on what they called
+her superiority--the young men who appeared in the evening. A number
+of them, cousins of the Feldt dinner parties or more casual, tried to
+engage her sympathies in their persons and prospects. It was a society
+of early maturity. But, without apparent effort, she discouraged them,
+principally by her serene lack of interest. It was a fundamental part
+of her understanding of things that younger men were unprofitable; she
+liked far better the contemporaries of Moses Feldt.
+
+Reynold Chase had ceased his visits, but his place had been taken by
+another and still another emotionally gifted man. The present one was
+dark and imperturbable: they knew little of him beyond the facts that
+he had been a long while in the Orient, that his manner and French were
+unsurpassed, and that practically every considerable creative talent in
+New York was entertained in his rooms.
+
+Judith had been to one of his parties; and, the following morning in
+bed, she told Pansy and Linda the most remarkable things.
+
+"It would never do for Pansy," she concluded; "but I must get Markue to
+ask you sometime, Linda. How old are you now? Well, that's practically
+sixteen, and you are very grown up. You would be quite sensational, in
+one of your plain white frocks, in his apartment. You'd have to promise
+not to tell your mother, though. She thinks I'm leading you astray
+now--the old dear. Does she think I am blind? I met a man last week,
+a friend of father's, who used to know her. Of course he wouldn't say
+anything, men are such idiots about that--like ostriches with their
+pasts buried and all the feathers sticking out--but there was a
+champagne expression in his smile."
+
+Linda wondered, later, if she'd care to go to a party of Markue's. There
+was a great deal of drinking at such affairs; and though she rather
+liked cordials, crême de thé and Grand Marnier, even stronger
+things flavored with limes and an occasional frigid cocktail, she
+disliked--from a slight experience--men affected by drink. Judith had
+called her a constitutional prude; this, she understood, was a term of
+reproach; and she wondered if, applied to her, it were just.
+
+Usually it meant a religious person or one fussy about the edge of her
+skirt; neither of which she ever considered. She didn't like to sit in
+a corner and be hugged--even that she could now assert with a degree
+of knowledge--but it wasn't because she was shocked. Nothing, she told
+herself gravely, shocked her; only certain acts and moments annoyed her
+excessively. It was as if her mind were a crisp dress with ribbons which
+she hated to have mussed or disarranged.
+
+Linda didn't take the trouble to explain this. Now that her mother had
+withdrawn from her into a perpetual and uncomfortable politeness she
+confided in no one. She would have been at a loss to put her complicated
+sensations and thoughts into words. Mr. Moses Feldt, the only one to
+whom she could possibly talk intimately, would be upset by her feelings.
+He would give her a hug and the next day bring up a new present from his
+pocket.
+
+Her clothes, with the entire support of Lorice, were all delicate
+in fabric, mostly white with black sashes, and plainly ruffled. She
+detested the gray crepe de Chine from which Judith's undergarments were
+made and the colored embroidery of Pansy's; while she ignored scented
+toilet-waters and extracts. Markue, in finally asking her to a party at
+his rooms, said that there she would resemble an Athenian marble, of the
+un-painted epoch, in the ballet of Scheherazade.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+"There's nothing special to say about Markue's parties," Judith,
+dressing, told Linda. "You will simply have to take what comes your way.
+There is always some one serious at them, if you insist, as usual, on
+dignity." She stood slim and seductive, like a perverse pierrot,
+before the oppressive depths of a black mirror. Linda had finished her
+preparations for the evening. There was no departure from her customary
+blanched exactness. She studied her reflection across Judith's shoulder;
+her intense blue eyes, under the level blot of her bang, were grave on
+the delicate pallor of her face.
+
+In the taxi, slipping rapidly down-town, Linda was conscious of a slight
+unusual disturbance of her indifference. This had nothing to do with
+whether or not she'd be a success; her own social demands were so small
+that any considerable recognition of her was unimportant. Her present
+feeling came from the fact that to-night, practically, she was making
+her first grown-up appearance in the world, the world from which she
+must select the materials of her happiness and success. To-night she
+would have an opportunity to put into being all that--no matter how
+firmly held--until now had been but convictions.
+
+Her interest was not in whom or what she might meet, but in herself.
+Judith, smoking a cigarette in a mist of silver fox, was plainly
+excited. "I like Markue awfully," she admitted.
+
+"Does he care for you?" Linda asked.
+
+"That," said Judith, "I can't make out--if he likes me or if it's
+just anonymous woman. I wish it were the first, Linda." Her voice was
+shadowed; suddenly, in spite of her youth and exhilaration, she seemed
+haggard and spent. Linda recognized this in a cold scrutiny. Privately
+she decided that the other was a fool--she didn't watch her complexion
+at all.
+
+The motor turned west in the low Forties and stopped before a high
+narrow stone façade with a massive griffon-guarded door. Judith led the
+way directly into the elevator and designated Markue's floor. It was
+at the top of the building, where he met them with his impenetrable
+courtesy and took them into a bare room evidently planned for a studio.
+There were an empty easel, the high blank dusty expanse of the skylight,
+and chairs with the somber hats and coats of men and women's wraps like
+the glistening shed skins of brilliant snakes.
+
+They turned through the hall to an interior more remarkable than
+anything Linda could have imagined; it seemed to her very high, without
+windows and peaked like a tent. Draperies of intricate Eastern color
+hung in long folds. There were no chairs, but low broad divans about the
+walls, a thick carpet with inlaid stands in the center laden with boxes
+of cigarettes, sugared exotic sweets and smoking incense. It was so dim
+and full of thick scent, the shut effect was so complete, that for a
+moment Linda felt painfully oppressed; it seemed impossible to breathe
+in the wavering bluish atmosphere.
+
+Markue, who had appeared sufficiently familiar outside, now had a
+strange portentous air; the gleams of his quick black eyes, the dusky
+tone of his cheeks, his impassive grace, startled her. New York was
+utterly removed: the taxi that had brought Judith and her, the swirling
+traffic of Columbus Circle and smooth undulations of Fifth Avenue, were
+lost with a different life. She saw, however, the open door to another
+room full of clear light, and her self-possession rapidly returned.
+Judith--as she had threatened--at once deserted her; and Linda found an
+inconspicuous corner of a divan.
+
+There were, perhaps, twenty people in the two rooms, and each one
+engaged her attention. A coffee-colored woman was sitting beyond her,
+clad in loose red draperies to which were sewed shining patterns of
+what she thought was gold. Markue was introducing Judith, and the seated
+figure smiled pleasantly with a flash of beautiful teeth and the supple
+gesture of a raised brown palm. That, Linda decided, was the way she
+shook hands. Two dark-skinned men, one in conventional evening dress,
+were with her; they had small fine features and hair like carved ebony.
+
+Linda had never before been at an affair with what she was forced to
+call colored people; instinctively she was antagonistic and superior.
+She turned to a solemn masculine presence with a ruffled shirt and
+high black stock; he was talking in a resonant voice and with dramatic
+gestures to a woman with a white face and low-drawn hair. Linda was
+fascinated by the latter, dressed in a soft clinging dull garnet.
+It wasn't her clothes, although they were remarkable, that held her
+attention, but the woman's mouth. Apparently, it had no corners. Like a
+little band of crimson rubber, or a ring of vivid flame, it shifted
+and changed in the oddest shapes. It was an unhappy mouth, and made her
+think of pain; but perhaps not so much that as hunger ... not for food,
+Linda was certain. What did she want?
+
+There was a light appealing laugh from another seated on the floor in a
+floating black dinner dress with lovely ankles in delicate Spanish lace
+stockings; her head was thrown back for the whisper of a heavy man with
+ashen hair, a heavenly scarf and half-emptied glass.
+
+Her bare shoulders, Linda saw, were as white as her own, as white but
+more sloping. The other's hair, though, was the loveliest red possible.
+The entire woman, relaxed and laughing in the perfumery and swimming
+shadows, was irresistible. A man with a huge nose and blank eyes, his
+hands disfigured with extraordinary rings, momentarily engaged her.
+Then, at the moment when she saw an inviting and correctly conventional
+youth, he crossed and sat at her side.
+
+"Quite a show," he said in the manner she had expected and approved. The
+glow of his cigarette wavered over firmly cut lips. "We've just come to
+New York," he continued. "I don't know any one here but Markue, do you?"
+Linda explained her own limitations. "The Victory's fine and familiar."
+
+She followed his gaze to where a winged statue with flying drapery was
+set on a stand. She had seen it before, but without interest. Now it
+held her attention. It wasn't a large cast, not over three feet high,
+but suddenly Linda thought that it was the biggest thing in the room; it
+seemed to expand as she watched it.
+
+Beside the Victory, in a glass case with an enclosed concealed light,
+was a statue, greenish gray, a few inches tall, with a sneering
+placidity of expression as notable as the sweep of the other white
+fragment. "That's Chinese," her companion decided; "it looks as old as
+lust." There was the stir of new arrivals--a towering heavy man with
+a slight woman in emerald satin. "There's Pleydon, the sculptor," the
+youth told her animatedly. "I've seen him at the exhibitions. It must be
+Susanna Noda, the Russian singer, with him. He's a tremendous swell."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+Linda watched Pleydon as he met Markue in the middle of the room. He was
+dressed carelessly, improperly for the evening; but she forgave that as
+the result of indifference. The informal flannels and soft collar, too,
+suited the largeness of his being and gestures. There was a murmur of
+meeting, Susanna Noda smiled appealingly; and then, as Pleydon found a
+place on a divan, she at once contentedly sat on his lap. Watching her,
+Linda thought of a brilliant parrot; but that was only the effect of her
+color; for her face, with a tilted nose and wide golden eyes, generous
+warm lips, was charming. She lighted a cigarette, turned her graceful
+back on the room and company, and chatted in French to the composed
+sculptor.
+
+Linda divined that he was the most impressive figure she had
+encountered; the quality of his indifference was beautiful and could
+only have come in the security of being a "tremendous swell." That
+phrase described all for which she had cared most. It included
+everything that her mother had indicated as desirable and a lot that
+she, Linda, had added. Money, certainly, was an absolute necessity;
+but there were other things now that vaguely she desired. She tried to
+decide what they were.
+
+Only the old inner confusion resulted, the emotion that might have
+been born in music; however, it was sharper than usual, and bred a new
+dissatisfaction with the easier accomplishments. Really it was very
+disturbing, for the pressure of her entire experience, all she had
+been told, could be exactly weighed and held. The term luxury, too, was
+revealing; it covered everything--except her present unformed longing.
+
+There were still newcomers, and Linda was aware of a sudden constraint.
+A woman volubly French had appeared with a long pinkish-white dog in a
+blanket, and the three Arabians--she had learned that much--had risen
+with a concerted expression of surprise and displeasure. Their anxiety,
+though, was no more dramatic than that of the dog's proprietor. The
+gesture of her hands and lifted eyebrows were keenly expressive of her
+impatience with any one who couldn't accept, with her, her dog.
+
+"Markue ought to have it out," some one murmured. "Dogs, to high caste
+Mohammedans, are unclean animals." Another added, "Worse than that, if
+it should touch them, they would have to make the pilgrimage to Mecca."
+
+Without any knowledge of the situation of Mecca, Linda yet realized that
+it must be a very long journey to result from the mere touch of a dog.
+She didn't wonder at the restrained excitement of the "colored" people.
+The situation was reduced to a sub-acid argument between the Frenchwoman
+and the Begum; Madame couldn't exist without her "_p'tit_." The Oriental
+lady could not breathe a common air with the beast. The former managed a
+qualified triumph--the "_p'tit_" was caged with a chair in a corner, and
+the episode, for the moment, dropped.
+
+Soon, however, Linda saw that the dog had wriggled out of captivity. It
+made a cautious progress to where the candy stood on a low stand and
+ran an appreciative tongue over the exposed sweet surfaces. Rapidly a
+sugared fig was snapped up. Linda held her breath; no one had noticed
+the animal yet--perhaps it would reach one of the objectors and she
+would have the thrill of witnessing the departure for Mecca.
+
+But, as always, nothing so romantic occurred; the dog was discovered,
+and the Mohammedans, with a hurried politeness, made their salaams.
+Instead, a man with a quizzical scrutiny through glasses that made him
+resemble an owl, stopped before her.
+
+"'Here we go 'round the mulberry-bush,'" he chanted. "Hello, Kate
+Greenaway. Have you had a drink?"
+
+"Yes, thank you," she replied sedately.
+
+"Certified milk?"
+
+"It was something with gin," she particularized, "and too sweet." He
+took the place beside her and solemnly recited a great many nursery
+rhymes. On the whole she liked him, deciding that he was very wicked.
+Soon he was holding her hand in both of his. "I know you're not real,"
+he proceeded. "Verlaine wrote you--_'Les Ingenus':_
+
+  "'From which the sudden gleam of whiteness shed
+    Met in our eyes a frolic welcoming.'
+
+"What if I'd kiss you?"
+
+"Nothing," she returned coldly.
+
+"You're remarkable!" he exclaimed with enthusiasm. "If you are not
+already one of the celebrated beauties you're about to be. As cool as a
+fish! Look--Pleydon is going to rise and spill little Russia. Have you
+heard her sing Scriabine?" Linda ignored him in a sharp return of her
+interest in the big carelessly-dressed man. He put Susanna Noda aside
+and moved to the dim middle of the room. His features, Linda saw, were
+rugged and pronounced; he was very strong.
+
+For a moment he stood gazing at the Winged Victory, his brow gathered
+into a frown, while he made a caressing gesture with his whole hand.
+Then he swung about and, from the heavy shadows of his face, he looked
+down at her. He was still for a disconcerting length of time, but
+through which Linda steadily met his interrogation. Then he bent over
+and seriously removed the man beside her.
+
+"Adieu, Louis," he said.
+
+The weight of Pleydon's body depressed the entire divan. "An ordinary
+man," he told her, "would ask how the devil you got here. Then he would
+take you to your home with some carefully chosen words for whatever
+parents you had. But I can see that all this is needless. You are an
+extremely immaculate person.
+
+"That isn't necessarily admirable," he added.
+
+"I don't believe I am admirable at all," Linda replied.
+
+"How old are you?" he demanded abruptly.
+
+She told him.
+
+"Age doesn't exist for some women, they are eternal," he continued. "You
+see, I call you a woman, but you are not, and neither are you a child.
+You are Art--Art the deathless," his gaze strayed back to the Victory.
+
+As she, too, looked at it, it seemed to Linda that the cast filled
+all the room with a swirl of great white wings and heroic robes. In an
+instant the incense and the dark colors, the uncertain pallid faces
+and bare shoulders, were swept away into a space through which she was
+dizzily borne. The illusion was so overpowering that involuntarily she
+caught at the heavy arm by her.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+"Why did you do that?" he asked quickly, with a frowning regard. Linda
+replied easily and directly. "It seemed as if it were carrying me with
+it," she specified; "on and on and on, without ever stopping. I felt as
+if I were up among the stars." She paused, leaning forward, and gazed
+at the statue. Even now she was certain that she saw a slight flutter of
+its draperies. "It is beautiful, isn't it? I think it's the first thing
+I ever noticed like that. You know what I mean--the first thing that
+hadn't a real use."
+
+"But it has," he returned. "Do you think it is nothing to be swept into
+heaven? I suppose by 'real' you mean oatmeal and scented soap. Women
+usually do. But no one, it appears, has any conception of the practical
+side of great art. You might try to remember that it is simply
+permanence given to beauty. It's like an amber in which beautiful and
+fragile things are kept forever in a lovely glow. That is all, and it is
+enough.
+
+"When I said that you were Art I didn't mean that you were skilfully
+painted and dressed, but that there was a quality in you which recalled
+all the charming women who had ever lived to draw men out of the
+mud--something, probably, of which you are entirely unconscious, and
+certainly beyond your control. You have it in a remarkable degree. It
+doesn't belong to husbands but to those who create 'Homer's children.'
+
+"That's a dark saying of Plato's, and it means that the _Alcestis_ is
+greater than any momentary offspring of the flesh."
+
+Linda admitted seriously, "Of course, I don't understand, yet it seems
+quite familiar--"
+
+"Don't, for Heaven's sake, repeat the old cant about reincarnation;" he
+interrupted, "and sitting together, smeared with antimony, on a roof of
+Babylon."
+
+She hadn't intended to, she assured him. "Tell me about yourself," he
+directed. It was as natural to talk with him as it was, with others,
+to keep still. Her frank speech flowed on and on, supported by the
+realization of his attention.
+
+"There really isn't much, besides hotels, all different; but you'd be
+surprised how alike they were, too. I mean the things to eat, and the
+people. I never realized how tired I was of them until mother married
+Mr. Moses Feldt. The children were simply dreadful, the children and
+the women; the men weren't much better." She said this in a tone of
+surprise, and he nodded. "I can see now--I am supposed to be too old for
+my age, and it was the hotels. You learn a great deal."
+
+"Do you like Mr. Moses Feldt?"
+
+"Enormously; he is terribly sweet. I intend to marry a man just like
+him. Or, at least, he was the second kind I decided on: the first only
+had money, then I chose one with money who was kind, but now I don't
+know. It's very funny: kindness makes me impatient. I'm perfectly sure
+I'll never care for babies, they are so mussy. I don't read, and I can't
+stand being--well, loved.
+
+"Mother went to a great many parties; every one liked her and she liked
+every one back; so it was easy for her. I used to long for the time when
+I'd wear a lovely cloak and go out in a little shut motor with a man
+with pearls; but now that's gone. They want to kiss you so much. I wish
+that satisfied me. Why doesn't it? Is there anything the matter with me,
+do you think? I've been told that I haven't any heart."
+
+As he laughed at her she noticed how absurdly small a cigarette seemed
+in his broad powerful hand. "What has happened to you is this," he
+explained: "a combination of special circumstances has helped you in
+every way to be what, individually, you were. As a rule, children are
+brought up in a house of lies, like taking a fine naked body and binding
+it into hideous rigid clothes. You escaped the damnation of cheap
+ready-cut morals and education. Your mother ought to have a superb
+monument--the perfect parent. Of course you haven't a 'heart.' From the
+standpoint of nature and society you're as depraved as possible. You are
+worse than any one else here--than all of them rolled together."
+
+Curiously, she thought, this didn't disturb her, which proved at once
+that he was right. Linda regarded herself with interest as a supremely
+reprehensible person, perhaps a vampire. The latter, though, was a
+rather stout woman who, dressed in frightful lingerie, occupied couches
+with her arms caught about the neck of a man bending over her. Every
+detail of this was distasteful.
+
+What was she?
+
+Her attention wandered to the squat Chinese god in the glass case. It
+was clear that he hadn't stirred for ages. A difficult thought partly
+formed in her mind--the Chinese was the god of this room, of Markue's
+party, of the women seated in the dim light on the floor and the divans;
+the low gurgle of their laughter, the dusky whiteness of their shoulders
+in the upcoiling incense, the smothered gleams of their hair, with the
+whispering men, were the world of the grayish-green image.
+
+She explained this haltingly to Pleydon, who listened with a flattering
+interest. "I expect you're laughing at me inside," she ended impotently.
+"And the other, the Greek Victory," he added, "is the goddess of the
+other world, of the spirit. It's quaint a heathen woman should be that."
+
+Linda discovered that she liked Pleydon enormously. She continued
+daringly that he might be the sort of man she wanted to marry. But he
+wouldn't be easy to manage; probably he could not be managed at all. Her
+mother had always insisted upon the presence of that possibility in any
+candidate for matrimony. And, until now, Linda's philosophy had been in
+accord with her. But suddenly she entertained the idea of losing herself
+completely in--in love.
+
+A struggle was set up within her: on one hand was everything that she
+had been, all her experience, all advice, and her innate detachment;
+on the other an obscure delicious thrill. Perhaps this was what she now
+wanted. Linda wondered if she could try it--just a little, let herself
+go experimentally. She glanced swiftly at Pleydon, and his bulk, his
+heavy features, the sullen mouth, appalled her.
+
+Men usually filled her with an unaccountable shrinking into her remotest
+self. Pleydon was different; her liking for him had destroyed a large
+part of her reserve; but a surety of instinct told her that she couldn't
+experiment there. It was characteristic that a lesser challenge left her
+cold. She had better marry as she had planned.
+
+Susanna Noda came up petulantly and sank in a brilliant graceful swirl
+at his feet. Her golden eyes, half shut, studied Linda intently.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+"I am fatigued," she complained; "you know how weary I get when you
+ignore me." He gazed down at her untouched. "I have left Lao-tze for
+Greece," he replied. She found this stupid and said so. "Has he been no
+more amusing than this?" she asked Linda. "But then, you are a child,
+it all intrigues you. You listen with the flattery of your blue eyes and
+mouth, both open."
+
+"Don't be rude, Susanna," Pleydon commanded. "You are so feminine that
+you are foolish. I'm not the stupid one--look again at our 'child.' Tell
+me what you see."
+
+"I see Siberia," she said finally. "I see the snow that seems so pure
+while it is as blank and cold as death. You are right, Dodge. I was the
+dull one. This girl will be immensely loved; perhaps by you. A calamity,
+I promise you. Men are pigs," she turned again to Linda; "no--imbeciles,
+for only idiots destroy the beauty that is given to them. They take your
+reputation with a smile, they take your heart with iron fingers; your
+beauty they waste like a drunken Russian with gold."
+
+"Susanna, like all spendthrifts, is amazed by poverty."
+
+Even in the gloom Linda could see the pallor spreading over the other's
+face; she was glad that Susanna Noda spoke in Russian. However, with a
+violent effort, she subdued her bitterness. "Go into your Siberia!" she
+cried. "I always thought you were capable of the last folly of marriage.
+If you do it will spoil everything. You are not great, you know, not
+really great, not in the first rank. You've only the slightest chance of
+that, too much money. You were never in the gutter as I was--"
+
+"Chateaubriand," he interrupted, "Dante, Velasquez."
+
+"No, not spiritually!" she cried again. "What do you know of the
+inferno! Married, you will get fat." Pleydon turned lightly to Linda:
+
+"As a supreme favor do not, when I ask you, marry me."
+
+This, for Linda, was horribly embarrassing. However, she gravely
+promised. The Russian lighted a cigarette; almost she was serene again.
+Linda said, "Fatness is awful, isn't it?"
+
+Pleydon replied, "Death should be the penalty. If women aren't lovely--"
+he waved away every other consideration.
+
+"And if men have fingers like carrots--" Susanna mimicked him. Judith,
+flushed, her hair loosened, approached. "Linda," she demanded, "do you
+remember when we ordered the taxi? Was it two or three?" Markue, at her
+shoulder, begged her not to consider home.
+
+"I'm going almost immediately," Pleydon said, "and taking your Linda."
+His height and determined manner scattered all objections.
+
+Linda, at the entrance to the apartment, found to her great surprise--in
+place of the motor she had expected--a small graceful single-horse
+victoria, the driver buttoned into a sealskin rug. Deep in furs, beside
+Pleydon, she was remarkably comfortable, and she was soothed by the
+rhythmic beat of the hoofs, the even progress through the crystal night
+of Fifth Avenue.
+
+Her companion flooded his being with the frozen air. They had, it
+seemed, lost all desire to talk. The memory of Markue's party lingered
+like the last vanishing odor of his incense; there was a confused vision
+of the murmurous room against the lighted exterior where the drinks
+sparkled on a table. Linda made up her mind that she would not go to
+another. Then she wondered if she'd see Pleydon again. The Russian
+singer had been too silly for words.
+
+It suddenly occurred to her that the man now with her had taken Susanna
+Noda, and that he had left her planted. He had preferred driving her,
+Linda Condon, home. He wasn't very enthusiastic about it, though; his
+face was gloomy.
+
+"The truth is," he remarked at last, "that Susanna is right--I am not
+in the first rank. But that was all nonsense about the necessity of the
+gutter--sentimental lies."
+
+Linda was not interested in this, but it left her free to explore her
+own emotions. The night had been eventful because it had shaken all the
+foundation of what she intended. That single momentary delicious thrill
+had been enough to threaten the entire rest. At the same time her native
+contempt of the other women, of Judith with her tumbled hair, persisted.
+Was there no other way to capture such happiness? Was it all hopelessly
+messy with drinks and unpleasant familiarity?
+
+What did Pleydon mean by spirit? Surely there must be more kinds of love
+than one--he had intimated that. She gathered that "Homer's children,"
+those airs of Gluck that she liked so well, were works of art,
+sculpture, such as he did. Yet she had never thought of them as
+important, important as oatmeal or delicate soap. She made up her mind
+to ask him about it, when she saw that they had reached the Eighties;
+she was almost home.
+
+"I am going away to-morrow," he told her, "for the winter, to South
+America. When I come back we'll see each other. If you should change
+address send me a line to the Harvard Club." The carriage had stopped
+before the great arched entrance to the apartment-house, towering in its
+entire block. He got out and lifted her to the pavement as if she had
+been no more than a flower in his hands. Then he walked with her into
+the darkness of the garden.
+
+The fountains were cased in boards; the hedged borders, the bushes and
+grass, were dead. High above them on the dark wall a window was bright.
+Linda's heart began to pound loudly, she was trembling ... from the
+cold. There was a faint sound in the air--the elevated trains, or
+stirring wings? It was nothing, then, to be lifted into heaven. There
+was the door to the hall and elevator. She turned, to thank Dodge
+Pleydon for all his goodness to her, when he lifted her--was it toward
+heaven?--and kissed her mouth.
+
+She was still in his arms, with her eyes closed. "Linda Condon?" he
+said, in a tone of inquiry.
+
+At the same breath in which she realized a kiss was of no importance a
+sharp icy pain cut at her heart. It hurt her so that she gasped. Then,
+and this was strange, she realized that--as a kiss--it hadn't annoyed
+her. Suddenly she felt that it wasn't just that, but something far more,
+a part of all her inner longing. He had put her down and was looking
+away, a face in shadow with an ugly protruding lip.
+
+She saw him that way in her dreams--in the court under the massive
+somber walls, with a troubled frown over his eyes. It seemed to her
+that, reaching up, she smoothed it away as they stood together in a
+darkness with the fountains, the hedges, dead, the world with never a
+sound sleeping in the prison of winter.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+Linda thought about Dodge Pleydon on a warm evening of the following
+May. At four o'clock, in a hotel, Pansy had been married; and the entire
+Feldt connection had risen to a greater height of clamorous cheer than
+ever before. Extravagant unseasonable dishes, wines and banked flowers
+were lavishly mingled with sentimental speeches, healths and tears.
+Linda had been acutely restless, impatient of all the loud good humor
+and stupid compliments. The sense of her isolation from their life was
+unbearably keen. She would have a very different wedding with a man in
+no particular like Pansy's.
+
+After dinner--an occasion, with Pansy absent, where Mr. Moses Feldt's
+tears persisted in flowing--she had strayed into the formal chamber
+across from the dining-room and leaned out of a window, gazing into the
+darkening court. Directly below was where Pleydon had kissed her. She
+often re-examined her feelings about that; but only to find that they
+had dissolved into an indefinite sense of the inevitable. Not alone had
+it failed to shock her--she hadn't even been surprised. Linda thought
+still further about kissing, with the discovery that if, while it was
+happening, she was conscious of the kiss, it was a failure; successful,
+it carried her as far as possible from the actuality.
+
+Pleydon, of course, had not written to her; he had intimated nothing to
+the contrary, only asking her to let him know, at the Harvard Club, if
+she changed address. That wasn't necessary, and now, probably, he was
+back from South America. Where, except by accident, might she see him?
+Markue, with his parties, had dropped from Judith's world, his place
+taken by a serious older dealer in Dutch masters with an impressive
+gallery just off Fifth Avenue.
+
+That she would see him Linda was convinced; this feeling absorbed any
+desire; it was no good wanting it or not wanting it; consequently she
+was undisturbed. She considered him gravely and in detail. Had there
+been any more Susanna Nodas in his stay south? She had heard somewhere
+that the women of Argentine were irresistible. Her life had taught her
+nothing if not the fact that a number of women figured in every man's
+history. It was deplorable but couldn't be avoided; and whether or not
+it continued after marriage depended on the cunning of any wife.
+
+Now, however, Linda felt weary already at the prospect of a married life
+that rested on the constant play of her ingenuity. A great many things
+that, but a little before, she had willingly accepted, seemed to her
+probably not less necessary but distinctly tiresome. Linda began to
+think that she couldn't really bother; the results weren't sufficiently
+important.
+
+Dodge Pleydon.
+
+She slept in a composed order until the sun was well up. It was warmer
+than yesterday; and, going to an afternoon concert with Judith, she
+decided to walk. Linda strolled, in a short severe jacket and skirt, a
+black straw hat turned back with a cockade and a crisp flushed mass of
+sweet peas at her waist. The occasion, as it sometimes happened, found
+her in no mood for music. The warmth of the sunlight, the open city
+windows and beginning sounds of summer, had enveloped her in a mood in
+which the jangling sentimentality of a street organ was more potent than
+the legato of banked violins.
+
+She was relieved when the concert was over, but lingered at her seat
+until the crowd had surged by; it made Linda furious to be shoved
+or indiscriminately touched. Judith had gone ahead, when Linda was
+conscious of the scrutiny of a pale well-dressed woman of middle age.
+It became evident that the other was debating whether or not to speak;
+clearly such an action was distasteful to her; and Linda had turned away
+before a restrained voice addressed her:
+
+"You will have to forgive me if I ask your name ... because of a certain
+resemblance. Seeing you I--I couldn't let you go."
+
+"Linda Condon," she replied.
+
+The elder, Linda saw, grew even paler. She put out a gloved hand. "Then
+I was right," she said in a slightly unsteady voice. "But perhaps, when
+I explain, you will think it even stranger, inexcusable. My dear child,
+I am your father's sister."
+
+Linda was invaded by a surprise equally made up of interest and
+resentment. The first was her own and the second largely borrowed
+from her mother. Besides, why had her father's family never made the
+slightest effort to see her. This evidently had simultaneously occurred
+to the other.
+
+"Of course," she added, quite properly, "we can't undertake family
+questions here. I shouldn't blame you a bit, either, if you went
+directly away. I had to speak, to risk that, because you were so
+unmistakably a Lowrie. It is not a common appearance. We--I--" she
+floundered for a painful moment; then she gathered herself with a
+considerable dignity. "Seeing you has affected me tremendously, changed
+everything. I have nothing to say in our defense, you must understand
+that. I am certain, too, that my sister will feel the same--we live
+together in Philadelphia. I hope you will give me your address and let
+us write to you. Elouise will join with me absolutely."
+
+Linda told her evenly where she lived, and then allowed Miss Lowrie to
+precede her toward the entrance. She said nothing of this to Judith,
+nor, momentarily, to her mother. She wanted to consider it undisturbed
+by a flood of talk and blame. It was evident to her that the Lowries had
+behaved very badly, but just how she couldn't make out. She recalled her
+father's sister--her aunt--minutely, forced to the realization that she
+was a person of entire superiority. Here, she suddenly saw, had been
+the cause of all their difficulties--the Lowries hadn't approved of the
+marriage, they had objected to her mother.
+
+Five years ago she would have been incensed at this; but now,
+essentially, she was without personal indignation. She wanted, for
+herself, to discover as much as possible about her father and his
+family. A need independent of maternal influences stirred her. Linda was
+reassured by the fact that her father had been gently born; while she
+realized that she had always taken this for granted. Her mother must
+know nothing about the meeting with Miss Lowrie until the latter had
+written.
+
+That was Friday and the letter came the following Tuesday. Linda, alone
+at the breakfast-table, instantly aware of the source of the square
+envelope addressed in a delicate regular writing, opened it and read in
+an unusual mental disturbance:
+
+"My dear Linda,
+
+I hope you will not consider it peculiar for me to call you this,
+for nothing else seems possible. Meeting you in that abrupt manner upset
+me, as you must have noticed. Of course I knew of you, and even now I
+can not go into our long unhappy affair, but until I saw you, and so
+remarkably like the Lowries, I did not realize how wicked Elouise and I
+had been. But I am obliged to add only where you were concerned. We have
+no desire to be ambiguous in that.
+
+However, I am writing to say that we should love to have you visit us
+here. It is possible under the circumstances that your mother will not
+wish you to come. Yet I know the Lowries, a very independent and
+decided family, and although it is my last intention to be the cause of
+difficulty with your mother, still I hope it may be arranged.
+
+In closing I must add how happy I was at the evidence of your blood.
+But that, I now see, was a certainty. You will have to forgive us for a
+large measure of blindness. Affectionately,
+
+AMELIA VIGNÉ LOWRIE."
+
+
+Almost instantaneously Linda was aware that she would visit the Lowries.
+She liked the letter extremely, as well as all that she remembered of
+its sender. At the same time she prepared for a scene with her mother,
+different from those of the past--with the recourse to the brandy
+flask--but no less unpleasant. They had very little to say to each other
+now; and, when she went into her mother's room with an evident definite
+purpose, the latter showed a constrained surprise, a palpable annoyance
+that her daughter had found her at the daily renovation of her worn
+face.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+Linda said directly, "I met Miss Lowrie, father's sister, at a concert
+last week, and this morning I had a letter asking me to stay with them
+in Philadelphia."
+
+Mrs. Feldt's face suddenly had no need for the color she held poised
+on a cloth. Her voice, sharp at the beginning, rose to a shrill
+unrestrained wrath.
+
+"I wonder at the brass of her speaking to you at all let alone writing
+here. Just you give me the letter and I'll shut her up. The idea! I hope
+you were cool to her, the way they treated us. Stay with them--I guess
+not!"
+
+"But I thought of going," Linda replied. "It's only natural. After all,
+you must see that he was my father."
+
+"A pretty father he was, too good for the girl he married. It's my fault
+I didn't tell you long ago, but I just couldn't abide the mention of
+him. He deserted me, no, us, cold, without a word--walked out of the
+door one noon, taking his hat as quiet as natural, and never came back.
+I never saw him again nor heard except through lawyers. That was the
+kind of heart he had, and his sisters are worse. I hadn't a decent
+speech of any kind out of them. The Lowries," she managed to inject a
+surprising amount of contempt into her pronouncement of that name. "What
+it was all about you nor any sensible person would never believe:
+
+"The house smelled a little of boiled cabbage. That's why he left me,
+and you expected in a matter of a few months. He said in his dam' frigid
+way that it had become quite impossible and took down his hat."
+
+"There must have been more," Linda protested, suppressing a mad desire
+to laugh.
+
+"Not an inch," her mother asserted. "Nothing, after a little, suited
+him. He'd sit up like a poker, just as I've seen you, with his lips
+tight together in the Lowrie manner. It didn't please him no matter what
+you'd do. He wouldn't blow out at you like a Christian and I never knew
+where I was at. I'd come down in a matinée, the prettiest I could buy,
+and then see he didn't like it. He would expect you to be dressed in the
+morning like it was afternoon and you going out. And as for loosening
+your corsets for a little comfort about the house, you might as well
+have slapped him direct.
+
+"That wasn't the worst, though; but his going away without as much as a
+flicker of his hand; and with me like I was. Nobody on earth but would
+blame him for that. I only got what was allowed me after we had changed
+back to my old name, me and you. He never asked one single question
+about you nor tried to see or serve you a scrap. For all he knew, at a
+place called Santa Margharita in Italy, you might have been born dead."
+
+She was unable, Linda recognized, to defend him in any way; he had acted
+frightfully. She acknowledged this logically with her power of reason,
+but somehow it didn't touch her as it had her mother, and as, evidently,
+the latter expected. She was absorbed in the vision of her father
+sitting, in the Lowrie manner, rigid as a poker; she saw him quietly
+take up his hat and go away forever. Linda understood his process
+completely; she was capable of doing precisely the same thing. Whatever
+was the matter with her--in the heartlessness so often laid to her
+account--had been equally true of her father.
+
+"You ought to know what to say to them," Mrs. Moses Feldt cried, "or
+I'll do it for you! If only I had seen her she would have heard a thing
+or two not easy forgotten."
+
+Linda's determination to go to Philadelphia had not been shaken, and she
+made a vain effort to explain her attitude. "Of course, it was horrid
+for you," she said. "I can understand how you'd never never forgive him.
+But I am different, and, I expect, not at all nice. It's very possible,
+since he was my father, that we are alike. I wish you had told me this
+before--it explains so much and would have made things easier for me. I
+am afraid I must see them."
+
+She was aware of the bitterness and enmity that stiffened her mother
+into an unaccustomed adequate scorn:
+
+"I might have expected nothing better of you, and me watching it coming
+all these years. You can go or stay. I had my life in spite of the both
+of you, as gay as I pleased and a good husband just the same. I don't
+care if I never see you again, and if it wasn't for the fuss it would
+make I'd take care I didn't. You'll have your father's money now I'm
+married; I wonder you stay around here at all with your airs of being
+better than the rest. God's truth is you ain't near as good, even if I
+did bring you into the world."
+
+"I am willing to agree with you," Linda answered. "No one could be
+sweeter than the Feldts. I sha'n't do nearly as well. But that isn't
+it, really. People don't choose themselves; I'm certain father didn't at
+that lonely Italian place. If you weren't happy laced in the morning it
+wasn't your fault. You see, I am trying to excuse myself, and that isn't
+any good, either."
+
+"Unnatural," Mrs. Moses Feldt pronounced. And Linda, weary and
+depressed, allowed her the last word.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+Nothing further during the subsequent brief exchange of notes between
+Miss Lowrie and Linda was said of the latter's intention to visit her
+father's family. Mrs. Feldt, however, whose attitude toward Linda had
+been negatively polite, now displayed an animosity carefully hidden from
+her husband but evident to the two girls. The elder never neglected an
+opportunity to emphasize Linda's selfishness or make her personality
+seem ridiculous. But this Linda ignored from her wide sense of the
+inconsequence of most things.
+
+Yet she was relieved when, finally, she had actually left New York. She
+looked forward with an unusual hopeful curiosity to the Lowries. To
+her surprise their house--miles, it appeared, from the center of the
+city--was directly on a paved street with electric cars, unpretentious
+stores and very humble dwellings nearby. Back from the thoroughfare,
+however, there were spacious green lawns. The street itself, she saw
+at once, was old--a highway of gray stone with low aged stone façades,
+steep eaves and blackened chimney-pots reaching, dusty with years, into
+the farther hilly country.
+
+A gable of the Lowrie house, with a dignified white door, a fanlight of
+faintly iridescent glass and polished brasses, faced the brick sidewalk,
+while to the left there was a high board fence and an entrance with a
+small grille open on a somber reach of garden. A maid in a stiff white
+cap answered the fall of the knocker; she took Linda's bag; and, in a
+hall that impressed her by its bareness, Linda was greeted by the Miss
+Lowrie she had seen.
+
+Her aunt was composed, but there was a perceptible flush on her cheeks,
+and she said in a rapid voice, after a conventional welcome, "You must
+meet Elouise at once, before you go up to your room."
+
+Elouise Lowrie was older than Amelia, but she, too, was slender
+and erect, with black hair startling in its density on her wasted
+countenance. Linda noticed a fine ruby on a crooked finger and beautiful
+rose point lace. "It was good of you," the elder proceeded, "to come and
+see two old women. I don't know whether we have more to say or to keep
+still about. But I, for one, am going to avoid explanations. You are
+here, a fool could see that you were Bartram's girl, and that is enough
+for a Lowrie."
+
+The room was nearly as bare as the hall: in place of the deep carpets of
+the Feldts' the floor, of dark uneven oak boards, was merely waxed and
+covered by a rough-looking oval rug. The walls were paneled in white,
+with white ruffled curtains at small windows; and the furniture, the
+dull mahogany ranged against the immaculate paint, the rocking-chairs
+of high slatted walnut and rush bottoms, the slender formality of tables
+with fluted legs, was dignified but austere. There were some portraits
+in heavy old gilt--men with florid faces and tied hair, and the delicate
+replicas of high-breasted women in brocades.
+
+There was, plainly, an air of the exceptional in Amelia Lowrie's
+conduction of Linda to her room. She waited at the door while the other
+moved forward to the center of a chamber empty of all the luxury Linda
+had grown to demand. There was a bed with tall graceful posts supporting
+a canopy like a frosting of sugar, a solemn set of drawers with a
+diminutive framed mirror in which she could barely see her shoulders,
+a small unenclosed brass clock with long exposed weights, and two
+uninviting painted wooden chairs. This was not, although very nearly,
+all. Linda's attention was attracted by a framed and long-faded
+photograph of a young man, bareheaded, with a loosely knotted scarf, a
+striped blazer and white flannels. His face was thin and sensitive,
+his lips level, and his eyes gazed with a steady questioning at the
+observer.
+
+"That was Bartram," Amelia Lowrie told her; "your father. This was his
+room."
+
+She went down almost immediately and left Linda, in a maze of dim
+emotions, seated on one of the uncomfortable painted chairs. Her father!
+This was his room; nothing, she realized, had been disturbed. The mirror
+had held the vaguely unsteady reflection of his face; he had slept under
+the arched canopy of the bed. She rose and went to a window from which
+he, too, had looked.
+
+Below her was the garden shut in on its front by the high fence. There
+was a magnolia-tree, now covered with thick smooth white flowers, and,
+at the back, low-massed rhododendron with fragile lavender blossoms on
+a dark glossy foliage. But the space was mainly green and shadowed
+in tone; while beyond were other gardens, other emerald lawns and
+magnolia-trees, an ordered succession of tranquillity with separate
+brick or stone or white dwellings in the lengthening afternoon shadows
+of vivid maples.
+
+It was as different as possible from all that Linda had known, from the
+elaborate hotels and gigantic apartment houses, the tropical interiors,
+of her New York life. She unpacked her bag, putting her gold toilet
+things on the chest of drawers, precisely arranging in a shallow closet
+what clothes she had brought, and then, changing, went down to the
+Lowries.
+
+They surveyed her with eminent approval at a dinner-table lighted only
+with candles, beside long windows open on a dusk with a glimmer of
+fireflies. Suddenly Linda felt amazingly at ease; it seemed to her
+that she had sat here before, with the night flowing gently in over the
+candle-flames. The conversation, she discovered, never strayed far
+from the concerns and importance of the Lowrie blood. "My grandmother,
+Natalie Vigné," Elouise informed her, "came with her father to
+Philadelphia from France, in eighteen hundred and one, at the invitation
+of Stephen Girard, who was French as well. She married Hallet Lowrie
+whose mother was a Bartram.
+
+"That, my dear, explains our black hair and good figgers. There never
+was a lumpy Lowrie. Well, Hallet built this house, or rather enlarged
+it, for his wife; and it has never been out of the family. Our nephew,
+Arnaud Hallet--Arnaud was old Vigné's name--owns it now. Isaac Hallet,
+you may recall, was suspected of being a Tory; at any rate his brother's
+descendants, Fanny Rodwell is the only one left, won't speak."
+
+The placid conversation ran on unchanged throughout dinner and the
+evening. Linda was relieved by the absence of any questioning; indeed
+nothing contemporary, she realized, was held to be significant. "I
+thought Arnaud would be in to-night," Elouise Lowrie said; "he knew
+Linda was expected." No one, however, appeared; and Linda went up early
+to her room. There, too, were only candles, a pale wavering illumination
+in which the past, her father, were extraordinarily nearby. A sense of
+pride was communicated to her by so much that time had been unable to
+shake. The bed was steeped in the magic of serene traditions.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+Arnaud Hallet appeared for dinner the evening after Linda's arrival;
+a quiet man with his youth lost, slightly stooped shoulders, crumpled
+shoes and a green cloth bag. But he had a memorable voice and an easy
+distinction of manner; in addition to these she discovered, at the
+table, a lighter amusing sense of the absurd. She watched him--as
+he poured the sherry from a decanter with a silver label hung on a
+chain--with a feeling of mild approbation. On the whole he was nice but
+uninteresting. What a different man from Pleydon!
+
+The days passed in a pleasant deliberation, with Arnaud Hallet
+constantly about the house or garden, while Linda's thoughts continually
+returned to the sculptor. He was clearer than the actuality of her
+mother and the Feldts or the recreated image of her father. At times she
+was thrilled by the familiar obscure sense of music, of longing slowly
+translated into happiness. Then more actual problems would envelop her
+in doubt. Mostly she was confused--in her cool material necessity for
+understanding--by the temper of her feeling for Dodge Pleydon. Linda
+wondered if this were love. Perhaps, when she saw him again, she'd be
+able to decide. Then she remembered promising to let him know if she
+changed her address. It was possible that already he had called at the
+Feldts', or written, and that her mother had refused to inform him where
+she had gone.
+
+Linda had been at the Lowries' two weeks now, but they were acutely
+distressed when she suggested that her visit was unreasonably prolonged.
+"My dear," they protested together, "we hoped you'd stay the summer.
+Bartram's girl! Unless, of course, it is dull with us. Something
+brighter must be arranged. No doubt we have only thought of our own
+pleasure in having you."
+
+Linda replied honestly that she enjoyed being with them extremely. Her
+mother's dislike, the heavy luxury of the Feldt apartment, held little
+attraction for her. Then, too, losing the sense of the bareness of the
+house Hallet Lowrie had built for his French wife, she began to find it
+surprisingly appealing.
+
+Her mind returned to her promise to Pleydon. She told herself
+that probably he had forgotten her existence, but she had a strong
+unreasoning conviction that this was not so. It seemed the most natural
+thing in the world to write him and, almost before she was aware of
+the intention, she had put "Dear Mr. Pleydon" at the head of a sheet of
+note-paper.
+
+I promised to let you know in the spring when you came back from South
+America where I was. I did not think I would have to do it, but here I
+am in Philadelphia with my father's sisters. I do not know just how long
+for, but a month, anyhow. It is very quiet, but charming. I have the
+room that was my father's when he was young, and look out of the window
+like he must have. If you should come to Philadelphia my aunts ask me to
+say that they would be glad to have you for dinner. This is how you get
+here....
+
+Very sincerely,
+
+LINDA CONDON.
+
+She walked to a street crossing, where she dropped the envelope into a
+letter-box on a lamppost, and returned to find Arnaud Hallet waiting for
+her. He said:
+
+"Everyone agrees I'm serious, but actually you are worse than the
+Assembly." They went through the dining-room to the garden, and sat
+on the stone step of a deep window. It was quite late, perhaps eleven
+o'clock, and the fireflies, slowly rising into the night, had vanished.
+Linda was cool and remote and grave, silently repeating and weighing the
+phrases of her letter to Pleydon.
+
+She realized that Arnaud Hallet was coming to like her a very great
+deal; but she gave this only the slightest attention. She liked him,
+really, and that dismissed him from serious consideration. Anyhow,
+in spite of the perfection of his manner, Arnaud's careless dress
+displeased her: his shoes and the shoulders of his coat were perpetually
+dusty, and his hair, growing scant, was always ruffled. Linda understood
+that he was highly intellectual, and frequently contributed historical
+and genealogical papers to societies and bulletins, but compared with
+Dodge Pleydon's brilliant personality and reputation, Pleydon surrounded
+by the Susanna Nodas of life, Arnaud was as dingy as his shoes.
+
+She wondered idly when the latter would actually try to love her. He was
+holding her hand and it might well be to-night. Linda decided that he
+would do it delicately; and when, almost immediately, he kissed her, she
+was undisturbed. No, surprisingly, it had been quite pleasant. He hadn't
+mussed her ribbons, nor her spirit, a particle. In addition he did not
+at once become impossible and urgently sentimental; there was even a
+shade of amusement on his heavy face.
+
+"You appear to take a lot for granted," he complained.
+
+"I'd been wondering when it would happen," she admitted coolly.
+
+"It always does, then?"
+
+"Usually I stop it," she continued. "I don't believe I'll ever like
+being kissed. Can you tell me why? No one ever has; they all think they
+can bring me around to it."
+
+"And to them," he added.
+
+"But they end by being furious at me. I've been sworn at and called
+dreadful names. Sometimes they're only silly. One cried; I hated that
+the most."
+
+"Do you mean that you were sorry for him?"
+
+"Oh, dear, no. Why should I be? He looked so odious all smeared with
+tears."
+
+Arnaud Hallet returned promptly: "Linda, you're a little beast." To
+counteract his rude speech he kissed her again. "This," he said with
+less security, "threatens to become a habit. I thought, at forty-five,
+that I was safely by the island of sirens, but I'll be on the rocks
+before I know it."
+
+She laughed with the cool remoteness of running water.
+
+"I wonder you haven't been murdered," he proceeded, "in a moonless
+garden by an elderly lawyer. Do you ever think of the lyric day when,
+preceded by a flock of bridesmaids and other flowery pagan truck, you'll
+meet justice?"
+
+"Marriage?" she asked. "But of course. I have everything perfectly
+planned--"
+
+"Then, my dear Linda, describe him."
+
+"Very straight," she said, "with beautiful polished shoes and brushed
+hair."
+
+"You ought to have no trouble finding that. Any number of my friends
+have one--to open the door and take your things. I might arrange a very
+satisfactory introduction for everybody concerned--a steady man well on
+his way to preside over the pantry and table."
+
+"You're not as funny as usual," Linda decided critically. "That, too,
+disturbs me," he replied. "It looks even more unpromising for the near
+future."
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+In her room Linda thought, momentarily, of Arnaud Hallet; whatever might
+have been serious in her attitude toward him dissolved by the lightness
+of his speech. Dodge Pleydon appealed irresistibly to her deepest
+feelings. Now her mental confusion was at least clear in that she knew
+what troubled her. It was not new, it extended even to times before
+Pleydon had entered her life--the difficulties presented by the term
+"love."
+
+In her mind it was divided into two or three widely different aspects,
+phases which she was unable to reconcile. Her mother, in the beginning,
+had informed her that love was a nuisance. To be happy, a man must love
+you without any corresponding return; this was necessary to his complete
+management, the securing of the greatest possible amount of new clothes.
+It was as far as love should be allowed to enter marriage. But that
+reality, with a complete expression in shopping, was distant from the
+immaterial and delicate emotions that in her responded to Pleydon.
+
+Linda had been familiar with the materials, the processes, of what, she
+had been assured, was veritable love since early childhood. Her mother's
+dressing, the irritable hours of fittings and at her mirror, the paint
+she put on her cheeks, the crimping of her hair were for the favor of
+men. These struggles had absorbed the elder, all the women Linda had
+encountered, to the exclusion of everything else. This, it seemed, must,
+from its overwhelming predominance, be the greatest thing in life.
+
+There was nothing mysterious about it. You did certain things
+intelligently, if you had the figure to do them with, for a practical
+end. The latter, carefully controlled, like an essence of which a drop
+was delightful and more positively stifling, was as real as the
+methods of approach. Oatmeal or scented soap! The force of example and
+association combined to bathe such developments in the sanest light
+possible, and Linda had every intention of the successful grasping of an
+easy and necessary luxury. She had, until--vaguely--now, been entirely
+willing to accept the unescapable conditions of love used as a means or
+the element of pleasure at parties. Now, however, the unexpected element
+of Dodge Pleydon disturbed her philosophy.
+
+Suddenly all the lacing and painting and crimping, the pretense and lies
+and carefully planned accidental effects, filled her with revolt. The
+insinuations of women, the bareness of their revelations, her
+mother returning unsteady and mussed from a dinner, were unutterably
+disgusting. Even to think of them hurt her fundamentally: so much of
+what she was, of what she had determined, had been destroyed by an
+emotion apparently as slight as echoed music.
+
+Here was the real mystery and for which nothing in her experience had
+prepared her. She began to see why it was called a nuisance--if this
+were love--and wondered if she had better not suppress it at once. It
+wouldn't be suppressed. Her thoughts continually came back to Pleydon,
+and the warmth, the disturbing thrill, always resulted. It led her away
+from herself, from Linda Condon; a sufficiently strange accomplishment.
+A concern for Dodge Pleydon, little schemes for his happiness and
+well-being, put aside her clothes and complexion and her future.
+
+Until the present her acts had been the result of deliberation. She had
+been impressed by the necessity for planning with care; but, in the cool
+gloom of the covered bed, a sharp joy held her at the possibility of
+flinging caution away. Yet she couldn't quite, no matter how much she
+desired it, lose herself. Linda was glad that Pleydon was rich; and
+there were, she remembered, moments for surrender.
+
+As usual these problems, multiplying toward night, were fewer in the
+bright flood of morning. She laughed at the memory of Arnaud Hallet's
+humor; and then, it was late afternoon, the maid told her that Pleydon
+was in the drawing room. Her appearance satisfactory she was able to see
+him at once. To her great pleasure neither Pleydon nor his clothes had
+changed. He was dressed in light-gray flannels; a big easy man with a
+crushing palm, large features and an expression of intolerance.
+
+"Linda," he said, "what a splendid place to find you. So much better
+than Markue's." He was, she realized, very glad to see her, and dropped
+at once, as if they had been uninterruptedly together, into intimate
+talk. "My work has been going badly," he proceeded; "or rather not at
+all. I made a rather decent fountain at Newport; but--remember what
+Susanna said?--it's not in the first rank. A happy balance and strong
+enough conception; yet it is like a Cellini ewer done in granite. The
+truth is, too much interests me; an artist ought to be the victim of a
+monomania. I'm a normal animal." He studied her contentedly:
+
+"How lovely you are. I came over--in an automobile at last--because I
+was certain you couldn't exist as I remembered you. But you could and
+do. Lovely Linda! And what a gem of a letter. It might have been copied
+from 'The Perfect Correspondent for Young Females.' You're not going to
+lose me again. When I was a little boy I had a passion for sherbets."
+
+She smiled at him with half-closed eyes and the conviction that, with
+Pleydon, she could easily be different. He leaned forward and his voice
+startled her with the impression that he had read her mind:
+
+"If you could care for any one a lifetime would be short to get you.
+Look, you have never been out of my thoughts--or within my reach. It
+seems a myth that I kissed you; impossible ... Linda."
+
+"But you did," she told him, gaining happiness from the mere assurance.
+They were alone in the drawing-room, and he rose, sweeping her up
+into his arms. Yet the expected joy evaded her desire and the sudden
+determination to lose utterly her reserve. It was evident that he as
+well was conscious of this, for he released her and stood frowning, his
+protruding lower lip uglier than ever.
+
+"A lifetime would be nothing," he said again; "or it might be everything
+wasted. Which are you--all soul and spirit, or none?"
+
+"I don't know," she replied, in her bitter disappointment, her heart
+pinched by the sharpest pain she remembered. There was the stir of
+skirts at the door; Linda turned with a sense of relief to Amelia
+Lowrie. However, dinner progressed very well indeed. "Then your aunt,"
+Elouise said to Pleydon, "was Carrie Dodge. I recall her perfectly."
+That established, the Lowrie women talked with a gracious freedom,
+exploring the furthermost infiltrations of blood and marriages.
+
+Linda was again serene. She watched Pleydon with an extraordinary
+formless conviction--each of them was a part of the other's life; while
+in some way marriage and love were now hopelessly confused. It was
+beyond effort or planning. That was all she could grasp, but she was
+contented. Sometimes when he talked he made the familiar descriptive
+gesture with his hand, as if he were shaping the form of his speech: a
+sculptor's gesture, Linda realized.
+
+Later they wandered into the garden, a dark enclosure with the long
+ivy-covered façade of the house broken by the lighted spaces of windows.
+Beyond the fence at regular intervals an electric car passed with
+an increasing and diminishing clangor. The white petals of the
+magnolia-tree had fallen and been wheeled away; the blossoms of the
+rhododendron were dead on their stems. It was, Linda felt, a very old
+garden that had known many momentary emotions and lives.
+
+Dodge Pleydon, standing before her, put his hands on her shoulders.
+"Would I have any success?" he asked. "Do you think you'd care for me?"
+
+She smiled confidently up at his intent face. "Oh, yes." Yet she hoped
+that he would not kiss her--just then. The delicacy of her longing and
+need were far removed from material expressions. This, of course, meant
+marriage; but marriage was money, comfort, the cold thing her mother had
+impressed on her. Love, her love, was a mistake here. But in a little
+it would all come straight and she would understand. She no longer had
+confidence in her mother's wisdom.
+
+In spite of her shrinking, of a half articulate appeal, he crushed her
+against his face. Whatever that had filled her with hope, she thought,
+was being torn from her. A sickening aversion over which she had no
+control made her stark in his arms. The memories of the painted coarse
+satiety of women and the sly hard men for which they schemed, the loose
+discussions of calculated advances and sordid surrenders, flooded her
+with a loathing for what she passionately needed to be beautiful.
+
+Yet deep within her, surprising in its vitality, a fragile ardor
+persisted. If she could explain, not only might he understand, but be
+able to make her own longing clear and secure. But all she managed
+to say was, "If you kiss me again I think it will kill me." Even that
+failed to stop him. "You were never alive," he asserted. "I'll put some
+feeling into you. It has been done before with marble."
+
+Linda, unresponsive, suffered inordinately.
+
+Again on her feet she saw that Pleydon was angry, his face grim. He
+seemed changed, threatening and unfamiliar; it was exactly as if, in
+place of Dodge Pleydon, a secretive impersonal ugliness stood disclosed
+before her. He said harshly:
+
+"When will you marry me?"
+
+It was what, above all else, she had wanted; and Linda realized that to
+marry him was still the crown of whatever happiness she could imagine.
+But her horror of the past recreated by his beating down of her
+gossamer-like aspiration, the vision of him flushed and ruthless, an
+image of indiscriminate nameless man, made it impossible for her to
+reply. An abandon of shrinking fear numbed her heart and lips.
+
+"You won't get rid of me as you do the others about you," he continued.
+"This time you made a mistake. I haven't any pride that you can insult;
+but I have all that you--with your character--require. I have more money
+even than you can want." She cried despairingly:
+
+"It isn't that now! I had forgotten everything to do with money and
+depended on you to take me away from it always."
+
+"When will you marry me?"
+
+In a flash of blinding perception, leaving her as dazed as though it had
+been a physical actuality, she realized that marrying him had become an
+impossibility. At the barest thought of it the dread again closed about
+her like ice. She tried, with all the force of old valuations, with even
+an effort to summon back the vanquished thrill, to give herself to
+him. But a quality overpowering and instinctive, the response of her
+incalculable injury, made any contact with him hateful. It was
+utterly beyond her power to explain. A greater mystery still partly
+unfolded--whatever she had hoped from Pleydon belonged to the special
+emotion that had possessed her since earliest childhood.
+
+In the immediate tragedy of her helplessness, with Dodge Pleydon
+impatient for an assurance, she paused involuntarily to wonder about
+that hidden imperative sense. There was a broken mental fantasy of--of a
+leopard bearing a woman in shining hair. This was succeeded by a bright
+thrust of happiness and, all about her, a surging like the imagined
+beat of the wings of the Victory in Markue's room. Almost Pleydon had
+explained everything, almost he was everything; and then the other,
+putting him aside, had swept her back into the misery of doubt and
+loneliness.
+
+"I can't marry you," she said in a flat and dragged voice. He demanded
+abruptly:
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I don't know." She recognized his utter right to the temper that
+mastered him. For a moment Linda thought Pleydon would shake her. "You
+feel that way now," he declared; "and perhaps next month; but you will
+change; in the end I'll have you."
+
+"No," she told him, with a certainty from a source outside her
+consciousness. "It has been spoiled."
+
+He replied, "Time will discover which of us is right. I'm almost willing
+to stay away till you send for me. But that would only make you more
+stubborn. What a strong little devil you are, Linda. I have no doubt I'd
+do better to marry a human being. Then I think we both forget how young
+you are--you can't pretend to be definite yet."
+
+He captured her hands; too exhausted for any resentment or feeling she
+made no effort to evade him. "I'll never say good-bye to you."
+
+His voice had the absolute quality of her own conviction. To her
+amazement her cheeks were suddenly wet with tears. "I want to go now,"
+she said unsteadily; "and--and thank you."
+
+His old easy formality returned as he made his departure. In reply to
+Pleydon's demand she told him listlessly that she would be here for,
+perhaps, a week longer. Then he'd see her, he continued, in New York, at
+the Feldts'.
+
+In her room all emotion faded. Pleydon had said that she was still
+young; but she was sure she could never, in experience or feeling, be
+older. She became sorry for herself; or rather for the illusions, the
+Linda, of a few hours ago. She examined her features in the limited
+uncertain mirror--strong sensations, she knew, were a charge on the
+appearance--but she was unable to find any difference in her regular
+pallor. Then, mechanically conducting her careful preparations for the
+night, her propitiation of the only omnipotence she knew, she put out
+the candles of her May.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+What welcome Linda met in New York came from Mr. Moses Feldt, who
+embraced her warmly enough, but with an air slightly ill at ease. He
+begged her to kiss her mama, who was sometimes hurt by Linda's coldness.
+She made no reply, and found the same influence and evidence of the
+power of suggestion in Judith. "We thought maybe you wouldn't care to
+come back here," the latter said pointedly, over her shoulder, while
+she was directing the packing of a trunk. The Feldts were preparing for
+their summer stay at the sea.
+
+Her mother's room resembled one of the sales of obvious and expensive
+attire conducted in the lower salons of pleasure hotels. There were
+airy piles of chiffon and satin, inappropriate hats and the inevitable
+confections of silk and lace. "It's not necessary to ask if you were
+right at home with your father's family," Mrs. Condon observed with an
+assumed casual inattention. "I can see you sitting with those old women
+as dry and false as any. No one saved me in the clacking, I'm sure."
+
+"We didn't speak of you," Linda replied. She studied, unsparing,
+the loose flesh of the elder's ravaged countenance. Her mother, she
+recognized, hated her, both because she was like Bartram Lowrie and
+still young, with everything unspent that the other valued and had lost.
+In support of herself Mrs. Feldt asserted again that she had "lived,"
+with stacks of friends and flowers, lavish parties and devoted
+attendance.
+
+"You may be smarter than I was," she went on, "but what good it does
+you who can say? And if you expect to get something for nothing you're
+fooled before you start." She shook out the airy breadths of a vivid
+echo of past daring. "From the way you act a person might think you
+were pretty, but you are too thin and pulled out. I've heard your looks
+called peculiar, and that was, in a manner of speaking, polite. You're
+not even stylish any more--the line is full again and not suitable for
+bony shoulders and no bust." She still cherished a complacency in her
+amplitude.
+
+Linda turned away unmoved. Of all the world, she thought, only Dodge
+Pleydon had the power actually to hurt her. She knew that she would
+see him soon again and that again he would ask her to marry him. She
+considered, momentarily, the possibility of saying yes; and instantly
+the dread born with him in the Lowrie garden swept over her. Linda told
+herself that he was the only man for whom she could ever deeply care;
+that--for every conceivable reason--such a marriage was perfect. But the
+shrinking from its implications grew too painful for support.
+
+Her mother's bitterness increased hourly; she no longer hid her feelings
+from her husband and Judith; and dinner, accompanied by her elaborate
+sarcasm, was a difficult period in which, plainly, Mr. Moses Feldt
+suffered most and Linda was the least concerned. This condition, she
+admitted silently, couldn't go on indefinitely; it was too vulgar if for
+no other reason. And she determined to ask the Lowries for another and
+more extended invitation.
+
+Pleydon came, as she had expected, and they sat in the small
+reception-room with the high ceiling and dark velvet hangings, the piano
+at which, long ago it now seemed, Judith had played the airs of Gluck
+for her. He said little, but remained for a long while spread over
+the divan and watching her--in a formal chair--discontentedly. He rose
+suddenly and stood above her, a domineering bulk obliterating nearly
+everything else. In response to his demand she said, pale and composed,
+that she was not "reasonable"; she omitted the "yet" included in his
+question. Pleydon frowned. However, then, he insisted no further.
+
+When he had gone Linda was as spent as though there had been a fresh
+brutal scene; and the following day she was enveloped in an unrelieved
+depression. Her mother mocked her silence as another evidence of
+ridiculous pretentiousness. Mr. Moses Feldt regarded her with a furtive
+concerned kindliness; while Judith followed her with countless small
+irritating complaints. It was the last day at the apartment before their
+departure for the summer. Linda was insuperably tired. She had gone to
+her room almost directly after dinner, and when a maid came to her door
+with a card, she exclaimed, before looking at it, that she was not in.
+It was, however, Arnaud Hallet; and, with a surprise tempered by a faint
+interest, she told the servant that she would see him.
+
+There was, Linda observed at once, absolutely no difference in Arnaud's
+clothing, no effort to make himself presentable for New York or her. In
+a way, it amused her--it was so characteristic of his forgetfulness, and
+it made him seem doubly familiar. He waved a hand toward the luxury of
+the interior. "This," he declared, "is downright impressive, and lifted,
+I'm sure, out of a novel of Ouida's.
+
+"You will remember," he continued, "complaining about my sense of humor
+one evening; and that, at the time, I warned you it might grow worse.
+It has. I am afraid, where you are concerned, that it has absolutely
+vanished. My dear, you'll recognize this as a proposal. I thought my
+mind was made up, after forty, not to marry; and I specially tried not
+to bring you into it. You were too young, I felt. I doubted if I
+could make you happy, and did everything possible, exhausted all the
+arguments, but it was no good.
+
+"Linda, dear, I adore you."
+
+She was glad, without the slightest answering emotion, that Arnaud,
+well--liked her. At the same time all her wisdom declared that she
+couldn't marry him; and, with the unsparing frankness of youth and her
+individual detachment, she told him exactly why.
+
+"I need a great deal of money," she proceeded, "because I am frightfully
+extravagant. All I have is expensive; I hate cheap things--even what
+satisfies most rich girls. Why, just my satin slippers cost hundreds of
+dollars and I'll pay unlimited amounts for a little fulling of lace or
+some rare flowers. You'd call it wicked, but I can't help it--it's me.
+
+"I've always intended to marry a man with a hundred thousand dollars a
+year. Of course, that's a lot--do you hate me for telling you?--but I
+wouldn't think of any one with less than fifty--"
+
+Arnaud Hallet interrupted quietly, "I have that."
+
+Linda gazed incredulously at his neglected shoes, the wrinkles of his
+inconsiderable coat and unstudied scarf. She saw that, actually, he had
+spoken apologetically of his possessions; and a stinging shame spread
+through her at the possibility that she had seemed common to an
+infinitely finer delicacy than hers.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Most of these circumstances Linda Hallet quietly recalled sitting with
+her husband in the house that had been occupied by the Lowries'. A
+letter from Pleydon had taken her into a past seven years gone by; while
+ordinarily her memory was indistinct; ordinarily she was fully occupied
+by the difficulties, or rather compromises, of the present. But, in the
+tranquil open glow of a Franklin stove and the withdrawn intentness of
+Arnaud reading, her mind had returned to the distressed period of her
+wedding.
+
+Elouise Lowrie--Amelia was dead--sunk in a stupor of extreme old age,
+her bloodless hands folded in an irreproachable black surah silk lap,
+sat beyond the stove; and Lowrie, Linda's elder child, five and a half,
+together with his sister Vigné, had been long asleep above. Linda was
+privately relieved by this: her children presented enormous obligations.
+The boy, already at a model school, appalled her inadequate preparations
+by his flashes of perceptive intelligence; while she was frankly abashed
+at the delicate rosy perfection of her daughter.
+
+The present letter was the third she had received from Dodge Pleydon,
+whom she had not seen since her marriage. At first he had been enraged
+at the wrong, he had every reason to feel, she had done him. Then his
+anger had dissolved into a meager correspondence of outward and obvious
+facts. There was so much that she had been unable to explain. He had
+always been impatient, even contemptuous, of the emotion that made her
+surrender to him unthinkable--Linda realized now that it had been the
+strongest impulse of her life--and, of course, she had never accounted
+for the practically unbalanced enmity of her mother.
+
+The latter had deepened to an incredible degree, so much so that Mr.
+Moses Feldt, though he had never taken an actual part in it--such
+bitterness was entirely outside his generous sentimentality--had become
+acutely uncomfortable in his own home, imploring Linda, with ready
+tears, to be kinder to her mama. Judith, too, had grown cutting, jealous
+of Linda's serenity of youth, as her appearance showed the effect of her
+wasting emotions. Things quite extraordinary had happened: once
+Linda's skin had been almost seriously affected by an irritation that
+immediately followed the trace of her powder-puff; and at several times
+she had had clumsily composed anonymous notes of a most distressing
+nature.
+
+She had wondered, calmly enough, which of the two bitter women were
+responsible, and decided that it was her mother. At this the situation
+at the Feldts', increasingly strained, had become an impossibility.
+Arnaud Hallet, after his first visit, had soon returned. There was no
+more mention of his money; but every time he saw her he asked her
+again, in his special manner--a formality flavored by a slight diffident
+humor--to marry him. Arnaud's proposals had alternated with Pleydon's
+utterly different demand.
+
+Linda remembered agonized evenings when, in a return of his brutal
+manner of the unforgettable night in the Lowrie garden, he tried to
+force a recognition of his passion. It had left her cold, exhausted,
+the victim of a mingled disappointment at her failure to respond with
+a hatred of all essential existence. At last, on a particularly trying
+occasion, she had desperately agreed to marry him.
+
+The aversion of her mother, becoming really dangerous, had finally
+appalled her; and a headache weighed on her with a leaden pain. Dodge,
+too, had been unusually considerate; he talked about the future--tied
+up, he asserted, in her--of his work; and suddenly, at the signal of her
+rare tears, Linda agreed to a wedding.
+
+In the middle of the night she had wakened oppressed by a dread
+resulting in an uncontrollable chill. She thought first that her mother
+was bending a malignant face over her; and then realized that her
+feeling was caused by her promise to Dodge Pleydon. It had grown worse
+instead of vanishing, waves of nameless shrinking swept over her; and in
+the morning, further harrowed by the actualities of being, she had sent
+a telegram to Arnaud Hallet--to Arnaud's kindness and affection, his
+detachment not unlike her own.
+
+They were married immediately; and through the ceremony and the
+succeeding days she had been almost entirely absorbed in a sensation of
+escape. At the death of Amelia Lowrie, soon after, Arnaud had suggested
+a temporary period in the house she remembered with pleasure; and,
+making small alterations with the months and years, they had tacitly
+agreed to remain.
+
+Linda often wondered, walking about the lower floor, why it seemed so
+familiar to her: she would stand in the dining-room, with its ceiling of
+darkened beams, and gaze absent-minded through the long windows at the
+close-cut walled greenery without. The formal drawing-room, at the right
+of the street entrance, equally held her--a cool interior with slatted
+wooden blinds, a white mantelpiece with delicately reeded supports and a
+bas-relief of Minerva on the center panel, a polished brass scuttle for
+cannel-coal and chairs with wide severely fretted backs upholstered in
+old pale damask.
+
+The house seemed familiar, but she could never grow accustomed to the
+undeniable facts of her husband, the children and her completely changed
+atmosphere. She admitted to herself that her principal feeling in
+connection with Lowrie and Vigné was embarrassment. Here she always
+condemned herself as an indifferent, perhaps unnatural, mother. She
+couldn't help it. In the same sense she must be an unsatisfactory wife.
+Linda was unable to shake off the conviction that it was like a play in
+which she had no more than a spectator's part.
+
+This was her old disability, the result of her habit of sitting, as
+a child, apart from the concerns and stir of living. She made every
+possible effort to overcome it, to surrender to her new conditions; but,
+if nothing else, an instinctive shyness prevented. It went back further,
+even, she thought, than her own experience, and she recalled all she had
+heard and reconstructed of her father--a man shut in on himself who had,
+one day, without a word walked out of the door and left his wife,
+never to return. These realizations, however, did little to clarify her
+vision; she was continually trying to adjust her being to circumstances
+that persistently remained a little distant and blurred.
+
+In appearance, anyhow, Linda told herself with a measure of reassurance,
+she was practically unchanged. She still, with the support of Arnaud,
+disregarding current fashion, wore her hair in a straight bang across
+her brow and blue gaze. She was as slender as formerly, but more
+gracefully round, in spite of the faint characteristic stiffness that
+was the result of her mental hesitation. Her clothes, too, had hardly
+varied--she wore, whenever possible, white lawns ruffled about the
+throat and hem, with broad soft black sashes, while her more formal
+dresses were sheaths of dull unornamented satin extravagant in the
+perfection of their simplicity.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+Arnaud Hallet stirred, sharply closing his book. He had changed--except
+for a palpable settling down of grayness--as little as Linda. For a
+while she had tried to bring about an improvement in his appearance, and
+he had met her expressed wish whenever he remembered it; but this was
+not often. In the morning a servant polished his shoes, brushed and
+ironed his suits; yet by evening, somehow, he managed to look as though
+he hadn't been attended to for days. She would have liked him to change
+for dinner; other men of his connection did, it was a part of his
+inheritance. Arnaud, however, in his slight scoffing disparagement,
+declined individually to annoy himself. He was, she learned, enormously
+absorbed in his historical studies and papers.
+
+"Did you enjoy it?" she asked politely of his reading. "Extremely," he
+replied. "The American Impressions of Tyrone Power, the English actor,
+through eighteen thirty-three and four. His account of a European packet
+with its handbells and Saratoga water and breakfast of spitch-cock
+is inimitable. I'd like to have sat at Cato's then, with a julep or
+hail-storm, and watched the trotting races."
+
+Elouise Lowrie rose unsteadily, confused with dozing; but almost
+immediately she gathered herself into a relentless propriety and a
+formal goodnight.
+
+"What has been running through that mysterious mind of yours?"
+
+"I had a letter from Dodge," she told him simply; "and I was thinking a
+little about the past." He exhibited the nice unstrained interest of
+his admirable personality. "Is he still in France?" he queried. "Pleydon
+should be a strong man; I am sure we are both conscious of a little
+disappointment in him." She said: "I'll read you his letter, it's on the
+table.
+
+"'You will see, my dear Linda, that I have not moved from the Rue de
+Penthièvre, although I have given up the place at Etretat, and I am not
+going to renew the lease here. Rodin insists, and I coming to agree with
+him, that I ought to be in America. But the serious attitude here toward
+art, how impossible that word has been made, is charming. And you will
+be glad to know that I have had some success in the French good opinion.
+A marble, Cotton Mather, that I cut from the stone, has been bought for
+the Luxembourg.
+
+"'I can hear you both exclaim at the subject, but it is very
+representative of me now. I am tired of mythological naiads in a
+constant state of pursuit. Get Hallet to tell you something about
+Mather. What a somber flame! I have a part Puritan ancestry, as any
+Lowrie will inform you. Well, I shall be back in a few months, very
+serious, and a politician--a sculptor has to be that if he means to land
+any public monuments in America.
+
+"'I hope to see you.'"
+
+The letter ended abruptly, with the signature, "Pleydon."
+
+"Are you happy, Linda?" Arnaud Hallet asked unexpectedly after a short
+silence. So abruptly interrogated she was unable to respond. "What
+I mean is," he explained, "do you think you would have been happier
+married to him? I knew, certainly, that it was the closest possible
+thing between us." Now, however, she was able to satisfy him:
+
+"I couldn't marry Dodge."
+
+"Is it possible to tell me why?"
+
+"He hurt me very much once. I tried to marry him, I tried to forget it,
+but it was useless. I was dreadfully unhappy, in a great many ways--"
+
+"So you sent for me," he put in as she paused reflectively. "I didn't
+hurt you, at any rate." It seemed to her that his tone was shadowed.
+"You have never hurt me, Arnaud," she assured him, conscious of the
+inadequacy of her words. "You were everything I wanted."
+
+"Except for my hats," he said in a brief flash of his saving humor. "It
+would be better for me, perhaps, if I could hurt you. That ability
+comes dangerously close to a constant of love. You mustn't think I
+am complaining. I haven't the slightest reason in the face of your
+devastating honesty. I didn't distress you and I had the necessary
+minimum--the fifty thousand." His manner was so even, so devoid of
+sting, that she could smile at the expression of her material ambitions.
+"I realize exactly your feeling for myself, but what puzzles me is your
+attitude toward the children."
+
+"I don't understand it either," she admitted, "except that I am quite
+afraid of them. They are so different from all my own childhood; often
+they are too much for me. Then I dread the time when they will discover
+how stupid and uneducated I am at bottom. I'm sure you already ask
+questions before them to amuse yourself at my doubt. What shall I do,
+Arnaud, when they are really at school and bring home their books?"
+
+"Retreat behind your dignity as a parent," he advised. "They are certain
+to display their knowledge and ask you to bound things or name the
+capital of Louisiana." She cried, "Oh, but I know that, it's New
+Orleans!" She saw at once, from his entertained expression, that she
+was wrong again, and became conscious of a faint flush of annoyance. "It
+will be even worse," she continued, "when Vigné looks to me for advice;
+I mean when she is older and has lovers."
+
+"She won't seriously; they never do. She'll tell you when it's all over.
+Lowrie will depend more on you. I may have my fun about the capital of
+Louisiana, Linda, but I have the greatest confidence in your wisdom. God
+knows what an unhappy experience your childhood was, but it has given
+you a superb worldly balance."
+
+"I suppose you're saying that I am cold," she told him. "It must be
+true, because it is repeated by every one. Yet, at times, I used to be
+very different--you'd never imagine what a romantic thrill or strange
+ideas were inside of me. Like a memory of a deep woods, and--and the
+loveliest adventure. Often I would hear music as clearly as possible,
+and it made me want I don't know what terrifically."
+
+"An early experience," he replied. Suddenly she saw that he was tired,
+his face was lined and dejected. "You read too much," Linda declared.
+He said: "But only out of the printed book." She wondered vainly what he
+meant. As he stood before the glimmering coals, in the room saturated
+in repose, she wished that she might give him more; she wanted to
+spend herself in a riot of feeling on Arnaud and their children. What a
+detestable character she had! Her desire, her efforts, were wasted.
+
+He went about putting up the windows and closing the outside shutters, a
+confirmed habit. Linda rose with her invariable sense of separation, the
+feeling that, bound on a journey with a hidden destination, she was only
+temporarily in a place of little importance. It was like being always in
+her hat and jacket. Arnaud shook down the grate; then he gazed over
+the room; it was all, she was sure, as it had been a century ago, as it
+should be--all except herself.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+Yet her marriage had realized in almost every particular what she
+had--so much younger--planned. The early suggestion, becoming through
+constant reiteration a part of her knowledge, had been followed and
+accomplished; and, as well, her later needs were served. Linda told
+herself that, in a world where a very great deal was muddled, she had
+been unusually fortunate. And this made her angry at her pervading lack
+of interest in whatever she had obtained.
+
+Other women, she observed, obviously less fortunate than she, were
+volubly and warmly absorbed in any number of engagements and pleasures;
+she continually heard them, Arnaud's connections--the whole superior
+society, eternally and vigorously discussing servants and bridge, family
+and cotillions, indiscretions and charities. These seemed enough for
+them; their lives were filled, satisfied, extraordinarily busy. Linda,
+for the most part, had but little to do. Her servants, managed with
+remote exactness, gave no trouble; she had an excellent woman for the
+children; her dress presented no new points of anxiety nor departure ...
+she was, in short, Arnaud admitted, perfectly efficient. She disposed of
+such details mechanically, almost impatiently, and was contemptuous, no
+envious, of the women whose demands they contented.
+
+At the dinners, the balls, to which Arnaud's sense of obligation both
+to family and her took them against his inclination, it was the
+same--everyone, it appeared to Linda, was flushed with an intentness she
+could not share. Men, she found, some of them extremely pleasant, still
+made adroit and reassuring efforts for her favor; the air here, she
+discovered, was even freer than the bravado of her earlier surroundings.
+This love-making didn't disturb her--it was, ultimately, the men who
+were fretted--indeed, she had rather hoped that it would bring her the
+relief she lacked.
+
+But again the observations and speculation of her mature childhood, what
+she had heard revealed in the most skillful feminine dissections, had
+cleared her understanding to a point that made the advances of hopeful
+men quite entertainingly obvious. Their method was appallingly similar
+and monotonous. She liked, rather than not, the younger ones, whose
+confidence that their passion was something new on earth at times
+refreshed her; but the navigated materialism of greater experience
+finally became distasteful. She discussed this sharply with Arnaud:
+
+"You simply can't help believing that most women are complete idiots."
+
+"You haven't said much more for men."
+
+"The whole thing is too silly! Why is it, Arnaud? It ought to be
+impressive and sweep you off your feet, up--"
+
+"Instead of merely behind some rented palms," he added. "But I must say,
+Linda, that you are not a very highly qualified judge of sentiment."
+He pronounced this equably, but she was conscious of the presence of an
+injury in his voice. She was a little weary at being eternally condemned
+for what she couldn't help. Any failure was as much Arnaud Hallet's as
+hers; he had had his opportunity, all that for which he had implored
+her. Her thoughts returned to Dodge Pleydon. April was well advanced,
+and he had written that he'd be back and see them in the spring. Linda
+listened to her heart but it was unhastened by a beat. She would be very
+glad to have him at hand, in her life again, of course.
+
+Then the direction of her mind veered--what did he still think of her?
+Probably he had altogether recovered from his love for her. It had been
+a warm day, and Arnaud had opened a window; but now she was aware of a
+cold air on her shoulder and she asked him abruptly to lower the sash.
+Linda remembered, with a lingering sense of triumph, the Susanna Noda
+whom Dodge had left at a party for her. There had been a great many
+Susannas in his life; the reason for this was the absence of any
+overwhelming single influence. It might be that now--he had written of
+the change in the subjects of his work--such a guide had come into his
+existence. She hoped she had. Yet, in view of the announced silliness of
+women, she didn't want him to be cheaply deluded.
+
+He was an extremely human man.
+
+But she, Linda, it seemed, was an inhuman woman. The days ran into weeks
+that added another month to spring; a June advanced sultry with heat;
+and, suddenly as usual, a maid at the door of her room announced
+Pleydon. It was five o'clock in the afternoon, she had to dress, and she
+sent him a message that he mustn't expect her in a hurry. She paused in
+her deliberate preparations for a long thoughtful gaze into a mirror;
+there was not yet a shadow on her face, the trace of a line at her eyes.
+The sharp smooth turning and absolute whiteness of her bare shoulders
+were flawless.
+
+At first it appeared to Linda that he, too, had not changed. They were
+in the library opening into the dining-room, a space shut against the
+sun by the Venetian blinds, and faintly scented by a bowl of early tea
+roses. He appeared the same--large and informally clad in gray flannels,
+with aggressive features and sensitive strong hands. He was quiet but
+plainly happy to be with her again and sat leaning forward on his knees,
+watching her intently as she chose a seat.
+
+Then it slowly dawned on her that he had changed, yes--tragically.
+Pleydon, in every way, was years older. His voice, less arbitrary,
+had new depths of questioning, his mouth was more repressed, his face
+notably sparer of flesh. He was immediately aware of the result of her
+scrutiny. "I have been working like a fool," he explained. "A breath of
+sickness, too, four years ago in Soochow. One of the damnable Asiatic
+fevers that a European is supposed to be immune from. You are a miracle,
+Linda. How long has it been--nearly eight years; you have two children
+and Arnaud Hallet and yet you are the girl I met at Markue's. I wanted
+to see you different, just a little, a trace of something that should
+have happened to you. It hasn't. You're the most remarkable mother
+alive."
+
+"If I am," she returned, "it is not as a success, or at least for me.
+Lowrie and Vigné are healthy, and happy enough; but I can't lose myself
+in them, Dodge; I can't lose myself at all."
+
+He was quiet at this, the smoke of his cigarette climbing bluely in a
+space with the aqueous stillness of a lake's depths. "The same," he went
+on after a long pause; "nothing has touched you. I ought to be relieved
+but, do you know, it frightens me. You are relentless. You have no
+right, at the same time, to be beautiful. I have seen a great many
+celebrated women at their best moments, but you are lovelier than any.
+It isn't a simple affair of proportion and features--I wish I could hold
+it in a phrase, the turn of a chisel. I can't. It's deathless romance in
+a bang cut blackly across heavenly blue." He was silent again, and Linda
+glad that he still found her attractive. She discovered that the misery
+his presence once caused her had entirely vanished, its place taken
+by an eager interest in his affairs, a lightness of spirit at the
+realization that, while his love for her might have grown calm, no other
+woman possessed it.
+
+At the dinner-table she listened--cool and fresh, Arnaud complained,
+in spite of the heat--to the talk of the two men. By her side Elouise
+Lowrie occasionally repeated, in a voice like the faint jangle of an old
+thin piano, the facts of a family connection or a commendation of the
+Dodges. Arnaud really knew a surprising lot, and his conversation with
+Pleydon was strung with terms completely unintelligible to her. It
+developed, finally, into an argument over the treatment of the acanthus
+motive in rococo ornament. France was summoned against Spain; the
+architectural degrading of Italy deplored.... It amazed her that any one
+could remember so much.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+Linda without a conscious reason suddenly stopped the investigation of
+her feeling for Pleydon. Even in the privacy of her thoughts an added
+obscurity kept her from the customary clear reasoning. After dinner,
+out in the close gloom of the garden, she watched the flicker of the
+cigarettes. There was thunder, so distant and vague that for a long
+while Linda thought she was deceived. She had a keen rushing sensation
+of the strangeness of her situation here--Linda Hallet. The night was
+like a dream from which she would stir, sigh, to find herself back again
+in the past waiting for the return of her mother from one of her late
+parties.
+
+But it was Arnaud who moved and, accompanying Elouise Lowrie, went into
+the house for his interminable reading. Pleydon's voice began in a low
+remembering tone:
+
+"What a fantastic place the Feldt apartment was, with that smothered
+room where you said you would marry me. You must have got hold of Hallet
+in the devil of a hurry. I've often tried to understand what happened;
+why, all the time, you were upset--why, why, why?"
+
+"In a way it was because a ridiculous hairdresser burned out some of my
+mother's front wave," she explained.
+
+"Of course," he replied derisively, "nothing could be plainer."
+
+She agreed calmly. "It was very plain. If you want me to try to tell you
+don't interrupt. It isn't a happy memory, and I am only doing it because
+I was so rotten to you.
+
+"Yes, I can see now that it was the hairdresser and a hundred other
+things exactly the same. My mother, all the women we knew, did nothing
+but lace and paint and frizzle for men. I used to think it was a game
+they played and wonder where the fun was. There were even hints about
+that and later they particularized and it made me as sick as possible.
+The men, too, were odious; mostly fat and bald; and after a while, when
+they pinched or kissed me, I wanted to die.
+
+"That was all I knew about love, I had never heard of any other--men
+away from their families for what they called a good time and women
+plotting and planning to give it to them or not give it to them. Then
+mother, after her looks were spoiled, married Mr. Moses Feldt, and I
+met Judith, who only existed for men and men's rooms and told me worse
+things, I'm sure, than mother ever dreamed; and, on top of that, I met
+you and you kissed me.
+
+"But it was different from any other; it didn't shock me, and it brought
+back a thrill I have always had. I wanted, then, to love you, and have
+you ask me to marry you, more than anything else in the world. I was
+sure, if you would only be patient, that I could change what had hurt
+me into a beautiful feeling. I couldn't tell you because I didn't
+understand myself." She stopped, and Pleydon repeated, bitterly and
+slow:
+
+"Fat old bald men; and I was one with them destroying your exquisite
+hope." She heard the creak of the basket chair as he leaned forward, his
+face masked in darkness. "Perhaps you think I haven't paid.
+
+"You will never know what love is unless I can manage somehow to make
+you understand how much I love you. Hallet will have to endure your
+hearing it. This doesn't belong to him; it has not touched the earth.
+Every one, more or less, talks about love; but not one in a thousand,
+not one in a million, has such an experience. If they did it would tear
+the world into shreds. It would tear them as it has me. I realize the
+other, the common thing--who experimented more! This has nothing to do
+with it. A boy lost in the idealism of his first worship has a faint
+reflection. Listen:
+
+"I can always, with a wish, see you standing before me. You
+yourself--the folds of your sash, the sharp narrow print of your
+slippers on the pavement or the matting or the rug, the ruffles about
+your hands. I have the feeling of you near me with your breathing
+disturbing the delicacy of your breast. There is the odor and shimmer of
+your hair ... your lips move ... but without a sound.
+
+"This vision is more real than reality, than an opera-house full of
+people or the Place Vendôme; and it, you, is all I care for, all I think
+about, all I want. I find quiet places and stay there for hours, with
+you; or, if that isn't possible, I turn into a blind man, a dead man
+warm again at the bare thought of your face. Listen:
+
+"I've been in shining heaven with you. I have been melted to nothing and
+made over again, in you, good. We have been walking together in a new
+world with rapture instead of air to breathe. A slow walk through dark
+trees--God knows why--like pines. And every time I think of you it is
+exactly as though I could never die, as though you had burned all the
+corruption out of me and I was made of silver fire. And listen:
+
+"Nothing else is of any importance, now or afterward, you are now and
+the hereafter. I see people and people and hear words and words, and I
+forget them the moment they have gone, the second they are still. But I
+haven't lost an inflection of your voice. When I work in clay or stone I
+model and cut you into every surface and fold. I see you looking back at
+me out of marble and bronze. And here, in this garden, you tried to give
+me more--"
+
+The infinitely removed thunder was like the continued echo of his voice.
+There was a stirring of the leaves above her head; and the light that
+had shone against the house in Elouise Lowrie's window was suddenly
+extinguished. All that she felt was weariness and a confused dejection,
+the weight of an insuperable disappointment. She could say nothing.
+Words, even Pleydon's, seemed to her vain. The solid fact of Arnaud, of
+what Dodge, more than seven years before, had robbed her, put everything
+else aside, crushed it.
+
+She realized that she would never get from life what supremely
+repaid the suffering of other women, made up for them the failure of
+practically every vision. She was sorry for herself, yes, and for Dodge
+Pleydon. Yet he had his figures in metal and stone; his sense of the
+importance of his work had increased enormously; and, well, there were
+Lowrie and Vigné; it would be difficult, every one agreed, to find
+better or handsomer children. But they seemed no more than shadows or
+colored mist. This terrified her--what a hopelessly deficient woman she
+must be! But even in the profundity of her depression the old vibration
+of nameless joy reached her heart.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+In the morning there was a telegram from Judith Feldt, saying that her
+mother was dangerously sick, and she had lunch on the train for New
+York. The apartment seemed stuffy; there was a trace of dinginess,
+neglect, about the black velvet rugs and hangings. Her mother, she
+found, had pneumonia; there was practically no chance of her recovering.
+Linda sat for a short while by the elder's bed, intent upon a totally
+strange woman, darkly flushed and ravished in an agonizing difficulty of
+breathing. Linda had a remembered vision of her gold-haired and gay
+in floating chiffons, and suddenly life seemed shockingly brief. A
+serious-visaged clergyman entered the room as she left and she heard the
+rich soothing murmur of a confident phrase.
+
+The Stella Condon who had become Mrs. Moses Feldt had had little time
+for the support of the church; although Linda recalled that she had
+uniformly spoken well of its offices. To condemn Christianity, she had
+asserted, was to invite bad luck. She treated this in exactly the way
+she regarded walking under ladders or spilling salt or putting on a
+stocking wrong. Linda, however, had disregarded these possibilities of
+disaster and, with them, religion.
+
+A great many people, she noticed, talked at length about it; women in
+their best wraps and with expensive little prayer books left the hotels
+for various Sunday morning services, and ministers came in later for
+tea. All this, she understood, was in preparation for heaven, where
+everybody, who was not in hell, was to be forever the same and yet
+radiantly different. It seemed very vague and far away to Linda, and,
+since there was such a number of immediate problems for her to consider,
+she had easily ignored the future. When now, with her mother dying, it
+was thrust most uncomfortably before her.
+
+She half remembered sentences, admonitions, of the godly--a woman had
+once told her that dancing and low gowns were hateful in the sight of
+God, some one else that playing-cards were an instrument of the devil.
+Pleasure, she had gathered, was considered wrong, and she instinctively
+put these opinions, together with a great deal else, aside as envious.
+
+That expressed her whole experience. She had never keenly associated the
+thought of death with herself before, and she was unutterably revolted
+by the impending destruction of her fine body, the delicate care
+of which formed her main preoccupation in life. Age was supremely
+distasteful, but this other ... she shuddered.
+
+Linda wanted desperately to preserve the whiteness of her skin, the
+flexible black distinction of her hair, yes--her beauty. Here, again,
+with other women the vicarious immortality of children would be
+sufficient. But not for her. She was in the room that had been hers
+before marriage, with her infinite preparations for the night at an
+end; and, her hair loose across the blanched severity of her attire,
+her delicately full arms bare, she clasped her cold hands in stabbing
+apprehension.
+
+She would do anything, anything, to escape that repulsive fatality to
+her lavished care. It was only to be accomplished by being good; and
+goodness was in the charge of the minister. She saw clearly and at once
+her difficulty--how could she go to a solemn man in a clerical vest and
+admit that she was solely concerned by the impending loss of her beauty.
+The promised splendor of heaven, in itself, failed to move her--it
+threatened to be monotonous; and she was honest in her recognition that
+charity, the ugliness of poverty, repelled her. Linda was certain that
+she could never change in these particulars; she could only pretend.
+
+A surprising multiplication of such pretense occurred to her in people
+regarded as impressively religious. She had seen men like that--she
+vaguely thought of the name Jasper--going off with her mother in cabs
+to dinners that must have been "godless." She wondered if this mere
+attitude, the public show, were enough. And an instinctive response told
+her that it was not. If all she had been informed about the future were
+true she decided that her mother's chance was no worse than that of any
+false display of virtue.
+
+She, Linda, could do nothing.
+
+The funeral ceremony with its set form--so inappropriate to her mother's
+qualities--was even more remote from Linda's sympathies than was common
+in her encounters. But Mr. Moses Feldt's grief appeared to her actual
+and affecting. He invested every one with the purity of his own spirit.
+
+She left New York at the first possible moment with the feeling that she
+was definitely older. The realization, she discovered, happened in
+that way--ordinarily giving the flight of time no consideration it was
+brought back to her at intervals of varying length. As she aged they
+would grow shorter.
+
+The result of this experience was an added sense of failure; she tried
+more than ever to overcome her indifference, get a greater happiness
+from her surroundings and activity. Linda cultivated an attention to
+Lowrie and Vigné. They responded charmingly but her shyness with them
+persisted in the face of her inalienable right to their full possession.
+She insisted, too, on going about vigorously in spite of Arnaud's
+humorous groans and protests. She forced herself to talk more to the
+men attracted to her, and assumed, with disconcerting ease, an air of
+sympathetic interest. But, unfortunately, this brought on her a rapid
+increase of the love-making that she found so fatiguing.
+
+She studied her husband thoughtfully through the evenings at home,
+before the Franklin stove, or, in summer, in the secluded garden.
+Absolutely nothing was wrong with him; he had, after several deaths,
+inherited even more money; and, in his deprecating manner where it was
+concerned, devoted it to her wishes. Except for books, and the clothes
+she was forced to remind him to get, he had no personal expenses. In
+addition to the money he never offended her, his relationships and
+manner were conducted with an inborn nice formality that preserved her
+highest self-opinion.
+
+Yet she was never able to escape from the limitations of a calm
+admiration; she couldn't lose herself, disregard herself in a flood of
+generous emotion. When, desperately, she tried, he, too, was perceptibly
+ill at ease. Usually he was undisturbed, but once, when she stood beside
+him with her coffee cup at dinner, he disastrously lost his equanimity.
+Tensely putting the cup away he caught her with straining hands.
+
+"Oh, Linda," he cried, "is it true that you love me! Do you really
+belong to us--to Vigné and Lowrie and me? I can't stand it if you won't
+... some day."
+
+She backed away into the opening of a window, against the night, from
+the justice of his desire; and she was cold with self-detestation as her
+fingers touched the glass. Linda tried to speak, to lie; but, miserably
+still, she was unable to deceive him. The animation, the fervor of his
+longing, swiftly perished. His arms dropped to his side. An unbearable
+constraint deepened with the silence in the room, and later he lightly
+said:
+
+"You mustn't trifle with my ancient heart, Linda, folly and age--"
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+The only other quantity in her life was Dodge Pleydon. He wrote her
+again, perhaps three months after the explanation of his love; but his
+letter was devoted wholly to his work, and so technical that she had to
+ask Arnaud to interpret it. He added:
+
+"That is the mind of an impressive man. He has developed
+enormously--curious, so late in life. Pleydon must be fully as old as
+myself. It's clear that he has dropped his women. I saw a photograph
+of the Cotton Mather reproduced in a weekly, and it was as gaunt as a
+Puritan Sunday. Brimmed with power. Why don't we see him oftener? Write
+and say I'd like to contradict him again about the Eastlake period."
+
+He made no further reference to Pleydon then, and Linda failed to write
+as Arnaud suggested. Though she wasn't disturbed at the possibility of
+a continuation of his admissions of love she was weary of the thought of
+its uselessness. Linda was, she told herself, damned by practicability.
+Her husband used the familiar term of reproach, material. She didn't
+in the least want to be. Circumstance, she had a feeling, had forced it
+upon her.
+
+Arnaud, however, who had met Dodge Pleydon in Philadelphia, brought him
+home. Linda saw with a strange constriction of the heart that Pleydon's
+hair was definitely gray. He had had a recurrence of the fever
+contracted in Soochow. The men at once entered on another discussion
+which she was unable to follow; but it was clear that her husband
+now listened with an increasing surrender of opinion to the sculptor.
+Pleydon, it was true, was correspondingly more impatient with minds that
+disagreed with his. He was at once thinner and bigger, his face deeply
+lined; but his eyes had a steady vital intensity difficult to encounter.
+
+She considered him in detail as the talk left dinner, the glasses and
+candles spent. He drank, from a tall tumbler with a single piece of
+ice, the special whisky Arnaud kept. He had been neglecting himself,
+too--there were traces of clay about his finger-nails, and he ate
+hurriedly and insufficiently. When she had an opportunity, Linda
+decided, she would speak to him about these necessary trifles. Then, she
+had no chance; and it was not until the following winter, at a Thursday
+afternoon concert during the yearly exhibition of the Academy of Fine
+Arts, that she could gently complain.
+
+It was gloomy, with a promise of snow outside; and the great space of
+the stairway to the galleries was filled with shadow and the strains
+of _Armide_ echoing from the orchestra playing at the railing above
+the entrance. Pleydon, together with a great many others, had spread
+an overcoat on the masonry of the steps, and they were seated in the
+obscurity of the balustrade.
+
+"You look as though you hadn't had enough to eat," she observed. "You
+used to be almost thick but now you are a thing of terrifying grimness.
+You look like a monk. I wonder why you're like a monk, Dodge?"
+
+"Linda Condon," he replied.
+
+"That can't be it now; I haven't been Linda Condon for years, but Mrs.
+Arnaud Hallet. It's very pretty, of course, and I'd like to think
+you could keep a young love alive so long. Experience makes me doubt
+anything of the sort; but then I was always skeptical."
+
+"You have never been anyone else," he asserted positively. "You were
+born Linda Condon and you'll die that, except for some extraordinary
+accident. I can't imagine what it would be--a miracle like quaker-ladies
+in the Antarctic."
+
+"It sounds uncomplimentary, and I'm sick of being compared with polar
+places. What are quaker-ladies?"
+
+"Fragile little flowers in the spring meadows."
+
+"I'd rather listen to the music than you."
+
+"That is why loving you is so eternal, why it doesn't fluctuate like a
+human emotion. You can't exhaust it and rest before a new tide sweeps
+back; the timeless ecstasy of a worship of God ... breeding madness."
+
+She failed to understand and turned a troubled gaze to his bitter
+repression. "I don't like to make you unhappy, Dodge," she said in a low
+tone. "What can I do? I am a horrid disappointment to all of you, but
+most to myself. I can't go over it again."
+
+"Beauty has nothing to do with happiness," he declared harshly. He rose,
+without consulting her wishes; and Linda followed him as he proceeded
+above, irresistibly drawn to the bronze he was showing in the Rotunda.
+
+It was the head and part of the shoulders of a very old woman,
+infinitely worn, starved by want and spent in brutal labor. There was a
+thin wisp of hair pinned in a meager knot on her skull; her bones were
+mercilessly indicated, barely covered with drum-like skin; her mouth
+was stamped with timid humility; while her eyes peered weakly from their
+sunken depths.
+
+"Well?" he demanded, interrogating her in the interest of his work.
+
+"I--I suppose it's perfectly done," she replied, at a loss for a
+satisfactory appreciation. "It's true, certainly. But isn't it more
+unpleasant than necessary?" Pleydon smiled patiently. "Beauty," he said,
+with his mobile gesture. "Pity, _Katharsis_--the wringing out of all
+dross."
+
+The helpless feeling of her overwhelming ignorance returned. She was
+like a woman held beyond the closed door of treasure. "Come over here."
+He unceremoniously led her to the modeling of a ruffled grouse, faithful
+in every diversified feather. Linda thought it admirable, really
+amazing; but he dismissed it with a passionate energy. "The dull
+figuriste!" he exclaimed. "Daguerre. Once I could have done that, yes,
+and been entertained by its adroitness and insolence--before you made
+me. Do you suppose I was able then to understand the sheer
+tragic fortitude to live of a scrubwoman! The head you thought
+unpleasant--haven't you seen her going home in the March slush of a
+city? Did you notice the gaps in her shoes, the ragged shawl about a
+body twisted with forty, fifty, sixty years of wet stone floors and
+steps? Did you wonder what she had for supper?"
+
+"No, Dodge, I didn't. They always make me wretched."
+
+"Well, to realize all that, to feel the degradation of her nature,
+to lie, sick with exhaustion, on the broken slats of her bed under a
+ravelled-out travesty of a quilt, and get up morning after morning in
+an iron winter dark--to experience that in your spirit and put it into
+durable metal, hard stone--is to hold beauty in your hands."
+
+Her interest in his speech was mingled with the knowledge that, in order
+to dress comfortably for dinner, she must leave immediately. Pleydon
+helped her into the Hallet open motor landaulet. Linda demanded
+quantities of air. He was, he told her at the door, leaving in an hour
+for New York. "I wish you could be happier," she insisted. He reminded
+her that he had had the afternoon with her. It was so little, she
+thought, carried rapidly over a smooth wide street. His love for her
+increased rather than lessened. How wonderful it was.... The woman
+outside that barred door of treasure.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+Linda thought frequently about Dodge and his feeling for her; memories
+of his words, his appearance, speculations, spread through her tranquil
+daily affairs like the rich subdued pattern of a fine carpet on the
+bare floor of her life. She was puzzled by the depth of a passion that,
+apparently, made no demands other than the occasional necessity to be
+with her and the knowledge that she existed. If she had been a very
+intelligent woman, and, of course, not quite bad-looking, she might
+have understood both Pleydon and Arnaud, the latter a man whose mind was
+practically absorbed in the pages of books. There could be no doubt, no
+question, of their love for her.
+
+Then there had always been the others--the men at the parties, in her
+garden, through the old days of her childhood in hotels. It was very
+stupid, very annoying, but at the same time she became interested
+in what, with her candid indifference, affected them. She had never,
+really, even when she desired, succeeded in giving them anything,
+anything conscious or for which they moved. Judith Feldt, on the
+contrary, had been prodigal. And, while certainly numbers of men had
+been attracted to her, they all tired of her with marked rapidity. Men
+met Judith, Linda recalled, with eagerness, they came immediately and
+often to see her ... for, perhaps, a month. Then, temporarily deserted,
+she was submerged in depression and nervous tears.
+
+But, while it was obviously impossible for all lovers to be constant,
+two extraordinary and superior men would be faithful to her as long as
+she lived, no--as long as they lived. This was beyond doubt. One was
+celebrated--she watched with a quiet pride Pleydon's fame penetrate
+the country--and the other, her husband, a person of the most exacting
+delicacy of habits, intellect and wit.
+
+What was it, she wondered, that made the supreme importance of women to
+men worth consideration. Linda was thinking of this now in connection
+with her daughter. Vigné was fourteen; a larger girl than she had ever
+been, with her father's fine abundant cinnamon-brown hair, a shapely
+sensitive mouth, and a wide brown gaze with a habit of straying, at
+inappropriate moments, from things seen to the invisible. She was, Linda
+realized thankfully, transparently honest; her only affectation was
+the slight supercilious manner of her associations; and she read,
+ridiculously like her father, with increasing pleasure.
+
+However, what engaged Linda most was the fact that Vigné already liked
+men; she had been at the fringe, as it were, of young dances, with a
+sparkling satisfaction to herself and the securely nice youths who "cut
+in" at her brief appearances.
+
+The truth was that Linda saw that more than a trace of Stella Condon's
+warm generosity of emotion had been brought by herself to Arnaud's
+daughter. The faults of every life, every circumstance, were endlessly
+multiplied through all existence. At fourteen, it was Linda's frowning
+impression, her mother had very fully instructed her in the wiles and
+structure of admirable marriage, and she had never completely lost some
+hard pearls of the elder's wisdom. Should she, in turn, communicate them
+to Vigné?
+
+The moment, the anxiety, she dreaded was arriving, and it found her no
+freer of doubt than had the other aspects of her own responses. Yet
+here she was possessed by the keenest need for absolute rectitude; and
+perhaps this, she thought, with an unusual pleasure, was an evidence of
+the affection she had seemed to lack. But in the end she said nothing.
+
+She was still unable to disentangle the flesh from the spirit, love--the
+love that so amazingly illuminated Dodge Pleydon--from comfort. Dodge
+had disturbed all her sense of values, even to the point of unsettling
+her allegiance to the supremacy of a great deal of money. He had worked
+this without giving her anything definite, that she could explain to
+Vigné, in return. Linda preserved her demand for the actual. If she
+could only comprehend the force animating Dodge she felt life would be
+clear.
+
+She was tempted to experiment--when had such a possibility occurred to
+her before?--and discover just how far in several directions Pleydon's
+devotion went. This would be easy now, she was unrestrained by the fact
+of Arnaud, and the old shrinking from the sculptor happily vanished. Yet
+with him before her, on one of his infrequent visits to their house,
+she realized that her courage was insufficient. Was it that or something
+deeper--a reluctance to turn herself like a knife in the source of the
+profoundest compliment a woman could be paid. Linda thought too
+highly of his love for that; the texture of the carpet had become too
+gratifying.
+
+They were all three in the library, as customary; and Linda, restless,
+saw her reflection in a closed long window. She was wearing yellow, the
+color of the jonquils on a candle-stand; but with her familiar sash tied
+and the ends falling to the hem of her skirt. The pointed oval of her
+face was unchanged, her pallor, the straight line of her black bang, the
+blueness of her eyes, were as they had been a surprisingly long while
+ago. Arnaud, with a disconcerting comprehension, demanded, "Well, are
+you satisfied?" She replied coolly, "Entirely." Pleydon, seated for
+over an hour without moving, or even the trivial relief of a cigarette,
+followed her with his luminous uncomfortable gaze, his disembodied
+passion.
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+Linda heard Vigné's laugh, the expression of a sheer lightness of heart,
+following a low eager murmur of voices in her daughter's room, and she
+was startled by its resemblance to the gay pitch of Mrs. Moses Feldt's
+old merriment. Three of Vigné's friends were with her, all approximately
+eighteen, talking, Linda knew, men and--it was autumn--anticipating the
+excitements of their bow to formal society that winter. They had, she
+silently added, little enough to learn about the latter. Through the
+year past they had been to a dancing-class identical, except for an
+earlier hour and age, with mature affairs; but before that they had been
+practically introduced to the pleasures of their inheritance.
+
+The men were really boys at the university, past the first year,
+receptacles of unlimited worldly knowledge and experience. They belonged
+to exclusive university societies and eating clubs, and Linda found
+their stiff similarity of correct bigoted pattern highly entertaining.
+She had no illusions about what might be called their morals; they were
+midway in the period of youthful unrestraint; but she recognized as well
+that their attitude toward, for example, Vigné was irreproachable. Such
+boys affected to disdain the girls of their associated families ... or
+imagined themselves incurably in love.
+
+The girls, for their part, while insisting that forty was the ideal age
+for a lover--the terms changed with the seasons, last year "suitor" had
+been the common phrase--were occasionally swept in young company into a
+high irrational passion. Mostly, through skillful adult pressure or firm
+negation, such affairs came to nothing; but even these were sometimes
+overcome. And, when Linda had been disturbed by the echo of old days in
+her daughter's tones, she was considering exactly such a state.
+
+One of the nicest youths imaginable, Bailey Sandby, had lost all trace
+of superior aloofness in a devotion to Vigné. He was short, squarely
+built, with clear pink cheeks, steady light blue eyes and crisp very
+fair hair. This was his last season of academic instruction, after
+which a number of years, at an absurdly low payment, awaited him in
+his father's bond brokerage concern. However, he was, Linda gathered,
+imperious in his urgent need for Vigné's favor.
+
+Ridiculous, she thought, at the same time illogically rehearsing the
+resemblances of Vigné to her grandmother. She had no doubt that the
+parties Vigné shared on the terraces and wide lawns, in the informal
+dancing at country houses, were sufficiently sophisticated; there was
+on occasion champagne, and--for the masculine element anyhow--cocktails.
+The aroma of wine, lightly clinging to her young daughter's breath,
+filled her with an old instinctive sickness.
+
+She had spoken to Arnaud who, in turn, severely addressed Vigné;
+but during this Linda had been oppressed by the familiar feeling of
+impotence. The girl, of course, had properly heard them; but she gave
+her mother the effect of slipping easily beyond their grasp. When she
+had gone to bed Arnaud repeated a story brought to him by the juvenile
+Lowrie, under the influence of a temporary indignation at his sister's
+unwarranted imposition of superiority. Arnaud went on:
+
+"Actually they had this kissing contest, it was at Chestnut Hill, with
+a watch held; and Vigné, or so Lowrie insisted, won the prize for length
+of time--something like a minute. Now, when I was young--"
+
+Submerged in apprehensive memory Linda lost most of his account of
+the Eden-like youth of his earlier day. When, at last, his assertions
+pierced her abstraction, it was only to bring her to the realization of
+how pathetically little he knew of either Vigné or her. She weighed
+the question of utter frankness here--the quality enhanced by universal
+obscurity--but she was obliged to check her desire for perfect
+understanding. A purely feminine need to hide, even from Arnaud, any
+detracting facts about women shut her into a diplomatic silence. In
+reality he could offer them no help; their problems--in a world
+created more objectively by the hand of man than God--were singular to
+themselves. Women were quite like spoiled captives to foreign princes,
+masking, in their apparent complacency, a necessarily secret but
+insidiously tyrannical control. It wouldn't do, in view of this, to
+expose too much.
+
+The following morning it was Arnaud, rather than herself, who had a
+letter from Pleydon. "He wants us to come over to New York and his
+studio," the former explained. "He has some commission or other from a
+city in the Middle West, and a study to show us. I'd like it very
+much; we haven't seen this place, and his surroundings are not to be
+overlooked."
+
+Pleydon's rooms were directly off Central Park West, in an apartment
+house obviously designed for prosperous creative arts, with a hall
+frescoed in the tones of Puvis de Chavannes and an elevator cage
+beautifully patterned in iron grilling. Dodge Pleydon met them in his
+narrow entry and conducted them into a pleasant reception-room. "It's a
+duplex," he explained of his quarters; "the dining-room you see and the
+kitchen's beyond, while the baths and all that are over our heads; the
+studio fills both floors."
+
+There were low book cases with their continuous top used as a shelf for
+a hundred various objects, deep long chairs of caressing ease and chairs
+of coffee-colored wicker with amazingly high backs woven with designs of
+polished shells into the semblance of spread peacocks' tails. The yellow
+silk curtains at the windows, the rug with the intricate coloring of a
+cashmere shawl, the Russian tea service, were in a perfection of order;
+and Linda almost resentfully acknowledged the skilful efficiency of his
+maid. It was surprising that, without a wife, a man could manage such a
+degree of comfort!
+
+Over tea far better than hers, in china of an infinitely finer
+fragility, she studied Pleydon thoughtfully. He looked still again
+perceptibly older, his face continued to grow sparer of flesh,
+emphasizing the aggressively bony structure of his head. When he shut
+his mouth after a decided statement she could see the projection of the
+jaw and the knotted sinews at the base of his cheeks. No, Dodge didn't
+seem well. She asked if there had been any return of the fever and he
+nodded in an impatient affirmative, returning at once to the temporarily
+suspended conversation with Arnaud. There was a vast difference, too, in
+the way in which he talked.
+
+His attitude was as assertive as ever, but it had less expression in
+words; unaccountable periods of silence, almost ill-natured, overtook
+him, spaces of abstraction when it was plain that he had forgotten the
+presence of whoever might be by. Even direct questions sometimes failed
+to pierce immediately his consciousness. Dodge, Linda told herself,
+lived entirely too much alone. Then she said this aloud, thoughtlessly,
+and she was startled by the sudden intolerable flash of his gaze.
+An awkward pause followed, broken by the uprearing of Pleydon's
+considerable length.
+
+"I must take you into the studio before it is too dark," he proceeded.
+"Every creative spirit knows when its great moment has come. Well, mine
+is here." The men stood aside as Linda, her head positively ringing with
+the thrill that was like a strain of Gluck, the happy sadness, entered
+the bare high spaciousness of Dodge Pleydon's workroom.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+
+Everything she saw, the stripped floor, the white walls bare but for
+some casts like the dismembered fragments of flawless blanched bodies,
+the inclined plane of the wide skylight, bore an impalpable white dust
+of dried clay. In a corner, enclosed in low boards, a stooped individual
+with wood-soled shoes and a shovel was working a mass of clay over which
+at intervals he sprinkled water, and at intervals halted to make pliable
+lumps of a uniform size which he added to a pile wrapped in damp cloths.
+There were a number of modeling stands with twisted wires grotesquely
+resembling a child's line drawing of a human being; while a stand with
+some modeling tools on its edge bore an upright figure shapeless in its
+swathing of dampened cloths.
+
+"The great moment," Pleydon said again, in a vibrant tone. "But you know
+nothing of all this," he directly addressed Linda. "Neither, probably,
+will you have heard of Simon Downige. He was born at Cottarsport, in
+Massachusetts, about eighteen forty; and, after--in the support of his
+hatred of any slavery--he fought through the Civil War, he came home
+and found that his town stifled him. He didn't marry at once, as so many
+returning soldiers did; instead he was wedded to a vision of freedom,
+freedom of opinion, of spirit, worship--any kind of spaciousness
+whatever. And, in the pursuit of that, he went West.
+
+"He told them that he was going to find--but found was the word--a place
+where men could live together in a purity of motives and air. No more,
+you understand; he hadn't a personal fanatical belief to exploit
+and attract the hysteria of women and insufficient men. He was not a
+pathological messiah; but only Simon Downige, an individual who couldn't
+comfortably breathe the lies and injustice and hypocrisy of the ordinary
+community. No doubt he was unbalanced--his sensitiveness to a universal
+condition would prove that. Normally people remain undisturbed by such
+trivialities. If they didn't an end would come to one or the other, the
+lies or the world.
+
+"He traveled part way in a Conestoga wagon--a flight out of Egypt; they
+were common then, slow canvas-covered processions with entire families
+drawn by the mysterious magnetism of the West. Then, leaving even such
+wayfarers, he walked, alone, until he came on a meadow by a little river
+and a grove of trees, probably cottonwoods.... That was Simon Downige,
+and that, too, was Hesperia. Yes, he was unbalanced--the old Greek
+name for beautiful lands. It is a city now, successful and corruptly
+administered--what always happens to such visions.
+
+"It is necessary, Linda, as I've always told you, to understand the
+whole motive behind a creation in permanent form. A son of Simon's--yes,
+he finally married--a unique and very rich character, wife dead and no
+children, commissioned a monument to the founder of Hesperia, in Ohio,
+and of his fortune.
+
+"They even have a civic body for the control of public building; and
+they came East to approve my statue, or rather the clay sketch for it.
+They were very solemn, and one, himself a sculptor, a graduate of the
+Beaux Arts, ran a suggestive thumb over Simon and did incredible damage.
+But, after a great deal of hesitation, and a description from
+the sculptor of what he thought excellently appropriate for
+such magnificence, they accepted my study. The present Downige,
+really--though I understand there is another pretentious branch in
+Hesperia--bullied them into it. He cursed the Beaux-Arts graduate with
+the most brutal and satisfactory freedom--the tyranny of his money; the
+crown, you see, of Simon's hope."
+
+He unwrapped one by one the wet cloths; and Linda, in an eagerness sharp
+like anxiety, finally saw the statue, under life-size, of a seated man
+with a rough stick and bundle at his feet. A limp hat was in his hand,
+and, beneath a brow to which the hair was plastered by sweat, his eyes
+gazed fixed and aspiring into a hidden dream perfectly created by his
+desire. Here, she realized at last, she had a glimmer of the beauty, the
+creative force, that animated Dodge Pleydon. Simon Downige's shoes were
+clogged with mud, his entire body, she felt, ached with weariness; but
+his gaze--nothing Linda discovered but shadows over two depressions--was
+far away in the attainment of his place of justice and truth.
+
+She found a stool and, careless of the film of dust, sat absorbed in the
+figure. Pleydon again had lost all consciousness of their presence; he
+stood, hands in pockets, his left foot slightly advanced, looking at his
+work from under drawn brows. Arnaud spoke first:
+
+"It's impertinent to congratulate you, Pleydon. You know what you've
+done better than any one else could. You have all our admiration." Linda
+watched the tenderness with which the other covered Simon Downige's
+vision in clay. Later, returning home after dinner, Arnaud speculated
+about Pleydon's remarkable increase in power. "I had given him up," he
+went on; "I thought he was lost in those notorious debauches of esthetic
+emotions. Does he still speak of loving you?"
+
+"Yes," Linda replied. "Are you annoyed by it?" He answered, "What
+good if I were?" She considered him, turned in his chair to face
+her, thoughtfully. "I haven't the slightest doubt of its quality,
+however--all in that Hesperia of old Downige's. To love you, my dear
+Linda, has certain well-defined resemblances to a calamity. If you ask
+me if I object to what you do give him, my answer must shock the gods of
+art. I would rather you didn't."
+
+"What is it, Arnaud?" she demanded. "I haven't the slightest idea. I
+wish I had."
+
+"Platonic," he told her shortly. "The term has been hopelessly ruined,
+yet the sense, the truth, I am forced to believe, remains."
+
+"But you know how stupid I am and that I can't understand you."
+
+"The woman in whom a man sees God," he proceeded irritably:
+
+"'_La figlia della sua mente, l'amorosa, idea_.'"
+
+"Oh," she cried, wrung with a sharp obscure hurt. "I know that, I've
+heard it before." Her excitement faded at her absolute inability to
+place the circumstances of her memory. The sound of the words vanished,
+leaving no more than the familiar deep trouble, the disappointing
+sensation of almost grasping--Linda was unable to think what.
+
+"After all, you are my wife." He had recovered his normal shy humor.
+"I can prove it. You are the irreproachable mother of our unsurpassed
+children. You have a hopeless vision--like this Simon's--of seeing me
+polished and decently pressed; and I insist on your continuing with the
+whole show."
+
+Her mind arbitrarily shifted to the thought of her father, who had
+walked out of his house, left--yes--his family, without any intimation.
+Then, erratically, it turned to Vigné, to Vigné and young Sandby with
+his fresh cheeks and impending penniless years acquiring a comprehension
+of the bond market. She said, "I wonder if she really likes Bailey?"
+Arnaud's energy of dismay was laughable, "What criminal folly! They
+haven't finished Mother Goose yet."
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+Linda, who expected to see Pleydon's statue of Simon Downige finished
+immediately in a national recognition of its splendor, was disappointed
+by his explanation that, probably, it would not be ready for casting
+within two years. He intended to model it again, life-size, before he
+was ready for the heroic. April, the vivifying, had returned; and,
+as always in the spring, Linda was mainly conscious of the mingled
+assuaging sounds of life newly admitted through open windows. A single
+shaded lamp was lighted by a far table, where Arnaud sat cutting the
+pages of _The Living Age_ with an ivory blade; Dodge was blurred in the
+semi-obscurity.
+
+He came over to see them more frequently now, through what he called the
+great moment--so tiresomely extended--of his life. Pleydon came oftener
+but he said infinitely less. It was his custom to arrive for dinner and
+suddenly depart early or late in the evening. At times she went up
+to her room and left the two almost morosely silent men to their own
+thoughts or pages; at others she complained--no other woman alive would
+stay with such uninteresting and thoroughly selfish creatures. They
+never made the pretense of an effort to consider or amuse her. At this
+Arnaud would put aside his book and begin an absurd social conversation
+in the manner of Vigné's associates. Pleydon, however, wouldn't speak;
+nothing broke the somberness of his passionate absorption in invisible
+tyrannies. She gave up, finally, a persistent effort to lighten his
+moods. Annoyed she told him that if he did not change he'd be sick, and
+then where would everything be.
+
+All at once, through the open window, she heard Stella, her mother,
+laughing; the carelessly gay sound overwhelmed her with an instinctive
+unreasoning dread. Linda rose with a half gasp--but of course it was
+Vigné in the garden with Bailey Sandby.
+
+She sank back angry because she had been startled; but her irritation
+perished in disturbing thought. It wasn't, she told herself, Vigné's
+actions that made her fear the future so much as her, Linda's, knowledge
+of the possibilities of the past. Her undying hatred of that existence
+choked in her throat; the chance of its least breath touching Vigné,
+Arnaud's daughter, roused her to any embittered hazard.
+
+The girl, she was certain, returned a part at least of Bailey's feeling.
+Linda expected no confidences--what had she done to have them?--and
+Arnaud was right, affairs of the heart were never revealed until
+consummated. Her conclusion had been reached by indirect quiet
+deductions. Vigné, lately, was different; her attitude toward her mother
+had changed to the subtle reserve of feminine maturity. Her appearance,
+overnight, it seemed, had improved; her color was deeper, a delicate
+flush burned at any surprise in her cheeks, and the miracle of her body
+was perfected.
+
+It wasn't, Linda continued silently, that Vigné could ever follow the
+example of Stella Condon through the hotels and lives of men partly
+bald, prodigal, and with distant families. Whatever happened to her
+would be in excellent surroundings and taste; but the result--the
+sordid havoc, inside and out, the satiety alternating with the points
+of brilliancy, and finally, inexorably, sweeping over them in a leaden
+tide--would be identical. She wondered a little at the strength of her
+detestation for such living; it wasn't moral in any sense with which she
+was familiar; in fact it appeared to have a vague connection with her
+own revolt from the destruction of death. She wanted Vigné as well to
+escape that catastrophe, to hold inviolate the beauty of her youth, her
+fineness and courage.
+
+She was convinced, too, that if she loved Bailey, and was disappointed,
+some of the harm would be done immediately; Linda saw, in imagination,
+the pure flame of Vigné's passion fanned and then arbitrarily
+extinguished. She saw the resemblance of the dead woman, all those other
+painted shades, made stronger. A sentence formed so vividly in her mind
+that she looked up apprehensively, certain that she had spoken it aloud:
+
+If Vigné does come to care for him they must marry.
+
+Her thoughts left the girl for Arnaud--he would absolutely oppose her
+there, and she speculated about the probable length his opposition would
+reach. What would he say to her? It couldn't be helped, in particular it
+couldn't be explained, neither to him nor to the friendly correctness of
+Bailey Sandby's mother. She, alone, must accept any responsibility, all
+blame.
+
+The threatened situation developed more quickly than she had
+anticipated. Linda met Bailey, obviously disturbed, in the portico,
+leaving their house; his manner, mechanically, was good; and then, with
+an irrepressible boyish rush of feeling, he stopped her:
+
+"Vigné and I love each other and Mr. Hallet won't hear of it. He
+insulted us with the verse about the old woman who went to the cupboard
+to get a bone, and if he hadn't been her father--" he breathed a
+portentous and difficult self-repression. "Then he took a cowardly
+advantage of my having no money, just now; right after I explained how I
+was going to make wads--with Vigné."
+
+An indefinable excitement possessed Linda, accompanied by a sudden acute
+fear of what Arnaud might say. She wanted more than anything else in
+life to go quickly, inattentively, past Bailey Sandby and up to her
+room. Nothing could be easier, more obvious, than her disapproval of a
+moneyless boy. She made a step forward with an assumed resolute ignoring
+of his disturbed presence. It was useless. A dread greater than her
+fright at Arnaud held her in the portico, her hand lifted to the
+polished knob of the inner door. Linda turned slowly, cold and white,
+"Wait," she said to his shoulder in an admirable coat; then she gazed
+steadily into his frank pained eyes.
+
+"How do you know that you love Vigné?" she demanded. "You are so young
+to be certain it will last always. And Vigné--"
+
+"How does any one know?" he replied. "How did you? Married people always
+forget their own experiences, the happy way things went with them.
+From all I see money hasn't much to do with loving each other. But, of
+course, I'm not going to be poor, not with Vigné. Nobody could. She'd
+inspire them. Mr. Hallet knows all about me, too; and he's the oldest
+kind of a friend of the family. I suppose when he sees father at the
+Rittenhouse Club they'll have a laugh--a laugh at Vigné and me." His
+hand, holding the brim of a soft brown hat, clenched tensely.
+
+"No," Linda told him, "they won't do that." Her obscure excitement was
+communicated to him. "Why not?" he demanded.
+
+"Because," she paused to steady her voice, "because I am going to take a
+very great responsibility. If it fails, if you let it fail, you'll ruin
+ever so much. Yes, Mr. Hallet, I am sure, will consent to your marrying
+Vigné." She escaped at the first opening from his incoherent gratitude.
+Arnaud was in the library, and she stopped in the hall, busy with the
+loosening of her veil. Perhaps it would be better to speak to him after
+dinner; she ought to question Vigné first; but, as she stood debating,
+her daughter passed her tempestuously, blurred with crying, and Arnaud
+angrily demanded her presence.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+
+"You were quite right," he cried; "this young idiot Sandby has been
+telling Vigné that he loves her; and now Vigné assures me, with tears,
+that she likes it! They want to get married--next week, tomorrow, this
+evening." Linda stood by the window; soon the magnolia-tree would be
+again laden with flowers. She gathered her courage into a determined
+composure of tone. "I saw Bailey outside," she admitted. "He told me. It
+seems excellent to me."
+
+Arnaud Hallet incredulously challenged her. "What do you mean--that you
+gave him a trace of encouragement!" Linda replied:
+
+"I said that I was certain you would consent." She halted his
+exasperated gesture. "You think Vigné is nothing but a child, and yet
+she is as old as I was at our wedding. My mother was no older when
+Bartram Lowrie married her. I think Vigné is very fortunate, Bailey is
+as nice as possible; and, as he said, it isn't as if you knew nothing of
+the Sandbys; they are as dignified as the Lowries."
+
+An expression she had never before seen hardened his countenance into
+a sarcasm that travestied his customary humor. "You realize, of course,
+that except for what his father gives him young Sandby is wretchedly
+poor. He's nice enough but what has that to do with it? And, in
+particular, how does it touch you, Linda Condon? Do you suppose I can
+ever forget your answer that time I first asked you to marry me? You
+wouldn't consider a poor man; you were worth, really, a hundred thousand
+a year; but, if nothing better came along, you might sacrifice yourself
+for fifty."
+
+"I remember very well," she answered; "and, curiously enough, I am
+not ashamed. I was very sensible then, in a horrible position with
+extravagant habits. They were me. I couldn't change myself. Without
+money I should have made you, any man, entirely miserable. Arnaud, I
+hadn't--I haven't now--the ability to see everything important through
+the affections, like so many many women. You often told me that; who
+hasn't? I have always admitted it wasn't pleasant nor praiseworthy. But
+how, to use your own words, does all that affect Vigné? She isn't cold
+but very warm-hearted; and, instead of my experience, she has her own so
+much better feeling."
+
+"I absolutely refuse to allow anything of the sort," he declared
+sharply. "I won't even discuss it--for three years. Tell this Sandby
+infant, if you like, to come back then."
+
+"In three years, or in one year, Vigné may be quite different, yes-less
+lovable. Happiness, too, is queer, Arnaud; there isn't a great deal of
+it. Not an overwhelming amount. If it appears for an instant it must be
+held as tightly as possible. It doesn't come back, you know. Don't turn
+to your book yet--you can't get rid of us, of Vigné and me, like that;
+and then it's rude; the first time, I believe, you have ever been
+impolite to me."
+
+"Forgive me," he spoke formally. "You seem to think that I am as
+indifferent as yourself. You might be asking the day of the week to
+judge from your calm appearance. The emotion of a father, or even of
+a mother, perhaps, you have never explored. On the whole you are
+fortunate. And you are always protected by your celebrated honesty." She
+said:
+
+"I promised Bailey your consent."
+
+"Why bother about that? It isn't necessary for your new romantic mood.
+An elopement, with you to steady the ladder, would be more appropriate."
+
+She repeated the fact of her engagement. Her dread for him had vanished,
+its place now taken by a distrust of what, in her merged detachment and
+suffering, she might blunderingly do. At the back of this she realized
+that his case, his position, was hopeless. Without warning, keen and
+undimmed, his love for her flashed through his resentful misery. There
+was no spoken acknowledgement of surrender; he sank into his chair
+dejected and pitiable, infinitely gray. His shoes, on the brightness of
+the hooked rug, were dingy, his coat drawn and wrinkled.
+
+Linda saw herself on her knees before him, before his patience and
+generosity, sobbing her contrition into his forgiving hands. She
+longed with every nerve--as she had so often before--to lose herself in
+passionate emotion. She had never been more erect or withdrawn, never
+essentially less touched. After a little, waiting for him to speak,
+she saw that he, too, had retreated into the profound depths of his own
+illusions and despairs.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+
+For a surprising while--even in the face of Vigné's radiance--Arnaud
+was as still and shadowed as the inert surface of a dammed stream. Then
+slowly, the slenderest trickle at first, his wit revived his spirit; and
+he opened an unending mock-solemn attack on Bailey Sandby's eminently
+serious acceptance of the responsibilities of his allowed love.
+
+The boy had left the university, and his father--a striking replica of
+Arnaud's prejudices, impatience and fundamental kindness--exchanged with
+Vigné's male parent the most dismal prophecies together with concrete
+plans for their children's future security. This, inevitably, resulted
+in Vigné's marriage; a ceremony unattended by Pleydon except by the
+presence of a very liberal check.
+
+The life-size version of his Simon Downige was again under way--it had
+been torn down, Linda knew, more than once--and he was in a fever of
+composition. Nor was this, she decided with Arnaud, his only oppression:
+the Asiatic fever clung to him with disquieting persistence. Pleydon
+himself admitted he had a degree or two in the evening.
+
+Linda was seated in his studio near Central Park West, perhaps a year
+later, and she observed aloud that so much wet clay around was bad for
+him. He laughed: nothing now could happen to him, he was forever beyond
+accident, sickness, death--his statue for the monument in Hesperia was
+finished. It stood revealed before them, practically as Linda had first
+seen it, but enlarged, towering, as if the vision it portrayed had
+grown, would continue to grow eternally, because of the dignity of its
+hope, the necessity of its realization.
+
+"Now," she said, "it will go to the foundry and be cast." He corrected
+her. "You will go to the foundry and be cast ... in bronze." A distinct
+graceful happiness possessed her at the knowledge that his love for her
+was as constant as though it, too, were metal. Not flesh but bronze,
+spirit, he insisted.
+
+The multiplying years made that no more comprehensible than when, a
+child, she had thrilled in a waking dream. Love, spirit, death. Three
+mysteries. But only one, she thought, was inevitably hers, the last. To
+be loved was not love itself, but only the edge of its cloak;
+response was an indivisible part of realization. No, sterility was the
+measure--of its absence. And she was, Linda felt, in spite of Vigné and
+Lowrie, the latter a specially vigorous contradiction, the most sterile
+woman alive. There were always Dodge's assurances, but clay, stone,
+metal, were cold for a belief to embrace. And she was, she knew,
+lovelier now than she had ever been before, than she would ever be
+again.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+
+The faint ringing of the bell from outside that probably announced
+Arnaud sounded unreal, futile, to Linda. He came into the studio, and
+at once a discussion began between the two men of the difference in
+the surfaces of clay and bronze. The talk then shifted to the pictorial
+sources of the heroic Simon Downige before them, and Linda declared,
+"Dodge, you have never made a head of me. How very unflattering!"
+
+"You're an affair for a painter," he replied; "Goya or Alfred Stevens.
+No one but Goya could have found a white for you, with the quality of
+flower petals; and Stevens would have fixed you in an immortality of
+delicate color, surrounded by your Philadelphia garden." He stood quite
+close to her, with his jacket dragged forward by hands thrust into its
+pockets, and he added at the end of a somber interrogation, "But if you
+would really like to know why--"
+
+In a moment more, she recognized, Dodge would explain his feeling for
+her--to Arnaud, to any one who might be present. The gleam in his
+eyes, his remoteness from earthly concern, were definitely not normal.
+Pleydon, his love, terrified her. "No," she said with an assumed hurried
+lightness, "don't try to explain. I must manage to survive the injury to
+my vanity."
+
+They left New York almost immediately, Pleydon suddenly determining to
+go with them; and later were scattered through the Hallet household.
+Vigné and her husband were temporarily living there; with their heads
+close together they were making endless computations, numerous floor
+plans and elevations. Linda, at the piano in the drawing-room, could
+hear them through the hall. Pleydon was lounging in a chair beyond her.
+She couldn't play but she was able, slowly, to pick out the notes
+of simple and familiar airs--echoes of Gluck and blurred motives of
+Scarlatti. It was for herself, she explained; the sounds, however crude
+and disconnected, brought things back to her. What things, she replied
+to Pleydon's query, she didn't in the least know; but pleasant.
+
+The fact that she understood so little depressed her with increasing
+frequency. It was well enough to be ignorant as a girl, or even as a
+young woman newly married; but she had left all that behind; she had
+lost her youth without any compensating gain of knowledge. Linda could
+not assure herself that life was clearer than it had been to her serious
+childhood. It had always been easily measured on the surface; she
+had had a very complete grasp of its material aspects almost at once,
+accomplishing exactly what she had planned. Perhaps this was all;
+and her trouble an evidence of weakness--the indecision, she saw
+with contempt, that kept so many people in a constant agitation of
+disappointment.
+
+Perhaps this was enough; more than the majority had or accomplished. She
+made, again, a resolute effort to be contented, at rest. Her straying
+fingers clumsily wrought a fragmentary refrain that mocked her
+determination. It wasn't new, this--this dissatisfaction; but it had
+grown sharper. As she was older her restlessness increased at the
+realization that life, opportunity, were slipping from her. Soon she
+would be forty.
+
+The conviction seized her that most lives reflected hers in that their
+questioning was never answered. The fortunate, then, were the incurious
+and the hearts undisturbed by a maddening thrill. She said aloud, "The
+ones who never heard music." Pleydon was without a sign that she had
+spoken. Her emotions were very delicate, very fragile, and enormously
+difficult to perceive. They were like plants in stony ground. Where had
+she heard that--out of the Bible? Then she thought of her failure to get
+anything from religion--a part of her inability to drink at the springs
+which others declared so refreshing. Linda pressed her hands more
+sharply on the keys and the answering discord had the effect of waking
+her to reality.
+
+Pleydon remained until the following afternoon, and then was lost--in
+the foundry casting his statue--for six months. Arnaud went over to view
+the completion of the bronze and returned filled with enthusiasm. "Its
+simplicity is the surprising part," he told her. "The barest statement
+possible. But Pleydon himself is in a disturbing condition; I can't
+decide if it is mental or physical. The fever of course; yet that
+doesn't account for his distance from ordinary living. The truth is, I
+suppose, that men weren't designed for great arts, and nature, like
+the jealous God of the Hebrews, retaliates. It is absurd, but Pleydon
+reminds me of you; you're totally different. I suppose it's because of
+the detachment you have in common." He veered to a detail of Lowrie's
+first year at a university, and exhibited, against a decent endeavor to
+the contrary, his boundless pride in their son.
+
+The boy was, Linda acknowledged, more than commonly dependable and
+able. He was heavy, like his father, and so diffident that he almost
+stuttered; but his mental processes flashed in quick intuitive
+perceptions. Lowrie was an easy and brilliant student; and, perhaps
+because of this, of his mental certainty, he was not intimate with
+her as Arnaud had hoped and predicted. It seemed to Linda that he
+instinctively penetrated her inner doubt and regarded it without
+sympathy. In this he was her son. Lowrie was a confident and
+unsympathetic critic of humanity.
+
+Even now, so soon, there was no question of his success in the law his
+fitness had elected. The springs of his being were purely intellectual,
+reasoning. In him Linda saw magnified her own coldness; and, turned on
+herself, she viewed it with an arbitrary feminine resentment. He was
+actually courteous to her; but under all their intercourse there was a
+perceptible impatience. His scorn of other women, girls, however, was
+openly expressed and honest; it had no trace of the mere affectation
+of pessimism natural to his age. Arnaud, less thoughtful than she, was
+vastly entertained by this, and drew Lowrie out in countless sly sallies
+and contradictions.
+
+Yes, he would succeed, but, after all, what would his success be
+worth--placed, that was, against Vigné's radiant happiness, Bailey
+Sandby's quiet eyes and the quality of his return home each evening?
+
+Her thoughts came back to Pleydon--she had before her a New York paper
+describing the ceremony of unveiling his Simon Downige at Hesperia.
+There was a long learned article praising its beauty and emphasizing
+Pleydon's eminence. He was, it proceeded, an anomaly in an age of
+momentary experimental talents--a humanized Greek force. He didn't
+belong to to-day but to yesterday and to-morrow. This gave her an
+uncomfortable vision of Dodge in space, with no warm points of contact.
+She, too, was suspended in that vague emptiness. Linda had the sensation
+of grasping at streamers, forms, of sparkling mist. A strange position
+in view of her undeniable common sense, the solid foundations of her
+temperament and experience. She saw from the paper, further, that the
+Downige who had commissioned the monument was dead.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+
+In the middle of the festive period that connected Christmas with the
+new year Arnaud turned animatedly from his breakfast scanning of the
+news. "It seems," he told her, "that a big rumpus has developed in
+Hesperia over the Pleydon statue--the present Downige omnipotence, never
+friendly with our old gentleman, has condemned its bronze founder.
+You know what I mean. It's an insult to their pride, their money and
+position, to see him perpetuated as a tramp. On the contrary he was a
+very respectable individual from a prominent family and town.
+
+"They have been moving the local heavens, ever since the monument was
+placed, to have it set aside. I suppose they would have succeeded,
+too, if a large amount given to the city were not contingent on its
+preservation. But then they can always donate more money in the cause of
+their sacred respectability."
+
+Linda had never, she exclaimed, heard of anything more disgusting. It
+was plain that Hesperia knew nothing of art. "Every one," she ran on
+in the heat of her resentment, "every one, that is, who should decide,
+agrees it's magnificent. They were frightfully lucky to get it--Dodge's
+finest work." She wrote at once to Pleydon commanding his presence and
+expressing her contempt of such depravity of opinion. To her surprise he
+was undisturbed, apparently, by the condemnation of his monument.
+
+He even laughed at her energy of scorn. She was hurt, perceptibly
+silenced, with a feeling of having been misunderstood or rather
+undervalued. Her disturbance at any blame attached to the statue of
+Simon Downige was extremely acute. But, she thought, if it failed to
+worry Dodge why should she bother. She did, in spite of this philosophy;
+Simon was tremendously important to her.
+
+He stood for things: she had watched his evolution from the clay sketch,
+and in Pleydon's mind, to the final heroic proportions; and she had
+taken for granted that a grateful world would see him in her light.
+A woman, she decided, had made the trouble; and she hated her with a
+personal vigor. Pleydon said:
+
+"I told you that old Simon was unbalanced; now you can see it by his
+reception in a successful city. The sculptor--do you remember him, a
+Beaux-Arts graduate?--admits that he had always opposed it, but that
+political motives overbore his pure protest. There is a scheme now to
+build a pavilion, for babies, and shut out the monument from open view.
+They may do that but time will sweep away their walls. If I had
+modeled Simon Downige, yes, he would go; but I modeled his vision, his
+aspiration--the hope of all men for release and purity.
+
+"Downige and the individual babies are unimportant compared to a vision
+of perfection, of escape. As long as men live, if they live, they'll
+reach up; and that gesture in itself is heaven. Not accomplishment. The
+spirit dragging the flesh higher; but spirit alone--empty balloons. A
+dream in bronze, harder even than men's heads, more durable than their
+prejudices, so permanent that it will wear out their ignorance; and in
+the end--always in the end--they'll bring their wreath.
+
+"A replica has gone to Cottarsport, from me; and you ought to see
+it there, on a block of New England granite. It's in the Common, a
+windswept reach with low houses and a white steeple and the sea. It
+might have been there from the beginning, rising on rock against the
+pale salt day. They can go to hell in Hesperia."
+
+Still Linda's hurt persisted; she saw the unfortunate occurrence as a
+direct blow at her pride. Arnaud, too, failed her; he was splendid in
+his assault upon such rapacious stupidity; but it was only an impersonal
+concern. His manner expressed the conviction that it might have been
+expected. He was blind to her special enthusiasm, her long intimate
+connection with the statue. Exasperated she almost told him that it was
+more real to her than their house, than Vigné and Lowrie, than he. She
+was stopped, fortunately, by the perception that, amazingly, the statue
+was more actual than Dodge Pleydon. It touched the center of her life
+more nearly.
+
+Why, she didn't know.
+
+If her mental confusion increased by as much as a feeling, Linda
+thought, she would be close to madness. It was unbearable at practically
+forty.
+
+Lowrie said, at the worst possible moment, that he found the entire
+episode ridiculously overemphasized. A statue more or less was of small
+importance. If the Downige family were upset why didn't they employ
+an able lawyer to dispose of it? There were many ways for such a
+proceeding--
+
+"I have no desire to hear them," she interrupted. "You seem to know a
+tremendous lot, but what good it will do you in the end who can say!
+And, with all your cleverness, you haven't an ounce of appreciation for
+art. Besides, I hate to see any one as young as you so sure of himself.
+Often I suspect you are patronizing your father and me. It's not pretty
+nor polite."
+
+Lowrie was obviously embarrassed by her attack, and managed the abrupt
+semblance of an apology. Arnaud, who had put down his eternal book, said
+nothing until the boy had vanished. "Wasn't that rather sharp?" he
+asked mildly. "Perhaps," she replied in a tone without warmth or regret.
+"Somehow I am never comfortable with Lowrie."
+
+"You are too much alike," he shrewdly observed. "It is laughable at
+times. Did you expect your children to be fountains of sentiment?
+And, look here--if I can get along in comfort with you for life you in
+particular ought to put up peacefully with Lowrie. He is a damned sight
+more human than, at bottom, you are; a woman of alabaster."
+
+"I loathe quarrels," she admitted; "they are so vulgar. You know that
+they are not like me and just said so. Oh, Arnaud, why does life get
+harder instead of easier?"
+
+He put his book aside completely and gazed at her in patient thought.
+"Linda," he said finally, "I have never heard anything that stirred me
+so much; not what you said, my dear, but the recognition in your voice."
+A wistfulness of love for her enveloped him; an ineffable desire as vain
+as the passion she struggled to give him in return. She smiled in an
+unhappiness of apology.
+
+"Perhaps--" he stopped, waiting any assurance whatever, his face eager
+like a dusty lamp in which the light had been turned sharply up. She was
+unable to stir, to move her gaze from his hopeful eyes, to mitigate by a
+breath her slender white aloofness. A smile different from hers,
+tender with remission, lingered in his fading irradiation. The dusk was
+gathering, adding its melancholy to his age--sixty-five now. Why that
+was an old man! Her sympathy vanished in her shrinking from the twilight
+that was, as well, slowly, inevitably, deepening about her.
+
+It was laughable that, as she approached an age whose only resource
+was tranquillity, she grew more restless. Her present vague agitation
+belonged ridiculously to youth. The philosophy of the evident that had
+supported her so firmly was breaking at the most inopportune time. And
+it was, she told herself, too late for anything new; the years for
+that had been spent insensibly with Arnaud. Linda was very angry with
+herself, for, in all her shifting state of mind, she preserved an inner
+necessity for the quality of exactness expressed in her clothes. There
+were literally no neglected spaces in her conscious living.
+
+Her thoughts finally centered about the statue in Hesperia--it presented
+an actual mark for her fleeting resentments. She wondered why it so
+largely occupied her thoughts, moved her so personally. She watched the
+papers for the scattered reports of the progress of the contention it
+had roused, some ill-natured, others supposedly humorous, and nearly
+all uninformed. She became, Arnaud said, the champion of the esthetic
+against Dagon. He elaborated this picture until she was forced to smile
+against her inclination, her profound seriousness. Linda had the feeling
+that she, too, was on the pedestal that held the bronze effigy of Simon
+Downige challenging the fog that obscured men. Its fate was hers. She
+didn't pretend to explain how.
+
+As time passed it seemed to her that it took her longer and longer to
+dress in the morning, while her preparations couldn't be simpler; her
+habit of deliberation had become nearly a vice, the precision of her
+ruffles, her hair, a tyranny. She never quite lost the satisfaction of
+her mirror's faultless reflection; and stopped, now, for a moment's
+calm interrogation of the being--hardly more silvery cool than the
+reality--before her.
+
+Arnaud was at the table, and the gaze with which he met her was
+troubled. The morning paper, she saw, was, against custom, at her place,
+and she picked it up with an instinctive sense of calamity. The blackly
+printed sensational headline that immediately established her fear sank
+vivid and entire into her brain: an anonymous inflamed mob in Hesperia
+had pulled down and destroyed Pleydon's statue. Their act was described
+as a tribute to the liberality of the present Downige family in the
+light of its objection to the monument.
+
+As if in the development of her feeling Linda had a sensation of
+crashing with a sickening violence from a pedestal to the ground.
+Actually, it seemed, the catastrophe had happened to her. She heard,
+with a sense of inutility, Arnaud denouncing the outrage; he had a
+pencil in his hand for the composition of a telegram to Dodge. He
+paid--but perhaps only naturally--no attention to her, suffering dully
+from her fall. She shuddered before the recreated lawless approaching
+voice of the mob; the naked ugly violence froze her with terror; she
+felt the gross hurried hands winding ropes about her, the rending
+brutality of force--
+
+She sat and automatically took a small carved glass of orange-juice
+from a bed of ice, and her chilled fingers recalled a dim image of her
+mother. Arnaud was speaking, "I'm afraid this will cut through Pleydon's
+security, it was such a wanton destruction of his unique power. You see,
+he worked lovingly over the cast with little files and countless finite
+improvements. The mold, I think, was broken. What a piece of luck the
+thing's at Cottarsport." He paused, obviously expecting her to comment;
+but suddenly phrases failed her.
+
+In place of herself she should be considering Dodge; her sympathy even
+for him was submerged in her own extraordinary injury. However, she
+recovered from her first gasping shock, and made an utterly commonplace
+remark. Never had her sense of isolation been stronger. "I must admit,"
+her husband continued, "that I looked for some small display of concern.
+I give you my word there are moments when I think Pleydon himself cut
+you out of stone. He isn't great enough for that, though; in the way
+of perfection you successfully gild the lily. A thing held to be
+impossible."
+
+Linda told him with amazing inanity that his opinion of her was
+unreliable; and, contented, he lightly pursued his admiration of what
+he called her boreal charm. At intervals she responded appropriately
+and proceeded with breakfast. She had entered a region of dispassionate
+consideration, her characteristic detachment, she thought, regained. She
+mentally, calmly, reconstructed the motives and events that had led to
+the destruction of the statue; they, at least, were evident to her.
+She reaffirmed silently her conviction that it had resulted from the
+stupidity, the vanity, of a woman. The limitations of men, fully as
+narrow, operated in other directions.
+
+Then, with an incredulous surprise, she was aware that the clear space
+of her reason was filling with anger. Never before had such a flood
+of emotion possessed her; and she surrendered herself, in an
+enormous relief, to the novelty of its obliterating tide. It deepened
+immeasurably, sweeping her far from the security of old positions of
+indifference and critical self-possession. Linda became enraged at
+a world that had concentrated all its degraded vulgarity in one
+unspeakable act.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII
+
+
+It was fall, October, and the day was a space of pale gold foliage
+wreathed in blue garlands of mist. The gardener was busy with a wooden
+rake and wheelbarrow in which he carted away dead leaves for burning.
+The fire was back of the low fence, in the rear, and Linda, at the
+dining-room window, could hear the fierce small crackle of flames; the
+drifting pungent smoke was like a faint breath of ammonia. Arnaud had
+left for the day, Lowrie was at the university, while Vigné and her
+husband--moving toward their ultimate colonial threshold--had taken a
+small house. She was alone.
+
+As usual.
+
+However, in her present state her solitude had lost its inevitability;
+she failed to see why it must continue until the end of time. She could
+no longer discover a sufficient reason for her limitless endurance,
+her placid acceptance of all that chance, or any inconsiderable person,
+happened to dictate. She wasn't like that in the least. Her temper had
+solidified as though it were ice, taking everywhere the form in which
+it was held. It was a reality. She determined, as well, that her feeling
+should not melt back into the familiar acceptance of a routine that had
+led her blindfolded across such an extent of life.
+
+She understood now, in a large part, her disturbance at the indignity
+to Dodge's monument--he had assured her that she was its inspiration;
+except for her it would never have been realized, he would have kept
+on modeling those Newport fountains, continued with the Susanna Nodas,
+spending himself ignobly. He loved her, and that love had resulted in a
+statue the world of art, of taste, honored. But it was she all the while
+they were approving, discussing, writing about, Linda Condon.
+
+She had always been that, Pleydon had informed her, never Linda
+Hallet--in spite of Arnaud and their children. It sounded like nonsense;
+but, at the bottom, it was truth. Of course it couldn't be explained,
+for example, to the man who had every right, every evidence, to consider
+himself her husband. Nothing was susceptible of explanation. Absolutely
+nothing! There was the earth, which appeared to be everything, the
+houses you entered, the streets you passed over, the people among whom
+you lived, yet that wasn't all. Heavens, no! It was quite unimportant
+compared with--with other facts latent in the mind and blood.
+
+Dodge Pleydon's love was one of those other facts; it was simply
+impossible to deny its existence, its power. Dodge had been totally
+changed by it, born over again. But she, who had been the source, had
+had no good from it, nothing except the thrill that had always been
+hers. No one knew of it, counted it as her achievement, paid the
+slightest attention to her. Arnaud smiled indulgently, Lowrie scoffed.
+When the statue had been thrown down they thought of it merely as a
+deplorable part of the day's news. They hadn't seen that she, Linda
+Condon, was unspeakably insulted.
+
+She doubted if she could bring them to comprehend what had happened--to
+her. Or if Arnaud understood, if she made it plain, what good would be
+done! That wouldn't save her, put her back again on the pedestal. The
+latter was necessary. Linda recognized that a great deal of her feeling
+was based on pride; but it was a pride entirely justified. She had no
+intention of submitting to the coarse hands and ropes of public affront.
+Throughout her life she had rebelled against any profanation of her
+person, she had hated to be touched.
+
+Every instinct, she found, every delicate self-opinion, was bound into
+Pleydon's success; the latter had kept her alive. Without it existence
+would have been intolerable. It was unbearable now.
+
+She discharged the small daily duties of her efficient housekeeping with
+a contemptuous exactness; for years she had accomplished, in herself,
+nothing more. But at last a break had come. Linda recognized this
+without any knowledge of what reparation it would find. She wasn't
+concerned with that, a small detail. It would be apparent. Arnaud
+was silent through dinner; tired, it seemed. She saw him as if at the
+distant end of a dull corridor--as she looked back. There was no change
+in her liking for him. Mechanically she noticed the disorder of his
+scant hair and rumpled sleeves.
+
+Not until, waking sharply, in the middle of the night, did she have a
+glimpse of a possible course--she might live with Dodge and perfectly
+express both her retaliation and her accomplishment. In that way she
+would reestablish herself beside him and place their vision in bronze on
+an elevation beyond the spite of the envious and the blind.
+
+It was so directly simple that she was surprised it hadn't occurred
+to her before. The possibility had always been a part, unsuspected and
+valuable, of her special being; the largely condemned faults of
+her character and experience had at least brought her this--a not
+inconsiderable freedom in a world everywhere barred by the necessity
+for upholding a hypocritical show of superiority to honest desire. The
+detachment that deprived her of life's conventional joys released
+her from its common obligations. That conviction, however, was too
+intimately connected with all her inheritance to bring her any conscious
+dramatic sense of rebellion or high feeling of justified indignation.
+
+Sleep had deserted her, and she waited for the dawn in the windows that
+would bring her escape. It was very slow coming; the blackness took on
+a grayer tone, like ink with added faint infusions of water. Slowly the
+blackness dissolved and she heard the stir of the sparrows in the ivy.
+There was the passing rumble of an early electric car on the paved aged
+street, the blurred hurried shuffle of a workman's clumsy shoes. The
+brightening morning was cool with a premonitory touch of frost; at the
+window she saw a vanishing silver sheen on the lawn and board fence.
+
+A sensation of youth pervaded her; and while, perhaps, it was out of
+keeping with her years, she had still her vitality unspent; she was
+without a trace of the momentary frost on the grass. She was tranquil,
+leisurely; her heart evenly sent its life through her unflushed body.
+Piece by piece she put on her web-like garments, black and white;
+brushing the heavy stream of her hair and tying the inevitable sash
+about her supple waist.
+
+Below she met Arnaud with an unpleasant shock--she hadn't given him
+a thought. Her feeling now was hardly more than annoyance at her
+forgetfulness. He would be terribly distressed at her going, and she was
+genuinely sorry for this, poised at the edge of an explanation of her
+purpose. Arnaud was putting butter and salt into his egg-cup, after
+that he would grind the pepper from a French mill--pure spices were a
+precision of his--and she waited until the operation was completed.
+
+Then it occurred to her that all she could hope to accomplish by
+admitting her intention was the ruin of his last hour alone with her.
+He was happier, gayer, than usual. But his age was evident in his voice,
+his gestures. Linda marveled at her coldness, her ruthless disregard of
+Arnaud's claim on her, of his affection as deep as Pleydon's, perhaps no
+less fine but not so imperative. Yet Arnaud had had over twenty years of
+her life, the best; and she had never deceived him about the quality
+of her gift. It was right, now, for Dodge to have the remainder.
+But whether it were right or wrong, there was no failure of her
+determination to go to Pleydon in the vindication of her existence.
+
+She delayed speaking to Arnaud until, suddenly, breakfast was over. He
+seldom went to the law office where he had been a partner, but stayed
+about the lower floor of his house, in the library or directing small
+outside undertakings. Either that or he left, late, for the Historical
+Society, with which his connection and interest were uninterrupted.
+As Linda passed him in the hall he was fumbling in the green bag that
+accompanied all his journeyings into the city; and she gathered that he
+intended to make one of his occasional sallies. She proceeded above,
+to her room, where with steady hands she pinned on her hat. It would
+be impossible to take any additional clothes, and she'd have to content
+herself with something ready-made until she could order others in
+the establishment of her living with Dodge. Her close-fitting jacket,
+gloves, and a short cape of sables were collected; she gazed finally,
+thoughtfully, about the room, and then, with a subdued whisper of
+skirts, descended the stair. Arnaud was in the library, bending over
+the table that bore his accumulation of papers and serious journals. A
+lingering impulse to speak was overborne by the memory of what, lately,
+she had endured--she saw him at the dusty end of that long corridor
+through which she had monotonously journeyed, denied of her one triumph,
+lost in inconsequential shadows--and she continued firmly to the door
+which closed behind her with a normal mute smoothness, an inanimate
+silence.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII
+
+
+The maid who admitted Linda to Pleydon's apartment, first replying,
+"Yes, Mrs. Hallet. No, Mrs. Hallet," to her questions, continued in
+fuller sentences expressing a triumph of sympathy over mere correctness.
+She lingered at the door of the informal drawing-room, imparting the
+information that Mr. Pleydon had become very irregular indeed about his
+meals, and that his return for lunch was uncertain. Something, however,
+would be prepared for her. Linda acknowledged this briefly. Often, with
+Mr. Pleydon at home, he wouldn't so much as look at his dinner. Times,
+too, it seemed as though he had been in the studio all night. He went
+out but seldom now, and rarely remained away for more than an hour or
+two. Linda heard this without an indication of responsive interest,
+and the servant, returning abruptly from the excursion into humanity,
+disappeared.
+
+She was glad to have this opportunity alone to accustom herself to a
+novel position. But she was once more annoyingly calm. Annoyingly, she
+reiterated; the fervor of her anger, which at the same time had been
+bitterly cold, had lessened. She was practically normal. She regarded
+this, the loss of her unprecedented emotion, in the light of a fraud on
+her sanguine decision. Linda had counted on its support, its generous
+irresistible tide, to carry her through the remainder of her life with
+the exhilaration she had so largely missed.
+
+Here in Dodge's room she was as placid, almost, as though she were in
+the library at home. That customary term took its place in her thoughts
+before she recognized that, with her, it had shifted. However, it was
+unimportant--home had never been a magical word to her; it belonged in
+the vast category which, of such universal weight, left her unstirred.
+She resembled those Eastern people restlessly and perpetually moving
+across sandy deserts as they exhausted, one after another, widely
+separated scanty oases.
+
+She studied the objects around her with the pleased recognition that
+they were unique, valuable, and in faultless taste. Then she fell to
+wondering at the difference had Dodge been poor: she would have come to
+him, Linda knew, just the same. But, she admitted frankly, it would
+have been uncomfortable. Perhaps that--actual poverty, actual
+deprivation--was what her character needed. A popular sentiment upheld
+such a view; she decided it was without foundation. There was no reason
+why beauty, finely appropriate surroundings, should damage the spirit.
+
+Her mind turned to an examination of her desertion of Arnaud, but she
+could find no trace of conventional regret; of what, she felt, her
+sensation ought to be. The instinctive revolt from oblivion was an
+infinitely stronger reality than any allegiance to abstract duty. She
+was consumed by the passionate need to preserve the integrity of being
+herself. The word selfish occurred to her but to be met unabashed by the
+query, why not? Selfishness was a reproach applied by those who failed
+to get what they wanted to all who succeeded. Linda wasn't afraid of
+public opinion, censure; she didn't shrink even from the injury to her
+husband. What Dodge would think, however, was hidden from her.
+
+She had no doubt of his complete acceptance of all she offered; ordinary
+obligations to society bound him as little as they held her. It would be
+enough that she wanted to come to him.
+
+She would bother him, change his habit of living, very little. Long
+years of loneliness had taught her to be self-sufficient. Linda would
+be too wise to insist on distasteful regularity in the interest of a
+comparatively unimportant well-being. In short, she wouldn't bother him.
+That must be made clear at once.
+
+More than anything else he would be inexpressibly delighted to have her
+with him, to find--at last--his love. Little intimacies of satin
+mules, glimpses, charming to an artist! He'd be faultless, too, in the
+relationships where Arnaud as well had never for a moment deviated from
+beautiful consideration. Two remarkable men. While her deficiency in
+humor was admitted, she saw a glimmer of the absurd in her attitude and
+present situation. The combination, at least, was uncommon. There had
+been no change in her feeling for either Arnaud or Dodge, their places
+in her being were undisturbed; she liked her husband no less, Dodge no
+better.
+
+Lunch was announced, a small ceremony of covered silver dishes, heavy
+crystal, Nankin china, and flowers. The linen, which was old, bore a
+monogram unfamiliar to her--that of Dodge's mother, probably. When she
+had finished, but was still lingering at the narrow refectory table, she
+heard Pleydon enter the hall and the explanatory voice of the servant.
+An unexpected embarrassment pervaded her, but she overcame it by the
+realization that there was no need for an immediate announcement of
+her purpose. Dodge would naturally suppose that she was in New York
+shopping.
+
+He did, to her intense relief, with a moving pleasure that she had
+lunched with him. "It's seldom," he went on, "that you are so sensible.
+I hope you haven't any plans or concerts to drag you away immediately.
+I owe you a million strawberries; but, aside from that, I'd like you to
+stay as long as possible."
+
+"Very well," she replied quietly; "I will."
+
+She hadn't seen him since the statue at Hesperia had been destroyed, and
+she tried faintly to tell him how much that outrage had hurt her. It had
+injured him too, she realized; just as Arnaud predicted. He showed his
+age more gauntly, more absolutely, than the other. His skin was dry as
+though the vitality of his countenance had been burned out by the flame
+visible in his eyes.
+
+"The drunken fools!" he exclaimed of the mob that had torn Simon Downige
+from his eminence; "they came by way of all the saloons in the city.
+Free drinks! That is the disturbing thing about what the optimistic call
+civilization--the fact that it is always at the mercy of the ignorant
+and the brutal. There is no security; none, that is, except in the
+individual spirit. And they, mostly, are the victims of a singular
+insane resentment--Savonarola and there were greater.
+
+"But you mustn't think, you mustn't suppose, that I mean it's
+hopeless. How could I? Who has had more from living? Love and complete
+self-expression. That exhausts every possibility. Three words. Remember
+Cottarsport. But the love--ah," he smiled, but not directly at her.
+Linda was at once reassured and disturbed; and she rose, proceeding into
+the drawing-room.
+
+There she sat gracefully composed and with still hands; she never
+embroidered or employed her leisure with trivial useful tasks. Pleydon
+was extended on a chair, his fingers caught beyond his head and his long
+legs thrust out and crossed at the ankles. His gaze was fixed on her
+unwaveringly; and yet, when she tried to meet its focus, it went behind
+her as though it pierced the solidity of her body and the walls in the
+contemplation of a far-removed shining image. Her disturbance grew to
+the inclusion of a degree of fretfulness at his unbroken silence, his
+apparent absorption in whatever his meditation projected or found.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX
+
+
+Now, she decided, was the moment for her revelation; or rather, it
+couldn't very well be further deferred, for it promised to be halting.
+But, with her lips forming the words, he abruptly spoke:
+
+"I have lived so long with your spirit, it has become so familiar--I
+mean the ability of completely making you out of my heart--that when you
+are here the difference isn't staggering. You see, you are never away.
+I have that ability; it came out of the other wreck. But you know about
+it--from years back. Time has only managed a greater power. Lately, and
+I have nothing to do with it, I have been seeing you again as a girl;
+as young as at Markue's party; younger. Not more than ten. I don't
+mean that there is anything--isn't the present fashionable word
+subliminal?--esoteric. God forbid. You'll remember my hatred of that
+brutal deception.
+
+"No, it's only a part of my ability to create the shape of feeling, of
+Simon's hope. I see things as realities capable of exact statement; and,
+naturally, more than all the rest, you come to me that way. But as a
+child--who knows why?" he relinquished the answer with an opened
+palm. "And young like that, perhaps ten, I love you more sharply, more
+unutterably, than at any other age. What is it I love? Not your adorable
+plastic body, not that. It isn't necessary to understand.
+
+"You have, as a child, a quality of blinding loveliness in a world I
+absolutely distrust. An Elysian flower. Is it possible, do you suppose,
+to worship an abstract idea? It's not important to insist on my sanity."
+
+The question of that had occurred independently to Linda; his hurried
+voice and lost gaze filled her with apprehension. A dull reddish patch,
+she saw, burned in either thin cheek; and she told herself that the
+fever had revived in him. Pleydon continued:
+
+"Yet it is a timeless vision, because you never get old. I see Hallet
+failing year by year, and your children, only yesterday dabs of soft
+flesh, grow up and pass through college and marry. I hear myself in the
+studio with an old man's cough; the chisels slip under the mall and I
+can't move the clay about without help--all fading, decaying, but you.
+Candles burn out, hundreds of them, while your whiteness, your flame--
+
+"Strange, too, how you light a world, a sky, eternity. A word we have no
+business with; a high-sounding word for a penny purpose. Look, we try
+to keep alive because it's necessary to life, to nature; and the effort,
+the struggle, breeds the dream. You can understand that. Men who ought
+to know say that love is nothing more." He rose and stood over her,
+towering and portentous against the curtained light. "I don't pretend to
+guess. I'm a creative artist--Simon Downige at Cottarsport--I have you.
+If it's God so much the better."
+
+What principally swept over Linda was the knowledge that his possession
+of her must keep them always apart. The reality, all realities, were
+veils to Pleydon. Her momentary vision of things beyond brick and earth
+was magnified in him until everything else was obliterated. The fever!
+Oh, yes, that and his passion for work merged in his passion for her.
+She could bring him nothing; and she had a curious picture of two Lindas
+visible to him here--the Linda that was actual and the other, the child.
+And of them it was the latter he cared most for, recreated out of his
+desire to defraud his loneliness, to repay the damage to his spirit
+realized in bronze.
+
+She was, suddenly, too weary to stir or lift her hand; a depression
+as absolute as her flare of rage enveloped her. Now the reason for her
+coming seemed inexplicable, as if, for the while, her mind had failed.
+She repressed a shudder at the thought of being, through the long nights
+of his restlessness and wandering voice, alone with Pleydon. She hadn't,
+Linda discovered, any of the transmuting feeling for him which alone
+made surrender possible. She calculated mentally how long it would take
+her to reach the station, what train would be available.
+
+Linda accepted dumbly the fatality to her own hope; for a few hours she
+had thought it possible to break out of the prison of circumstance, to
+walk free from all hindrance; but it had been vain. She gazed at Dodge
+Pleydon intensely--a comprehensive view of the man she had so nearly
+married, and who, more than any other force, dominated her being. It was
+already too late for anything but memory; she saw--filled with pity for
+them both--hardly more than a strange old man with deadened hair and a
+yellow parchment-like skin. His suit of loose gray flannel gave her a
+feeling that it had been borrowed from some one she lovingly knew. The
+gesture of his hand, too, had been copied from a brilliant personage
+with a consuming impatience at all impotence.
+
+"Remember me to Arnaud," he said, holding her gloves and the short fur
+cape. "Wait!" he cried sharply, turning to the bookcase against the
+wall. Pleydon fumbled in a box of lacquered gilt with a silk cord and
+produced a glove once white but now brown and fragile with age. "You
+never missed it," he proceeded in a gleeful triumph; "but then you had
+so many pairs. Once I sent you nine dozen together from Grenoble. They
+were nothing, but this you had worn. For a long while it kept the shape
+of your hand."
+
+"Dodge," she tried without success to steady her voice, "it stayed with
+you anyhow, my--my hand."
+
+"But yes," he answered impatiently. He returned the glove to its box,
+carefully tying the tasselled cord. Then, after clumsily helping her
+with the cape, he accompanied her to the elevator. "There were other
+things," he told her. "Did you see the letters about the Hesperia
+affair? Heaps of them. Rodin.... But what can you expect in a world
+where there is no safety--" The stopping cage cut off his remark. She
+held out the hand that was less real to him than the dream.
+
+"Good-by, Dodge."
+
+"Yes, Linda. But watch that door, your skirt might easily be caught in
+it." He fussed over her safety until, abruptly, he seemed to rise in
+space, shut out from her by the limitations of her faith.
+
+The evening overshadowed her in the train, as though she were whirling
+in the swiftest passage possible, through an indeterminate grayness,
+from day to night. The latter descended on her as she reached the steps
+of her home. It was still that; now it would continue to be until
+death. Nothing could ever again offer her change, release, vindication;
+nothing, that was, which might give her, for a day, what even her mother
+had plentifully experienced--the igniting exultation of the body.
+
+It was inevitable, she thought, for Arnaud to be in the library. He rose
+unsteadily as she stood in the doorway. "Linda," he articulated with
+difficulty. A book had rested open on the table beside him and, closing
+it, he put it back in its place. His arm trembled so that it took a
+painfully long while. Then he moved forward, still confused.
+
+"What a confounded time you were gone. I had the most idiotic fancy. You
+see, it was so unlike you; none more exact in habit. All day. I didn't
+get to the Historical Society, it seemed so devilish far off. I'd never
+blame you for leaving an old man without any gumption." He must never
+think that again, she replied. Wasn't she, too, middle-aged?
+
+
+
+
+XL
+
+
+Linda admitted, definitely, the loss of her youth; and yet a stubborn
+inner conviction remained that she was unchanged. In this she had for
+support her appearance; practically she was as freshly and gracefully
+pale as the girl who had married Arnaud Hallet. Even Vigné, with
+indelible traces of her motherhood, had faint lines absent from Linda's
+flawless countenance. Her children, and Arnaud, were immensely proud of
+her beauty; it had become a part--in the form of her ridiculously young
+air--of the family conversational resources. She was increasingly aware
+of its supreme significance to her.
+
+One of her few certainties had been the discovery that, while small
+truths might be had from others, all that intimately and deeply
+concerned her was beyond questioning and advice. The importance of her
+attractiveness, for example, which seemed the base of her entire being,
+was completely out of accord with the accepted standard of values
+for middle-aged women. Other things, called moral and spiritual, she
+inferred, should take up her days and thoughts. There was a course of
+discipline--exactly like exercises in the morning--for the preparation
+of the willingness to die.
+
+But such an attitude was eternally beyond her; she repudiated it with
+a revolt stringing every nerve indignantly tense. She had had, on the
+whole, singularly little from life but her fine body; it had always been
+the temple and altar of her service, and no mere wordy reassurance could
+now repay her for its swift or gradual destruction. The latter, except
+for accident, would be her fate; she was remarkably sound. In her social
+adventures, the balls to which, without Arnaud, she occasionally went,
+she was morbid in her sensitive dread of discovering, through a waning
+admiration, that she was faded.
+
+It would be impossible to spend more care on her person than she had in
+the past; but that was unrelenting. Linda was inexorable in her demands
+on the establishments that made her suits and dresses. The slightest
+imperfection of fit exasperated her; and she regarded the endless change
+of fashions with contempt. This same shifting, she observed, occurred
+not only in women's clothes but in the women themselves.
+
+Linda remembered her mother, eternal in gaiety, but very obviously
+different from her in states of mind affecting her appearance. She was
+unable to define the change; but it was unmistakable--Stella Condon
+seemed a little old-fashioned. When now, to Lowrie's wife, Linda was
+unmistakably out-of-date. Lowrie, fast accomplishing all that had been
+predicted for him, had married a girl incomprehensible to his mother.
+Observing this later feminine development she had the baffled feeling of
+inspecting a creature of a new order.
+
+To Linda, Jean Tynedale, now a Hallet, seemed harder than ever her own
+famous coldness had succeeded in being. This came mostly from Jean's
+imposing education; there had been, in addition to the politest of
+finishing schools, college--a woman's concern, Bryn Mawr--and then
+post-graduate honors in a noteworthy university. She was entirely
+addressed, in a concrete way, to the abstract problems of social
+progress and hygiene; and, under thirty, the animating spirit, as well
+as financial support, of an incredible number of Settlements and allied
+undertakings. She spoke crisply before civic and other clubs; even, in
+the interest of suffrage, addressing nondescript audiences from a box on
+the street.
+
+But it was her unperturbed dissection of the motives of sex, the
+denouncement of a criminal mysterious ignorance, that most daunted
+Linda. She listened to Jean with a series of distinct shocks to her
+sense of propriety. What she had agreed to consider a nameless attribute
+of women, or, if anything more exact, the power of their charm over men,
+the other defined in unequivocal scientific terms. She understood
+every impulse veiled for Linda in a reticence absolutely needful to its
+appeal.
+
+This, of course, the elder distrusted; just as she had no approval for
+Jean's public activities. Linda didn't like public women; her every
+instinct cried for a fine seclusion, fine in the meaning of an
+appropriate setting for feminine distinction, the magic of dress and cut
+roses. Her private inelegant word for Lowrie's wife was "bold;" indeed,
+describing to herself the younger woman's patronage of her bearing, she
+descended to her mother's colloquialism "brass."
+
+She thought this sitting at a dinner-table which held Vigné and her
+husband and Lowrie and Jean Hallet. Arnaud, drawing life from the
+vitality of an atmosphere charged with youth, was unflagging in splendid
+spirits and his valorous wit. Jean would never inspire the affection
+Arnaud had given her; nor the passion that, in Pleydon, had burned unfed
+even by hope.
+
+Her thoughts slipped away from the present to the sculptor. Three years
+had vanished since she had gone with an intention of finality to his
+apartment, and in that time he had neither been in their house nor
+written. Linda had expected this; she was without the desire to see
+or hear from him. Dodge Pleydon was finished for her; as a man, a
+potentiality, he had departed from her life. He was a piece with her
+memories, the triumphs of her young days. Without an actual knowledge of
+the moment of its accomplishment she had passed over the border of that
+land, leaving it complete and fair and radiant for her lingering view.
+Whether or not she had been happy was now of no importance; the magic
+of its light showed only a garden and a girl in white with a black bang
+against her blue eyes.
+
+The bang, the blueness of gaze, were still hers; but, only this
+morning, brush in hand, the former had offered less resistance in its
+arrangement; it was thinner, and the color perceptibly not so dense. At
+this, with a chill edge of fear, she had determined to go at once to
+her hairdresser; no one, neither Arnaud, who loved its luster, nor an
+unsympathetic bold scrutiny, a scrutiny of brass, should see that she
+was getting gray. There was no fault about her figure; she had that for
+her satisfaction; she was more graceful than Jean's square thinness,
+more slim than Vigné's maternal presence.
+
+Linda had the feeling that she was engaged in a struggle with time, a
+ruthless antagonist whom she viewed with a personal enmity. Time must,
+would, of course, triumph in the end; but there would be no sign of her
+surrender in the meanwhile; she wouldn't bend an inch, relinquish by a
+fraction the pride and delicacy of her person. The skilful dyeing of
+her hair to its old absolute blackness, as natural and becoming in
+appearance as ever, was a symbol of her determination to cheat an
+intolerable tyranny.
+
+The process, dismaying her soul, she bore with a rigid fortitude; as she
+endured the coldness of a morning bath from which, often, she was slow
+to react. This, to her, was widely different from the futile efforts
+of her mother, those women of the past, to preserve for practical ends
+their flushes of youth and exhilaration. She felt obscurely that she was
+serving a deeper reality created by the hands of Pleydon, Arnaud's
+faith and pure pleasure, all that countless men had seen in her for
+admiration, solace and power.
+
+But it was inevitable, she told herself bitterly, that she should
+hear the first intimation of her decline from Jean Hallet. Rather, she
+overheard it, the discussion of her, from the loiterers at breakfast
+as she moved about the communicating library. Jean's emphatic slightly
+rough-textured voice arrested her in the arrangement of a bowl of
+zinnias:
+
+"You can't say just where she has failed, but it's evident. Perhaps a
+general dryness. Perfectly natural. Thoroughly silly to fight against
+it--" Vigné interrupted her. "I think mother's wonderful. I can't
+remember any other woman nearly her age who looks so enchanting in the
+evening."
+
+Linda quietly left the flowers as they were and went up to the room that
+had been her father's. It was now used as a spare bedroom; and she had
+turned into it, in place of her own chamber, instinctively, without
+reason. She had kept it exactly as it had been when Amelia Lowrie first
+conducted her there, as it was when her father, a boy, slept under the
+white canopy.
+
+Linda advanced to the mirror; and, her hands so tightly clenched that
+the finger-nails dug into the palms, forced herself to gaze steadily
+at the wavering reflection. It seemed to her that there had been a
+malicious magic in Jean's detraction; for immediately, as though the
+harm had been wrought by the girl's voice, she saw that her clear
+freshness had gone. Her face had a wax-like quality, the violet shadows
+under her eyes were brown. Who had once called her a gardenia? Now she
+was wilting--how many gardenias had she seen droop, turn brown. Her
+heart beat with a disturbing echo in her ears, and, with a slight gasp
+that resembled a sob, she sank on one of the uncomfortable painted
+chairs.
+
+What, above every other sensation, oppressed her was a feeling of
+terrific loneliness--the familiar isolation magnified until it was past
+bearing. Yet, there was Arnaud, infallible in his tender comprehension,
+she ought to go to him at once and find support. But it was impossible;
+all that he could give her was, to her special necessity, useless. She
+had never been able to establish herself in his sympathy; the reason for
+that lay in the fact that she could bring nothing similar in return.
+
+The room--except for the timed clangor of the electric cars, like the
+measure of lost minutes--was quiet. The photograph of Bartram Hallet in
+cricketing clothes had faded until it was almost indistinguishable. Soon
+the faint figure would disappear entirely, as though the picture were
+amenable to the relentless principle operating in her.
+
+The peace about her finally lessened her acute suffering, stilled her
+heart. She told herself with a show of vigor that she was a coward, a
+charge that roused an unexpected activity of denial. She discovered that
+cowardice was intolerable to her. What had happened, too, was so far out
+of her hands that a trace of philosophical acceptance, recognition, came
+to her support. The loveliest woman alive must do the same, meet in a
+looking-glass--that eternal accompanying sibyl--her disaster. She rose,
+her lips firmly set, composed and pale, and returned to the neglected
+flowers in the library.
+
+Vigné entered and put an affectionate arm about her shoulders,
+repeating--unconscious that Linda had heard the discussion which had
+given it being--the conviction that her mother was wonderful, specially
+in the black dinner dress with the girdle of jet. With no facility of
+expression she gave her daughter's arm a quick light pressure.
+
+From then she watched the slow progress of age with a new realization,
+but an unabated distaste and, wherever it was possible, a determined
+artifice. Arnaud had failed swiftly in the past months; and, while she
+was inspecting the impaired supports of an arbor in the garden, he came
+to her with an unopened telegram. "I abhor these things," he declared
+fretfully; "they are so sudden. Why don't people write decent letters
+any more! It's like the telephone.... Good manners have been ruined."
+
+She tore open the envelope, read the brief line within, and, a hand
+suddenly put out to the arbor, sank on its bench. There had been rain,
+but a late sun was again pouring over the sparkling grass, and robins
+were singing with a lyrical clearness. "What is it?" Arnaud demanded
+anxiously, tremulous in the unsparing sunlight. She replied:
+
+"Dodge died this morning."
+
+His concern was as much for her as for Pleydon's death. "I'm sorry,
+Linda," his hand was on her shoulder. "It is a shock to you. A fine man,
+a genius--none stronger in our day. When you were young and for so
+long after.... I was lucky, Linda, to get you; have you all this while.
+Nothing in Pleydon's life, not even his success, could have made up for
+your loss."
+
+She wondered dully if Dodge had missed her, if Arnaud Hallet had ever
+had her in his possession. The robins filled the immaculate air
+with song. It was impossible that Dodge, who was so imperious in his
+certainty that he would never say good-by to her, was dead.
+
+
+
+
+XLI
+
+
+There was a revival of public interest in the destruction of Pleydon's
+statue at Hesperia, the papers again printed accounts colored by a
+variety of attitudes unembarrassed by fact; and the serious journals
+united in a dignity of eminently safe praise. At first Linda made an
+effort to preserve these; but soon their similarity, her inability to
+find, among sonorous periods, any trace of Dodge's spirit--in reality
+she knew so blindingly much more than the most penetrating critical
+intellect--caused her to leave the reviews unread. No one else living
+had understood Pleydon; and when descriptions of his life spoke of the
+austerity in his later years, his fanatical aversion to women, Linda
+thought of the brittle glove in the gilt-lacquer box.
+
+Her own emotion, it seemed to her, was the most confused of all the
+unintelligible pressures that had converted her life into an enigma.
+She had a distinct sense of overwhelming loss--of something, Linda was
+obliged to add, she had never owned. However, she realized that during
+Pleydon's life she had dimly expected a happy accident of explanation;
+until almost the last, yes--after she had returned from that ultimate
+journey, she had been conscious of the presence of hope. The hope had
+been for herself, created out of her constant baffled dissatisfaction.
+
+But now the man in whom solely she had been expressed, the only possible
+reason for her obstinate pride, had left her in a world that, but
+for Arnaud's fondness, looked on her without remark. The loss of her
+distinction had been finally evident at balls, in the dresses in which
+Vigné had thought her so wonderful, and she dropped them. Here, she
+repeated, was when affection, generously radiated through life, should
+have reflected over her a tranquil and contented joy. She had never
+given it, and she was without the ability to receive. She admitted to
+herself, with a little annoyed laugh, that her old desire for inviolable
+charm, for the integrity of a memorable slimness, was unimpaired. It
+was, she thought, too ridiculously inappropriate for words.
+
+Yet it had changed slightly into the recognition that what so often had
+been called her beauty was all she now had for sustenance, all she had
+ever had. Her mind returned continually to Pleydon, and--deep in the
+mystery of his passion--she was suddenly invaded by an insistent desire
+to see the monument at Cottarsport. She spoke to Arnaud at once about
+this; and alone, through his delicacy of perception, Linda went to
+Boston the following day.
+
+The further ride to Cottarsport followed the sea--a brilliant serene
+blue, fretted on the landward side by innumerable bare promontories,
+hideous towns and factories, but bowed in a far unbroken arc at the
+immaculate horizon. She left the train for a hilly cluster of houses,
+gray and low like the rock everywhere apparent, dropping to a harbor
+that bore a company of motionless boats with half-spread drying sails.
+
+The day was at noon, and the sky, blue like the sea, held, still as the
+anchored schooners, faint, chalky symmetrical clouds. Linda found the
+Common without guidance; and at once saw, on its immovable base of
+rugged granite, the bronze statue of Simon Downige. It stood well in
+advance of what, evidently, was the court-house, the white steeple Dodge
+had described. She found a bench by a path in the thin grass; and there,
+her gloved hands folded, at rest in her lap, her gaze and longing were
+lifted to the fixed aspiration.
+
+From where she sat the seated figure was projected against the sky;
+Simon's face was turned toward the west; the West that, for him, was the
+future, but which for Linda represented all the past. This conviction
+flooded her with unutterable sadness. A sense of failure weighed on her,
+no less heavy for the fact that it was perpetually vague. Her thoughts
+gathered about Dodge himself; and she recalled the curious vividness of
+his vision of her as a child, perhaps ten. She, too, tried to remember
+that time and age. It was almost in her grasp, but her realization was
+spoiled by absurd mental fragments--the familiar illusion of a leopard
+and a rider with bright hair, a forest with the ascending voices of
+angels, and an ominous squat figure with a slowly nodding plumed head.
+
+The vista of a hotel returned, a fleet recollection of marble columns
+and a wide red carpet ... the white gleam and carbolized smell of a
+drug-store ... a thick magazine in a brown cover. These, changed into
+emotions of mingled joy and pain, shifted in bright or dim colors and
+sensations. There was a slow heavy plodding of feet, now above her head,
+the passage of a carried weight; and, in a flash of perception, she knew
+it was a coffin. She raised her clasped hands to her breast, crying into
+the sunny silence, to the figure of Simon Downige lost in dream:
+
+"He died that night, at the Boscombe, after he had told me about the
+meadows with silk tents--"
+
+Her memory, thrilling with the echoed miraculous chord of the child of
+ten, sitting gravely, alone, among the shrill satins and caustic voices
+of a feminine throng, was complete. She saw herself, Linda Condon, as
+objectively as Pleydon's described vision: there was a large bow on her
+straight black hair, and, from under the bang, her gaze was clear and
+wondering. How marvelously young she was! The vindictive curiosity of
+the questioning women, intent on their rings, brought out her eager
+defense of her mother, the effort to explain away the ugly fact
+that--that Mr. Jasper was married.
+
+She saw Linda descending the marble stairs to the lower floor where
+the games were kept in a somber corridor, and heard a voice halting her
+irresolute passage:
+
+"Hello, Bellina."
+
+That wasn't her name, and she corrected him, waiting afterward to listen
+to a strange fairy-like tale. The solitary, sick-looking man, with inky
+shadows under fixed eyes, was so actual that she recaptured the pungent
+drift of his burning cigarette. He talked about love in a bitter
+intensity that hurt her. Yet, at first, he had said that she was lovely,
+a touch of her ... forever in the memory. Mostly, however, he spoke of
+a beautiful passion. It had largely vanished, his explanation continued;
+men had come to worship other things. Plato started it.
+
+She recalled Plato, as well, in connection with Dodge; now, it
+appeared to her, that remote name had always been at the back of her
+consciousness. There were other names, other men, of an age long ago in
+Italy. Their ideal, religion, was contained in the adoration of a woman,
+but not her body--it was a love of her spirit, the spirit their purity
+of need recognized, perhaps helped to create. It was a passion as
+different as possible in essence from all she had observed about her. It
+was useless for common purposes, withheld from Arnaud Hallet.
+
+The man, seriously addressing the serious uncomprehending interest of
+ten, proceeded with a description of violins--but she had heard them
+through all her life--and a parting that left only a white glove for
+remembrance. Then he had repeated that line, in Italian, which, not long
+back, her husband had recalled. The old gesture toward the stars, the
+need to escape fatality--how she had suffered from that!
+
+Yet it was a service of the body, a faith spiritual because, here, it
+was never to be won, never to be realized in warm embrace. It had no
+recognition in flesh, and it was the reward of no prayer or humility
+or righteousness. Only beauty knew and possessed it. His image grew dim
+like the blurring of his voice by pain and the shadow of death. Linda's
+thoughts and longing turned again to Dodge; it seemed to her that he no
+more than took up the recital where the other was silent.
+
+Pleydon--was it at Markue's party or later?--talking about "Homer's
+children" had meant the creations of great artists, in sound or color or
+words or form, through that supreme love unrealized in other life. The
+statue of Simon Downige, towering before her against the sky and above
+the sea, held in immutable bronze his conviction. The meager bundle and
+crude stick rested by shoes clogged with mud; Simon's body was crushed
+with weariness; but under the sweat-plastered brow his gaze pierced
+indomitable and undismayed to the vision of a place of truth.
+
+She was choked by a sharp rush of joy at Dodge's accomplishment,
+an entire understanding of the beauty he had vainly explained, the
+deathless communication of old splendid courage, an unshaken divine
+need, to succeeding men and hope. This had been hers. She had always
+felt her presence in his success; but, until now, it had belonged
+exclusively to him. Dodge had, in his love, absorbed her, and that
+resulted in the statues the world applauded. She, Linda thought, had
+been an element easily dismissed. It had hurt her pride almost beyond
+endurance, the pride that took the form of an inner necessity for the
+survival of her grace--all she had.
+
+She had even asked him, in a passing resentment, why he had never
+directly modeled her, kept, with his recording genius, the shape of her
+features. She had gone to him in a blinder vanity for the purpose of
+stamping her participation in his triumph on the stupid insensibility
+of their world. How incredible! But at last she could see that he had
+preserved her spirit, her secret self, from destruction. He had cheated
+death of her fineness. The delicate perfection of her youth would
+never perish, never be dulled by old age or corrupted in death. It had
+inspired and entered into Pleydon's being, and he had lifted it on the
+pedestal rising between the sea and sky.
+
+She was in the Luxembourg, in that statue of Cotton Mather, the somber
+flame, about which he had written with a comment on the changing
+subjects of his creations. From the moment when he sat beside her on
+the divan in that room stifling with incense, with the naked glimmer of
+women's shoulders, she had been the source of his power. She had
+been his power. Linda smiled quietly, in retrospect, at her years of
+uncertainty, the feeling of waste, that had robbed her of peace. How
+complete her mystification had been! And, all the while, she had had
+the thrill of delight, of premonition, born in her through the forgotten
+hour with the man who had died.
+
+The sun, moving in celestial space, shifted the shadow about the base
+of Simon Downige's monument. The afternoon was advancing. She rose and
+turned, looking out over the sea to the horizon as brightly sharp as a
+curved sword. The life of Cottarsport, below her, proceeded in detached
+figures, an occasional unhurried passage. The boats in the harbor were
+slumberous. It was time to go. She gazed again, for a last view, at the
+bronze seated figure; and a word of Pleydon's, but rather it was Greek,
+wove its significance in the placid texture of her thoughts. Its exact
+shape evaded her, a difficult word to recall--_Katharsis_, the purging
+of the heart. About her was the beating of the white wings of a Victory
+sweeping her--a faded slender woman in immaculate gloves and a small
+matchless hat--into a region without despair.
+
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Linda Condon, by Joseph Hergesheimer
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