Miss Southgate shook her head.
"And yet," said Williams, "the marriage turned out well, wouldn't you say?"
Antonia's fine arched black brows went up in doubt.
"It hadn't the disadvantages you ordinarily expect from such marriages," she answered. "She did not run about flirting with young men or spending my brother'smoney foolishly. On the other hand, she did not introduce any of that gayety and youth into his daily life, any of that humor and high spirits— She is a curious little person, good as gold, but not vital, not alive."
Williams went away wondering. Corpses don't blush like that, he thought. The wind had died down as the sun set; and now, with a red sky over the Palisades, the Riverside was not a bad place for a walk. He strolled southward, trying to remember, now that he had seen Doris Helen Southgate in the flesh, all that he had heard about her in the days when she was only a name—the folly of an otherwise shrewd client.
He thought he remembered that she was some relation to the clergyman of the Southgates' church—an orphan trying to support herself by one of those extremely ill-paid occupations which are considered ladylike. He thought she had come to the Southgate house to read to Antonia during a temporary affliction of the eyes. Before he had seen her he had thought of her as a serpent, insinuating herself into the household and then coiling herself so firmly that she could never be driven out; but now it seemed to him more as if a kitten had strayed into that great mausoleum and had been shut up there for life.
He remembered a frequent phrase of Southgate's, which he had never noticed much at the time: "Yes, I read it with great interest—at least my wife read it to me." He had been fond of being read aloud to, especially at night, when he couldn't sleep. Williams wondered whether Doris Helen had spent six years reading aloud—above the rustling of the avenue of palms atPasadena, above the rattle of the private car as they went back and forth and across the continent. Mercy, it was no wonder she wasn't much alive. And Southgate had never given her the trouble of signing a check, hadn't he? Well, that was one way to put it. No, of course, he said to himself, he did not want to see the little widow break loose—to hear that she was gambling at Monte Carlo or being robbed of her jewels at some café on the Left Bank; but he would have been glad to see her acting on the emotion that had turned her eyes so black that afternoon.
Although he went to the house several times again in the course of the next few days, he did not see Mrs. Southgate. She was always engaged with the correspondence which had resulted from her husband's death.
"She writes a very nice letter, if I give her a general idea of what ought to be said," Antonia had explained to Williams.
One afternoon about a month after Southgate's death, as Williams was leaving his office in Nassau Street, a card was brought to him. He did not know the name, and he sent word that he was just going home. If the gentleman could give him some idea—
Word came back that the gentleman was an old friend of Mrs. Southgate. Then Williams knew that he was holding in his hand the mate of the card that Doris Helen had pressed down upon her lap so tenderly that afternoon. The name was Dominic Hale.
Even Antonia could not have complained of lack of vitality in the young man who presently walked into Williams' private office. There was something vigorousabout the way he was built, the way he moved, the way his thick brown hair grew, like a close dark cap on his head. He spoke at once.
"I wanted to see you, Mr. Williams, as a friend of Mrs. Southgate's. You are a friend, aren't you?"
"Yes," said Williams, speaking as a man; and then added as a lawyer, "Though I must confess I have seen her only once in my life."
"My goodness!" said Hale, with a shake of his head, "I never knew of such a thing! I can't find that anyone has seen her more than once or twice in the course of the last five years. Wasn't she allowed friends?"
"Perhaps she did not want any."
Hale gave what in a tiger would have been a growl, but which in a man was merely a sound expressing complete disagreement.
"A girl of twenty-five—" he said; and added without pause, "Mr. Williams, I want to marry Mrs. Southgate."
The exclamation "Good!" which rose to Williams' lips was suppressed in favor of "I see." Then he went on, "And does she want to marry you?"
"She says not."
"But does not convince you of her sincerity?"
"Well, she said not in just the same tone seven years ago, when we became engaged."
"Oh, you and she were engaged before her marriage?"
"Yes, we called it that. We had no possible prospect of ever getting married. Then just before I went abroad to study—"
"And may I ask what it was you went abroad to study, Mr. Hale?"
The young man looked at him a moment in surprise before he answered, "Painting. I'm Dominic Hale."
Williams shook his head.
"Ought I to know?"
Hale laughed.
"You perfectly well might," he said. "Doris broke our engagement before I went. We did not part in a very friendly spirit."
"I see. She had already decided—"
"Oh, no! This was months before she went to the Southgates. She thought it was wrong for us to be tangled up with each other so hopelessly. It made me furious. She was so firm and clear about— She has a will of iron, that girl."
This last statement interested Williams almost more than anything Hale had said, for he suddenly appreciated the fact that he himself had had the same impression of the widow.
"Miss Southgate finds her almost too pliable and docile," he said.
"Then," answered Hale, "Miss Southgate has never tried to make her do something she did not want to. Oh, she's not petty—Doris! She'll drift quietly along with the stream, until something which makes a difference to her comes along, and then—"
He wagged his head, compressing his lips in thought.
"I don't see exactly how I can help you in the matter—if she thinks she does not want to marry you, and she has an iron will."
"I don't want help; I want advice," said Hale. "I think she cares about me, but how much? If she reallyloves me, losing the fortune makes no difference. But if she doesn't—if she's just fond of me as an old friend—can I urge her to give up a million for the fun of being poor with me?"
"Does it occur to you," asked Williams—"I don't want to say anything painful, but we must face facts—that she might love you a great deal and yet hesitate to give up the income from a million?"
"Of course it has occurred to me," answered Hale, "and if I thought it was true I'd kidnap her."
"Well, of course, you can't do that," said the lawyer; but his tone seemed to admit it wouldn't be a bad thing to do.
He was surprised after his visitor had left to find how sincerely he hoped that Hale would succeed in marrying the little widow. He owned that he himself would not give up a million for any romance in the world; but then he was a middle-aged man who had lived his life, not a pretty young woman who had spent five years of her youth almost as an upper servant.
She ought, he thought, to be unafraid of the adventure of poverty; though he was obliged to confess that there was an element of adventure, too, in spending a large income; an adventure which would appeal more strongly to most people. Only, he thought, there wouldn't be much joy in riches if one remained forever under the iron rule of Antonia.
Soon after this, that first day of spring arrived which always comes to deceive New Yorkers sometime in March; that day when the air is warm and the sky a pale even blue, and the north side of the street is dry and clearand the south side still runs in slush and rivulets. Then almost everyone does something foolish—from wearing thin clothes and letting the furnace go out to mistakes of a more devastating sort.
Williams, who was prudent by nature, did nothing worse than, in returning from arguing a case in Jersey City, to take the ferry instead of the tube. As he stood watching the boat for which he was waiting bumping its way into its slip, his attention was attracted by two people seated on the upper deck, with their elbows hooked over the rail and their bent heads close together, evidently at that delightful stage of intimacy when it is possible to talk—or rather whisper—simultaneously without either one losing a single word of what the other is saying. They showed no disposition to get off, no realization even that the boat had reached the shore, though the process of winding up the dock and letting down the drawbridges and opening the gates is not a quiet one. They were simply going to and fro on the river, for when the deck hand came to collect their fare it was obviously a repeated performance.
Williams had recognized Hale first, but the next second he had seen that the diminutive figure in black could be no other than Doris Helen. He did not disturb them, but from the window of the upper cabin he watched them—rather wistfully. Now and then they seemed to be saying something of the most serious importance, and, looking at each other in the middle of a sentence, they would forget to complete it. At other times they were evidently extremely frivolous, speaking with a manner common to those a little drunk and those deeply in love,a manner as if only they themselves could appreciate how deliciously ridiculous they were.
Williams was not much surprised the very next day to be called on the telephone by Miss Southgate, who wished to see him at once. She said she would come to his office, where they could talk without interruption.
She came. Her handsome alabaster mask was never allowed to express emotion, but she undulated her vast shoulders more than usual. A young man by the name of Hale—a painter—was coming every day to the house, and that morning Doris had admitted that he wanted to marry her.
"And my brother hardly a month in his grave!" said Miss Southgate, with all the concentrated bitterness of Hamlet's first soliloquy.
She was so deeply outraged by the idea that Williams did not dare point out to her that she would profit by the marriage. There was something noble about her utter indifference to this aspect of it, but there was something bitter and egotistical in her anger against her sister-in-law for daring to suggest the control of her own destiny. Williams remembered having seen Antonia show the same ruthless, pitiless bitterness toward a servant who had left her voluntarily. She regarded it as an insult from an inferior. Yet in her emotion there was also the wish to protect her brother's memory.
"It will make my brother ridiculous—an old man's widow," she said. "It was bad enough when he married her, but he and I together managed to keep the marriage on a dignified plane. No one could have found anythingto laugh at during his life; and now he is dead, after all his kindness and generosity to her, she shall not insult his memory."
"But has she any idea of doing it?" asked Williams. "There is a pretty heavy weight on the other side of the scale."
Miss Southgate clenched her hands.
"I don't know," she said, as if that were extraordinary enough. "I can't read her mind. She says not, and yet she sees him every day."
Williams shook his head.
"She won't do it," he said, and fortunately Miss Southgate did not catch the note of regret in his voice.
He promised to come and dine alone with the two women that evening. He found the little widow more alive than before, more prone to smile and talk, but no less docile in her attitude toward Antonia. There was nothing of the rebel about her, no hint that she was preparing to defy the lightning. And Williams admitted, as he saw the violence of Antonia's determination that the marriage should not take place, that a great deal of courage would be required. As he walked away from the house that evening he said to himself that if he were Hale he would kidnap her and take his chances of happiness.
A day or so later, a jubilant though black-bordered note from Miss Southgate announced that the decision had been made.
"Doris has promised me that she will not marry this man, or any other, without my consent. She is to seehim this afternoon at four. I should like you to be with me then, in case he makes a scene at his final dismissal."
Well, Williams said to himself, he was a lawyer; he had seen a good deal of life; he had always known that that was the way the thing would end. But how pitiful and how stupid! He thought of the ferryboat plying unnoticed from one bank of the Hudson to the other. Did Doris Helen suppose she would duplicate that afternoon for a million dollars?
He went punctually at four, and was ushered into the back drawing-room. The terrible room across the front of the house was already occupied by the parting lovers, where presumably the portrait of Alexander Southgate was dominating their farewells.
Antonia received him with a manner of calm triumph, unshadowed by the least doubt that her sister-in-law would keep her word. But after about an hour a silence fell upon her, and Williams became aware that she was listening with increasing eagerness for the sound of the opening of the front drawing-room door. At last she rose to her feet.
"This is unbearable," she said.
"An hour isn't so very long," he returned, "for two people who love each other to take an eternal good-by."
"It's over two hours," said Antonia. "And she had nothing to say to him but no."
A suspicion suddenly came to Williams that perhaps the other room was empty, that perhaps Hale had been driven to the alternative of carrying her off. He sprang to his feet.
"Just wait here," he said to Antonia.
The hallway between the two rooms was in shadow. As he stepped into it, the door of the front room opened and Doris and Hale came out of it together. They did not see Williams, for they both turned at once toward the staircase, Hale in order to descend it and Doris leaning on the balustrade, raising her shoulders and almost taking her feet off the ground. Their manner was not that of people who have parted forever.
"There isn't another woman in the world would make such a sacrifice for a fellow like me," Hale said. Williams could not see the smile she gave him, but it must have been potent. He took her in his arms, wrenched himself away, walked down about three steps, turned and walked up them again, kissed her a second time—a good satisfactory hug, and then exclaiming, "I can't bear to go," bounded down the stairs and was gone. The front door banged behind him, and Doris Helen lifted her hands from the balustrade. She hardly noticed Williams as he opened the door.
Antonia was still standing.
"Well, Doris," she said as the younger woman entered, and the tone of her voice was deep and bell-like.
Doris sat down on the edge of the sofa—she always sat on the edge of her chair so that her feet could touch the ground. Her hands, folded as usual in her lap, were perfectly quiet, yet something in the way her eyes darted from point to point made Williams feel that she was nervous.
"Well," he said briskly, "what did you decide?"
She looked at him wonderingly.
"I promised Antonia I would not marry without her consent. I shall keep my word, of course."
Her sister-in-law held out a hand to her, and with the other covered her eyes.
"Thank God!" she said.
Williams looked at the widow. Obviously she was deceiving either Hale or Antonia. That was no rejected lover who had just left the house. He speculated how the drama was going to unfold. There was no special purpose in deceiving Antonia. If there was to be a marriage, she would necessarily know it.
Perhaps Doris Helen was one of those people who couldn't say disagreeable things, but could write them.
Miss Southgate removed her hand from her eyes.
"And now," she said, "that nightmare is over, let us go back to Pasadena and begin our work editing my brother's memoirs."
Williams was aware of a certain bitter satisfaction in the thought that such a life was about all the little creature deserved, but the little creature was calmly shaking her head.
"No," she was saying gently; "no, I'm not going back to Pasadena, Antonia. I'm going to Spain."
Her sister-in-law stared at her.
"To Spain? But I don't want to go to Spain, Doris, and you can hardly go alone."
"I'm not going alone," answered Doris. "Mr. Hale is going with me."
Thirty years of training at the bar barely saved Williams from laughing aloud; the solution was so simple and so complete. The recollection flashed through hismind of the daughter of a friend of his, who when discovered in the act of smoking a cigar explained that she had promised her mother never to smoke a cigarette. He took himself in hand. The thing was serious and must be stopped. Evidently the word "sacrifice" had applied not to the loss of an income of fifty thousand dollars but to the resignation of the less tangible asset—reputation. Miss Southgate was already rolling out a magnificent invective. Doris Helen did not attempt to interrupt her. She sat still, with her eyes raised with interested surprise to Antonia's angry face. Only once she spoke.
She said quietly, "No, not as my lover, Antonia—as my secretary."
"And what difference does it make—what you call it?"
"Antonia!" Mrs. Southgate's tone protested. "It makes a great deal of difference what it is."
Her sister-in-law felt the reproach.
"I mean, no one will believe it, no one will care—the scandal will be the same."
Doris made gesture with her thin hands as if one couldn't go changing all one's plans for every shred of gossip that drifted across the horizon.
"One only cares what one's friends say," she explained, "and I haven't any friends—except you, Antonia."
"Are you utterly indifferent to the name of an honorable man who was your husband?"
"While my husband lived I tried to do my duty to him," said Doris firmly. "I gave my whole life to it, and my reward is that he tries to reach out of the grave and prevent my having the normal freedom that any woman of my age ought to have."
Williams had only to look into her set little face to see that it was hopeless to argue with her, but he had hopes of Hale. He had formed a favorable opinion of the young man and simply did not believe he was a party to any such plan.
"I should like to have a talk with Hale," he said.
"He's gone out of town," answered Doris. "He won't be back until a day or two before we sail."
Antonia gave a sound between a bleat and a whinny.
"You're sailing on the same steamer?"
"Of course—with my secretary."
She left the room.
In the course of the next few minutes Williams was surprised to discover the words included in the vocabulary of so majestic a woman as Antonia. There was nothing she did not call her sister-in-law, although she ended each sentence with an assertion that she wouldn't really do it.
"I wouldn't count on that," said Williams. "Most people are restrained by the opinion of their social group; but, as Mrs. Southgate says, she doesn't seem to have any group."
"Do you forget there is such a thing as a moral sense?" asked Antonia.
"If you had listened attentively," he replied, "you would have gathered as I did that there is nothing contrary to morals in this plan of your sister-in-law's—a lack of convention, yes."
"We will not allow it," said Antonia.
It was Williams' duty to point out that persuasion wasthe only method open to them. His sympathies were with the lovers, but he felt it his duty to mention to Miss Southgate his conviction that the best way to stop the whole thing was to send for Dominic Hale.
"This is not Hale's plan," he said. "I am sure he would not stand for it. If you send for him and have a talk you will find that he believes they are going to be married before they sail."
But Miss Southgate was too angry to listen to him. She tossed the suggestion aside with the utmost contempt.
"How can you be so innocent?" she exclaimed. "The whole plan is his. Doris would never have the imagination to think of such a thing. She has simply fallen into the hands of a designing man. She has no will of her own. You are utterly mistaken."
Well, perhaps he was; but he wanted to find Hale and have a talk with him; but as he could find no trace of the young man, he was obliged to content himself with an interview with Doris. He wanted to point out to her that she was ruining Hale irretrievably. It was the sort of thing a man could never live down. It would be said that he preferred to live on the dead husband's money rather than to make the widow his wife. He put it as badly as he could, but Doris was unshaken. She nodded her head.
"Yes, I know," she said. "No one will understand. He sacrifices his reputation too—not any more than I do, Mr. Williams, though perhaps not any less. We must learn to live without the world, but we can—we shall have each other."
Williams thumped his hand on his knee.
"I can't believe it of him," he said. "Such a disgusting rôle! So unmanly!"
Doris smiled at him sadly.
"Does it seem unmanly to you?" she said meditatively. "It seems to me it wouldn't be manly to say no to a woman who loves him and has been as unhappy as I have been."
Yes, Williams could see that point of view too. Hale might say to himself that a girl who had lived those years of self-abnegation had a right to his love and Southgate's money, if she wanted them both; that it wasn't his part to take a noble stand for which she must pay. There was a certain nobility in not caring what the world said of him.
And yet—
He tried one last argument.
"Well, then for yourself; can't you see that it's contemptible to cling so to a fortune? What's poverty, after all? You're young. Marry the young man."
She stared at him.
"But, Mr. Williams," she said, "that's exactly what I promised Antonia I wouldn't do."
"Break your promise."
She looked really shocked.
"What a funny thing for you to say—a lawyer!" She shook her head. "I never broke my word in all my life. Besides, Antonia says that Alexander particularly disliked the idea of my remarriage."
Williams thought this was too trifling.
"You can hardly suppose," he said stiffly, "that youwill be fulfilling the wishes of your husband by going to Spain with a man to whom you are not married."
She raised her shoulders as if beset by inconsistencies.
"What can I do?"
"You can give up the whole thing."
"Give up Dominic? No! I gave him up once because I thought it was better for him. I don't think I'd do it again, even for that—certainly not for anything else. I love him, Mr. Williams, and I'm of rather a persistent sort of nature."
Williams reported his failure to Antonia. He began to feel sorry for Antonia. Her age, her previous power and, above all, her mere bulk made it seem somehow humiliating that she could make no impression on this calm, steely chit of a girl. He was struck, too, by the depth and sincerity of her emotion.
"Don't care so much, my dear Miss Southgate," he said. "You've done your best to protect your brother's memory. Wash your hands of it all and go back to California. Forget there ever was such a person."
And then he saw what perhaps he had been stupid not to see before, that under all Miss Southgate's anger and family pride was a more creditable feeling—a love of Doris Helen, an almost maternal desire to protect her. As soon as Williams understood this—and he did not understand for some weeks—he advised compromise.
"Offer her half the income and let her marry the fellow."
Antonia's eyes flashed.
"Let myself be blackmailed?" she said. "You admit they are trying to blackmail me?"
"I admit they are in the stronger position," said Williams, as if in the experience of a lawyer it was pretty much the same thing.
"I shall not yield—for her own sake," answered Antonia.
In spite of the bitter issue between them the two women continued to live in the same house, and to discuss with interest and sometimes with affection all those endless daily details which two people who live in the same house must discuss. It was the preparations for the trip that finally drove Antonia to the wall: Doris' passport, her letter of credit from Southgate's bank, and the trunks all marked with the name of Southgate—"in red, with a bright-red band," Antonia explained to Williams, "so that no one can fail to notice them."
The final item was a dozen black-bordered pocket handkerchiefs. Williams, coming in late one afternoon, at the time when the shops are making their last delivery, found Antonia sobbing on the sofa and the little widow erect and pale, with the small, flat, square box open between them.
He looked questioningly at Doris, and she answered, pointing to the handkerchiefs, "It seems as if she did not want me to wear mourning. But I can hardly go into colors when Alexander has been dead such a short time."
Antonia sobbed out without raising her head, "Can she go careering about Europe in widow's mourning with that dreadful young man in bright colours?"
"Dominic's clothes are not bright," said Doris gently.
"They're not black like yours," returned Antonia.
The widow looked up at Williams.
"I don't think it's necessary for Dominic to wear black for my husband," she said, as one open to reason. "One puts one's footman in black, but not one's secretary."
At that terrible word "secretary" Antonia gave way.
"I can't let her do it!" she wailed. "In crape and he in colors—at hotels! Oh, Doris, it's horrible—what you're doing, but I must save you from utter ruin! I will make proper legal arrangements to give you half the income from the estate, and you can marry this—this person."
She covered her large statuesque face with her large white hands. Doris patted the heaving shoulder, but she did not leap at the offer. For an instant Williams thought she was going to bargain. She was, but not for money.
"Antonia, it's very kind of you," she said; "but I don't see how I could take your money—money which at least legally would have become yours—to do something that you hated."
"You can't expect me to approve of your marriage."
"If you don't, I won't do it," said Doris. "I'll just go—the way I said."
And on this she obstinately took her stand. Nor would she be content with Antonia's cry that she disapproved less of marriage than of this other horrible immoral plan.
"There was nothing immoral in my plan," answered Doris proudly, "and I cannot let you say so."
She insisted on being approved, and at length Antonia approved of her—or said she did. And so the paperswere drawn up and signed, and the arrangements for the wedding went forward, and at last Hale returned.
Williams had been waiting eagerly for this. He was more curious than he had ever been in his life. His whole estimate of his own judgment of men was at stake. Did Hale know, or didn't he? Five minutes alone with the young artist would tell him, but those five minutes were hard to get; Doris Helen was always there. Even when Williams made an appointment with Hale at his office, the young widow was with him.
They were married early one morning, and their vessel was to sail at noon. Then at last, while Doris was changing her clothes, Hale was left alone in the front drawing-room with Antonia and the lawyer. Antonia, who still clung to her belief that her sister-in-law was an innocent instrument in the hands of a wicked man, would not speak to Hale, but sat erect, with her eyes fixed on her brother's portrait. It was Hale who opened the conversation.
"Miss Southgate," he said, with his engaging energy, "I can understand you don't like me much for taking Doris away, but I do hope you'll let me tell you how nobly I think you have behaved."
Antonia stared at him as if in her emptied safe she had discovered a bread-and-butter letter from the burglar. Then without an articulated word she rose and swept out of the room. Hale sighed.
"I do wish she didn't hate me so," he said. "Doris tells me she says she approves of our marriage, but she doesn't behave as if she did."
"At least," said Williams, "she made it possible."
Hale took him up quickly.
"Not a bit of it. It was settled quite irrespective of her—that day when you saw me kiss Doris in the hall. It was all arranged then; only, of course, we thought we were going to be hard up. I shall never forget that, Mr. Williams—that Doris was willing to give up that enormous income for me."
"Was she?" said Williams. And as Hale nodded to himself he went on, "Why did you go away like that for a month?"
"Doris wanted me to," he answered. "She thought it was only fair to Miss Southgate. I felt perfectly safe. I had her promise, and she thought she might bring Miss Southgate round to approving of the marriage. I never thought she'd succeed; but, you see, she did. She's a very remarkable woman, is Doris."
"She is, indeed," said Williams cordially.
Presently she came downstairs—the very remarkable woman—hand in hand with Antonia, and she and Hale drove away to the steamer.
Williams found himself holding Antonia's large, heavy, white hand.
"I think you've been wonderful, Miss Southgate," he said.
She wiped her eyes.
"I did not want to make it impossible for her to come back," she said, "when she finds that man out."
The lawyer did not answer, for it was his opinion that if there was to be any finding out it would be done by Hale.
Aunt Georgy Hadley was rather unpopular with her own generation because she did not think the younger one so terrible. "I can't see," she insisted, "that they are so different from what we were." For an unmarried lady of forty to admit that she had ever had anything in common with the young people of the present day shocked her contemporaries.
Aunt Georgy was a pale, plain, brilliant-eyed woman, who liked to talk, to listen to other people talk, and to read. She simply hated to do anything else. As a girl she had always said that the dream of her life was to be bedridden; and so when, after she had ceased to be young, she had broken her hip so badly as to make walking difficult many people regarded it as a judgment from heaven. Georgy herself said it was a triumph of mind over matter; she was now freed from all active obligations, while it became the duty of her friends and relations to come and sit beside her sofa and tell her the news, of which, since she lived in a small town, there was always a great deal.
Her two sisters, married and mothers both, differed with her most violently about the younger generation. Her sister Fanny, who had produced three robust, handsome members of the gang under discussion, asked passionately, "Did we carry flasks to parties?"
"How silly it would have been if we had, when it was always there waiting for us," answered Georgy.
Her sister Evelyn, who had produced one perfect flower—little Evie—demanded, "Did we motor thirty miles at midnight to dance in disreputable road houses?"
"No," said Georgina, "because in our day we did not have motors; but we did pretty well with the environment at our disposal. I remember that Evelyn was once becalmed on the Sound all night in a catboat with a young man, and Fanny was caught just stepping off to a masked ball in the Garden, only—"
"I was not," said Fanny, as one who slams the door in the face of an unwelcome guest.
"Imagine Georgy's mind being just a sink for all those old scandals!" said Evelyn pleasantly, but without taking up the question of the truth or falsity of the facts stated.
Although Georgy was the youngest of the three Hadley sisters she, being unmarried, had inherited the red-brick house in Maple Street. It had a small grass plot in front—at least, it would have been a grass plot if the roots of the two maple trees which stood in it had not long ago come through the soil. There was, however, a nice old-fashioned garden at the back of the house; and the sitting room looked out on this. Here Aunt Georgy's sofa stood, beside the fire in winter and beside the window in summer. The room was rather crowded with books and light blue satin furniture, and steel engravings of Raphael Madonnas and the Death of Saint Jerome; and over the mantelpiece hung a portrait by Sully of Aunt Georgy's grandmother, looking, everyone said, exactly as little Evie looked today.
It was to the circle round the blue satin sofa thatpeople came, bearing news—from nieces and nephews fresh from some new atrocity, to the mayor of the town, worried over the gift of a too costly museum. Jefferson was the sort of town that bred news. In the first place, it was old—Washington had stopped there on his way to or from Philadelphia once—so it had magnificent old-fashioned ideals and traditions to be violated, as they constantly were. In the second place, it was near New York; most of the population commuted daily, thus keeping in close touch with all the more dangerous features of metropolitan life. And last, everyone had known everyone else since the cradle, and most of them were related to one another.
There was never any dearth of news, and everyone came to recount, not to consult. Aunt Georgy did not like to be consulted. One presented life to her as a narrative, not as a problem. There was no use in asking her for advice, because she simply would not give it.
"No," she would say, holding up a thin, rather bony hand, "I can't advise you. I lose all the wonderful surge and excitement of your story if I know I shall have to do something useful about it at the end. It's like reading a book for review—quite destroys my pleasure, my sense of drama."
That was exactly what she conveyed to those who talked to her—a sense of the drama, not of her life but of their own. The smallest incident—the sort that most of one's friends don't even hear when it is told to them—became so significant, so amusing when recounted to Aunt Georgy that you went on and on—and told her things.
Even her sisters, shocked as they constantly were by something they described as "Georgy's disloyalty to the way we were all brought up," told her everything. Step by step, the progress, or the decadence, by which the customs of one generation change into the customs of the next one was fought out by the three ladies,néeHadley, at the side of that blue satin sofa.
It began with cigarettes for girls and the new dances for both sexes. At that remote epoch none of the nieces and nephews were old enough either to smoke or dance; so, although the line of the battle had been the same—Fanny and Evelyn anti and Georgy pro—the battle itself had not been so bitter and personal as it afterward became.
The first time that Fanny's life was permanently blighted was when Norma, her eldest child, was called out and publicly rebuked in dancing school for shimmying. She wept—Fanny of course, not Norma, who didn't mind at all—and said that she could never hold up her head again. But she must have lifted it, for it was bowed every few months for many years subsequently. Aunt Georgy at once sent for her niece and insisted on having a private performance of the offensive dance, over which she laughed heartily. It looked to her, she said, so much like the old horse trying to shake off a horsefly.
The next time that the social fabric in Jefferson tottered and Fanny's head was again bowed was at the discovery that the younger set was not wearing corsets. Fanny tiptoed over and shut the sitting-room door before she breathed this bad news into her sister's ear.
"None of them," she said.
"But you wouldn't want the boys to, would you?" answered Georgy.
Fanny explained that she meant the girls didn't.
"Mercy!" exclaimed her sister. "We were all scolded because we did. Elderly gentlemen used to write embarrassing articles about how we were sacrificing the health of the next generation to our vanity, and how the Venus de Milo was the ideal feminine figure; and now these girls are just as much scolded—"
"The worst of it is," said Fanny, rolling her eyes and not listening, "that they take them off and leave them in the dressing room. They say that at the Brownes' the other evening there was a pile that high."
Still, in spite of her disapproval, Fanny's head was not so permanently bowed this time, because every mother in Jefferson was in the same situation. But craps struck Fanny a shrewder blow, because her child, Norma, was a conspicuous offender here, whereas little Evie, her sister's child, didn't care for craps. She said it wasn't amusing.
In order to decide the point Aunt Georgy asked Norma to teach her the game, and they were thus engaged when Mr. Gordon, the hollow-cheeked young clergyman, came to pay his first parochial visit. He said he wasn't at all shocked, and turned to Evie, who was sitting demurely behind the tea table eager to give him a cup of Aunt Georgy's excellent tea.
There was something a little mid-Victorian about Evie, and the only blot on Aunt Georgy's perfect liberalism was that in her heart she preferred her to the moremodern nieces. Evie parted her thick light-brown hair in the middle and had a little pointed chin, like a picture in an old annual or a flattered likeness of Queen Victoria as a girl. She was small and decidedly pretty, though not a beauty like her large, rollicking, black-haired cousin Norma.
Norma's love affairs—if they were love affairs, and whether they were or not was a topic often discussed about the blue satin sofa—were carried on with the utmost candor. Suddenly one day it would become evident that Norma was dancing, golfing, motoring with a new young man. Everybody would report to Aunt Gregory the number of hours a day that he and Norma spent together, and Aunt Gregory would say to Norma, "Are you in love with him, Norma?" and Norma would answer "Yes" or "No" or "I'm trying to find out."
"There's no mystery about this generation," Fanny would say.
"Why should there be?" Norma would say, and would stamp out again, and would be heard hailing the young man of the minute, "We're considered minus on romance, Bill"; and ten of them would get into a car intended for four and drive away, looking like a basketful of puppies.
But about little Evie's love affairs there was some mystery. Aunt Georgy did not know that Evie had ever spoken to the mayor—a middle-aged banker of great wealth—and yet one day when he came to tell Miss Hadley about the museum he told her instead about how Evie had refused to marry him, and how unhappy he was. The nice young clergyman, too, who preached so interestingly and pleased the parish in every detail, wasthinking of getting himself transferred to a city in California because the sight of an attentive but unattainable Evie in the front pew every Sunday almost broke his heart.
Aunt Georgy exonerated Evie from blame as far as the mayor was concerned, but she wasn't so sure about the Reverend Mr. Gordon.
"Evie," she said, "did you try to enmesh that nice-looking man of God?"
Evie shook her head.
"I don't get anywhere if I try, Aunt Georgy," she answered. "It has to come of itself or not at all. If Norma sees a man she fancies she swims out after him like a Newfoundland dog. But I have to sit on the shore until the tide washes something up at my feet. I don't always like what it washes up either."
The simile amused Aunt Georgy, but the more she reflected the more she doubted its accuracy. Those tides that washed things up—Evie had some mysterious control of them, whether she knew it or not. Evie's method and Norma's differed enormously in technic, but wasn't the elemental aggression about the same?
Life in Jefferson was never more interesting to Aunt Georgy than when psychoanalysis swept over them. Of course, they had all known about it, and read Freud, or articles about Freud; but the whole subject was revived and made personal by the arrival of Lisburn. Lisburn was not a doctor of medicine but of philosophy. He was an assistant professor of psychology in a New York college. He had written his dissertation on TheUnconscious as Portrayed in Poetic Images. With an astonishing erudition he brought all poetry from Homer to Edna St. Vincent Millay into line with the new psychology. Besides this, he was an exceedingly handsome young man—tall, dark, decided, and a trifle offhand and contemptuous in his manner. What girl could ask more? Norma did not ask a bit more. The moment she saw him she—in Evie's language—swam out after him. She met him at dinner one evening, and the next day her conversation was all about dreams and fixations and inhibitions. Mothers began to assemble rapidly about the blue satin sofa. Craps had been vulgar, the shimmy immoral, but this was the worst of all.
"Georgy," said Fanny solemnly, "they go and sit on that young man's piazza, and they talk about things—things which you and I did not know existed, and if we did know they existed we did not know words for them; and if we did know words for them we did not take the slightest interest in them."
"Then there can't be any harm in them," said Georgy, "because I'm sure when we were girls we took an interest in everything there was any harm in. But it sounds to me just like a new way of holding hands—like palmistry in our day. You remember when you took up palmistry, Evelyn. It made me so jealous to see you holding my young men's hands!"
"It's not at all the same thing," answered Evelyn. "There was nothing in palmistry that wasn't perfectly nice."
"Oh, yes, there was," said Georgy. "There was thatline, you know, round the base of the two middle fingers. We all felt a little shocked if we had it and a little disappointed if we hadn't."
But her sisters were too much worried to be amused. Their children, they said, were talking about things that could not be named. Fanny did name them, however, and was grimly glad to see that even Georgy, the liberal, reeled under the blow.
She recovered enough to say, "Well, after all, is it so different? We called people Puritans instead of saying that they had inhibitions. We didn't say a boy had a fixation on the mother, but we called him mother's little carpet knight. And as for dreams, Fanny, when a young man told me he had a dream about me I did not need a doctor of philosophy to tell me what that meant."
Even Fanny was obliged to confess that her younger son Robert had been cured of his incipient stammer after a few interviews with Lisburn. And the young Carters, who, after three months of marriage, were confiding to everyone their longing for divorce, had been reconciled. There was a dream in this—about a large white gardenia—and there was an incident connected with it—a girl in a florist's shop—
About this time the mayor, still worrying over the upkeep of the museum, wanted some sort of entertainment given in order to raise money. It was suggested that a lecture on psychoanalysis by Lisburn would be popular. Norma was delegated to go and ask him—make him, was the way the committee put it. Needless to say, she returned triumphant.
Aunt Georgy was among the first to arrive at the townhall on the evening the lecture took place. She had become curious about the young man and wanted a front seat. She limped up the aisle, leaning on her grandfather's heavy ivory-headed cane, with little Evie beside her. Norma was busy taking—one might almost say snatching—tickets at the door. It is a peculiar feature of modern life that so much time is spent first in getting lecturers to consent to lecture and then in drumming up an audience to hear them. But this time the audience was not difficult to get. They came in crowds.
The mayor opened the meeting. He was not a ready speaker, and the sight of Evie, sitting so attentive in the front row, embarrassed him hideously. He said a few panting words about the needs of the museum and turned the meeting over to the Reverend Mr. Gordon, who was going to introduce the speaker—who was going, in fact, to do a little bit more than that.
He advanced to the edge of the platform, looked down at Evie and smiled—after all, he wasn't in the pulpit—folded his hands as if lawn frills ought to have been dripping from them, and began:
"It is my great pleasure and privilege to introduce the speaker of the evening, although I myself am not at all in sympathy with the subject about which—which—about which he—"
Aunt Georgy had a second of agony. Could he avoid using the verb "to speak"? It seemed impossible; but she underrated his mental agility.
"—about which he is to make his interesting and instructive address." Mr. Gordon pulled down his waistcoat with a slight gesture of triumph. "The church," hecontinued, "has never been in very cordial sympathy with what I may be permitted, perhaps, to call these lay miracle workers."
Here he threw a smile over his shoulder to Lisburn—a smile intended to be friendly and reassuring; but as it had in it something acid and scornful, it only served to make his words more hostile. "The church endures," he went on, "and watches in each generation the rise and fall of a new science, a new philosophy, a new panacea, a new popular fad like this one."
Having done what he could to discredit the lecture, he gave the lecturer himself a flattering sentence: "A professor in one of our great universities, a new resident in this community, and my very good friend, Mr. Kenneth Lisburn."
The Reverend Mr. Gordon had been standing between Aunt Georgy and the speaker, so that she did not really get a good look at him until he stood up.
Then she said "Mercy!" in a hissing whisper in Evie's ear.
"Mercy what?" asked little Evie, rather coldly.
"So good-looking!" murmured Aunt Georgy.
Evie moved her shoulders about.
"Roughhewn," she whispered back.
Perhaps his features were a trifle rugged; but Aunt Georgy admired his hair—black as a crow under the bright though sometimes intermittent light of the Jefferson Light and Power Company. His eyes—black also—gleamed from deep sockets—"Like a rat's in a cave," Evie said. Lecturing was evidently nothing of an adventure to him. It did not embarrass him as it hadembarrassed the mayor; it did not stimulate him to an eloquence too suave and fluent as it did Mr. Gordon. It created not the least change in his personality. He stood on the platform as he swung in his chair in his college room, ready to say what he had to say as simply and as clearly as he could.
He wasn't so sure, he began, that his subject was popular. He found most people enjoyed the exploration of other people's unconscious, not of their own. In fact you could generally tell whether you were right in a diagnosis or not by the passion with which the victim contradicted you and the rapidity with which he invented explanations other than the true one. He was not, however, going to talk about psychoanalysis in general—rather too large a subject—with its relations to art and medicine. He was going to talk about the simple, commonplace actions of everyday life as clews to the unconscious—first, the so-called trivial ones. Nothing is really trivial. The tunes we whistle, the songs we sing, nine times out of ten have a wish-thought behind them. An amusing case of this had come to him the other day. A man had consulted him because he was being driven mad by a tune that ran in his head night and day. It was the Funeral March of a Marionette. Well, when it turned out that he was unhappily married and that his wife's name was Dolly it wasn't very hard to see whose funeral it was that he was mentally staging.
Aunt Georgy was perfectly delighted. She saw that psychoanalysis was going to make life in Jefferson infinitely more entertaining. The sphere of gossip was so remarkably extended. In old times one could only talkabout what had been done, said or written; but now what was dreamed, what was desired, and, best of all, what was entirely omitted could be made as interesting as a crime. She wriggled down into her chair with pleasure as he went on to take up the question of the types that people fell in love with. Of course, we have all noticed how people tend to fall in love again and again with the same type. The spoiled weak son is forever looking for a mother type to take care of him; the girl brought up under the domination of the father idea is attracted by nothing but protective older types of men.
Lisburn went on to describe such cases in greater detail so accurately that all through the audience married couples were nodding to one another and themselves. He described also a variant of this: How some people always abused the type that attracted them most; the virile man who is forever making fun of feminine weaknesses, the womanly woman always taking on about man's wickedness; they're afraid of the black magic they attack; they are trying to exorcise the spell—
As soon as the lecture was over, and while eager members of the audience were crowding to the platform to discuss with the speaker the cases of mysterious friends who had dreamed this and forgotten that, Aunt Georgy beckoned to Norma.
"Do," she said, "go and disentangle that interesting young man from his votaries, or whatever they are, and bring him down to be introduced to me."
"It was interesting, wasn't it?" said Norma, with an effort at detachment.
"I can never be sufficiently grateful," answered Aunt Georgy. "It is so satisfactory the way he lays the strictly virtuous open to attack—the sort of people we've wanted to catch in a scandal and never been able to."
Norma nodded.
"Oh, yes," she said, "Ken thinks people like that have a very foul unconscious."
Aunt Georgy gave a slight snort and asked Norma if she remembered the Bab Ballad about: