“Well, I fail to see how you can slide all that off on the girl,” said Jerry. “What’s the use of all this moralizing stuff? You know you like a good time as well as the rest of us. To crab at people who are enjoying themselves is a sign of the aged.”
“Look at us to-night,” said Greg. “Here we are paying I-don’t-know-what per couvert to sit in an uninteresting place and watch the world’s most ordinary potpourri, the personnel of a public dance hall, canter around on a bum floor——”
“And listen to you crab. I admit it’s awful,” said Jerry, rising. “Come on, Harry. Greg probably won’t dance after his oration, but I intend to see if itisa bum floor.”
They slid away, and Greg looked at Félicie. The lines in his face quivered into softness until he looked like a hungry, wistful child. Félicie’s colour had died to a brilliant flash in either cheek; her loveliness was almost aching in its intensity. “I’m sorry, Félicie,” he said gently. “Shall we dance?”
Steve and Joy looked after them as they joined “the world’s most ordinary-looking potpourri.” “He seems like a fine fellow,” said Steve; “but what’s eating him, anyway? Won’t she marry him? He ought to be glad.”
“Well, he doesn’t seem to be,” said Joy rather shortly.
“All this haste to get married while you’re young is idiotic,” said Steve, with an air of settling the subject. “If he says the modern girl is selfish because she doesn’t want to let herself in for the cares and risks of marriage until she has an everlasting good time out of her youth, he’s talking rot. The modern girl’s got a sane argument, and it’s the same one I’d use for myself. Marriage clips your wings, whether you’re a man or a girl, and there’s no use getting into it before you’ve had enough of high-flying!”
Joy said nothing. It was the same argument she had used for herself. Marriage was not for her, until the wings of her power had grown so that she could soar with that impediment. But Félicie’s case was different. She was in love—supposedly. And Greg’s face——
“Come on and twirl a measure,” said Steve, “if you’re not above mingling with the Too-Much-Perfumed.”
“Too-Much-Perfumed?” she echoed as they went out on the floor.
“Yes—I always think of that in these places—don’t you get the scent on different couples as they whiff by us? I always think of the common herd as perfuming themselves heavily. So, instead of calling ’em the Great Unwashed, I call ’em the Too-Much-Perfumed.”
It was about two when they returned to the Belmont. The girls undressed quickly, saying little. No one brought up the subject of Greg’s harangue. Jerry said that she would sleep with Félicie, so that Joy could have the single room and sleep as late as possible into the day.
“I know you’ve got to have sleep back of your voice,” she said, “so go to it, old girl. I’ll make Félicie open one window.”
If only Jerry were not such an Excitement-Eater——
By four the next afternoon, Joy had nearly scared herself into a chill. Félicie had gone down to Princeton for a party, but Jerry had remained with her. First, her costume offered trouble. After three changes, she was almost ready to start, when there was a heartsick moment of losing her short gloves. Then a worse moment when she found a rip in them that Jerry repaired with lightning skill. Hesitation over her music which Pa had told her to take indiscriminately, since the great one would select what she pleased to hear. It seemed such a lot to take in one music roll. Finally Jerry bundled her off, going down with her to the door of the waiting car, a dark green Cadillac, such as anyone,—well most anyone—might have. She was driven to the door of a Park Avenue apartment house, where the chauffeur instructed her to go to the top floor. A little maid admitted her to a room beautifully appointed in grey, relieved by sharp touches of black and the inevitable grand piano. Music was piled on the piano in indeterminate heaps; some of it was even trickling off to the floor. Another sheet fell as Joy came into the room, and she went over to pick it up, restoring the others to place as she did so.
“Ah, so we have a neat little housewife’s soul, in a singer!”
A full, perfectly poised voice, each word as flawless as if it had been engraved on a cameo. Joy turned, crimson with embarrassment and excitement, and straightway forgot both. The queen of music had a most understanding smile. Moreover, she did not look like a diva. She was not even large, as singers went, and certainly not of terrifying aspect. She was dainty as a little wren, standing by the doorway in a grey teagown, her head tipped to one side, her eyes—the eyes that looked so awe-inspiring in her pictures—surrounded by a network of little smile-wrinkles.
“Well,” she said, and came to take Joy’s hands; “have you nothing at all to say to me—or must all be sung, as in op-era? Never mind—” and she drew Joy to a sofa—“I once remember when I was younger than you, and they sent me to sing for Patti. Oh, how I died! It was after a performance, and Patti was in no charm to hear me. She was weary of child-wonders. How well I remember that long time ago! She was in her room at the hotel; there was a wood fire; she always had one go ahead of her, turn off the steam, and have a fire built ready for her coming. I sat in a tremble; and what I had brought to sing—at sixteen? The waltz song from Romeo and Juliet! But no matter. She came in all wrapped around with cloaks and hoods and shawls. How poisonous is the night air to a singer, and all other things that lend joy and romance! Her table was spread with her supper. I was to sing while she ate. She sat down, giving me a look with those black eyes, while her maid unwound her from the shawls. I was so unhappy! She pointed to the piano. ‘I do not know why they want me to hear them sing,’ she said. ‘I know nothing, just what I like or do not like, and how it sounds to me—I will listen not for the things the critics discuss. But sing! And I will tell you what I think.’”
She looked at Joy, her eyes twinkling up again. “I was in a horror! I shook, how I shook! And the noble Adelina saw that I could not do anything, although the young man was waiting for me at the piano. She arose from her clear soup, did Adelina, and went to look at what I had brought. ‘Ah, it is the waltz!’ she said. ‘Have you heard Nellie Melba sing this, child?’
“Nellie Melba was then dazzling the world. I had heard and rejoiced, as had everyone. I could only nod. But Adelina went on. ‘In my time,’ she said, ‘Nellie Melba’s voice would have been termed a light-opera voice. You gasp? But listen how we were taught to run the descent of the chromatic in this waltz.’”
She closed her eyes, her features sinking into a repose of prayer. “Oh, those notes that came floating from that supreme woman! Golden, perfectly matched, each one a pearl on the perfect string! She stopped on the B flat, and laughed a little at my face. ‘Now I will show you,’ said she, ‘how Nellie Melba pours it forth!’ And that Adelina ran it up and down in just the way I had heard Melba sing it many times. I cannot tell you the difference. Still beautiful, but—it was as if she had taken the bottom away from everything, that second time!”
“What did she say when you sang?” Joy asked eagerly, as she came to a pause.
The little wren tossed her hands and shoulders, laughing lightly. “The story ends there! I have gotten you to speak! Come—let us see what you have brought. I hope a variety, for I like to choose!” She ran her fingers lightly through the music-roll, pulling out “The Messiah,” to Joy’s horror. She had not dreamed that the heroine of thirty operas, and mistress of the concert stage, would even glance at oratorio.
“Behold what is complete in one,” she was saying. “We have everything here, from the dramatics to the dynamics. Come, let us be off!”
“I didn’t suppose—this is the hardest thing I ever tried to do—” Joy faltered, following her to the piano.
“No matter! You have saved yourself already, in saying ‘tried to do,’ instead of—‘done’!” She modulated into the pastoral symphony, still talking: “This is so cruel! Nearly eighty pages while the soprano sits like a rock! Many have no voice left when their time comes!”
She played for Joy to sing through the four first recitatives, then without comment plunged into the “Come Unto Him,” followed by “Rejoice Greatly,” and ending with “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth.”
Then she turned on the bench. “We all have fads, which we call convictions,” she said quietly; “and mine is that this music we have just done can show plainly as nothing else, what one has and what one has learned. Now let us have some fun and do some op-era. What can you do?”
“Pa hasn’t given me anything but Faust——”
“He wouldn’t; I am glad; for I know you have other airs, and I shall wish to see what you have done without Pa, with your own brain and soul-fire. Come, shall we do something so banal you shall have to lend it your own self, lest we remember the hurdy-gurdy?”
Joy hesitated, as she had been about to suggest her beloved Louise.
“But-terfly!” cried the little wren, and tore a wail of beauty from the keys.
So Joy sang Madame Butterfly . . . with a pulse beating in her voice that made the great one turn on the last note and kiss her exultantly.
“When I have a new sensation with that song, I am won!” she cried. “And you gave it—why, you little girl—with years before your maiden voice grows into your woman’s voice—you had not only the longing of Butterfly but the longing of all! Do you see what I mean? It is so that the American shop girl could hear you sing it in Italian and weep!”
She became quiet, judicial. “Pa Graham is right. The greatest of teachers are not always right—when the pupil has beauty which dazzles and deafens the beholder—but Pa is right with you. You have everything, everything and to spare, in equipment. Now it is the question of the years of preparation. Many young girls start out as you, with high hopes and encouragement. Many do not finish—of their own fault and choosing. Are you of a steadfast mind?”
“I will let nothing come in my way,” said Joy breathlessly, “not even love——”
“That is the thing that may end all. . . . And perhaps you may be glad that all is over, if you love greatly.” She looked down at the gorgeous rings on her fingers, and there was a little silence before she continued. “But most loves are not the great loves of which we sing and act; they are not the blazing altar-fires of which we dream; love comes down to a hearth-fire, after marriage. And we who sing are not content with hearth-fires. Remember that always, little one;we who sing are not content with hearth-fires.”
The maid came into the far end of the room, spraying the air with water from an atomizer. “My substitute for Adelina’s wood-fires,” the wren said with a smile. “Steam dries you up in your throat—oh, it is terrible! Bring the tea, will you, Aimée?” A pause, while she played rippling cadenzas and frowned at the keys. Joy longed to ask her to sing, but would not, when suddenly without apparent preparation or setting, her voice floated out in a great, full note that swelled to the power of the room until the very windows sang, and then quivered itself into silence. Under the little white hands the keys wove a melody above which the voice rang out, first dazzling with its fireworks, then charming with its beauty. Joy, listening, thought it the most perfect voice in the world, as it came close to being. It ended on a long high note as small and clear as a thread of silver, that hung in the air and charmed the echoes.
“It is an old Italian air,” she said, before Joy could speak. “I have not sung it for a long time; no one sings it any more; the new music is all different.”
“Thank you,” said Joy, reverently; “the memory of that will always spur me on. And thank you for not singing before I did!”
Her laugh, as lovely a thing as one of her runs, rippled out, and she turned to the wagon Aimée was wheeling into the room. “And now for tea. Here is a splendid illustration of the hardships of the singer. We must forswear life’s sweet things for the voice and the figure. Often I think, when shall I taste that French pastry my friends always de-vour?” She rolled her eyes, almost upsetting the teacup she was passing Joy. “But no, I do not even know what it would seem like.”
Tea with lemon and without sugar; buttered toast; flat little sponge cakes that tasted like sawdust.
“Once I let myself go and ate a caramel before a concert,” the little wren related, between sips of tea. “Never shall I forget! I came out and sang My Lovely Celia. I had not sung much in English, and they were ready to notice anything. I sang on, ‘as lilies sweet, as soft as air,’ and when I came to soft—you know it is but a G, but a tiny, small, floated thing—my voice stuck, I strangled, and the whole hall choked for me! I could feel that caramel sticking to my cords!”
Tea was over, and Joy knew that she must go. She managed to express her appreciation coherently, in spite of the fact that her hostess kissed her again.
“When you return to New York, you must come here once more,” she said, and put Joy’s music back into the roll for her. “And when you are through with all your work, we will get you that hearing.”
Joy rode back to the Belmont holding her music-roll gingerly. It was awesome, when you considered who had closed it. Would she ever want to open it again. . . . The queen of music had spoken as though her success were a matter of time. . . .
Jerry was sitting by the window, looking out into the darkness; a desolate Jerry with her hair pulled back into a brush, leaving her white face without shading.
“New York’s getting under my skin,” she said rapidly before Joy could speak; “there’s no use, Joy; it spells Phil Lancaster to me, and a lot of other things that do me no good to think about; I’ve got to get out of here.”
Joy put down her music roll before coming nearer, and as Jerry’s eyes fell on it, she jumped up, shaking her hair until it fell about her face once more. “I’m a selfish fool! Tell me all about it—quick!”
Joy had nearly finished her thrilling story when Jerry interrupted her. “Here’s a note they pushed under the door. I forgot to give it to you before.”
It was a little hotel envelope containing the information that Mrs. Eustace Drew had called and would call again at six-thirty. Joy looked at her watch wildly. It was that now.
“Does ‘will call at six-thirty’ mean in person, or by telephone?” she demanded. The telephone rang by way of answer, and a voice informed her that “Mrs. Drew was in the lobby.”
“She might at least have spoken to me herself,” she grumbled, flying to the mirror.
“Who?” said Jerry.
“My New York cousin. Things always come in bunches with me!”
Yes, Cousin Mabel certainly might have talked to her, if only to tell her what to expect, she thought as she went down to attack the lobby vaguely. But Cousin Mabel was standing by a pillar and came over to her immediately.
“Joy?” she asked with a smile its recipient recognised as genuine: “Well, I think we should have known each other anywhere—or is it mere fond vanity that tells me we look alike?”
Cousin Mabel was a pretty woman in her late twenties, a trifle faded already, but very dainty and luxurious-looking wrapped in her sables. She was of the same blond type as Joy, but her hair was already losing its brightness and her eyes were grey rather than the radiant blue that marked Joy’s greatest appeal. She was unvarnishedly pale, which made Joy conscious of the dab of rouge on her cheeks. As she stood exchanging amenities, Joy found herself contrasting Cousin Mabel’s style with Jerry’s. Jerry was always put together perfectly, with just the right amount of carelessness; but her style was the type that burst upon one. Mabel undoubtedly had style; but it was so quiet that one had to look many times to appreciate the small, perfect little details that made the unobtrusive whole.
“I have been trying to get you for so long, my dear,” she was saying. “But last night you were evidently making the most of being in New York; also this afternoon. Is it too late for you to run up to dine informally with us to-night? My big brother will be there, and my husband and one or two others.”
Joy stood with gracelessly opened mouth. Mabel’s big brother——
“I didn’t know I had more cousins that I hadn’t heard about,” she said heavily, thinking of no better way to bring back the subject.
“Oh, yes, there’s Phil! Older than I, and getting to be a more hard-and-fast bachelor every year. It’s even difficult to get him to dine with us, so you really must come to-night!” As Joy still hesitated, plunging for another setting to bring about what she wished, Mabel went on: “I know it’s awfully last minute-y, but it isn’t a dinner party, or anything but just an informal gathering—and as long as we are cousins——”
“Oh, I should love to,” said Joy, “but it would mean leaving the girl with whom I came over, all alone——”
“Bring her too, then! That settles it!” Mabel laughed. “I’ll send the car back for you at seven-fifteen. You’re a nice child, Joy!” She paused in her exit, and lifted a black-gloved finger. “So you and she are staying alone at an hotel in the wicked city. Dear me—these New England cousins!”
Joy went slowly back to the room where Jerry stared out of the window at a New York that had grown barren to her. She had made an opportunity—given Jerry her fighting chance. And now she was overwhelmed by misgivings. It did not seem possible that a love could have endured so long upon so little. And how could Jerry hold her own in the house of Mabel Lancaster Drew? She—Mabel—had all but raised her eyebrows—at their being alone in New York together. What would she think, when she saw Jerry—— But Joy put away that thought.
What should she tell Jerry? It was hard not to tell her the incredible truth; it was the fair, square way that Jerry would have taken. But it might be better for Jerry to be unprepared. She debated; and since she could not decide, did not tell her. Jerry showed no enthusiasm at the thought of dining with Joy’s cousins.
“You say you don’t know them at all, yet you’re passing up a wonderful chance for us to go along to some awful little joint while Félicie isn’t here to clamp down on dirty food!”
“We might as well get a meal paid for,” said Joy, watching Jerry’s preparations with ill-concealed suspense. Jerry, always sensitive to waves of feeling, dropped the bright green dinner gown she had taken up and laughed. “Why did you make ’em throw me in with the invitation, Joy, if you’re going to feel cross-eyed about my get-up?”
“Haven’t you brought anything—darker?” Joy asked feebly.
“Not in the dinner line. Never mind. Here’s a black velvet of Félicie’s.”
“It will hang on you in folds.”
“Oh, no, it won’t.” Jerry had wriggled in and out of the velvet, pinned a few bunches in the luscious material, then sat down with her sewing-kit in her favourite cross-legged position. Inside of six minutes, she put away her thimble, stuck her needle on the outside of the kit and threw it on the bed, and put on the velvet, which fell about her in full, majestic lines, but looked as if it had been built for her. Joy thought with a spurt of hope that she had never seen Jerry look so well. The black toned her down; the velvet softened her. She felt ashamed of her momentary qualms, and tried to make up for it by talking effusively on the way over, and jesting about the way cars were being sent for them. However, her efforts only evoked a puzzled look from Jerry, who did not know Joy in a talkative vein.
The car drew up in front of a large red sandstone house just off Fifth Avenue in the fifties, which brought a whistle from Jerry. “Say, Joy—what are you getting us into? The nearest I’ve been to this sort of stuff is the movies!”
It did not add to their composure to have a butler admit them, to be elevatored to one floor to take off their wraps and elevatored to another floor to meet Mabel. They were ushered into a drawing-room, which seemed to Joy’s eyes full of people whose faces were obscured in the candlelight which was the only illumination affected. Mabel came forward to greet them, a little overplump without the coat and glossing-over sables, but very attractive in warm rose, her only jewelry a single pink pearl hanging at the end of a platinum and diamond chain. Joy noticed these details automatically, her attention focussed on Jerry, who, since she had entered the room, had taken on a manner entirely foreign to her make-up as Joy knew it. She was the easy, gracious grande dame from the lilt of her walk and assured poise to the cultured cadences of the voice that Joy had often likened to rough plush. She had slipped into it as readily as one slips into another garment.
Joy could not know, as the East-Side gamin answered Mabel’s friendly greeting with a few well-chosen words of appreciation at her inclusion in the dinner, that poor little Jerry had assumed the atmosphere of the successful designer at Charlette’s, when she was conferring with a desirable patron. She only marvelled, then looked beyond. A man nearing forty, and plumpness; a girl with a complexion of peachdown, pleasantly irregular features, brown hair folded back straight without a crinkle or wave from a high white forehead; and behind these two—a taller man, whose face was above the range of the candlelight.
“Miss Dalrymple, Miss Nelson—and my husband, Mr. Drew—” The two who barred the way fell apart, and Joy was facing the man who had given Jerry the power to dream. “Phil, this is your new cousin.”
Weary blue eyes that settled on her without interest; a dark, beautiful face with hard lines carving manliness into it and softer marks etching bitternesses around the eyes and mouth; a man who, even Joy could sense, had been too inquisitive of life and found nothing worthy of his young curiosity. She fell aside and looked back at Jerry, still the grande dame, exchanging greetings with the first two. Jerry was never pretty; she could not sink to that level; and to-night she was at the height of her fascination. No one could wear bobbed hair quite like Jerry; it fluffed around her face, adding to the shimmering lights of expression; those lights that always seemed dancing to the surface, yet which by not being transmuted into speech and action, lent her subtlety, which is the essence of charm.
She came through to them, stately, gracious, with always that moonshine of charm flickering in her face. “My brother, Mr. Lancaster,” said Mabel at her elbow. Jerry looked up—and vivid colour, moonbeams, grande dame and all, were struck from her face as if an artist had wiped everything from his painting but the formless features. A long moment she hung thus, one thin hand which she had put out before lifting her head, fluttering without volition. Then with a gasp almost heard in the suspended quiet, she took shape again. Star-shine lurked itself into her face, and she threw back her head, bringing on the grand dame again in double-barreled force. Valiant! Joy thought; valiant! And stole a look at him. There she had the great surprise of the evening. He was taking Jerry’s hand, a bit lingeringly; smiling at her with interest—but without recognition!
“You look very much like someone I met a long time ago,” he said.
“A very long time ago?” murmured Jerry in the richest of her plush tones.
“Oh, very. At least two years—which means it was war times, and those times seem hundreds of years behind us now.”
“There you go, Old Crow’s-feet!” Mabel was hanging on his arm and smiling up at him. She brought the others into it with an explanatory quirk: “These returned war heroes think everyone forgets pretty quickly, but we don’t, do we?”
“Returned war hero!” Joy cried, her mind a suspended blank to be written over with wonder. Jerry said nothing with fierce intensity of question.
“Why, yes,” said Mabel. “Stop nudging me, Phil, I will if I want to!—He was over for a long time, and brought back millions of those little citation ribbons which he gave me with instructions to bury—stop, Phil!”
Another man-servant—did they havetwobutlers?—announced dinner at this moment, and Mabel gave Joy to her brother, leading the way with Jerry and leaving her husband to the girl with the white forehead, who so far had said nothing of any irrelevance, and so had made little impression on the party.
As they settled themselves behind the fruit cocktails, Joy watched Phil Lancaster, who kept his eyes fixed on Jerry across the table.
“Is—is the resemblance so very striking?” she probed gently.
“Not so very, after the first look.” He took his eyes away from Jerry with a jolt and landed them on Joy for one perfunctory second. “Your friend is quite a different type.” His eyes found Jerry again; and Jerry’s short, thick lashes quivered as she raised her chin higher and looked determinedly at Mabel, who was stretching out a large fund of small talk.
“That girl with the brown hair and white forehead—is she another cousin?” asked Joy, still quietly insistent that he should talk to her.
He drew his eyes back to Joy. “No; she’s a Bryn Mawr girl, one of Mabel’s protégés. Mabel’s awfully keen on younger girls.”
“You don’t like ‘younger girls,’ do you?” His tone had been descriptive.
“Why—has Mabel been getting biographic?”
“No; she didn’t say anything about you to me; I just guessed. And as long as I have guessed, I think you ought to tell me why.”
There was a pause as a third man in livery came between them with the soup, an opportunity he enriched by looking at Jerry; then he said: “To tell you why—would not make dinner conversation. But a young girl flaunting her conscious beauty and youth does not interest me, any more than I would give other than a passing look to a large coloured advertisement on a billboard.”
“And how about older women?” she asked, letting his statement pass without battle.
“Oh—they have either lost interest in life and are only pretending, or their minds are one-track affairs.”
“My——” said Joy thoughtfully. “It must be awful to be a bachelor.”
They both laughed then, and Jerry looked across the table with an answering gleam. His eyes caught hers for an intimate moment; then she turned back to Mabel and he to Joy.
“I admit it sounded humourous,” he said. “But I told you, the rest would not be dinner conversation.”
“When did you go across?” she asked abruptly. Her words carried across the table, and Jerry’s polite attention to Mabel took on another tin.
“In the fall of ’17.”
So she had been right in her random suggestion! Mabel, hearing a fragment of their conversation through Jerry’s silence, proudly contributed the fact that Phil had just been promoted to the rank of major when the armistice was signed. The girl with the white forehead and Mabel’s husband were deep in a steady stream of discussion which flowed on during the pauses of the rest of the dinner party.
So he did not remember Jerry. And yet he must, or why did he look at her so? Many times she reviled fashion of ceremony, as courses were brought on and taken off and dinner slowly rolled by with always the balancing of his and Jerry’s gaze across the table, while he talked vaguely and diffusely to Joy. It was when they were having coffee—Mabel had declared the men were too few to be left alone—that he seemed to give his attention to Joy for the first time. She had not been lessening her contemplative gaze, and he suddenly broke into it. “I’m sorry—I’ve rattled on so. I don’t know what’s in the air to-night—I’m not generally talkative. Are you of those awful ones who ‘draw people out,’ young cousin?”
He was almost boyish now. She had been noting one or two grey hairs sparkling in his ruddy crop.
“I don’t think—I’ve drawn you out at all,” she said, and her glance travelled to Jerry. He did not look this time, but his eyes were well distanced by now.
“I am glad you brought her with you,” he said simply.
The remark was so direct, after his circuitous discourse throughout the meal, that she was left in surprise without a response. Mabel, sensitive to Jerry’s aloofness, Phil’s apparent boredom and Joy’s non-registering silence, rose and wafted them into the drawing room. “Eustace, you can play the Victrola or do something entertaining while I show Joy the babies,” she demanded. “She doesn’t know she has some more cousins to meet!”
They left the four, for another elevator trip. “You have—children?” said Joy in awe.
Mabel nodded. “Three,” she said, with the first pride she had shown.
Three children—in as many years of marriage. Small wonder Mabel looked a little faded, in spite of every aura wealth could cast. The nursery was a long, wide room, into which they tiptoed, Mabel turning on the light of a small rose-shaded lamp. Three little white beds, with tiny, slumbering faces pressed hard against the pillows—faces beautiful with the unearthly beauty of babyhood on which all of life’s beauty is yet to be written. A moment while Joy gazed, and Mabel, going from one room to another, murmured ecstatic nothings. Then Mabel turned off the light, and they went to the door shivering in the cold from the open windows that they had not felt while looking at the children.
On the other side of the door Joy stammered her enchantment of eternity’s marvel. Mabel smiled, her hand on the knob, lingering as if she could not bear to leave that hold upon the nursery.
“You will never know—until you have them,” she said. “The greatest happiness in all the world, Joy. If only people realized! I myself didn’t know. I thought I had come to the crown of my life when I married. To have the love of the one you love—that is surely the greatest honour and happiness that life can bring. But this—this brings so infinitely much more—that you think you could only have barely existed, before!” She relinquished the knob, turning it gently so that the catch would hold. “All the happiness in the world, Joy, transmutes itself into this great one. After all, everything speaks in terms of love.” She laughed, half apologetically. “It’s true—we married people pity everyone who doesn’t go and do likewise!”
Joy was thinking of the phrases she had heard bandied with such assurance—yes, that she herself had bandied in her own mind; “the risks and sacrifices of marriage,” “marriage clipping the wings.” In the nursery—and now, with Mabel’s suddenly iridescent love spreading beauty in her face—a career with all its gilt glory seemed very far away and unreal. But they came back to a room which was echoing to great music filtered through a sounding-box; and nursery and Mabel’s face sank away. Different hearts, different loves—and what could one love one-half so satisfying as music?
Eustace Drew and the college girl were selecting other records from the cabinet—Jerry and Phil Lancaster were on the other side of the room, beyond the candles, talking. Jerry was sitting on the window-seat; he was standing looking down upon her, his back to the room. Joy frantically wished that she were a pane in that window, then sat down beside the college girl, who turned a smiling face to her with some comment on the music. Joy answered it without impetus, and in the ensuing conversation was surprised to find that Miss Dalrymple was actually interesting on the subject. Besides being well-read, as Joy innocently supposed all college girls to be, she was evidently well-heard. She decided that Miss Dalrymple added up to a very attractive girl. She wasn’t the type that a man would ask to a Prom to cut a wide swath and impress the other fellows with looks and jazz, but she was very attractive just the same. She had beauty of an unobtrusive sort; her clothes were quietly right; and she had a responsive glow that was most winning. Joy continued the conversation in an investigating frame of mind. This girl must be several years older than she was. She seemed older, in some few ways, but on the whole, so much younger. . . .
After a long conversation Joy again looked at the two at the end of the room. It was so maddening to sit through an evening in ignorance of all that was passing. Mabel followed her look.
“Your friend seems to have bewitched my brother, Joy,” she said lightly. “She must be a sorceress, and cast a spell—he hasn’t even been polite to a girl for so long.”
Joy stole a glance at her watch. Quarter of ten—it was surely already too late to stay after a dinner in a butlered house such as this,—even if Jerry did show no signs of desiring to leave the window seat. She was stopped in her preliminary motions of departure by the insistence of the Drews. Why, they were scarcely acquainted with their new cousin yet! They did not even know what she was doing—what school she was attending, or if she was just being a butterfly this year. Somehow, she drew back from telling them about her studying and its aspirations. It sounded so out of place in that atmosphere—so hectic after what she had seen upstairs. So she evaded the subject with a careless, “Oh, I’m not doing much of anything just now,” and this time succeeded in saying her farewells uninterrupted. Somehow Jerry saw her rise, and strolled over to them. Phil following with objecting footsteps. Jerry was palpably nervous. What she had done in allowing herself to be monopolized in a corner at such a small dinner-party where she had been a stranger, had been in bad taste; but it was the sort of thing that was being done continually by yearlings belonging to what is known as “the best families,” and she had not sinned against precedent.
Mabel bade Joy an affectionate good-bye, adjuring her not to forget that the next time she visited New York she must stay with her cousins, and the Bryn Mawr girl shook hands warmly, hoping-to-see-her-again in a really genuine tone. Joy found her voice returning a like remark in as genuine a tone.
Eustace Drew joined Phil as they went to the door, and the two men rode to the Belmont with Joy and Jerry in an easy volleying of general conversation carried on mainly by Mr. Drew. Jerry, back in the gloom of the car, was inscrutable; Phil more so. They left them at the elevator, where the two girls turned to each other as the door closed and they shot upwards.
“Anchor me down, Joy,” Jerry whispered; “anchor me down, or I’ll float away!”
“Jerry! What was he saying?”
An interim while they got off at their floor, passed a maid in the corridor, and gained their room. Jerry threw off her coat and went to the mirror. “Can you believe it, Joy?” she asked, in luxurious wonder, falling into all angles of pose; “he doesn’t know me! I’ve changed so much he doesn’t know me!”
“What did hesay?” Joy demanded. “I saw he didn’t know you!”
“Well, I’ve changed since then. Funny I hadn’t thought of it that way. My hair’s bobbed now, of course—and I used to dress a lot more so, and this black velvet changes me more yet—and my make-up was different——”
“Will you tell me what he said—or won’t you?”
She whirled around from the mirror, and with a jump, seated herself on the bureau top. “After you went out, I slumped down on the window seat. My legs had caved in—I couldn’t stand any longer. And he came over to me and looked down at me—which he kept on doing, by the way. Joy, helikesto look at me. Did you notice it? Didn’t you? And then he said—he said—‘Do you believe in love at first sight?’ I was knocked loggy for a minute. Did I? Hadn’t I! Then I passed back to him: ‘Not necessarily.’ ‘It is the only love which is formed without analysis,’ he said, ‘and analysis is death to love.’ ‘Maybe, with some people,’ I said. ‘You can’t generalize about those things—though I suppose love is one of the things that is most generalized about.’
“‘Do you want me to come down to particulars?’ he said. ‘Or is it safer to go on—generalizing?’” Jerry clenched her hands, smiling softly the while. “I laughed at that. I had to laugh or yell—it was all so like I’d been dreaming for so long—I can’t believe yet it’s all really happened—and I said: ‘Please don’t put it up to me.’ ‘Let us both waive the responsibility, then,’ he said. ‘If what I say sounds like sheer madness, forget it. You look as if you could forget, and had forgotten, much. But—I have fallen in love twice in my life. The second time was this evening, when I saw you come walking down the room to meet me, a spirit embodied from a dream.’ Joy, he said that! Was there ever anything like it under Heaven?”
“No!” cried Joy, hysterical with conflicting emotions. “Go on!”
Jerry jumped down from the bureau to look into the mirror again. “Jerry, your luck,” she cried to her triumphant reflection. “Your luck!” She turned to Joy. “I was so scared I got to shaking. ‘A dream,’ I said. ‘Yes, that’s what it was, a dream all right.’ I thought it was, too. ‘You do not understand,’ he said. ‘How could I expect it—there will never be another Brushwood Boy.’ That was one of the things he had given me to read, Joy. I guess I registered a recognition on that, for he went on:
“‘Oh, you’ve read it? You remember the Brushwood boy saw a little girl in the theatre, and afterwards he built an image of her in his dreams. His image grew in his dreams to womanhood, and bye and bye he met her in the flesh—a spirit embodied from the dream. Two years ago, in those fleeting, hectic days of war, at a time when no dreams were being left to me, I met a little girl who somehow brought me back to interest in life and—dreams. Our relationship was of the most casual; I only saw her a few times before I was suddenly put in command of a company that was sailing. She was not the sort to mean anything in my life, and I almost forgot her as herself. But her image stayed with me, always growing in little ways. She herself was so unfinished an image—she was of a type that could not change its atmosphere and environment—yet there was that in her which made me build, until the image grew to womanhood in my dreams. Am I boring you with details of a girl you never knew? But you see—the image grew to womanhood—and then I met you in the flesh, the embodiment of that dream.’ I hadn’t stopped shaking. ‘I don’t understand, except that I remind you of someone you once knew,’ I said. ‘Nor do I understand,’ he said. ‘It’s of the realm of—dreams. It’s not to be believed. What is this that makes me sure you are the complement to my existence, the one woman with everything I want, the sum total of a man’s fatuous dream that is generally too impossible to find realization?’ ‘You’d better not spread words around so,’ I said. ‘It isn’t wise to talk freely about anything you only know by sight. If I were anyone else, I’d think you were crazy.’ He snapped me up on that. ‘If you were anyone else! I must descend to the supreme idiocy and say—But you are you—and I knew you were when you came walking down the room to-night.’ ‘You must be a Southern man,’ I said. ‘I’ve always heard that they swung this line.’ He never blinked at that. ‘Do you feel nothing?’ he said. ‘If you tell me you felt nothing when your eyes met mine—if you did not feel that we had been a long time finding each other—if you tell me that—why then,—I will start in and make you realize what I know to be true.’”
She stopped, and ran to the window with a trembling laugh. “Look at old New York—that I couldn’t look at this afternoon! Joy—to think of his saying that! Asking me if I didn’t feel that we had been a long time finding each other! Joy—I was so scared I’d slip a cog and come through with some pithy talk! I spoke slow and thought twice between each word. ‘I—I really—these flashes that seem to go between two people—I never analyze them—which you seem to be doing, after all.’
“By this time you’d come back, but he didn’t even turn though I kept my off-eye alive on you. ‘That is—admission,’ he said, talking very low now. ‘We have started at the end, and defeated all the weary preliminaries.’ ‘Doesn’t it all amount to the same, though?’ I said; ‘for we’ll have to work back.’ ‘No, it’s not the same,’ he said, ‘for at the end I do not greatly care to turn back for my sake. I shall for yours, if you will; but I somehow feel, that to work back is something for which you, too, do not greatly care.’”
“What did he mean?” Joy interrupted. “How could you follow all this, Jerry?”
“Follow what he says? I’d get his drift if he made love to me in Latin! He was taking me at my face value, Joy—which wasn’t right, God knows—and dropping the remark in passing that he wouldn’t expect me to do the same thing with him, although he sort of thought that I would anyhow!”
“It’s so—so strange.”
“Strange! It’s—as he says—a dream! How did he happen to be your cousin, anyway? Didn’t you ever know he was?”
Joy explained, and the two fell into a silent labyrinth of wonder. Jerry walked restlessly about the room. “And he’s still unmarried, though every woman that passed his way must have made a grab for him!”
“He looks to me like a man who has always had his way—with women,” said Joy, trembling to break in upon Jerry’s exultation, but fearful memory driving the words out of her. “What if he was—just bandying words, Jerry? And thought you were too? Or didn’t care—what you thought? The last kind I know——You admitted too much, right off like that, it seems to me.”
Jerry laughed, running her fingers through her hair with a satisfied sigh. “Don’t you think I’ve been through enough sieges of men and their lines, in my life, not to be able to tell a real thing from a line? The real thing just thumps out. You never can mistake it. A line can be finely spun, but it can’t thump. The real thing and a line can have the same words—that’s where we women get fooled—it’s manner and looks you’ve got to watch.”
“He’s awfully cynical about women,” said Joy. “And his face, Jerry—it’s so full of—so—experienced.”
“Can you imagine me getting along well with anyone who was—not?” Jerry questioned; and then smiled again. Joy started. Her smile held in it an echo of Mabel’s peculiar radiance. “Cynical! His face looks like a kid’s who has asked for a stick of candy and been stuffed with the whole candy store.”
She began to slide out of her clothes. “And he doesn’t know—that I’m Galatea! Can you tie that?”
“You—don’t have to tell him,” and Joy watched her from the corner of one eye as she brushed her hair. “He doesn’t care about working back—he’s said so—you never have to tell him a—thing.”
Jerry shrugged her shoulders into the purple kimono. “He’s going to lunch with me to-morrow. He’ll see me in broad daylight without candles and the black velvet dress. It’ll be my turn to talk—in which case I can’t keep up my stride, and will have to slide into the American language. And I’m going to tell him—of course I’m going to tell him. Don’t you see my really being both things—starting the dream, and finishing it—makes it—better than ever? If he doesn’t see it that way—— But he will! I can’t wait to tell him.”
Joy crawled into bed with misgivings which grew faint in the face of Jerry’s firm faith. “It was just as we doped it, wasn’t it, Joy? You said he went across—and I said that I was too small and casual a matter for him to waste pains on—when it got inconvenient for him to do so. They sent him over sooner than he expected—so he simply knocked out of my life. But now! Those years were worth it—I’d go through ’em over again if I were sure this was coming at the end.”
“And he thinks he’s started at the end,” said Joy, “and ‘defeated all the weary preliminaries.’”
Jerry had snapped out the light, opened the windows and jumped into bed, but her head reared up again at this. “You think he’s had an easy time of it—compared to me—that I made it too easy for him, right off—don’t you? I—I didn’t want to make it any harder formyself! And look at his face, Joy—does he look as ifhehad had an especially satisfying time along the way—before he found me?”
“Forgive me, Jerry,” said Joy after a silence. “He was right, these things should not be analyzed.”
But Jerry did not even hear her. “We have been a long time finding each other. But the finding trims everything on heaven and earth tied together, to a finish!”
And Joy was conscious of an overpowering loneliness. It was a barren feeling; she had never really loved. She had not known Mabel’s radiance or Jerry’s ecstatic fireworks, in the disturbing thrills that had been hers in the past which now seemed so far removed it was as if it belonged to another life. And now, with Jerry silent but not asleep by her side, she felt suddenly, horribly alone. Jerry was her best friend, and save for Jim, her only friend. Yet how that friendship sank into insignificance now. Jerry’s world was full; all her world and life were but one man; and Joy was outside. She lost herself in sleep, where she dreamed that the only person remaining in her world who spelled anything in life to her, had left her. She woke up sobbing bitterly, with “Jim!” on her lips. All was toneless dark, that breathless hour of earliest morning when vitality is at its lowest ebb yet sometimes the heart may beat at its highest. Things are seen at that hour with uninfluenced clarity of vision. And Joy gasped in the shock of the knowledge that was rising within her. Jim Dalton was the only person left—who spelled anything in life to her. Jerry was sleeping quietly; her tears fell unconsoled. “Jim!” she sobbed again; and with his name trembling through the black fringe of dawn, she fell asleep.