path: root/78615-0.txt

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78615 ***




                                                                THE TIDE




  RECENT BORZOI NOVELS


  THREE PILGRIMS AND A TINKER
  MARY BORDEN

  THE TATTOOED COUNTESS
  CARL VAN VECHTEN

  THE ETERNAL HUNTRESS
  RAYNER SEELIG

  THE FIRE IN THE FLINT
  WALTER F. WHITE

  THE LORD OF THE SEA
  M. P. SHIEL

  BALISAND
  JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER

  SOUND AND FURY
  JAMES HENLE

  TREASURE TRAIL
  ROLAND PERTWEE

  WINGS
  ETHEL M. KELLEY

  ORDEAL
  DALE COLLINS




  MILDRED CRAM

  _The Tide_

  [Illustration]


  [Illustration]

  _New York_ · 1924

  ALFRED · A · KNOPF




  COPYRIGHT, 1923, 1924, BY MILDRED CRAM · PUBLISHED,
  OCTOBER, 1924. · SET UP, ELECTROTYPED
  AND PRINTED BY THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY,
  RAHWAY, N. J. · ESPARTO PAPER MANUFACTURED
  IN SCOTLAND AND FURNISHED BY W. F. ETHERINGTON
  & CO., NEW YORK. · BOUND BY THE H. WOLFF
  ESTATE, NEW YORK, N. Y.

  MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




TO MY HUSBAND




I


Lilah closed the door of the apartment and walked slowly across the
living-room to the window, removing her black hat and the chiffon veil
which had about it an unpleasant and penetrating odor of mourning. The
silence was good. To be rid of all those people, those eyes, trying to
gauge her grief, to measure it, as if it were soluble! Tears! Suppose
she hadn’t shed enough? Then they would have said that she had not
loved her father....

Well, she had.

Now she could do as she pleased about everything. She turned her back
to the window and with quick, critical eyes appraised the room her
father had liked to call the “library.” He had brought his books and
possessions from Ohio to New York when he accepted the professorship at
Columbia. “No, my dear, we mustn’t leave this, or this--these things
are very precious to me. They are--sanctified.”

Sanctified! A little burst of laughter shook Lilah. She wanted to sweep
everything into a great heap and set a match to it; to make a bonfire
of sanctified ugliness.

She felt very young and invincible as she stood there with her back
to the window. She had asked to be alone because she was afraid of
the exuberance that had taken possession of her on the way back
from the cemetery. Everything had looked so fresh, so gay, so
desirable--streets, houses, little flocks of sparrows, people passing
with disinterested glances at the long procession of funeral hacks. She
had wanted to jump out and walk. But she had kept her handkerchief over
her face to hide the upward curving of her lips, the look she knew must
be there of eagerness. She had gone through the business of burying
her father famously, had made all the conventional gestures. Something
within her had said: “I am free. This is the beginning for me.”

She was sorry that she had pitied her father. She would have preferred
to admire him. He had never understood, as she understood, life or
men. A failure, he had capitalized his defeat. She had seen through
him--his artful gentleness, his calculated patience, his martyrdom. He
never complained, but his eyes looked out at you like a startled deer;
you had a feeling that you had hurt him in some way. He was forever
turning the other cheek, accepting reverses and disappointments with
enthusiasm, as saints have worn and rejoiced in hair shirts.

Lilah thought: “Did I love him? Of course I did. Old hypocrite! I
shouldn’t. He lived his own life and never gave a thought to mine. And
he has left me penniless. He made me love beautiful things and I’ve got
to shift for myself in order to get them. But I loved him.”

She remembered his hands, large, hairy hands with freckles, that had
groped for hers in those last, terrified moments of wavering. And her
heart contracted with a deep pity, a shame, a pervading loneliness.
She began to cry....

She would save the books, of course. They were valuable. Her father,
who had been a gluttonous reader, had had excellent taste. Most of his
salary had gone into first editions--that rare Aretino, the Baudelaire,
the exquisite copy of Vasari’s “Vita di Leonardo da Vinci.” All the
book clerks in the city had gone to the funeral. He had belonged to
that rare genus, the veritable connoisseur.

“Your father was a wonderful man, Miss Norris. Wonderful. I’ll always
remember him prowling up and down between the shelves, peering and
questioning. He knew how to handle books! _He_ never broke their backs!”

Wiping the tears away, Lilah went into her bedroom. She hated herself
in black; she was too blonde and too slender. She decided, leaning
forward to stare at herself in the dressing-table mirror, that she
was positively plain.... And she made a little face at herself. She
undressed slowly, slipping out of the black dress she had bought for
the funeral. Then, sitting on the edge of the bed in her underthings,
she took stock of herself. She could still see herself in the mirror,
rather blurred by the dim light, but charming, not plain now that the
black was gone and her eyes were free of tears. She was one of those
women who take a serious pleasure in regarding themselves; she was
never unconscious of her cleverly modeled face, the misty quality of
her loveliness. And because of this preoccupation, her expression was
watchful, with something petulant in the droop of her mouth. She was
small and compact; she had the broad shoulders and meager hips of
a boy. Her hands were too large but she had inherited her mother’s
pointed and lustrous nails and a certain fineness, almost an elegance
of gesture. She was strong but indolent; she disliked fussy, unsteady
people.

She turned her head and gravely studied another angle of her face; she
had always taken a peculiar delight in the possession of her own nose;
its blunt, deft outlines were modern, audacious, “funny.” How lucky
not to be aquiline, or worse, Roman! It was part of her good fortune
to have been born in physical key with her period. She would have been
considered ugly in the sixteenth, the eighteenth centuries; in the
twentieth, she was delightful because her features were irregular and
provocative.

She thought again: “I am alone.”

All young lives, she reflected, must begin, be founded upon, the
death of some one already old. From the stale and disillusioned, such
soaring as hers! For she meant to soar. Change, decline, a difference
in her delicious outline, were remote and unimaginable calamities. She
remembered, with a shudder, her father’s last year. He had seemed to
surrender too easily to the little habits of senility--he had not been
always--quite nice. Why were old people so pathetic, so remote, so
unaware of their lack of grace?

Now, she knew, she was glad that it was over. She could be free of that
breathless pity, that impatience which had bordered on disgust and had
hurt her so--

She jumped up and went back to the library.

Her father’s chair was drawn up beside the table, so that the light
from the lamp might fall across his open book. He had been reading
Emerson. Not Nietzsche, at the end. He had said, with one of his
smiles, that as he drew nearer to the devil he sought a better
acquaintance with God.

Lilah wondered whether he had found God; whether, after that frantic
struggle not to die, he had come upon green hills and clouds white as
snow. She smiled at the thought of him, reading “Essays in Pessimism”
and neglecting his harp, or his pitch fork. Perhaps he had sought
acquaintance with God too late, as she herself was sure to.

She sat down in the old chair and contemplated her slippers, her
ankles, her legs. Pretty enough legs. She might try the stage. It was
an amusing thought, and while it lasted, she saw herself, very much
blonder, wearing one of those soubrette costumes with a bouffant skirt
and a “plate” hat tied under her chin....

The idea trailed off.

       *       *       *       *       *

When the telephone rang, she hesitated. It might be Aunt Jo--one of the
relatives, who had made this pilgrimage to New York with the gusto of
the confirmed funeral enthusiast. Or it might be David, who had made
her grief an excuse for offering his shoulder again.

On the chance that it might be Robert Peabody, she answered.

His voice, with that peculiar hesitation, said: “Miss Norris?”

He wanted to see her. He had only just heard. Might he come? Of course!
To-night.... She was alone and unhappy, depressed. He could imagine....

“Eight o’clock, then.”

She put the instrument down and ran into her bedroom, her spirits
flying again, like a whir of swift birds across a sunset sky. The
window was open, and, bare-armed, she leaned on the sill, watching
the tide in the street, people hurrying home, with bundles, with
newspapers, with twisted cornucopias full of flowers. The sky was
slate blue and the street a deep cañon full of purple shadows. All
the ugliness was erased; the cornices had a sort of beauty. A tall
apartment house over on the Avenue rose like a tower, a shaft of white
stone set with lights and crowned with wisps of steam, purple-blue
plumes in a giant’s cap. The murmur of the city rose, confused, a vast
grumble. She thought again of her father, lying out there beneath
a heap of flowers, and of herself, here, alive, with everything
unfolding....

He had always said that he had given his life to her. What he had
really given her was a dubious inheritance. She had all of his
impatience, his detestation of the crude or the banal.

He had taken her with him on his annual vacations in Europe, meager
excursions to Switzerland and Italy. Lilah summered in innumerable,
obscure _pensions_. She wore crêpe waists that “did up” without ironing
and comfortable German-Swiss shoes with hob-nails, and tramped through
the Alpine valleys carrying a stick and a knapsack. Her quick eyes saw
everything, took things in, assorted, rejected, accepted. She spoke
French and Italian with a pert accent, and while her father sought out
and worried his intellectual bones she absorbed the European Blue Book.

Beyond the redolent _pensions_ with their grottoed gardens and dingy
dining-rooms, there were the Grands Hôtels d’Europe, emblazoned
_concièrges_ and _parcs_ equipped with statuary and pavilions. And
beyond the hotels, a sacred circle of _chateâux_ and _villine_
sheltering the lives of people whose very names stirred in her a
melancholy envy. She had never thought herself socially inferior;
she had the peculiar pride of the pedagogical aristocracy; she was,
moreover, American in her assumption of equality. But she could not
be patient, she could not accept what she knew to be a surrender to
mediocrity.

In the meantime, several men fell in love with her--a Swedish pianist
with a bang and long finger-nails, an Italian cavalry officer and an
English engineer who wanted her to go with him to South Africa. She
knew, before she was twenty, the depth and the danger of passion. A man
had groveled at her feet, begging for something she could not feel. She
had known disgust and terror; afterwards, an exultation. She seemed to
have a certain persuasion. Realizing it, she cultivated her charm, what
men called her “mystery.” Part artifice, part instinct, this charm of
hers was deepened, made permanent, during those summers in Europe. She
was feminine and adroit. She knew that, given the right soil, she might
cultivate a very rare garden indeed.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now this....

She closed the window and began to dress. Black again, she supposed.
Robert Peabody was conventional enough to question grief in orchid
chiffon; he would expect pallor--and pearls. Her own string was
imitation and she threw it down again. The telephone was ringing ...
David.... She crinkled her nose at herself in the mirror. Let him ring!
He was one of those dumb, worshipful creatures made more ardent by
rebuffs. He would ring to-morrow, and the next day, and the next, until
she answered. Nothing must interfere with her seeing Robert Peabody
alone.

The bell stopped with a querulous note of surrender, and she went about
the library, straightening the chairs, pushing the ugliest ornaments
out of sight. She moved quickly, conscious of an unpleasant sensation
of fear. Her father seemed to be there, watching her, mournful and
beseeching, with those eyes of a dog or a wounded deer. She felt that
she had done something unfair; that she might, she might have held him
on this side a little longer--if she had resisted whatever it was that
was pulling him down and away! How horrible! Death should never come
near the living. It was unkind. Even to know--

She had put a silk scarf over her shoulders. The fringed ends touched
the floor; with one hand she held the heavy folds across her hips so
that the grace of her figure was visible.

When the door bell rang--it was one of the push-button variety--she
waited a moment before answering, an artistic interval intended to stir
a doubt in Peabody’s mind and then to reassure him so that he would
mount the four flights of carpeted stairs with a sense of victory, of
security.

While he climbed, she leaned over the banister. She could see his blond
head with the neat parting, his black and white muffler, a gloved hand
on the railing.... The ghost in the room behind her drifted out of the
window, back to the pyramid of flowers.

She thought: “He has never been here before. He’ll hate the room.”

But Robert Peabody seemed only to see her. His light eyes, not quick
like her own, but steady and almost expressionless, stared at her as he
took her hand: “I was so sorry to hear--so awfully sorry for you.”

Lilah’s lips trembled. She led him back to the library and took from
him the heavy overcoat, the silk muffler, his hat and gloves. The feel
of them pleased her; they were so exactly right in texture.

“I’ve been at the Point,” he said, taking her father’s chair. “I never
see a paper there. Gillow told me when I got back this morning.” He
hesitated. “I liked your father.”

“Every one did,” Lilah said.

“I know. I dare say he was better than most of us.”

“He was.”

“See here. I wish you wouldn’t cry! When people die, it’s a confounded
shame to talk about their good qualities. I’m a fool. I didn’t mean to
do what every one else does. I meant to cheer you up a bit.... Are you
alone?”

Lilah wiped her eyes. “Yes. I sent the relatives away. They enjoyed it
too much.”

He laughed. “Sensible of you! What can I talk to you about? Dogs?
People? Gardens?”

“Yourself,” Lilah answered. “I’m curious about you.”

This was obvious, but he was not the sort to be alarmed.

“Your father must have told you,” he said. And to her surprise he
flushed. “I was his worst pupil. I flunked everything. I’m terribly
stupid.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“But I am. I wouldn’t be anywhere to-day if it weren’t for my
grandfather. He created the family, and he still runs it. Funny
thing--he had all the creative instinct. He saw the possibilities in
lumber sixty years ago. He saw, and, he dared. Magnificent old chap! He
outlived my father. I dare say he’ll outlive me.”

“Hardly.”

“Eighty-four. Thin as a leaf and hard as steel! I’m third generation.
And drinkin’.”

“Why?”

“What else is there to do? My grandfather had all the fun. He broke
the ground and planted the seed. Now the trees are up--if I can put
it that way--and there’s nothing for me to do but sit in the shade....
Sometimes I envy him.”

Lilah glanced down at her slippers. “You shouldn’t. He gives you
everything.”

“And laughs at me! Because I’m soft. And thick-pated. He couldn’t hate
me any more than I hate myself. My God, Miss Norris, to be as rich as I
am and to look like an English governess.... Now, don’t I? Honest? You
ought to see my knees--they’re as pink as a baby’s! Look at my hands!
And this hair--it parts like that, neat, in the middle! Great God!” He
stared at her. “So I’m drinkin’.”

“You don’t blame your grandfather for your knees, do you?”

“Of course I do.” He slid forward and offered his cigarette case.
“Smoke?”

Lilah thought quickly: “Do I, or don’t I?”

She decided: “Yes.”

And leaning to the match he lighted, she puffed delicately, with quick
little intakes of breath. The smoke came through her nostrils. She
tipped her head back and let Peabody see the firm line of her throat,
her chin, round and feminine.

“I made you laugh, didn’t I? I wanted to.” His expression changed,
and she saw again that bland, sympathetic look, an intensification,
as if he were trying to focus on his emotion. He had no complexities
of feeling; he seemed to grope for the most simple reaction. It was,
Lilah thought, like one of those “slowed-up” pictures in the movies.
You saw his mood change as you watched him. She could anticipate
the conclusion before he was aware of it himself. Was he going to
bore her too much? Her mind was not always accurate but it was quick
as lightning. She saw--pounced--judged. She lay back in her chair
watching this man whose path had crossed hers only twice, once in
Europe, and again at a dinner given in honor of her father. He was
the only rich man she knew. The satellites that had revolved about
her in her _pension_ days had been on the lookout for the traditional
American heiress; she had no _dot_, and therefore no claim to their
serious attention. She knew this. And her attitude toward men had been
unconsciously established; she believed that she could not advance
without a compromise. She took it for granted that she would have to
forego love. She was too ironical to consider the possibility of a
lovable Robert Peabody.

“See here,” he said. The match burned out between his fingers and he
tossed it into the grate. “I have a suggestion.... You ought not to
stay here alone. Suppose you let me take you back to the Point? My
grandfather’s there. He’d love you. And there’s my Aunt Whiteside,
who’s a sort of housekeeper. It would do you good. What do you say?”

Lilah shook her head. “No.”

“Why not?”

She stood up, flicking the ashes into the hearth, with a gesture she
had perhaps copied from some one--it was not insolent, but it was very
“Russian.” She was picturesque, standing there, the lamplight on the
curious silver-gold of her hair, which she wore straight back from
her forehead. She had about her that peculiar and elusive element of
elegance which is usually the patina, unmistakable, of wealth. There
was no trace of her rather shoddy experience in either her carriage or
her attitude. She was not arrogant. She was assured. And this was her
most valuable asset.

She shook her head again. “I can’t. I’m penniless. I’ve got to do
something.”

Robert Peabody stared at his hands as if they offended him. “I’m sorry.
Terribly sorry. That’s rotten luck.”

The rich can be magnificently casual about money. It was rotten luck!
But to people like the Peabodys, financial calamity is too remote to be
classed among the realities of life.

Lilah, glancing down at the neat part in Robert Peabody’s hair, knew
that she had made a misstep.

“It’s all right,” she said lightly. “I’ll manage.”

“Of course you will! Only I’d hoped that you’d come. It would be jolly
for my grandfather. And for me.”

It would have been jolly for her, if she could have afforded it.
How could she tell Robert Peabody that she had only the one dress,
and nothing for evening? If she had been a personality, some one
established, a woman of importance, it would not have mattered. A
great woman needs only her wits and her name. But Lilah was nobody.
Twenty-seven years old, and nobody. She felt that her potentiality
had been walled in. Her father had had a streak of something common
in his nature; he had preferred mediocre people. He was always giving
money to blatant, down-at-the-heel sycophants whom he suspected of
talent or spiritual loveliness. He lent a sympathetic ear to tales
of degradation. There was something coarse in him--a streak aslant
the pure crystal of his intellect. His friends had called him a
humanitarian; to Lilah, his passion for derelicts meant a lack of
fastidiousness. She wanted him to be an epicurean; he had ended by
being a pathetic Nietzschan bleating for God....

Oh, to get away ... to forget, in the freshness of the country in May,
the stale odor of crêpe and wilted carnations....

“You ought to see the Point, Miss Norris. Some day, you must. I was
brought up there. I’m pretty much of a country chap. I’d like to show
you the kennels. D’you like spaniels?”

“Rather.”

“I’ve got a new litter. Four of the prettiest little chaps. Smooth as
silk with perfectly gorgeous ears.”

He went on, talking about spaniels, leaning back in her father’s chair.

She smiled. But her mind was busy making pictures of the Point; she
was walking down a garden path paved with brick between rose hedges.
The sun was warm on her back; she could feel it through the lace of
her gown, and on her neck, where her leghorn hat turned up and you saw
her hair twisted so smoothly, honey-colored. She was not with Robert
but with his grandfather. There was a look between them of perfect
understanding, something warm, mutual, delicious. And the sky was like
a Canaletto, flecked with “mackerel,” gentian and crystal. She saw the
chimneys of a house, and a sort of terrace where a cow grazed under
some trees....

“The little chaps hadn’t opened their eyes.”

“No?” she said. She came back out of the dream with a shiver of
pleasure. Then one by one the details of the room assailed her. This
was hers.

She twisted her shoulders and smiled. “Aren’t you hungry? I’ll make a
rarebit.”

Robert Peabody flushed again. “Will you?”

She led the way to the kitchen, and, letting the silk scarf fall
into Robert’s hands, she put on an apron. She was very expert and
swift, lighting the gas stove, opening and shutting the ice-box,
grating cheese, toasting crackers, stirring and measuring. She put
Robert in a corner, where he sat with her scarf between his hands,
caressing the stuff, not as some men would have caressed it, with
luxury, but with a sort of unconscious pleasure, as one strokes the
silky ears of a dog. All the while he watched her. She had decided
not to be ashamed of the way she lived; there was little or no use in
pretending luxury. A medley of sounds rose from the court outside,
and she closed the window. They were more alone in the silence. Their
intimacy and their strangeness demanded words, but he said nothing,
only watched, with emotions making their slow and obvious passage
across his eyes. He found her fascinating and she puzzled him. She
was practical, and pretty, a lady; you couldn’t be quite sure, these
days; he might have a shot at a flirtation; he pitied her; he was a
little afraid of her--but fascinating, by George. Damned attractive!
Something foreign about her.... And then the idea of love crossed his
mind. While she was stirring the rarebit, she watched the beginning of
that idea. His eyes were fixed on her hands and arms, from which the
black sleeves fell back. His eyes clouded with the poignant onslaught
of his conception--to love her, to be loved by her. Tremendous. A
responsibility. His mouth betrayed, by a droop at the corners, his
humility and discouragement. And his hands, touching the silk fringes,
began suddenly to caress them, gently.

When she leaned across the table to pour the rarebit, he bent quickly
and kissed her arm.

Lilah said: “Oh.”

“Forgive me, there’s a dear! I didn’t mean to. I swear I didn’t.”

“And you pretend to be stupid?”

“But I am. That’s just it.”

She shrugged. Her reaction was immediate and would have startled him
had he known how swift and inexorable her judgments were. She had
decided to make him suffer, and to land him full and fair in her net.
This one, and no other! You will see that she was romantic; only a
very sentimental woman enjoys making a man suffer. As a gauge of love
the process is primitive, even savage. It meant simply that in that
moment, so light, so brief, when he had put his lips to her arm, he had
attracted her.

“It’s a good rarebit,” he said. “And it seems to me you’re awfully cozy
here. Nice little flat. Everything comfortable.”

“But I haven’t any money.”

“Not literally?”

“Quite. When the nurses and doctors are paid, I shan’t have anything.”

She stifled a sudden depression. “I’ll do something. I can make hats!”

He looked up from the rarebit. “I bet you can! I’ll tell Aunt Whiteside
and the James girls. I know mobs of women....”

He branched off into the eccentricities of his Aunt Whiteside’s
hats. “Awful little bonnets with trees and crystal dew-dabs and
strings--everything shakes and shivers--all of her hats have the palsy.
But she pays like thunder for ’em. And the bills go to my grandfather.
He always says: ‘The price of virtue’ when he writes the check. She’s
sort of a mother superior in sequins. One day my grandfather said:
‘Robert, have you ever noticed Grace Whiteside’s legs?’ I’d never
thought of such a thing! But the next day I looked, and by George, they
were magnificent! Something terrible about it.... An old lady with
legs....”

“Go on,” Lilah said.

But Robert shook his head. “I’m shockin’ you.”

“No. I’ve known Italian men. They all talk like that, only, in Italian,
it sounds like d’Annunzio: _Le gambe belle di una vecchia donna_....”

They laughed.

He had forgotten about her poverty again.

Before he left, standing in the darkened hallway with his muffler on
and eyes sympathetic again, he said: “I’m going to ask Grace Fuller to
come around and see you. She’s looking for a room-mate. Splendid girl.
I’m rather sweet on her. You’d like her.”

“Grace Fuller?”

“She’s a nurse. Took care of me when I had my appendix. And she always
sees Aunt Whiteside through the gall-stones.”

He offered his hand.

Lilah felt that, behind her, the ghost had drifted in again. “I’d be
very glad,” she said faintly.

“Now you cheer up.” His voice deepened a note. He was genuinely sorry
for her. “Good night.”

Lilah leaned against the closed door.... Tired.... Tired.... Grace
Fuller.... Sweet on her.... What a damned fool of a man! What a bore!
Stupid! Stupid! To have had him here at all! To have tried....

She ran to the window and leaned out. A motor moved away with a silvery
clink of chains. It had been raining.... He was gone.... The street
lights were like balloons on sticks and an odor of wet dust rose,
pungent, acrid.

For a long time she leaned there, with dry eyes, her breath shallow.
The day flowed back over her spirit and she saw herself, little,
heartless, unsuccessful. She had better make up her mind to do with
what she had. To accustom herself to such ugliness as this.




II


She had hoped for a little life-insurance; her father’s wail had been,
whenever she wanted a new hat: “I can’t, my dear. I’ve got to pay the
life-insurance--twenty dollars.” She had never questioned him; it had
seemed unkind, but she knew that there was some sort of a policy. She
went through his papers, vaguely excited. There were a few letters from
some one who signed herself “Darling,” written in a spidery hand on
blue paper. Lilah threw the package into the waste basket, unread....
His knife. His precious letter of recommendation from Hadley.... A
note, long overdue, forgotten, outlawed, hardly decipherable.... A long
envelope containing snap-shots of his dog, Nellie, the old setter.
Lilah felt a penetrating pity--her father, laughing, in a corduroy
coat, with Nellie tugging at a leash. Her father, on a jig-saw veranda,
with his pipe, and Nellie scratching fleas behind him.... Nellie....
Nellie....

The policy was not there. She emptied the drawers of an accumulation of
cherished trash, all faded, incomprehensible.

She was interrupted by a caller, a thin, waspish man who tried to
be amiable, as if he expected, before the interview was over, to be
thoroughly disagreeable.

“Miss Norris? I represent Bilton and Chiswick, agents for this
apartment. We have heard of your misfortune. We would like to know
whether you intend to occupy the premises now that you are--alone--or
whether you prefer to sub-lease.”

Lilah said impatiently: “I’ll let you know.”

He consulted a black book, very much thumbed. “Your lease expires in
twenty days. Shall I prepare a new lease for the coming year? The rent,
in all these apartments, has been raised. We are asking sixty-five a
month for three rooms and bath.”

“How on earth does he know,” Lilah wondered, “that I’m broke?”

To shock him, she lighted a cigarette.

He jumped up. “We expect an answer in the morning. There’s a great
demand for these apartments.”

“Is there?”

Lilah went with him to the door and shut him out with a bang. These
agents had a mysterious money instinct--they could smell out poverty.
Beasts!

She went back to the library, suddenly conscious of the inestimable
blessing of a roof. She had sixty dollars. The doctor could be put
off. Doctors never expected to be paid at once.... The nurse, no.
Then, where would she be? Why hadn’t her father taught her to do
something.... She had forgotten the grocer’s bill, the milk, ice, gas,
newspaper....

She would have to borrow. From whom? Not Aunt Jo. Nor her father’s
cronies, the book clerks. Nor from any of the professors and
assistants. Every one she knew was poor, struggling, limited.

She signed a new lease. The waspish man was suspicious. He made a
sucking sound with his tongue and snatched his fountain-pen back before
Lilah had added the line and the two dots which usually ornamented her
large, flourishing signature. She had no idea how she was going to
thwart his obvious intention; he meant to evict her, bag and baggage,
at the first opportunity. When he had gone, sucking his teeth all the
way down stairs, Lilah telephoned David Brenner. He, at least, would
know that coupons don’t grow in geranium pots.

He came, smiling in that way he had of cherishing a secret.

“David, I’m frightened.”

“Broke?”

She emptied her purse on the table. “Forty-one, seventy-seven.”

He shook his head. “I’m not sorry for you, Lilah. You’re looking into a
mirror at what you think is life. And the mirror is a trick mirror--it
enlarges, distorts everything. You see your poverty--colossal! You
see your limitations--gigantic! You see your fear--enormous! And look
here--look! The Truth! You’re a pretty little humbug. You can earn your
living, only you’re afraid to.”

“David, I thought you loved me.”

“I do.”

The young Jew had eyes that went around her. “I do. Only--between the
sublime and the ridiculous there is the breadth of a hair.”

“Am I ridiculous?”

“You are a little humbug,” he said stubbornly.

“What can I do? I won’t cook. I won’t take care of babies. I won’t be a
chorus girl.”

“You’re too old.”

“Old?”

“Certainly. What else can you do?”

“I can make hats.”

Suddenly she raised her voice. “I hate poverty! It’s positively
immoral.”

“What a pretty speech! Wait until you know real poverty, as I have
known it! Did I ever tell you--I escaped from Russia when I was
sixteen? I stowed away from Vladivostok to San Francisco and lived
like a rat for three years. Only then my name wasn’t Brenner--it was
a mouthful! I don’t hate poverty. I hate the system which permits
poverty....”

Lilah interrupted. “I shan’t fail! I can get four with one and
one-half. I’m quick. But I don’t like having to be quick. I prefer to
wear chiffon and to walk in a garden....”

His eyes softened “Poor Lilah.”

“What shall I do?”

“Work.”

“_You_ don’t,” she said sharply.

But he would not part with his secret. Spreading out his hands,
he shrugged, and let her believe anything. Suspected of having
dodged the draft, David Brenner kept strange company, maintained an
enigmatic silence and, like all morose and discontented intellectuals,
appeared to be more important than he was. He wore a cloak of vague
disapproval. It was more an atmosphere than a militant conviction.
He was not a fighter. There was something adolescent in his moody
distraction, his hauteur, his indifference.

“Lilah, I am an alley cat, pawing over garbage. I have come upon
a glittering little fish, a fresh sardine--and that’s Lilah! I
shall never be the same cat again.... I shall always be looking for
sardines.... Will you lunch with me?”

She would.

They went to a Greenwich Village restaurant. In certain moods, Lilah
enjoyed such places. She liked to sit aloof and peep between her
fingers at these pathological bohemians. She smoked, veiled her eyes,
and let David Brenner hold her hand. The table was a patch-work of
initials and dates, egoistic trademarks. Lilah thought of Dante’s Tomb
and the names scratched on the face of the Sphinx--little names, here
and there, seen, gone ... nothing....

David Brenner was no better than Robert Peabody. Men only wanted to
kiss her.

       *       *       *       *       *

She left him and walked uptown, seeking the sacred pavements of upper
Fifth Avenue with a deep breath of relief. Here, she could be herself.
She drifted from one shop-window to another, absorbed, with something
in her expression of the devotee. She might have been a woman of
elegance, whereas she happened to be a little nobody with forty-one
dollars and seventy-seven cents in the world.

Characteristically, she postponed thinking about the future. She
enjoyed the great symphony of the streets. The crowds gave her a
feeling of security.

She studied the hats. One, in particular, delighted her. It was
_chinoiserie_, a poem in colored silks with a funny, pointed crown--no
one but Lilah could wear such a hat.

She went on; came back to stare.... Delightful.... Her father had not
wanted her to wear mourning. And this little hat would give her some
sort of glow....

She went into the shop.

It was a gray, padded, mirrored place. And a woman in a black dress,
too short, with long, square sleeves, came forward.

“The little hat in the window,” Lilah said in her best manner. “The
Chinese one.” She made a gesture.

“Ah, yes.”

The hat was produced, twirled, tipped, turned upside down.

“Let me see.”

“Certainly.”

Lilah sat down before a mirror and removed the black hat and veil. She
ran her fingers through her hair and gave a downward and upward thrust
of her head to receive this crown of bright, twisted silks.

“Lanvin,” the saleswoman remarked.

“Really?”

“A copy.”

“I thought so.”

“But, Madam, it is exact. In everything. The silk; the ornament--you
won’t see another.”

Lilah studied her profile. She was indeed a quaint and delightful
little person....

“Do you like it?”

“Very becoming, Madam.”

Lilah felt a rush of excitement and pleasure.

“How much is it?”

“Thirty-five, Madam.”

“That seems--”

She broke off. It was really not expensive.

“You look very well indeed, Madam. You wear that type of hat
wonderfully. So few can!”

“I’ll take it.”

The woman’s manner changed. “May I show you others? We have a few
models--it is rather early.... One very beautiful straw, from Molineux.
This one ... a little more to one side.... You wear hats so well.”

Lilah wanted to say: “I make them, too.”

Instead, she wrinkled up her nose and became very contemptuous. “I
don’t like it.”

“No?”

She went out of the shop wearing the little silk turban, and carrying
the black hat in a striped box inscribed: _La Mode Chez Annette_.

       *       *       *       *       *

Beneath a slate-blue sky the light stone palaces of trade were
curiously luminous. The Avenue itself, in shadow, was a revolving chain
of motors; the great procession of glittering vehicles moved forward,
stopped, was pierced by cross-town traffic, moved forward again. The
Towers built about the Plaza rose into sunlight and were gilded at
the tip. Lilah found the city very suave, mellow--there was none of
the brazen clamor of Chicago, the sullen roar of London.... A woman
approaching with a dog on a leash and wearing a long black cape and a
plush tricorn, was like a figure by Longhi....

Lilah was conscious of a keen esthetic pleasure. The hat had restored
her self-confidence, the certainty of success.

She was always alive to this pageant; its deeper meanings, its trend,
escaped her. But she saw every face that passed--she could label them,
put them in their niche. Old people touched her heart, if they were
brave and jaunty; she could be infinitely sorry for some suffering
and haughty face glimpsed in passing. The audacious, bow-legged, and
blatant girl of the people, aping fashion, irritated her; vulgarity
excluded the picturesque; there was nothing wistful about gum and
lop-sided French heels. Lilah was not pitiless, but her pity was
aroused by things in themselves not tragic--she was sorry only for
the strong who are defeated by time or disease. The weak and helpless
annoyed her because they made demands on her sympathy. She preferred to
give, unsolicited.

       *       *       *       *       *

She turned aside at Fifty-seventh Street, eager to wear the hat into
all the high-roads of fashion.

Then, superior to fatigue, borne along on the crest of that little
personal success, she walked downtown again, with her quick, short
steps and the imperious carriage of her head, threading the impersonal
crowds, stimulated, eager, warming herself against that pressure of
life.

       *       *       *       *       *

She climbed the four flights of carpeted stairs slowly. All the zest
was gone. If her father were only there--some one--

A woman, rather tall, with a curious, ugly face and a bang of lightish
hair under a queer hat, was leaning against the wall in the half-shadow
at the top of the stairs.

“Miss Norris? I’m Miss Fuller. I rang and you didn’t answer. But I came
up anyway. Robert Peabody sent me.”

Lilah said, in a voice she kept for strangers: “I’m so glad. Won’t you
come in?”

Miss Fuller followed and looked carefully at everything before she sat
down.

“This isn’t my taste,” Lilah said instantly.

“It wouldn’t be. Robert raved about it and about you. He liked both the
room and yourself. He has no discrimination, but he is a darling.”

“What, exactly, do you mean by that?”

“I mean that frills are wasted on him. He doesn’t see them. From what
he told me, I did not expect--you.”

Lilah laughed. Her good humor returned. She glanced at herself in the
mirror.... Reassuring, that hat....

“What did he tell you?”

“Oh.... Pretty.... Sweet.... You’re not sweet. I hate the word. Why do
men use it? Men are so stupid. When they think they’re in love with you
they call you ‘sweet’ and they always muss up your hair. I hate being
made love to. They never do it right. They either choke you or they
scratch you. It makes me irritable, and they never try it again.”

“Does Robert scratch you?” Lilah asked sweetly.

“No. He chokes.”

“He would,” Lilah said. “Do you let him?”

“I compromise. I insist on vacations. Then we are platonic and he is
pathetic. He is a child. He cries for a lollypop. So I say: ‘Go ahead.
Kiss me.’ And he does. And, afterwards, I use liniment to limber up my
neck.”

“You look like a Vanderbilt,” Lilah remarked. “All that wooly hair. And
that long neck. And those eyebrows.”

“I’m Middle West. My grandfather was a Carlsen, a farmer. But my
mother took a trip to Chicago before I was born and saw some wealth
and fashion and marked me. I love luxury. I can achieve it with cheese
cloth, safety pins and a little rouge. But now I’m bored. I want a
French maid.”

“Why don’t you marry Robert?”

“I’m going to. If you don’t.”

“I?”

“He has called you sweet.” Miss Fuller lighted a cigarette. She did
it in a characteristic way, a methodical, unhurried movement of her
cool, thin hands. “I won’t fight. I can’t. You have all the weapons.
And I have none. I’d be kind to him and you’d ruin his life. But you
would keep him dancing and I would see to it that he sat by the fire. I
understand him. You never will.” She tossed the match away. “And he’ll
take you.”

“Nonsense.” Lilah was pleased. She thought: “I’ll take _him_, rather.
She’d better watch out.”

Aloud, she said: “Robert says you’re a nurse.”

“I met him six years ago, when I was the starchiest graduate you’ve
ever seen--pink and white, with a cap pinned on a blonde pompadour. It
used to be fashionable to fall in love with your nurse, and I had a
bed-side technique. He asked me to marry him, but I wouldn’t, because
that was always part of an appendix convalescence. Afterwards, he
forgot. Of course! But later they sent me to the Point to nurse his
Aunt Whiteside--”

“I know! The gallstones!”

“He told you?”

Miss Fuller quenched her cigarette with the same, deliberate, unhurried
gesture. She had a strange smile, sensitive, in contrast to the clipped
irony of her conversational style. Lilah saw that this woman had
been grievously hurt, shockingly buffeted. There was something about
her calm which suggested the heroic self-control of the victim of a
hurricane or an earthquake. She was afraid, but she was hanging on.

“So I went. Starch, blonde bang, wrist-watch. Very cool.... That
house.... The grandfather’s house. About Eighteen-Seventy. Carpets.
Lots of silver. Walnut and ebony. Gongs for dinner. Velvet. You know
the sort of thing.... I don’t like the grandfather.”

“Why?”

“He doesn’t like me. He likes pert women, who hiss like cats and
scratch and then purr on his knee. My starch irritated him. But Robert
liked it.”

“Did he kiss you, then?”

“No. Not for years.”

Lilah said gently: “You love him.”

“Yes. I do.”

“Well--”

“Something I see, that you get to see when you know him! A gentleness.
He is kind to people and doesn’t make any fuss. There’s no mystery
about him. I’m sick of mysteries.... Doctors.... You don’t know what
those hospitals are! They make a cynic or a huntress out of you, unless
you happen to be a Florence Nightingale. I’m not. I don’t believe in
anything.”

She broke off and Lilah said: “Tell me about yourself. More! Aren’t you
happy?”

“Sometimes. When I’m alone. And I’m never alone.”

Lilah laughed. “Robert said you might live with me.”

“I _could_ live with you! You’re not the sort of woman who talks, or
fusses. You make me think of a feminine cat, licked, sitting on a
cushion. Indifferent and mysterious, but cozy.”

Lilah enjoyed this admiration; she knew that she possessed in an
unusual degree the qualities which Grace Fuller lacked; she could be
seductive because she had no particular sense of humor. Grace Fuller
was the sort of woman who keeps her emotions under lock and key because
she knows that she is ridiculous, that all emotion is ridiculous. She
waited for some one to smash in her defenses and rescue her hidden
self. In the meantime, she leaned on the door, fearful. But Lilah was a
naked heart behind a grill.

With a sudden impulse, Lilah said: “Come, then! There are two
bedrooms.... I pay sixty-five a month.... I’ve got to do something ...
make hats ... dance.... We’ll manage.”

They lighted cigarettes and sat, talking, watching each other, until
midnight.

       *       *       *       *       *

Grace Fuller moved in--her two trunks and a neat bag were put in the
room which had been Mr. Norris’. At once, an array of toilet articles
appeared on the bureau--cosmetics and perfumes of very good make in
crystal bottles, small, opaque boxes of rouge and lip sticks in metal
cases. Miss Fuller had a passion for cosmetics, but she did not look
like a woman who painted; her skin was her only claim to seduction, and
the faint odor of perfume was an indication of her restraint. She was
virginal, and, in her exaggerated loneliness, abnormal. She shut the
door of her room against Lilah, and only emerged, fully dressed and
curled, for formal conversation.

She left the apartment early in the morning and returned, often, late
at night, dog-tired, but unflinching.

Lilah made one attempt to get work to do. She had heard that one of
the fashionable men dressmakers wanted a designer. His shop, an entire
house in the East Fifties, was furnished in the exotic manner of
Poiret’s establishment in Paris. His mannequins inevitably graduated
to the stage, or to society. Diana, Kitty, Carmencita ... opulent,
tall girls with the hands and arms of goddesses.... Something about
this man’s manner had always attracted Lilah. He made the exploitation
of feminine vanity an enormously profitable business. She went to see
him, relying on the poetic little hat and her manner to carry her past
the guardians of his privacy to the inner sanctum, his office, a room
decorated by Chanler.

She found the approach unexpectedly easy. He was seated behind a desk.
She was surprised, upset, by his youth and his concise greeting:

“Won’t you sit down?”

“Thank you.”

“You are interested in a wardrobe? It is not the season. But there are
a few models....”

“No. I am a designer. Hats. I want a position with you.”

“There is no opening.”

“I thought....

“Your experience?”

“None. I have good taste....”

“I see! That hat?”

“Lanvin.”

“Ah.”

“But I am talented, myself.”

“You know Paris?”

“Very well.”

“You are hard up?”

With a flash of anger, Lilah said: “Yes. I am. I want a job.”

“You shouldn’t have come to me. I am a busy man. Why didn’t you see
Mr. O’Connor or Mrs. Frazer, at the work-rooms?” He wrote something on
a card and tossed it across the desk. “There! If there’s room in the
shop, they’ll give you a chance.... First, you must learn to put hats
together. Later, perhaps, you can design them.”

Lilah rose. She did not take the card. She felt his eyes, shrewd,
appraising, absolutely without illusion, slide over her--it was a
physical, a nauseating attachment.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Not at all.” He waved his hand. His expression changed. He dismissed
her. “Good morning.”

       *       *       *       *       *

She postponed reality. There seemed to be no incentive, no immediate
need; she was strangely lulled. She had, for years, searched for
something vital, something with which to satisfy her restless longing
for perfection. She had failed. There was nothing ahead that she could
not, now, recognize as dull, inevitable, beyond her capacity for
patient endurance.

She was afraid of death, but she believed that, once dead, she would be
thoroughly dead. As a child, she had had an overdose of religion; her
mother had fed her all the gloomy details of the orthodox legend; on
the other hand, she had been conscious that her father, secretly, knew
better. It was the old tragedy of credulity, Santa Claus and the cotton
beard.

Her dreams were deeper, more hidden than is usual with women. She
wanted love but not what she called suburban love. She secretly desired
a man who would be indifferent to her contempt and beyond the reach of
her irony. She could imagine herself in love, but the co-protagonist
was always featureless; she invariably built her romance about her
own personality. She was forever clothing herself in the garments of
romance and falling in love with herself.

       *       *       *       *       *

Robert Peabody reëntered her life a week after the relation with Grace
Fuller had been established.

He came one evening when the two women were together, Lilah sewing
at some impractical square of brocade, Grace Fuller, her narrow feet
elevated, smoking a cigarette in an amber holder. She had watched a man
die that afternoon--an old man whose pet particular nurse and slave
she had been for six months. Yet there was no sign of relaxation, of
discouragement. Her pessimism was too deep, established, like some
physical disease--slowly, she was hardening in the mold fate had made
for her.

Robert Peabody was embarrassed and jovial. Lilah found him amusing
because, for the first time, she saw that another woman really wanted
him.

While he talked, as usual, about his dogs, Grace Fuller watched him.
Her scrutiny, deep, unswerving, made Lilah conscious that he was, in
a way, handsome. Always well-dressed, he had the deft outlines of a
man accustomed to luxury; and his bland good humor was the result of
an existence devoid of anxiety. His appendix had been the outstanding
complication, so far. Something of his grandfather’s looks had passed
to him; he had the high nose with flaring nostrils. But his eyes were
his mother’s and hers the rather sensitive and melancholy mouth.

He liked these two women. They were outside his sphere. He “played
about” with the women who lived near Peabody’s Point, women he had
watched grow up from spoiled little girls into a casual maturity; he
had flirted with all of them, had seen them married and had settled
into the bantering familiarity of the cherished bachelor in a “young
married” community.

Whatever he felt, inwardly, he was outwardly an inflexible optimist.
Lilah wondered whether he saw Grace Fuller’s eyes, whether, if he saw,
he could appreciate the extent, the danger, of that dedication. And she
remembered, with an unexpected excitement, how he had kissed her arm.

She went on sewing, bending her head so that the light from the lamp
would fall on her hair. Her soft abstraction, her air of modesty and
domestic content, drew him away from Grace Fuller. He leaned forward
to finger the stuff she was making into a useless and ornamental bag,
and she explained that the brocade came from a shop in Florence where
the copying of ancient materials was a specialty. This was the robe
of Boticelli’s Primavera, a delicate scattering of small flowers on a
background of cream silk.

Grace Fuller rose suddenly and went into her bedroom.

“Don’t flirt with me,” Lilah said. “Miss Fuller won’t like it.”

He flushed. “You’re quite mistaken.”

“You told me you were ‘sweet’ on her.”

“I am. But I can flirt with you all the same.”

Already, they had the manner of conspirators. Robert lowered his voice
and said: “Will you dine with me? To-morrow? Say ‘yes.’ I’m going back
to the Point on Friday. We’ll take a hansom to the Park and eat there.
What do you say?”

Lilah whispered: “Yes. I’ll be ready at five. Not later.”

The door opened and Grace Fuller came in again. She caught the
quick lifting of Robert’s head, his smile, at once embarrassed and
triumphant. She knew him so well that her heart ached for this
duplicity; she could even pity him for having had to hurt her. But she
said nothing.

When he had gone, she spoke from the doorway to Lilah, who was winding
rough, colored threads about cardboard spools.

“I wonder if you know what love is? Oh, you can imagine it! You think
about it a lot! But do you know? The pain.... Exhausting.... Of trying
to pour yourself into a man’s consciousness.... And then being stupid.
Hurting him--pushing him off.... Pretending.... Because you’re ashamed
of wanting.... Killing what you want. Not wanting what you want until
you’ve lost it....”

“That’s a bit excessive,” Lilah said. “You’re morbid, aren’t you? I
could make any man happy by learning to understand him. If he liked
mystery, I’d be mysterious. If he wanted a pal, I’d pal. To the limit.”

“Could you be domestic?”

“Certainly.”

Miss Fuller laughed that short, dry and brittle laugh. “What we all
say! Pretend to be clay for the molding. Other women nag. We wouldn’t!
Other women suffer jealousy. We wouldn’t! Other women fail in the
little illusions and go about in curl-papers and a mask of cold cream,
without their mental corsets. We wouldn’t! But married.... Well, it’s
positively thrilling to observe the similitude of women.... Marriage is
a sort of antiphlogistine--it brings out all the lurking devils.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve observed ... remember, I am a nurse. The shades up and the light
of day on the domestic drama....”

Lilah said suddenly: “I may take your Robert away from you.”

Miss Fuller seemed to consider. “I see what you mean. I’m jealous!” She
shook her head. “Robert isn’t the man for you. He isn’t a snob. And you
are. I mean, you care a great deal about things Robert never notices.
At the Point he goes about like a hired man in a pair of corduroy
trousers and an old green sweater. He’s lazy. And sometimes he says
stupid things....”

“What?” Lilah asked sharply.

She felt a sharp pang of irritability slip into her consciousness,
edged. Her eyes were lowered; her fingers flew around the cardboard
spools.

“Oh, he’s full of platitudes. He collects stamps. He reads the wrong
books, and he wants children.”

“Does he?” Lilah’s voice was cool. The inflection was iced.

The thought crossed her mind that perhaps Grace Fuller had lived with
Robert. This was at once a revelation and a weapon. She glanced up.
With a look both appraising and sympathetic, she studied that worn,
disillusioned face, in which the charm of a blonde freshness had given
way to a shadow, a premonition of old age. Vaguely distinguished,
aloof, sharp and bitter, she had a tender mental surface. Lilah knew
that she herself could control Grace Fuller’s opinions; she was not
afraid of her tongue; the woman was quivering under the skin.

“I see what you’re thinking,” Grace Fuller said. “It isn’t true. I’ve
loved, but not Robert--that way. You won’t believe me. He’s decent, as
men have forgotten how to be decent.... Lilah, let me have him!”

She crossed the room suddenly and stood before Lilah with her hands
clenched at her sides, her face strained. “I love him!” she cried.

Lilah tossed the silks upon the table. “Nonsense,” she said crisply.
“I don’t want your Robert! He’s a fearful bore. He’s flat. He moves
about on the face of the earth like a wet beetle. Grace, you’re biased.
You’re lop-sided. You’re hypnotized by his morality--or his money!
You’re making yourself ridiculous and Robert is flattered. He doesn’t
intend to marry you. It’s too comfortable to know that he can make you
suffer. Why not make him suffer? Men don’t appreciate martyrdom. You
look like an old woman, at thirty. Am I unkind? I don’t mean to be. I’m
awfully fond of you.... I tell you, I don’t want your Robert.... But I
can’t help it if he should happen to fall in love with me.... Men do
those things. They love the wrong woman.... If you didn’t care.... If
you could....”

She broke off.

“Let’s go to bed. I’m tired. He tires me. I tell you he bores me. Let’s
not talk about him.”

Without a word, Grace Fuller went into her room and shut the door.

In a few minutes she came out again. She had brushed her hair back from
her forehead, and had a startled, innocent look. She kept rubbing cold
cream into her face and neck with little upward, crawling motions of
her finger-tips. She wore a corduroy wrapper and felt slippers. Lilah
noticed that her feet were narrow and bony, like a priest’s. Her elbows
were sharp. Her shoulders were too narrow.... Lilah felt round and
cozy and soft. She felt warm; her flesh delighted her. She thought how
delicious she must look, sitting there with her feet in high-heeled
slippers tucked under her. She was sorry, in a comfortable sort of
way, for Grace Fuller. She wanted, at that moment, to help her, to give
her some of her own warmth and brilliance, to bring her into the circle
of her inevitable success.... She saw herself making it very delightful
for Grace Fuller at Peabody’s Point. “My dear Grace, Robert loves to
have you.... He is so fond of you. You must stay as long as you can!”
Perhaps giving her some decent clothes.... She would be quite smart in
simple things, with eccentric hats and bizarre ornaments....

Grace Fuller rubbed the cream into her finger-nails with the absorption
she put into doing all unimportant things, as if performing a rite. As
Lilah had never seen her out of the formality of curled hair and rouge,
she felt a vague embarrassment.

“I wanted to say,” Grace Fuller remarked presently, “that we mustn’t
have a misunderstanding. You’re more important to me than Robert.”

“I tell you, I don’t want him,” Lilah repeated.

       *       *       *       *       *

She dressed carefully for her meeting with Robert. The Chinese hat had
lost some of its novelty, but she had added a French veil.... She was
almost, literally, penniless.

At five o’clock Robert Peabody arrived. He was eager, flushed.

A shiny hansom-cab, deliciously out of balance, precarious, waited at
the curb. A group of curious small boys gaped at this contrivance, and,
as Lilah and Robert crossed the sidewalk, a window was thrown up and
a burst of laughter floated down to them. Lilah was acutely conscious;
Robert unaware. He had the fine indifference of the wealthy to other
people’s little humiliations. She had a momentary feeling of defeat. He
was infinitely removed. He intended, probably, to treat her as he had
treated Grace Fuller....

Then, abruptly, her mood changed.

The cab turned uptown; the rhythmic clop of hoofs, the remote and
cushioned cabin, like a sedan on wheels, her own youth.... Suddenly
everything was desirable, delightful. This was what she wanted,
deserved....

She began to sparkle. She was so intimate, so gay, that Robert
Peabody’s rather stolid expression changed to one of amazed delight in
her. He turned around; their eyes met. She noticed that his eyes were
not blue, but hazel, very clear and wide open. She pressed her shoulder
against him, and he became aware of a delicate odor of sandalwood.
They laughed a good deal. Because she thought that he would not be
interested in her European experiences, she talked about the rare
summers she had spent in American resorts. She spoke of her “good
tennis arm” and how an Indian had taught her to handle a paddle. As a
matter of fact, she was an indifferent sport. But she could imagine
herself doing all these things. She believed she had done them.

Robert Peabody discovered a new eloquence. He had an admirable passion
for the out-of-doors. It kept him, he said, from drinkin’. In New York,
he gave way in that point. Prohibition was a good thing--he’d be the
last person to interfere with such a colossal experiment. But any one
who could afford to drink, drank. He did. He supposed he wasn’t a
good American. He never had been, in a literal sense. Politics didn’t
exactly get under his skin; the country muddled through without him.
He had his property, his dogs, his friendships, his conviction of an
inalienable right to these possessions. If there should be social
changes, upheavals, revolutions, he would accept whatever came. He
believed in going with the times, never bucking the trend, whatever it
was.

The war hadn’t interfered with this facile philosophy; he had accepted
the fact that the world was fighting mad, stark crazy, gibbering. A
phase. It had happened before; it would happen again. He couldn’t stop
it by stating a preference for open fields and dogs. So, he had gone
to the first officers’ camp, and had agreed cheerfully to whatever
“authority” said. A knack for details, hitherto undiscovered, had
landed him in the ordnance and he had worn silver chevrons in cheerful
glory at Rochester, New York. Captain Peabody!

“Now it’s over, I am back where I want to be. The world hasn’t changed
much. I don’t understand all this talk about a new consciousness. Men
won’t change, either. We had our chance when Wilson went to Paris. But
the recoil didn’t surprise me. We aren’t ready for practical idealism.
You and I--people who see what might be--aren’t a drop in the bucket of
public feeling. We’re swamped by millions of frightened ignoramuses.
They’ll swing back to the doddering conservatives, bleating for
normalcy. They’ll get it! We’re in for another Dark Age.”

“Don’t you care?”

“No. I never believed in the pet illusions we fought for, anyway.
Civilization has always tickled my sense of humor. There are certain
unchangeable, satisfactory things--well, dogs! And days when you
can smell the sea, sweet, like flowers, blowing in over the fields.
September days! I’d stack ’em up against every bloody war for
supremacy, the confounded conceit of man--I’m talking like a poet. I’m
not a poet. I’m lazy. I like peace, and plenty to eat.”

He laughed. “And you. I like you. You’re cute as the devil.”

Lilah turned to him again and let him see the curve of her lips. She
had never been more vivacious. The city flowed by the cab windows with
a dignity impossible in a motor, taking place, not as kaleidoscopic
flashes in a cubistic ensemble, but as buildings, towers, parks and
people. In the wide brilliance of Madison Square there was time to
value the great campanile soaring out of the feathery green of the park
into a bland sky.... Then, more slowly, up the long incline to the
Library, where the lions seemed to gaze down their noses over invisible
spectacles; they had, Lilah remarked, a sort of haughty senility--Grand
Army of the Republic lions about to recite the “Battle of Gettysburg.”
One of them had worn a rakish snow hat during a February blizzard,
the other a white blanket about his middle, like a pet poodle in a
wooly-wooly....

Lilah found the city astonishingly beautiful--but something held her
from telling Robert Peabody so. He would not have shared her delight in
the unfinished masterpiece. New York, to him, was simply New York; like
so many New Yorkers, he suffered from a familiarity with marvels. Lilah
found it both monstrous and audacious. She had always tasted cities
as a connoisseur tastes wine. Now, in this slate-blue twilight, she
shivered with pleasure. The lava-stream of motors filled the air with a
sort of luxurious purring; it seemed to Lilah that the hidden springs
of vitality within herself had begun to vibrate, to hum, like harp
strings; she was vibrant. If some one would write a grand opera, not
in the manner of “Louise,” not lyric, amorous, but metallic, about New
York! The leit-motif, a theme of feverish, restless striving. The minor
melodies, machines, riveters, steam jets, whistles, sirens, bells,
six million human voices--unceasing, beating against the human heart
like the tom-tom of African drums. The sets ... from a window, streets
like Sienese back-alleys enormously exaggerated. Vast, tilting walls.
A few lights on the face of the cañon. Weight of stone and steel and
swaying towers. Or, a bloodless avenue of square monoliths, imposing,
imponderable, significant....

The cab turned into the Plaza, so long an upheaval of derricks, mud,
French Gothic and erratic statuary, now settled into a beauty of its
own, and Robert Peabody said: “Shall we stop here? Or do you prefer
the Park?”

Lilah preferred the Park.

They dined out-of-doors, their faces close together over a narrow
table. She found him more attractive here. He had a genial yet vigorous
manner of dealing with waiters and hat-boys, an almost aristocratic
indifference to publicity and he did not, after calling her “cute
as the devil,” come back to the attack. He let her see that he was
aware of the privilege of her company. There were other women in the
restaurant; a startlingly brunette girl in black satin which made her
look, Lilah thought, like a wet cod-fish, sat almost at his elbow,
yet he disposed of her, and her seduction, with a glance. He ordered
planked shad and regretted that there was no white wine; at the Point,
he had over a thousand bottles of Sauterne....

“I want to meet your grandfather,” Lilah interrupted.

“He would like you. He doesn’t like Grace Fuller.”

“Why?”

Robert’s face puckered. “I don’t know.”

Lilah said quickly, in a way she had of disposing of things: “She’s
not quite sane. She will never be contented. She’s such a darling ...
but she takes life too seriously. She depresses me. She’s like white
grass growing in a dark place.... I don’t know.... Yes, I do know.
She’s a celibate. I hope she’ll never marry. For her own sake. But more
for the man’s. I’d pity a man who found that instead of a woman he
had an obstinate, distorted idea in his arms. Not love at all, but a
misconception of love. She wants experience but runs away from it--she
curls her hair and rouges and then hides.”

“I like her,” Peabody said. “But I don’t pretend to understand her.
Perhaps you are right.”

“I know I’m right.”

She dismissed Grace Fuller and set about captivating this rather
ponderous intelligence. Again, she relied on her quickness, her
intuition, her adroit penetration. He had been, evidently, upset by
mention of Grace Fuller; either he had a sense of responsibility or he
was annoyed by Lilah’s analysis. His was a basic honesty and loyalty.
She changed the subject to herself. She could see that she excited
him; he was, she had heard from Grace Fuller, accustomed to women who
preferred sport clothes and who rode to hounds; he had been brought up
in a society which imitated, on a smaller, more restricted scale, the
life of the English counties. He had had no intellectual companionship.
He could not juggle with the stock phrases of the _cognoscenti_; he
was too simple, or too indifferent, to acquire a modern vocabulary
of names and cults, movements and personalities. But she could stir
his imagination with herself, her decisive manner, her melting eyes,
the little upward turn of her mouth, as if, always, she wanted to be
kissed. She felt him leaning toward her, absorbed. She knew how to
make what she said audacious, and, by a subtle turn, to leave the
implication in doubt. She suggested desire without feeling it. This
was a part of what other people called her “technique.” She was not
unaware of it, but she did not consider that it was something she ought
to be ashamed of. Rather, it gave her an inestimable advantage.

After dinner they walked through the park, their arms and shoulders
touching in the darkness. There was everywhere a subdued gurgle of
water in shallow basins or lipping the banks of the lake. Couples
passed, drifting, close together, with a murmur of voices. The blatant
artificiality of the landscape was blurred, softened, gathered into
somber walls of vegetation, threaded with globes of light. Groups of
people passed in and out of the shadows, made mysterious, dignified by
an unreality that had about it something of the theater. Faces glimpsed
in passing were indefinite; the sound of feet on the asphalt paths, the
murmur of voices were Venetian, melancholy....

Robert Peabody drew her arm through his. At Eighty-fifth Street, as
they crossed the road, he raised his cane and signalled for a cab.
Lilah sank back with a little sigh.

“This is comfortable! Let’s drive.”

Suddenly his arm went about her shoulders. She was surprised at the
strength, the violence of his grasp.

“You’re adorable. Let me kiss you.”

She shook her head. “No.”

But he bent down, kissed her, once, twice, a dozen times. She was
breathless, angry, frightened, but helpless in the circle of his arm.
“Don’t! Don’t!” she said. “Please. Here....”

She heard him say: “I love you. I want you to marry me.”

Her heart contracted. How on earth had this happened? What would the
driver think of such a scene? This was what, all along, she had wanted.
He had everything ... everything.... Something in his eyes, his voice,
husky, shaken, made her know that he loved her. It would be easy to
manage him.... Love.... She couldn’t expect to kiss him like that at
once. As always, she shrank from contact. But if she....

“Answer. Open your eyes.”

She made a struggle to throw into her expression something ardent,
convincing. And lifting her face, she kissed him. She need not say, at
once, the words he expected. She was not as dishonest as that.... A
wave of feeling, relief, excitement, went over her. His head fell back,
down again, on her shoulder. He was, suddenly, weak, surrendered to
his emotion. She saw the back of his neck, his close, blonde hair. The
intimacy of their attitude assailed her and she pushed him away.

“Not here. Later....”

“You’ll marry me?”

“Yes. Yes.”

She lifted her arms and straightened her hat. Then she felt her hand
seized and his lips fastened on her fingers, hungry, insatiable....




III


Lilah was afraid to tell Grace Fuller that she had promised to marry
Robert Peabody. Her conscience, an inconsistent element in her nature,
disturbed her to the extent of making her irritable. She went to her
room without saying good night.

She was trembling with excitement and could not sleep. Instead, wrapped
in a kimono, she paced the floor, seeing her white face at intervals in
the oval mirror of her dressing-table.

What would her life be with Robert Peabody? Not what she had dreamed,
certainly. She would have the scope money affords. But not the pride of
love; she would always be a little ashamed of Robert. She did not know
why, exactly. To justify her acceptance of him, she assured herself
that she could change him, pour him out of his mold into hers. Yet she
shivered with apprehension. He might guess her lack of feeling and
grow cold himself. Men wanted love, the gestures and jealousies, the
unconsidered, delicious abandonments, passion. She could never give him
this. And she would miss the wild sweetness, the danger, the pain of
love that is mutual, acknowledged. But she wanted ease....

She paused to stare at herself. Perhaps she was wrong. There might
not be love of that sort. Perhaps she was giving Robert all that he,
or any man, expected--her prettiness, her charm, her youth. He must
be forty. He had had experience--but, good heavens, she couldn’t be
jealous! Only he mustn’t go on; if she married him, he must be loyal....

Pacing the room again, she pictured herself in possession, at last,
of security. It was humiliating to battle with poverty when you had
no wits with which to pull yourself out; if she had been one of those
clever girls who stalk success, on the stage, in studios, newspaper
offices, shops.... She hadn’t their courage or their audacity; she
despised struggle.

Persistently, the idea returned, that she was cheating. She recalled,
with a shudder, an instinctive recoil, his attitude as he bent over her
hands--it had been both supplicating and possessive.

What she was doing was immoral, wrong. She had been brought up to
believe that such a step leads to good, old-fashioned perdition,
hell, damnation and brim-stone. Experience had taught her that in all
probability she would suffer, but that if she were clever she could
balance the advantage against the price; wealth against Robert, love
against comfort; she threw her charm in, to square the account. She
could be generous on that score. She would dress remarkably well; she
would create an interesting atmosphere, and if Robert did not know
the most entertaining personalities in New York, she would get them
together; before long, she would be a famous hostess. In just that,
her ability to attract people, lay her genius. She could, given the
means, make living an art, create, out of places and people, something
unique and memorable, as Lorenzo of the Medici had made his pages, his
poets, his ladies and his gardens into an immortal legend. Why not?
American literature had recently exploited the soda-water clerk and the
corner groceryman, the farmer, the traveling salesman, the immigrant
and the crook. No one was interested in the spiritual reactions of
that almost extinct dodo, the gentleman. Nothing was art that did not
deal with a profane ape groping for the stars and missing them! The
more interesting and complex society was overlooked in this effort to
capture the soul of what Lilah called the proletariat; it proved, this
soul, as elusive as a flea. One was left with the conviction that the
country was populated by illiterate sensualists--a vast, imponderable
mediocrity. There was no one else. The fine flower had withered in the
clutches of this overwhelming parasite. An inchoate fumbling at the
foundations ... a wail of protest ... ignorance and braggadocio....

Or else, they advertised the flapper, the country-club habitué, the
pathological spinster and the cad. Society was constantly being
reminded that it was rotten. Novelists were what David Brenner had
called himself, alley-cats pawing over garbage. Apparently, the brave
and the witty, the poetic, the exquisite were, for artistic purposes,
fresh sardines. The cry was for Truth, and the whole pack ignored any
truth that was not putrefied, or, at least, stale....

Lilah thought: “I can do something to change this.”

The idea trailed off into a vision, a spectacle, a kind of
entertainment in which she played the leading rôle. She saw the house
she would have in New York. Herself, in gray brocade trimmed at the
neck and hem with fur, her feet in brocaded slippers, advancing across
an immense, glowing room, her hand outstretched....

       *       *       *       *       *

She did not want to hurt Grace Fuller. At breakfast she shivered with
dread. It would be like putting poison in a cat’s milk. She expected to
see Grace Fuller actually foam and shriek and stiffen and then stretch
out dead on the kitchen floor, her bang in curl and the pallor of her
cheeks brushed faintly with expensive rouge.

Lilah was very tender. She made pop-overs and cooked the hominy in a
double boiler. She hovered over Grace Fuller, who ate with precision,
as if she were afraid of exuberance, as if, Lilah thought, she were
guarding herself against some strain of hysteria.

Lilah said suddenly: “Robert asked me to marry him last night. I said
I would. I know you’ll think I’m a liar. I didn’t really want him
yesterday morning! When he kissed me--I did.”

Miss Fuller went on buttering a slice of toast. She did it thoroughly.
Then she said in an absolutely unchanged voice: “What are you going to
do for a trousseau?”

Lilah flushed crimson. To cover her relief, she opened the oven door.
She had expected something more--more feminine. She said: “I thought
you cared.”

“I do.... I learned certain things in France. One of them was not to
care too much.”

“I didn’t know you went to France, Grace.”

“Three years.... And things like this happened.... At Soissons there
was a French boy, about twenty-two years old. He looked nineteen. They
brought him in with a wound in his abdomen--he told me, that first day,
that he had looked down at himself and had seen his own intestine. He
was going to die. They all said so. We were being shelled, and every
night we had to carry the wounded into the cellar. He couldn’t be
moved. And while all the rest of them cried out and groaned or made a
joke of it, he said nothing. The wards were dark. They let me have a
baby flash which I held under my apron, and I used to run back to him.
Sometimes the racket was fearful--that long howl and screech of shells
passing over. Sometimes it was quiet as the tomb. I was never sure
whether that boy was alive until I saw his eyes, blue, steady, patient,
asking me to pull him through.... Well, I did! He was my case. He got
well. The day came when he was out in the garden in a chair, and then
he was in uniform again, going home....”

Grace Fuller shrugged her shoulders. “I cared. Terribly. It was my own
little victory. He was a brave boy. I used to gloat over the fact that
I had cheated death.... Then, one night, a year later, they brought him
in again. I was standing in the hall when the ambulances came. There
had been a drive and we had our hands full. Suddenly I saw him. His
stretcher was sopping with blood. He had gone back as an observer and
his plane had been shot down ... he was riddled. But he knew me. And
again he asked me to see him through. _I couldn’t!_ He died there, in
the hall ... my victory! And I had to see those patient eyes fill up
with distrust, with protest, with a sort of mocking challenge, as he
felt himself slipping out of my arms into that red tide....”

She rose, folding her napkin into a neat square.

“Since then, I haven’t let myself care.”

“How did you stand it?”

“What?”

“The war.”

“I didn’t stand it. I changed my nature.”

Lilah said: “I wanted to do something--help.... But the women over
here acted so badly I was ashamed.... They seemed to enjoy, some of
them, all the risk and death. You’d see them rushing down the library
steps, their faces red, clutching at men, trying to drag them into it:
‘You’re going to fight, aren’t you? Why aren’t _you_ in khaki?’ And
then the Liberty drives ... a sort of circus parade of ambulances,
stretchers, posters smeared with blood, pictures of atrocities--that
terrible one by George Bellows, of a massacre at Dinard.... People
were excited. They took a sort of morbid pleasure. I wanted to stay
out of it and hold on to sanity, if I could. It never ‘got’ me. And
when the wounded began to arrive, it was worse. One of the doctors at
Greenhut’s told me that they had to force the women out. They weren’t
all of them sympathetic; they wanted to look at the wounded. The way
a crowd rushes to an accident.... Morbid. Even the women who danced
with the soldiers and sailors and knitted in the theaters struck me as
ridiculous.... I hated it.”

“It was better in France.”

A silence fell and Lilah’s cheeks burned again. She rolled the sleeves
of her dress above her elbows and began to clear the table. Miss Fuller
stood, rigid and uncompromising. Presently, in her usual precise voice,
she said: “If you are going to marry Robert, you’ll have to have some
clothes. Have you any money?”

“No.”

“How much would you need to see you through? I have saved a little.
I’ll let you have it.”

“I can’t allow you to do that.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve hurt you----”

“No, you haven’t.” Unexpectedly, she put her arms around Lilah. “I want
you to be happy. I admire you enormously.”

Lilah hugged her. “Darling Grace! After all, it’s better that I should
have him. You’ve got strength, and I haven’t. Left alone, I’d sink.”

“Oh, I’ll swim,” Grace Fuller admitted. “Women like me always do! We
give the impression of strength because we have our imaginations under
control. I’m as helpless as you are, but I won’t admit it. The men of
my family were all farmers. From them, perhaps, I got my tolerance. I
can’t blame you. I wish I could! I can’t blame Robert. I have none
of the usual feminine eagerness to blame men for everything that goes
wrong. You probably think I have no standards. I haven’t. I understand
too well.”

She went into the other room and came back wearing her hat, with a
rather dog-eared fur neck-piece clasped under her chin; in high, tight
collars she had the swan-like look of Consuela. Lilah was deeply sorry
for her. For the moment she felt herself inferior.

“I can let you have five hundred dollars, Lilah. Don’t tell Robert.”

The telephone rang. They looked at each other with a glance stripped
naked of pretense.

“Go. It’s Robert.”

“No! No!”

“Hurry! Please.”

Lilah went. She put the receiver to her ear with a certain dread, a
reluctance.

And she heard Robert’s voice, vibrant, saying: “Lilah? Sweetheart! I
want you to meet me for lunch. We’ll buy that ring. What d’you say?” He
broke off. “Is Grace there?”

“No,” Lilah said distinctly.

She turned her head and saw the door closing.

“No,” she repeated. “I’m alone.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Lilah was married a month later, in Junius Peabody’s house at the Point.

She had had an overwhelming four weeks. Grace Fuller’s five hundred
dollars had no more than cleared the first hurdle. When Robert Peabody
asked her whether she wanted pearls or a bandeau of diamonds, she had
replied: “I prefer the money. I don’t care for jewels, and there are
all sorts of things I want, and need; foolish things I can’t afford.”

He had given her a check for five thousand dollars.

With this sum deposited and in possession of a book of blanks smartly
bound in leather, Lilah reversed her mask of poverty. She wore,
instead, her most devastating sophistication, a fetching air of
patronage and sweetness. Her first pilgrimage was to the gray stone
house in the Fifties occupied by the esthetic and sharp couturière who
had refused her a chance to work. She sent word to him that she was
interested, this time, in a “wardrobe.” She was wearing a slim and
expensive frock of red crêpe and a Paisley turban. She was positively
beautiful; her slimness, her arched feet in delicate shoes, her gloves,
were dominating.

The dressmaker (his name was Maurice) pretended not to recognize her.
With a bow, he led her to his show rooms and, summoning a saleswoman,
entered, in French, into a passionate discussion of Lilah’s height, her
coloring, her possibilities. One of the deep-skinned models trailed
upon the scene in a sheath of gold cloth, dragging behind her a tail of
emerald green chiffon. She met Lilah’s stare with an expression totally
blank, as if she were walking in her sleep. Maurice sent for materials,
yards and yards of brocade, metallic cloth, crêpe de Chine; jade,
orange, violet and dull red mingled on the floor, the backs of chairs,
across lacquered screens and tables. This profligate heap of stuffs
went to Lilah’s head, but she preserved her air of polite indifference,
sitting with crossed knees, her feet, in the elaborate, strapped shoes,
displayed.... The model, she decided, had ugly ankles.

       *       *       *       *       *

At lunch that day she told Robert of her purchases.

He shook his head. “Where shall you wear them? Peabody’s Point is a
wilderness--the three houses, my own, my father’s and my grandfather’s,
a deep forest of maples, pines and birch, and the sea! We seldom see
any one, but when we do, they come on horse-back or by motor. It is
astonishing when the women wear evening clothes. On great occasions, a
house warming or a birthday or a dance--once, or twice, a year--there
is some show of ceremony.... You will find us very rural.”

Lilah stifled her disappointment. “Shan’t we live in town in the
winter?”

“If you like. We have a house in Thirty-eighth Street. It is closed
now.”

“Take me there!”

The rooms were dark, and when, admitted by a caretaker, Lilah and
Robert explored the first two floors, they found the furniture
swaddled in linen, the chandeliers wearing net veils, like Bluebeard’s
brides, and the rugs rolled back. The house was an exact example of
the New York residence of the early Eighties. The marble mantels were
surmounted by elaborate, wooden fret-work, an intricacy of shelves
and pilasters, screens and grills, roosting place for those useless,
ugly and enormously expensive vases of the period. Mirrors divided the
windows and curtains of dark red velvet were looped up, held clear of
the floor by chenille ropes. There was a multiplicity of cushions,
tables, tabourettes; paintings, in deep frames, by Rosa Bonheur, Henner
and Corot, and one luminous and arresting Inness, a landscape with elms
and a river, sunlight and haze, russet, gold, and blue. Lilah seized
upon this as a reason for enthusiasm.

“My grandfather understands pictures,” Robert explained. “Even the
modern fellows! I don’t. No one has ever taken the trouble to explain
what they’re all about.”

“Don’t you like this?”

“Oh, yes. But Inness wasn’t a modern exactly.”

Suddenly he put his arm through Lilah’s and said: “You’re so clever. If
I didn’t know what a darling you are, I’d be afraid of you. I want you
to teach me all these things--what I should like, and why. I don’t want
you to be ashamed of me.”

Lilah, with a pretty bend of her head, put her face against his
shoulder. She was feeling mellow, generous. This house, a valuable
property in Murray Hill, was soon to be hers. Going from room to room,
she mentally refurnished it.

“I don’t like the house,” she said frankly. “It’s hideous--all this
Victorian velvet and ebony. Horrible!”

“Lilah!”

His expression warned her. “You sweet old stupid! Of course it’s
horrible.”

He stammered: “It’s a sort of--of monument to my grandmother.”

“A mausoleum,” she corrected. “We’ll change it.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Miss Fuller would not go to the Point for the wedding. She had, she
insisted, an important case out of town. And, with her neat traveling
bag and the fur neck-piece, she started off the day before Lilah left
town. She had agreed to keep the apartment and to pay the astonished
agent on the first of every month.

Lilah went alone. Robert had engaged a compartment for her; she found
flowers, candy, books there; _Lilah Norris_, written on Robert’s
cards, thrust hastily into envelopes stamped with the names of shops
internationally famous. The porter, judging from his eagerness, had
been tipped. When he closed her into this walnut and green plush cell,
he reminded her that he would call her at five. She would be “put off”
at Peabody’s Point at five forty-five....

The train moved out of the city, boring its way through the tunnel into
a twilight studded with red and green, white and topaz-yellow flashes.
A glimpse of the river. Tall stacks. Then darkness, broken by suburban
stations, where, for an instant, people and motors were glimpsed in a
strange immobility, as if painted on the car windows.

Lilah undressed. She enjoyed the unaccustomed luxury of her traveling
things, so unlike the pack she had slung across her shoulder in
Switzerland. Her night-gown was sheer batiste, scalloped, threaded with
white ribbon. She braided her hair, switched off the light and lay on
her side, staring out of the window. The silence was clamorous, yet she
could hear the beating of her own heart. She pressed her hands there,
frightened.

She was going to marriage, in which, supposedly, she would never again
be alone, like this.... Never again alone.... She ran her hands over
her body, jealous of herself. Life, the crude fact, was unimaginable;
she was aloof; somehow, she would gain time, hold herself for herself a
little longer.... Outside a late moon had pierced the usual smokiness
of a city sky. Trees brushed by. The odor of the flowers sent by Robert
was sickish in the close room.... Lilah felt suddenly the weight of
his affection, his conquest. She burned with anger, with a sort of
resentment. How could he think, expect.... She thought of running away,
giving him the slip.... They would find the compartment, the roses, his
fatuous cards, but no Lilah. No woman. She pressed her face into the
pillow and cried. She was infinitely sorry for herself, desolate. If
only she were simple! If only she could love, accept, like other women!

       *       *       *       *       *

In the morning she was happier, sustained by excitement.

While she dressed, she glanced out of the window at a northern
landscape of carelessly cleared fields now white with daisies, patches
of pine and maple, and, beyond, a range of hills, sharply outlined
against a clear, white sky. Puffs of air came through the screen
infinitely fresh and cool; country air. Lilah took deep breaths.

At the station, where the train stopped only long enough to let down
a grinning porter and a step, Robert was waiting. He lifted her down,
kissed her. She was instantly conscious of a difference in him; his
coat was rough and cold; his face was red, sun-burned. And his hair,
always so smooth and well-brushed, had blown askew, over his forehead.
It got in his eyes and he smoothed it back with an impatience, a
carelessness, new to her.

“Grandfather is waiting. The early morning air isn’t awfully good for
him. He sent apologies.”

He hurried her into an open motor and the robe was adjusted about her
knees. Robert drove. And again she noticed that he was in some sense
more free. His hands on the wheel were casual but in control; with a
quick turn of his head he scanned the road and turned north with a
burst of speed startling in a man usually so hesitant and cautious.

“Five miles,” he shouted. “We live at the end of nowhere. Our property
already--all these fields. Wait until you see the woods!”

The woods were somber in the morning light, green as trees are in
stage-settings, immensely tall and close and straight, upon a carpet of
moss and fern, wintergreen and arbutus. The road at intervals crossed a
bridle-path, now and then emerging into cleared spaces where a tangle
of clover, buttercups and daisies grew lush, knee-deep.

Robert brought the car to a standstill and turned to Lilah. His face
was older in an unexpected seriousness. “This is all yours, Lilah. I
am yours. Does it mean anything to you that I love you so? Your coming
here has made me terribly happy--a queer sort of happiness, for I
can’t sleep or eat. I ache for you. I want you to kiss me of your own
accord....”

“Haven’t I, ever?”

“No.”

She lifted her face, but at the first light contact of her lips, he
could not have told whether she loved him or not. He gave to the
embrace all the feeling he craved from her. She was overwhelmed,
relieved. Nothing was required of her; she need not show herself, give
herself up. Not yet.... She smiled, with closed eyes....

Suddenly he let her go. Almost violently he relaxed his hold, so that
she fell back and away from him.

“If you don’t love me, Lilah,” he said, in a dry voice, “say so.”

Lilah protested: “I do! What on earth makes you ask?”

Robert Peabody did not answer, but sat bent forward over the wheel,
as if, at a signal from her, he would start the car and drive back to
the station. His expression was terrible; somehow, she knew that he
had sensed her relief in the moment just passed. She had hurt him. It
wasn’t going to be altogether easy.

In a silence made poignant by a stir of branches and the early morning
clamor of birds, she fought for the right words, the gesture that would
reassure him. Her hand touched his sleeve, crept down to his hand
clenched on the wheel. “It is all new,” she began, “strange.... It
isn’t love so much that I feel, but recognition ... of you, and this
place ... mine ... you might be a little patient....”

He bent swiftly and kissed her fingers. The car sprang forward into the
forest again.

       *       *       *       *       *

She did not glimpse the sea until they were fairly out of the wood and
making a wide turn in a sort of park, where moss and fern gave way
to an incredibly deep sward, smooth, emerald-green. She saw a house,
another, and a sparkle of water beyond. At once she could smell the
sea, kelp, sweet and sickish, salty. Robert had not spoken, but now he
turned and said: “Here we are! Lilah! Home!”

He swept into a gravel driveway and under a porte-cochère.... She
was getting out, rather faint, frightened now that she had committed
herself.... A servant spoke to her and Robert said: “Miss Norris,
Maisie.”

“How do you do, Miss Norris? I’m sure we’re all very glad.”

The hall, within, was dark--too much wood-work, and a huge, stone
mantel, top-heavy. Lilah put her hand up to her hat, and, turning
instinctively in search of a mirror, found herself confronting an old
man.

“My grandfather,” Robert said. “This is Lilah.”

Junius Peabody was tall and very handsome, at eighty-four. He offered
his hand, and Lilah, giving her own into that dry, rather bony clasp,
met his eyes. They were black, deep-set, with something ironic,
quizzical, in their depths, like a spark of light at the bottom of a
well. He wore a heavy mustache, perhaps to hide the leanness of his
cheeks. He had what Robert had missed, a flame of some sort, a feeling
for things, for life, for women, for beauty.

“Lilah? May I?”

She felt his lips on her cheek, and noticed a faint odor of Cologne.

“You must be tired. Will you breakfast with us? Or, perhaps, later--”

“Breakfast, by all means,” Lilah said. “I’m not tired. I’m very excited
and happy.”

She was, inexplicably, exhilarated again. The old man’s look had been
appraising, and satisfied. He found her delightful. She knew this,
and because she was certain that he was not easily pleased, she could
afford to be flattered. He moved at her side through the house, across
a large, cluttered room to a veranda, where Venetian shades were
half-drawn against the brilliance of the sea in full sunlight; a table
had been set for breakfast. Geraniums in boxes hedged the veranda on
three sides. Beyond, a narrow garden separated the house from a pebbly
beach and rocks covered with brown kelp.

“Low tide,” Junius Peabody remarked.

It was not the house she had pictured. There were no Italian gardens.
But there was something substantial and vigorously assertive in the
ugly width and spread of the wings, the turrets and verandas and
useless, expensive ornamentation. In the Eighties this would have been
a “place.” Meadows of wet kelp mingled with the fragrant spiciness of
geraniums. A man servant in an apron, very old, with a crumpled mouth
in a pink face, brought coffee. And Robert said: “Miss Norris, Edwin.”
Lilah put just the right shade of interest into the pronouncement
of the word “Edwin” with a rising inflection. She loved Edwin. She
loved Junius. She loved Robert. She was conscious of being more
charming, more herself, than she had ever been in a life given over to
being, always, some one unlike the real Lilah. The real Lilah was a
delightful, amusing, affecting little person.

Once over that moment of appraisal, Junius Peabody made it plain that
he approved of her.

And after breakfast, brushing his mustache with a large cambric
handkerchief, he walked with her into what he called the “greenery,”
a park-like place at the back of the house away from the sea where a
gardener worked among formal beds of Spring flowers. “No, Robert, you
stay back--I want Lilah to myself.”

Robert disappeared and Lilah threw a kiss, very prettily, at his back.

“Robert would like to show you the kennels, but that can wait.”

Lilah said impulsively: “It was good of you to let me come here to be
married. I am very alone.... The few relatives I have are in the West,
and I don’t like any of them. They will not approve of my marrying so
soon. But my father wouldn’t care, so why should I?”

They crossed the greenery and, without comment, Junius Peabody pointed
out another house. “My son’s. He died ten years ago. We have closed
the place. Robert didn’t like it. I’ll show you his house, later.
Although I dare say you will want to change it, it is modern enough.
This, you see, is what I call the East Aurora period; it was built in
nineteen-four, when America was beginning to absorb the Morris a b c’s.
Inside it is worse.... Hand-tooled by Fra Bunco....” He broke off.
“What perfume is that? Sandalwood? Delicious. My dear, we are delighted
to welcome you.” And before she could thank him, he began again: “I am
really astonished. I didn’t expect you to be--what you are. You are
very clever; I can see that. Robert won’t understand you, but that
won’t matter if you see to it that he isn’t humiliated. A woman must
never be conspicuously superior to her husband. I dare say you know
just what you are doing.”

With a flash of anger, she said: “I am very fond of him!”

“I’m glad of that.”

They came into a small grove of pines, young trees near the sea, and
on the shore, built upon the dunes, she saw another, smaller house,
gray-shingled with gray blinds and stone chimneys. This, she realized,
was to be her home. At first glance, it seemed a desolate place;
there was no garden, only the white sand blown into little hills, and
glistening, thick blades of dune grass and, beyond, the sea. Always
keen to beauty, she resented the uncompromising grayness of the house.
“The blinds should be blue,” she said quickly, “and there should be
yellow and blue awnings and a brick terrace at the back with hydrangeas
in pots. Why not a wall on this side and turf and some poplars?”

Junius Peabody laughed. “You must ask Robert. He will do anything you
suggest. He is very much in love with you.... I think you two will
make a go of it if you won’t be impatient. Robert will be stubborn if
you criticize him. He isn’t as simple or as pliable as he seems, on
the surface, to be. His father, not I, was responsible for his career.
My son had no more sense of the beautiful than his house indicates;
he lived only to serve my creation, Peabody and Sons. He never loved
or needed to love. He quite literally worked himself to death and
collapsed in harness. But he wanted Robert to do the same thing, and,
to prepare him, sent him to a boys’ school at Territet and then to
Columbia! And then, by way of hardening him, a trip around the world!
For one year before his father died, Robert sat in an office in the
Peabody Building in Boston, staring out of the window.... It might have
been, in the end, a tragedy.”

He took her arm. “Let’s go back. Robert will want you, and I don’t like
the sun.”

       *       *       *       *       *

That night she talked to him again. A mist had come up, opaque,
chilly, and at intervals a buoy beyond the reef tolled like a ship’s
bell. A fire was lighted in the drawing-room, and Lilah, in a gown of
disturbing simplicity, very short, faced Junius Peabody. He had the
outlines she most admired, a distinguished thinness; his wrists and
ankles were characteristic, slender. His elegance was stressed; he had
not Robert’s unawareness; the details of Junius Peabody’s dress were,
to the least fold of a tie, considered, epicurean. And this ceremony
somehow detracted from his age, gave him an appearance not in the least
jaunty, but vivacious. When Lilah dressed for dinner, she chose her
gown for him, not for Robert; she had found, in Junius, an audience
appreciative of those things Robert overlooked. She thought: “While
he’s alive, I shall be happy here. I like him because he won’t give
in to being old. He never apologizes.” She had, she knew, brought him
something he longed for and was too proud to seek, youth and the little
drama of furbelows and perfumes, ribbons and silk stockings. She was
pert enough to amuse him. He would have despised a sentimental woman.

Robert left them again. One of his favorite dogs had developed a
distemper and he went away, wrapped in a great coat, to spend a
watchful night beside a box full of straw where the silver gray bitch
lay on her side, panting. Robert’s face was puckered with regret and
humiliation. “I know you’ll think I’m a fool! But that dog’s damned
sick, Lilah.”

When he had gone, Junius Peabody said: “In my day, Edwin would have sat
up with the dog. Love isn’t what it used to be.”

“I don’t mind,” Lilah said. “Grace Fuller warned me.”

“She did, did she?” The old man jerked in his chair. “Unpleasant
female. I never liked her. She made me feel that my illusions were
hocus-pocus, rubbish. As if she had spotted all my weaknesses and could
put her finger on them, the way those osteopath chaps pick out sore
spots on your spine. Here, vanity. There, arrogance. And down the line.”

He chose a cigar from a silver box at his elbow.

“I don’t want the truth. At my age, it’s dangerous. I am like a twist
of paper that has gone up in flames; the shape remains, but at a touch
will crumble away.... Excuse me, my dear. I do not often mention my
age. After all, I may live twenty years, and I must not shrink from the
dust too soon.”

He reflected, with a curious gratification, that he was at last
very safe from life, because he no longer cared what happened to
him--nothing _could_ happen. He was free from his old restless
curiosity, his desire to be always in contact with experience.

“You, my dear, are still seeking the unattainable. Immeasurably
superior--old age! You want big happenings; I am content with little
happenings. Thank God, I’m not a dyspeptic ... men who understand food
never are. I’ve never bolted, like these modern business men. To
be appreciated, done justice, breakfast must be given half an hour,
luncheon an hour, dinner two hours. There’s something vulgar in this
dishing up and gobbling down.... Robert says you’re a good cook.”

“I am,” Lilah admitted.

“You must make something for me. Even a potato--boiled with
art--Consider the slow, the exquisite processes of its growth! The
earth must be turned, the seed planted. Then the feathery stalks, the
white blossoms, the root upturned, the gathering.... Some conception of
the potato must be in the seed, an immortal thought contained within
the physical means of realization. Very comforting, that idea! It gives
one at least the security of divine attention. Could there have been,
before I was at all, a picture of me, dry as dust, tall and gaunt, with
this mustache? Perhaps! The finished product must be contained in the
germ, irrevocable, bound to materialize.”

“Fatalist!” Lilah cried.

“Otherwise, wouldn’t an onion grow into an oak tree, a toad into
an eagle, a mushroom into a man? The intention must be there along
with the cell structure! Stay as you are, my dear--you are a lovely
celestial mistake, an orchid grown into a woman!”

He was very particular about his cigar--a mild panetela with an easy
pull. He sliced off the tip with a pen-knife, squeezed slowly between
thumb and forefinger, held the cigar against the light, took it between
his lips, sucked, closed his eyes, and, opening them suddenly, applied
the match.

“Havana,” he said. “I smoked my first cigar in Hergesheimerland.... But
I mustn’t go back! Old men are always doing that, perhaps because youth
takes on a patina with years.”

“Were you happy?” Lilah asked.

“Never! Avid. Insatiable. Restless. Always goaded by desire--but not
happy. Now, at eighty-four, I know how to live. I know that familiarity
is more precious than novelty, and that relaxation is sweeter than
distraction.”

Lilah shook her head. “I don’t believe you. You are as eager as I am,
perhaps more so.”

“The world of men is behind--the world of spirit opens up. You don’t
believe that, either. Wait until you are alone with yourself--if you
out-live your family, as I have. My wife, Minnie, my two brothers, my
son. Robert doesn’t count. He is a remote descendant.”

“You won’t die,” Lilah said.

“I may,” he admitted, with a smile faintly ironic. “Although I have
always believed that I neither would nor could! The earth is too sweet
and I have loved ... everything. Other men don’t. They die complaining
of a lack, where I have found a surfeit of beauty. For twenty years
I’ve been burying people who didn’t love enough, little disappointed
people, jealous, enraged, all of them! Because youth had gone! Youth!”

He stood up. And with that quick, faintly unsteady gait, he went to the
mantel, staring up at the portrait of a young man in a black coat, a
white waist-coat and tie who sat, stiff and somehow violent, in a red
velvet chair. The thick, black brows almost met above the bridge of the
nose; the lips were full, both sensual and ironic; the eyes small and
dark. A dark skin stained with red--

“They used to say I was ‘foreign’ looking. And I was proud of it. My
wife rather disapproved.”

He sat down again, stroking his chin. “Poor Minnie! Poor girl! To be
foreign wasn’t quite respectable in the ’Sixties. But there you have
me--young! And miserable.”

“Why miserable?”

“What do you know about love?” he demanded suddenly. “Pretty minx,
sitting there with your cigarette, talking to me when you should be out
in the fog with your lover. You modern women are as cold as ice. You’re
not normal. Nothing about you is rational except your love of finery.
I have a streak of it in myself. I can remember my wife’s night gowns
where I have forgotten her opinions. You haven’t changed in _that_. So
many scents and sachets, little scissors, sticks, powders, essences,
curls, bandoline and brilliantine, creams and rouges. Precious things
put away in drawers, wrapped in tissue-paper, hidden in boxes! Rites of
beauty! For men? For love? Instinct? Nothing else is left--”

He broke off. Lilah watched the fire-light strike flashes in the
buckles of her slippers. What an amusing old sensualist! What was he
trying to prove? That he hadn’t loved his wife or that she didn’t love
Robert?

“I won’t argue,” she said. “Women _are_ different. Why not? They are no
longer deceived about love....”

“Ah.” He stared at her down his nose.

“There isn’t time for loving nowadays.” Lilah insisted. “Not your sort.”

“My sort?”

“I realize--”

“What you youngsters _don’t_ realize,” he interrupted, with a touch of
anger, “is that the old are unchanged, within. The casing is rusty, but
the springs and wheels are as good as ever. What makes us different is
our nearness to death. We don’t change, otherwise.”

He rose again and beckoned to her. “Come into the library; I want to
show you something.”

As she followed him, he said: “This isn’t my taste. My wife controlled
the furnishing of our houses--a Victorian feminine prerogative.”

“I know. I have seen the house in Murray Hill.”

“I never live there. It is cruelly innocent.”

“May I change it?”

“Of course.”

“Then you aren’t sentimental.”

He stroked his chin, again Lilah saw that look of rather Hogarthian
humor.

“My wife was a dear little soul. She loved me; she disapproved of me;
she died for me, not guessing, thank God, that she had never entered
my imagination.... This tobacco jar was my grand-uncle Stephen’s. He
brought it from England, a hundred years ago.”

He paused in the hall. “A few of these things are mine. If I could
count on twenty years, I’d build the sort of house I like. These
Chippendale chairs--gratifying, aren’t they? That ship’s model over the
door--a full-rigged whaler! And this jade; milky, like moonlight....
The Chinese are real craftsmen. ‘White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,
ringed with blue lines--’ Eh? Why not? Better than hymns and prayers
and incantations. Now you know how spiritual I am! If love of this sort
of thing is pagan, then I am pagan, and proud of it. I would rather
carve a piece of jade into such loveliness than save a soul....”

He opened a door and Lilah preceded him into a room smaller than the
others. A coal-fire had burned low in a shallow grate. There were
several lamps, easy chairs and many shelves of books.

Lilah put her pointed slipper on the fender and glanced up at him.
“Your room?”

He said: “It’s quiet, and everything is mine. That picture up there is
by Kent.”

“I don’t like it. It’s too frosty.”

“How about this Shinn?”

“Naughty!” Lilah exclaimed, rather shocked by the naked little woman in
a garden hat who was reading a French novel. “Do you like it?”

“Very much.”

Suddenly he tossed the unfinished cigar into the grate. “Sit down. I
want to tell you something. Something very personal. About myself.
I’ve never told any one. It needn’t embarrass you. But it might help
you.”

He went to a writing desk that was closed, and, producing a key from
his watch-chain, he unlocked the top and opened it. It seemed to Lilah
that he was a bit unsteady. Perhaps so much talk wasn’t good for
him. He turned, holding a small package of letters, the envelopes,
inscribed to Junius Peabody in a big, square hand, bearing the stamp
of Italy like a seal. “I can recapture,” he said, “the old magic, just
by touching these letters.... They are letters from a woman.... They
have nothing to do with my wife, or my son, or Robert. But they have
everything to do with people like ourselves.”

He sat down in the chair facing hers; sank back, still holding the
slender packet of letters. He seemed, in an odd way, to be conjuring
up some memory, summoning back a great happening that had grown dim in
outline. For a moment, she thought he had ceased to breathe. Then, in a
rather broken voice, he began to tell her what he saw:

       *       *       *       *       *

He was in Venice, Venice still under the shadow of the Austrian eagle,
yet, as always, incomparable; a city of bizarre façades reflected in
salty lagoons; nothing classical--he despised neo-classicism--but
cupids, garlands, fore-shortened goddesses, golden! He had sensed the
Venice of Longhi, thank God! Of Titian. Of Veronese. These catapulting
Venuses and rampant Mars, these lions and gilt domes and love-songs!
Nothing mattered save his own recognition of beauty. And for a while
it bowled him over.

A woman was part of it, touched by the same unreality, removed from all
experience.

He had left Minnie, his wife, that summer, in this very house, while he
went off to Europe chasing rainbows.

The quest had been much deeper than that, only he had been afraid to
acknowledge it. Rainbows were no part of his need; he was in pursuit
of the intangible justification, something Minnie could not give him.
Minnie was life. He wanted, as he supposed all such men sooner or later
want, the illusion of life.

In Venice, he had met the woman. No need to tell Lilah her name; that
would be beyond the point. She had put him right again, reaching
delicately, expertly, into his spirit, setting his psychic house in
order.

How? He didn’t know. She was a woman of women, sane, fearless,
magnificent.

A week only. Out of a lifetime, he reflected, this seemed meager
compensation. Yet he supposed that few men had had as much. A week in
Longhi’s Venice with a woman in whom purity wore a lace mask; a woman
strangely aloof, strangely seductive, possessed of a miraculous and
unbroken mystery. She had loved him and had told him nothing of herself.

He remembered her, wearing white; he could not recall the style, but
people stared at her. She was a tawny woman, dark-skinned, tall, with
topaz eyes, and she moved with a sort of slow grace--every pose an
immortal loveliness. A foreigner. That something “foreign” in him had
leaped to the encounter. So, at least, he justified his passion. They
seldom spoke. It had been, nevertheless, communion. Everything about
her delighted him--her jewels, her parasols, her perfumes. She was
distinguished.

Yet she could play her part in their brief personal drama like an
artist, delighting in him, in their climaxes, their interludes,
their sure approach to the inevitable finale, savoring each detail.
What a woman! He had had no twinge of conscience; almost, he had
forgotten Minnie. He had had his week. No vulgarity. No reproaches. No
questioning. Beauty.

Well....

She had gone.

These three letters, written from Belaggio. Then, no more, as it should
have been!

“There must be some reason, my dear, for these glimpses. A divine
tantalization, perhaps. Souls led to heaven as a donkey follows a
carrot to the crest of a hill.... Some day you will love this way.
Wouldn’t it be wiser to wait? You are very like me.”

Lilah stood up with a quick, almost violent gesture of rebellion. “No!
How can you?”

A door opened out from the library to the veranda. Lilah threw it back
and ran outside.

The veranda was wet, and a heavy mist poured in from the sea. Lilah
crossed the garden and hurried toward the kennels along a narrow gravel
path. The mist stung her bare arms, drenched her hair, soaked through
the thin soles of her slippers.

Some one loomed out of the shadows and she recognized Robert, still in
his great-coat, bare-headed.

He cried: “Lilah!” And, startled, blocked the path.

Lilah caught his arm. “Robert. Kiss me again. Again. Make me kiss
you.... I want to! I want to! Your grandfather’s wrong. I’ll love you.
Kiss me.”

They clung together. Her emotion, her fear, became desire. She could
not see Robert’s face; his restless hands slipped down her arms to her
waist, back again to her shoulders. She cried, pressing herself against
him: “Robert!”

“Poor little girl. Poor little Lilah. It’s all right....”

Her lips against his, her arms pinioned, she thought: “I love him. That
detestable old man.... This is love--_this_.”

Aloud, she asked again: “Do you love me?”

For answer, he lifted her clear of the ground and held her, so that she
could hear his heart and her own, beating together.




IV


There was no going back now, and Lilah went forward swiftly,
forgetting, in the excitement of the wedding, her hours of doubt.
She clung to the memory of that moment in the fog; it was at once a
disguise and a justification. To Junius Peabody she had said simply: “I
promise you; it will be all right.”

She was married one morning, out-of-doors, before an altar made of
syringa bloom. For this occasion, Robert’s Aunt Whiteside came from
some Virginia spa, caparisoned, as Junius Peabody put it, like a
Christmas tree. She found Lilah a “useless ornament.” And said so in an
astonishing bass voice.

There was nothing fashionable about this wedding. A few friendly,
rather shy and inarticulate people, appeared for the ceremony, were
introduced, and disappeared immediately.

Lilah kissed Junius, noticed again the odor of Cologne, and was hurried
away toward the traditional honeymoon in Robert’s motor ... Portland
... Bath ... Bar Harbor.... It would soon be over and she could be
herself....

Six months later she was established in Thirty-eighth Street.

A small army of decorators occupied the doorstep and besieged Lilah
by letter and telephone. And Mrs. Junius Peabody’s Victorianism was
pulled up, literally, by the roots. Gilt-framed mirrors went headlong
down the “stoop” into moving vans. Chinese porcelains and top-heavy
vases disappeared into barrels. Mantels were ripped out, parquet floors
became, in some instances, black and white tiles, in others smooth
painted surfaces. Tabourettes, gilded what-nots, ponderous buffets
vanished on the backs of moving men, and the discreet marbles and
pedestaled bronzes were banished to heaven knows what storage vault.

“No one would _buy_ these things,” Lilah explained. “You couldn’t
_give_ them away! The Ladies’ Home Journal has changed all that. I’m
not sure whether what they’ve got is any better, but at least it’s no
worse.”

“I liked it,” Robert said. “It was cozy.”

Lilah sniffed.

During the reconstruction they lived on the top floor, in rooms
occupied in Mrs. Junius Peabody’s era by servants. Lilah had painted
the furniture herself and had hung at the windows curtains of glazed
chintz--parrots, cabbage roses and gay Kundry-blooms. Robert slept in a
cottage bed beneath a quilted spread and shaved peering into a crackled
mirror. He was vaguely uncomfortable and dubious. Beneath him, the
familiar house of his childhood was disintegrating, falling to pieces.
One by one the precious familiarities disappeared. But if it pleased
Lilah, why, for God’s sake, on with the game!

What it all meant was beyond Robert’s comprehension. His mother had
been content to spend half a lifetime with walnut and plush.... And why
all the fuss about the front door, the brownstone steps?

“But they’re _hideous_,” Lilah cried. “_No one_ has them! Every house
on the block, except ours, has an English front.”

Robert shrugged his shoulders, and a month later the stone façade
became a brick façade; the steps gave way to a white doorway with a
fan grill, and window boxes planted with evergreens added that touch
of a Mayfair dwelling. It was all very discreet, and, to Robert, very
startling. He could not believe his eyes. He wrote to his grandfather
that Thirty-eighth Street was “jolly giddy.”

Lilah was supremely happy. She wore chintz aprons and bound her hair
in silk, as if she were gardening. Her eyes had a critical, appraising
look. Robert never saw her unless he pursued her to the top of a
step-ladder or forced his way through the ranks of decorators. These
people frightened him; they had such an air--as if they thought and
spoke in symbols. It was a secret order to which, apparently, Lilah had
been initiated, for she tossed off the phraseology with a reckless, and
sometimes condescending, carelessness.

“Isn’t it too delicious? This needle-point? Miss de Blauvelt wants
brocade, but I insisted....”

“It’s rather--pale,” Robert said lamely.

“Nonsense. It’s exquisite.... The panels are to be painted all the way
to the ceiling. Ships and cliffs and trees and great folds of silk,
like Claude Lorraine, with steps, you know”--she made a gesture--“and
funny clouds.”

She pulled him by the hand. “Come into the dining-room--I want you to
see something. It’s here! The Venetian glass.... Look! Look!”

Robert said guardedly: “Purple glass? What for?”

“For use, silly.”

“And what are these--vegetables?”

“For the console--they’re merely decorative.”

“But I don’t like them!”

“Never mind. You will, when everything is finished! An Aubusson rug.
Gray walls. A great mirror, cut in squares, here. An enameled table
with strips of old lace or brocade. Your grandfather’s Boucher here. A
screen, there. And crystal--”

“Lilah! Lilah!”

Robert picked his way through plaster, lathes, packing-cases and
excelsior whenever he left the house to go to the dubious comfort of
his Club. He wanted the country, his dogs, his old green sweater. But
if Lilah was happy....

And Lilah happy was less difficult than Lilah unhappy. At the Point,
during the summer, there had been days when she was too restive to
be quite comfortable. He was to blame for something; eventually he
discovered that he was to blame for liking the out-of-doors. The
implication was vague. Whenever Robert let himself go, Lilah would
say: “Beautiful? Yes?” As if there were some reason for resentment.
When Robert discovered that she wanted New York, and Thirty-eighth
Street, he capitulated at once. But he had faced mysterious rebuffs,
inexplicable moods, hurts that were more damnable for being beyond
analysis. He had wondered. He had questioned himself. He had, more
than once, blamed himself. For what? Why, for failing her somehow!
He hated to see that look of resentful discontent. He was ashamed of
being happy! And this was a new sensation. He had always been happy.
But he encountered the feminine rebellion against a mood which does
not exactly match her own; and at last depressed by the atmosphere of
blame, he gave way to temper, flung himself down and hid his head in
his arms. Then, Lilah had been repentant; he felt her hand on his hair.
“Robert, what’s the matter?” He had not answered. And Lilah had kissed
the back of his neck and had called him “cross old Bobsie.”

With New York an accomplished fact, and the woods, the rocks, exchanged
for a sultry October in town, she was gracious, delightful.

Robert promised himself that he would never again deprive Lilah of
anything. She was worthy of the most unselfish behavior.... He adored
her.... He would do anything to hear her call him “cross old Bobsie.”

He made the mistake of becoming his most cheerful, his most optimistic
self.

       *       *       *       *       *

The panels were to be done by an American artist, a man famous for the
facility of his execution; he painted like a fury. One day you had the
cartoons, in red chalk--a swirl of draperies, figures of long-limbed,
rather sheep-like women and top-heavy columns in the Tiepolo manner.
The next, a finished canvas.

Robert began to stumble over this Elmer Shawhan in his comings and
goings. He had none of the trappings Robert expected of painters, but
worked in a disreputable coat, collarless. He was small and agile,
Irish, with the head of a vaudeville actor and the feet of a Brazilian
dancer.

Lilah found him violent and amusing.

“I despise women,” he told her, “but I can’t keep away from ’em. It’s
their drawing--ankles and knees and long arms and necks. They’re so
damned graceful.”

He was sitting on a scaffold ten feet above her head, dangling a pair
of patent pumps and ankles encased in sheer silk socks. Lilah’s walls
were already transformed. Shawhan painted the panels in his studio and
mounted them himself.

Lilah could not rest until she found out whether he considered her
pretty. He made her feel dumpy and too blonde, because the women he
painted were like fresh strawberries mounted on long silk legs. No
woman had legs like that....

“I know,” he said. “I paint legs plus the universal male exaggeration
of their importance. That’s why my stuff sells. I got seventy-five
thousand dollars for covering a millionaire’s home with silk stockings
and frillies. He thinks he likes it because it’s art.”

“Isn’t it?” Lilah demanded.

“My stuff? Of course not. Mister Tiepolo of New York! No, I’m clever. I
have a certain facility, that’s all. I learned to draw when I was a cub
reporter on a southern daily--I had to make quick sketches of murders,
suicides, hangings and celebrities; President Cleveland in the morning
and Lulu the opium-queen in the afternoon. I _had_ to draw! Then I came
to New York and drew New York. Slums and ‘L’ stations and bums in the
park and snow and fire-engines and horse ’buses. In those days New York
was a _place_. Twenty years ago....”

“I was seven,” Lilah interrupted.

“Well, I wasn’t! I was twenty-three. And what I had you’ll never have.”

“Why?”

“It doesn’t exist any more. You’ll never see Ethel Barrymore in
‘Captain Jinks’ with those eyes of hers and that bass voice and that
Barrymore bend. Davis was on the crest of the wave and Gibson was
immortalizing the shirtwaist. It meant something in those days to be
tailored in England and to wear the kind of shoes I wear--look at
’em--no tips--soft as a glove! Davis and I wore wing collars when
it was considered degenerate, and we carried canes in the face of
public ridicule and private envy. Stanford White was building glorious
houses. Most of us were in love with Minnie Ashley. Talk about the age
of innocence! Clyde Fitch, Maxine Elliot, Elsie de Wolfe and Clara
Bloodgood.... I could name a dozen. We were the American aristocracy of
wit. What we said and did was shocking and unique. It was worth while
being clever because almost no one was. To live in Gramercy Park, to
eat at the old Café Martin and _not_ to wear pads in your shoulders--”

He went back to his canvas with a sort of violence.

“I object to to-day because every one is superficially clever! And
there are ten geniuses to one, twenty years ago, men who can write
colossal novels about the war; men you’ve never heard of, like Dos
Passos, producing a sort of heroic poem, every verse beginning and
ending with Goddam! Gorgeous! And chaps like Manship and Simonson. And
Bellows. And God knows who--there are thousands of ’em.”

“Well?” Lilah said, being very Russian with her cigarette.

Shawhan came down the ladder. He had a most engaging and roguish smile.
With the neck of his shirt turned in, he was more Byronesque than
vaudevillian; he would have been romantic if he had not looked out at
you through eyes so initiated and so skeptical.

“And there you are! Genius is a drug on the market.”

“Then you’re asking too much for these panels,” Lilah said sweetly.

“I’m a specialist,” was his shrewd reply, “not a genius. I have cashed
in on my facility. You’re paying, not for my work, but for my name.
When people come into this room, they will know who decorated your
walls and your stock will jump!”

“How did you manage it?” Lilah asked.

He smiled. “The New York way. A very exotic house and studio. Two
marriages with famous and temperamental women both of whom divorced
me, quite amicably. A dash of scandal. Parties every one wanted to get
to because they were both beautiful and risquè and the guests were
limited.... Thirty, no less, no more! An impassioned, and anonymous,
press agent. Kissing the finger-tips of such women as you. Getting the
reputation of being a misogynist. _And legs!_”

Lilah laughed. “And now?”

“You pay for it.”

“And you?”

“It doesn’t leave much to believe in, does it? That’s why I sneeze when
people drag in art. Art! Oh, my God. The whole thing is an elaborate
hoax. You want these walls--these lovely empty spaces--filled with
something gracious, pretty, to harmonize with your furniture and your
lamp-shades.”

“Oh, no--” Lilah interrupted.

“Oh, yes! I beg pardon. Yes! Your husband wouldn’t live with a wall by
Michelangelo--big, fat torsos and bumpy females and snakes. And how
would you look, in that gown, against a Gaugin jungle? Be honest.”

“Well--”

“You go to Miss de Blauvelt. She wants to sell you some Louis Quatre
chairs and one of those French sofas, an escritoire and a five hundred
dollar footstool. So she looks through her mental card-index and says:
‘French. Shawhan.’ Then she phones me. I get the specifications and the
limitations and the architects’ blue-prints. I go to the Palais Royal
and make sketches on the back of the menu-card. Mrs. Robert Peabody’s
Louis Quatre drawing-room for November twenty-eighth. Lots of pink. A
swing, with four Watteau ladies and satin garters, a poodle on a yellow
cushion, some fuzzy trees, a cupid on a pedestal and five hundred yards
of Alice Blue silk looped back with Fragonard tassels. One Tiepolo
column, one Boucher bosom and a knot of flowers.”

“You’re disgusting,” Lilah said.

“This is the Twentieth Century,” he reminded her, “and you are living
in New York.”

He backed away from his work, twisting the ladder aside. “What do you
think of it?”

“I like it. I believe you do. Isn’t your contempt a part of your
business manner?”

“Don’t you see--all this is very sad?” he remarked. “What I’ve told
you--what I am and what you are, and our buying and selling this way--”
He broke off. “Yes, I like it,” he admitted.

He stood, his hands on his hips, his head tilted, staring at the
exquisite thing he had somehow summoned out of his staleness and
disillusionment. Into his expression something mocking appeared to
contradict his absorption.

“Some day,” he said, “I shall decorate a pork-packer’s ballroom. Two
hundred thousand down and no interference! I shall paint what I like--a
series of cartoons--sky-scrapers, flappers, head-waiters, taxicabs,
chorus girls, Jews and fashionable women, cabarets, streets, theaters
and--the whole mess! Wouldn’t it be gorgeous? A parade, all the way
around the ballroom, where my pork-packer had expected nymphs in
panniers?”

Lilah tossed her cigarette away and yawned. “I see. You’re an artist,
after all. And a humbug.”

He laughed, and their eyes met with appreciation.

“Perhaps,” Lilah suggested, “you’ll put me into that cartoon.”

His glance deepened; his expression changed; as if he sensed the trap
laid down by her, he said dryly: “Perhaps.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Lilah told Robert that Elmer Shawhan was an egoist.

“Probably,” Robert said. “He looks it.”

“Why? Because he is spectacular?”

Robert sensed opposition. “Why, yes. His hair--”

“Externals!” Lilah cried.

“That’s one of your phrases, Lilah. Don’t trip me unfairly. Hair _is_
an external, but the way a man cuts it is indicative of something
internal. I suspect your artist of being what you call him, an egoist,
because he has patiently cultivated a pompadour. Now, whiskers--”

Lilah put her fingers in her ears.

As the house began to take form and to emerge from the chaos of
reconstruction into a very harmonious and comfortable air of
permanence, Lilah discovered that she was being too extravagant. The
bills for all this mannered luxury began to appear, statements that had
a matter-of-fact coldness, a finality. She must face, placate Robert,
make him see, as always, in smaller things, her rightness.

Miss de Blauvelt had an exaggerated and flattering conception of
the wealth of her clients. She was accustomed to magnificence and
munificence. She spent other people’s money, Lilah discovered, with the
largest possible gesture, and then added her own fee, a compensation
out of all proportion to her services; she was “cheeky” in a way too
subtle for rebuff.

With a graceful sweep of her hands, she would say: “I can do a
delightful boudoir for ten thousand. Not perfect, of course--for
_that_--but modern and witty, a perverse little room. Leave it to me.
You don’t mind?”

The names of social celebrities flowed in and out of the stream of
her talk like minnows. She knew every one. Lilah gathered that at her
own house at Dinard she gathered together the froth of fashionable
and artistic Europe--skimmed off the cream for her own amusement.
With this woman, business seemed to be an excuse for indulging in
extravagances. The account, rendered before the workmen were out of the
house, staggered Lilah. She had, she realized, spent a fortune. Her
heart contracted and the blood rushed to her face, receding to leave
her trembling, frightened, sick. She had no idea how she was going to
face Robert with this fact--it was done; there was no going back. She
should have consulted him. The whole thing suggested a sort of vulgar
eagerness on her part, a head-long impatience. And she had made it
only too evident that Robert bored her. She must go back, patiently,
and try to understand herself and him, prepare him, somehow, for this
preposterous bill headed simply De Blauvelt, Interiors, Paris, New York.

Miss de Blauvelt appeared on the following day to make what proved to
be a final inspection of her handiwork. Lilah, caught unawares, felt
at a disadvantage in the presence of this compact little cosmopolitan.
There was something decidedly challenging in the frivolity of her
beautiful feet and ankles and the whiteness of her hair. She was an
old woman sustained by the success and color of her life. Everything
had been done that could be done by science and art to preserve, make
permanent, her famous slimness, her provocative and ugly features, her
_chic_. The result was not quite human; there were no wrinkles, no
visible signs of age; in the transparent mask of her face, only her
eyes seemed to be alive, black, intelligent and cruel. She never smiled
and Lilah decided that she couldn’t; plastic surgery had deprived her
of animation. She wore a tube-like dress, short in the fashion of the
moment, a turban of dyed metallic cloth and the curious square-toed,
clumsy, strapped slippers affected by the Parisian _mondaine_.

“Well? You like it?” she demanded.

“Very much.”

“You had better let me do your country place before I go back to
France.”

Lilah said decidedly: “Thanks. No.”

“Why not?”

“Your bill was exorbitant.”

Miss de Blauvelt’s eyes came around with a pounce. “Nonsense. I was
more than charitable! If you expected department store economies--”

She broke off. “Surely, you understood--”

“Oh, yes,” Lilah said hurriedly. “But I shan’t undertake another--not
now.”

“You must come to Dinard,” Miss de Blauvelt said in an even voice; “I
live there with two amusing and talented women, a sculptress and a
pianiste. It’s very simple and very beautiful.”

She made an expressive gesture. “This is my last house in America. You
may tell every one so. It will give your interior a peculiar luster and
perhaps reconcile you to the expense.”

And with a nod, she walked quickly out, and across the pavement to her
motor.

       *       *       *       *       *

Lilah spent the rest of the afternoon at her desk adding up a list of
bills, De Blauvelt, Shawhan, plumbers, painters, masons, upholsterers,
warehouses, rugs, electricians, florists, contractors....

She was interrupted by a servant, a new acquisition like everything
else, who said: “Miss Fuller” in a dubious voice as if he were weary
of ushering in tradespeople and nobodies.

Lilah turned with relief. She hated details. She almost ran forward to
meet Grace Fuller, who came into the room unruffled and casual, as she
had entered the flat in Ninth Street.

Lilah forgot the bills in the excitement of displaying her possessions.
And as Grace Fuller followed her from room to room she felt her
enthusiasm mounting. For the first time her dreams seemed to be
concrete, her security certain. Her feet slipped along the rugs with a
luxurious appreciation of their softness. Grace Fuller followed, saying
very little. But then she never did have any enthusiasm. She might be
regretting--poor soul! This warmth and glow, after the room in Ninth
Street, the gas-log, the oak table, the green lamp and her father’s
chair, worn hollow.

“It’s quite like you,” Grace Fuller said. “Purry. I feel stroked
myself. Tea? By all means. I’m dog-tired.... New York all summer--heat
that withered the geraniums on the fire escape! I had to open the
dumb-waiter door for ventilation....”

She lighted a cigarette. “How’s Robert?”

“Awfully well.”

Lilah busied herself with cups and saucers. She did not care to discuss
Robert. But Grace Fuller said: “He hates New York at this time of year.”

“He has his club.”

“Has he?”

“Are you being disagreeable?”

“I don’t think so. I want you to be happy, and it seems to me that you
are doing figure eights around the danger sign.... In November, the
Maine natives go down East for deer. Robert always hunts with his gang
of Perkins and Littlefields and Brewsters. Hasn’t he told you?”

“We have been married less than six months. He wouldn’t leave me,”
Lilah said concisely.

“He would, if you gave him the least little push! He wanted a moose
this year.”

Abruptly, she changed the subject. She told Lilah that she was very
nearly worn out. It seemed to be her fortune to get nothing but
“hopeless cases,” invalids engaged in the long-drawn-out process of
dying by inches. She had had to witness so much poor, human suffering,
to face the mute or the querulous questions of people who “had to
know.” “The ones who suffer most are the ones who want to stay. They
seem to love life. They’re so futile, so pathetic! I’ve listened for
hours to women who could remember every detail of their girlhood--how
pretty they were, and the number of tucks on their graduation dress,
and all about their wedding day: what he said and the cinders on the
honeymoon journey, and how he took the littlest, weeniest bite out of
the lobe of her ear.... They want it all back again! I’m dog-tired,
trying to get it for them. When they die, they give me just the funny,
accusing look that boy in France gave me.”

“Poor Grace.”

“I’d like to nurse an alcoholic case or a pretty actress with the
mumps. Something to amuse me. I don’t understand death. I wish I did.
To put us here, to inform us that our stay is limited, to offer no
proof of immortality--it’s damnable! Animals don’t know, do they?
They’re afraid of being hurt, but do they know, when they’re old enough
to know anything, that some day, no matter how brave and quick they
are, they’ve got to give it all up?”

Lilah twisted her shoulders. “For heaven’s sake, Grace, be cheerful.”

“I can’t. I live in an atmosphere of dread and tip-toeing. Doctors
tip-toeing in and out. Relatives tip-toeing in and out. And the
poor creature on the bed yearning for life! I’m no good any more. A
rebellious nurse had better stop nursing. I’m going to stop, and come
back again when I have found something to offer them.”

Lilah had been turning a new idea over in her mind. Sparring for time,
she said: “You can’t justify death, Grace.”

“I might. I sometimes think it is more justifiable than life.”

“Don’t be bitter.”

“I’m not.” Grace Fuller put her tea-cup down. Her expression was
excited, she flushed and clasped her hands together as she always did
when she felt anything deeply. “It seems such a waste of power. Youth,
with all that energy. A wave of youth rising up in every generation and
spending itself against the facts of life. Why must it be? I remember,
when I was a child, how wonderful it all seemed, fields and clouds,
and wind. Even the seasons were exciting; when the first snow came, I
was in ecstasy, watching the landscape change. Something was always
waiting for me. I never knew, or cared to know what--but if I were to
open my eyes wide or stretch out my hand, there it would be--shining
and glorious, mine!”

She relaxed and sank back, the old cynical look reappearing, as if she
had lost hope again.

“I’m a fool. It happens to everybody.”

Lilah turned quickly and asked: “Would you have been happier with
Robert?”

That slow flush remounted. “No.”

“Then I want you to do something for me. I’m swamped with details,
correspondence, bills, people I don’t want to see and people I must
see. I need some one to help me. Some one, like you, who has a good
telephone voice and decent manners. Will you try it? Please don’t say
no! I hate talking business, but I assure you you won’t lose anything.
You can rent the flat in Ninth Street and come here. Now that the
second floor is finished, you can have our quarters on the third. The
servants are on the fourth.”

Seeing Robert in the doorway, Lilah called to him: “Hello! Just in time
for tea! Grace is going to be my secretary. Isn’t it wonderful?”

Robert took Grace Fuller’s hand and bent down a little to smile at her.
“I’m glad,” he said.

“Then I’ll come,” Grace Fuller answered.

Robert sat down beside Lilah on the narrow French sofa that bulked so
conspicuously as an item in the De Blauvelt account. He seemed heavier
than usual, very pink from his walk across town in a sharp November
wind. His eyes had that untroubled expression which particularly
irritated Lilah because it was an indication of profound inner content.
She did not want him to be contented, to take for granted her love, as
if a gift so inestimable could be accepted easily. Something warned her
to keep her temper; if Grace Fuller were watching for a rift in the
lute she would be disappointed.

She may have made a mistake in asking this waspish woman to live under
the same roof. Strangely enough, the prospect excited her. Without
Grace Fuller, there would be no rebound to life. She could fling her
challenge: “See what I am, what I have become,” at this surface, and
catch, in the deepening irony of the other, her own particular shimmer
and brilliance. Lacking Junius Peabody, who was desirable because he
enjoyed watching Lilah wrestle with destiny, Grace Fuller would be the
necessary audience. To know that she had loved Robert would make Robert
more endurable. Grace would pore over his stamp-albums and condone his
canine complex and perhaps read aloud to him the terrible books he
preferred, murder mysteries and western melodramas: “Nothing like a
crackerjack mystery, Lilah! Now this chap, Jenkins, was locked up in a
house on the Hudson and there was a sort of secret passage leading down
to the river--”

Lilah came back with a start to the unfamiliar outlines of her
drawing-room. Robert was being very genial and talkative. His enameled
boots caught the fire-light. Lilah’s eyes rested on his hands; she
noticed for the first time the breadth and strength of his fingers,
the blond hair on the backs of his hands. Whenever she came in contact
with the physical, she felt revulsion. She would have preferred a
disembodied Robert, or no Robert at all. She turned her eyes away with
a little shiver of apprehension....

When Grace Fuller had gone, Lilah sat for a long time in silence.
Robert lighted a cigarette mounted in a long tortoise-shell holder
with a gold mouth-piece. One hand rested over hers. She wondered what
he was thinking, whether he liked the room, the house, this brand-new
air of expensive perfection. The sound of his breathing, heavy and
regular, was audible above the muffled rumble of traffic in the street.
A servant removed the tea things and drew the shades, kindling lights
here and there on tables and against the paneled walls.

“Do you like it?” she said at last.

Robert moved. His answer came with the usual slow marshaling of facts
and words: “Shall I tell you the truth? I prefer the old house at the
Point.” His hand tightened over hers; she tried to draw her fingers
away, but he held them within his. “I’ve hurt you! But you don’t want
me to be a lap-dog, do you? Must I bark every time you say: ‘Speak,
Fido’?”

“Why didn’t you tell me so in the beginning? did you let me spend all
this money?”

“Because I love you,” he said simply.

“Do you?”

“Very much.”

Lilah hurried to the issue. “I’ve spent thousands and thousands. For
something you hate--”

“I know very little about such matters,” he said. “I left it to you
to re-furnish the house. I expected a certain expense. Ten or twenty
thousand--”

“I’ve spent forty thousand,” Lilah said, trying to keep her voice
steady.

There was a short silence. Robert’s grasp relaxed and she drew her hand
away. Presently he said: “That is a great deal of money, my dear.”

With a flash of temper she answered sharply: “Why didn’t you stop me,
then? Instead of letting me go blindly on, believing that I had your
consent? Was it a trick to trip me up?”

“Lilah!”

“Both you and your grandfather think I married you because I was hard
up and frightened! You’ve made me feel your suspicion. Suppose I had
really loved you--and I tried to make you see that I did--wouldn’t your
doubting me make me self-conscious?”

“Now you’re being nasty.”

She closed her eyes. Shivers of feeling ran through her like currents
of poison. “Nasty! What a primitive word! I’m being frank, if that’s
what you mean.”

“I thought you _did_ love me,” Robert said. “I’m probably
old-fashioned, but I admit that I had an entirely different idea of
love. I’ve read a lot of trash and believed a lot of sentimental
idiocy, perhaps....”

“What, exactly, did you expect?”

He turned. “Lilah! We mustn’t talk like this!”

She insisted: “What did you expect that I haven’t given you?”

He made a gesture of surrender. “If I told you, you’d laugh at me.”

“Do I laugh at you? How unfair you are! You are trying to make me out a
cheat.”

“No. I love you. Only don’t you see--I wanted, and still want,
companionship. You rather took this house out of my hands, didn’t you?
As far as I’m concerned, it might be a hotel. Even if I have rotten
taste, I like a little of it around--in my own room, for instance. Why
not? Am I irrational?” He unclasped his hands and clasped them again
with a slow pressure that whitened his knuckles. “I wanted to plan
things--go over things with you. I didn’t want this woman to buy my
bed--it’s none of her business! I’ve always dreamed of building a home
with the woman I loved and married.... I suppose you’re laughing at me.”

Lilah said nothing. She could not trust her voice.

She felt that her power over him had been shattered. None of the old
tricks would do. She must find new magic, and quickly, if she wanted
him.

“I’m not laughing at you,” she said at last. “If I’ve done wrong, I’ll
do the only thing I can do, under the circumstances; I’ll go.”

“You mean, leave me? Lilah, you’re joking! We’re a grown man and woman
trying to understand each other. I don’t care a damn about that forty
thousand. It’s you I’ve got to get at--and I can’t buy your heart. I’m
not rich enough....”

“That was a very pretty speech, Robert.”

“I didn’t mean it to be. I’m in deadly earnest. I’m not contented with
myself as I am. No one is, perhaps. But my case is extreme. I’m pretty
much of a waster. I waste myself on harmless amusements, but I waste
myself. I thought--I just imagined--it was a damn foolish notion--but I
wanted you to stir me up, get me started at something, make me want to
serve, somewhere, somehow. And when you married me, you dropped me out
entirely--” he spread his hands, “for this.”

He turned to her, his face white and strained. “There shouldn’t be much
of a toss-up between a house and a human being.”

She did not answer, but sat with her body drawn away, her shoulders
hunched, her breath quick and shallow. Her expression was guarded
but she permitted herself a half-smile that was both patient and
contemptuous.

“You’re so damned feminine,” he said. “My mother was like that. She’d
bang doors and sulk. And my father would rap and beg her to come out,
and she wouldn’t. Not for hours, while the rest of us went around with
lead in our hearts, feeling ashamed! When she did open the door, she’d
sort of smile. She was my mother, but I hated her when she did that....”

“What do you want me to say?” Lilah demanded.

“Something honest,” was his surprising answer.

She stood up suddenly. “I won’t stand this any longer. I won’t!”

She did not cry easily, but now she burst suddenly into a storm of
tears. The flood gates of fear and questioning broke; she was swept
away. Through it all, she was aware of the room, of her own attitude
and of Robert, frightened, aghast, repentant, trying to tear her hands
away from her face.

“Don’t cry. Lilah, don’t cry.”

She collapsed against him and he drew her down on his knees. His
unsteady hands caressed her hair. She felt his lips on her neck. She
drew in her breath sharply and the tears stopped; with shut eyes she
remained against his shoulder, motionless. The storm of feeling had
passed, leaving again that curious unreality. Robert was not a part of
experience; he was in her life for some purpose, to carry her forward a
little way. Without discontent there could be no advance. From him, she
would go on, perhaps to love.... But he already felt what she could not
feel, and this involved her because she had given herself. She shivered
and a deep sigh cut through her immobility. His arms tightened. He kept
on whispering, with his lips against her ear, but she heard nothing.

She became conscious again of the large expanse of Aubusson and of
pools of light in which hot-house flowers seemed made of wax, and of
sleek surfaces, smooth contours. Her own slippers, the chiffon across
her knees, were a part of the vision.

Robert was saying: “We mustn’t quarrel. It’s childish. I’ll do any
earthly thing for you.”

With a quick, almost feline motion, she turned in his arms. “Here
goes,” she said to herself.

And very deliberately, purposefully, she kissed him.




V


With that perilous moment bridged, Robert given again his unquestioning
security in her, Lilah began her search for experience, for
satisfaction, for a vague, undetermined happiness. She had for so many
years peered over the wall at the social garden-party, at women in
light dresses and men in polished hats, marionettes, voiceless, yet
animated, infinitely removed--she had imagined so much, given these
people a wholly romantic and unnatural luster--Now she found herself
about to drop into the garden, among them, and her eagerness took
Robert’s breath away. He told himself that he must be patient; when the
novelty had worn off, when Lilah had rubbed elbows with a world already
familiar to him, she, too, would discard it. In the meantime, he tried
to content himself with her rare impulses of affection, hasty caresses,
light kisses that stung his flesh and penetrated to his heart like
thin, precise knife-thrusts. For the most part she met him with banter
and postponement, as if she were skimming over the dark depths of life,
a vivid and elusive skater on silver skates....

He found himself, suddenly, a slave to hope. Some day she would skim
back to him, into the circle made by his love, his arms, and remain
there, safe. But she must first dart here and there, fearless and
foolish, enjoying herself. It became his dubious pleasure to watch,
ready to pull her out if the ice should crack.

Robert was not exactly a fool, although he took no pains to appear
otherwise. What he had seen of the world had landed him back at the
Point again, where, he argued, all the facts of life and death, of love
and hate, were uncomplicated and recognizable. He could not see, he
told Lilah, why experience should acquire anything by multiplication.
You were born, you loved, hated and died. You could do all these
things, and get out of it what there was in it, as well in one place as
in another; nothing was gained by chasing down the horizon--once you
got there, it was the same, love and life, hate and death. He preferred
a limited existence to the accumulated sensations offered by such
cities as New York and Paris. Crowds gave him a mental indigestion.
Ideas, unless they were based on truths, caused him to suffer an
intellectual heart-burn. He was not swift enough to chase the casual
and elusive theories of most modernists, who were content with the
haphazard because no one could pause long enough to argue or to prove.

But he was willing, after that sharp quarrel with Lilah, to experiment.

He made a hurried trip to Maine and shamefacedly kissed his spaniels,
turning back to New York with an assumed eagerness that deceived even
himself. In the train, he left the sleeper for the smoking-car and
sat up all night trying, as he put it, to reduce Lilah to a common
denominator. The secret of her fascination lay in her swift and
inexplicable changes of mood; he waited for favors with a feverish
sort of excitement. It was probably unhealthy, bad for him to be so
buffeted about by feeling, alternately exalted to heaven and left flat,
with a sense of humiliation and shame.

Another type of man might spare himself indignity by letting her see
a certain brutality. But Robert was not so gifted. He could only be
himself.

For her he had abandoned his “drinkin’” and had tried desperately to
part his hair on the side. The green sweater had gone down before her
contempt. In a hundred little ways he tried to re-make, improve, the
outward man; he knew when he bored her, although he was never certain
why he bored her. His enthusiasms were as authentic as hers. But
Lilah was Lilah, and for such a woman he, any man, would attempt the
impossible.

He had wanted a strong, sweet, fearless love, ecstasy and pride and
recognition.

What he had was different, but he could not be sure that he had not
wanted too much. Perhaps all women were like Lilah, and tormented you,
where they should offer their breasts for you to put your head against
and rest, and rest, from life.

       *       *       *       *       *

When Grace Fuller moved in, Robert felt more comfortable. She was a
familiar, understanding sort of woman.

He wondered whether Lilah were justified in calling Grace a deliberate
celibate. He began to study her face, to question his knowledge of
her. She had never enjoyed kissing him, but had always pushed him
away, with an expression almost of fear in her eyes. He couldn’t say
that he had enjoyed it, either; it was too much like forcing her to
his will.... There were times, at night, when Lilah was strange and
emotional, when she pressed against him and ran her fingers up and down
the back of his neck with the caress he liked, and kissed him, quick,
almost furtive kisses; when she relaxed in his arms, suddenly, as if
she were about to surrender, and then was tense again, pushing him
away, turning her face aside....

He couldn’t understand.

Grace left him alone, left his senses alone. She was a good companion
in spite of her sharp tongue. He supposed that all nurses had that same
air of watching out for you, mothering you, seeing that things were
comfortable and orderly. There was no trace in her manner or her look,
of remembering; she let him off, magnificently. He would say that for
her; she was a sport! They began again, as people who have only just
met. And all those meaningless kisses and casual, artificial embraces
were forgotten in their common passion for Lilah.

Lilah became a bond between them. When Robert came in and Lilah was not
at home, he sought Grace and questioned her.

Lilah was fascinating, reckless, just a little terrible and they never
tired of discussing her. She had done this, or that. This one and
that one had telephoned. She had bought a new dress or a new book.
Everything she did startled them, because, once certain of Robert,
Lilah had become more startling, more reckless and more insatiable than
ever.

It was as if she had come into full possession of life without
questioning her right to it. She was not, as far as Robert could see,
happy, but she was, on the other hand, arrogant with fulfillment.
Because she herself had succeeded, she could not help having contempt
for people who had failed.

This amused Robert, but it was also cause for a certain amount of
chagrin, since he saw that his position had been the lever she needed
to lift her out of obscurity. She could never have done it alone.

But because he loved her, he did for her everything she seemed to
require. Before long, she knew every one of importance in Robert’s
world. It was a world limited by necessity to a few hundred souls.
Lilah called them Murray Hill blackbirds. They were, in fact, the old
guard, a thinned-out company of so-called Knickerbockers, New Yorkers
long enough to cherish their few square blocks of sacred soil with a
tenacity that was almost aristocratic.

They gave Lilah critical inspection; her house was less important and
could, in its severe restraint and exact emphasis, be taken for granted.

Flushed, beautiful, excited, Lilah received them. The sleek Aubusson
became the arena of her first social struggle. These people were
fashionable but not modish. For them, sensing their prejudices, Lilah
wore black and was over-careful of her accent. Her Russian atmosphere
was discarded for the occasion, and Robert and Grace were amazed,
embarrassed, by a totally different Lilah, a châtelaine, wistful,
eager and disarming.

Robert was rather proud of the gathering; people like this made him
feel safer about the future; they cemented the cracks in society. He
adored dowdy wealth because it was an indication of permanence, a stand
against the upstart, ’Change. There was something plucky about foulard,
sensible shoes and elaborate whiskers in the Jazz age. While these
people lived, the last cable held. Their names were less impressive now
that their city had become unaware of them. But Lilah seemed to enjoy
juggling these rather musty titles. Robert didn’t know it, but she was,
consciously, laying a foundation down. She would stand, eventually, not
upon the quicksand of new, untried, if glamorous names, but upon the
veritable, bed-rock Manhattanese.

Afterwards, to Grace and Robert, she was explicit: “What fearful bores!
All of them, except Mrs. Humphrey-hyphen-whatever-her-name-is.... The
red-headed one.”

“She goes everywhere,” Robert explained, “and is invited nowhere. She
_was_ glorious, thirty years ago.”

“She is now.”

“She’s a bad egg,” Robert said.

“What do you mean, exactly?”

“Oh, she left her husband, and lived with a chap--some one--I’ve
forgotten.... She’s quite purple.”

Lilah laughed. “I’d die if I had to know these people.... I liked your
purple one. She was human. The rest ... _blackbirds_!”

She was being Russian again.... While the new servant, placated by the
announcement of so many celebrated blackbirds, removed the tea tables
and gathered up cups and saucers, Lilah disposed of Robert’s friends
with a tirade of pointed witticisms. She could afford to laugh at them
because now, she knew, she could subjugate them. All she had to do was
to snub the purple lady, entertain discreetly, grow old, and die. In
ten years she would look just like the rest of them--ground-grippers
and a pince-nez, a maribou boa, a bit of real lace, amethysts and
rheumatism in her finger-joints.... She preferred more difficult
attainment....

Suddenly she went to the piano and, still smoking, played a rakish
accompaniment to a French song.

“_Je sais que c’est une folie!_”

Robert and Grace Fuller turned about in their chairs and listened. She
seemed to be unaware of them. With her head thrown back, the cigarette
aslant, she sang in a light, high voice, a little song about madness
and youth and _la tendresse_ and, meltingly, _l’amour_.

       *       *       *       *       *

From this little occasion, Lilah stepped off into New York. There were,
she discovered, no barriers raised against a pretty, witty and wealthy
woman. She had all the ingredients to make a very potent brew.

In the beginning, Robert was always at her elbow, puzzled, but
stimulated in exact proportion to her own pleasure. New York was not
“dry” and before long Robert was drinking again with that boastful
abandonment characteristic of prohibition. Everywhere there was gin,
and according to the social scale, it was either genuine, or frankly
synthetic. Lilah drank for the first time in her life, steadily,
carelessly. She explained to Robert that there was no other way to
“fizz” at dinner or to hold off fatigue. And, happening to discover a
substantial supply of good wines and whisky in the cellar of the Murray
Hill house, she wrote to Junius Peabody and obtained his somewhat
satirical permission to uncork all but the rarest vintages. Those,
he explained, belonged to his “heirs” and were to be handed down as
historical evidence. Lilah must consider, take pity on the parched
palates of her sons....

Lilah tossed the letter into the fire. She did not intend that there
should be sons. She was infected by the casuistry of the age, a
total lack of interest in the coming generation. Behind men’s lives
there was no longer any sustaining idealism, any heroic faith in an
unbroken purpose. The war had severed a link in the chain of passions,
spiritual, national and racial. The day, the needs and fulfillments of
the day, sufficed.

Robert could find nothing to refute her claim that the war had made
morality ridiculous and had stripped adolescent humanity of its
illusions. Everywhere, in both men and women, he encountered the
cynicism that goes, usually, with embittered old age, with failure and
disappointment. People were reckless because the moral skids were off;
there was a gay determination, everywhere evident, to meet disaster
as gayly as possible. But this was not heroic; it was cowardly, and
Robert found himself despising the times he lived in.

As usual, he was not expressive. Something about his physical pinkness
and blondness, his air of being extremely well-fed and well-brushed,
held him back from complaining. Lilah might be right. Certainly, there
was no evidence of spirituality, of change.

       *       *       *       *       *

New York was dancing-mad, in a mood essentially unlike the madness
of Nineteen-Fourteen, when blind satiety had twirled on the lid of a
seething volcano. This madness was sophisticated and purposeful. The
Argentine tango had given way to the primitive rhythms of Africa and
Maylasia, a brutal tom-toming, savagery stalking progress through a
maze of the senses. There were very few private dances. Robert could
remember the day of the cotillion leader, Ward McAllister’s reign. Now,
society patronized the commercial dance-halls or the exclusive “clubs”
given over to all-night dancing, in defiance of a closing law which
arbitrarily separated jazzing couples at one in the morning. There were
few formal occasions; hostesses relied upon haphazard dinner-parties, a
box at the theater or the opera, and the confused, prismatic, exciting
contact afterwards.

Lilah danced beautifully, without a trace of vulgarity, but Robert
objected to the frank enticement of her gowns that displayed her flesh
to the casual observer. She answered that he belonged in the Dark Ages;
no one paid any attention to backs and arms; the sight was too usual.
Fashion had freed women because women had first freed themselves.
They were too frankly undressed to be alluring, and men ought to be
grateful; nudity rid them of obscene imaginings.

Robert was not certain that women’s clothes were a symbol of masculine
indifference. Lilah might be right; she was infinitely more clever than
he, and besides she said things with a conviction, a finality, that
floored him. It is hard to contradict a woman you love. He had his
reservations.

They rarely dined at home. As the winter progressed, their program
of pleasure became more complicated. The details were left to Grace
Fuller, who sat at a desk the better part of every day, answering
the telephone and attending to Lilah’s correspondence. An avalanche
of people had swept Robert’s handful of Murray Hill blackbirds out
of the picture. It had been but a step from these conservatives to
their children, the reckless generation that had outlived but had not
out-thought the war; and from them to the professionals, a little world
of hard, bright, amazingly talented modernists, racially nondescript,
intellectually polyglot, artistically indeterminate.

Robert encountered too many enthusiasms to have much faith in a
standard of taste. A sort of united press-agentry conspired to prove
that there was an American art. Painstakingly, Robert sought what Lilah
declared already existed, and he failed to find it. He found, instead,
a horde of facile, astonishing copyists. The extremists irritated him
because they struck him as being too lazy to study. Further than that,
he refused to express himself.

For several months he followed wherever Lilah led. Then it became
an easy matter to excuse himself. He did not dance, and the rôle of
caryatid to the striped awning at the Palais Royal was proving irksome.
Conversation, he insisted, had been annihilated by those jungle noises
produced by the saxophone, the oboe, the violin, the piano and the
bass-drum. He was not capable of feeling the necessary emotion; he
preferred staying at home to holding a half-dozen strange and hectic
women in his arms.

“By all means, stay,” Lilah said agreeably. She kissed him on the top
of his head and went out, wrapped in a voluminous coat of gold cloth,
from which her face emerged, powdered, delicately rouged, like the face
of a bisque figurine.

Her mistiness had taken on a certain sharp and defined quality; she
was more accentuated, less shadowy. The petulant droop of her lips
was pronounced; her eyes were larger and more brilliant--they sought
admiration frankly, if disdainfully, and gave nothing in return.

Robert went to his easy chair with a sense of having been left flat. He
expected at least a show of protest, of regret.

Grace Fuller was at work, in the library; he heard the click of her
typewriter. He might go to her. Damn it, why not? She might be able to
tell him what Lilah had meant when she said, “By all means, stay.”

He climbed the stairs slowly, puffing his cigar. He was, he realized,
very tired. Pleasure exhausted him because he didn’t believe in it. To
Lilah, it had all the luster of a Cause.

Grace Fuller glanced up.

“Not going?”

“Not going.”

“Why?”

Robert said lightly: “I’m fagged. Old age, I suppose.”

She pushed the machine away and sat staring at him with an expression
which made him vaguely uncomfortable.

“What did Lilah say?”

Robert laughed: “She invited me by all means to suit myself.”

“You made a mistake. Why didn’t you tell her how tired you are and make
her stay at home?”

“I can’t _make_ Lilah do anything.”

“I wouldn’t admit it, if I were you.”

“Why not? She is undisciplined, but I would be the last one to try to
curb her.”

“It’s too late, Robert. Lilah has taken the bit. She’s running away
from you.”

With a pang of irritable fear, Robert said sharply: “Nonsense.”

Grace Fuller jerked the typewriter forward again and struck at the keys
with her long, cool fingers. Her mouth had hardened; her eyes were
obstinate. “Very well,” she said.

“See here, Grace. Don’t exaggerate! Lilah’s excited. She has never
seen life. She isn’t stale. And you and I are.... She’ll get over it.
There’s good in her.”

“It isn’t ‘bad’ to love life,” Grace answered. “I am only suggesting
that it is bad for you.”

“I can stand it.”

Grace Fuller gathered together her day’s work with deliberate gestures,
sheaves of gray note-paper heavily embossed with the Thirty-eighth
Street address in the English fashion, square envelopes, checks and
receipted bills. Then she rose and stood for a moment looking down at
Robert.

“I’m really very happy, Grace,” he said, on his guard against something
in her expression.

“I’m awfully glad,” she said finally, “to hear that.”

She turned to leave the room, but Robert spoke quickly: “Don’t go. I
want to talk to you....” He hesitated, and then said awkwardly, “about
yourself.”

“Myself?” Grace Fuller hesitated, flushing. “Please don’t.”

But she came back, and sank with a deep sigh, a sudden, almost pathetic
relaxation, into a chair before the fire. Robert had never seen her
looking so positively ugly; the guards were down; her distinction
had given way to the essential woman, a creature defeated by her own
disbelief. It was shocking, and to Robert, humiliating. He turned his
eyes away.

“Don’t talk about me,” Grace said. “I prefer to be left in my own
Nirvana of self-forgetfulness. I have conquered ambition and regret,
and you’re sorry for me! You ought to congratulate me....”

She caught her breath sharply. “How well that sounded! I almost
convinced myself....” She smiled crookedly at him, with a funny little
grimace. “You can’t get Nirvana without surrendering. I suppose there’s
some primal bug of hope in my system; I still cherish the unattainable.
I wish I had had the courage to fling myself away, as nuns do. What
peace! To believe ... I can’t.... Here I am, talking about myself....”

“There ought to be some way,” Robert said, “to live in the world
and like it. I used to. At one time I had things reduced to pretty
simple terms. Lilah has shaken me out of my security. She is like a
humming-bird, or something swift and alive. You’re right--she has left
me behind! My own world is stale, and hers is beyond my comprehension.
Those darts and flights and quick stabs at things.... When a man gets
to be my age, he wants to stand on a sort of hill and look off at his
future. I’m too old to be puffing up the nether side. Frankly, I don’t
know where Lilah is leading me, or whether, if I ever over-take her,
I shall see anything beyond. Have I said too much? This isn’t in the
nature of a confession. I’m not disgruntled. Only I thought that you
might....”

Grace interrupted: “I can’t analyze her. She dazzles me. For all I
know she is shallow water, but I am more inclined to think that she
is beyond our depth, yours and mine. We’re making rather fools of
ourselves trying to reach her and drag her up to our level into the
common light of day. I adore her. She is the only human being I’ve ever
known I could believe in, because she is absolutely honest.”

“Then why--” Robert began.

“Because you’ll never understand her! Dear old Robert. You’re a
brownstone-front and Lilah is an English basement. You’ve inherited all
the prejudices and social quaverings of the ’Eighties. Lilah is--I wish
there were a superlative for the word modern; would it be futurist? She
has bolted into a new generation, with all its recklessness and daring
and passion for facts. She likes things as they are, raw and naked. And
that makes her saner than you and me, and safer.”

“I’m not sure that you’re right,” Robert said after a moment. “I think
Lilah dodges reality. And what I’m afraid of is that the facts will
spring out from ambush and hurt her terribly. I don’t want her hurt!
There’s something ... at times ... like a willful child....” His
expression changed. He became unaware of Grace Fuller’s watchfulness.
“I have failed to show her anything.”

       *       *       *       *       *

When Lilah came in at two o’clock, she found them still together, in
the library filmed with the smoke of cigars and cigarettes and before a
fire that had burned out.

She crossed the room swiftly, letting her gold cloak slip away from
her as the petals of a flower fold back from a slender stamen. She
was dressed in pollen yellow with amber ornaments; barbaric ear-rings
brushed her shoulders. She wore no rings, not liking them; her wedding
ring had been discarded an hour after her wedding.

“Hello! Still awake? I thought you were sleepy, Robert! Who has a
cigarette? I came back before I wanted to because I had twinges of
conscience. I thought afterwards, that you might be ill. It was foolish
of me. I made apologies to the Sinclairs and painted a terrible
picture--Robert with a fever. They wanted me to go on to the Club,
so I went. Reluctantly! Now don’t you both feel silly? I danced with
Heifetz. He has eyes like agates set in satin cushions. He dances
divinely, but I was afraid he might scratch one of his famous hands
on this girdle of mine--the beads are so sharp. He thought me quite
Austrian, not French. He is coming here with that American violinist
who made such a hit in Rome and has married a pretty American girl
when he had a choice of titles and millions. It was really awfully
amusing. Poiret was there, looking us over. He is rather like a
Bedouin--Barker’s Constantine Madras. He thinks American women
potential; but they lack something the French have. Now you know, both
of you, that we don’t know how to wear hats; if we’re picturesque,
we’re not _chic_, and if we’re _chic_, we’re not picturesque. I’m
sick and tired of hearing about Cécile Sorel. Poiret raved, too, and
there was a little Roumanian attaché from Washington who declared
that she is the most beautiful woman in the world. I can’t see it.
She has a wonderful neck, but that mouth! And there’s nothing subtle
about flamingo-pink ostrich feathers in a Roman helmet made out of
rhinestones. Bordoni is lovelier; she has the most provocative feet
in the world. Heifetz likes olive women with eyebrows ... at least,
I think so--he danced with one and his expression was like the last
movement of Debussy’s _L’Après-Midi d’un Faune_.... Another cigarette,
Robert. Aren’t you two being rather glum? What have you been talking
about? Me, of course! I suppose you dished me up from soup to nuts.
Is there anything left of me? Do you like me? I’m a trusting soul, to
leave you together! Not a servant in sight and you two marooned in the
library, picking my mortal bones....”

She perched on the arm of Robert’s chair and the cloak fell to the
floor. She was as alive, as vivacious, as if the night were only begun.
She had an imperishable luster, a surface brilliance that was beginning
to harden, like the skin of a pearl....

       *       *       *       *       *

Lilah dreaded the approach of Spring. Summer meant the Point, where she
had no one to stand between Robert and herself except Junius. There
had been no appreciable abatement of the New York season; very few
people had gone South, since all eyes were turning again toward Europe.
Lilah suggested Paris to Robert, but he was, for once, determined. He
expected her to go with him, in June, to Maine.

Lilah had been launched with a certain momentum; now she could not
stop. She ran from one important pleasure to another. Her time was
taken up by the meaningless activities of the young married set, the
débutantes of an immediate yesterday who were now tasting freedom and
a characteristic dissipation; marriage seemed to be not a bondage but
an excuse for license; the manners, and the casual morality of these
matrons were the result, they said, of the War. Most of them had
married in a hurry, but there were no signs of leisurely repentance;
rather, divorce was spoken of across the dinner-table and accomplished
after breakfast. Speech was reckless, profane and satirical; there was
nothing left to be shocked at because everything had been said. Love
was always possible, but never probable unless tinged, at least, with
the illicit. Concessions were made to any one who had “a line,” and
lapses from social grace were condoned and even glorified.

There was, Lilah discovered, a code, astonishing to the older
generation. But this had always been so. The difference lay, not in the
code itself, but in the mental condition that had produced it. This
generation had been hurled against the bayonets, into the mud-pits and
stench holes, the heroisms and pitiless defeats of war. Brought up to
believe in progress, in their own infallibility and triumph, they had,
in adolescence, been stripped of their most inestimable faith. It was
natural that they should scorn both their teachers and the untruth
they had been fed, as with a spoon. They made their own deductions;
impatient, ironic, and without sentiment, they raced forward.

The men were more balanced than the women; a preponderance of
serious-minded men were intent on finding out something, no matter
what. Lilah listened to much bitter speculation. While they speculated,
they either drank or danced or, without emotion, experimented in the
flesh.

Lilah met some strange fish. There were times when her over-stimulated
mind refused to accept impressions and she saw faces swimming,
floating, snatched away, reappearing, like the fantastic denizens of
an aquarium. The city required that a woman should appear impervious
to fatigue; Lilah fell into the luxurious habit of having her tired
face “patted” into lines of animation at so much an hour. Tilted back
in a combination barber-chair and operating table, she gave herself
up to the fingers of a beauty specialist. Lilah submitted to hours
of manipulation; her face was smothered in clay masks, packed in
ice, slapped, pinched, and stroked. These were her only moments of
relaxation. At the mercy of the expert, her body rested, her mind swam
in and out of the mazes. At her side, upon a highly antiseptic glass
table, bottles and jars contained the supposedly mysterious ingredients
of youth; Lilah believed in their advertised potency. Lulled by the
touch of soothing fingers and the odor of creams, lotions, tonics,
herbs, sachets, rouges and powders, Lilah spent hours in these brocaded
salons. Other hours, fixed appointments rigorously kept, were spent at
the hairdressers’, where, before a triple mirror, beneath a cluster
of lights, her vanity was fed by a mannered Frenchman who wielded the
Marcel irons with a sort of tenderness. Her hands, surrendered to
a pale girl in black, became smooth and pointed, tinted, polished.
She enjoyed the odor of this establishment--a combination of violet
brilliantine, singed hair and a Gallic thrift.

Early in February her life took a strange turn. She went around a
corner into a new street.

       *       *       *       *       *

She had been invited, significantly, without Robert. May Sinclair
thought Robert a wet-blanket and had said: “Come alone. It’s going to
be a bit wild. Robert wouldn’t understand. Give him his slippers and
leave him at home.”

The Sinclairs lived in a Park Avenue apartment, fifteen stories above
ground. A columbarium maze of small rooms had been transformed, by a
judicious knocking out of walls, into a stately salon. Upon this lofty
shelf Mrs. Sinclair lived and entertained, in the fashion of modern New
York, any one who amused her.

Lilah found the company already there. A man sat at the piano,
improvising. She recognized Montague Wilder and his inevitable tumbler
of whisky. He couldn’t play, he said, unless he was thoroughly drunk.
Then he played divinely. He looked up as Lilah came in and, not
pausing, called: “Lilah! Lovely Lilah! Dance for us! This is a waltz on
a poem by von Hofmanstahl. Listen! Isn’t it lovely? Dance. Something
Viennese! Cupids and garlands, hoops and little waists....”

Lilah lifted her arms. Suddenly she felt very gay and triumphant. She
was conscious of people sitting in the shadowy corners of the room,
watching her. She began to waltz. The little square of cloth that did
for a train got between her feet and she caught it up, exposing her
ankles to the frank admiration of her audience. No one said anything.
This was the lazy after-dinner hour before vivacity had worked its way
to the surface. Later, every one would talk at once.

Lilah said breathlessly: “Mrs. Vernon Castle!” And waltzed into the
arms of Chivers Chew, who was the only man in the room on his feet.
They whirled for a minute (Chew danced abominably) and then Lilah sat
down beside Wilder. “That was wonderful, Montague. But play something
serious. Chopin.”

“For God’s sake, Montague, cut it out,” Chew complained. “I’m blue
enough.”

“Use your mind,” some one advised. “You can do anything with your mind.”

Montague Wilder improvised on the theme “Kalua.” Glittering scales
ornamented the melody; he took it by the hand and led it into the
Debussy half-tones, so that the South Sea ragtime tune became a wistful
French song, a thing of strangeness and nuance. His left hand reached
for the whisky glass without seeming to know what his right hand did,
but there was no break in the invention of technical feats. Through
this dissonance and unexpected harmony the familiar melody seemed
classical, important. “You’re wickedly clever,” Lilah said.

“Wait until I’ve had a quart,” he answered. “I’ll play the D-flat waltz
in thirds. Rosenthal could do it, but no one else ever has.”

“Who’s here?” Lilah asked.

“Oh, the Heywoods. Pound, the shipbuilder. He’s middle-class English.
‘The wife’ is with him and she’s worse. Carey; the Hawaiian Carey. Miss
Wagner--pronounced with a wag. Putnam Flagg and a girl from San Diego
who writes. May has never drawn such a hand--aces and eights! Why are
_we_ here?”

“Who is Putnam Flagg?” Lilah interrupted.

“I don’t know.”

“What is May going to do with us?”

“The opera. Then back here. And then talk, until morning.”

“Talk?”

May Sinclair unfolded and rose from a long sofa upholstered in taupe
velvet. “Come on! ‘Butterfly’!”

“‘Butterfly’! Good God,” Wilder groaned.

“Let’s stay here and play, you and I,” Lilah whispered.

“No, you don’t!” May Sinclair’s clear, high voice came between them.
“Drink that whisky, Montague, and bring Lilah! Farrar’s singing.”

“Worse and worse,” Montague Wilder said. But he rose, and Lilah found
her wrap.

In the elevator she brushed shoulders with a tall man who stared at
her down his nose. May Sinclair never introduced any one. This, Lilah
supposed, was Putnam Flagg. Afterwards, long afterwards, it used to
amuse her to think of their meeting in a stuffy little elevator that
slid down fifteen stories while they stared at each other.

He had a curious, rather flat nose, eyes like an animal and the
beautifully modeled full mouth of a satyr.

They did not speak, but Lilah thought: “I hope May will let him come
with me.”

The Sinclair motor waited at the curb, and Lilah hung back, pretending
to adjust the collar of her wrap. She heard Mrs. Sinclair call:
“Lilah! Lilah!” With a flurry, the writer from San Diego and the
elder Carey embarked, the Englishman and his wife followed and the
attendant, closing the door of the limousine, signaled for Lilah’s
little brougham.... She was to have the tall man and Montague Wilder to
herself.

She beckoned to them; the car slipped into the stream of downtown
traffic upon the heels of May Sinclair’s crowded chariot, and again she
became conscious of the pressure of her shoulder against his.

“I am Mrs. Peabody,” she explained.

“Major Flagg,” he answered briefly.

They did not speak again until a skillful and precarious landing had
been made before the Opera. It was Montague Wilder’s monologue. He
complained on the way across town that opera in New York was debased,
a commercial side-show. There were no voices worth mentioning. No one
below the peanut heaven knew anything about music; tradition was lost
on the balance of the house, and therefore the singers played fast and
loose with the scores. He had heard a distinguished prima donna cheat
three times in one evening, substituting a b flat for a high c to the
rage and mortification of Moranzoni; but the audience was unaware, so
why bother to sing? Galli flatted to her heart’s content. Now that
Caruso was gone, there was no one. No one, that is, save Diaz, who was
permitted to sing once or twice a season--it was worth going a thousand
miles to hear him do the prologue of the “Coq d’Or” and the rag-picker
in “Louise.”

But who could sing “Depuis le Jour” since Mary had gone to Chicago?
Jeritza would snuff out like a rocket, in two years, or less. She was
too damned Teutonic....

In the lobby, May Sinclair gathered her aces and eights and led them
around the red velvet corridors to her box. She was a tall, blonde,
long-waisted woman who had reduced from two hundred to one hundred and
thirty-five pounds in less than a year and had had a sort of personal
renaissance, a rebirth. From a fat placidity, a dowdy gentleness, she
had entered upon a willowy emotionalism; she was enormously interested
in what she had, for years, surrendered because of her sense of the
fitness of things. She was experimenting; it was no longer ridiculous
to experiment. She was forty but she was not fat.

Butterfly’s relatives were retreating before a matter-of-fact
Pinkerton, sung by Martinelli. Farrar, in a nasturtium-red kimono with
a metallic obi, her blue-black hair a pinwheel of lacquered ornaments,
crouched before an artificial cherry tree in the fullness of unnatural
blossoming. Lilah saw the stage, a pool of light, and the two small
gesticulating figures, across the shoulders of Mrs. Sinclair and the
writer from San Diego. That music, melting, propitiating, assailed her,
like a personal appeal. _Bimba, dagli occhi pieni di malia--_

If Martinelli would only cut his hair....

The house was not crowded, but, as always, the boxes made a show--poor
relatives of the holders, or relatives of the poor relatives, or music
teachers, or God knows who.... Lilah had not heard “Butterfly” often
enough to be bored. But Montague Wilder had curled up in the ante-room
and had gone sound asleep.

Suddenly Lilah’s eyes turned to Major Flagg. She had wanted him to be
watching her, and he was. Their eyes held. It was a game. His eyes
were unwavering and yet something kept flickering in them; it was as
if a shutter opened and closed. Whenever she was about to leap into
his eyes, he shut her out. More than anything she had ever wanted, she
wanted to get by that barrier, whatever it was, into his eyes. Once
inside, she could conquer him, but never so long as he kept her out.

She had not spoken to him except to say that she was Mrs. Peabody and
to receive his polite but noncommittal answer.

He was winning the game....

Lilah shrugged her shoulders and turned back to the stage, where
Pinkerton, feeling carefully behind him for the steps, drew Butterfly
into the _dolce dimora_. Farrar, abandoned, Carmen in a kimono, swayed
forward, lost in ecstasy; her feet, in gold lacquer sandals, mounted
the steps, slowly, slowly, as her head tilted back to that kiss on the
threshold....

“Oh, God,” Montague Wilder said, sitting up, disheveled and sleepy.
“Puccini! Lilah--let’s go back and drink more of May’s Scotch.”

She shook her head.

It was no use pretending they had not looked at each other like that.

In the corridor, pacing up and down with Mrs. Sinclair, who couldn’t
find any one to smile at because it was a parade of “loans,” Lilah
heard in snatches that Putnam Flagg was “queer,” that he had “ideas.”
He had been gassed and had a bad heart. It made Mrs. Sinclair jumpy
because at any moment he might faint.

“Talk to him, Lilah, I can’t.” Mrs. Sinclair caught sight of old
“Rosie” Jackson and shed Lilah.

Lilah found herself at Flagg’s side. He was too tall. She felt little
and silly. But more than that she was excited, a dangerous, unfamiliar
excitement. She could not explain it, then, or later. He spoke of the
opera. He liked it. He liked Farrar. “Because she is alive. A woman
like that....”

“Well?”

“Magnificent! Not quite feminine.”

“Do you know her?”

“No. I shouldn’t want to.”

“Why?”

“I hate finding sawdust in dolls.”

“Perhaps you wouldn’t.”

“I might.” He smiled down at her. “And then I’d have one less
enthusiasm. I can’t do with too few! It’s lonely enough as it is. Rows
of ’em, prone, with the sawdust spilling out of their heads! Leave me
Farrar, please.”

After a moment he said: “This is the first opera I’ve heard in five
years. I’ve been in New Mexico for two years. Before that, in France, I
didn’t care to go. I hope Mrs. Sinclair won’t leave early. I want to be
in at the death.”

“Montague Wilder would consider you very unsophisticated. He laughs at
Puccini, or, as you know, he goes to sleep.”

Flagg seemed for a moment to consider. “I don’t dare to laugh at
things,” he said presently. “It’s dangerous. You begin by laughing at
your pet little detestations and you wind up by losing your big faiths.
It doesn’t pay to be too fastidious.”

“Doesn’t it?” Lilah said lightly.

He shut her out again. As if embarrassed by having made a confidence,
he turned his head away. People were staring at them and Lilah wondered
whether she had been recognized. Her photograph, taken by a flattering
man of title against a background of Florentine brocade, had been
published broadcast in those magazines whose business it is to foster
the idea that an American society really exists. Lilah had discovered
that it is not altogether easy to get yourself advertised, even though
you happened to be Mrs. Robert Peabody. But she had taken this hurdle,
as she took all of them, with alacrity, and it was therefore not
improbable that this strolling crowd stared at her for the reason that
the American crowd loves its celebrity as the Englishman loves his
duke. Ordinarily, she would have been content to enjoy the flattery
implied by this attention alone, but to-night her pleasure was doubled
because she particularly wanted this man to be aware of her. He could
scarcely be unaware that she was attracting attention.

At the box door, Mrs. Sinclair waited with the air of being about to
sweep them into a net. “We’re going on to the Rendezvous after the
second act. Montague’s fearfully bored and Carey has a Gilda Gray
complex. I hope you won’t mind, you two.”

Flagg made a polite if not enthusiastic gesture and Lilah, catching his
eyes deliberately, permitted her own to say: “I’m sorry, for your sake.”

As they entered the box, he remarked simply: “I have a rotten heart and
can’t dance.... Who is Gilda Gray?”

“She is a lovely, initiated, transplanted savage,” Lilah explained,
“who dances the hula-hula on Forty-fourth Street.”

Again their eyes held. The lights dimmed; with a sigh, a rustle, the
great audience faced again the glowing proscenium. Lilah had a curious
sensation of being isolated, alone, in a crowded emptiness, with this
man. Life, for the moment, was immeasurably suspended. There was a
dignity, a beauty about the impending, the imminent disaster. She would
love this man. She could not help herself. She paused, amazed, before
the strangeness and the splendor of that recognition. The moment
prolonged itself, until, in the fixed and intense meeting of their
eyes there was mutual declaration. It seemed that they must sit thus,
strangers, in a shadowy balcony above a pool of music, forever....




VI


When Lilah returned to the Thirty-eighth Street house, late that night,
it was her inclination to avoid any encounter with Robert. She hoped
that he had fallen asleep. Dismissing the servant, Lilah entered the
electric elevator, another of De Blauvelt’s innovations, and got out on
the second floor. The door was noisy and as she turned toward her room
she saw a light flash on in Robert’s room across the hall. He called:
“Lilah?”

“Yes,” she said, and paused, holding her breath. She ought to go in.
But she could not. She felt that her excitement had written itself on
her face and she hated to invent reasons for that animation. She wanted
most of all to be alone and to see herself, clearly, before she went
further. Robert might surprise her into saying something before she was
ready.

“I’m tired,” she called out. “Good night!”

She locked herself into her room, suddenly determined to have her
way. She must deal with this new feeling before anything happened to
diminish it, to mar its shining beauty. Robert expected to be kissed;
it was a part of the utterly stupid and peremptory rite of marriage,
devoid of spontaneous affection or of that emotion which is led up to,
prepared, by word and touch. Why did he insist, when he knew that it
was a conventional gesture and could lead to nothing, create nothing,
change nothing? She heard his hand sliding over the panels of the door,
and again he called: “Lilah?”

She saw herself reflected in all the mirrors in an attitude of disgust
and rebellion and she was struck by her loneliness. No one could help
her. This was a primitive feeling, so powerful that it was all she
could do not to hurl her dismissal at the closed door. What, in a man
she loved, would have been lovable, in Robert was revolting.

“Go away,” she said in a low voice.

At once he was silent, as if she had struck him dead. She listened for
the sound of his retreating footsteps, but she could hear nothing. He
must have gone swiftly, silently; or else was still standing there, his
hand suspended, his gesture arrested by something final in her voice.

She spoke again: “I’m very tired.”

There was no answer. And slowly she undressed, trembling as if there
had been an actual disaster.

She slipped into bed and switched off the light. The silence of the
room was permeated by a low and continuous sound, a distant mingling of
voices, victorious, hopeless, a vast, removed dissonance.... The city.

She got up again and kneeled by an open window. There, the sound took
form, was less terrifying. The street, beneath a moon at the full,
was empty, like a street in a nightmare. Office buildings were like
pyramids in a forest of pyramids, inscrutable, lifeless. And one
tower, higher than the rest, was pierced by a loggia, rimmed with
moonlight, romantic.

She tried to piece together the fragmentary happenings of that
evening. The idea came to her that perhaps she had over-estimated
Flagg’s interest; her own had been immediate, sharp, an emotion more
penetrating than anything she had experienced. The meeting had upset
her whole philosophy of conduct; she had thought herself safe within
the defined circle of her material desires; her inner self, what
idealists were pleased to call her soul, she had believed secure
against temptation; beauty, in things, was to have been enough. And now
she saw, dimly, that she had stepped outside the circle into a strange
territory where beauty, to be beauty at all, must be of the spirit.

She recalled their silence in the motor, the brief contact of
shoulders, an ostentatious indifference when, seated at the Rendezvous,
their interest had either to disguise itself or be subjected to remark.
Flagg had not danced, but Lilah did, because it was expected of her.
The writer from San Diego claimed Flagg. She was witty and tangibly
human, a woman, Lilah decided, in daylight. Broad of feature, with
a tanned skin and careless braids of thick brown hair, she had an
enviable indifference to what men thought of her which assured her
their instant, delighted attention. Whenever Flagg laughed Lilah’s
heart contracted with something like hate. She had thought herself
incapable of jealousy. What she felt was worse than jealousy; it was a
primitive, an atrocious suffering. She had gone on dancing, smiling,
but her eyes had sought Flagg again and again, had sought, across
the crowded room blue with smoke and dust, confirmation of something
she had only glimpsed and might have imagined--his head, the short,
smooth hair, his features, his expression of humorous, sensitive
understanding. He leaned a little sideways, to catch the ironic
comments of the sun-burned lady from San Diego, but his eyes never
failed to meet Lilah’s, to let her in a little way and then, abruptly,
to shut her out....

Once, she had found herself alone at the table with him.

“You have shown yourself to me,” he said abruptly in a lowered voice,
staring away from her at the crowd. “Perhaps because of something in
me or because of something that has happened to make you careless. No.
Don’t interrupt. You are right. We are not alike but we are different
enough to be dangerous to each other. I am going to be frank with you.
Nothing could have flattered me more than your being aware of me, for
now I know that something I thought had died in me is still alive. But
I can’t be what you might want me to be. I can’t play any game but my
own. You see, I have chosen to stay alive at the expense of my old
enthusiasms--and failings. I have only a margin of life. Like that chap
of Conrad’s, I have an enemy in my breast. I must be watchful and I
must feel nothing. And here you are, commanding me to feel. I haven’t
any existence of my own. I am dedicated to my unstable heart, fending
off reality to spare myself a damnable pain that makes me red in the
face, sick, unconscious.... I haven’t any life of my own. I am as dead
as dust. I am a man who buys life, day by day, simply by sparing his
heart.... Love is selfish.... If I love you, it will be selfishly. I
warn you. I have no desire to play the game of hide-and-seek, to dodge
jealous husbands. I haven’t anything to offer you--either money or
feeling or security.”

Lilah had said quickly: “Thank you! You are very explicit.”

A momentary fear passed to leave her trembling. She realized that while
he was speaking she had lost all sense of the crowding dancers, the
barbaric throb of the music, their publicity. She put up her hand to
hide what she knew must be an expression of utter rage.

“Even to-day,” she began, in an unsteady voice, “when anything is
permitted--you dare--I don’t understand--”

Suddenly he turned and looked at her. “Even to-day preliminary
skirmishes are ridiculous. I beg your pardon. I took it for granted
that you were experienced enough to hear the truth.”

They were interrupted by Chivers Chew who bore Lilah away without
the formality of an apology to Flagg; he rose and let Lilah go with
the conventional reluctance. In Chew’s arms, held too close, Lilah
suffered panic. She had no idea what Flagg had meant; whether he had
laughed at her or whether, without question, he wanted her. Whatever
he had intended, one thing was certain, the feeling she had wanted
to avoid was being thrust upon her. The immediate future held a great
selfishness or a great daring. This feeling was bound to assert itself
or destroy her. She could not be certain that it was, in the romantic
sense, love.

She could not, even now, be certain; kneeling in the open window with
her blank gaze on the city, she wondered....

They had not spoken again. She might not see him, ever. But that was
impossible! She had left the party, at one o’clock, to come home alone.
Her coming had been in the nature of a flight, an escape from an
intangible danger, a fatal, desirable, disastrous happiness....

She rose, with a sudden impulse to go back.... They would be at May
Sinclair’s apartment, talking, drinking, until dawn....

She switched on the electric light again. Her cloak lay across a chair.
She threw it over her shoulders, thrust her bare feet into the slippers
that lay where she had kicked them off and opened the door.

Robert was standing outside, his face curiously puckered. “Where on
earth are you going?” he demanded.

Lilah said furiously: “Why on earth are you listening at my door?”

“I wasn’t listening.”

He lifted his arms. “I forgot. You spoke to me.... I was waiting....
Well, by God, I was a fool!”

Lilah closed the door. Her teeth were chattering. She flung the wrap
aside. “Go away. Go away,” she said. “Go away.”

       *       *       *       *       *

It seemed of sudden, vital importance that she should be happy. Since
there was no certain immortality, temporal happiness was necessary at
any cost. She had been cheated because she did not love; but Robert had
loved her, still loved her. He had failed because he had not fulfilled
the promise of that moment in the fog. He was like all prosaic lovers;
he had thought of nothing better to say than: “Poor Lilah! Poor little
girl.” She had always despised pity. She denied all the feminine
attributes other women used as defensive weapons. She preferred
admiration to sympathy; and in this she was unusual; most women like to
cry against a masculine shoulder. Lilah wanted the fullness of success,
recognition of her strength.

She went to the telephone and in a cautious voice gave Mrs. Sinclair’s
number.

“Lilah!” The high, clear tones came into the receiver against a
confused background of music and voices. “I thought you found us dull!”

“May I come back?”

“Now?” Then, with a burst of amused laughter: “Of course! Come.”

Lilah called a taxi and dressed hurriedly. From her window she saw the
car slip down the hill from Madison Avenue and the driver, jumping out,
glanced up.... He mustn’t ring! Mustn’t!

She flew downstairs. Robert’s door was closed. If he heard, he made no
attempt, this time, to stop her. The house was dimly lighted, muffled,
close; there was an unreality about the formal arrangement of chairs,
the stiff, precise folds of curtains and draperies, as if no one had
ever lived in these rooms or passed up and down the stairs.... The
thought crossed Lilah’s mind that she had, after all, failed to create
a livable home. Her heart hadn’t been in it....

She made violent signals to the chauffeur of the taxi: “_Don’t ring!_
Here I am! Take me to four-seventy Park.”

The man gave her a curious look as he shut the door. Then she realized
that it was three o’clock.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Sinclair’s party was still in progress. The formal luxury of
the room had been put askew. Wilder was at the piano. Carey sat
cross-legged on a table, singing Hawaiian ditties in a soft, saccharine
voice. With shut eyes and upcurling lips, he was like an elderly Buddha
in a dinner-jacket.

Lilah saw immediately that Flagg was there and her heart leaped, but
she said, smiling at him: “I’m not a bit of a coward. I came back to
apologize.”

They sat down together, unexpectedly embarrassed. It was not possible
to fence effectively before a roomful of people. But Lilah felt that
she had committed herself. She studied his face, his well-modeled
hands. He was harder, more mature than Robert; the nature of his
aloofness was not clear to her. Either he was cruel, or he was
removed, by the nature of his experience, from ordinary behavior.
He said nothing but sat with his eyes on the fire which had burned
low in a shallow hearth of yellow and black marble. May Sinclair was
flirting, in her intense, experimental fashion, with Chivers Chew. The
shipbuilding Englishman and his wife had disappeared. Nearby, stretched
at full length with her head in Heywood’s lap, the writer from San
Diego was explaining the hows and the whys of the short-story game:

“It’s perfectly easy. Any boob can do it. All you have to know is human
nature and God knows human nature doesn’t cringe from publicity, these
days! All of us skin our souls in public. I’m successful because I
skin mine a little closer. I give the public naked hearts, as you hand
around olives at a picnic--on a pickle fork! People are sick and tired
of flappers. They want ‘strong stuff,’ be it pseudo or not; heroic love
and sacrifice. Divorce has lost its novelty. I’ve been writing the most
exalted morality-tales.... You’ll see--in another year skirts will go
down and manners will go up. It isn’t going to be fashionable to lie
with your head on a strange gentleman’s bony knee--”

“Then why do you do it?” Heywood demanded, not stirring.

“Because it’s quite roguish in San Diego.”

“San Diego--where on earth is San Diego?”

Lilah turned to Flagg. He smiled. “What a lot of rubbish! Why do people
generalize about taste and morals? To-day, when propriety is a vice in
New York, a cigarette is immoral in San Diego. And if skirts go down
in New York, they’ll go up in San Diego, because San Diego is always
two years behind--and what does that prove?”

He leaned forward, lowered his voice: “Is it decided, then? Are we to
go on?”

Lilah said simply: “Yes.”

She rose, tossing her cigarette away. She was languid again; her eyes
drooped. She brushed against him, but he sat, immovable, his expression
guarded.

       *       *       *       *       *

“May,” she said, “I don’t like your party. I’m going home.”

“Have a drink,” was the succinct reply.

Lilah’s hostess did not trouble to rise. And Chivers Chew, peering
over the back of the sofa with a blurred expression said: “Don’t be
a grouch, Lilah! We’re all danced out. Listen to Carey. He’s on the
fiftieth verse of the Hawaiian poem in praise of the first Missionary
Carey, who had fifteen wives and sixty-two sons. Tune in--there’s a
good girl.”

Flagg followed Lilah into the corridor. His offer to accompany her was,
in its tempered formality, old-fashioned. She could not understand
just wherein he differed from the men she knew; he was more bold, more
direct than they, but he seemed devoid of the fashionable carelessness
which made them, very often, insulting. The women were responsible for
most of it--they let themselves be slapped on the back and addressed as
“old girl.”

As they stepped into the elevator they heard Montague Wilder entering
upon the D-flat waltz, in thirds.

“The stale hour,” Flagg remarked, as they waited on the curb for a
night-prowler. With his cane he signalled a skulking vehicle that
turned out of a side-street. A sharp, cool wind whipped Lilah’s cloak;
the sky was already pale with dawn. But the streets were deserted; in
pools of light cast by the tall, globed arcs, an occasional figure was
visible, unreal, moving upon strange errands; cars passed, rarely, with
a smooth purring of tires, bearing shadowy, drooping women, and men in
the attitude of relaxed satiety.

Flagg did not speak, and Lilah became conscious of his unswerving
regard.

“I don’t understand what’s happened,” she said unsteadily. “I am not
willing--I want happiness. But I can’t hurt, too much, some one who has
been kind to me. I’m selfish. You’ll see. I want--things. But this is
new. I don’t know. I’m frightened.”

“Don’t be,” he said.

He continued to stare at her. He seemed to be dreaming, sunk in a
reverie. Lilah’s fear deepened. If he had touched her, or had spoken,
she would have thrust him aside with all of her accustomed scorn and
impatience. But there was something in his silence that was devotional,
innocent, almost immaterial. She recognized that he was above self,
absorbed in her.... With a shiver, she recalled Robert, at her door....

The taxi swerved and stopped before the Thirty-eighth Street house.

Lilah gave her hand into Flagg’s clasp and as they looked again at each
other her lips trembled. She heard herself asking him to come, as soon
as possible; then, conscious of a too apparent eagerness, she added:
“Thursday. I’m fearfully busy.”

“To-morrow.”

“No. No. I can’t. Give me a day or two. Thursday, at four.”

       *       *       *       *       *

At breakfast, Lilah said sweetly: “Was I cross last night? I’m sorry.”

Robert lowered the newspaper. His answer surprised her, but she did not
alter her smile that had in it a touch of malice. “Cross? No. Why?”

“I thought perhaps--”

“I’m going to the Point,” he interrupted. “My grandfather isn’t well.”

“Oh, Robert--”

“It’s not serious,” he said. And added, with no apparent irony: “I’ll
come back!”

Lilah lowered her eyes to hide her expression. This little
circumstance, unlooked for, outside her volition or her intention, was
a part of her unfailing luck. In every circumstance, she was triumphant.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she began.

“He has a cold. Damned nuisance! Old men shouldn’t have colds. He might
die. I’m fond of him. And besides, he holds the business together. An
enormous amount of correspondence goes to the Point. In the end, he
makes all the important decisions, defines policies--his preferences
are respected. If he should die, I would have to take his place. But
there are other reasons why I don’t want him to die.”

“Shall I go?” Lilah asked. “I will. But wouldn’t Grace be more useful?”

“He doesn’t need a nurse. He’s lonely. If you will come with me, and
wear your prettiest dresses and perhaps play poker with him--he will
get well. Old people sometimes die because they are ignored. They
live alone until they lose the sense of their own reality; they sort
of--vanish.”

Lilah said briefly: “Let me see his letter.”

Junius Peabody’s fine, careful writing with the curious, looped s’s
covered half a sheet of stationery. He said simply that he would be
glad of company since he was confined to his bed and feverish. “They
won’t let me up, confound them!”

“He’s not very ill,” Lilah remarked. “You go, and if I’m really needed,
wire me.” She added: “You’ll be happy, because you love the country.
And I have a great deal to do. Oh, unimportant things! But if I’m to go
away in June, I won’t have more than just enough time to get ready.”

When Robert said: “Very well,” she had the feeling that she was safe.
The immediate future held, not the necessity for speaking a dangerous
truth, but an adventure, delectable, mysterious, exciting.

Suddenly gracious, she gave her hand to Robert. “I’ll miss you, cross
old Bobsie,” she said sweetly.

       *       *       *       *       *

The next two weeks were as exciting as she could have wished.

She heard from Robert that his grandfather was better but that the
spaniel had canker of the ear. “It’s terrible. She moans like a human
being and shakes her head and tries to get her hind foot into her ear.
The vet came--that old fellow from Biddeford--and operated. Last night
I sat up until four o’clock putting ice on her nose and pouring stuff
into her ear. She wouldn’t sleep and kept looking at me. I’ve been away
too long. Edwin shut her head in a door because she wanted to get into
the warm kitchen and lie under the stove. My God, why can’t people
understand that animals are human? I’ll never like Edwin again. It
makes me sick to look at him. If I had a son, I’d act this way, only
worse. The silver bitch is the only son I’ve ever had.... I’ve been
thinking over you and me. I have failed with you and I don’t know why.
No one could love you more than I do. But I suffer in my love, and that
isn’t right--love ought not to betray, but it seems to. Will you help
me? Perhaps you know what I mean. If we had a son, there would be no
complications. Last night when I sat there giving that pup pieces of
ice that melted as if I’d put them on a red-hot stove, I saw a good
many things clearly. The ice ran over my hand and up my arm and ruined
my shirt, and at the risk of your hating me I’ll tell you that I cried
like a baby and my tears ruined my tie. When I got through I looked
like the sole survivor of the Flood. (You write Biblical words with
capitals, don’t you?) And, as I was saying, certain things were sort of
washed clean or clear, or both. If I could only put my thoughts down
on paper so that you would understand! I know that if I could explain
myself to you, you’d come, quick! Love shouldn’t be a sacrifice; it
should be a service. That goes down easily on paper, but it took hours
to bubble up out of my unconscious. And another thing, it doesn’t pay
to go running around looking for new material to work with. What you
have at hand is usually workable, if you are patient enough. Success
is, after all, making what you have into a decent sort of achievement.
The people who fail are the ones who kick about never having had a
chance. We all have a chance. I could be specific, only I won’t. I am
offering myself to you as a lump of clay for your fashioning. You might
make something of me--the life-size statue of a happy man. Isn’t it
worth trying?”

Lilah did not know what to answer; she postponed answering, and, after
a while, forgot. The issue was not pressing. To placate Robert, she
sent a wire: “Love to you both. Lilah.”

These two weeks were exclusively her own. She did not want to
serve love or to use the material at hand. She hated smug, decent,
stereotyped domesticity. Other women could spend year after year with
the details of a home and children; it was unthinkable that she should
surrender to monotony. She must live to the full; she was willing,
she assured herself, to take both the reward and the punishment. The
penalty, however, was too remote to be considered.

Putnam Flagg had been a professor before he became a major. He
preferred the first title to the second, since he declared that he was
not, by nature, a soldier. He disapproved of the advantage offered
by rank and insignia to men who might be disposed to bully their
inferiors, but he approved of awards that carried with them nothing
but recognition of work well done. As a teacher and a scientist,
he had known abstract adventure; no war could equal the hazards of
research. Yet his ability had forced him into the most terrible branch
of warfare and, as an expert in the use of poison-gas, he had had a
dose of his own medicine. This struck him as an altogether exquisite
justice; he had been an unwilling but an intelligent servant of his
country--once convinced of his duty he had used all of his knowledge,
and had, temporarily, laid aside his scruples. He despised war, but he
also despised despotism. He was one of the few thinkers whose faith
had not been shaken by the tragedy; rather, he emerged from it with
an even deeper belief in man’s progress. Flagg was convinced that
society had gone too far to turn back; surrender, discouragement, meant
annihilation; the battle must be fought to the end.

He did not shrink from facts; he believed that the esthetic imagination
would be supplanted by the scientific imagination. There was no limit
to the audacity of man; no limit to what he might dare, what he might
do....

Flagg was to go back to his university in the Autumn. Lilah got a
very definite picture of a small city, a group of Gothic buildings
unhallowed by age, the plain, a wide river, brown polished, slow and
resistless.... Flagg would have a house “on the campus” and a small
laboratory of his own. Three times a week, in a Gothic room, before
an un-Gothic audience of farmers’ sons and business men in embryo,
he would lecture. His “subject” he told her, was zoölogy. Lilah
shuddered. She could not understand Mendelian heredity, but she had
understood what Junius Peabody said about the adult being in some
manner contained within the germ. She could not see what was gained,
exactly, by knowing.... In the end, you always stumbled upon God, and
the inscrutable beginnings.

“We must make certain,” Flagg said, “that there is not a God beyond
God. Perhaps our conception is childish.”

Lilah put her hand over his mouth. “Let’s not talk about it. I’m more
interested in your college, your guinea pigs and rabbits and test
tubes.”

His smile was mocking. “Guinea pigs and God,” he remarked. Suddenly
he caught her hands. “I think I love you because you are beautiful.
There’s nothing else to love! Yet I love you! Do you care? Or are you
playing with me?”

Lilah had not, so far, committed herself. They were spending an hour
before her fire, sharing the French sofa that had been too small for
Robert. Flagg’s touch frightened her.

She had been so happy. A week had passed like a day; it had contained
the essence of experience. If she let herself love, she must face exile
in a western university town--but that was impossible; Flagg would not
be spared because he happened to be an unusual and valuable man. She
would have to wait, and divorce Robert. She saw a year, two years, of
postponement, poverty again, criticism, ugliness, the battle to justify
passion. If she did not love, there was Robert, and this, and this--A
house! Or Flagg might die....

Her hands trembled in his, but she was obstinately silent. Outside, a
heavy rain fell, obliterating, for the moment, the rumble of traffic in
Madison Avenue. A servant, or Grace Fuller, might come in and find her
hands in this man’s hands, her face, with a look of lost desire, turned
up to his.... If she kissed him, she knew, she would be powerless
to turn back to the facile little enthusiasms of her life. If she
didn’t kiss him, she would be safe, forever, in her rooms frescoed by
Shawhan and decorated by De Blauvelt, in her chosen interests, in the
perfunctory embraces of her marriage.

On the other hand, there was happiness. Happiness, at that moment,
seemed terrible, a dark undertaking, something forbidden and murderous.
It involved Robert. The intensity of that moment in the fog, when she
had promised Robert love, was nothing more than a betrayal. She must
not promise again, and fail.

Somehow this feeling was different. She was swayed by more than her own
part in the drama; for once she turned out from herself toward another
human being. Pity had no part in her love for Flagg; his affliction
was not evident; she had learned to accept his guarded manner as part
of his personality. His appearance--that length and leanness and the
pagan outlines of his face--stirred her. His eyes were brown, without
sparkle, lifted, under heavy lids, like the eyes of a cat. “You belong
in mythology,” she said. He was not ready to her hand; she felt always
that he might turn suddenly, with a feline indifference, and walk away
from her. He seemed always to be amused by her artificialities, yet
delighted, as if he had come upon an unusually winning little mouse.

She wanted to hate him, because it would be more comfortable to hate
than to love him. Without quite knowing what she did, but staring
straight into his eyes with a look full of questioning, she leaned
forward until their lips met.

He whispered: “Lilah!” and caught her close to him. When she heard
his heart beating, she realized what she had done. She could not
draw away.... This was the reality of giving. She must keep it....
How beautiful! How final! She could not turn back, undo what she had
done, or cease to feel what she was feeling.... Helpless, she leaned
against him, hardly conscious of his lips on her forehead, her hair.
He kept on whispering: “Lilah! Lilah!” She had not expected him to be
so gentle. When finally she opened her eyes and pushed him away, she
saw that he was suffering. His face was flushed, transformed, made
ugly and pathetic by pain. The feeling of death was there, tangible,
sickening.... His eyes were wide open, and in them an expression of
surprise deepened into horror.

Lilah cried: “Your heart!”

He nodded and, loosening the grasp of her hands, tried to stand up.

“Don’t! Stay where you are. I’ll get help....”

He said in a surprisingly loud voice: “No! I’ll be all right. Wait....”

His struggle was short and sharp. He seemed to be trying, over and
over again, to start the interrupted action of his heart. With every
failure, fear and amazement made more horrible the expression of his
wide-open eyes. Lilah watched. Once she cried out: “You mustn’t! For
my sake!” Flagg tried to smile, to reassure her. He seemed to be
listening. And the blood left his face, drained out, like a tide. His
flesh was blue-white, livid. The physical agony seemed to waste him.
Soon, Lilah thought, he would fall out of her arms. But he held himself
upright with an effort, meeting the enemy again and again, and it was
as if he held himself precariously on the rim of space.

Suddenly, for no appreciable reason, it was over. He slipped sideways,
back upon the sofa, and his eyes closed. “I’m all right.... Only
sorry.... Perhaps you know, now, how I love you....”

A servant was coming into the room. With a wrenching effort, Lilah
steadied her voice and said: “What time is it?”

“Six o’clock, madam.”

“Is Miss Fuller in the library?”

“Yes, madam.”

“Ask her to come here.”

Grace Fuller came at once. Between them, they made Flagg comfortable;
he lay with his arm under his head, apparently asleep. With deft,
impersonal touches, Grace Fuller ascertained his pulse, wiped off his
forehead, which was drenched with sweat, gave him water. She said
nothing. Lilah did not meet her eyes. Her own feelings were confused;
now that Flagg was safe, she could sense to the full her triumph; but
how fragile a thing happiness had become--it depended on this man’s
living! And it was doubtful whether he could resist the fatal pressure
of the inevitable emotion. He lay exhausted, pallid, one hand hanging
limply with fingers that brushed the floor.

Lilah turned her face away, afraid that Grace Fuller might see her
expression, the mingling of pity and glory, of fear and expectancy.

“Is he all right? Will he die?”

“No,” Grace Fuller said.

At that, Flagg opened his eyes. “Die? Of course not! This happens very
often. I shall be all right in half a second. I’m sorry and ashamed.
Your kindness....”

He sat up.

Lilah’s gesture toward him was immediate; before she tempered its
meaning, Grace Fuller had seen. But the nurse remained with her cool
fingers on Flagg’s wrist. Only her lips twisted as if, before that
revelation, she wanted to laugh. She helped Flagg to his feet.

“Good of you,” he said.

He bowed, apologized again and with a glance at Lilah, unreadable, went
out and quickly downstairs.

“That’s war,” Grace Fuller remarked dryly. “Thousands like him, trying
to....”

Lilah brushed her aside. “I’m going with him! He’s ill.... Let me go, I
tell you....”

Grace Fuller caught Lilah’s arm, held her. “Lilah, don’t be a fool.”

Lilah cried wildly: “Let me go! I must.... He’s ill.... Oh, damn you!”

In a white fury she struck, clawed, but Grace Fuller pinioned her arms,
shook her, twisted her back, away from the door.

“I love him! I love him! I’m not ashamed. Tell Robert! Tell every one!
I want it over.”

“You’re hysterical,” Grace Fuller said.

Lilah ceased struggling. For an appalling moment she thought her own
heart had stopped. She sagged against Grace Fuller’s shoulder; while a
dark tide of feeling rose, submerged her, receded again.

“I love him,” she repeated in a dull voice. “That’s all. What can I
say, or do?”

She straightened and pushed Grace Fuller away. “Now, you two can dance
on my grave.”




VII


In her own room again, Lilah went to the telephone and called Flagg at
his apartment. A man’s voice answered that Major Flagg was not well.

“I know,” Lilah said impatiently. “I am Mrs. Peabody. I must speak to
him.”

“I am Major Flagg’s physician,” was the reply, in a tone Lilah thought
a shade too dry. “He cannot speak to any one.” He went on to explain
that Major Flagg was not seriously ill, but that he must, for a
fortnight, be absolutely quiet.

“I saw him less than an hour ago,” Lilah insisted. “He seemed quite all
right.”

The physician, with some acerbity, added that Major Flagg had had
another attack on his way home. He was in bed and must stay there,
undisturbed....

“Thank you,” Lilah said.

She turned away from the instrument with a frightened gesture. She
couldn’t see him! That meant she must meet disaster alone; she had,
irrevocably, committed herself to Grace Fuller. No matter what happened
to Flagg, whether he lived or died, she had lost Robert....

She began, unsteadily, to dress for dinner. The Sinclairs, the
lissome May and her husband, were coming, and, as a balance to their
unimportant millions, Lilah had invited the American violinist and his
curtly intelligent bride, a woman who might amuse the Sinclairs because
she belonged to one of the richest families in the country. In the
Sinclairs, two fortunes had come together, and the only enthusiasm they
had in common was money. Their interest was not vulgar, it was, rather,
fraternal. They enjoyed communion with the rare, kindred blessed.

Lilah thought: “I’ve got to pretend. But none of this is mine--”

In her chemise, with her hair tumbled on her shoulders, she realized
that she had not called her maid. When she did, it was with a certain
humility that she said: “I am very late.”

The maid said: “Yes, m’am,” and went into the bathroom to start the
tub. She was a pretty mulatto, a soft, slight creature with the gait of
an enchantress. Lilah had never liked her because she had the air of
knowing everything, and the suave, the velvet quality of her St. Kitt’s
English gave her a certain distinction.

Lilah wondered: “Could she have heard that row with Grace?”

She studied the girl’s back, her unhurried, expert gestures, and when
she straightened suddenly, and turned, Lilah was embarrassed.

“The bath’s ready, m’am.”

A shower of violet crystals sparkled in the tub, and as Lilah stirred
them, testing the scented water with the tips of her fingers, she had
a sharp memory of tin tubs and basins in Swiss _pensions_.... And,
willfully, she recalled the lovers of Lorelay.... She glanced down at
herself, silver-white, with little bubbles, like quicksilver, climbing
over her skin, bursting on the surface of the water. How lovely her
thighs were, indented, slim, young.... And her knees, her feet....
She could go to Lorelay with Flagg and send for that famous, that
notorious, tin tub without shame. She was like Manet’s Olympe, not
classical but adorable. Flagg would understand if she mentioned Lorelay
and Olympe. Robert would not; or, if he did, he would be shocked....

“Seven o’clock, m’am.”

“Coming!”

In a robe of dark blue silk, thrown over a shift of cream chiffon, she
faced her mirror, while the mulatto girl dressed her hair. Her panic
had been replaced by exuberance. She felt certain that she could handle
Grace. Flagg would say, do, nothing. She was safe for a fortnight, with
both love and beauty....

“Draw it back, away from my ears. Not fluffy! Here, give me the comb!
I’ve told you so many times.”

“Sorry, m’am.”

That pretty, petulant face, honey-colored, was reflected in the triple
mirror in an unguarded moment and Lilah caught a flash of dislike and
contempt from eyes that were usually turned aside.

“Have you a sweetheart?” Lilah asked, twisting her hair into the Second
Empire contour she affected.

“Yes, m’am.”

“Does he love you?”

The mulatto shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. Men are funny. He’s
a pretty man, but he gambles. He spends all my money. He’s a sailor.”

“Get me the black dress. I’ll want the white cameo ear-rings. No! Not
there! In the leather box. Stupid! Stupid! I’m late.”

On her way downstairs, where the financial rating of the violinist’s
wife was just dawning on the Sinclairs, Lilah stopped to speak to Grace
Fuller.

“Grace?”

“Yes.” Grace Fuller was having her own dinner, in the fashion of
nursery governesses, on a card-table before the fire.

“You’ve had dinner?”

“I’m having it--just.”

Lilah came into the room. She was very lovely. She wore no jewelry,
save the heavy white cameos, set in gold, that dangled from her ears.
She gave no hint of her actual years; Grace Fuller thought, in a
moment of judgment, that she was like the city, a creation of that
energy which is all nerves. There was something ageless in the slim,
provocative, sexless body, thrust a little forward, the carriage of her
head, with its dense weight of hair coiled under, her lips, painted
like an Oriental’s, not scarlet, but magenta. She said lightly: “Am I
all right? Will I do?”

“Beautifully,” Grace said, flushing.

Lilah bent down, and Grace became conscious of the odor of sandalwood.
“Dear old Grace; I’m absolutely in your hands.”

“If you mean that I am not to say anything to Robert,” Grace replied,
“I won’t. Things like this are too personal, too terrible, for an
outsider--”

“I will know what to say when I see Robert,” Lilah interrupted. Her
manner became, abruptly, sharp and decisive. “Or whether to say
anything at all.” She added, almost carelessly: “My feeling may have
been pity.”

Grace said nothing. The flush had mounted until her face burned, as if
the shame of Lilah’s confession were hers. For the first time she had
had a glimpse of Lilah’s weakness--she saw her exposed to defeat; the
revelation was, somehow, humiliating. Grace Fuller turned her eyes away.

“I think you can trust me,” she said. And, instantly, she hated herself
for not having struck. Now it was too late.

Lilah went downstairs.

Her guests were already launched. Fred Sinclair was staring at the
violinist’s wife with the satisfaction of an entomologist who has
happened upon a singularly rare insect. Mrs. Sinclair was testing her
charm upon an unyielding surface; the violinist was more a priest than
an artist. Lilah found him parrying Mrs. Sinclair’s sentimental thrusts
with his own peculiar irony. He despised any one who wasted his time.
Lilah trembled for the success of her dinner. She said deftly that in
Robert’s absence she depended perhaps too much on her friends; she
suggested loneliness and a peculiar sensitiveness to “atmospheres.” The
violinist promptly pocketed his ill-temper and his bride surrendered
to Mr. Sinclair’s butterfly-on-a-pin manner. On the way in to dinner,
she graciously stated the size of her fortune, Mr. Sinclair’s
collection thereby gaining a precious specimen.

Lilah had counted on Flagg as a sixth at the table. In her failure
to warn the servants, a place had been set and she had to explain.
Immediately, the silver and glass were removed, the chair taken away,
but Flagg’s name had interested the violinist.

“I’m sorry. I’ve always wanted to know him. What a thundering crime--a
man like that, gassed! There could be no survival of the fittest in
such warfare.”

He spoke with bitterness of the destruction of the world’s best brains
and of the inevitable hiatus--there would be a wide break in both
science and art. As it was, the few who were left carried a double
burden; their responsibility to the past and to the generation that had
had no expression save in death. Flagg was one of the men the world
could not spare. The indignity of his suffering now--

The violinist broke off: “I know it isn’t considered polite to talk
about the war. In Europe, people aren’t so squeamish. It happened. It
may happen again.”

Mrs. Sinclair thought not.

Lilah smiled at the violence of his retort; he had served on the
Russian front, had seen the Kolchak debacle, and, before that, had
flown over Triest and Pola, Villach and Wien, with d’Annunzio. Mrs.
Sinclair listened to his tirade with a pained expression, as if he
were being intentionally disagreeable. Why on earth talk about war when
you could talk about the theaters, reducing and prohibition--there were
enough interesting things....

Lilah pictured Mrs. Sinclair in her Long Island house, a Tudor mansion
set down in a vast wilderness of new rose-gardens upon a featureless
plain, not unadorned but unhallowed. Her security, established when
she was a child, had been deepened by the possession of this enormous
stone house, a fortress against chance or change; in rooms as cold,
as cheerless, as echoing as a series of railway terminals, she seemed
removed from those things which happen to all of us; the walls were
too thick and too new to admit defeat. Lilah wondered what Mrs.
Sinclair would do if the armies the violinist invoked should trample
the Sinclair flower-beds and pepper the Tudor walls with machine-gun
bullets.... Send for the Swiss butler, probably, and die, game and
unconvinced, sipping a dry Martini.... Lilah could not decide which
counted for more--the indifference of the Sinclairs or the awareness
of the violinist; they believed that the future was negligible, the
present amusing, which sufficed; he believed that the world could
be saved only by incredible effort, a supreme, unending, unified
intention....

He complained that there was no flame in humanity--too much water had
been thrown on it, perhaps. Life was drab unless kept at an artificial,
stimulated pitch; pleasure, purchased, had taken the place of faith....

Mrs. Sinclair, bending her willowy body from the waist, whispered to
Lilah: “My dear--what’s this I hear about you and Putnam Flagg? It
wouldn’t do for you--it wouldn’t do at all! He’s penniless. Now, don’t
look innocent. A dozen people have seen you together, lunching at _tea
rooms_ and meeting in _art galleries_ ... it’s awfully touching, but no
one believes these naïve--”

“May,” her husband said.

“Oh, yes.” She turned again to the violinist. “Faith. You were
saying--?”

       *       *       *       *       *

In the morning Flagg telephoned. “Did you think that I would pay any
attention to a doctor’s orders? I want to see you.”

His voice unnerved Lilah. Every time it was like the first time--a
breathless recognition, a summons, alarming and unavoidable, to a self
beyond self. “He was very severe--” Suddenly her voice broke. Through a
flood of frightened tears, she stammered: “Oh, my darling! My darling!”

Flagg said gravely: “Lilah--if I could comfort you.... Will you get
your hat and come over here? It’s quite respectable. There’s a nurse,
who will, if I ask her, leave us alone. Or, if you prefer, she will
stay in the room.”

“I can’t. It isn’t possible! I might be seen.”

“And what if you are? Before long every one who knows you will know
that you love me. Things like this can’t be gone at politely. When you
break up a marriage, it’s war. It’s got to be war. And neither of us
can afford to be afraid, now, or later. You understand, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then come!”

“But--”

He was silent, and Lilah knew that the issue was important. If she
refused, she would in all probability never see Flagg again.

“You’re better?”

“Yes.... Take a taxi. You know the number. These are bachelor quarters,
but I’ve prepared the elevator man--he’ll bring you up.... I’ll be a
lot better when I see you.”

Lilah thought: “Don’t be squeamish. All the women you know do this sort
of thing.”

Aloud, she said: “I’ll come at once.”

She dressed with a romantic attention to detail. She chose a small
black hat with an air of intrigue and sophistication; a veil that
seemed to shut her beauty away so that her eyes were remote, enticing
beneath the rakish brim of the tricorn.

A streak of conventionality, a dislike of criticism, warred with her
eagerness to see Flagg. She sent her motor away and walked westward to
the Avenue, then uptown. Lilah wanted to have her own way but to be
considered above reproach. The possibility of scandal frightened her;
she thought: “I’m not a coward! Only, to be torn to bits and thrown to
the yellow journals to make a middle-class holiday! A Sunday supplement
martyr! It’s so stupid.... So ugly.... Robert and Junius, all of us--”
With a shock of relief, she thought: “I’m glad I haven’t a child.”

Still, she might have. Even now, she might have! Robert’s child. Even
now, as she went to Flagg. But that would be a loathsome trick of
destiny; it couldn’t be! Couldn’t.... She didn’t deserve punishment;
not such a punishment! God thought of people--there must be some sort
of divine justice. Now that she had love--But suppose, as Flagg had
said, that there were a God beyond God, and no one watching, no one
caring....

She found herself standing before a shop window, and was conscious of
the blurred reflection of herself, the fashionable outline of a woman
of the world. There was security, insurance against a detestable, a
repugnant reality, in the fact of her worldliness. Like Mrs. Sinclair,
she was a product of civilization, a vital, representative image of
society, removed, by her unquestioned right to her position, from the
blind attacks of destiny. She was powerful because she was instructed.
She was indomitable because she was intelligent. If there was a God
beyond a God she could reach Him. She would not take punishment--need
not--

She shook herself, tried to stare at the things in the window--a
Florentine chair, more graceful than most of them; a Persian bowl; a
Flemish chest; a Luini; a strip of ecclesiastical velvet; a pair of
Waterford glass chandeliers....

Her thoughts flew back to the house she had just left. She had wanted
glass chandeliers for her bedroom--one on either side of the narrow
mantel, to balance the _trumeau_. These were delightful--a shower
of crystals, delicate as cobwebs after a rain. They were, probably,
expensive....

Lilah hesitated. Her room was lifeless, almost gloomy; it needed such
a sparkle as these little chandeliers would give.... She saw herself,
moving about in a bland, crystal light....

She went into the shop, conscious, as always, nowadays, of her ability
to reach out and take what she wanted. The chandeliers were displayed
by a collector who flattered her by making no comments. That they were
genuine, and rare, was beyond question.

“I’ll take them.”

“Very well.”

“Mrs. Robert Peabody.”

“I know. We had the pleasure of importing some Venetian glass--”

Lilah interrupted: “Be sure to send a man to hang the chandeliers.”

“Certainly. To-morrow.”

She went out again, somehow relieved, as if she had come unscathed
through a hurricane. Buying things always gave her a sense of security.
Silly of her, to have been afraid of something that could never happen
to her ... never....

       *       *       *       *       *

Flagg lived in the West Fifties, not far from the noisy “L” track where
trains passed like steel comets, clattering, insistent.... An old man
in an alpaca jacket admitted her to a narrow hallway and to a slow,
dingy elevator operated by a cable. His face was scarlet; there seemed
to have been an explosion of veins beneath the surface of the skin....
Without glancing at Lilah, he let the cable slip through his hands, as
if, in his dejection and ennui, there could be no end to this ascent.
Lilah thought: “How easy, after all.” He let her out and indicated a
door “to the left. Push the button.”

Lilah saw the name “Flagg.” There was a rustle behind the door and it
opened sharply. A woman in starched linen said: “Mrs. Peabody? Major
Flagg is waiting. This way, please.”

Lilah had expected him to be in bed. But he rose from an arm-chair and
smiled down at her.

“You’re better?”

“Yes.... Now! You were a long time getting here.”

“I walked.”

“Miss Peterson--Mrs. Peabody.”

The starched woman, who was, to Lilah, as featureless as an egg, bowed,
murmured something and went out, closing the door.

“Don’t be afraid,” Flagg said. “I won’t keel over again. I’ll give
you tea presently. But now I want to talk to you. You lovely thing!
She can’t hear--there’s a corridor, and then my bedroom, where she’s
sitting. Shall I send her away?”

“No. No.” Lilah shook her head. “It’s bad enough--my being here.”

He leaned forward and caught her hands, smiling. He drew off her
gloves, turned her palms over and kissed them. His gestures were
slow but there was nothing of Robert’s hesitancy about him; his eyes
flew over her. She felt again that penetrating delight in him, and
because he did not expect pity, her pity made her tremble; there was
a maternal, a brooding pain in her heart. Without speaking, she went
back to her eager search for the things she loved, enumerated them--the
line of his cheek, the peculiar, sharp modelling of his lips, his
lids, a way his hair had of growing, like a sort of fur, short, thick,
lusterless--she wanted to stroke it, but she didn’t. Somehow, he was
still a stranger whose presence excited and embarrassed her. She
wondered if any one had ever known him; whether she would ever know
him. Robert was like a plant that recoils at the touch of a prying
finger. But Flagg was like an animal; he had the grace, the aloofness
of an animal, the eyes of an animal. She was almost afraid to touch
him. His absorption flattered her, as if a creature of the woods had
strayed close to rub against her and purr--a big cat. Without stirring,
she let him kiss her fingers, one after the other. And she felt again
that sense of a moment prolonged, suspended, until she lost reality.

Her glance went beyond him to the room. She had never thought of him as
living anywhere.... A shabby, slovenly room. Rows of white shelves were
weighted with books. There were no photographs. Only a small bronze of
a woman and a jar filled with pipes....

“This isn’t my place,” he said, glancing up quickly. “It belongs to
a man I knew in France, who’s broke. He loves books, and I’ve had a
feast....”

His eyes deepened and there came into them that look of a satyr,
mischievous and sensual. She wanted to kiss him, but she held herself
away. Something told her that there would be no going back after
to-day; he would not grant her a reprieve.

“I’m sorry,” he began, “for what I said yesterday. In time, you’ll love
love--not the idea, but the thing itself. That’s what I’m waiting for.
When it comes to you, so that you understand it--its beauty and its
penalty--you will lose yourself. And then you will be exquisite.”

“I love you,” she insisted, “now.”

He shook his head.

He relinquished her hands and, crossing the room, filled and lighted a
pipe. Then he asked abruptly: “What are you going to tell your husband?”

“I don’t know.” Catching her breath, she evaded him: “Must I tell him
anything?”

He did not answer. His expression was mocking. And angrily Lilah cried:
“It isn’t easy! For you, yes! But for me--to break with a man who loves
me and who doesn’t suspect--”

“Oh. He loves you. I didn’t know that. I had hoped that he didn’t. Are
you sure he does?”

“Of course! It will kill him. He trusts me.”

“You haven’t betrayed him!” Flagg said sharply.

“What do you mean?”

“Love is never a betrayal. It’s the truth! I am convinced that it is a
sin to deny love, under any circumstances, for any reason--to live with
one man and love another is unmoral, ugly, inexcusable. To live with
one woman and love another is to betray them both. I am not arguing on
the side of promiscuousness. I despise filth. But there is, after all,
a definite standard. A responsibility--to the emotion itself. There’s
your obligation! Only, the world won’t recognize it.... You’ve got to
be sure--dead certain--that what you feel justifies what you do.”

“You’re putting it up to me, then?”

He came over and kneeled beside her. He was asking something. His
body pressed against her knees. His hands were supplicating. For
the first time he was humble, but more than ever insistent; life
itself, demanding that she say yes or no, that she take or leave,
give or refuse. In spite of herself, she touched his hair, and with a
terrifying sense of being lost, slipped forward into his arms.

“I’ll tell him, simply, that I love you.”

“When?”

She struggled back, away from him again. But Flagg remained on his
knees, no longer a suppliant; stubbornly, he repeated: “When?”

“When he comes back--next week.”

She added, with a flash of disdain: “You might at least be sorry for
him!” She put out her hand quickly and caught his. “I didn’t mean that!
I hurt everybody. Don’t let me hurt you!”

Flagg laughed. “I don’t let myself be hurt.”

What he thought was: “If she cares for me, I can hurt her--that’s my
weapon, and she knows it.” He got up and went to the window, stood
there, smoking, his back turned. He waited with admirable restraint for
Lilah to speak again. Behind him, she was absolutely silent. The sun
had gone. The room was fading into the gray shadows of late afternoon,
retreating, dimming, like a blurred photograph. Flagg kept his eyes
on the street; his senses were aware of her; he had no comfort in her
presence, but he wanted her there. Suddenly, she was close to him,
soft, propitiating. She put her arms around him, pressed her face
against his back and they stood, in silence, for a long time. Flagg
no longer saw the city; that slate-gray twilight seemed to envelope
them both, to isolate them. And he had a deep pity for himself and
for her. What should be so simple, so natural, so uncomplicated,
would be raveled and frayed and tarnished.... Between this moment and
anything like the realization of happiness, there would be a struggle
of egos--rebellion, shocked pride, jealousy, in conflict. Before he
could show himself to her and lose himself in her loveliness, both
of them would suffer. And for what? Because life was so confounded
complicated--no passion could be single, perfect, but must be linked up
to other passions, an endless tangle of little, petty feelings--like
lichens on a tree. The growth was hindered, the sap cut off so that the
blossoms withered and the whole plant, tree and parasite, came down
into the dust, choked to death....

“Are you sure we’re right?” Lilah asked. “I’ve got to be sure! Isn’t it
selfish to be happy?”

Flagg answered that to be unhappy was the worst sort of selfishness.
For centuries the world had been in the grip of a superstitious fear of
acknowledged happiness, as if being contented with one’s lot were an
indication of alliance with the devil. If you sang, in old Salem, you
were hanged for a witch. “But to-day, if you sing, you are selfish! And
it amounts to the same thing--the world has its fingers crossed....”

Flagg asked, without turning: “Have you ever loved your husband, Lilah?”

Lilah pressed against him. “Don’t ask me, now, to say.... A moment....
Perhaps, yes. But not like this! I am perfectly willing to divorce him.”

Flagg wanted to know what reasons she would give. She said impatiently:
“Why--I _want_ a divorce! Isn’t that enough? Such things are arranged.
Nowadays, you don’t have to give reasons, do you?”

Flagg answered that he would prefer that she allow Robert to bring
suit; the defection, such as it was, was hers; she had tired of her
bargain; she had broken her word; she had found compensation. If
any one was to blame, she was.... Lilah interrupted: “You’re mad!
It would ruin me! It is accepted, usual, for men to take the public
blame for these things--every one understands. It isn’t serious. Don’t
you know--you silly--idealist--that in New York a man can arrange an
adulterous affair by simply hiring a woman, a room and a witness? I
know decent men, respectable men, who have done it, not once, but
several times. Like vaccination, it doesn’t always take. My darling,
you don’t want me talked about.... And it would be so funny.... Robert,
in silk pajamas, entertaining a chorus girl.”

“You and I, in love--and your husband, caught with a hired adulteress
in a rotten hotel, for your sake! What cheap irony! Such things
are damned ugly. You and I will take our medicine, Lilah. Or we’ll
renounce, now, what might be so fine. If you’re afraid, say so.”

After a moment, Lilah said, “I’m not afraid.”

She drew away. A knock at the door was followed, discreetly, by a
professional inquiry: “You are feeling better, Major Flagg?” And that
starched, rustling presence entered, carrying a glass. With a gesture
of rebellion, funny because it was unconscious, Flagg took the mixture
and drank it.

“You’re talking too much,” the nurse said. With another crackle of
starched skirts, she moved from lamp to lamp and the room came into
sharp outline. The slovenly carpet and worn chairs, a frayed scarf on
the table....

“I’ll go,” Lilah said quickly.

“Hang the doctor!” Flagg exploded. “I beg your pardon, Miss
Peterson--but doctors don’t always understand.”

She took the empty glass from him, shrugging her shoulders. And the
door closed upon her with a disapproving bang.

“I must go,” Lilah said again. “I must. If anything should happen to
you--”

Flagg made her sit down. He made her remove the concealing veil and
the little black hat. He began to take the pins out of her hair, but,
laughing, she stopped him. She could not, now, imagine that he had
ever been ill; a mood of playfulness had followed his rebellion; he
was curiously like a young animal again, lost in his delight in her.
He was lovable, willful; she stayed because he wanted it. It was hard
to refuse him anything. And she couldn’t see that her being there hurt
him--he had forgotten his enemy in his discovery of Lilah. Sitting
on the floor with his arm thrown across her knees, he talked about
himself. Himself, as a little boy. As an almost grown boy. As a young
man. It was as if he wanted her to share everything, all in a moment;
as if he could make her see the whole pattern of his life, so that he
would never be alone again. Lilah could feel herself change, relent,
bend down to him with a lovely tenderness. It was what she had always
wanted to be, the way she had wanted to feel, only that no one had
let her be herself. People had allowed her to be hard and bright and
dominating! Now she was the woman she might have been. The simplest
things he said touched her. She had no desire to ridicule, to hurt him.
She wanted him to want her, to need her, to get closer and closer to
her heart.

“I wish I had seen you when you were a little boy,” she said.

“I was a sort of flat face and terribly earnest. From the beginning,
before I could reason, I wanted to know about God. I couldn’t believe.
And the harder they tried to make me believe, the more stubborn I was.
God was unimaginable. They sent me to Sunday school, where I sat with
my underlip sticking out, denying God with my muscular system--braced
against acceptance. I remember that this refusal made me, in my own
eyes, an outcast. I thought of myself as the loneliest and wickedest
child on the crust of the globe. But I believed only what I could see,
touch or smell.” He shook his head. “And I never got a whiff of God! I
remember that one day a sort of evangelist came to the Sunday school.
He asked all the little boys and girls who believed in God to stand up.
I sat where I was, burning with shame. He leveled at me a shouting and
frothing, invective, hate and threats of damnation--eternal. And how I
loathed God! When he got through he asked all the little boys and girls
who didn’t believe in God to stand up, and I stood up, alone....

“Aren’t kids everlastingly funny? I hadn’t an ounce of prevarication in
me; I told the truth, always, until I was a grown man, when I learned
that there are times when the truth hurts. Then I drew in my claws. I
make velvet paws nowadays. But that doesn’t affect my honesty--I am
deadly honest with myself.”

Lilah wondered whether he could feel her shivering with delight in
being near him, whether he saw how her eyes looked at him. She could
never go back to Robert. She could never again pretend. It was going to
be hard. It was going to hurt her to strip herself naked of pretense
and fight for this new, this strange and wonderful raiment.

“Did you ever change,” she asked unsteadily, “about God?”

He was launched again. He told her about his student days in
Germany--how he had gone back, patiently, to the sources. His days of
pessimism. His romantic year. A period of mysticism. A frightened, at
first tentative groping through the mazes of science. Then, something
like a personal conviction, emerging.... He began to shake off support
and to stand alone, almost against his will, for to stand alone was
a responsibility. It forever removed him from the sensuous, happy,
careless self he had wanted to be and demanded that he face facts,
cold, brutal, unadorned and make of them what he could. God came to him
out of these facts--not the God he had refused to believe in--a vastly
different--

He made her see, somehow, why he was not afraid of pain or death, and
why he was reconciled. He hadn’t much longer--but why should he have
longer? Only to love her. To make her happy, if that was what she
wanted.

“I didn’t know you could care like this. But since you do--”

She still trembled; he could not help but see what she was feeling. The
thing that hurt her now was that he would have to know how little and
selfish she had been. The self she had to offer him was inadequate.
Her magic was tawdry, like cheap spangles on a dancer’s skirt. Her
beauty was painted on. The reality, the real Lilah had nothing to give
him. And some day, when he had stopped loving her technique, he would
look for her art, and find nothing, only fear and an ugly desire to
keep him, at all costs. She saw herself, in a sort of contorted and
nightmarish vision, pleading with him; she saw his indifference--no,
his recognition--crushing her down. It wasn’t Robert and Junius,
scandal, that she was afraid of; it was not having Flagg. That was the
most terrible thing--to be alone again, inventing enthusiasms, because
the reason for being was not there.

This was what Robert had meant.

“You’re not listening,” Flagg said.

“I am. I am.”

“I changed,” he went on, from what beginning Lilah could not guess, “as
every one changed. And like every one else, I saw freedom as the most
desirable end, gaining it all important. Only that I differed from most
in that I didn’t want freedom for personal reasons. I’ve always been
singularly free of the crooked, inherited notions that hold men back.
But a freedom that releases the mental power of humanity--I can’t make
you understand; I’ve only the vaguest notion myself! But I see that if
we don’t adapt ourselves, we’ll disappear from the earth. We don’t need
web feet or fluffy little wings or snouts, yet we do need an entirely
new sort of mind. And the old way of thinking has got to be pitched
out, forgotten.”

He clasped her hands, tight, between both of his. “But we can’t pitch
it out all at once! The social wheel is still revolving, although the
engine has been smashed--it is carried forward by its own momentum,
down-hill--a few hundred years of coasting! The survivors will look
back at us as we look back at the Neanderthal ape--that’s how fast
we’re going.... In the meantime, here we are, you and I, trying to
conform to the decencies.”

“Are we?” Lilah asked. In spite of herself, she laughed. “I don’t think
it’s decent, exactly, to cheat Robert. If we’re being honest....”

He interrupted: “Lilah, have you stopped to think about me?”

“Why, yes.”

“Aren’t you thinking about yourself?”

She shook her head.

He insisted: “Do you know what I want? What I dream of? Hours of
sunshine. Hours of perfectly imbecile happiness, lying on a green
hill with my head in your lap, watching the clouds go over. Must we
wait? It isn’t so far to Spring. Can’t we go somewhere--I know a town
in Connecticut, off the tourist track, where we’d be let alone. In
April, the frogs sing at dusk, and the air is moist, cool, full of
little gnats that dance as the sun goes down. I used to go there, years
ago, to watch things grow. A marvelous season, Lilah. There’s a stir,
actual, in the soil, and those prying, green fingers come through....
Suppose you and I were there to watch it together? I stayed at a
farmhouse. We could go there. The apple orchard--if it hasn’t changed,
and God forbid!--is deep with grass. And our room would be under the
eaves....”

“You mustn’t talk like this!”

“Why not?”

“You mustn’t.”

“Does it hurt you? Tell me!”

“Yes.”

“Then I know I’m right. You’ve got to come to me as soon as you’ve
told your husband. It isn’t fair to take from him what you don’t
deserve--that house, and these clothes and all your ease and luxury!
It doesn’t belong to you! After to-day, I’ll hate every hour you spend
there. I want you to give back everything he’s given you. I’m not
jealous, only I believe in value received.”

Lilah felt like a runner. Breathlessly, she dodged this obstacle. “You
wouldn’t expect Robert to bargain?”

“I’m not thinking of Robert. I’m thinking of you. What I want you to
be. If you love me, you’ll come to me, free, not all tangled up in
another man’s possessions.”

She pushed him away.

“I’ve got to go.”

“Not yet. It’s only six o’clock.”

“But it’s dark. What will that nurse think?”

“I’m all right. I only want you.”

“I know. But some day you may have too much of me.”

“Stay.”

She got up and he stood close, pleading. Lilah was afraid, with that
same delicious fear. Now, she wanted to hide her trembling from him,
to ward off what must happen if he guessed the extent, the danger, of
her surrender. She began to fasten her veil, her arms, in tight, black
sleeves, upraised; Putnam Flagg watched her, and, characteristically,
avoided, at that moment, any caress. When she glanced up, he said:
“Very charming. What a minx you are! An artist. I admire you
inordinately, if for nothing more than your gift of putting me off!”

Suddenly she clung to him. “Tell me the truth. Are you going to get
well?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it terrible--the pain?”

“Bad enough. As if a hand squeezed, here, harder and harder. I could
die, if I’d let myself. Only I won’t.”

“What does the doctor say?”

“Nothing. He’s used to bad hearts.”

“I hate doctors. They’re beasts! I hate suffering. I hate bodies.”
She beat with her palms against his breast. “It’s terrible. Terrible!
That you should suffer so! And we stand here, talking about houses and
clothes and my owing something to Robert. When I only owe myself to
you, now and forever.”

They kissed. They trembled against each other. And Lilah had never
known such giving. He said: “The world’s full of ugliness. It needn’t
be, perhaps. But it is. We’ll have to face this pain of mine along with
the rest.... Now I’ll let you go.”

She went out into the street again. No one she knew was, at the moment,
passing. She turned East, facing a cold wind. Her figure passed in and
out of the squares and rounds of light cast by shop windows and street
lamps, hurrying, bent a little forward. Her thoughts were hurrying,
hurrying, ahead of her, toward the Spring, a dusk when frogs would sing
and gnats dance, and she would lie against Flagg, holding the pain away
with her two arms, her lips, her love....




VIII


Lilah woke again to that certainty....

She opened her eyes. Familiar things came into focus, were,
inexplicably, unreal. She had the impression of waking in a strange
room. Circumstance had changed the very outlines of accepted facts.
At once her mind began the chase interrupted by sleep; unleashed, her
thoughts darted down confused paths, circled, doubled, stopped aghast.

She leaned on her elbow and examined her arms, her hands. She could
not associate her hands with herself. They might have belonged to
another body. This certainty had in some mysterious way deprived her of
herself. Her consciousness was separate; it was pain and fear.

She fell back on the pillows and pressed her fingers against her
eyes. She must get hold of herself. Do something. Other women had had
children. She wouldn’t die. In a year it would be over and she could
go back.... The acceptance of that thought was like a trickle of ice
through her veins.

If she had loved Robert....

       *       *       *       *       *

Back again! Her thoughts were mad, erratic, feverish. She could not
control them, or bring order out of chaos.

Sitting up with a violent gesture, she saw that it was past nine
o’clock. She had, then, slept. Extraordinary! That she could sleep,
that the tired body was stronger than the will! She had not wanted to
sleep or to lose for an instant her watchfulness. Now, she felt, she
had surrendered to this fact. In sleep, she had been stamped by nature
with acquiescence.

She had been running away from herself. For a week, in crowded
theaters, restaurants and drawing-rooms dedicated to forgetfulness, she
had let herself be swept forward on the current. For hours at a time,
she had forgotten, had postponed remembering. As if there were no reef
ahead, no shattering of the frail craft that had carried her so far
toward disaster. In moments of waiting, it had returned, always like a
thin, icy trickle, down through her brain to her heart.

She must do something.

She half rose, but before she could disguise her dishevelment,
the scars left by tears, the door opened and the mulatto came in,
moving furtively as if to cover her curiosity. Lilah, for the first
time, had the feeling that she was trapped, humiliated, her pride
leveled by a tragedy shared by all women--this yellow girl, herself!
She felt contempt. Some women sacrificed themselves with a smile
to the inevitable, or concealed their wretchedness beneath an air
of superiority, as if a thing so usual, so inexorable, so outside
themselves, were a matter for congratulation. Other women seemed to be
ordained--an order of motherhood; but they were never lovers, wives;
they tended the flame of race, kept it burning. God knew why any
one should willingly add a soul to a world where there were already
too many souls, too much suffering. Better to let humanity dwindle,
thousand by thousand, until the last man staggered to his knees and
died and the earth was left once more to the forests, to animals, to
storm and sunlight, unrecorded, eternal.

The maid, lifting the blinds, remarked that Miss Fuller had been
waiting for half an hour.

“Ask her to come up. And I shall want breakfast here.”

“Yes, m’am.”

Grace Fuller came, bringing, as always, the morning’s mail. Her fringe
was curled, not a hair out of place. And across the pallor of her
cheeks, rouge showed like veining on a leaf.

From the bed, Lilah asked: “Anything amusing? I overslept.”

Grace Fuller put the letters within reach of Lilah’s hand, on the
coverlet. Without preface, she said: “I’m sorry, Lilah. I can’t stay,
go on--I thought I ought to tell you. I’ve registered and to-morrow I
take a case.” A faint smile twisted her lips as she added: “A hopeless
case.”

Lilah glanced at the letters. Suddenly she tossed them aside. “You
needn’t leave, unless you want to. I’m going to have a baby.”

She sat up, pushing the hair back from her forehead, straining it back
violently. Her eyes were heavy. There was no trace of beauty in her
face; she was, for the moment, old. “I’m going to have a baby,” she
repeated in a dull voice.

Her head went down between her knees. She heard Grace Fuller saying:
“Lilah. Lilah! I’m glad for you! This will change everything. Wait
until your heart accepts--I know what it does to women. I’ve watched.
You’ll forget the other, come back to Robert, in gratitude.”

Lilah held her breath. Her revolt and her hate were ponderable; she
felt the weight of them across her back; her body huddled; she tried to
flatten herself out, to escape. Her hair fell forward and she caught at
the thick strands with her teeth. Now, she knew, it was inevitable. She
jerked away from Grace’s hands, flung herself aside.

“I’ll never change,” she cried. “Never. This won’t make me different.
I’m myself. I will be. It’s something I’ve got to stand. But I’ll keep
myself away from it. I’ve always resented being a woman. Gross. Ugly.
Unfair....”

She sat up again. “Tell that girl to see that the cook doesn’t ruin the
eggs. I want a decent breakfast.”

       *       *       *       *       *

At eleven o’clock Lilah was seated in the outer office of a physician
who was secure in the possession of a fashionable patronage.

The room was quiet, almost bare, and in chairs ranged against the wall,
ten or twelve women were waiting. Now and then a door opened and a
woman in white, with eyeglasses and a cap elaborately starched and
folded, beckoned to one or the other. These patients, Lilah noticed,
never reëntered the anteroom, but were ushered out another way, perhaps
to keep the tide of despair from meeting the tide of hope. Other women,
arriving, took the vacated chairs. A table covered with neat stacks of
magazines offered an escape from curious eyes; there was a discreet,
a constant turning of pages. Behind them, expressions were guarded,
indefinable. Lilah sought duplication of her own sensations. Her face,
she decided, must be as expressionless as the others. It was as if, at
a prearranged signal, these women had become anonymous, featureless.
Only when the door opened and the capped woman beckoned, there was a
flash of excitement, of dread, of something forced and desperately
unwilling.... Time and again the door opened and closed.

When Lilah heard her name, repeated three times because she had
withdrawn so far into herself, she followed the nurse with a sort of
arrogance, an indifference to the outcome. Inwardly, she felt again
that sense of acquiescence, of surrender to a ruthless inquisitor.

The inner office was large, paneled. At a desk between two tall windows
draped with brown velvet, the doctor allowed himself the advantage of
turning his back to the light. Lilah saw him in silhouette--not the
traditional physician, bearded and purposefully benign; a business man
clipped, concise, scientific. To him she was no more than a name, a
number. His manner had in it a trace of the impatience of the normal
man who has had to deal with the delicate and unstable emotional
balance of sick women. He was not jovial; he was not even polite. His
dry questions, spoken with an accent of amusement, irritated Lilah. She
snapped back at him. She had always been healthy; she had had a healthy
contempt for illness; people were sick because they were stupid, or
victims, like Flagg, of accident. She had thought of herself as immune,
outside suffering and the ugly, wearisome details of suffering.... She
had time, while he questioned her, to notice the elaborate simplicity
of his settings; he received his patients in a room reminiscent of
little drawing-rooms at Fontainebleau. A pretty, red-haired girl took
Lilah’s answers in short-hand. Lilah resented this girl’s presence. The
whole proceeding was degrading, like a public scandal.

Lilah fixed the physician with an unwavering gaze. She had expected
him, for a large fee, to rid her of this tormenting suspicion. But she
had not expected him to uncover her fear, subject it to Hogarthian
records in short-hand.... Marriage à la Mode filed away in a card-index
cabinet....

She wished, now, that she had stayed away.

       *       *       *       *       *

In her motor, still quivering under that professional irony, a
confirmation which had stripped her of arrogance, she looked out at the
city with, again, that tormenting sense of the unreality of familiar
things. People hurrying, laughing, meeting, waiting on the curbs for
the tide of traffic to pass--Lilah was hurt by their indifference to
her tragedy. There was no such thing as a common, a shared, suffering.
No one, not even Flagg, could comprehend. She saw a group of people
familiar to her, Chivers Chew with three women, standing before a
florist’s window in animated conversation. Their security, their
pleasure, seemed as remote as dumb-show within a lighted proscenium.
And Lilah’s melancholy was shot across by a pang of jealousy.

The mulatto met her with the announcement that Major Flagg had
telephoned repeatedly.

Lilah said in an indifferent voice: “Pack my things. I’m going to
Maine to-night. Ask Elliott to wire Mr. Peabody. And tell him to get
a stateroom. If Major Flagg calls again, you may say that I have left
town.”

       *       *       *       *       *

March came in, blustering, with a buoyant race of large, white clouds
and a wind that ruffled the swollen streams and spread steel-colored
fans across the purple-blue of the sea. The air was sweet with the odor
of wet earth. Willow sprouts showed silver-gray in the ditches. In the
woods and hollows patches of brown snow melted in the sun. Trailing
sprays of waxen arbutus lifted the pine-needles and fallen leaves,
thrust them up and aside. And always the wind billowed and tumbled over
the brown hills, the soaked fields, the noisy, awakened forests.

There was a stir in the earth, after the long stillness of winter.

In a short skirt, a jacket of fur, hatless, Lilah turned away from
the sea and walked inland. A cane Robert had given her, of Malacca,
mounted in amber, swung from her hand. She could not abide the sea, the
dunes, the beach brushed with swift eddies of blown sand. A boisterous
sea was strong medicine for the spirit. It was too bright, too alive;
it had a ruthless virility that frightened her. If only she had been
free enough, brave enough, to brace herself in the shifting, stinging
sands, to breast the wind, to take great swallows of it into her lungs,
to fill her body with it, to laugh at it! Because she was a coward,
she preferred the woods, where, in a chill shadow, in a sort of calm
beneath the brittle crackle of bending boughs above, she was safe from
nature itself. She walked in a void, her thoughts held in abeyance,
like hounds on a leash.

She had told Robert immediately of his good fortune. Something warned
her not to express, just then, her own dissatisfaction. She noticed
a difference in him; his desire for her was no longer humble; it had
become definitely material and possessive, concrete. His happiness only
added to her own inner tumult. He guessed nothing of what went on in
her mind, her heart. He was happy. So must she be! He had never heard
Flagg’s name. He did not guess what had happened, what she had felt.
She was infinitely removed from him; she could even be sorry for him.

Robert behaved as she supposed all men behaved under the circumstances.
He became both dictatorial and tender. She was shielded from draughts,
assisted up and down stairs; he ran after her with shawls and wraps;
she became the object of his unwavering, worshipful attention; his
blue eyes, round, expressionless and innocent, followed every move
she made. “For heaven’s sake, Robert, leave me alone. I’m quite all
right. I won’t break.” And he would say absent-mindedly: “I’m sorry.”
The next instant his arm would be around her waist. It was clear that
he realized nothing.... Some day he must know that he had been making
a fool of himself. Her physical presence, this child, were his. Her
feeling, all that made her desirable, belonged to Flagg. Without Flagg,
she was valueless, like a counterfeit coin. Robert was insufferable
because he could not see.

To escape him, the barrier of protective, almost primitive tenderness
he had built around her, she followed the bridle paths through the
woods. She wanted to ride but Robert objected. There were two saddle
horses in the stable, a roan and a chestnut, good English horses full
of mettle that turned rakish eyes on Lilah whenever she went to their
stalls. “They’ve been boxed up all winter,” Robert said. “They’re mad
to run. But the ground’s soft. They won’t feel a saddle until the end
of April.” He added: “We may have more snow. This is a false Spring.”

Whenever Robert touched her, Lilah had an impression of herself tamed
and savage, a dangerous restraint, a hanging on beyond the powers of
endurance.

She had not written Flagg. That soft St. Kitt’s voice with its accent
of mockery had told him that Mrs. Peabody was “out of town.” No more.
She had not seen him since that day in his rooms, when she had
promised him.... Now she was gone. He would believe that she had lost
courage, had fled from facts. So she had.... She could not face such
facts as had assailed her, beaten her down, overwhelmed her. He would
despise her. Or else he would follow and question her.... She dreaded
every day that held this possibility. It would be like Flagg to get at
the truth, whether or not he hurt her or hurt himself.

Men were selfish. Flagg, like the rest. She was being destroyed by the
selfish love of these three men, Junius, Robert, Flagg.

Junius had said simply, at Robert’s announcement: “I’m glad. There will
be some one, a Peabody, to appreciate the Moselle.” Later, to Lilah,
he had added: “I wish you were happy, Lilah.” Irritated, she moved
away, and he followed, put his thin, withered hand on her arm. “I don’t
pretend to understand your generation. But I can read certain human
sign-posts. If you can’t talk to me, to whom can you talk?”

She faced him with a stony expression. “If Robert could read
sign-posts,” she said, “I wouldn’t be here. He wouldn’t want me.”

Junius Peabody’s look changed and Lilah realized that she had touched
his pride. After a moment, during which he brushed his mustache with
that large, cambric handkerchief scented faintly with Cologne water,
he said: “I won’t argue. Your remark was in bad taste.... I don’t give
a snap of my finger for Robert. He hasn’t the qualities I admire; the
things I began he seems unable to finish. Or else he doesn’t care,
which is the disease at the core of society to-day. You don’t care, any
of you, about anything outside yourselves.... I believe I warned you,
in the beginning, of what might happen?”

Lilah ignored the implied question. “I’m here,” she said briefly.

“Is duty, too, out of fashion?” he asked with an ironic smile.

“Yes,” she answered. “When it is discharged unwillingly. When it gets
in the way of--”

“Of what?”

“Being yourself.”

Junius Peabody shrugged his shoulders. “What will the world be like
when each one of us looks out for himself? We will be at the mercy of
such disciplined creatures as the army ant. I can’t see that you gain
by being what you term ‘yourself.’ You aren’t happier than the women of
my day, who were what their husbands expected of them.... I am willing,
however, to be instructed....”

He broke off and stared through the window at the flashing sea. “The
Forsythe’s girl, Marian, spent the holidays at home. She used to come
over here quite often. At first, because she came on skis across the
hills and arrived as rosy as a snow apple, I enjoyed her visits. Later,
I dreaded them. At seventeen, she has the knowledge and the vocabulary
of a roué. She had learned more badness at a girls’ school in New York
than I knew at thirty, or forty. She smoked, of course. She would
sit where you are sitting and light one cigarette from another. And
she tossed the ends away with the gesture of a longshoreman. She was
an excellent shot.... Externals.... So I thought. But the thing went
deeper. She was clever. She had reasoned herself out of responsibility
and I could find no flaw in her arguments.... When she had gone I would
sit for hours, depressed, frightened. That she used a lipstick, not
skillfully, is certainly a symbol--of what, I am not certain. I would
have said that she was going to the devil.... She had a sort of brusque
contempt for love, as I understand it; yet her whole appeal was to sex.
Her attitudes--initiated, purposeful--were inviting. Love would fail.
Marriage would fail. She not only expected to have a lover, she behaved
as if such experiments were inevitable. She liked me, at eighty-four,
because, she said, I was a ‘sport.’ What she meant was that I gave her
cigarettes and whisky whenever she came here. She was bored, and, I am
certain, not happy. Something has been damaged in these young people;
their imagination....”

Lilah said: “I wouldn’t be too complacent about the past, if I were
you. There were girls like Marian Forsythe in Victoria’s day--they
fainted for the same reason the modern flapper shows her legs.”

He laughed and Lilah, stooping quickly, kissed the top of his head,
where the hair, snow white, showed a pink parting. “I love to
quarrel with you.... You aren’t to worry about me. I’m twenty-seven,
twenty-eight, almost. I love some one Robert doesn’t know, has never
heard of. You said I would. I do. It happened the way that wind out
there comes up in the Spring, scattering everything, waking things up,
changing the face of the world. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Take
him, of course. But not now.”

Junius Peabody’s face had gone a little gray; beneath the sweep of
white mustaches, his lips trembled. Lilah saw that he was too old, too
worn, to stand the shock of violent circumstances. He said nothing. His
unsteady hands groped for hers, patting them, stroking them. Suddenly
Lilah loved him, because he seemed to understand her.

       *       *       *       *       *

Robert wanted her to see his spaniels. “It’s a small thing to do for
me, Lilah.” It was, invariably, either too cold or too windy or too
damp to cross the “greenery” to the kennels. Lilah found excuses,
because to subscribe to an enthusiasm of Robert’s was to encourage
him, and it was more stimulating to test his devotion by inventing
subtle rebuffs. The question of the spaniels came up repeatedly; their
antagonism swung to it like a weather vane; it became the focus of
his desire to subjugate her and of her desire to torment him. There
was no other vengeance; Lilah found comfort in blaming Robert for her
loss. “I don’t like spaniels.” Robert winced and said desperately: “But
they’re fine little chaps! You can’t help liking them.” Lilah knew
that Robert’s pups fetched extravagant prices and that a glass case in
the kennels contained a dozen blue rosettes dear to Robert’s heart.
She finally inspected the trophies and the dogs. It would not do to
be surly. But she managed, by an expression, a smile, a reservation,
to make Robert feel that the whole business was childish, useless and
absurd.

       *       *       *       *       *

April came, and still there was no snow.

It was customary at the Point to send one of the stable men to the
postoffice, ten miles distant, every day at noon. The mail was brought
in a leather pouch and emptied upon a table in the hall. Lilah was
conscious of this rite no matter where she happened to be. A month had
passed without word from Flagg. She dreaded any sign from him, yet
expected, longed for even the most scornful message. She waited with a
peculiar, tormented shrinking for that letter she knew must come.

One day, as she passed the table, she caught sight of her name written
in a small, black, unfamiliar hand upon a square envelope.

She opened it before she realized that Flagg had, at last, written.
Thrusting the letter into her pocket, she went outdoors, and, this
time, to the beach. No matter what he had said, he had written; she
could bear the brightness of the sea! The beach was packed smooth by
the receding tide, and ribbons of kelp lay at high-water mark like
garlands strung from dune to dune. There was no wind. A mackerel sky,
translucent shells of vapor, clouded the sun. It was such a vast sky,
so tall, so immovable, so luminous! Lilah saw herself, very small,
walking between sky and earth, walking in a great crystal globe, with
her letter.

She read it at last, expecting a burning accusation. But Flagg said
simply that he was waiting for word from her. He was remarkably better,
and her absence, prolonged unreasonably, was the only thing that stood
between him and happiness, recovery.

Lilah turned back to the envelope. The address, Peabody’s Point, proved
that he knew where she was. If she did not write to him, he would come.
And that, for every one, for herself most of all, would mean disaster.

She went through the deep, dry sand to the dunes and lay full length,
her arms under her head, staring up at the sky. The earth receded,
seemed to drop away, and she was floating in a void. The sand was warm
on the surface, cool if you dug your fingers in. And the hum of the sea
was lazy, detached, like the hum in a conch shell. Patches of cloud
moved, and the sky was gentian blue.... It hurt, a physical hurt, to be
alone....

What could she tell him? The truth? And drive him away! Nothing?

Suddenly, for the first time, she saw herself as a failure. She had
missed everything.

       *       *       *       *       *

The following morning she spoke to Robert about the necessary closing
of the Thirty-eighth Street house. She thought that he ought to attend
to it. Servants were always careless and she herself did not feel equal
to details. Robert, in riding breeches and puttees, was polishing
a saddle. He had the rich man’s fondness for doing himself what he
paid other men to do. “Let Grace attend to it,” he said. “She’s a
crackerjack at that sort of thing.” Lilah said tersely that Grace had
gone back to nursing; she was not in New York. Robert looked up. “Well,
I’ll be damned! Why didn’t you tell me so?” Lilah answered that she
had not supposed he cared one way or the other. This Robert took to be
a twinge of jealousy. His spirits rose and he caught Lilah and kissed
her. “You care, don’t you? I mean, for me? Sometimes, I wonder. You’re
a deep one.... I’m crazy about you, Lilah! I wonder if you know how
happy I am?”

“Are you? Then you’ll go to town and close the house. There’s a good
Bobsie.”

When he had gone, she felt relief. It was good to be alone with Junius.
He pottered about at small, fussy undertakings which had the dignity
of rites religiously performed. The old relish details which impede
the young--the exact measure of a cup of coffee, the arrival of the
mail carriage promptly at noon, the aroma of a cigar, a meticulous and
rigidly adhered to change of garments at seven o’clock, the rise and
fall of the barometer, the flavor of a chop. Life was given a false but
comforting air of permanence and dignity by the importance of little
things. There was no headlong rush.

Lilah had allowed herself to be careless; she had not, since her
arrival, dressed for dinner. Now, with Robert gone, that eager,
propitiating, sympathetic presence out of the way, she flattered
Junius by appearing for dinner in negligeés with floating sleeves, in
odd headdresses made of twisted silk, her fingers a frosty, excessive
sparkle of jewels. A sort of flirtation, rather, an appreciation of
one another, candid and humorous, could not have gone on in Robert’s
presence. They could not be themselves where there was a likelihood
of criticism. Lilah said: “We are very alike.” And Junius agreed.
Changeable, intolerant, vain, impulsive. Delightful! But dangerous to
other people. Together, they could play--act, shift like the winds,
speak of beauty, or sit in silence, conscious of their pride and their
perfection. Robert had a way, heavy, uncomprehending, of taking them
for granted. “She is happier without Robert,” Junius thought. “I’ll
keep him away a while longer. There is work to be done in Georgia--I’m
buying cypress. I’ll send him there, make it imperative. The color’s
coming back to her cheeks. Too bad! Too bad!... But I stuck, where
she won’t.” He could pity her, for she was so like himself, with all
that indefinable search for perfection, that restless desire never
satisfied. He was sorry for such people. Far better to be commonplace
and to find, in acceptance of dullness, content he and she could
never find. There was something wrong, unbalanced, in such insatiable
natures, and yet their very discontent and arrogance set them aside
from the common run of people, made them, he felt certain, immeasurably
superior. He was sorry for her. He took to watching her furtively as he
smoked his single after-dinner cigar.

She had absolutely no interest in small domestic matters; however,
when she was in the house things ran better than they ever did under
Aunt Whiteside’s fussy management. She would spend a whole evening
staring into the fire, wanting to talk to him about the man she loved,
but keeping still because she had a sense of proportion--after all,
he was Robert’s grandfather! Junius was curious to know about the man
who had won her, what sort of fellow he was--some one unusual, of
course, as different from Robert as possible. And Junius had a twinge
of remote envy, an almost romantic sensation; he knew what rapture
she was capable of if a man once touched her imagination. Some one
mysterious, a little cruel--otherwise, she would have had nothing to
do with him.... As for himself, he enjoyed her presence; he would have
prolonged the moment, stretched it out indefinitely, for it contained,
in its essence, the illusion of youth. He could dream, without being
ashamed of dreaming. Detached, sympathetic, he watched her. She would
play for him if he asked it; he liked the modern composers; the more
modern the better! Old songs were wistful, reminiscent. But these
strange, exciting modernists gave you a sense of to-morrow, innovation,
audacity, as if anything were possible, save when, as in the Clair de
Lune, there was pity and tenderness for the despised and forgotten
posturings of lovers and poets....

       *       *       *       *       *

Robert went reluctantly to Georgia, and Lilah was left to make her
decision. Another letter came from Flagg, impatient, this time, with
a touch of anger and rebellion. She answered that things were not as
simple as she had expected; he must wait. A wire was brought to her two
days later. He was coming!

Lilah went at once to Junius. She gave him the telegram and stood
waiting. “You see. I can’t stop him. He’ll be here to-morrow.”

Junius said: “Flagg.... You didn’t tell me his name.... Does he
know....”

“No!” Lilah spoke sharply. “No! I love him. I want him. What shall I
do?”

“I’ll send him away. He mustn’t bother you. He’s got to be made to
understand that you are here, with us, temporarily.... You see, in this
I am old-fashioned. His following you shocks me. Robert is away. And as
sorry as I am for you, if he insists, I’ll take my cane to him!”

He stroked her hand. “There. There. These things aren’t irrevocable.”

Lilah said: “I intend to see him.”

“I intend to prevent you.”

“You can’t.”

Their eyes met and Junius rose. “I won’t have you cheapen yourself.
Sell yourself for a song! I love you, too.”

“You don’t!” she retorted. “You couldn’t, and expect me to go on living
this way. Quivering, inside, when Robert comes near me. I deny him
everything. I torment him. His goodness makes a devil of me. I don’t
want this child. I’m drugged, now, by this place--a sort of lull, when
I sleep because it is easier to sleep. But now that I know Flagg is
coming, I come alive, body and soul. Perhaps I have ruined Robert’s
life, but my own will be ruined unless I have Flagg.”

With a feeling of futility, of confusion and fatigue Junius said: “If
this man’s a gentleman, I won’t need to send him off; he’ll go. And
stay!”

With a gesture of contempt, Lilah left him. But she was more concerned
than she cared to let Junius know.

She went to her room and dressed for riding. The windows were open and
she could hear the excited barking of dogs in the kennel. A gardener
was turning sod on the lawn, spreading manure. Lilacs were in bud.
Nearly a year had passed since that marriage before an altar of syringa
bloom. Another year, and what would have happened to her?

She stared at herself in the mirror; then, dissatisfied, studied her
face in a hand-glass, scrutinizing her skin. The struggle to preserve
a balance, to keep some sort of hold on security, had aged her; her
mouth drooped. In two years she would be thirty. In ten, forty. And
she was going to be a withered, embittered little old woman; perhaps,
after all, beauty was a disadvantage. If Flagg lived, she would have
to hold him with beauty, where another woman might hold him with
easy sensuality, laughter and indifference to externals--a lazy,
affectionate, humorous, slovenly woman....

Lilah put the mirror down. She passed her hands over her face,
shivered, laughed unsteadily. She was slim as a boy in riding clothes.

She went out without speaking again to Junius. Their friendship had
been shattered in that clash of wills; pride, in him, was intensified
by senility. He was going to be difficult; he might even send for
Robert because the Peabody integrity was threatened....

One of the stablemen was rollicking with the spaniel in the yard.
He touched his cap and when Lilah asked him to saddle the roan, he
remarked doubtfully: “He’s awful fresh, ma’am.” Lilah stooped over the
dog and said tersely: “Bring him out. I can manage him.”

In the saddle, she had a moment of panic. The big horse wheeled
sideways in the gravel, but Lilah mounted, with a spring from the
stableman’s palm. She felt very small and light and free.

She rode directly to the woods, where, in softer ground, the roan was
impatient. It was late afternoon. A sudden darkness, clouds pushing
up from the western horizon, was followed by a rush of cold wind, and
a whirl of leaves blew against the horse’s legs, startling him. Lilah
controlled him with difficulty. Her hand on his neck, she urged him
forward.

The wood was bleak, gray, silent again after that brief rush of wind,
and Lilah heard a shrill, treble pipe of frogs in a pool. But where was
Flagg’s dance of gnats at sundown? Spring was here and she could not
watch it with him. She would have to send him away. Truth or pretext,
she would have to send him away.... She thought of the child as a
tide, rising, rising, uncontrollable. This life was within her. She
contained it and was contained within it. Neither in body or soul was
there escape. She was no longer herself; she was implicated, bound up
in, adhered to, responsible for, another self, a self unrecognized,
featureless, without volition, yet powerful, terrible. She was a body
bound by body. Irrevocable....

The world had changed. The sun was gone, and with it the warmth of the
earth. The roan was chilly, nervous. His ears flicked back, and with a
whinny he began to run. Lilah thought: “I’ll give him his head and let
him run it out--he’ll come to himself when he’s tired.” Already her
hands were numb, her arms stiff.

The bridle path doubled through the woods, crossed and recrossed
itself, gaining ten miles by this duplicity. The dark, wet earth,
broken by pools of melted snow, made a tunnel through tangled growth
of trees, very old and tall. A blurred twilight seemed to bar the way.
Lilah bent forward. She could no longer guide the horse. Sensing her
surrender, her fear, he lost his head.

He left the road. The branch of a tree tore Lilah’s hat off. She
shrieked at him. “Whoa! Whoa! Stop! You brute! Stop! For God’s sake,
stop!”

She was struck on the back, between her shoulders. A tearing, a blow.
She was pulled, thrown, dragged, face down, in a thicket. She thought,
twisting over on her side: “This is death.”

A dark pain, like blood, flowed over her breast, and she fell back
again.




IX


There was nothing to do but for Lilah to go.

Robert came into her room again, pale, with that new look of a man who
has found himself in suffering.

“I’m going, Robert.”

Robert sat down by the bed. He avoided looking at her. It was a pain to
look at her; Lilah, with that ghost whiteness, the blue veins showing
at her temples, her hair in two childish braids over her shoulders. She
was like a little girl. At the same time, there was a mystery about
her. She had suffered so. She had had to pass, alone, through a dark,
terrible suffering where no one could follow or help her. Robert felt
ashamed, because his own suffering was so unimportant in comparison to
hers. And yet his own cried out for speech. He wanted her to know that
she had killed something in him; he would never tell her. Never.

“You can go, if you want to,” he said stiffly.

Lilah turned her head on the pillow. “You don’t want me to stay, do
you?”

“Not if you love Flagg.”

“I do.”

After a moment, Robert said, “I’ve seen Flagg. He’s staying at
Biddeford. Did you know?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose my grandfather told you.”

“Your grandfather is decent enough to pity me.”

Suddenly Robert went down on his knees and put his face on her hand.
“God knows I pity you. Stay with me, Lilah. Tell me where I’ve failed.”

“It’s no good,” she said, “to try. To stay. Don’t blame me too much. I
didn’t know what love was.”

Her hand stirred beneath his lips, and he got up again stiffly.

“You must stay until you’re well.”

“They’ll let me walk to-morrow,” she said eagerly.

“Flagg wants me to divorce you.... Well, I won’t.”

“Why?”

He had not intended to tell her. But the answer was torn out of him,
a physical wrench, as if he had pulled a leech from off his heart.
“You’ve hurt me enough between you! I’ll be damned if I’ll let you
humiliate me. A man who divorces his wife is a coward. You may do what
you like. But I won’t divorce you.”

Lilah turned on her side, away from him. She could see the sky, a deep,
warm blue, with thin clouds passing over. And a quick flight of birds.
She had intended to tell Robert that she was sorry. Now she couldn’t.

After a moment, he went out.

       *       *       *       *       *

She left the Point one morning in June. Her trunks and boxes had
gone off the night before. Robert’s motor, driven by the stable man,
Edmonton, was to take her to the station. Robert had flung away up the
beach, followed by the spaniel. Junius kissed her good-by. He permitted
himself only one reproach. “I’m not sure that this is going to be any
better. You won’t like poverty. And happiness at the expense of another
is likely to go stale.”

“You had Venice,” she reminded him.

“But I came back.”

He took her hand. “Are you sure?”

“Quite.”

A wave of faintness, something almost hysterical, caused her to lean
against him. “We have to be true to ourselves. Sacrifice is out of
date.... If Robert is wise, he’ll let me go and not care.”

“Good-by, my dear.”

She kissed him quickly.

The motor turned out of the drive, sped smoothly through the forest,
now richly green, and she saw the place where she had been thrown,
where Flagg, late that night, had found her. It was like him to have
arrived sooner than he was expected. Like him, once there, to have
faced his responsibility. Through her illness, he had stayed at
Biddeford, within call. They had not let him see her, but Junius had
played the part, not unwillingly, of messenger; he enjoyed, Lilah knew,
the disloyal intrigue. Any man of spirit, Junius probably argued--any
man of his own day--would have driven to Biddeford to thrash Flagg on
general principles; but Robert had mooned about the house, had sat for
hours with his head in his hands! Junius Peabody’s sympathies were
with Lilah. Lilah, who lay rigid, her figure outlined beneath the
bed covers, her face drawn with the peculiar tension of her will to
conquer. Even death.... He had brought Flagg’s messages with a grim
tenderness and had murmured them to her often when she seemed unable
to hear. Only her lips had quivered, or there had been a faint smile.
Whenever Junius wavered, ashamed of his own part in the affair, he
reminded himself that in no other way could she be kept alive....

Lilah shuddered. The motor left the woods, turned sharply into the
paved highroad.... What did Edmonton know?

It occurred to her that Edmonton was no longer her servant. In the
performance of his duty, he was driving her, as he would have driven a
guest, to the station.

She straightened herself sharply. Her look became at once indifferent
and haughty. But something was unsteady, out of balance, threatening.
Her hold on life was precarious; she was drifting away from safety,
from her established self. The new self she would have to create
to meet the situation she found herself in was still shadowy; she
must wear a different face.... Love in exile.... The future had no
significance. Nor was there reality in the image of herself, reckless,
dedicated, indifferent, somehow romantic....

At the station, Edmonton, swinging her hand-luggage to the platform,
showed an impassive face and asked: “New York, madam?”

She thought of tipping him and changed her mind. After all, she wasn’t
a guest.... She could not resist saying, as the long train slipped down
the track toward them: “Don’t let Mr. Robert saddle the roan while I’m
away, Edmonton.”

He flushed and touched his cap. He had heard something! Servants found
out everything. “No, ma’am. Indeed, no, ma’am. I won’t. Be sure of
that.” An astonished, gratified, sly look passed across his eyes. He
handed Lilah aboard with a return of deference, an unmistakable relish.

       *       *       *       *       *

Lilah met Flagg in New York. She went to a hotel, and Flagg stayed at
the borrowed flat in the ’Fifties. She had a few hundred dollars, and
she had brought every rag and stitch of clothing and all of her jewels.
It was, she argued, no affair of Flagg’s. Robert had given her these
things; they belonged to her. She owned a distinguished string of small
pearls, well-matched and unusually brilliant, and, for the more formal
occasions of the season, Junius had given her a small crown of emeralds
which had belonged to Minnie; this, with an emerald bracelet, too
heavy and ornate for wear, had about them the innocent elegance of the
’Eighties.... Lilah discovered her wedding ring among the diamonds and
square-cut sapphires she preferred. She decided to wear it....

She met Flagg in the lobby of the hotel and they talked in the
comparative isolation of a taxicab throbbing up and down Fifth Avenue
in a complicated, nervous stream of traffic.

Their first excitement gave way to a hurried planning. They must, Lilah
argued, leave New York. “I’ve made such a ‘noise’ here,” she said. “I’m
more of a personage than you realize.”

Lilah expected to follow Flagg to his middle-west university town and
to become an anonymous figure in the background of his life. But Flagg
shook his head. “We’d be better off in New York.”

Lilah suppressed a sharp anxiety. “You won’t lecture, then?”

He assured her again that he wanted only to lie on a green hill with
his head in her lap!

“I can get my hands on three hundred a month. Not much; but we needn’t
starve! If you say, we’ll go abroad. Three hundred a month isn’t to be
sneezed at in Italy.”

“But you wanted to go on with your work!”

His interest in teaching, he explained, had lessened as his knowledge
increased. He was beginning to believe that he could do little more
than “shove his pupils off the high road into the wilderness of
personal experience, speculation”; besides, he was beginning to doubt
the value of his own contribution. “When I found you there, crumpled,
covered with blood, apparently dead, I was staggered by my ignorance.
Death, for myself, has always seemed a sort of translation. But
you--flesh I love--There is no solace for what I felt! I want to spend
the rest of my days with my arms around a concrete loveliness, warmth,
life.... Lilah, I’m afraid to go on alone!”

His desire persisted. They must go abroad, at once. Every day spent
in the city, crowded, humid, was wasted. Lilah had the impression
that Flagg was hurrying to a happiness which might, with delay, be
lost. Impatient, often irritable, he was upset by small details; he
wanted Lilah, enjoyment, fulfillment, immediately. The matter of
passports proved to be embarrassing. Flagg’s honesty would permit of no
compromise and Lilah refused to allow their names to appear on the same
passenger list. They agreed, finally, to sail on different ships and to
meet in Genoa or Naples.

Flagg left Lilah at her hotel and, alone, went about the complicated
business of steamer reservations.

If only there had not been this hiatus; the outlines of the adventure
were already blurred; in his arms, secure, the past definitely
discarded, her pleasure in her own audacity would return....

She glanced out over the city. From her bedroom, twenty-two stories
above the street, she could see the rivers, metallic, laced with
bridges. She was impressed by her lack of superiority, save only the
elevation granted her by this wall of granite and steel.... Flagg was
somewhere down in that swarm of people, that tossing and scurrying of
humanity....

Here, society was out of focus. Her rightness or wrongness was lost
in a conglomerate jumble of right and wrong. She could not comprehend
adultery--a cruel word--betrayal. These things counted only as they
affected a few individuals. Her right to happiness was paramount.
That crowd down there cared nothing, knew nothing, of what she did or
was, what she felt, her success, her failure.... She was struck by the
indifference of the mob, the savage concentration of the individual.
No tragedy, not even national disaster, not even war, could touch
them all! What, then, was she, was any one afraid of? To break a
commandment, to do good, was like throwing a pebble into a pool--a
little hoop of ripples....

       *       *       *       *       *

Flagg did not come back at once. He telephoned that he was standing
in line at the Customs House. “Have a photograph taken.” “Must I?”
It struck her that it was not going to be simple, this flight. They
might have gone to California, to Cuba! “But we can’t buy _lire_ in
California,” Flagg reminded her. With a hint of impatience, he rang
off. And Lilah, alone again, thought: “I’ll go to Thirty-eighth Street.
There may be an old photograph--”

She dressed with an odd sense of excitement, of daring. She remembered
the Waterford glass chandeliers; she had never seen them in place.
After all, the house was her creation; she had evoked it. Flagg could
have no possible objection to her going there. For the rendezvous
with that self she was discarding, she wore a gown Elmer Shawhan had
approved of, longer than the fashion of the moment, made of dark
blue and sulphur yellow; her stockings, sheer; her feet, in strapped
slippers, might have been bare. A small hat and a heavy veil, the
perfume she affected, gave her an exclusive, an unmistakable elegance.

The caretaker admitted her, after a delay, while the taxicab she had
hired waited at the curb. “Mrs. Peabody!”

Again that look of surprise! Lilah brushed her way in, across the hall,
upstairs. The shades were not drawn and a flood of sunlight illuminated
Elmer Shawhan’s riotous panels. Lilah thought: “I told Robert to darken
this room!” She stood on the threshold in a sort of trance of delight.
She had forgotten how lovely it was; even now, with the furniture
covered, the rugs rolled back, it was a room worthy of respect.... Her
dreams of a little renaissance had come to nothing; her next step was
even less promising. Italy, with a man she could not marry, an invalid
who had abandoned his career for her sake....

She crossed the room and became suddenly conscious of voices. Before
she could draw back, or hide, Robert and Grace Fuller came in from the
hall. Grace Fuller was in gray, her natural distinction accentuated
by a clever hat. Lilah saw Robert’s face, flushed and angry. For the
first time in her knowledge of him he was beside himself. She said
breathlessly: “I didn’t know you were in New York! I wouldn’t have come
here, naturally....”

“I intend to sell the house,” he interrupted. “I haven’t spent a happy
day here.... If there is anything you want, you are welcome to it.”

Grace Fuller looked from one to the other. In her expression, amusement
and pity conquered embarrassment. “Aren’t you two going to be sensible?”

“No!” Lilah wanted to run, to fly ignominiously from this humiliation.
She saw how the wind blew; what Robert intended to do; where he had
turned, already, for solace, “understanding.” The whole incident made
life and love seem disgusting, trivial. Flagg could do nothing to erase
the fact of her marriage to Robert. All of their best moments together
were ugly in the light of their present situation. They who had been
intimate were bitter strangers, abashed by the memory of their intimacy.

She cried desperately: “Let me go. This is abominable.”

Robert said nothing and she ran downstairs. The astonished caretaker
opened the door and shut it again, with a bang.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the taxi, Lilah conquered her panic. “Drive around the park slowly.”
She needed people, movement, color, to restore her faith in herself....

No matter what the world thought, now, later she would be forgiven
if she failed magnificently. New York was charitable to picturesque
sinners. Florence, a villa, herself, wistful but triumphant.... She
wondered whether she could do without the things she had, in a year,
come to regard as necessary. On three hundred a month she would have
to wear made-over clothes; she would have to curb her extravagant
desire for amusing, expensive accessories. She was one of those women
who sense every variation in style, each new subtle trick of elegance,
the sleight-of-hand of the mode. To be inconspicuous and astonishing
had become paramount. Until she met Flagg, she had thought of little
else. Her charm and her pert wit had carried her. She had forgotten
how to think, what to think, since she had long ago discovered that a
worthless opinion spoken decisively passes for cleverness in a hurried
world.

Flagg would not like her friends, vivacious log-rollers who had
peddled their superficial accomplishments successfully and now called
themselves the Young Generation of American writers, painters, actors,
critics and editors. Lilah enjoyed their ostentatious sophistry, their
good humor and their irreverence. They stimulated her and never bored
her; like them, she was fundamentally restless, unstable, impatient.
Perhaps she was incapable of constancy.... She could never follow
Flagg’s thought, painstaking, honest, uncompromising....

The cab turned into the park. On wide, dusty greens children in bright
dresses romped with colored balloons. A procession of motors in a blue
reek of gasoline clogged the drives.

To be victorious, she must dominate Flagg. He might turn poet or
mystic, or he might be content with sunlight and _fritto misto_.

She had seen many such couples--lovers who had surrendered
respectability without a struggle, who had relinquished position, who
no longer cared what was said or thought about their affair and who
fought like cats and dogs. She must see that this didn’t happen. After
all, every love, no matter how exalted in the beginning, inevitably
resolved into a struggle against the loss of illusion. So fragile the
threads from heart to heart, so impermanent affection.... Junius had
once said to her that the only happy love relationships were illicit
because marriage harnessed the imagination. He believed in the European
marriage of convenience, a business arrangement, something outside
the emotions. If this were so, Lilah thought, she had a chance of
happiness....

The telephone bell was ringing fretfully when she opened the door of
her room at the hotel. She ran, lifted the receiver with a sudden,
passionate recklessness.

Flagg’s voice, purposefully tranquil, tightened her heart. He began to
say that there would be difficulty, when she interrupted him: “No! No!
I was wrong. Forgive me. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. The slate’s
clean. We’ll go together.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Florence was all a golden yellow in August, dusted with the pollen
of hot sunlight. Flagg and Lilah climbed over the hills or drove in
a rickety cab, house-hunting. They chose, finally, a small villa,
ironically enough named “Villino Sans-Souci,” near the Ponte a Mensola.
It was dirty, but there was a grape arbor at the back, and two very old
cypresses, black, tipped with gold, traced invisible slow spirals upon
a purple sky. Vincigliata rose behind them and in the cypress groves at
sunset there was a constant call of cuckoos. “Legendary,” Flagg said.
“Mournful, and beautiful. We’ll take this. What do you say, Lilah?”

They could afford it, just. Flagg figured hurriedly on the back of an
envelope. “Rent. Cook. Food and light. Fuel. Not much left for cabs,
Lilah! Or the opera. But we have the view! Turn around, my dear, and
look--”

Through the arbor, framed in the dusty arch of grape-leaves, they could
see the Dome, those delicate stone shafts, remote, miraculous, the
Tower, the Bargello, and that great black lily, the Signoria, thrusting
through the tumbled roofs of the city.

“It hasn’t changed,” Lilah said. “What immortal loveliness!” She leaned
against Flagg and let herself sink into her appreciation of him. Robert
would have been more concerned with the plumbing than with the view.
Flagg cared for nothing so long as he could fill his senses with this
old, secretive, sardonic city, this city with bold cheek-bones, short
shining hair, the smile of Gioconda and the eyes of a hired warrior.
Flagg belonged in Florence; there was nothing modern about him; he was
like Leonardo, was perhaps, Leonardo, sent back to question, to advance
a little way, to recede again, like a comet flying down space.... She
turned her head and kissed his shoulder.

“Perhaps you won’t miss the other things--”

“What other things?”

“Your work. Those guinea pigs and test tubes, those farmer boys looking
to you for the word.”

His eyes, for the first time in many weeks, shut her out. But he smiled
and his arm tightened about her waist. “If no one ever comes here--if
we’re left alone to grow old in our arbor--will you mind, Lilah?”

“No!”

They went into the house, and Lilah, with wide gestures, refurnished
it. “We’ll have to get rid of all the furniture. All of it! And those
fearful pictures. Except that one--that’s so bad it’s--positively good!
This room needs Venetian brocade, claret-against-the-light color, with
Sixteenth Century chairs--”

“But we can’t afford such things,” Flagg interrupted.

“I’d go mad if I had to live in the same house with a gilded
waste-paper basket,” Lilah answered.

The agent, sensing criticism, rattled the keys. “The villino belongs to
a celebrated poet,” he said eagerly. He showed his teeth and repeated:
“Most celebrated!”

“It was here,” he assured them with dignity, “he wrote ‘_Belle Mani_.’
You know this book?”

They had come out into the arbor again. And, licking herself in a patch
of sunlight, a little black cat had made herself at home. “Does the cat
go with the house?” Flagg demanded.

The agent made a violent gesture. “I have him killed! At once! This
poet liked the cats--_everywhere cats_!” He made a terrible face and
waved his arms. “_Shoo!_ Get out!”

The cat rose, arched her back, yawned and with her tail in the air,
slightly crooked at the tip--a sign of pleasure--went straight to
Flagg. He picked her up. “If your poet liked cats, he has my permission
to use gilded waste-paper baskets.”

Lilah was seized with a perverse mirth.

“Spaniels and cats,” she said. But, to Flagg, she refused to explain.
Holding the little black cat in the crook of his arm, he was tickling
her under the chin where a patch of white fur was worn, daintily, like
a bib.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the blazing stillness of an August mid-afternoon, their drowsy
isolation was broken into by a friend of Flagg’s who came out from
Florence on a bicycle and arrived at the gate of “Sans-Souci,” dusty,
jovial and eager, with a quizzical look for Lilah and a shout for Flagg.

Lilah had been painting kitchen chairs an artless apple green. She
looked up, saw a strange man staring at her and stood, the paintbrush
at arm’s length. This, she saw at once, was to be her first social
encounter.

She said quickly: “Mr. Flagg is asleep. I’ll call him!”

“Don’t. Please....”

She hurried indoors, angry, rather stimulated. Flagg was lying
uncomfortably on the poet’s divan. He was not asleep and his eyes
looked up at her, mischievous, black, bright, more alive than any eyes
she had ever seen.

“Some one--” she began breathlessly. “Tall, dusty man on a bicycle--”

“McNair!” Flagg shouted.

He ran outside and Lilah heard their noisy greeting. She did not quite
dare to follow, but waited for Flagg to call her. Presently he did.
“Lilah! Oh, Lilah!”

She flew to a mirror.... How pretty she was getting to be! The color
of happiness was over her, warm, golden.... What a pity that all women
couldn’t be happy; so many of them were pinched and gray, shadowy,
unrecognized, unreal. She had never existed until Flagg loved her,
until, she corrected herself, she had loved Flagg. She had had no other
consciousness, since coming to this place, but this.... She went out,
smiling.

“Lilah,” Flagg said, “this is Gil McNair. Can you manage tea?”

Lilah gave her hand, sticky with paint, into a large, warm clasp, and
it was then she caught that quizzical look. It was not a question, it
was, rather, a brief investigation. With an upward rush of spirits, the
challenge accepted, Lilah said: “Tea? Of course!” But she threw into
her glance what she would have preferred to say: “Yes! Here we are.
Quite irregular. But quite charming!”

She made tea on a spirit lamp because she had not conquered the
mysteries of an Italian stove and, so far, she had been unable to
lure a cook as far out of town as the Ponte a Mensola. It was not the
Florence of before the war; Tuscan maid-servants had become aware of
their potentiality in commerce.... The poet’s cups were eccentric;
apparently _il the_ had not been popular at the “Villino Sans-Souci.”
There wasn’t any cut sugar and Lilah had to use cream from a can.
“Aren’t there any cows in Italy?” she wondered. She could hear Flagg
laughing in the arbor, and she felt a pang of jealousy because he could
laugh at something she did not share. To love, she had discovered,
is to be jealous--jealous of everything, each unconsidered, careless
gesture not directly to do with her; when Flagg slept, she was jealous
of his dreams.

She was glad, hearing him laugh, that he had accepted their situation,
not as if he were making the best of a bad bargain, but with the
positively gorgeous indifference of a man superior to his audacities.
She had not once considered right or wrong--she had thrust aside the
shadow of presentiment, had drawn the warmth of sunlight over the dark
depths of possibility. She had rested for hours with her head against
Flagg’s breast, listening to the beating, rapid, unstable, of his
heart, his enemy, her enemy; she had lost the reality of death in the
living body....

The arbor was patterned with the cool, blue shadows of grape leaves;
the sun struck through, white, hot, and lay in flakes on the table, on
the smoothly brushed earth.

The black cat had wandered in and sat on Flagg’s knee in that peculiar,
feline trance he liked because, he said, it was so “damned superior.”
He stroked the shining black fur as he talked and Lilah, in spite of
herself, watched the caressing fingers.

McNair took the tray from Lilah. His gestures were quick, nervous.
Lilah discovered that he had done something astonishing, if not
conspicuous, in the war, what, she could not quite make out; it had to
do with “listening gear.”

“He can hear celestial ragtime,” Flagg said. “He ‘listens in’ on the
Beyond--michrophonic miracle man.”

McNair laughed. He had big, square white teeth, like tombstones, and
dusty hair worn in a bang. Lilah wanted him to notice her. She felt
that she must look very pretty in her chintz apron, the little turban
of twisted green silk, her feet in buckled slippers.

McNair accepted tea and drank it greedily, his eyes on Flagg; their
talk was experimentary, the talk of men widely different yet gifted
with an identical passion for the world, the adventure offered by life
to eager men; they liked it well enough to want, honestly, to better
it. Words, names she had never heard, at first baffled, then bored her.
She yawned, but Flagg was not stricken, as she had hoped he would be,
as Robert would have been, with an immediate concern. So she moved to
the bench beside him, slipped her arm through his and let her head fall
against his shoulder.

McNair, putting his tea-cup aside with a clatter, as if he had only
just become aware of her, said: “You’re going back in October, Flagg?”

Flagg answered: “No! I’m through. For a while.... I have what every man
secretly desires at one time or another, leisure for contemplation.
I’ve never had time to think. Since the war smashed man’s favorite
image of himself, wearing the laurels of progress, I want to sit
alone with the fragments and make of them what I can, for my own
satisfaction.”

“For your own satisfaction?” McNair repeated. “You used to believe, or
claimed you did, that man owes his wisdom to man. You once said that
you despised ascetics and hermits.” He glanced around. “Delightful!
Your arbor! But you won’t stay here!”

Lilah interrupted: “Why?”

“Ask Flagg!”

Flagg said: “I claim the right to the one certain beauty--life itself!
I’ve been through the five cycles of psychic hell. I’ve questioned
until I’m sick and tired of questioning. I’ve come to a sort of
acceptance that isn’t surrender--it’s seeing! And if I should tell you,
any one, what I see, know--I’d be damned as a dreamer or an idiot.
I see that science and religion, both, have failed. We still suffer
plague. We still arm ourselves. We still distrust our brother.... But
we go forward. Imperceptibly, forward.... Here, at peace, I want first
to think, later, if possible, to write. It depends on whether or not I
have anything to say.”

“You won’t stay,” McNair repeated. His face was flushed, and he said
good-by abruptly, almost angrily.

When he had gone, Lilah said: “Did you really mean what you said?”

“Yes.”

“What did McNair think--about--us?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, I dare say.”

Lilah insisted: “But he must have wondered--”

Flagg lifted her face and said gravely: “For God’s sake, let’s be
decent sinners! I thought we had decided to pay our debt in the coin of
the realm.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean that it doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn what McNair or any
one else thinks of us! The only thing that matters is what we think
of ourselves. If you’re ashamed, you ought not to be here. If you’re
sorry, you’re only hurting me.”

She answered: “We’re happy when we’re alone. But when people come,
we begin to blame each other.” She kissed him, quick, light kisses.
Then her head sank again on his shoulder, and they sat there, clasped
together, staring through the arch of the arbor at Florence, the
towers, the brazen Arno climbing across the plain toward Pisa. It was
very still. A cart went down the road beyond the wall with a tinkle of
bells. The little black cat sat on the table, licking, her tail in a
plate of cakes.




X


The lazy enchantment of their exile lasted through the summer. In
September, Lilah complained to Flagg that all of New York seemed to
have moved to Florence. Whenever she went to town she met some one
she had known during her brief appearance as Mrs. Robert Peabody. She
encountered curiosity but, from the younger generation, at least, no
hostility; she was not certain whether this was an indication of social
emancipation or due, rather, to her own remoteness from the lives,
the activities of these people--she was, perhaps, not worth snubbing!
The older generation was unaware of her; their standards resisted,
obdurately, the pressure of modern opinion. Lilah could dismiss
them because they were “old-fashioned.” But she resented the casual
indifference of her contemporaries; it was selfish, even vulgar; she
had, it seemed, nothing material to offer them! She was bitterly aware
that most of them could have been hooked had she baited her line with
millions. Money, enough of it, meant pleasure, diversion, a sop for the
martyrdom of satiety. She could have lured the fashionable world to one
of the veritable _ville_ in the hills near Florence--jazz on a Medicean
terrace, swimming parties in a marble basin by Mino da Fiesole, a
liberal supply of sporting Italians of the upper class.... Her scandal
would be an asset under such glamorous circumstances. The “Villino
Sans-Souci” was another story.

McNair came again, bringing a young Englishman, a pianist, a pupil of
Busoni, who played on the poet’s upright. He soothed Lilah because,
without hesitation, he fell in love with her; she called him “silly
boy,” but he was, if anything, older than Lilah; he “adored” women,
professed to have been badly treated by them, to have thrown himself
away, whereas he was quite unscrupulous, lazy and irresponsible. He
played with facility and refused to practice because he seemed to have
been born with a technique. Tall, heavy, he had the typical thespian’s
skull, the profile of a Shakesperian actor.

He made love to Lilah whenever Flagg’s back was turned. He played “for”
her, he said. Lilah began to believe that she was responsible for the
seductive music he somehow got from that long-toothed piano; she saw
herself in the waltzes of Kreisler, the moon-smitten nuances of Ravel,
the songs of Rachmaninoff. And she was filled with a vague melancholy,
almost a pity for herself, inexplicable, delicious, like the
forebodings of adolescence. She would sit on the terrace with Flagg,
her hand in his, and seeing the “silly boy’s” ardent profile swaying
against the glow of the piano-lamp, she would think tenderly of Robert,
of Junius, and of herself.... She could only relent, apparently, when
she had had her own way.... She squeezed Flagg’s hand.

Lilah began to know the sort of people she would, in New York, have
ignored. A thin, hawk-nosed, Pittsburgh-born American _contessa_ who
lived nearby called repeatedly, bringing with her a shifting retinue
of cavalry officers; the _contessa_ conducted a sort of matrimonial
agency; she had, she boasted, introduced many “dear, sweet, rich
American girls” to young Italians of title. Lilah suspected that she
lived upon the precarious fruits of gratitude.

Flagg’s reputation attracted scientists from France, from Germany,
from Rome--he was at the mercy of men who coveted his knowledge. He
was always generous, but Lilah saw him in moods of savage contempt and
rebellion. “You waste yourself on these people,” she said.

“I know! I wish they’d leave me alone!” But he never seemed to be able
to resist them; she would rescue him from arguments carried on in half
a dozen languages, lead him indoors and make him lie down. He would
look up at her, his face pinched, his lips pale, and with a gesture of
hopelessness, say: “I’ll have to go back, some day, and work! I don’t
know a damn thing!” And once he added, with a querulous bitterness:
“There’s so little time.”

“But you’re going to get well.”

“Yes,” he said. “Perhaps. It’s a new idea.... If I do, it will be
because of you.” He smiled. “I’m not used to you, Lilah! I find myself
looking at you, wondering who you are and how you came to be here....
You’re not sorry, are you?”

“Not if you aren’t.”

So they reassured each other.

       *       *       *       *       *

Flagg was not a man who enjoyed idleness. McNair left for Edinburgh.
Save only Don Orlando, a priest who came down from Siena occasionally
to spend an hour in the arbor, and an eccentric Florentine, a sort of
inventor-alchemist, there was no one he enjoyed. He took to wandering
away into the country, on foot. Lilah was left to her own devices.
She tried to convince herself that she was happy. This was what she
had made for herself; she could not question his love; her own was
deeper than she had thought possible--her feeling consumed her. But her
character was unchanged. She resisted, despised discipline; denial made
her intractable. She wanted pleasure, excitement, admiration. There was
danger in the heartless and unstable passion of such men as the English
pianist. She hated herself because this was so. But she told herself
that had Flagg been different, she would have been contented to sit in
the arbor at the Ponte a Mensola, secure in the possession of love.

Something instinctive in Flagg, out of reach, resisted accepted
social standards. He stood aloof from close personal bonds, even,
fundamentally, from Lilah. He was solitary, but not morose. She never
really knew his failings or his ambitions; his confidences were always
touched with self-scorn, yet he refused sympathy--it was as if he
preferred to find his own way. His feeling for her was identical; he
realized, perhaps, that sex would entangle him, hold him back from
that mysterious pursuit of his. He was not easily stirred by her mere
physical presence; she never felt that he had gone into the adventure
through a desire for gratification. And she was flattered by his most
casual caress because she realized that he was not demonstrative; his
emotions were deep, strong and, when aroused, ruthless.

But there were moments when Lilah was baffled by his reserve; she felt
inadequate. Her own human, reprehensible sufferings, longings and
jealousies fell back before his impartiality. He had believed in their
right to live together. The fact that she did not love her husband,
Flagg insisted, absolved her. But he had not stopped to consider what
the affair might mean to Lilah; it was demoralizing, she decided, to
ignore the world’s opinion. If Flagg should die, she would have no
resistance.

Thoughts like these threaded her consciousness; for the most part, she
was lulled by the fact of his presence. Whenever he touched her, she
sensed the immortality of happiness.

       *       *       *       *       *

Coming out of Doney’s confectionery shop one afternoon, with a box of
French pastry, she met Mrs. Sinclair, a willowy figure in gray crêpe,
with enveloping veils, descending from an open touring-car painted
royal blue.

“My precious darling.”

She enfolded Lilah briefly.

“I heard that you’d run off with Putnam Flagg. The Wagners crossed
with you. That witty Wagner girl was too absurd--she said you’d been
flagged. Was that vulgar? How are you?”

“Awfully well,” Lilah answered. She was sorry that she had worn her
most unbecoming hat and a dress that was much too short for the mode.

“Of course you came to Florence. Extraordinary, how they all do--people
who break away--irresponsible, brave people! Sinclair and I are so
desperately conventional. We’ve been married fifteen years and neither
of us has ever cast the eye--well, not seriously! Sinclair’s in the
car. Don’t speak to him, Lilah darling--he’d be shocked. Flagg hasn’t a
cent, has he? I don’t see, frankly, why you did it, or what you gained.
You had everything on earth you could ask for, and New York at your
feet. Sympathy is with Robert, of course. He’s enormously popular, and
any number of women are applying.... You aren’t divorced?”

“No.”

Mrs. Sinclair turned with a swirl, positively oriental, of draperies.

“Are the chocolates good here? We’re on our way to Bologna--then on up,
to Paris. They say Doucet’s clothes are inimitable, and I’m in rags.”

She went into the shop and Lilah, lifting her head, crossed the
sidewalk to the royal blue car. Behind a pair of smoked goggles she
found Sinclair’s eyes staring at her with a sort of panic. “How do you
do?” He gasped, leaned forward, offered a limp hand. “How do you do?
Beastly weather, isn’t it? Where are you stopping?”

“At the Ponte a Mensola,” Lilah said sweetly.

“Well, I must say, you’re looking fit.”

“I am.”

“What’s May doing? Tell her to hurry!”

Lilah turned away. The encounter had left her trembling. She crossed
the Tornabuoni, signaled a cab and drove all the way back to the Ponte
a Mensola. Somehow this extravagance comforted her.

The ride was long and dusty. A stream of cars and trucks, carts and
trolleys, blocked the narrow road between endless villa walls. The
cabman, a disreputable Tuscan in a frock coat and a patent-leather hat,
gurgled and hiccoughed at the horse. She could imagine the progress
of the Sinclair’s motor, climbing the tortuous streets of sun-smitten
hilltowns, rushing across the Lombardian plain, climbing Alpine
passes, on again through France to Paris--in its wake a servile host
with well-silvered palms bent in an attitude of obeisance to American
millions. Lilah knew how Mrs. Sinclair would spend her time in Paris--a
round of the _couturières_, perhaps in the company of a Frenchman,
a rarefied sycophant, dancer, flatterer and debased wit who would
criticize _mannequins_ and gowns, choose May Sinclair’s wardrobe and
profit by her vanity to the extent of a cruise in the Sinclair yacht or
a trip to the South of France in the Sinclair’s private car.

Lilah’s imagination, like a shutter, opened and closed upon visions of
fashionable America, the people she had known and might eventually
have dominated, moving from Paris to London, from Biarritz to San
Moritz, from New York to Palm Beach. Their houses, jewels, clothes,
pleasures, were rare and exclusive enough to permit them any latitude
of behavior; now that she was not a part of their life, Lilah could be
contemptuous. Except for chance, she would in all probability have been
in Paris, buying the best of Doucet’s collection ... or ... no; at the
Point, waiting for her child to be born....

She put her hands up to her face.

Women like May Sinclair had escaped. Lilah suffered because she had not
been content to use the material at hand--the fabric for the fashioning
of her dreams had always been just beyond reach.

She decided to say nothing to Flagg of her encounter. She went up the
steep path from the gate to the house. Flagg was leaning on the terrace
wall. The late sun gilded him, so that he was like a figure in bronze.
Lilah called: “You old pagan! I want ten _lire_. I’ve been extravagant.”

“Ten _lire_?”

“To pay the cabman.”

“Lilah,” Flagg said seriously, “you haven’t changed.”

“But I have!”

She paid the cabman and ran back to Flagg. “But I _have_ changed! I
needed gloves and bought pastry instead for your tea--black, sticky
cakes with cherries on top. Look!”

Flagg looked. “Lilah, do you know, I think that cat’s going to have
kittens!”

They went to the arbor. Lilah admitted that Flagg’s suspicions were
justified; the little black cat _was_ going to have kittens. And Flagg
said: “Damn! I hate having dumb things suffer. We’ll have to make a bed
for her.”

He went into the house and came back with a clothesbasket and a
blanket. “But she’s not going to have them to-day!” Lilah cried. Flagg
answered seriously that it was just as well to be prepared. These
things upset him; birth was terrifying. “I hope you’ll never have a
child. I’d probably die. Go mad. Knock my brains out.”

Lilah stroked the cat. Her heart tightened. After a moment she said: “I
won’t have a child.”

“What do you mean?”

“That time when I was thrown--”

Their eyes met. Something flashed across Flagg’s eyes, a fugitive
anger. “Oh. That was it. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I couldn’t.”

“You can tell me anything.”

After a pause, he added: “You weren’t quite honest, Lilah. I wouldn’t
have gone to Maine if I had known what you’ve just told me. Your
husband has every reason to believe that I’m a cad.”

“Must we talk about these things? Can’t we forget them?”

He stooped again over the basket. His expression was not guarded and
Lilah cried: “If you think I wanted to be hurt--if you think I tried
deliberately--”

Flagg turned away. “We can’t forget these things. But you’re right; we
needn’t talk about them.”

When he had gone, Lilah wept a little. The warm, sinewy body of the
stray cat comforted her; she held it close, as she would never have
held one of Robert’s spaniels, letting her tears fall on the glossy
fur like drops of quicksilver. If she sat there long enough, she knew,
Flagg would come back, repentant. And presently he came, drawn by her
silence. “I’m sorry, Lilah.”

She burst out: “You’re thinking of yourself when you ask me not to
divorce Robert! I could, easily, in Paris.” The accusation was turned
adroitly against Flagg. “Am I selfish? Isn’t it, rather, a question
of honesty? Must we go over that again?” Lilah turned her head away.
“I’m unhappy.” Flagg gazed at her with a curious detachment, as if he
were seeing her for the first time. Presently he said deliberately: “If
divorce will make you happy, by all means go to Paris. I don’t know
what the process is, how long you’d have to live there or whether, in
the end, we could afford the necessary expense. But you must, at all
costs, be happy.”

Later in the day, still smarting under the memory of Sinclair’s
dismissal, she wrote to Junius: “I am going to divorce Robert. Will you
find out from him, for my sake, whether he would be willing to come to
Paris and make the necessary arrangements?” She added, with a flourish
of defiance: “I am gloriously happy.”

With the letter safely in the post, Lilah felt a return of security.
It was only a matter of time before she could demand recognition. She
dreamed of subjugating Florence; there was opportunity for a clever,
pretty and accomplished woman to have a distinguished “drawing-room.”
She hadn’t money, but she had everything else.

With this possibility in mind she looked with new eyes at the “Villino
Sans-Souci.” The poet had furnished it with lavish bad taste. He had
had a morbid turn of mind, and perhaps to stimulate his imagination or
in the interests of publicity had slept in a bed built like a gondola,
black, funereal, uncomfortable, and had placed a wooden statue of
Aphrodite in a niche, a sort of shrine before which he had burned
tapers “to love and sorrow.” His drawing-room was a museum of amorous
mementoes, signed photographs of pretty actresses--_Á mon cher! Tua,
Maria. Sempre, Nina_--abominable porcelains, first editions, cushions
and ecclesiastical velvets. His desk, where he had probably written
“_Belle Mani_,” was the largest piece of furniture Lilah had ever seen,
an affair of ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl, “a battleground for
literature,” Flagg said. “The whole place is like an embalmed scandal.”

The house itself was old; it had been a _podesta’s_ and bore the patina
of several centuries. “I believe we could buy it for a song,” Lilah
said. She kissed the tips of her fingers. “And I could make it into one
of the loveliest houses in Florence.”

Her desire for beauty had never got her anywhere. Now she was restless
and dissatisfied because there were too many footstools and majolica
vases in the “Villino Sans-Souci.” A few thousand dollars--only a
few--would transform this wilderness into a setting worthy of her
ambition. She began to haunt the shops along the Borgognissanti, where,
for ridiculous prices, she was offered the treasures of palaces;
Sixteenth Century tables, dim Venetian mirrors, flamboyant chairs,
chests, silver, brocades stiff with tarnished gold threads, faded,
“like sunlight through claret.” Her desire for possession--she was a
victim of her love of these things--was a sort of drunkenness; she made
promises, broke them, had furniture sent to the “Villino Sans-Souci”
on approval and sent back again; she was at once the despair and the
victim of the antiquaries.

Flagg had no idea that she had in her possession the pearls Robert had
given her. They were hidden away in a hat-box together with the emerald
crown and bracelet.

One day she took them to a dealer whose shop was on the Ponte Vecchio,
an unpretentious, shadowy room ten feet square. Across a modern counter
upholstered in black velvet, Lilah faced a man who was positively
medieval, lean, dark and clever; he had the delicate hands of an
expert, flexible wrists and pointed, sensitive, critical fingers. The
pearls, a long string, lay coiled on a small cushion, an opalescent
serpent. Lilah had no idea how much they were worth. “I want to sell
them,” she explained. The dealer considered, his hands clasped under
his chin. His offer, in lire, astonished her, but she covered her
surprise with an emphatic shake of her head.

“Too little?” The dealer’s face became enigmatic. “I recognize
these pearls, Madame. They belong to the Peabody collection. I sold
them--this clasp--to Mr. Junius Peabody, thirty years ago. I never
forget a really important purchase; sooner or later, the most valuable
pearls in the world pass through my hands. I have, besides, a record.”

Suppressing a feeling of guilt, Lilah said: “The pearls are mine. I am
Mrs. Robert Peabody.”

“I see. Exactly.... I can sell the string, immediately, to an American
lady who is now in Rome. My offer stands.”

Realizing that this man was superior to the sort of bargaining usual on
the Rialto, Lilah accepted the offer. The pearls were whisked away by a
clerk. The dealer remarked upon the weather. And the clerk, returning,
paid into Lilah’s hands the sum of seventy-five thousand lire. She
signed her name--once, twice--the dealer bowed without a trace of
animation, and she went out again into the street, a street, a world
transformed, no longer inimical, but hers. A duck of a world!

       *       *       *       *       *

A duck of a world!

With seventy-five thousand lire hidden away beneath the tissue paper in
an “Annette” hat-box, happiness flowed back over Lilah’s spirit. Her
worldly surface, that inimitable appearance of security, reappeared.
Her manner became decisive, her bearing assured. She found it possible
to smoke a cigarette with her old manner of casual indifference. She
could be Russian without an inward shiver of self-ridicule and distrust.

She postponed buying what she coveted because, in possession of
seventy-five thousand lire, she could afford to be particular. The
“Villino Sans-Souci” was inadequate. She must have one of the smaller
Medicean houses--she could imagine Mrs. Sinclair saying: “Lilah,
darling! What a delicious garden!”

With the _contessa_, in a hired carriage driven by a respectable
coachman in livery, Lilah inspected the available houses. Flagg
knew nothing of these excursions. The gates of imposing, crumbling
_ville_ were thrown open and Lilah glimpsed some of the most coveted
interiors in Italy. The demoralizing simplicity and perfection of these
rooms--spacious, exquisite in proportion, frescoed--went to her head.
She found herself living in imagination in a setting contrived by the
most cunning artists of Lorenzo’s day for a corrupt and fastidious
court. Terraces of stone worn smooth, grass-grown, crumbling; basins
reflecting the complicated foliage of live oaks; cypress alleys and
balustrades, the warm, ochre walls of Tuscan palaces, unbroken, without
ornamentation, sharp against the dazzling purple of the sky....

The _contessa_ was garrulous; her enthusiasm, her bad and fluent
Italian embarrassed Lilah. She was greedy, over-inquisitive. And with a
sort of officious generosity she wanted to establish Lilah at once in a
_villa_ at Montughi. “But, _cara mia_, it’s perfect! I don’t see what
you expect. You’d better snap it up at once or some American vulgarian
will lease it.”

It was easy to imagine herself established, with Flagg, in that
ingenuous, expensive little palace. The seventy-five thousand _lire_,
her treasure horde, were an open sesame to the most extravagant dreams.

But she did not dare to confide in Flagg; something warned her that he
would not approve, understand, forgive.

The December rains drenched Florence. Valambrosa was powdered with
snow. The Arno, amber, swollen, poured through the city, covered the
mud flats, became all at once a veritable river.

Flagg was driven indoors. He began, tentatively, to write. The
effort exhausted him. He would wrestle with his enemy, breathless,
contemptuous, until he collapsed.

And suddenly, for no reason, out of her security, the idea came and
persisted that her happiness was threatened.

Flagg was ill again.

Lilah never knew the precise moment when she was first aware that he
might not be going to live. His eyes were frightened most of the time,
although he kept on smiling at her. Noises irritated him. He wanted
silence. He would sit at his desk, writing, into the night, obstinate.
And when she spoke to him, he would shake his head and ask her to go
away. There was something he wanted to do, to finish, before he called
quits. It was absurd to say that he couldn’t work. He could.

On fine days he sat in the arbor, holding the cat and smiling a queer,
fixed smile that terrified Lilah. When it rained, he moved indoors and
sat, bent, in an attitude which was belligerent and pathetic, at his
desk--that “battle-ground of literature” inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

At night he would come into her room and lie with his face pressed
against her shoulder, like a child that is afraid of what he might see
in the dark.

When she questioned him, he was perfectly still.

And now, she knew, she loved him more than anything in the world.

       *       *       *       *       *

Love, complete love, came because she knew she could not have it. Flagg
was going to die. She had let herself off from feeling, because there
was always time to give way to an emotion that would be so great that
something of herself would have to perish. Now, because there was so
little time, she surrendered to it. She could not dodge facts any more;
she must face them and make of her life what she could with what she
had. Her nature was terrible to her because she was in the grip of a
genuine passion; she wanted to make herself over in time to conquer
Flagg’s reticence, to have him for herself. She had been selfish. She
had taken whatever she wanted, without caring. But she had cared.... It
hadn’t been easy to give up everything and come to Flagg. She wasn’t
superior, as Flagg was superior, to humiliation.

But now she saw what she had come for.

She saw herself, little, defeated, having to start all over again. She
was humble, frightened. She saw that she could have nothing without
earning it. And this revelation was like an unendurable light beating
against her consciousness. There was no escape. Because the future held
no happiness, the present was terrible, since it contained the essence
of the thing she would go on wanting all the rest of her life. It was
so precious, so elusive, so beautiful, and so inevitable.

She could not bear to watch Flagg’s suffering. She sent for a physician
who came out from Florence and was alone with Flagg for two hours.
Lilah waited, her heart fluttering as if she, not Flagg, were going to
die.

When the two men finally opened the door and came out, Flagg was still
smiling, but it was not that fixed, self-conscious smile Lilah had come
to fear. He seemed relieved. The physician nodded casually to Lilah and
drove away again, in a rickety cab, toward the city. Lilah thought: “He
can’t be a great specialist and come in a _carozza_. I won’t believe
anything....”

Flagg said: “It’s all right, Lilah. I’m sorry you worried. I’ve got a
chance. Only I’ll have to stop writing.”

Lilah thought: “He’s not telling me the truth. He’s going to die and
he’s glad of it.”

After that she felt that everything was against her, even Flagg’s will
to die. If he had really loved her, he would have wanted to live.

She heard from Junius Peabody toward the end of December. The familiar,
heavily embossed stationery post-marked Peabody’s Point bore her name
and the frivolous address: “Villino Sans-Souci” in Junius’ spidery
hand. Lilah tore the envelope open with a feeling of impending crisis.

She read:

“DEAR LILAH:

  “Your letter, the first from you in over six months, contained no
  news of yourself. I wanted to know whether or not you had made a
  success of your experiment. Society has never been charitable to
  women who take happiness they are not entitled to. A few celebrated
  women of genius have escaped criticism because their contribution was
  superior to their ‘transgression.’ I am not preaching to you. In this
  day and generation there are no fixed standards of behavior. I am
  only complaining because there is something shoddy, to me, offensive,
  in a woman of your quality ‘taking’ life in a rented villa--one of
  that pathetic band of outlaws who play at respectability in the
  smaller cities of Europe. I admit my part in the affair. But I
  somehow had faith that you would send that fellow packing when you
  were well enough to recognize his peculiar selfishness. I cannot
  resist begging you to consider seriously returning with Robert. He
  will, as you request, meet you in Paris on the first day of January.
  I am enclosing the name and address of his lawyer there. I will see
  that your position, in America, is secured.”

He signed himself, characteristically: “Junius.”

Lilah thought angrily: “Hypocrite! He wants me there, because I amuse
him.”

His own indiscretions had been made palatable, sugar-coated with
secrecy. She was happier than he had ever been in his selfish enjoyment
of women who had had to leave him because he was respectable. He had
spared Minnie’s Victorian sensibilities by carrying on an elaborate, an
“artistic” deception....

“I despise men,” Lilah said aloud.

Flagg glanced up. “Why?”

“Read this!”

She tossed Junius’ letter across the breakfast table.

Flagg’s expression was both contemptuous and embarrassed. When he
spoke, his voice was unsteady. “It seems that your husband is, after
all, going to let himself be divorced.”

The question of money came up immediately. Lilah couldn’t go to Paris
because there wasn’t enough money. They had spent their month’s
allowance already and the January draft, which wouldn’t come until the
tenth of the month, would have to be used to settle the December bills.
“I could wire for a few hundred. I’ve never told you. This money is
mine during my life-time. It comes from an estate held in trust for my
younger brother who’s out in India. When I die, it goes to him. I could
borrow on the future, but I don’t want to. I never have.”

“But I’ve got to go. Think, darling, what it means! Surely, you aren’t
jealous of Robert--now.”

“No.”

“I’ll have to see him. But it will be formal, embarrassing. The lawyer
will explain things. And before you know it, I’ll be free.”

Flagg turned to Junius’ letter. “I’m not sure. I hardly think it will
be as simple as that. They’ll urge you to go back. They’ll put up all
sorts of arguments. They’ll make it hard for you. I’d prefer that you
didn’t go.... Later, will be time enough.”

He got up and came around the table, touching her hair, a caress that
always stirred her to the heart, it was so unconsidered and gentle, the
caress of a friend; it made her precious to herself. But now, in her
eagerness, she drew away.

“I must go! I want to marry you! Then, you can return to America, to
the work you like. Or we can live here--properly. Be the sort of people
you despise, upright, tipping-over-backward people! But we can always
laugh at ourselves. We needn’t lose our sense of humor simply because
we happen to be respectable....”

She paused, scared by his look, aware of her failure, but sustained by
a conviction that she was misunderstood.

Flagg reminded her again that there was no money. “Only a few _lire_,
unless I cable for more.”

Lilah cried: “But I have some money! Lots of it. I meant to tell you. I
sold my pearls.” She laughed: “Like the lady in the melodrama....”

“I didn’t know you had any pearls.”

“They weren’t becoming,” she said carelessly. “I prefer jade, or
ivory--”

“Were they valuable?”

“I got seventy-five thousand _lire_.”

“Good God.”

Flagg turned abruptly and went to the window. He stood there looking
out into a downpour of rain, at Florence, sodden and drenched.

“The pearls were mine,” Lilah remarked. She felt herself growing
angry. She felt that she would lose her temper if he pressed her; say
things she would regret. The old self wasn’t conquered. She despised
criticism. She wanted to be thought right.

Flagg turned. His face was dark again, but his feeling had driven the
look of fear out of his eyes. He had forgotten himself. “You left the
Peabody’s under circumstances that required the most absolute honesty.
You should have come to me with the clothes you stood in. I forgave you
the eight trunks full of finery--after all, your husband had no use
for it, and you, apparently, did. It doesn’t matter, to you, who pays
for the things you want, or whether you are giving value received. To
me, it does matter.... What we did might have been splendid. It isn’t!
I’m as ashamed as you are. Because of these damned, petty things--this
letter, for instance! And what you’ve just told me. The stinking
ugliness of desire and compromise....”

He got control of himself with a wrenching effort. “You’d better go to
Paris. I’d rather compromise than be ashamed.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Flagg went out and did not come back. She watched him hurry down the
path to the gate, bending his head against a downpour of rain. She said
bitterly: “You shouldn’t have spoken to me like that.” But he couldn’t
hear, of course--the window was closed, and the rain beat against the
ground with a harsh, rhythmic clatter, the noisy rain of southern
countries.

Flagg disappeared up the road to Vincigliata, into the forest of young
cypress trees.

Lilah thought: “I ought to feel more than I do.”

What had happened was too important for concrete, recognizable
feelings. She couldn’t grasp it all at once. She was numb with
misery. She went about the house doing unimportant things with great
seriousness, an exaggerated attention. She put a book-shelf in order
and cleaned Flagg’s study. The dust flew out of the window as she would
have liked to shake out her thoughts, scatter them, get rid of them.

At ten o’clock the casual servant who came in from a near-by farm
appeared under a _contadino’s_ green umbrella, like a big, wet
lettuce-leaf on legs.... Lilah was explicit, much more so than usual.
She set the table herself, humming, “as if nothing had happened,” she
reminded herself. She had the feeling that if she ignored what had
happened it couldn’t be serious. But everything she touched seemed to
be impermanent; knives and forks and plates had a sort of unreality.

She went upstairs, frightened by the dread that clutched at her throat.
But she must put off remembering. She would count the money--try to
understand what Flagg had meant about her selling the pearls.

She counted the bills, laid them in little piles, was relieved by their
ordinary appearance. Surely Flagg hadn’t stopped loving her because
of these little green notes.... She put them away, confident that she
could make him understand as soon as he came in.... It was absurd
for a man and woman in love with each other to quarrel over something
petty....

But she mustn’t think of that.

Flagg did not come in for lunch. The sky was leaden, yellow, and the
rain came down in solid sheets. She couldn’t bear to be alone in the
house. That wet lettuce leaf stumbled down the hill. There was no one
but Aphrodite in her niche, a painted goddess with gilded ringlets and
heavy lids, the smile of a courtesan, the little hands of a child....
No wonder the poet had turned to warfare for sensation. Things. Things.
Things. And nothing got you anywhere. First, you thought it was this
and then that. And nothing satisfied the you that was personal and
aching. Not even love. For then things like this happened....

She thought: “I’ll go out. I’ll feel better if I go out.”

She splashed down the road and stood, holding her umbrella against the
rain, waiting for a tram.

Twenty-five centesimi. Cheaper than a cab.... She sat with the dripping
umbrella pressed against her knees and stared at the people. An old
man. His trousers were baggy at the knee and the skin of his hands was
like brown corduroy. A young girl with bold, unwavering eyes stared
back at Lilah; there was an imitation diamond ring on the first finger
of one plump, red hand.

The city closed around the street; great, drenched walls thrust up,
cornices leaned over; people surged along the narrow sidewalks under
a tossing and writhing of umbrellas; priests, fascisti with curled
forelocks like young game-cocks, like frizzed savages ... girls....

Here and there a shop-window was lighted.

Lilah walked through the square and across to the Tornabuoni.

She went into a hairdresser’s establishment. A warm, sickish odor,
perfumed, assailed her. She explained to a pale woman in pearl earrings
and clinging black satin that she wanted a “wave.” Madame could be
accommodated because, on a rainy day, there were many cancelations.
Right here.... In this booth. _Subito!_

A small, blackish man removed Lilah’s hat. Her hair fell down on her
shoulders and she thought with a stab of pain, acute, physical, of
Flagg’s fingers, caressing, caressing....

The marcel irons twirled. Did Madame want pompadour or straight back?
It was becoming fashionable to clip the hair at the nape of the neck,
close, like a boy’s.... It would be very becoming to Madame.

Did this man love? Every one did, sooner or later. Why was it that the
world wasn’t smitten with madness; would she ever be sane again.... She
fingered the bottles on the dressing-table. Brilliantine. Rouge. Skin
tonic. Pomade. _Mettre cette poudre avec la houppe, s’essuyer avec un
linge...._

Sooner or later, she would have to question not only her reflection,
that face, unchanged by dread and bewilderment, but Lilah, the woman.
It wasn’t possible longer to avoid that encounter. She, herself, had
failed.... _Not yet!_

“Madame has pretty hair. In French, we say _cendrè_--the colour of
ashes.”

       *       *       *       *       *

She found the English pianist in the drawing-room when she got back to
the “Villino Sans-Souci.”

“Hallo! I thought you’d give me tea. Beastly day. Where’s Flagg?”

“He’s not here,” she said coldly. Suddenly she wanted to hurt Flagg. “I
don’t know where he is.”

The Englishman’s eyes grew round. He made a sound like a whistle. “I
_see_! You’ve quarreled.”

“Yes.”

Let him know it. It didn’t matter. Flagg was trying to frighten her....
She took off her hat and sank down on the divan. “I don’t want to talk.
I want you to play for me. Something strange, ugly. I see now why
modern art is out of balance and discordant and crooked--the world is
sick at its soul. When you’re sick at your soul you don’t want beauty.
You want something clever and horrible, like the evil in yourself.”

The Englishman’s eyes, always flickering, as if there were little
flames in them, blazed up. His lips parted. He was like a smooth,
too fat faun smoking a cigarette. His eyes appraised her. And, for a
terrible reason, Lilah was glad that she was beautiful. She tipped her
head back so that he could see her throat.

This man understood women; he pitied them and desired them; but they
never loved him unless they had lost love; he had never known, never
would know, the best of love, because he expected the worst of it.

Suddenly he jumped up and went to the piano. “I’ll play you the
Saint-Sebastien; I know your real mood is religious, not evil at all! A
woman of your experience buries each amour with a _Te Deum_.”

Lilah wanted to tell him that she had had no experience, but she knew
that he wouldn’t believe her. Her life with Robert, with Flagg, had
never really changed her; she hadn’t loved Robert, and Flagg hadn’t
loved her; when people spoke of experience she supposed they meant that
dedication of self which is spontaneous, mutual, irrevocable....

“Stop! I can’t bear that sort of music.”

He spun around, seized another cigarette. “Then we’ll talk. I’ll cheer
you up. Poor, lonely, adorable Lilah.” He sat, too close, on the divan.
“What on earth possessed you to fall in love with a man whose mind is
fixed on the primeval atom?”

Lilah shrugged her shoulders. It was easy to say: “I don’t know! Why do
we?”

“You ran off, didn’t you? Cut loose? I’ve heard rumors--I beg your
pardon, but things get about a small place like this. Infernal curious,
most people. They like to eat a pretty woman up; crunch her bones.
Now, if you were ugly as mud and fat and forty, they’d call you
‘emancipated.’ Waving the banner of personal freedom and all that sort
of thing.... They’d make you out a martyr to unholy matrimony, meaning
matrimony which is no go. But since you’re young and lovely--very
lovely--they’re tearing you to bits down there.”

“Are they?”

“I’m no end sorry for you. Really.” His eyes said more. “Doing all this
for a man who doesn’t appreciate--well, you--” his eyes said. But he
was too clever, too wary, to put the thought into words.

A bitterness surged up in Lilah’s heart. Six o’clock. And Flagg hadn’t
come in. He might have taken a train to Rome. She saw him in Rome
walking up a street in the rain, wearing that fixed smile, alone. Or
Milan. Another picture. Only this time, she saw him sitting in a hotel
bed-room in his shirt-sleeves.... He might have died, up there in the
cypress grove. He might, even now, be lying on the soaked ground, his
face pressed into the sodden leaves.

She got up. “I think you’d better go,” she said. “I want to be alone.
If you don’t mind.”

The Englishman rose. She was too miserable to sense the danger. He
stayed, looking down at her. And then he caught her shoulders, pressed
her against him and kissed her. She could feel the softness of his
body. She shivered, gasped and pushed him away. She hated him.

“Abominable!” she said.

“Oh, very well.”

With a gesture of contempt, as if it really mattered very little, he
got his hat and went out, slamming the door.

       *       *       *       *       *

She went upstairs, followed by the black cat and the only one of the
kittens they had saved. It, too, was black, with eyes like jewels and
an incredibly thin, flexible tail. The cats did not seem to know or to
care whether Lilah suffered, and she wanted them to know; she said:
“You little brutes! Don’t frisk! I can’t bear it!” But they frisked on
the gondola-bed, over it and under it, scratching and leaping, as if
nothing had happened.

Lilah undressed. Then, in a warm negligée, banded with fur, her hair
under a sort of gypsy cap made of purple chiffon, she went into Flagg’s
room and peered at his things, his brushes, his coats, on hangers, his
handkerchiefs, in neat piles. She touched everything, sensing his dear
person.... She would wait until eight o’clock, and then, if he hadn’t
returned, she would go out, alone, and look for him in those dark woods.

Eight o’clock came, but she didn’t dare to go out. She got into bed,
instead, and lay in the dark, listening to the rain. She was terribly
afraid. Life was inimical again, and she had lost faith in herself, in
her ability to be pert and to win success with the misty quality of her
loveliness. Accepted things, long-established ideas, convictions, had
failed. There was nothing to go on.... She began, reluctantly, almost
with terror, to look herself straight in the face. She saw an image of
herself, silly, vain, rushing in pursuit of unimportant things. Always
things! And where had they gotten her?

A motor, turning into the Vincigliata road, cast a swinging light
through the windows, across the walls, across Aphrodite, imponderable
and secretive in her niche....

Flagg!

Her heart stopped.

They might have come to tell her....

No. The downstairs door opened, closed again, and she heard his
footsteps, coming, coming....

She thought: “He’s been cruel. I ought to punish him.” But she called
him.

She saw him in the doorway and summoned her half-glimpsed self with a
passionate and peremptory cry. Flagg hesitated, a dim figure, silent,
remote. Then he moved forward and, quivering, her nerves unsteady, she
felt him leaning down over her. She could not see his face. She could
smell the cloth of his coat, wet.... And with a sudden lifting of her
arms, she dragged him down to her. He had to kneel. His face pressed
into her throat. Again she felt his hair, the shape of his head. He
was warm and alive; he was all of life. How could she have doubted,
questioned, hesitated, when this, this was the answer to everything--to
be near him.

“I thought you’d never come. I wanted to tell you that I’ll give the
money to Robert, all of it. I understand.”

Flagg said nothing. He sighed. His body relaxed. He pressed his face
closer against her. His arms went around her.... Lilah could feel the
two cats frisking over her feet, and she thought: “They know. I’m
happy. I’m happy.”

They clasped each other, for the first time, with that love which is
pity and forgiving and ecstasy.




XI


Lilah went to Paris.

In a compartment on the Rome-Lausanne express, she sat with her chin
in her hand, staring out of the window at the slow unrolling of the
landscape, fields, towns, mountains, fields, towns and mountains. But
she was conscious of being stared at from the corridor, and it was
pleasant, even exciting, to attract attention, after six months of life
in the country.

Flagg had not been well, but he had reassured her: “I’m all right. Only
hurry back. I’m going to miss you.”

How strained and white his face had been when, at the station in
Florence, he had followed the moving train for a way, looking up at her
with a curious, unreadable expression.

She thought: “He’ll be all right. I mustn’t worry.”

And the further the train was from Florence--Bologna, Milan,
Brigue--the more certain she became that Flagg was quite well. She
could see him walking up the Vincigliata hill, whistling, swinging
along with the gait of a man who had no enemy. She was comforted by
this vision. The more she thought about it the more she believed in
it. And the memory of his face at the train in Florence faded, was at
length forgotten, since she preferred not to remember. Later, she
promised herself, she would remember.

But now. Paris.

Again she was at that crowded, noisy gateway to Paris, that sordid,
ringing, clashing place full of people with bundles, porters with
luggage, soldiers, nuns, tourists, a mad jumble of dingy, dusty,
worried-looking, crumpled people all going somewhere and in a terrible
hurry. Florence, everything to do with her life there, seemed unreal.
How could she have let herself suffer so? How stupid of her! It was a
mistake, dangerous, to concentrate oneself too much; it would do her
good, do Flagg good, to break the thread of their intimacy; both of
them had been overanxious to prove their right to each other. After
all, who knew or cared whether they succeeded? Lilah hurried through
the crowd, refreshed, as if bathed in that cool, manifold impersonality.

She leaned forward in the taxi, staring at Paris, searching for some
indication of recent wounds. None. None! The streets, shining in a
thin, cold drizzle; a swirl of umbrellas; lights and kiosks; vistas
converging; and that air of brittle gayety, that something precise,
insouciant, perverse--the same! Lilah tapped on the window. “I’ve
changed my mind. The Ritz.” For two days! Why not? But now she could
laugh at herself. She knew that she was ridiculous; a _pension_ would
have done just as well! Only that she longed for warmth and color, the
pageant, not without meaning, of the worldlings. This would be her last
bow before the curtain. And that precarious few hundred dollars cabled
to Flagg after an interval of doubt, of suspense ... her last fling at
luxury. Make-believe.... At least, Robert wouldn’t think that she had
come down in the world! She could confront him clothed in the accepted
garments of his kind, on common ground.... She would wire Flagg at
once: “Ritz. Paris. Love. Lilah.”

       *       *       *       *       *

When she saw Robert crossing the lobby of the Ritz with that vague,
amiable, short-sighted manner, she was not surprised. This was the sort
of thing that was bound to have happened, what, perhaps, she had hoped
would happen.

“Lilah! Well, I’ll be damned!”

They confronted each other. Robert flushed. He laughed, offered his
hand, remembered, and said miserably: “I suppose this is shocking.
I’m awfully sorry.” But his question, immediate, with an accent of
surprise, irritated her: “You’re staying here?”

“Yes,” she snapped. “Are you?”

“I’m at the Meurice. I’m dining here with the Gaylords, but I can shift
’em, if you say. That lawyer needn’t know, and I want to talk to you.”
He added: “I need to talk to you, Lilah.”

Lilah considered. “I’ve only just come. I haven’t unpacked. I’m
fearfully dusty.”

“I’ll wait.”

Something reminiscent twisted Robert’s face into a sort of grimace.
“Oh, Lord, Lilah--Here we are! There’s no precedent--What am I supposed
to say?”

And, out of the past, Lilah flung back at him: “Something honest! I’ll
dine with you, of course.”

An admiring look came into Robert’s eyes. “Here, then, in an hour,” he
said simply. “I’ll wait.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Lilah was prompt. She found Robert, characteristically, exactly where
she had left him. She thought, before he caught sight of her: “This
is my husband.” And she gave him a quick, appraising look, trying
to realize what he had been. She failed. He was some one she hadn’t
known.... He turned, and in the meeting of their eyes there was an
immediate recognition, a searching, reproachful, profoundly intimate
encounter. Both of them trembled and pity ran through them. Lilah felt
as if she could not, under any circumstances, speak to him.

“Let’s go where we’ll be alone,” he said. “I know a place across the
river--decent food, French--we won’t see any one we know.” He flushed
again. “Oh, my lord--don’t misunderstand me. I’m not ashamed! Only I
hate advertising my emotions.”

In the taxi, drawn away from him, huddled in her furs, Lilah shivered.
Life had never seemed more of a picture-puzzle; all the pieces lay
about her, and she could not put them together again. The piece that
was missing, the necessary piece--Freedom. It was the answer to
everything. If she could find the meaning of freedom.... Every one
to-day, old and young, cried out for freedom, to put their scattered
picture-puzzle together with, to make it whole and reasonable and
recognizable, something to enjoy. Every one searching, picking up now
this, now that, expedient and finding that nothing fitted, nothing
matched.... Freedom for oneself had been the cry of the generation.
But was there such a thing? Weren’t people, lives, inextricably woven
together, so that one experience involved another, one giving another,
one selfishness another? She could never be free again because of this
man at her side.

She stole a look at his face. There was something pathetic in his
expression, as if, he too, were groping for the missing fragment,
baffled by the confusion of ideas and morals; pitying her, loving her,
despising her, yet, in spite of himself, understanding her.

They were afraid to say anything; afraid and miserable.

The restaurant, Robert’s choice of a place where they’d not see any
one, was half-way down a short, dark street. He had engaged a private
room; before a coal fire burning in a shallow grate a table had been
set for two. The room was small, of the eighteenth century, faded,
crackled and mellow. And an old waiter in an enveloping apron took
Lilah’s cloak with that paternal gesture which is the gift of inspired
waiters, waiters of a certain persuasion, a genius, a _flair_. His
exit was discreet, but promising, and when he returned, with _bisque_
of crayfish, he offered it as an artist turns a canvas from the wall:
“_Voila!_”

Robert’s glance was beseeching. You couldn’t disappoint such a fellow
as this waiter; he expected them to be jolly! Lilah felt this, too. A
room so exquisite. The festive air imparted by the _bisque_, steaming
in real Sèvres bowls. Her gown, the last of the trousseau, a slip
of metal cloth, girdled with flat emerald stones set in silver....
Suddenly, she felt smooth, like the _bisque_, exclusive and desirable.
The walls of the little room seemed to shut her away from confusion in
a world made secure by the tradition of elegance, by the permanence
of all rare and lovely things. She felt again the conviction that she
belonged peculiarly in this world; it was stimulating, just for an hour
or two, to pretend that she had never left it. It was stimulating,
also, to discover that Robert could still look at her as if he found
her the most mysterious and delightful woman in the world. Perhaps he
wanted her back, at any cost--She looked at him with that half-smile
which means: “Do you forgive me?” But she waited for him to speak, to
commit himself, because there was always the memory of Grace Fuller, in
a gray dress and a clever hat....

“Lilah,” he said suddenly. He stopped, as if appalled by his audacity.
He stretched out his hand and she took it. They clasped hands solemnly,
with scared looks. And the waiter, lowering his eyes, whisked the
crayfish away and disappeared behind a silk screen decorated in the
Fragonard manner.

“Lilah,” Robert began again. He couldn’t go on. He squeezed her hand,
held fast to it as if he would never let it go. “Isn’t this a nice
place? Chew told me about it. The _filet_ of sole’s famous--better’n
Marguery.... Lilah....”

Lilah wanted to laugh. She shook her head, instead, and tears came into
her eyes; it was easy to cry nowadays. She wiped them away with the
tips of her fingers. Then Robert said the one thing he should not have
said: “It was all my fault, Lilah.”

The waiter came in again, bearing a silver platter with a great dome
of a cover. “_Filet Esterhazy_,” he announced. He looked as if he had
presented them with an heir.

Robert said: “Ah!” He loved good food. Lilah remembered how she had
grown to wince inwardly whenever he leaned forward at the table with
that look of dedication and rapture, that sort of hovering, like a
gull over a floating morsel. She remembered the way he had of flapping
his elbows, as if he were skimming down, close, to snatch the tid-bit;
only, he never snatched; he ate slowly, with the peculiar relish, the
rapt appreciation of the gourmet. “_Bon!_” he said in a loud voice.
“_Tres bon!_”

“_Merci, m’sieur!_”

“You’ll want wine, of course, Lilah--champagne; what d’you say to
champagne?”

Lilah thought: “Just this once.” She nodded. In Florence they had red
wine, thin and sour, if they had wine at all, wine that puckered her
mouth, the strong, sharp wine of Dionysius. But this--a pale amber
bubble, an eternal spring of levity and carelessness, of love and
daring, of wit and dreaming.... She lifted the glass and a little
light danced on her bare arm, leaped to the table-cloth, frisked and
quivered, a drunken little light....

“I remember....” Robert began. He stopped.

The waiter hurried away, as if he were saying: “One moment! One little
moment! I’ll leave you alone as soon as I can.”

A perverse notion caused Lilah to say: “How is dear old Grace?”

She could see the slow, inevitable flush, self-conscious, painful, the
sudden mistiness of his eyes. Elaborately careless, he said: “She’s
awfully well.”

“Where is she?”

“Now?”

Robert drained his glass, set it down again. “At the Point.”

“Your grandfather isn’t ill?”

“No.”

Lilah thought: “I see. He’s going to marry her.” And she felt a
tightness around her heart.

“Grace is awfully fond of you, Lilah.”

“Is she?” Lilah smiled. “Are you going to marry her?”

“Damn it all,” Robert cried. He pushed his plate away with a violent
gesture. “No!”

“Meaning you are,” Lilah said sweetly. “Meaning, it’s none of my
business. But it is! After all, I’m your wife, my dear.”

“Don’t be too modern, Lilah.” But in spite of himself, he smiled.
Lilah couldn’t be sure. She smiled back at him while the waiter filled
her glass again.... They were all three playing a game. What if they
should speak what was in their minds? The waiter would probably say:
“It’s late. I’m tired. I want to be at home with my family, reading the
newspaper by the lamp, with my tired feet in slippers.” Robert would
probably say: “I want you, and I want Grace, too. I don’t respect you.
I love you and I want my freedom.” And she would say: “I love Flagg.
But I’m afraid.” Because, it was true, she was afraid; she was at the
mercy of her fear. She could not remember the wonderful self she had
been a week ago, three days ago; it seemed far away, unreal, the self
that had loved Flagg, that had promised to give seventy-five thousand
lire to Robert, the self that had feared nothing, nothing. That self
had fluttered away out of this warm, bright room, away from her body
into the darkness outside and there it was waiting, mournful and alone,
for Lilah. Which was Lilah? This, or that other?

“_Salade, madame._”

A plate. A deep bowl. A wooden spoon. Lettuce. String beans, very
green. How did the French do it? And a dressing flavored faintly with
garlic.

“I’m going into my grandfather’s business,” Robert said. He mixed the
salad thoroughly, tossing and stirring it, his face intent. “Seriously.
I had to do something. I found that sitting in the shade wasn’t enough;
I had to plant some trees of my own. You remember what Dave Harum said
about a dog and his fleas....” He paused to stare at the salad. Then he
said suddenly: “It was a good thing you left me. Good for me, I mean.”

“Oh.”

“I was counting on you to make something of me. It’s a damn sight more
fun to make something of myself. A rum world, Lilah. We’re put here for
some reason. I didn’t used to think so. Now I know! I’m not inquiring
the reason. It’s enough to be sure that the lessons we learn aren’t
wasted.”

“_Fromage, madame?_”

Lilah looked at the creamy pie-shaped wedge of Camembert.... Robert was
reminding her that she had failed. “_Oui_,” she said to the waiter. She
must not let him sense her humiliation. She must make him see that she,
too, was triumphant. And the image of Flagg, walking by the train as it
pulled out of the station, assailed her. She said: “Mmm! Good cheese!
Try it. Delicious.”

“I prefer American cheese. They make a cheese in California--I’ve
forgotten what they call it--a rich orange color, finely flavored....”

“Then you’re glad I left?”

He looked up. His eyes were startled. “No. I loved you.”

“Don’t you love me now?”

The waiter disappeared at the word love. The verb _aimer_ ... _to love,
I love, you love_ ... these people were _amants_, after all.

Robert got up. He came around the table. Lilah said nothing, did
nothing to stop him. He came slowly, but his intention was in his
deliberate gesture. And Lilah thought: “This is my worst self.” A
wave of pity engulfed her; she closed her eyes. She wanted, wanted
everything Robert could offer her; her mind flew back to the “Villino
Sans-Souci”; she did not see herself in Flagg’s arms, submerged in that
deep rapture; she saw herself, alone. She waited.... But Robert did
not touch her. With a feeling of faintness, she opened her eyes again.
Robert was standing just there, his napkin in his hand, as if he had
been frozen. “You didn’t mean that, Lilah.”

“Sit down! The waiter--”

The waiter appeared, very sorry, with downcast eyes, just as Robert
hurriedly regained his place. This time, the talented one bore a silver
tray full of pastries, fat chocolate ones and long, snaky green ones
and twisted ones full of cream, and pink ones upon which a devilish
clever pastry-cook had painted flowers and bow-knots of sugar.

“You haven’t told me about your grandfather,” Lilah said, in her
special voice, eyeing the pastries as if she hated them. “The green
one--that one--please.”

“_Oui, madame._”

Robert answered that Junius was well. “Wonderful old chap! You can’t
imagine how gratified he is that I’ve taken hold. He’d about given me
up.”

“I suppose Grace Fuller’s responsible?”

Robert flushed again. He said nothing. Lilah smiled and stretched out
her hand. “Cigarette, please. And don’t frown like that! Why shouldn’t
you marry Grace Fuller if you want to? That’s why you’ve come to Paris,
isn’t it? For her sake. Not for mine! One of the last things you said
was that you’d never divorce me....”

“Lilah....”

At last the waiter was gone. They were alone in the room.

Lilah put the cigarette between her lips and tilted her head: “Light,
please.” And while Robert struck the match she watched him, her eyes
enigmatic. A quiver passed over his face. His hand trembled. “Lilah.
Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“You’re trying to get at me. God knows why.” He tossed the match away.
“After all, we have things to say that aren’t easy to say. It’s all
very well to pretend that what we’re doing to-night is usual--it’s
wrong, terrible, and I’m sorry we tried it. We’re married. That’s my
ring, isn’t it? You left another man to come here with me and make
believe before a waiter that we’re friends. Friends! Let’s be honest.
We’ve failed at a great undertaking. We ought to be down on our knees
praying for a chance to make good! I’ll take my half of the blame.
Neither of us tried. I loved you. I still love you. I thought I didn’t.
I told Grace Fuller that I didn’t. But she’d be the first to welcome
us, if we were to go back together.”

He paused, his hands, with the fingers interlocked, pressed violently
together. “There’s such a thing as moral insensibility.... You’ve had
your fling. What has it proven?”

Before she could answer he went on: “What does that sort of thing prove
to any one? No one will profit by our separation, not even Grace,
because I love you, and she’ll know it.”

“Happiness--”

“A chimera of childhood! I’d like to blot the word out of the
language. You were after something for yourself--something ready-made,
something you didn’t have to work for. What you had--me-- Well--I want
you to come back. Try again.”

“Did Grace Fuller know that you intended to invite me, after what has
happened, to go back where I will always be on suffrance--an object of
suspicion, perhaps of amusement?”

“I don’t understand,” Robert said impatiently, “why you harp on Grace
Fuller. The issue is between you and me.”

“But if you promised her--”

“I sometimes wonder whether you have forgotten that you are married to
me--you behave as if you considered the whole thing an episode, both of
us absolved--I haven’t promised anything.”

Lilah got up. There was a divan near the fire, upholstered in shabby
yellow sateen. Lilah’s cloak lay across the end, Robert’s overcoat,
his muffler and gloves beside it. She thought: “How domesticated.
Like Robert’s imagination. How can I make him understand when I don’t
understand myself? She felt suddenly tired. The bubble of gayety had
burst, was gone. She had a passing, a poignant regret at the inevitable
bursting of all such pretty bubbles....

“If I fail with you,” Robert was saying, “the whole past has been
wasted. You can’t erase marriage by simply running away from it. Or,
like the magician, by exchanging one marriage for another ... a sort of
social legerdemain ... dangerous, because I believe once married always
married.... I may be old-fashioned. I dare say I am making myself
ridiculous.... These things go deeper than words. If I could make you
see what I’ve seen....”

Lilah wanted to say: “But I don’t love you.” She didn’t dare say it
because there was something she wanted to hold to, a thread, a fragile
link between herself and security. She recognized the ugly need of
security; her own weakness made it imperative that she should hold
Robert off until her own future was certain, until she had found the
strength to admit that other self or to close that self out forever. A
little time. If life only didn’t press you so....

Robert followed; he, too, seemed to press close, although he stood
some distance away, his hands still tightly pressed together in a
curious attitude of supplication and misery. “You’re afraid of public
opinion.... At the Point, you have nothing to fear. We can prove, by
the dignity”--he hesitated--“the decency of our lives that there is
such a thing as courage. Both of us will need it, but not because of
criticism; we were both born into a reckless society. You can’t tell
black from white, nowadays! And yet--we’re like ships without rudders,
drifting, drifting in the open sea, all pretending that we’re getting
somewhere. We call it revolt; we call it breaking chains; we call it by
a dozen high-sounding names, ‘reality’ among them. But none of us is
satisfied.” He suddenly pointed at her and raised his voice. “You’re
not!”

“I am,” she said. “I have love.”

Robert turned away. His face was drawn. He looked old. He went back to
the table and poured out another glass of champagne. The rattle of ice
in the bucket, the clink of glass against glass, summoned the waiter
who re-appeared, blinking, as if he had dozed off behind the screen.
“_M’sieur?_” At once he began to clear the table, his sleepy look
giving way to a half-smile, as if he were thinking of the embrace he
had probably interrupted. But he wanted to go home. It was ten o’clock
and his feet were tired.

“Let’s go somewhere,” Robert said angrily. “We can’t talk here. And
I’ve got to convince you--”

He did not glance at the bill but paid it with the indifference to
other people’s honesty which characterized him.

“I have convictions,” he said in the cab. “I’m not the flaccid fish
I appear to be. There was a time when I approved of men, and women,
too, smashing down every door that kept them from experience. It was
exciting to watch the new generation kicking convention in the face.
It cleared things up, for a while. I foresaw a new race of straight
thinkers, purged of fear. What you did didn’t shock me. It seemed
necessary--”

He turned to her, trying to read her face in the uneven flow of light.
“Where’ll we go? We can’t ride around Paris all night.”

“Let’s dance,” she said.

“Dance?”

After a hesitation, a silence she could not read, he rapped on the
window and ordered the driver to take them to a club in the Bois. Lilah
thought: “This will give me time.”

At the club, a smart restaurant given over to a jazz orchestra and
a dancing floor, food had taken second place. Lilah was stimulated
by the rush of waiters, the whirl of dancers, the cascading crystal
chandeliers, the monotonous and passionate rhythm of the music.
Florence, the “Villino Sans-Souci” were part of a dream. She had
dreamed of the melancholy weeks of rain, the somber, suggestive call of
birds in the cypress groves. This was being awake. Her body came alive.
She felt herself swaying to the provocative melody as Robert frowned at
a card. “What’ll you have, Lilah?” “Anything!” While he ordered, she
let her cloak slip away from her bare shoulders; instinctively, she
fell into the attitude of fashionable unconcern. “Anything.” The rite
of dining was lost in the need to dance. People came here to indulge
their senses in the barbaric measures of a simple people unknown to
them; the negroes, perspiring, hysterical, carried beyond themselves by
their success, swayed, jerked, stamped, shouted. Their leader, holding
a violin at arm’s length, played a melody; the voice of the instrument,
thin, sweet and penetrating, rose above the relentless tom-toming of
the drums, the frantic unceasing blare of horns, an accompaniment
soulless and exciting.... In a pool of light, revolving, the dancers
seemed beyond themselves. Other dancers, revolving, moved in the
mirrors, silent, remote, like a company of ghosts....

Robert said politely: “Will you?”

They rose. He clasped her with a sort of shiver, almost a reluctance,
and they were caught by the tide, whirled and buffeted. Lilah’s face
was pressed against Robert’s shoulder. He noticed again the faint and
seductive odor of sandalwood; he sensed the peculiar flexibility of
her body--she had always seemed to be both fragile and powerful. He
saw her eyes, wide with excitement, lifted to his face, scrutinizing
him--did she love or hate him, or was she only trying to decide whether
she could, after all, live with him again? “Wonderful music.” Robert’s
clasp tightened. And he felt a deep pity, for her, for himself, for all
these foolish, fatuous, bewildered people twirling around a polished
floor in each other’s arms. “Yes, wonderful,” he said.

       *       *       *       *       *

At their table again, confronted by a chafing dish in which chicken
and cream and mushrooms bubbled energetically, Robert remarked that he
hadn’t any appetite. But Lilah had. “I haven’t been anywhere; I haven’t
seen any one, or done anything, for six months.... I’m really enjoying
myself. Am I wicked?” And she held out her plate. “I’m starved.
Wolfish! What’s that they’re playing? We never hear anything in Italy
except Neapolitan love songs and the ‘Merry Widow’ waltz. Jazz ...
after all ... it’s my native music. It goes to my head.... You dance
better than you used to, Robert....”

She glanced up. Her expression changed; a look of panic flashed across
her eyes. “People I know--”

A flurry of women, slim, bare-armed, in the simple gowns of the
period.... Aureoles of hair, short, frizzed.... Make-up.... The
fashionable drawl of the young New Yorker....

“Lilah! Robert! Of all the cool ones! Honeymooning in Paris.... What’s
the plot? We thought you two had parted forever! Lilah, where’s the
villain? Did you park him in Florence? What a lovely dress.... Poiret?”

Chairs were brought. Three amiable and vivacious Frenchmen were
presented to Lilah, to Robert. Bare shoulders, long white arms,
manicured finger tips, a medley of perfumes, cigarette smoke.... “Have
you been to--” “Have you seen--?” Talk crossed talk. Lilah, on her
guard, but eager, eager, as if she were again drinking champagne,
tasting the little golden bubbles of gayety. Poor Lilah! Robert pitied
her and understood her; but more than ever he wanted her, because he
divined, beneath the fixed and purposeful animation of her face, her
profound confusion.

The music began again after a pause no longer than a heart beat, and
Lilah whirled away in the arms of one of the Frenchmen. Robert rose
politely and claimed the girl at his right, a slim, arrogant young
thing with sharp shoulder-blades and shingled hair; she had the misty,
brushed-in eyes of an Oriental, the lips of an odalisque. “You don’t
remember me, do you? I’m Marian Forsythe--I live near the inlet; we can
see your house on clear days. I know your grandfather. Wonderful music,
isn’t it? I’m over here with the Careys. Isn’t Paris awful in winter?
We’re going to Algiers next week. I like to run away from things, don’t
you? I get bored so easily.” She twisted a little in his arms. He felt
her hand, sharp, nervous, against his shoulder. “I must say I think
Lilah’s a sport. She tried it out, anyway. I suppose she liked you
best, after all. If more people were sensible about such things....”

Robert interrupted sharply: “You don’t know anything about it.”

He had an hysterical desire to shake her. If men didn’t protect girls
like this against their own ignorance, the world would be better off.
“I’m getting to be a damned reactionary,” he thought. “It may be
progress, it may be transition--whatever it is, I’m out of it.”

He was too angry to dance, but Marian Forsythe was inexhaustible.
“Don’t be a grouch,” she advised him sweetly. “Lilah’s perfectly happy
with Captain Romain. Let’s waltz.”

       *       *       *       *       *

It was past three o’clock when he succeeded in getting Lilah away. The
little group waited beneath the glass and bronze porte-cochère of the
restaurant while a carriage-man in a white rubber overcoat pursued
taxicabs, shrieking upon a tin whistle, vanishing and reappearing like
an energetic ghost. A thin drizzle fell aslant the somber shadows of
massed chestnut trees, tiny, broken splinters, glass-like, shivering
out of a black sky. The women huddled in their wraps, their faces
covered, their feet, in delicate slippers, exposed to the rain, to the
sharp wind that whipped their floating chiffons about their ankles.
The men were still fresh. Only Robert was tired, tired and childishly
disappointed. Everything--Lilah’s eight months away from him, his rage,
his love, his idealism, all of it was stupid, futile, because of these
people and their casual worldliness; as if suffering and loneliness and
pride and longing were inconsiderable, as if nothing were real but the
things he had grown to despise. How on earth could he make it clear to
her that there could be no satisfaction for either of them until they
had discharged their duty.... And, suddenly, he was too tired to try....

That ghost of a carriage-man came panting back with a taxicab, and
Robert selfishly took it for himself and Lilah. The others would have
to wait. He hated them.... Lilah leaned against him. “I’ve had such a
good time, Bobsie. I didn’t realize how starved I’ve been.”

“You forget--you haven’t told me anything about yourself.”

“Must I? Now? It’s so late.” She yawned. “I’m so sleepy!”

Away down the boulevard, like a pale new moon, Robert saw the Arc du
Triomphe. An irrelevant thought came to him. Even heroism was futile.
Great gestures. Wasted. That soldier, unknown, who was buried there,
wouldn’t he have been better off in his orchard, his shop, his palace?
But this had nothing to do with Lilah, with himself. He pulled himself
together. “What do you want me to do? I’ve got to know.”

“Can’t we talk to-morrow?”

“One thing I promise: If you decide to come back, I’ll never question
you. I’m not magnanimous. I realize that you would hate me if I made
you feel that I had forgiven you.... We’ll consider the past eight
months erased.”

“Not erased! Mine!”

“As you please.”

They sat very stiffly, scarcely breathing, not looking at each other.

       *       *       *       *       *

“Telegram for you, madam.”

“For me?”

Lilah took the thin envelope. Yes. “Mrs. Robert Peabody.” She got into
the elevator. Two men and a woman stood there, laughing, while the car
soared up--one, two, three--_Troisième_!

“Madame.”

She did not open the telegram until she had lighted the light by the
bed and had thrown aside her wrap. She kept assuring herself that Flagg
had answered her wire. Some such message as: “All well.” Or: “I miss
you.”

  “Advise your immediate return. Major Flagg seriously ill.

                                                                “BACCI.”

Bacci! Who on earth was Bacci? Her heart contracted, expanded again.
The doctor. That man who had come out to the Ponte a Mensola in a hired
cab.... She sat down, trembling. Her hands shook so that the thin paper
envelope rattled.

“Seriously ill.”

Dying. “Immediate return.”

She thought: “While I was dancing.”

She began to undress. She tore the fragile tissue because she hated it.
She wanted to destroy the fact, to blot out the visible evidence, strip
naked. She heard herself sobbing.... A curious, unfamiliar sound, as if
some one else were sobbing in another room. Her eyes were dry. She took
her hair down and placed the pins in a neat pile. She must start at
once; she must get to him. “Because,” she said aloud to her reflection,
“I love him.” Now, she knew, Flagg wouldn’t believe her. If she got
there; if she was in time--something about her would show him that she
had forgotten, that she had betrayed herself, and he would say: “I
never believed.” And he would go away, without her. That seemed the
most terrible possibility of all--that at the end his eyes might shut
her out....

She glanced at her watch, wound it carefully. “I’ll bathe, dress. By
that time it will be daylight and I can make arrangements.”

But when she was dressed, her veil adjusted, everything packed, it was
still dark. She threw the window wide open and leaned on the sill,
conscious of a cool current of air, a dampness rising from the wet
pavements. A single pedestrian down there crossed the street at an
angle, wavering, as if uncertain of a destination, and she thought: “I
am like that.” The night is so intimate. She was alone with the night.
Paris seemed a little place, all the lives gathered under that roof
of darkness, all the lives helpless, pathetic in sleep, their defenses
down. “I am alone.” Not since her father died had she been so alone.
And she was afraid, afraid of death, of what she might be going to see,
of the way that doctor would look at her, of Flagg, struggling with his
enemy, alone. Every one was alone. Alone and afraid. She felt suddenly
that she could not go to Florence. She would tear up the telegram,
pretend she hadn’t heard, and they would wire her that it was over,
Flagg was dead....

       *       *       *       *       *

But even then the sky seemed to deepen, to become more dense, blacker.
And a shaft of light sprang to the apex, opened, like a fan. Dawn.

Immediately there was a stir in the city. A stir of sparrows in the
eaves. A stir of little, skulking people in the alleys. A stir of smoke
from innumerable chimneys.

Lilah got to her feet. She was shivering. Because she saw that if she
kept Robert off, prevaricated, perhaps promised him that she would
return, there would be a way back, out of that other darkness, later....

But Flagg was in Florence, alone. She saw him, lying on his right side,
with his arm under his head, struggling silently, not saying a word--as
if he and his heart crashed together, like two dark, insane men on
horses, tilting, splintering against each other, again and again.

She ought to go to Flagg, because she loved him. Why had God made her
afraid of ugliness? Flagg was ugly because he was suffering. If she
could only be spared! If only she didn’t have to go!

She went to the telephone. “What time is it?”

She had meant to ask about trains. “_Cinq heures et demie, madame._”

She put the instrument down again and sat on the bed, rocking back and
forth with her arms folded, as if she were trying to put her thoughts
to sleep. The room was still dark. The windows were gray. A hum rose
from the streets, a silvery clink of chains along the wet asphalt....
She was envious of any one going anywhere.... Only not to be herself.

For an instant she was in Florence; she could smell the damp plastered
walls of the house; the odor of wet stone and moss and verbena from the
garden; Flagg’s pipe. A pang of memory. Herself, dragging Flagg down to
her. The feel of his hair, furry, cool.

“I love him so!” she said again, aloud.

But to be poor. To be back where she had started, only weaker. A woman
who couldn’t do anything, a fool, a pretty fool.

If Flagg died, he would never know that she had promised Robert....

Then why not lie?

Because she couldn’t.

She was afraid of life itself. She wanted to hide behind pretenses,
behind beauty, behind her own charm, behind what Robert offered her.
But she would have to go to Florence and watch Flagg die. Something new
and wonderful was being born in her--that other self was thrusting
up, like a plant, like the beginnings of a great tree, through the
frightened Lilah that crouched on the bed.

There was no use in going back to the Point, to the warmth of that
fireside, because she had never believed in it; it had never, from the
beginning, been hers.

The only thing that had ever happened to her that belonged wholly to
her was that moment in the dark when Flagg had sighed against her
breast and the cats had frisked over her feet. That moment was hers.
She had made it. She had created it out of pain and longing and honesty.

It was time that she stopped pretending.

       *       *       *       *       *

She wrote hurriedly to Robert:

“MY DEAR ROBERT:

  “Thank you. But I must go back to Florence. You have been very kind.
  Later, if you want a divorce, I will do everything to help you. I am
  leaving your grandmother’s emerald crown, the bracelet and some money
  in the care of the hotel management, with the understanding that you
  will call for them and identify yourself. The money I got for the
  pearls. I was foolish and wrong. But I can’t buy them back for you.
  I’m sorry.

                                                                “LILAH.”

She addressed the envelope and sealed it. She felt very small and
unimportant, burned out, dry; she must look, at last, definitely old.
She went to the telephone again, and, this time, she asked about trains.

The compartment was crowded. People kept popping in and out, asking
questions, shouting, losing their heads, kissing noisily. “_Au ’voir!
Au ’voir maman!” “Mignon!_” “Here’s your bag. And the fruit. I’ll
put them here.” “Take care of yourself.” Anxious faces, detached,
drifting along the platform, looking in or looking ahead, eagerly,
as if everything counted on their getting somewhere. Here was life
again--so terribly important and silly! Lilah sat by the window, her
veil thrown back, staring out. She half expected to see Robert, pale,
distraught, determined, searching for her in the crowd. “Here you are!”
And it would be taken out of her hands. He would make her turn back; he
would make her see that what she had intended to do was wrong. Robert
didn’t come. An Englishman in a trench coat with shabby shoes searched
and searched for some one. His eyes were like a dog’s and his pinched,
brown face was puckered with longing. At last he saw whoever it was.
“_There you are! Hallo! Just in time!_” And he leaped into one of the
compartments with a bound.... Life was such fun for the living, for
those who believed in it....

The train was moving. A telegraph boy rushed past, shouting: “_Madame
de Lattre!_” But no one paid any attention to him. The Englishman
leaped down again, his face very red, his eyes afire, and snatched off
his hat. “_Good-by! Good-by!_” Steam. A flood of sunlight. Darkness
again.

“Would madame object?”

And the little Frenchman in the corner of the compartment got up,
stepped politely but firmly over every body and closed the window.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was raining when the train drew into the Santa Maria Novella Station
at Florence. Dusk was shutting down, blotting out the towers, as if
snuffing lighted candles; one by one they disappeared. Lilah had been
closed in a compartment with four soldiers, noisy, self-conscious
_bersaglieri_ who had angled for her attention all the way down from
Bologna. She had sat like a stone, with her eyes lowered. One of the
soldiers had kept looking at himself in a little mirror; he combed his
hair with a small, steel comb and smoothed his eyebrows. He wanted her
to admire him. Whenever he said anything, his black, polished eyes
rolled in her direction....

The train seemed to disgorge its passengers; it was like a long, spiney
dragon vomiting people. People spilled from the open doors, mingled
on the platform, crashed together--and through it all porters bawled
“_facchino_!” One of them snatched at Lilah’s bag, her coat, her
umbrella, angrily, with determination, and rushed toward the cab-stand,
shoving his way through the crowd. Lilah cried, “Don’t hurry!” But
he paid no attention, because, if he hurried, he knew he could get
other customers and more pennies. A row of cabbies had backed into the
square; they snapped their whips and shrieked at Lilah as she hurried
after the implacable porter through the rain. Everyone was conspiring
to get her to the Ponte a Mensola ... if only there hadn’t been any
cabs, a delay, somehow....

She tipped the angry porter and the cab jerked forward, bouncing over
the cobbles, bouncing, bouncing. The cabman’s umbrella dripped on
Lilah’s feet. Had it been raining for five days? The rain frightened
her; it was sullen and unkind, a purposeful torment. Puddles bubbled,
the sidewalks were covered with tiny silver explosions and the great
eaves poured out amber floods that gurgled in the gutters. And now it
was dark.

“Seriously ill.”

Was Bacci with him? Who was with him? What should she do? She asked
herself suddenly and sharply what she should do if she found him dying?
And at the thought, she wanted the cabman to say that he couldn’t go
on. She wanted some one to keep her from what she must see and do. But
the cab jolted forward, turning corners recklessly, clattering over
car-tracks, rolling smoothly, unexpectedly, on stretches of asphalt.
Lilah stared out at the people and the lights, at faces caught and
fixed in a brief immobility. She tried not to remember what was so
precious and terrible. Yet her thoughts were unconquerable, rapacious;
they fastened on her consciousness, and at last she sank back, defeated.

Love.

The word challenged her. She struck it away. She beat it back. It
seemed to her that from the beginning she had been a prisoner, a woman
too conscious of herself, tormented by herself, fascinated by herself,
like that coxcomb of a _bersagliere_. If she could escape from herself,
she might find what she craved, the freedom she must have or--But when
you needed to know these things, you were too selfish, too happy to
know them! When you were happy, the debt piled up and you were asked to
pay it when you no longer cared.

The rain, incessant, indifferent, slanted out of a black sky.... A
tram, brilliantly lighted, passed with a rumble, and Lilah glimpsed
a row of people, unconscious of her, laughing and talking. A baby
pressed its nose against the window spangled with big, white drops,
like quicksilver, and the baby’s nose was flattened, pressed out of
shape ... the tram passed, and Lilah was alone again in the darkness of
the cab. She began to listen, attentively, to the clop of the horse’s
hoofs on the wet pavement, as if, absorbed in that rhythmic, hollow
sound, time would stretch out, and she would never, never arrive at her
destination....

       *       *       *       *       *

The cab lurched. They were on the dirt road, turning across the bridge,
beginning the sharp climb ... a light in the window!

“Hurry!” she cried out.

She stood in the rain, her hands shaking, to pay the cab man. He swung
himself down, grunting. It was a long drive out from the city on such
a night, and his horse was tired.... He struck a match and scrutinized
the coins Lilah gave him. What on earth was one supposed to tip;
he looked disgusted--she gave him an extra five lire and he thanked
her, as if he had been cheated and taken advantage of by a foreigner.
“Good-night.”

Lilah opened the gate and stumbled up the path between the cypresses.
The great pointed trees, so old, so quiet, so superior to the brief and
unimportant tragedies of men, shook down a heavy splattering of rain....

The door opened. A strange silhouette against the light....

“I have been expecting you.”

“Can I see him?”

“Yes.”

She searched this man’s face. Behind glasses, his eyes were curious
and tender. “I’ll take off my things. I’m wet and cold.” He seemed
to be bowing, standing aside to let her pass. She went upstairs and
the doctor followed, quietly, as if there were no hurry. No hurry at
all. This struck her as ominous. But she did not dare to ask how Flagg
was. Something prevented her from questioning the doctor, from, even,
looking at him. At the top of the stairs she paused, stricken with
fear. “Which--which room?”

He pointed. “In there.”

In his own room! She turned to her door, opened it, went in and faced
her mirror. It seemed necessary to remove her hat, to go in to Flagg
hatless....

She powdered, rouged, touched her lips with a perfumed stick of carmine
paste.

In the hall, the doctor was waiting, his hands in his pockets.

“_Signora_,” he began.

Lilah threw out her hands. “No. Don’t tell me. I can’t bear any more. I
want to see him.”

She pushed him aside and went in.

How tall he was. She had forgotten, in five days, how tall he was. His
head, dark, round, rumpled, was deep in the pillow. Some one had put a
newspaper over the light.

For no reason, with a rush of feeling, she was proud to be coming back
to him. It was all right. She was safe. She had been decent. She had
done what he expected of her. Now, perhaps, he would let her into his
eyes....

She tiptoed. She stood over him.... Asleep.

She touched his hand.

He was mischievous in sleep, a satyr again, smiling....

“Signora.”

Suddenly she turned and ran back, away from the bed. Her legs moved
strangely; her arms jerked. “I can’t bear it.” Yet he was beautiful,
beautiful in death....

“He died an hour ago, _Signora_. I am terribly sorry. I did
everything--possible.”

Through a burst of tears, uncontrollable, humiliating, an agony of
tears, Lilah cried: “I’ll go back to-morrow and look at him.... Not
now! Don’t ask me to, now! Is he dead?”

The doctor nodded. “An hour ago,” he repeated.

Lilah went downstairs. The doctor had been sitting in Flagg’s chair
by the desk and a cigarette still burned in an ash-tray. He had been
reading some of those scattered sheets of manuscript, Flagg’s last
work. Now he stooped and gathered them up, without self-consciousness
or apology. “A remarkable mind,” he said.

Lilah huddled in a corner of the divan, dabbing at her eyes with a
handkerchief. She shivered. Her teeth knocked together. Yet behind the
atrocious confusion of her thoughts she was grateful that she had not
arrived two hours sooner. Another idea fought to the surface, seemed
to explode in her brain, to shatter her--she was alone. She had lost
love.... And she saw herself, night after night, endless, identical
nights, lying in her bed, her body rigid beneath the bed-covers.
She had so little to remember and so much time to remember in--her
experience reduced itself to that one victorious moment when Flagg had
loved her without question--and there was no comfort in remembering....

“I cannot offer my sympathy,” the doctor was saying, “in the usual
terms. I understand so well what it means to find oneself alone, the
physical self cheated of the comforting reality, the spiritual self
unaccustomed.... Later, a week, a month, a year, it will be more
difficult for you. Then, suddenly, you will find relief--in work, new
interests, another love.”

“Don’t!”

He spread out his hands. “Inevitable! This man has gone. But you
remain. You must progress. Your education, if you will permit me to
say so, is not complete. His, I dare say, was....”

He put the typewritten pages back on the desk. “Tell me about him.”

He leaned forward, offering a curious, leather cigarette case. “You
smoke?”

“Yes.”

She saw his hand as he held the match for her, a hand at once sensitive
and acquisitive; there was a large ring on one of the fingers, and
Lilah thought: “How Italian!”

“You’re shivering. Give me your hands. Steady now! You mustn’t let go,
_signora_. It’s devilish hard to pull oneself back.”

“You speak English very well.”

“My mother was English. But I was born in Persia and educated in
Germany. Ah. Your pulse is better. Breath. Deep. Deeper! That’s it.
Now, smoke? Later, I’ll get some coffee for you. I let the servant
go. But I have made myself very much at home here.... I used to know
your poet. Before his exile, he was an extravagant host. A charming,
innocent fellow who enjoys his evil reputation. He is, actually,
religious, but he is ashamed of his inclination and attempts to deceive
us with abominable clap-trap.... You’re all right. All right.”

“You’ll stay here to-night?”

“Of course.”

“It is very kind of you. I can’t help shivering. Something in me is
whirring--like a wheel--”

She had to try, at least. She was ashamed to shake and chatter before
this stranger. He drew up a chair and sat before her, with his elbows
on his knees. Then, for the first time, she looked at him. He was short
and had ginger-colored hair and a ginger-colored beard streaked with
gray. His face was lean; the skin was dry and tight, drawn over the
bones so that you saw the structure, the modeling, extraordinarily
precise and fine. His eyes were the color of moss agates, small,
brilliant and inquisitive.

“I think I can sleep,” she said abruptly.

Her lids were heavy. She stopped trembling and yawned. Her head fell
back against the cushions. She felt the doctor’s eyes, appraising her,
but she could not meet the attack. Nothing was left of her audacity.
This drowsiness was like a drug. And little by little consciousness
of what had happened slipped away. She would start, gasp, reach out
for that certainty, only to have it evade her, to have it submerged
in great waves of sleep.... She struggled to recall what it was that
needed remembering, what it was that was gone.... Nothing remained but
the face of the doctor, thrust forward, still and absorbed. Suddenly it
was jerked away and she sank down, down, into sleep ... for hours.

       *       *       *       *       *

She woke again. It was dark. The windows showed, black squares, save
one, where the lamp was reflected, seeming to burn steadily and
brightly both within the house and without. The doctor had not moved.
“How long have I slept?”

“About three minutes.”

“Oh.”

Then she remembered. Flagg was gone. She would never again feel his arm
beneath her head, the tightening of the muscles in his shoulder, the
weight of his sleeping body against hers.

She sat up. And instantly the doctor got to his feet. “I’ll make
coffee. Wait. Don’t move.”

He was gone. What a strange man. What did he think of her? Whom did he
imagine her to be? Would he question her? What would happen, now?

She went to a mirror and stared at herself, surprised to discover that
she was the identical Lilah; again, she sensed a peculiar, penetrating
delight in the witty outlines of her nose....

Strange, that in moments of tremendous meaning, meaningless things
demanded attention. She was more aware of the things in the
room--chairs, tables, ornaments--than of the body upstairs. The
chairs were somehow strange and terrible at that hour--they were like
listening people, spying people, ready to say in sharp, unnatural
voices that it was late--turn out the lights ... let us sleep, let us
dream in the shadows, our dark, mysterious dreams....




XII


The days that followed were too crowded to hurt very much. A procession
of strangers came to the “Villino Sans-Souci”; Lilah was questioned,
with respect, with pity, with impudence, with disdain. She discovered
that she knew nothing of Flagg’s family, his affairs. Cables were
dispatched to his bank and, after a delay, a dry, unemotional and
explicit reply was received, not by Lilah, but by the Florentine bank
which had handled the small matter of Flagg’s account. Lilah was
visited by an Anglo-Italian who wore a white Imperial in the flamboyant
manner of Maximilian and who gesticulated with small, self-conscious
hands in black kid gloves. She was, he informed her, to leave Flagg in
Italy, since there was no one to receive him in America.

“Then I am not to be consulted?” she demanded with a smile that should
have humiliated him.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Those were our instructions, _signora_.”
He rose and bowed, his eyes veiling their curiosity, his attitude a
discreet expression of admiration. “We are also instructed to meet any
expense--any necessary expense.”

“I suppose you mean that I am to get back to America any way I can.”

“I suggest that you wire your own bank, _signora_.”

“Oh, yes,” she said crisply. “Of course! I was not referring to money
but to the indifference of Mr. Flagg’s family.”

Those little, initiated, trained hands made a gesture disposing of
families. “The world is cruel, _signora_. If there is anything I can do
for you, call upon me. I am not indifferent to distress. Permit me to
say that I am more than sorry--”

When he was gone, she wandered from room to room, from window to
window, peering out at the black sky, at the drenched cypresses, the
bedraggled arbor. The little cat asked to be let in. “I must find a
home for you,” Lilah said. Because, like Lilah, the little cat loved
soft and beautiful things, she was forever crying at closed doors,
begging to be let in to warmth and light. But no one cared, because it
is not enough to love soft things, beauty--

The house-agent, rattling his keys, interrupted her. He had an air of
relishing the situation and there was, at the same time, something sly
and insinuating in his manner. He stared, immediately, at everything
as if he expected to find that some of the furniture had been removed.
He asked whether Lilah intended to remain at the “Villino Sans-Souci,”
which had been leased by the “poor gentleman” for a year.

Lilah realized, with a shock of positive terror, that she must leave
the house at once.

“An English gentleman is most anxious to take the house. Perhaps,
next week--to be precise, Wednesday--the _signora_ will surrender the
property?”

Afraid of his eyes, Lilah said: “I cannot move before the first of the
month. The rent is paid until then.”

This was a mistake. The agent repeated that his English client must
take possession at once--or find another, suitable house. It was
not a simple matter to find tenants for houses in the country, the
_forestieri_ preferred, as a rule, the life and gayety of the city. “As
for me, _signora_, I would die of the melancholy in this place.”

“Wednesday, then,” Lilah said. She shut him out with a weary gesture.

Where on earth should she go? Now, of course, she could not ask Robert,
or Junius, for money. She had burned her bridges.

She packed Flagg’s things, vaguely intending to give them to some one
who might need them--the farmer next door or that tall idiot boy who
lived over the hill, the one who could imitate the birds and sat all
day calling them, delighted by his own cleverness. Lilah could not
kiss Flagg’s things, or caress them. Some women might have, but they
would not have been the kind of women who love deeply. Lilah shook his
clothes out, folded them, with a sort of frozen indifference, as if
they had belonged to some one else. She had had her hour of bravery,
alone with him. She had sat with death. No one, not even David Brenner,
could call her a coward now.... But at the end, Flagg’s eyes shut her
out. He had gone away without her, still cherishing his secrets....
Selfish.... The word rang in her ears.

She got up, went quickly downstairs and to his desk where that little
heap of manuscript lay untouched. She began to read eagerly, hearing
his voice in every word.... How long would it be before she would
forget his voice? How long must she suffer like this?

She could not understand what he had written.... No wonder that he had
never confided in her. He had either gone infinitely further along the
paths she feared and shrank from, or else he had been deluded, blinded
by glimpses of the infinite. His phrases had no meaning for her. How
far must she go, she wondered, before she could judge, appraise him?
She would know, some day, whether he had been selfish, or beyond the
proscribed, essential personality of the unenlightened being--Robert,
Junius, herself.

She had deceived him, in the beginning; he had thought that he saw
in her what, eventually, he found she did not have. He had little
by little uncovered her artifice, her ignorance, her evasions, her
frivolity, her fear, until in the end, he clasped, perhaps with shame,
a naked little body.... That was why, in the end, he smiled at her and
shut her out....

       *       *       *       *       *

Hearing a carriage, she thrust the papers under a blotter, out of
sight, as if they had been a proclamation of her failure. The servant
came in, announcing the _contessa_.

“_Cara mia_, I have just heard.”

She offered both her hands to Lilah. She was dressed in the extreme of
fashion, and Lilah thought: “She must have made a match.”

The _contessa’s_ sharp, initiated eyes studied Lilah’s face through
a lorgnon. She wore, always, too many ornaments, chains, bracelets,
medallions and pins; her flat breast was hung with brilliants. “My poor
child. I hear that you were in Paris. What a terrible thing. What will
you do? Go back to your husband?”

“No.”

“Perhaps you will remarry.”

“My dear _contessa_,” Lilah said impatiently, “I am not yet divorced.
And I loved the man who is dead.”

“But you’ll have to do something with your life. You can’t live here,
alone, in this treasure-house of sweet memories! You’ll have to do
something! You’re young. I don’t believe in women sitting desolate
among the ruins, willfully mourning the irrevocable. Life is so
terribly short and cruel, so--so avaricious. I have always believed
in snapping my fingers in the face of destiny. You couldn’t imagine
the number of times I’ve been knocked down. I always get up again. I’m
clever. A woman alone has to be. You’ve got to understand men. If I
were beautiful, with my knowledge of men, I could achieve anything....
As it is--sixty, and a bag of bones--I manage--” Her voice trailed off.
A look of weariness and fright crossed her eyes. “I manage. Now, if I
were you--”

“I haven’t a cent,” Lilah cried suddenly. “I don’t know what to do. Can
you lend me a few hundred dollars?”

The _contessa_ closed her lorgnon with a snap. Her expression became
sly, sweet, and guarded. She stared down at her large, awkward
hands, at the glitter of small, inexpensive but ostentatious rings
which ornamented her fingers. She shook her head. “Impossible. Just
at the moment, I am what we Americans call flush. But you never can
tell.... You never can tell! It’s a precarious world. And the Italians
aren’t gifted with a sense of gratitude. I did wonderful things for a
_borghese_, a store-keeper, who wanted to enlarge his establishment....”

She broke off. “You might live with me for a while. I would enjoy your
companionship. Your presence would brighten my _salon_. I am quite in
earnest. I would not expect compensation. Gayety. Vivacity. Elegance.
And in return the advantage of my large acquaintance....”

“Thank you,” Lilah said. “No.”

She shivered. “No. You are very kind. But I am going back to America.”

She stood, and the _contessa_, her chains and bangles clinking
together, took her leave. “You are very foolish,” she said at the
door. “Perhaps you will reconsider. You are intelligent enough to know
that I am respectable. If you are afraid of facts....” She got into
her carriage, crossed one leg over the other, displaying an elaborate
slipper, and waved. “_Au ’voir!_”

       *       *       *       *       *

Lilah thought: “Who knows? Some day.”

She sat before the fire, smoking and stroking the cat, that kept up
a remote humming, a sort of tea-kettle purring. She thought of the
simple existence of a cat. Either you were hungry and hunted, or you
weren’t, and purred, with no thought of the next day or the next. If
she were to leave the little black cat to the mercy of the agent, the
birds in the cypress groves would have to watch out--a lean, famished
little cat with lashing tail would creep through the under-brush,
stalking.... “I’ll give you to the doctor,” Lilah said aloud. The
little cat blinked and fell asleep.

Life wasn’t so simple for a woman whose only talent was knowing how
to dress well. To live. Just to live, and not be hungry! Suppose she
were to accept the _contessa’s_ invitation. She knew quite well what
it meant--a married woman, in Italy--even a divorcee would find it
almost impossible to remarry. She would become the mistress of one of
the _contessa’s_ friends, for a compensation. He would, of necessity,
be a wealthy _borghese_, since men of title were seeking dowries,
not adventures. She let the projected image of herself pass across
her imagination, an image of Lilah accentuated, for the moment more
brilliant, her mystery understored, her charm deepened by necessity to
a certain vulgarity--an actress pretending to be a lady.... She would
seek satisfaction in the possession of concrete adornments, tributes
to her first, untarnished success. She might, even, take her situation
seriously....

She threw her cigarette into the fire with a gesture that was both
violent and contemptuous. First her father, now Flagg, had left her to
shift for herself. Her mouth drooped. Her eyes, angry, dull with pain,
brooded. “I can’t bear this. What, in God’s name, am I going to do?”

It was not yet dark. Twilight was gathering, and the ugly, incongruous
objects in the room retreated into shadow. She thought of the
Thirty-eighth Street house, Shawhan’s flamboyant ladies, the dull
gold of shaded lights, the discreet, remote murmur of traffic in that
brazen, that fearless, that challenging city.... She went to the
window. The valley, Florence, was dark beneath a dark sky; there were
no lights; it might have been a city forgotten and deserted, a place
given over to the ghosts of a reckless, fearless, challenging yesterday.

“I must go back,” she thought.

She straightened herself, as if she were facing an antagonist. Across
the valley, beneath that dark sky, Flagg was alone with the secret
he had withheld from her. It seemed to Lilah that she must, somehow,
get to him, hear his voice, listen again to the beating of his heart,
caress his hair. But there was something she must do first. She must
bring him the Lilah he wanted.

       *       *       *       *       *

Doctor Bacci lived across the river in an old house, narrow, tall,
toppling, in the Via dei Bardi. There was a garden at the rear, where,
he assured her, the little black cat and her kitten would be free to
caper or to bask in the sun. He opened the hat-box Lilah had brought
from the Ponte a Mensola, from which emerged a continuous scratching
and mewing. Damp and disheveled, the two cats jumped out and began
at once to investigate, under tables, behind doors, into cupboards,
everywhere.

“You’re sure you don’t mind?”

The doctor smiled. “I am, on the contrary, flattered.”

He touched a bell and a man servant came in. The doctor said in
Italian: “These are my two children. The little, black female is called
Simonetta. The other, Moro. Will you ask Tata to feed them?”

“_Si, signore._”

He turned to find Lilah in tears. “Now, there is nothing,” she said.

“You have forgotten the future.”

With a flash of scorn, she answered: “What cold comfort!”

“I have nothing better to offer.” The doctor looked away from her,
through the French door to the patch of garden. Lilah wondered whether
pity embarrassed him. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

She told him, at once, her situation. “There is no one else I can go
to. I’m alone. I don’t want my husband or his grandfather to know
anything about me. I am afraid that if I should see them I might
weaken. I might go back. I have told you enough about myself to make it
plain to you that if I should go back it would be--”

“Unthinkable,” the doctor interrupted.

He rose politely. “There are a few patients--When I have seen them, I
will join you in the garden.”

He opened the door and Lilah passed him, conscious of his glance, both
curious and eager. Before the door closed again, he watched her cross
the garden and seat herself on a stone bench beneath the polished
foliage of a camelia tree. There, in that square pool of green, at the
bottom of a well formed by the walls of houses, beneath another square
of cloudless sky, Lilah felt a pervading loneliness. An emotional
courage had carried her so far. Could she go farther? Everything,
literally everything, depended on this man. If he should open the door
and come toward her with a certain expression, she would know that she
was to be forever the victim of her negative philosophy; her vision
could not outlast the attack of a calculated and intelligent cynicism.
Her balance was too precarious. If he came toward her with another
expression--and she could tell, when he had no more than opened the
door--she would be forever under obligation to her new self. There
could be no backsliding.

She relaxed suddenly. The sunlight, after so many weeks of rain, had
about it an almost personal warmth; it lay across her hands, her cheek,
her shoulders. The walls dripped moisture and a shallow fountain kept
up a thin tinkle as a jet rose and fell. A door opened, some one said
“_Via!_” and the two cats scampered out, their tails very stiff. They
sat down in a patch of sunlight and began to lick themselves, first
their haunches, then their stomachs, and at last their heads, over
and over with their paws. Finished, one of them fell asleep, his paws
tucked under so that he was heart-shaped. The other, Simonetta,
explored the garden, daintily, stepping over everything lightly, her
tail twitching....

“She has forgotten him already,” Lilah thought. And she remembered
Flagg’s fingers caressing the black fur.... Her own hair.... A wild
sweetness possessed her. She closed her eyes, abandoned to it. It
flowed over her like light, this remembering. It was bitter and
wonderful and exquisite. If she could remember like this, she would
never be altogether alone; she could summon the recollection of his
touch....

The sensation passed. She was cold. She opened her eyes to the bright
immobility of the garden.

The French doors of the doctor’s office opened. He came toward her
quickly, but she did not look at his face.

He said without preface: “I will see that you get back to New York
and that you are provided for until you can find something to do.
Florence isn’t the place for you. Here you would never reach the final
step--purification. It is too old, too settled a beauty. You need the
struggle America offers--competition, enthusiasm. I could show you an
Italy you don’t dream of, but it is mine, not yours! You would never
understand it and, in the end, it would destroy you, since you are
weakened by perfection. You will have to cut your way out of ugliness.”
He paused. Then in a different, casual voice he said: “Simonetta has
come to stay. She is asleep on the kitchen step.” And he called:
“_Vieni! Gattinino!_”

Lilah returned to New York. It was Spring of the year. She mingled in
the restless stream flowing up one side of the Avenue, down the other,
broken by cross-currents, flowing on again, resistlessly, to no purpose.

The doctor’s generosity had been limited by his resources; he was not,
in the American sense, well-to-do. When Lilah counted her pennies and
considered her debt, she realized that he had spoken the truth; she
must cut her way out of ugliness. Poverty in a cottage might be, at
least, picturesque, immaterial; in New York it was ponderable, a sordid
weight of petty obstacles; so much for so much and never quite enough.

Lilah established herself in a room not far from Astor Place.

New York was a desert. She was alone in a crowded wilderness. She
was shabby, in debt and desperate. But if Robert had reappeared and
had asked her to return to the Thirty-eighth Street house, to the
sumptuous, familiar extravagances of her life there, she would have
lacked the courage to accept.

She had a new thirst for power, a new eagerness to escape. She wanted
the power that comes with personal success. She wanted to escape from
the curse of materialism. She had lived in a sham world; the shabby,
dark room, the dingy window-panes, the worn carpet were reality.

Lilah’s daily search for work took her through streets where there
was not even a remote chance of being recognized by old friends; she
threaded the crowded mazes of commerce, anonymous and frightened.

It did not occur to her to go back to the fashionable couturier in the
’Fifties who had “built” her trousseau. She remembered his first curt
dismissal, the card tossed to her across his desk. “Learn to put hats
together; then, perhaps, you can design them.”

She avoided those up-town streets given over to fashionable shops and
hotels, establishments haunted by women of her acquaintance whose whims
carried them from one dressmaker to another, from one antiquarian to
another. She wanted to lose herself, to be immersed in an unfamiliar
atmosphere, to be alone with this strange, new Lilah. Now that Flagg
was dead, he was more than ever real. He had never been so insistently
near her, more insistently a part of her. But their life together had
lost all reality. It seemed, now, to have happened in a half-forgotten
dream. She had dreamed and had wakened to the commonplace business of
living. The actual became confused with the vision; she experienced a
new, strong sense of distaste, almost fear, at the proximity of people
who might break the comforting nostalgia.

She saw no one but David Brenner. The young Jew fitted her mood. He was
not, now, in love with her but with some scheme of his own. He called
her his “little sardine” but he did not accuse her of being a humbug.

She lunched with him at the identical restaurant of their last meeting,
and Lilah traced with her finger recent signatures scratched in the
pine table by unknowns craving an easy notoriety.

David Brenner’s talk was of people, things, she knew nothing about.
A dozen personalities had flashed across the American intellectual
firmament trailing sparks and shedding inhibitions--rockets, most of
them, that shot up with a tremendous dazzle and were destined soon
to snuff out, to zig-zag to earth. David Brenner spoke of them with
immense seriousness. He was like most Americans, she decided, in his
facile enthusiasms, his sudden, scornful shifts of opinion.

“I’m broke, David,” she said.

He did not take her seriously. He knew nothing about her. And behind
his bantering admiration there was always distrust. When she told him
that she could not find work, he shrugged his shoulders. “You’ll never
get the sort of job you’re looking for, Lilah. Try Fifth Avenue and
your own particular brand of bluff.”

There it was again. Her own particular brand of bluff.

It was lonely, living by herself. She left David Brenner and went back
to the room just off Astor Place. Day after day at five o’clock she
went there because there was nowhere else to go. She had lost her sense
of the pageantry of the streets and of her part in it. No one turned
to look at her, because she no longer had the assurance, the air of
victory, which attracts attention.

She took David Brenner’s advice. After all, what did it matter if
Robert’s friends should happen to see her? She had been stupid.
She was not the type of woman they wanted in East Side shirtwaist
factories. Over and over again she had failed because she had had no
“experience,” that vague attribute of anemic, gum-chewing, bobbed girls
who always “got the job” Lilah failed to get. Her manner, her charm
counted for nothing. She discovered that she was too old to serve the
necessary apprenticeship. Girls of fifteen were doing, efficiently,
what she could not do. Others, thousands of them, were trained, ready
to take the succeeding steps toward the few high-salaried positions
available to women in business. At eight o’clock, at five o’clock, the
streets were choked with women, all of them initiated--

Lilah sat before her mirror and took stock of herself.

“Twenty-nine,” she said aloud.

In the fashionable world she had left, twenty-nine was at the beginning
of experience. At thirty, a woman tried her wings; if she were clever
and ambitious, it was the age of marital re-adjustment, of social
expansion, of thrilling experiment, leadership. But to be a lonely
little nobody at thirty! To climb endless iron stairs to innumerable
glazed doors marked: _Private_. To answer advertisements a day too
late. To be told to leave her name and address, to come again, to
telephone, to write. To thread the crowded streets, pretending
eagerness. To try and fail....

It would be easier to write Robert something evasive, something
pathetic ... she could always touch his heart ... and, to-morrow, she
would be at the Point, laughing with Junius, everything forgotten....

She actually went to the table and took up a pen, dipping it several
times in the ink. She wrote: _March 30_. But she could not write: _Dear
Robert_. Could not. The letters would not go down.

She put her head on the paper and cried. She cried until she fell
asleep. She was very tired and she was beginning to be hungry. The
doctor’s loan would not carry her another week and she could not ask
him for more. It was enough that he was caring for Simonetta and
Moro.... It was enough that he had seen Flagg die....

In the morning she went up town. Someone, very optimistic, had set out
English daisies in window boxes. It was warm on the sunny side of the
street. And what shops! What clothes! Lilah, drunk, paused to stare
at a chinchilla wrap, a Leghorn hat, a pair of brocaded sandals, a
fan made of pheasants’ feathers set in onyx sticks.... She felt the
old hunger for possession. She shook her head and straightened her
shoulders. She groped for her dim, new faith, what it was that drove
her on, why it was that she must win this obscure, personal game....

She went into the employee’s entrance of a department store. A
doorman, who was sitting on a stool, directed her to the office of
“Miss Craig--she sees everybody.” Miss Craig was young, and a lady.
From behind spectacles with tortoise-shell rims her eyes investigated
Lilah’s unmistakable elegance. Maurice’s black gown was a miracle of
simplicity; it had outlasted two seasons. Miss Craig wrote something
on a pad. Her expression was purposefully enigmatic, but the corners
of her mouth twitched. “There isn’t much chance just at present....
I could try you in the cotton good’s department. It’s quite hard.
You’d have to learn the stock. The material isn’t heavy, but the bolts
are--it means lifting all day and standing on your feet. Our employees
are expected to go to school in the beginning. We have to be sure that
they are reasonably good mathematicians--honest--intelligent--” She
paused, flushing.

“Anything,” Lilah said. “I’ll do anything. I’m at the end.”

After a moment, Miss Craig said: “I’m terribly sorry. I guessed as
much. Would twenty-five dollars a week help any? I can’t offer you
more. For a novice, you know--”

“Yes. Yes. Anything.”

Lilah went to school. Fractions terrified her. Graduated, she pasted
labels, and, for a week, wrote undecipherable, meaningless numbers and
letters on pasteboard tickets. She did not see Miss Craig again. She
learned of the men “higher up”; the floor-walkers, department managers,
buyers and sales managers who dominated this world of workers. She
encountered the “politics” of a big store. She heard gossip, the
bitter, querulous backbiting of tired women.

The day came when, with a sense of dread and excitement, she was put
“on the floor.” All day she lifted heavy rolls of gingham, muslin,
cotton, crêpe, twisted them, measured them, rolled them up again.
Pink. Yellow. Hideous checks and nauseating plaids. Pretty, crisp
organdies, like the starched skirts of little girls at a picnic....

All day she was questioned, bullied, scolded. She passed close to
the other clerks, brushed them with her own body and yet never saw
them. This was not Lilah. This was a common, clever, indifferent girl
who was rolling and unrolling cotton goods. “How many yards, madam?”
That was not Lilah’s voice; it was too high and sharp; the accent too
clipped.... Once she thrust her pencil through her hair, and something
apart from Lilah laughed. Junius had said that she was an actress....
“Two sixty-four. At one thirty-two a yard. Anything else?”

A young girl with a broad face and gray eyes said: “Say, you can’t wear
that dress. Mr. Mansfield will get after you. It has to be plain black,
and no frills.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Twenty-five a week was not enough. Lilah left the room near Astor Place
and moved to Tenth Street. An old house, the house of a merchant of the
’Eighties, had resisted the tide of factories and sweatshops. It stood,
peeling, cracked and damp, between two towering buildings occupied by
fur manufacturers and printers. A smell of hides dominated, indoors
and out of doors. Packing cases littered the sidewalks and trucks
stood wheel to wheel for blocks. Spring, a hint of sunlight, brought
out an army of workers. Before the aquiline façade of the old house a
polyglot crowd lock-stepped, making wide gestures and speaking the dim
languages of southeastern Europe. At night, the street was deserted.

Lilah’s room, three flights up, faced a courtyard which must have been,
in the old days, a formal garden. Now, in a litter of boxes, cans and
barrels, a lilac tree fought to live. Lilah recalled the cypresses of
Vincigliata.

She had lost the last vestiges of her hard brightness, her security.

She lunched every day with the young girl who had warned her not to
wear the Maurice dress, that conspicuous miracle of simplicity. And
painstakingly, as if everything depended on it, Lilah acquired from
this girl a new standard of judgment based on the unpalatable facts
of life. She was surprised at her own flexibility. But something
unalterable, fixed, in her nature demanded achievement, justification.
There would be, must be, a way out....

Summer was stifling; the city seemed closed beneath a dome of steel,
its reverberations intensified, the air was thick and hot.

In the store, a few limp and wilted shoppers wandered aimlessly
about, but there was so little business that, it was rumored, some of
the sales force would be dropped. Lilah knew the daily panic which
comes of uncertainty. Her record was not good; she had never reached
the average sales required to justify her presence in the shop, her
salary, which was, after all, percentage on an investment. The other
clerks were sharper; they had the tenacity of women born in poverty.
Her instinctive mental attitudes, beyond their comprehension, made
competition, playing the game on their terms, impossible.

She was not surprised when Miss Craig sent for her.

“I’m sorry. We’re letting fifty people go. There’s no business.”

“And I’m one of the fifty?”

“Yes.” Miss Craig looked away, as if Lilah’s expression hurt her. “It
isn’t _me_, Mrs. Peabody. _I_ don’t decide these things. I’m told that
fifty must go. I look through the averages--”

“Like the massacre at Dinard,” Lilah said. She felt cold and stiff and
her fingers tingled.

“Don’t you know any one--” Miss Craig suggested.

Lilah shook her head. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll manage.”

“I’m _sure_ you will.” Miss Craig was evidently relieved. She said
brightly: “Why not try the uptown shops? You don’t belong here. I’ll
give you a letter to ‘Emilie.’ He’s Irish. He’ll like you.”

“You are very kind.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Lilah knew, now, that there were two phases of life--life with illusion
and life without it. To exist, to reconcile living with life, something
must take the place of the lost beliefs. There must be faith in the
abstract promise, the idea, withheld, mysterious and penetrating, of
immortality.... She did what she always did, in moments of questioning.
Facing herself in a mirror she thought: “Flagg would have told me
this, only I wouldn’t have understood. I wasn’t ready.”

She was conscious, too, of an apathy that was new to her, an
indifference, a shadow of the lassitude which comes with a surrender
of personality. She shrugged the feeling away. She must live. She must
take, while there was still time, the advantage offered by her youth,
her charm. “Humbug! Humbug!” she said to her reflection.

She glanced at Miss Craig’s letter addressed to the firm of “Emilie.”
“Dear Reilly: Mrs. Peabody is the rustle of silk in our cotton goods
department. Have a heart. Edna.”

Lilah smiled. This letter was so sharp and bright and cold, so
cocksure. It might mean everything or nothing. She wondered how any
one--a woman--could scratch off a letter like that and give it to
another woman who was desperate and friendless. “Have a heart!”

She found “Emilie” on Park Avenue. A small, ornate, Venetian house with
grilled windows and a loggia beneath a tiled roof had been converted
into an “establishment.” A man in livery opened the heavy door and
scrutinized the letter. “Mr. Reilly’s busy. Come Wednesday at four
o’clock.”

Lilah pushed her way in. “I’ll wait. I’ve got to see him. Tell him the
letter is from Miss Craig. He’ll see me.”

The man hesitated, turning the letter over and over between
cotton-gloved fingers. “I’m sorry, but Mr. Reilly gave particular
orders--”

Lilah glanced beyond him. A thin, spry man in a cutaway coat was
running down a flight of carpeted stairs, yards of purple chiffon
hanging across his arm and trailing behind him like the robes of a
Pharaoh. Lilah’s heart contracted. She was amazed to hear herself
saying: “Oh, Mr. Reilly!” in a loud, confident voice. Inwardly she
quaked. She had never done such a thing. She had no idea whether or not
this was the dressmaker.

He bounded toward her, gathering up the chiffon, all the time staring
at her as if he intended to take a bite out of her. He looked like a
very angry fox-terrier.

“Mr. Reilly--”

“Oh, God.”

He tripped over the chiffon and threw it on the ground. He snatched at
the letter, read it, showed his teeth and almost growled. “Can’t you
wait? I’m busy. No. Come upstairs. I’ll let you help. Bring this stuff,
Fred.”

While they mounted the stairs, Reilly running just ahead, his patent
shoes and white gaiters twinkling, he carried on an irritable
monologue. “Everyone’s sick. Mrs. Mason went to Lake George this
morning. I’m short-handed. Twenty-five models came on the _Olympic_
yesterday and they’ve got to be photographed. If you can wear hats you
can go over to the studio with Duncan and he’ll get the collection.”

“I’m not a model,” Lilah interrupted.

He turned sharply and surveyed her. She felt that he could see more
than it was decent for any stranger to see--he could see her crouching
within herself, afraid of hunger. “We’ll try.” He kicked open a door
and she followed him into a room paneled from floor to ceiling with
mirrors. She encountered herself, little, with scared eyes, profile,
three-quarters, her back turned, face to face. She raised her hand and
a dozen images of herself all raised their hands in a sort of salute.

The floor was littered with packing cases from which spilled tissue
paper and hats. “We’ll try,” Reilly repeated. He swooped down, growled,
came up with a bonnet. Lilah understood that she was to remove her
own hat and assume this fashionable coal-scuttle, this modern, French
adaptation of a mode seventy-five years old. “My dress is wrong,” she
said. The challenge excited her. She felt, suddenly, re-animated,
alive, after a period of stillness.

Reilly said: “Never mind. You have a charming head.”

She bent her head quickly and looked up at herself.

“Very good. Now, this one.” He swooped again. Lilah had never seen such
a flexible human being; he seemed not to have any bones. “Don’t wear it
too far forward. These hats need eyes.... Too violent for you. You’re
pale....” He made a vague gesture. “Paisley. Amber. Blonde lace. Pink
net and camelias.... _Ah!_” He emerged from a heap of tissue-paper with
a small _cloche_. “Try this.”

A dozen Lilahs adjusted the expensive trifle of straw, a hat
magnificently disdainful, unornamented, copyrighted by an astute and
talented milliner.

“I’ll call Duncan.”

Reilly disappeared and Lilah was left alone with the manifold
reflection of herself.

Well, it was over, now. She had known from the beginning that she could
not escape--

Reilly returned with a stout, breathless man in an alpaca coat who wore
a straw hat pushed back.

After a brief inspection, wholly impersonal, he said: “Too blonde.
She’d photygraph like a white mouse.”

Reilly waved him out again. The sense, the implication of the
photographer’s remark was clear. Lilah removed the _cloche_ and tossed
it aside. She groped for her own hat. “Don’t go,” Reilly interrupted
sharply. “Wait. You can take Katherine’s place--”

He beckoned to her.

The front of the house, from basement to loggia, was given over to
salesrooms, luxurious, miniature shops designed to attract and hold
devotees at the shrine of that elusive deity, the mode. Reilly was an
astute priest. He had capitalized his serious interest in women; he
was unaware of his own incongruity. Sharp, alert, inexhaustible, he
worshipped women and exacted payment from them--he “burned incense and
passed the plate” he told Lilah. Something effeminate in his gesture,
the use of his hands, was contradicted by the shrewdness of his eyes.

He preceded Lilah into a room furnished in the Venetian manner, dimly
lighted, opening upon the loggia. Through the delicate, turned columns,
a prismatic confusion of vertical stone shafts picketed the smoky
sky--the city. A girl rose from a bench, approached with the languid
gait of the trained _mannequin_. “Duncan wants you. This is Mrs.
Peabody. She’ll take your place.”

Reilly turned. “There’s no business at this time of year. But if any
one should come in, sell! The hats are in these cases. Use your own
judgment and get as much as you can for them. Nothing under thirty-five
dollars. Poor models, more. Good models, less. That’s excellent
psychology. A woman who pays fifty dollars for an ugly hat will wear it
to spite the devil, and she’ll like it, in spite of herself. A woman
who gets a beautiful hat for thirty-five dollars will advertise it--and
us!”

He sat down, clasped his knees and asked abruptly: “Who are you? Not
Mrs. Robert Peabody?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t tell any one! Call yourself Mrs. Isaac Peabody--anything! If
you stay here, you are not likely to meet your friends. I cater to
actresses, rich middle-westerners and fashionable demi-mondaines.
They’ll like your looks and your manners. Women are always fascinated
by the unattainable.”

“Thank you.”

“We’ll say thirty to start with. If you make good, I’ll give you this
department, at seventy-five. Katherine is a beautiful bonehead....”

He leaped up. “I’ll send a stock-girl. For God’s sake don’t ask any
questions. Use your common sense and sell hats.”

He stepped forward and with no softening of his expression, touched her
hair. “That’s a good girl.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Lilah discovered before long that Reilly was withholding the reward,
the promise of that first day. Summer melted into the stifling heat of
September and beneath a metallic, dark blue sky the city shimmered,
quivered as if licked by the minute flames of an infernal fire. “My
God, it’s hot,” the stately Katherine remarked. She stood by the open
window, in silhouette, her attitude reminiscent of Francesca, the
disdainful melancholy of Duse. “My God, it’s hot. Why don’t Reilly
close on Saturday?”

“I don’t know.”

“I do. He might lose a dollar.”

Lilah had changed her opinion of Reilly; he paid very little attention
to her; she had never again had to endure that brief, impersonal
caress. He had called her, without preface of any sort: “Lilah.” And he
had left her to her own devices.

She came to the conclusion that Reilly was either a fraud or an artist.
The room in which he received his clients had only one window and three
doors, one leading into the workroom, one into his bath and the other
into the “Salotto d’Oro.” His desk bore, in addition to an alabaster
lamp, stacked copies of _La Vie Parisienne_: a copy, in French of _Le
Mariage de Loti_; a box made of lacquered leather heavily embossed;
and a small colored bust in terra-cotta that at first glance might
have been Florentine but was, actually, Egyptian. Behind him, in an
angle of the wall, a secretary of inlaid wood towered almost to the
ceiling. There were three Venetian chairs, ornate and faded. And hung
together above a small cabinet, signed photographs of Ibanez, Poiret,
Chaliapin and Nora Bayes.

Lilah found that Reilly was a man of violent enthusiasms. His interest
in her had been immediate, sharp; he had, perhaps, been studying her.
There was a certain zest in competing for his attention, since he
had indicated in the beginning, a definite award. Lilah held aloof
from the other women of the establishment, because Reilly had warned
her that she could expect jealousy, and that she must avoid conflict
if she expected to advance. Her ambition was trivial. But faith in
herself, her potentiality, returned slowly. She was humble and, in her
recollection of Flagg, disciplined. As the actuality of that experience
receded, its meaning became more clear.

Katherine, stretching her long arms above her head, yawned. “I could
stand the present if it wasn’t for the future,” she said. “Waiting’s
hell when nothing happens.”

She caught herself as the mirror-paneled door of the elevator slid
back and two women stepped into the room. “_B’ jour, mesdames_,” she
murmured; her body undulated; she swam toward them.

Lilah’s expression of polite concern deepened into surprise, dismay.
She recognized Grace Whiteside, fat, over-ornamented, placid in the
secure possession of family and position, and, behind her, Miss Fuller,
as always, in gray with a little pan-cake hat made of leaves.

Lilah held up her hand to ward off their recognition. Grace Whiteside
came to a full stop; she seemed to spread, to puff out, like an angry
turkey.

“Don’t,” Lilah said faintly. She turned and ran out of the room.

She waited, leaning against the closed door. She heard a murmur of
voices, Katherine’s suave and insinuating: “Very _chic, madame_. Very
new. Reboux. Just try this one, _madame_.”

Presently they were gone. The elevator came up; the door rattled; it
descended again, making a hollow, reverberating sound in the wall.

Lilah wondered at her own fear; it was not a moral cowardice, of that
she was certain; she was not ashamed. She had a different sense of
responsibility toward herself and the opinion people had of her. She
was unwilling to face Miss Whiteside and Grace Fuller because she had
not, as far as they could see, progressed; the change that had taken
place within her was beyond their comprehension. The new self had
always been there, dormant; but it had been disclosed by Flagg’s death,
by the questioning which had followed.

Katherine emerged from the “Salotto d’Oro” suddenly. Her expression was
sly and gratified, as if she had caught Lilah in an indiscretion. She
passed, without a word, going toward Reilly’s office, the black satin
drapery of her skirt slipping over the carpet like a smooth serpent.

Lilah went back to the salesroom. Grace Whiteside had been trying on
bonnets, Reilly’s rare confections of lace and spangles designed for
grandmothers of the stage. It had been, apparently, a perfunctory
inspection.

As Lilah put the hats back in their place, she pictured Miss Whiteside
rushing to the nearest telegraph office to wire Junius Peabody....
Grace Fuller would probably try to prevent what, in the end, would mean
her own happiness. But nothing could turn aside the fanatical thrusts
of the outraged spinster; she would plant her vengeance sooner or
later. Now, Lilah must let herself be divorced; an eventuality which
would deprive her of her position with Reilly, since the inevitable
scandal would affect her usefulness. Reilly was beginning to cast in
social waters, and he was baiting his hook cautiously. He was shrewd
but he was not sophisticated. His knowledge of society had been derived
at second hand. Into his vocabulary the word “form” had appeared. He
had subjugated the theatrical world and now, longing for other, more
difficult attainment, he was angling for what he termed, in a whisper,
“Newport and Bar Harbor....”

Lilah’s mind went off at a tangent; she caught herself wondering
whether Grace Fuller had been chaperoning Robert’s aunt through another
attack of gallstones, or whether--

Reilly came in, shutting the door with an irritable bang. “What’s
this? What’s Katherine trying to put over?” Lilah did not answer and
snatching the bonnet away from her, Reilly tossed it aside. “I hate
tittle-tattle! She came down stairs, gloating, as if she had caught you
picking the safe. What happened?”

With a sense of the futility of any explanation, Lilah said: “I lost my
head and Katherine lost a sale....”

“Damn the sale!”

Reilly stood, wrapped in a sort of angry contemplation, his hands in
his pockets, his small, gaitered feet spread. “You’d better let me go,”
Lilah said. “It might happen again.” She added, with a curious smile:
“I’m sorry, more so than I can say.”

He fixed his eyes on her face.

“I’ll let you know,” he answered sharply and left the room.

A week later, he sent for her.

“I’m going to put you in the workroom. I think you have the makings of
a designer. Later, perhaps, I’ll send you to Paris, Vienna.... It won’t
do to have you upstairs.”

He hesitated and then said sharply: “I’ve heard from your family.”

Lilah had not expected this. She leaned against the desk with a feeling
of faintness.

“They’ve written me. One of them--a Mr. Junius Peabody--wants to see
you.”

“I can’t! No.... For heaven’s sake, no! I don’t want to see him.”

Reilly considered her. “I thought I’d warn you. He’s downstairs.
There’s his card.” He tossed it across the desk. “You’d better see
him.” Reilly rose and came around to her; his hand fell on her
shoulder. “You’re not a coward, are you?”

“No.”

“Then face things! If you don’t, they steal up behind you and knock you
down. Always keep your eye on your fears.” His clasp tightened. “Do
you know why I hired you? I was afraid of you! I’m not familiar with
your sort. You made me ashamed of what I am.... Now, it seems, you are
ashamed of what you are.... Either you’re stubborn or you’re guilty. I
don’t pretend to understand. I’d like to put across to you--well, don’t
make a mistake.”

Lilah smiled, made a gesture of surrender. “I’ll see him.”

“That’s a good girl.” Reilly paused on the threshold. “And listen.
Don’t hold out against him because of any resentment ... don’t be a
damn fool. There is more than one way of making good.”

A moment later, rigid, consciously and painfully correct, he bowed
Junius Peabody into the room and closed the door again, softly, as if
he were closing it upon the sacred essence of good form.

Lilah faced Junius with a trace of confusion; her lips trembled; she
smiled unsteadily, because he was so unfalteringly Junius in spite
of everything. He carried his overcoat on his arm; his head, bared,
was held erect, the white, thick hair brushed carefully back from the
veined forehead. Immaculate, even exquisite, at eighty-seven he still
gave the impression of vigorous and aristocratic possession. He said:
“Lilah,” and, leaning forward, she kissed him, clung to him suddenly
with a passionate eagerness to be understood. Forgiveness was not
required, looked for, since she had had to do what she had done.

She felt his hand, patting, patting her back. “_There, there_,” he said.

She made an effort and controlled herself, remembering that at Junius’
age emotion is painful and perhaps ugly.

He sat down; disposed of his coat, his hat and the heavy, goldmounted
cane, and glanced about him. “My first visit to a dressmaker’s since
’Eighty-six,” he said. “They’ve changed. No ribbons here!” He made a
gesture of dislike. “That fellow--that popinjay--”

“Emilie,” Lilah said, wiping her eyes. A flash of her old self came
through, evoked by Junius’ presence. But she could not, now, laugh at
Reilly. He was her destiny. She was forced to admit that without Reilly
she might be caught in the tide and carried out to sea.

“He’s really very clever.”

“A man dressmaker,” Junius stated dryly, “puts me on edge. I will never
be reconciled--”

He broke off and scrutinized her. “Well, Lilah.”

With sudden violence she burst out: “I know! You can’t understand why
I’ve hidden myself away. I had to. You and I are alike, but you’ve
never had to remake yourself. You still look down on people you
consider inferior, and I’ve had to learn to respect them. I’ve had to
kill my old self--or starve.”

“I have always admired you inordinately,” he remarked.

“But you have never cared--how could you--whether I was being cowardly
and selfish, so long as I was superior, like you, a snob. We’re both
materialists, you, because you could afford to be and I because I
wanted to be. I haven’t changed. I want finished, rare, superlative
things as much as ever. But I hate myself because I am a materialist.
And that’s as good as changing.”

“You’ve been unhappy.”

She turned away. And Junius continued: “You are coming back, of course?”

She shook her head.

With a trace of impatience, Junius Peabody demanded: “Why not? There
isn’t any one else--another attachment--” Rebuked by her quick glance,
he apologized: “I know. What you felt was genuine. But since it is
over, done with--”

She interrupted: “I wonder if you can understand. What happened is as
immaterial as a dream. I can’t repent. Atone. Do any of the expected
things.... I’m not sorry or ashamed. I am not even, in the accepted
sense, chastened. As you say, it is over. But I am different, deep
down, out of sight, beyond my knowledge....”

She smiled at him. “It’s a mixed-up world. I know, now, that it isn’t
nasty.... We, ourselves, are nasty.”

“Robert needs you.”

With a flash of scorn she demanded: “Did he expect you to tell me so?”

Junius shook his head. “Don’t misunderstand. Robert hasn’t any
illusions. They are all gone. He is burned out, Lilah. But I like him
better than I ever did when he was moon-struck. I think, at times, he
hates you because you took away his belief in that moon of his. I could
have told him that he was worshipping, not a moon but a glow-worm,
because, as you say, we are very much alike, you and I.”

“We give a lovely light,” Lilah said.

The memory of an old appreciation warmed them both. The door of the
workroom opened suddenly, and violently a head was thrust in. “Mr.
Reilly, here’s that fitting--_Oh, excuse me!_” The door slammed again,
shutting out the noisy clatter of machines, the snip-snip of scissors,
the staccato treble of women’s voices.

Junius rose.

“We are living very quietly at the Point,” he said. “I came down on
purpose to see you, talk to you. I won’t urge you. After all, what more
can I say than that you are needed?”

Lilah cried desperately. “But I don’t love Robert, Junius.”

Junius Peabody faced her, a moment, in silence. She noticed that every
detail of his dress was correct, meticulous; he displayed the interest
of a young man in the outward semblance of superiority, of pride.
Something unfamiliar in her nature caused her to recoil, almost to
resent this deliberate conforming to prejudice.... Then, as suddenly,
she admired him for this very tenacity, this unswerving adherence to an
ideal of behavior, of appearance. He took her hand. “There is such a
thing as being beyond personal happiness. I hoped that you had learned
to do without it. There is no other serenity.... You’ll come back?”

“Perhaps.”

She covered her face with her hands.

She saw herself, not in the garden, not in the forest, but on the green
before the kennels, where Robert’s spaniels romped and barked. She saw
herself kneeling in the grass, fondling a wriggling puppy, stroking and
kissing the soft fur. She heard herself saying: “Oh, Robert, aren’t
they darlings!”


THE END




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


Typos corrected: “saxaphone” to “saxophone” (page 114); “skiis” to
“skis” (page 191); “Troisieme” to “Troisième” (page 272); 
“spinister” to “spinster” (page 315).

Extraneous/missing punctuation corrected on pages 30, 177, 191, 269,
and 277.

Author’s spelling of “Nietzschan” (page 14) retained.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been left unchanged.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78615 ***