The automobiles started in a concentration of accelerated gasoline explosions, their headlights sweeping across the house and plunging into the farther night. Fanny gathered her wrap closely about her throat. “I'm cold,” she asserted; “it was so nice at home, with the children, and plans—I intend to take out that yellow rambler and try a climbing American beauty rose there. What a lovely dress of Anette's; it must be the one she's been talking about so much, that Miss Zillinger made; really good for Eastlake. What was that man's name who was in the navy, and did you notice his rank? The officers of the navy are a lot better looking than army men. And Mina Raff, after all did you find her interesting?”
“Quite. She struck me as very intelligent.” He had no wish to repeat the conversation about Cytherea. It was queer, that; the more he considered it the more significant it appeared to be. “Did it seem to you,” he asked, “that Peyton was very attentive?”
“I didn't have time to notice. Do you think it's true about her getting all that money? It looks almost wicked to me, with so many people needing just a little. But anybody could see that she thinks only of herself; I don't mean she isn't charitable, but in—in other ways.”
They were late, and the main floor was being emptied of a small crowd moving into the dining-room. There the long table of the club dinner reached from end wall to wall; and, with the scraping of chairs, a confusion of voices, the places were filled. Lee found himself between Bemis Fox, a younger girl familiar enough at the dances but whose presence had only just been recognized, and Mrs. Craddock, in Eastlake for the winter. Anette was across the board, and her lips formed the query, “The first dance?”
Lee Randon nodded; he was measurably fond of her; he usually enjoyed a party at which he found Anette. That she liked him was very evident; not desperately, but enough to dispose of most restraint; she repeated to Lee what stories, formal and informal, men told her, and she asked his advice about situations always intimate and interesting.
The flood of voices, sustained on cocktails, rose and fell, there were challenges down the length of the table and quickly exchanged confidences. Bemis, publicly ingenuous, laid a light eager hand on his arm, and Mrs. Craddock answered a question in a decided manner. The dinner, Lee saw, was wholly characteristic of the club and its members: they had all, practically, known each other for years, since childhood; meeting casually on the street, in the discharge of a common living, their greetings and conversation were based on mutual long familiarity and recognized facts; but here, at such dances, they put on, together with the appropriate dress, a totally other aspect.
An artificial and exotic air enveloped whatever they did and said—hardy perennials, Lee thought, in terms Fanny's rather than his, they were determined to transform themselves into the delicate and rare flowers of a conservatory. Women to whom giggling was an anomaly giggled persistently; others, the perfect forms of housewife and virtue, seemed intent on creating the opposite engaging impression; they were all seriously, desperately, addressed to a necessity of being as different from their actual useful fates as possible.
The men, with the exception of the very young and the perpetually young, were, Lee Randon knew, more annoyed than anything else; there was hardly one of them who, with opportunity, would not have avoided the dinner as a damned nuisance; scarcely a man would have put his stamp of approval on that kind of entertainment. It was the women who engineered it, the entire society of America, who had invented all the popular forms of pleasure; it was their show, for the magnifying of their charms and the spectacle of their gay satins and scented lace; and the men came, paid, with a good humor, a patience, not without its resemblance to imbecility. Women, Lee continued, constantly complained about living in a world made by men for men; but the truth of that was very limited: in the details, the details which, enormously multiplied, filled life, women were omnipotent. No man could withstand the steady friction, the inexhaustible wearing, of feminine prejudice; forever rolled in the resistless stream of women's ambition, their men became round and smooth and admirable, like pebbles. This, he saw, in Fanny's loving care, was happening to him: she had spun him into the center of a silken web—
“You are not very polite,” Mrs. Craddock said.
“Are you a mind-reader,” he replied, “or haven't I heard you?”
“It doesn't matter,” she explained, “but you were so far away.”
He told her something of what had been in his thoughts, and she rewarded him with a swift speculative interest. “I hadn't realized you were so critical about your guinea hen,” she acknowledged. “Well, if what you say is true, what can you do about it?”
“Nothing,” Lee returned non-committally; “I am comfortable.” This, he instantly decided, sounded unfair to Fanny, and he substituted happy. Mrs. Craddock obviously was not interested in the change. “I get as tired of this as you do,” she asserted abruptly; “it's like being on a merry-go-round someone else started and can't stop. You have no idea how we get to hate the tunes.”
“But you mustn't forget the chance of catching a gold ring,” he reminded her.
“It's brass,” Mrs. Craddock asserted.
The orchestra began in the other room and, though dinner was not over, there were breaks in the table, couples dancing beyond. Anette rose, and Lee Randon, taking her into his arms, swept out from the doorway. “What was she talking about?” Anette demanded. “You,” he replied experimentally. “I like her; experience has brought her some wisdom; and she knows men, too.”
“God knows she ought to,” Anette's face was close to his, and he caught the flash of malice in her eyes. Conscious of the flavor of an acceptable flattery he didn't let this disturb him. “What a marvelous dance,” she proceeded; “there must be twenty men over. But I like it better when the porch isn't inclosed, and you can sit on the bunkers.”
How was it that she contrived to make nearly everything she said stir his imagination? Anette had the art of investing the most trivial comments with a suggestion of license. It was a stimulating quality, but dangerous for her—she was past thirty with no sign of marriage on the horizon. He wondered if she really had thrown her slipper over the hedge? It wasn't important, Lee decided, if she had. How ludicrous it was to judge all women, weigh their character, by the single standard of chastity. But this much must be admitted, when that convention of morality was broken it had no more significance than the fragments of a coconut shell. The dance came to an end and they returned to their vanilla mousse, coffee and cigarettes.
Some of the men were leaning over the table, drunk and noisy; a woman's laugh was shrill, senseless. Senseless! That, for Lee Randon, described the whole proceeding. He had looked forward to the dance with a happy anticipation, and, now that it was here, even before he had come, he was out of key with it. The efforts of the people about him to forget themselves were stiff and unconvincing; their attitudes were no more than masks held before their faces; there wasn't a genuine daring emotion, the courage of an admitted thrill, to be found. And then, as if to mock his understanding, he saw Peyton Morris with such a desperately white face bent over Mina Raff that he had an impulse to reprove him for his shameless exposure.
Instead, he cut in on their dancing and carried her to the other end of the floor. “I don't know why you did that,” she complained; “you don't like me. But you can dance, and with Peyton it's a little like rushing down a football field. There! Shall we drop the encore and go outside? My wrap is on a chair in the corner.”
“I don't go to parties,” she explained; “I am only here on Anette's account. That was Oscar Hammerstein's idea—he wouldn't let his actresses even ride in a public car; he said that mystery was a part of their value, and that people wouldn't pay to see them if they were always on the streets. Beside, I am tired all the time; you can't possibly know how hard I work; a hundred times harder than you, for instance.”
“I've been told that about moving pictures.”
“The glare of the silver-foil reflectors is unbearable,” she looked up, with a pointed and famous effect. “But you don't like me?”
“I do; aside from that, though, I'm not sure; probably because you are so remote and cold.”
“Thank God!” she replied. “You haven't stopped to think where I'd be if I weren't. And yet, no one, in their work, is supposed to be more emotional. It's funny, and I don't pretend to understand. The trouble with me is that I have no life of my own: ever since I was sixteen I've done what directors told me, for the public; it is time I had some private feelings.”
“It must be a nuisance,” he agreed.
Another dance began, but neither of them stirred; from where Lee sat the long doors were panels of shifting colors and movement. The music beat, fluctuated, in erratic bars. A deep unhappiness possessed him, an appalling loneliness that sometimes descended on him in crowds. Even Fanny, the thought of his children, could not banish it. Above the drum he thought he could hear the sibilant dissatisfaction of the throng striving for an eternity of youth. The glass about the porch, blotted with night, was icy cold, but it was hot within; the steam pipes were heated to their full capacity, and the women's painted and powdered faces were streaked—their assumption of vitality and color was running from them.
“Hideous,” Mina Raff said with a small grimace. She had the strange ability of catching his unexpressed thoughts and putting them into words. “Women,” she went on, “spend all their money and half their lives trying to look well, and you'd suppose they would learn something, but they don't.”
“What do women dress for?” he demanded; “is it to make themselves seductive to men or to have other women admire and envy them?”
“Both,” she answered, “but mostly it's a sort of competition with men for the prize. I'll tell you something about us if you like—we are not made of sugar and spice and other pleasant bits, but only of two: prostitute and mother. Not, of course, separately, or in equal parts; some of us have more of one, others more of the other. That girl across the table from you is all prostitute, the married woman you were talking to is both, quite evenly divided; your wife is a mother, even with her remarkable eyes.” She stopped his obvious inquiry:
“I am an artist, and no one has yet discovered what that is. Do you remember the straw you used to get with a glass of soda water? You see, often I think I'm like that, a thing for bright colors to pour through. It's very discouraging. There is Peyton, and he'll want to dance.” She rose, slipping out of her cloak.
Lee Randon saw Fanny not far away, and he dropped into a chair beside her. “Well,” he asked, “how is it going?”
“It seems all right,” she told him, with one of her engaging smiles. “I was surprised that you talked so long to Mina Raff; I had the idea you didn't like her.” Women, he reflected, were uncanny. “Three women are just plastered up in the dressing-room,” she continued; “Sophie Tane ruined her dress completely, and Crystal Willard has been sobbing for an hour. Lee, there are horrid bruises on her arm—do you think he is brutal?”
He told her not to bother about the Willards, and then rose to get a chair for Claire Morris. “Peyton is simply fascinated,” Claire asserted lightly. “This Mina ought to have something handsome for giving him such a splendid time. She is a lovely wench, Lee.”
“You have it over her like a tent, Claire,” he insisted; “you're lovely and human both.”
“Thank you, darling; I'm human, fast enough, now that the drink is dying. I believe for the first time in my life I am ready to leave a dance before the last flourish of the music. Fanny, we are getting older; it's hideous but so. We're getting on, but our young men are gayer every day.”
Fanny Randon's smile, her expression, were secure.
This made Lee restive, and, patting her hand, he left to dance with Alice Lucian. “When this is over,” she informed him, “we'll get Anette and George, and go out to my car. There is a Thermos bottle of cocktails hidden under the seat.” The girl who had sat at Lee's right was dancing with a tall fair-haired boy in a corner. Entirely oblivious of the rest of the room, they were advancing two matched steps and then retreating, their eyes tightly shut and cheeks together. A man fell in the middle of the floor, catching his partner's skirt and tearing it from the waistband. Everywhere the mad effort at escape!
Lee Randon lost his impression of the triviality of the occasion: they all seemed desperately searching for that something he had lost and which was overwhelmingly important to him; and all the while the music stuttered and mocked and confused a tragic need. Or it was like a momentary release from deadly confinement, a respite that, by its rare intoxication, drove the participants into forms of incredulous cramped abandon. Positively, he thought, they were grasping at light, at color, at the commonplace sounds of a few instruments, as though they were incalculable treasures. Alice, when she danced, held her head back with eyes half closed; and suddenly, with her mouth a little parted, she, too, had a look of Cytherea, a flash of the withheld beauty which filled him with restlessness.
It startled him, and, sub-consciously, his arm tightened about her. She responded immediately, with an accelerated breath, and the resemblance was gone. Greatly to his relief, a man cut in on them, and once more he found himself dancing with Anette. She asked him, in a murmurous warmth, if he liked her, at all. And, with a new and surprising, a distasteful, sense of lying, he replied that he did, tremendously. No, a feeling in him, automatic and strange, responded—not Anette! He wanted to leave her, to leave everyone here, and go. For what? At the same time he realized that he would stay, and go out, drink, in the Lucians' car. He had a haunting impression, familiar to him in the past weeks, that he was betraying an essential quality of his being.
Yet along with this his other consciousness, his interest in Anette, lingered; it existed in him tangibly, a thing of the flesh, not to be denied. She was all prostitute, Mina Raff had said, using the word in a general sense rather than particularly, without an obvious condemning morality. Indeed, it might easily be converted into a term of praise, for what, necessarily, it described was the incentive that forever drove men out to difficult accomplishment, to anything rather than ease. Good or bad, bad or good—which, such magic or maternity, was which?
“What are you thinking about?”
“It would take years to tell you.”
“I wish ... you might; but I didn't mean to say that, to let you know—”
“You didn't let me know anything,” he broke into her period impatiently. “If we get on together isn't that enough? It's really not necessary to hide ourselves behind a lot of pretentious words. And what we feel tonight hasn't a thing to do with tomorrow; probably then we'll be entirely different; how can it matter?”
“It does, though, because you might hate me tomorrow for being myself tonight. What you think of me has to be big enough to guard against that. You hurt me, Lee, very much, talking in that way.”
Alice Lucian, with George Willard, passed them and nodded significantly toward the entrance. “You will need a cloak,” Lee told Anette; “it's blowing colder and colder.” She vanished up the stairs, to the dressing-rooms, while Lee stood waiting with Willard. He didn't especially like the latter, a man with an exuberant loud friendliness, a good nature, that served as a cover for a facilely predatory sensuality.
He was continually taking hold of feminine arms, bending close over dinner dresses; and he used—with a show of humorous frankness—his long knowledge of the girls of Eastlake as a reason for kissing them on every possible occasion.
Anette and Alice appeared, with their wraps turned to exhibit the silk linings, bright like their dresses; and, at a favorable moment, they slipped out into the malice of the wind beating on them from the darkness. Anette was pressed tightly against Lee, Alice and George Willard were vaguely ahead; and, after a short breathless distance, they were in the protection of the shed. The Lucians' automobile had an elaborate enclosed body: shutting the doors they were completely comfortable, unobserved and warm. “No,” Alice directed, “don't put on the light; I can find it. There! We'll have to use the cap for a glass.” The aluminum top of the bottle was filled and refilled; the frigid gin and orange juice brought Lee Randon a glow of careless well-being, irresponsibility.
The others had gone to the front seat, where they were squeezed into a remarkably small space. Anette sat leaning forward, her chin propped in her left hand and the right lightly resting on Lee's knee. A loose board in the shed kept up an exasperating clatter. A match flared and Willard lighted a cigarette. It was curious about Alice—only in the last year, and for no reason Lee could discover, had she done things such as this. Perhaps, with no children, and the money Warner had accumulated comparatively lately, she hadn't enough to do. Of course, Warner, a splendid individual, could not be called entertaining; he was totally absorbed in his business, often away at the wood-pulp mill, in the Laurentian Mountains, in which he had a large interest.
Warner Lucian had nearly all the principal virtues—integrity, generosity, courage, and he was as single in mind as Willard was dubious; but, in spite of so much, it was clear that he had begun to weary Alice. She was publicly indifferent to him, careless of his wishes; she had even complained to Lee about her husband's good conduct, explaining that if he would only have what she termed an affair he would be more human.
“I am still very cross at you.” Anette spoke out of a gloom in which her face was barely distinguishable. “You took all the niceness out of our friendship and made it seem horrid; just as though you had pulled off my clothes; I—I haven't the same feeling about you.”
His effort at honesty, at discovering the mystery of profound disturbing needs, had been vain. Gathering Anette in his arms Lee kissed her. She rested there for a moment; then, with her hands against his chest, pushed him away. “I can't, now,” she told him; “somehow it's all spoiled. It seemed as though you were studying me disapprovingly. I'm not just bad, you know.”
“I don't think you are bad at all,” he replied irritably; “you brought that into it. Why, in the name of heaven, should I?”
“Fanny doesn't like me,” she said at a tangent.
“Who put that in your head?”
“Fanny. She's hardly civil.”
“If you mean she's jealous, she isn't.”
“You hardly need to add that. Of course, I realize Fanny Randon couldn't be jealous of me. Good Lord, no! Why should she be? No one would give me a thought.”
Anette, wholly irrational, was furious. Damn women, anyway! It was impossible to get along with them, since they hadn't a grain of reason. He was superior to her temper, indifferent to it, because he was indifferent to her. Suddenly the charm she had had for him was gone, the seductiveness dissolved, leaving only Anette, a fairly good-looking girl he had known for a great while. His warm response to her was dead; whatever she had aroused and satisfied, or left in suspense, no longer contented him. The memory of his interest in her, the thought he had expended, was now a cause of surprise, incomprehensible. Lee wanted to return to the club house and Fanny.
There was an obscure indication of Alice's hands raised in the rearrangement of her hair. George Willard half turned, facing the rear of the car. “I can't see much,” he said, “but it is evident that you two have been fighting. Why don't you live in peace and happiness? The trouble's all with Lee, too, you don't have to tell me that, Anette; he is too cursed cantankerous; and it would serve him right if you'd come up here with us.”
Anette opened the door and an icy draft swept about their knees. “Not yet,” Willard begged; “we won't be missed.”
“You may stay as long as you want,” Anette replied, “but I am going back.” Positively her voice bore a trace of tears. What, what was it all about? It was Alice who decided that they should return together: “The bottle's empty, my hair net is fixed for the third time, and we had better. You get out, George, please. No, I told you.”
Lee Randon welcomed the solid rushing of the wind; it swept in full blast across the open of the golf course and made walking precarious. Anette was lost, forgotten. If the chill air could only take the fever, the desire, out of his mind and blood! He wished that he might be absorbed into the night, the storm, become one with its anonymous force, one with the trees he heard laboring on their trunks. Instead of the safety of being a part of nature he felt that, without directions, he had been arbitrarily set down on earth, left to wander blindly with no knowledge of his destination or its means of accomplishment.
Fragments of a dance measure were audible, and he returned to the pounding music, the heat, the perceptibly chlorinated perfumes and determined activity. He went at once in search of his wife; she had apparently not moved from the chair in which he had left her. Meeting her slightly frowning, questioning expression he told her simply, without premeditation or reserve, that he had been out in an automobile. Fanny was obviously not prepared for his candor, and she studied him with the question held on her lifted face. Then banishing that she proceeded to scold him:
“You know how I hate you to do such things, and it seems precisely as though my wish were nothing. It isn't because I am afraid of how you'll act, Lee; but I will not let you make a fool of yourself. And that, exactly, is what happens. I don't want women like Anette to have anything on you, or to think you'll come whenever they call you. I can't make out what it is in your character that's so—so weak. There simply isn't any other name for it. I don't doubt you, Lee,” she repeated, in a different, fuller voice, “I know you love me; and I am just as certain you have never lied to me. I'm sure you haven't, in spite of what the girls say about men.”
He was cut by an unbearably sharp, a knife-like, regret that he had ever, with Fanny, departed from the utmost truth. Lee Randon had a sudden vision, born of that feeling returning from the shed, of the illimitable tranquility, the release from all triviality, of an honesty beyond equivocation or assault. Fanny, in her way, possessed it; but that, he saw, was made vulnerable, open to disaster, through her love for him. It was necessary, for complete safety, to be entirely insulated from the humanity of emotions. That condition he instinctively put from his thoughts as being as undesirable as it was beyond realization. Lee, with all his vitality, drew away from a conception, a figure, with the cold immobility of death. After all, he reassured himself, he had never essentially lied to Fanny; he had merely suppressed some unnecessary details in order to make their existence smoother. The welcome collapse of his small affair with Anette proved the wisdom of avoiding the exaggeration and difficulty of explanations.
“Lee,” Fanny said, changing the direction of their thoughts, “I don't want to bother you, but I am uneasy about Claire and Peyton. He hasn't left Mina Raff a minute this evening. And he has such an unhappy expression, not at all as though he were enjoying himself.”
“I noticed that,” Lee agreed; “but it will do him no good with Mina—she's a cold potato, career's the only thing in her head.” Then he remembered what Mina Raff had told him about her individuality, her personal desire; and he repeated it to his wife.
“I don't think Claire is entirely wise,” she went on; “but you can't tell her a thing. She listens as sweetly as possible and then says that she won't interfere with Peyton. Well, someone else will. Claire has too much reserve, she is too well-bred and quietly superior. You wait and see if I am not right; life is very vulgar, and it will take advantage of her.”
“I wonder if you are? Well, as you say, we shall see. If Mina Raff fixes her mind on him there will be a lot to watch.”
“You must speak to him.”
“Now there,” Lee expostulated, “you make me sick. How—will you tell me—can I speak to Peyton until he first says something? And when that happens, as easily as not it may be a cable from Peru. You want to interfere too much, Fanny, and insist that everybody follow your idea of right.”
She retired into a silence of wisdom that merely looked down on him. Her face was troubled, her lips tightly compressed. “What time is it?” she asked sharply; “the ribbon of my watch is worn out. Oh, we can go home with decency. It makes me rather sick here.”
He went below, for his hat and coat, and found the room beyond the lockers, built as an informal café before the era of prohibition, occupied by a number of men transferring the balance of fulness from a row of bottles to themselves.
He accepted a drink, more for the purpose of considering Peyton Morris, moodily abstracted by the table, than for itself. It seemed to Lee that the young man had actually aged since the cocktail party at his house, earlier in the evening. Peyton's mouth was hard and sullen; his brow was corrugated. “We're going home,” Lee told him; “and it seemed to me that an hour ago Claire was tired.”
“She didn't tell me,” Peyton responded punctiliously; “and certainly if she's low we'll go too.” He rose promptly, and, with his outer garb, accompanied Lee Randon. His step was uncertain, and Lee put a hand under his elbow. “Liquored?” he asked casually.
“Not in my brain,” Peyton Morris returned: “it seems like I could never get drunk again; but my dam' feet are all over the place. Thanks for hanging on to me: I have an idea you are going to drop me pretty quickly.”
“I don't want to question you,” Randon said, “or in any way force a confidence, but, Peyton, in addition to the relationship, I am exceptionally fond of Claire; and, since helping you is practically the same thing as helping her—”
“I wish to Christ I had been sunk in the North Sea,” Morris broke in bitterly.
They were up the stairs and standing on the emptied floor of an intermission. Fanny, prepared to leave, was gazing about for him. “You've been an age,” she cried to Lee; “and, Peyton, Claire is at last looking for you; although she'd kill me for saying it. You had better go outside a minute, first, and clear your head.”
He came very near to her, slightly swaying. “Fanny, you are a darling, but you are hard; you are hard as the Commandments.”
“That is not very kind, Peyton,” she protested; “but I have some common sense.”
“Haven't you any uncommon sense?” he begged. “That's what I want. A little just now might save everything.”
“You must try to find out,” she informed him; “I think I have been successful with Lee; anyhow he ought to say so.”
“I do,” Lee Randon asserted quickly. “Fanny is wonderful. If I'm of no use go to her.”
“You don't know,” Peyton muttered; “you can have no idea.”
“What in the world was he talking about?” she asked Lee in the automobile.
“Peyton is in love with Mina Raff,” he admitted shortly, in a pressure of conflicting emotions.
“Lee!” she exclaimed; “are you sure? Did he say so? That is simply frightful.”
“I imagine it's worse than you realize.”
“Do you mean—”
“Nothing actual yet,” he interrupted her impatiently; “perhaps nothing you would bother about. But you'd be wrong. It's all in his thoughts—some damned spoiled ideal, and as dangerous as possible.”
“Poor Claire,” she said.
“Of course, that's the thing to say,” he agreed. “The man is always a criminal in such situations.”
“You are not trying to defend him?” she asked quietly.
“Maybe I am; I don't know. After all, we are jumping at conclusions; Peyton was drunk. But, for heaven's sake, if either of them comes to you don't just be moral. Try to understand what may have happened. If you lecture them they will leave you like a shot.”
Fanny was driving, and she moved one hand from the wheel to his cheek. “It isn't us, anyhow, Lee; and that is really all I care for. We are closer than others, different. I don't know what I'd do if you should die first—I couldn't move, I couldn't go on.”
“You would have the children,” he reminded her.
“They are nothing compared with you.” It was the only time she had made such an admission, and it moved him profoundly. It at once surcharged him with gratitude and an obscure disturbance.
“You mustn't pin so much to me,” he protested; “you ought to think of a hundred other things.”
“I would if I could; I often try, but it is impossible. It is terrible to care for a man the way I do for you; and that's why I am so glad you are what you are: silly at times, ridiculously impressionable, but not at all like George Willard, or Peyton Morris.”
He had an overwhelming impulse to explain himself in the most searching unsparing detail to Fanny, the strange conviction that in doing it he would anticipate, perhaps escape, grave trouble. Lee Randon realized, however, that he would have to begin with the doll, Cytherea; and the difficulty, the preposterousness, of trying to make that clear to his wife, discouraged and kept him silent. No woman, and least of any the one to whom he was married, could be trusted to understand his feeling, his dissatisfaction in satisfaction, the restlessness at the heart of his peace.
Fanny went up at once, but he lingered, with a cigar, in the living room. A clock struck one. A photograph of Claire with her bridesmaids, Peyton and his ushers, on a lawn, in the wide flowered hats of summer and identical boutonnières, stood on a table against the wall; and beyond was an early girlish picture of Fanny, in clothes already absurdly out of mode. She had a pure hovering smile; the aspect of innocence time had been powerless to change was accentuated; and her hands managed to convey an impression of appeal. He had been, in the phrase now current, crazy about her; he was still, he told himself strictly. Well, he was ... yet he had kissed Anette; not for the first time, either; but, he recognized, for the last. He was free of that! A space, a phase, of his life was definitely behind him. A pervading regret mingled with the relief of his escape from what he had finally seen as a petty sensuality. The little might, in the sequence, be safer, better, than the great. But he vigorously cast off that ignominious idea. A sense of curious pause, stillness, enveloped Lee and surprised him, startled him really, into sitting forward and attentive. The wind had dropped, vanished into the night and sky: the silence without was as utter as though Lee Randon were at the center of a vacuum.
On Saturday morning Lee telephoned to his office, found nothing that required his immediate attention there and, the brief-case again in evidence, stayed at Eastlake. Fanny, too, with her hair severely plain and an air of practical accomplishment, was occupied with her day book. She kept this faithfully; but Lee couldn't decide whether the obvious labor or her pleasure in the accomplishment were uppermost. She addressed the day book with a frowning concentration, supplementary additions and subtractions on stray fragments of paper, which at times brought him with an offer of assistance to her shoulder. But this she resolutely declined—she must, she insisted, maintain her obligation along with his. However, Fanny, like all other women, he thought, was entirely ignorant of the principle of which money was no more than a symbol: she saw it not as an obligation, or implied power, but as an actuality, pouring from a central inexhaustible place of bright ringing gold and crisp currency.
However, Fanny had always been accustomed to the ease of its possession, familiar with it; and that had stamped her with its superiority of finish. How necessary, he continued, money was to women; or, rather, to the women who engaged his imagination; and women were usually the first consideration, the jewelled rewards, of wealth. As he visualized, dwelt on, them, their magnetic grace of feeling and body was uppermost: sturdy utilitarian women in the kitchen, red-faced maids dusting his stairs, heavily breasted nurses, mothers, wives at their petty accounts—he ended abruptly a mental period escaping from the bounds of propriety. What he meant, all that he meant, was that beauty should be the main consideration. Lee applied himself to far different values; and, before he had finished, lunch was ready.
“I have been thinking half the morning about Claire and Peyton,” Fanny told him; “I do feel that we exaggerated the situation last night; it all seemed more immediate, bigger, than it will turn out. Heavens, as you said, they can't do anything, nothing can happen.”
He was still inclined to believe that. “There is a tremendous lot of talk and no result; yes—no one really does a thing. They want to, and that's all it comes to.”
Fanny cast a glance of repressed attention at him across a lower center-piece. “If you could be whatever you wanted, what and where, what would you choose?” she asked.
“Here, with you and the children,” his voice replied without hesitation. The youth of her expression was happily stained by a flush. He meant it, Lee told himself sharply. But about Peyton—
“Of course, he was drunk last night, and he said nothing conclusive; he was only wretchedly unhappy—wished he had been killed in the war and all the romantic rest.”
“It is too much for me,” Fanny decided generally; “but I am glad that I was young when I was; being alive was quite simple then. I am comparatively young, Lee, 'way under forty—well, two years—but you can't realize how things have changed in such a short while. The women we knew didn't even smoke then. Wasn't it only five or six years ago they were first allowed to in nice cafés? And, not simply that, men didn't, either, when they were with us. We used to go to Cape May; they called the dances hops; and do you, oh, do you, remember the bathing suits?”
“I am not so certain about any great change,” he objected. “I seem to recall—”
“Horrid people will always be horrid!” she exclaimed. “I knew one or two very fast girls; but they were different about it from now, it was only whispered around and condemned, and it's shouted out today. I wish I had known you sooner; I would have done a lot better than your mother. I'd like to have had you, Lee, as a little boy; but I suppose you're enough that yet.”
His opposition to Fanny's maternal manner, directed at him, was stronger than customary; she seemed to accept in herself every responsibility for him; as though, whenever his actions were unfortunate, it had been due to her imperfect control. With practically no experience of life, guarded from its threatening aspects, her attitude was that, not without patience, she brought him with relative safety through a maze in which otherwise he'd be lost. This was evident now in what he felt to be the complacency of her voice and expression; and a perverse impulse grew in him to combat and shatter her blind satisfaction. Lee subdued this, in the merest decency; but the effort left him thoroughly irritated. He found, finally, an outlet for his annoyance in the restlessness of Helena; and he ordered her from the table.
This show of paternal discipline Fanny met with lowered eyes and a silence that endured until Gregory had walked sedately from the room; then she reminded Lee that he must never, absolutely never, correct his children when he was in an ill temper.
“That's nonsense,” he returned shortly; “you ought to see that because it's impossible. Even theoretically I don't agree with you—a child can understand a punishment in which there is some warmth. You are dealing with a little animal and not a reasonable being.” To this Fanny replied that her children were not animals.
“Really, Fanny, you don't know what you are talking about,” he asserted; “we are all, men and women and children and giraffes, animals. You might look that up in the dictionary.”
“I haven't any need to,” she observed, with a calmness that further tried him. “If the dictionary says that it isn't a very good one. And if you are trying to tell me that Helena and Gregory are no better than giraffes you're sillier than usual.”
“That isn't in the least what I said,” Lee retorted, with widely separated words. “I wasn't speaking of the comparative but of the absolute. It is a fact that we are animals, more responsible and with greater powers than the others, but animals, animals.”
“Then what is an animal?” Fanny demanded.
“A mammal.”
A marked expression of distaste invaded her. “It has a nasty sound,” she admitted with her instinctive recoiling from life. “I don't see how we got on this subject anyhow, it's too much like sex. It seems you are able to discuss nothing else.”
“It is only nasty in your mind,” he declared.
“That's exactly like you, you all over, to blame things on me. It's convenient, I must say, but not fair nor true: it was you who got in a wicked temper and sent Helena, who was feeling miserable, away.”
“You always say the children are sick when they misbehave.”
“I wish I could be as sure of you as I was of that,” she answered quickly; “for instance, when you go out in automobiles at the dances with women.”
“Now, we are beginning,” he told her with emphasis; “we never had an argument that didn't degenerate into this; and I'm sick of it.”
“I thought I was the one who was sick of it,” Fanny complained; “I wonder that I don't just let you go.”
“I wish you would,” he said, rising; “I give you my word, I'd rather be damned comfortably than have this endless trouble.” In a position of unassailable quiet behind his papers he told himself that the scene with Fanny had been particularly vain because, underneath, he agreed with her opinion about the casual expression of small emotions; he no longer wanted it any more than she did. Yes, at last they were one there. And yet he felt further from her even than before—whatever his marriage hadn't satisfied, that he had stilled in minor ways, was now without check. The truth was that it had increased, become more serious, insistent.
The tangible facts, the letters and memoranda, before him, retreated and came back to his consciousness. Tobacco worms had been boring through his cigars, and destroyed a third of the box. Helena passed, affecting a grievance out of any proportion to its cause in him. Outside, the country was flooded with a deceptive golden radiance; and he remembered, suddenly, that Alice Lucian had told him to bring Fanny to the Club and a tea that afternoon, which she was giving for Mina Raff. He repeated this to his wife, in a conciliatory regret at his forgetfulness; and she replied that if he cared to go she would come over later for him in the car. Lee, standing at a window, thought he wouldn't; but, adding that Peyton would be there, he decided that, in view of the possible developments, his presence might be wise.
The early gloom gathered familiarly in the long main room of the clubhouse; the fire cast out fanwise and undependable flickering light upon the relaxed figures; it shone on tea cups, sparkled in rich translucent preserves, and glimmered through a glass sugar bowl. It was all, practically, Lee Randon reflected, as it had been before and would be again. How few things, out of a worldful, the ordinary individual saw, saw—that was—to comprehend, to experience: a limited number of interiors, certain roads and streets, fields and views. He made his way through life blinded to the customary and unaware of the strange; summer was hot and winter, usually, cold; the spring became green under rain; winds blew and the leaves fell in fall—of how much more was he conscious?
It was the same with regard to people; he, Lee Randon, knew a great many, or rather, he could repeat their names, recognize their superficial features at sight. But to say that he actually knew them—that was nonsense! Why, he was almost totally ignorant of himself. How much could he explain of Fanny's late state of mind? She had done all that was possible to make it clear to him; with little result. Fanny was an extraordinarily honest person; or, damn it, she seemed to be. He had a reputation for truthfulness; but how much of what was in his mind would he admit to his wife? The discrepancy between what he appeared and what he felt himself to be, what he thought and what published, was enormous, astounding.
There, as well, was Peyton Morris; Lee would have sworn that he understood him thoroughly—a character as simple, as obvious as Fanny's. But here was Morris seated with Mina Raff on the stairs to the upper floor, beyond the radius of the fire; and, though they were not ten feet away, he could not hear a word of what they were saying. At intervals there was an indistinct murmur, nothing more. Claire, at Lee Randon's side, was sitting with her chin high and a gaze concentrated on the twisting flames: talking generally had fallen into a pause.
The door from without opened, Fanny entered, and there was a momentary revival of animation. “Is Lee here?” she demanded; “but I know he is. The fire is just as attractive at home, yet, even with nothing to do, he'll hardly wait to give it a poke. Where's Peyton?”
“On the stairs,” someone answered casually.
There was a movement, and Mina Raff approached. “It's so hot here,” she asserted.
“It is warmer out,” Fanny informed her; “I wonder what the weather is in New York?”
“I can't say, I'm sure; but I shall discover tomorrow morning. I have to be back as early as possible. Then—work, work, work.”
“Mina has been made a star,” Peyton Morris announced. But he stopped awkwardly, apparently conscious of the warmth, the largeness, in his voice. Fanny whispered to Lee that it was quite too outrageous. In return, he asked, “What?” and, indignant, she drew away from him.
The conversation died again. Lee Randon could see Mina Raff's profile, held darkly against the glow; her lips and chin were firm. “Where,” Anette asked her, “shall you stay when you get back—at Savina Grove's?” No, Mina replied, her hours would be too long and uncertain to allow that; probably she would be at the Plaza. Lee had heard the Groves' name mentioned before in connection with Mina Raff; and he made an effort to recall the reason. The Groves—it was the William Loyd Groves—were rather important people, financially and socially; and one of them, yes, that was it, was related to Mina, but which he didn't know.
More came back to him: Mina Raff's parents had died when she was a young girl, and the Groves had rescued her from the undistinguished evils of improvidence; she had lived with them until, against their intensest objections, she had gone into moving pictures. Probably the Groves' opposition had lasted until Mina's success; or, in other words, their support had been withheld from her through the period when it had been most needed.
Yes, the girl had a determined mouth. If he, Lee Randon, had followed his first inclinations—were they in the way of literature?—how different his life would have been. Mina Raff had been stronger, more selfish, than her environment: selfishness and success were synonymous. Yet, as a human quality, it was more hated, more reviled, than any other. Its opposite was held as the perfect, the heavenly, ethics of conduct. To be sacrificed, that was the accepted essence of Christ; fineness came through relinquishment. He didn't believe it, he told himself fiercely; something deep, integral, in him revolted absolutely.
Mina Raff had been wholly justified; the very people who had thrown all their weight against her admitted it fully. It was only when such a self-belief was without compensating result, value, that it was wrong. But who could say what any outcome would be? Some people took the chance and others didn't; he had not. Then the question came up of whether he had not failed as it was? No one would agree with him that it might be failure; he hadn't called it that. Suddenly, vehemently, he wished that he could grow old at once, in a second; anything to quiet the restlessness at his heart.
Lee had a conviction that he ought to decide the case of the individual against the world, the feeling that it was of the greatest importance to him; but for centuries men had considered, without answer, just that. The thing to do was to live, not to think; for it was possible that those who thought, weighed causes and results, hardly lived at all in the sense he meant. All the people he knew were cautious before they were anything else; they existed primarily for their stomachs. The widely advertised beauty of self sacrifice was golden only when it adorned like a halo the heads of others. That was natural, inevitable to the struggle for survival; it didn't answer Lee's question, which, he felt, was of the spirit rather than the body.
“It's getting late,” Fanny said briskly. There was a general movement, sighs and the settling of skirts. The lights were switched on, and the fire, that had been a source of magic, became nothing more than ugly grey charring logs with a few thin tongues of flame. Lee, with his wife, stopped to say good-bye to Mina Raff; Fanny's manner was bright, conventional; as palpably insincere to the other woman, Lee was certain, as it was to him. He said:
“I hope your new picture will go well.”
“Thank you,” she responded, her slight hand lingeringly holding his; “perhaps you will like me better on the screen than in reality.”
“Could you tell me which was which?”
She hesitated. “Three months ago, yes, but not now; I'm not sure of myself.”
“That was positively indecent,” Fanny observed afterward; “she is as bold as brass. I hope I am not as big a fool as Claire.”
“Claire and you are very different,” he told her; “I have an idea that she is doing whatever is possible. But then we don't know what we are talking about: it's fairly evident that Peyton and Mina Raff are interested in each other, they may be in love; and, if they are, what does that mean? It isn't your feeling for the children or mine for you; they are both love; yet what is it?”
“It is God in us,” Fanny said gravely; “and keeps us all, Helena and Gregory and you and me, safely together.”
She seldom spoke to him of religion, but it dwelt closely, vitally, within her, and not as an inherited abstraction or correct social observation, but definitely personal in its intercommunication. Lee Randon had none at all; and in her rare references to it he could only preserve an awkward silence. That had always been a bar between his family and himself, particularly with the children: he was obliged to maintain an endless hypocrisy about the miracles, the dogmas and affairs, of Sunday school and the church. As a child he had been so filled with a literal Presbyterian imagery that, when a degree of reason discarded figures of speech seen as concrete actualities, nothing had been left. With the lapse of a purely pictorial heaven and hell, the loss of eternal white choirs and caldrons of the unrepentant, only earth remained.
He could recall in gloomy detail his early impression of Paradise: it was a sombre plain floating cloud-like in air, with, doubling through it, an unspeakable sluggish river of blood; God, bearded and frowning in the severity of chronic judgment, dominated from an architectural throne a throng of the saved in straight garments and sandalled feet; and, in the foreground, a lamb with a halo and an uplifted cross was intent on the baptism of individuals issuing unaccountably white from the thickly crimson flood.
Yet his children, in a modified Episcopalian form, were being taught the same thing: the Mosaic God; Christ Jesus who took unto Himself the sin of the world; the rugged disciple, St. Peter and the loving disciple, St. John. The sky, they learned, was the habitation of light-winged angels. The ark was still reported on its memorable voyage, with its providential pairs of animals gathered from every zone, but there was a growing reticence about Jonah. The persistence of such credulity, Lee thought, was depressing; just as the churches, leaning on the broken support of a charity they were held to dispense, were a commentary on the poverty of the minds and spirits of men.
Yes, the necessity of charging Helena and Gregory with such assurances, their rigid bending into mental forms, large and small, in which he had no confidence, put Lee outside the solidity of his family. In the instruction, the influences, widely held paramount in the welding of polite Christian characters, Fanny was indefatigable—the piece of silver firmly clasped in the hand for collection, the courtesy when addressed by elders, the convention that nature, birds, were sentimentally beneficent. When Gregory brought out these convictions, lessons, in his indescribably fresh eager tones, Lee listened with a helpless disapproval.
Everything, it seemed to Lee Randon, increased the position of self-delusion at the expense of what he felt to be reality. His doubts, for example, were real; with no will, no effort on his part, they invaded his mind ceaselessly. Cytherea's disturbing charm was real, as definite as Fanny's quiet actuality. However, he wasn't interested in an abstract arraignment of life, but intent only on the truth about himself. Lee wanted to discharge fully his duty to existence—in the more inglorious phrase, he didn't want to make a fool of himself—and yet it was growing more difficult all the while to distinguish folly from sense.
This affair, if it did exist, of Peyton's with Mina Raff wasn't so easily determined as Fanny insisted. Perhaps, like his own, Peyton Morris' life had been restricted by artificial barriers thrown about the rebellious integrity of his fundamental being. Few children could stand out against the combined forces of the older world; but it was conceivable that, later, like a chrysalis, they might burst the hard, superimposed skin and emerge triumphant.
That damned problem of self-sacrifice!
How much claim had men upon each other? What did children gain who sacrificed their lives for their parents? It was supposed to bring them nobility; but, at the same time, didn't it develop in the parents the utmost callous selfishness; didn't the latter, as their needs were exclusively consulted, grow more exacting, unreasonable? Was not love itself the most unreasonable and exacting thing imaginable?
Once surrendered to it, the tyranny of a beloved subject was absolute: Lee told himself that the emotion he was considering—the most sacred of earthly ties—ignominiously resembled the properties of fly paper. He turned abruptly from that graceless thought: it was a great deal warmer, and a mist, curiously tangible in the night, was rising through the bare branches of the maple trees.
“I am going to talk to Claire,” Fanny said firmly.
“It would do both of you no good,” he informed her; “besides, you'll have to take so much for granted.”
“Claire will tell me.”
“I wonder?” They were in their room, preparing for bed; Fanny, with her hair spread in a thin brown tide over the chaste shoulders of her nightgown, was incredibly like a girl. The mechanical sweep of her hand with a brush kept a brief sleeve falling back from the thinness of her arm. How delicately methodical she was—an indispensable quality in the repeated trying contacts, the lost privacy, of marriage. So much depended upon the very elusiveness which the security of possession, habit, destroyed.
“This love,” he continued his speculations aloud, “isn't at all understood—we are ignorant about it in spite of endless experience and reports and poetry. Take us,” he had one of his dangerous impulses of complete honesty, “before we were married, while we were engaged, we had an impracticable romantic attraction for each other. I know that I thought of you all the time, day and night; and, just because you existed, the whole world was full of prismatic colors; it was as though an orchestra were playing continually and I were floating on the finest music. You were like a figure in heaven that drew me up to you.
“Well, that lasted quite a while into our marriage; at first I had an even greater emotion. Then, as Helena and Gregory were born, it changed.” Midway in the brushing of her hair Fanny was motionless and intent. “I don't say it decreased, Fanny, that it lost any of its importance; but it did change; and in you as well as me. It wasn't as prismatic, as musical, and there's no use contradicting me. I can explain it best for myself by saying that my feeling for you became largely tenderness.”
“Oh!” Fanny exclaimed, in a little lifting gasp; “oh, and that tenderness,” her cheeks were bright with sudden color, “why, it is no more than pity.”
“That isn't just,” he replied; “unless you want to speak of pity at its very best. No, that won't do: my affection for you is made of all our experiences, our lives and emotions, together. We are tied by a thousand strings—common disappointments and joy and sickness and hope and pain and heaven knows what else. We're held by habit, too, and convenience and the opinion of society. Certainly it is no smaller than the first,” he argued, but more to himself than to Fanny; “that was nothing but a state of mind, of spirit; you can't live on music.”
“Don't you think you have said enough for one night?” she asked, in a calm voice belied by the angry sparkle of her eyes, the faint irrepressible trembling of her lips. “Do you think I want to hear that it is only convention and our neighbors that keep you with me? You have no right to insist that your horridness is true of me, either. I—I could hear music, if you would let me.” She sank on the little cushioned bench before her dressing table, where her youthfulness took on a piercing aspect of misery. Fanny's declaration, not far from tears, that she was just as she had always been was admirably upheld by her appealing presence.
The tenderness he had admitted, reduced by a perceptive impatience and the sense of having been wholly, wilfully, misunderstood, carried him over to her. He took Fanny, with her face strained away from him, into his arms. “Don't be an idiot,” he begged softly; “you ought to be used to my talking by now. Let me go on, it can't come to anything—” She stiffened in his embrace:
“What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing, nothing,” he answered shortly, releasing her; “where is all that certainty you assured me of? If you go on like this I shall never be able to tell you my thoughts, discuss problems with you; and it seems to me that's very necessary.”
“It has been lately,” she spoke in a metallic voice; “nothing satisfies you any more; and I suppose I should have been prepared to have you say things to me, too. But I'm not; you might even find that I am not the idiot you suspect.”
“I was giving you a chance to prove that,” he pointed out.
“Now you have discovered the fatal truth you can save yourself more trouble in the future.” She emphatically switched off a light beside her, leaving him standing in a sole unsparing illumination. Yet in her extreme resentment she was, he recognized, rubbing Vaseline into her finger nails, her final nightly rite. Then there was silence where once he had kissed her with a reluctance to lose her in even the short oblivion of sleep.
Throughout Monday, at his office, Lee Randon thought at uncomfortable intervals of the late incipient scenes with Fanny. They had quarrels—who hadn't?—but they had usually ended in Fanny shedding some tears that warmly recemented their deep affections. This latter time, however, she had not wept—at the point of dissolving into the old surrender she had turned away from him, both in reality and metaphorically, and fallen asleep in an unexpected cold reserve. He was sorry, for it brought into their relationship a definite new quality of difference. He was aware of the thorough inconsistency of his attitude toward their marriage; again two opposed forces were present in him—one, Fanny, as, bound to her, he knew and cherished; and the other—the devil take the other!
He was organizing a new company, and, figuring impatiently, he pressed the button for Mrs. Wald, his secretary. She appeared at once and quietly, her notebook and pencil ready, took a place at his side. “Run this out, please, Mrs. Wald,” and an involved financial transaction followed. What he wanted to ascertain was, with a preferred stock bearing eight per cent at a stated capitalization, and the gift of a bonus of common, share for share, how much pie would remain to be cut up between a Mr. Hadly, Sanford, and himself? The woman worked rapidly, in long columns of minute neat figures. “About thirty-four thousand dollars, each, Mr. Randon,” she announced almost directly. “Is that close enough; or do you want it to the fraction?”
“Good enough; send Miss Mathews in.”
Almost anyone on his staff, Lee reflected, knew more about the processes of his business than he did; he supplied the energy, the responsibility of the decisions, more than the brains of his organization; and it perfected the details. The stenographer, Miss Mathews, was very elaborately blonde, very personable; and, dictating to her, Lee Randon remembered the advice given him by a large wielder of labor and finance. “Lee,” he had said, touching him with the emphasis of a finger, “never play around with an employee or a client.”
He, John Lenning Partins, had been a man of eccentric humors, and—like all individuals who supported heavy mental burdens, inordinately taxed their brains—he had his hours, unknown to the investing public, of erratic, but the word was erotic, conduct. On more than one occasion he had peremptorily telegraphed for Lee to join him at some unexpected place, for a party. Once, following a ball at the Grand Opera House, in Paris, they had motored in a taxi-cab, with charming company, to Calais. During that short stay in France John Partins had spent, flung variously away, four hundred thousand dollars.
The industrious, the clerks, efficient women like Mrs. Wald, the middle-aged lawyers in his office, were rewarded...by a pension. It was all very strange, upside down: what rot that was about the infinite capacity for taking pains! He supposed it wouldn't do to make this public, the tritest maxims were safer for the majority; but it was too bad; it spread the eternal hypocrisies of living. He asked Miss Mathews:
“You're not thinking of getting married, are you? Because if you do I'll have your young man deported; I simply won't let go of you.”
“I don't see any signs of it, Mr. Randon,” she replied, half serious and half smiling; “my mother thinks it's awful, but I'm not in any hurry. There are men I know, who might like me; they show me a very good time; but somehow I am not anxious. I guess in a way it's the other married girls I see: either they housework at home, and I couldn't be bothered with that; or they are in an office and, somehow, that seems wrong, too. I want so much,” she admitted; “and with what clothes cost now it's terrible.”
“Moralists and social investigators would call you a bad girl,” he told her; “but I agree with you; get your pretty hats and suits, and smart shoes, as long as you are able. You're not a bit better in a kitchen than you are here, taking dictation from me; and I am not sure you would be more valuable at home with a child or two. You are a very unusual stenographer, rapid and accurate, and you have a good mind in addition to your figure. Why should you lose all that at once, give it up, for the accidents of cholera infantum and a man, as likely as not, with a consumptive lung?”
“But what about love, Mr. Randon? That's what throws me off. Some say it's the only thing in life.”
“I'm damned if I know,” he admitted, leaning back from his wide flat-topped desk. “I hear the same thing, and I am rather inclined to believe it. But I have an idea that it is very different from what most people insist; I don't think it is very useful around the house; it has more to do with the pretty hat than with a dishpan. If you fall in love go after the thing itself, then; don't hesitate about tomorrow or yesterday; and, above all else, don't ask yourself if it will last; that's immaterial.”
“You make it sound wild enough,” she commented, rising.
“The wilder the better,” he insisted; “if it is not delirious it's nothing.”
The road and countryside over which he returned in the motor sedan, partly frozen, were streaked by rills of muddy surface water; the sky, which appeared definitely to rest on the surrounding hills, was grey with a faint suffusion of yellow at the western horizon. It was all as dreary, as sodden, as possible. Eastlake, appearing beyond a shoulder of bare woods, showed a monotonous scattering of wet black roofs, raw brick chimneys, at the end of a long paved highway glistening with steel tracks.
Lee Randon was weary, depressed: nothing in his life, in any existence, offered the least recompense for the misfortune of having been born. He left his car at the entrance of his dwelling; Christopher, the gardener, came sloshing over the sod to take it into the garage; and, within, he found the dinner-table set for three. “It's Claire,” his wife informed him; “she called up not half an hour ago to ask if she could come. Peyton was away over night, she said, and she wanted to see us.” He went on up to his room, inattentive even to Claire's possible troubles.
He dressed slowly, automatically, and descended to the fire-lit space that held Cytherea in her mocking, her becoming, aloofness. In the brightly illuminated room beyond the hall Helena and Gregory were playing parchesi—Gregory firmly grasped the cup from which he intently rolled the dice; Helena shook the fair hair from her eyes and, it immediately developed, moved a pink marker farther than proper.
“You only got seven!” Gregory exclaimed; “and you took it nine right on that safety.”
“What if I did?” she returned undisturbed. “I guess a girl can make a mistake without having somebody yell at her. Your manners aren't very good.”
“Yes, they are, too,” he asserted, aggrieved; “I have to tell you if you move to a safety where you don't belong.” He shook the dice from the cup. “Now, see there—that just brings me to your man, and I can send him home.”
“I don't care,” Helena informed him; “it's a young sort of game, anyhow. Now I'm wearing waists and buttoned skirts I'd just as leaves write a letter to Margaret West with no boys in it at all.”
She left the parchesi board, and crossed the room to the piano, where she stood turning over sheets of music with a successful appearance of critical interest. Gregory, silently struggling with the injustice of this, gazed up with a shadowed brow at Lee. “I was going to beat her,” he said, “I was almost home, and she went away. She just got up like nothing was happening.” Helena put in, “Neither there was.” Lee Randon took her place. “You can beat me instead,” he proposed. His interest in the game, he felt, was as false as Helena's pretended musical preoccupation; but he rolled the dice and shifted the counters, under Gregory's undeviating scrutiny, with the conviction that parchesi was not conspicuously different from the other more resounding movements of the world and its affairs. Gregory easily vanquished him, and Lee rose with a curt, unwarranted nod of dismissal.