A light in Dr. Osterhout's laboratory showed him at work over some test tubes.
"Bobs!" called Dee. "Come out. There's been an accident. We've got a car."
In less than a minute they were retracing their course at wild speed, the electrician driving with consummate control while Dee acquainted Osterhout with the main facts. As they came to a stop in the yard Dee turned to the volunteer chauffeur.
"Will you wait for me?" she asked in a tone that made Osterhout turn to look at her.
"Yes."
Within they found the victim violently ill in the midst of a half-dressed and vastly relieved group.
"None the worse for it," Osterhout reported to Dee after attending the victim. "A little too much water for comfort. And something besides water, wasn't there?"
"Yes."
"A good deal of it?"
"Plenty for all hands."
"A rough party?"
"About the usual, at this house."
"Don't you think you're out of place in that gallery, Dee?"
"Oh, don't lecture me, Bobs," said the girl wearily."I'm through." But it was another, not Bobs, who was the inspiration of that resolve.
To the other, patient in the sighing darkness, she returned. "She's all right," she informed him. "But it was a close call."
"Scott saved her, I expect," he replied absently. "He knew the method."
"Do you know Cary Scott?" she asked, startled.
He hesitated. "I did once. I should hardly have expected to find him at this kind of an orgy."
"It isn't as bad as it looks," she defended weakly.
"You told me, didn't you, that you were going into the pool with the others?"
"Yes. But you don't understand. Will you wait until I go in and get my clothes on?"
"I—don't—think—so," he said with palpable effort.
She gathered all her resolution. "Aren't you going to take me home?"
Through the darkness came the sound of a deep-drawn breath.
"No," said his voice, both hard and sad. Only the sadness remained as he continued. "You see, I had idealised you."
"You needn't have," she retorted bitterly. "I'm just like other girls."
"So I see. I wish to God I'd never seen you!"
"There's no reason why you should ever see me again," she answered with rising spirit.
"Not the slightest," he agreed dolorously. "Good-bye."
She turned and went into the building.
As Dr. Osterhout had no car, Scott and Dee drove him back to his place.
"Who was your friend in the service car, Dee?" asked the physician.
"His name is Wollaston."
Cary Scott gave a start. "Wollaston! You know, I thought I caught a glimpse—— Then I supposed that my eyes had gone wrong in the sudden light. He was in working clothes, wasn't he?"
"Yes. He was the electrician from the plant."
"Stanley Wollaston? Electrician? It can't be the same."
"It is. He recognised you and said that he used to know you."
"Know me! Good God! I should say so! We were in hospital together for weeks in the war. Afterwards I visited him at their place in Hertfordshire. He was a poet and a dreamer then. I remember now. I heard that his branch of the family went broke."
"Where did you know him, Dee?" asked Osterhout.
"Oh, it's a long story, Bobs," said the girl lightly.
Herein she said what was not true. It was a short story; short and vivid and bewildering. In the darkness she ran over the whole scope of it, every detail as clear as if it had not occurred nearly a year before: the breakdown of her motor car in the open country near Rahway; the stranger on the bank of a stream who had put down his rod and come to her aid, a roughly dressed stranger with questing eyes and a quaint turn of speech; the long and patient tinkering, with the mechanism, ending in a second collapse; the luncheon offered and shared, the talk that followed, a long, long talk such as Dee had never before known, running through luminous hours, touching all the realms of fancy until the incredulous sun turned his face from them and went down; the drive back to the village where she left him; his final words, "I am resisting anintolerable temptation when I say no more than good-bye and thank you," and then nothing until now.
Scott's voice broke in upon her meditations. "I must find out where he is."
"I don't believe I would, Cary," she advised after Osterhout had bidden them good-night.
"What? Not look up old Stanley? Why not?"
"I think he's cut himself off from all the old life. He—he's a queer person."
Until the car drew in at Holiday Knoll Scott thought that over in silence. Then he laid a friendly hand over Dee's. "Old girl," he said gently, "you seem to know a lot about him."
"So I do. You can learn a lot in an afternoon."
"There's a lot to learn. He's a wonderful person. Pretty tough to find him like this.... Are you really interested in him, Dee?"
"Who? Me? I shouldsaynot!" returned Dee hardily. "I'm going to marry Jimmie James."
Ripples from the swimming party spread to wash far shores. Although the participants had been sworn to secrecy, the details had of course been whispered confidentially, adorning themselves with rich imaginings as they travelled. For this, the inopportune electrician was blamed, the indictment against him being strengthened by the astounding fact that Wally Dangerfield, seeking to bribe him into a promise of silence, had been effectually snubbed. To the indirect procurement of the outsider was attributed a specially lively brace of paragraphs inTown Topics, even less veiled than was typical of that journal's transparent allusions. Penetrating within the virginal confines of the Sisterhood School where it was naturally upon the Index Expurgatorius, the publication entranced Pat and also contributed in no small degree to her prestige. Having a sister who was involved in a T.T. scandal was feather for any girl's cap!
Pat cherished the glittering ambition of one day appearing in those glorifying pages herself.
She wrote to Dee begging to be told all about it. In return came a letter informing her of her sister's engagement to Jameson James. Connie also wrote saying that it had come off at last, it was a very good thing, and everybody was satisfied. But the genuine opinion of the betrothal went forth from the pen of Robert Osterhout to, or perhaps only toward, the dead Mona.
"I do not pretend to understand it, my dearest," he wrote, "and what I do not understand I do not like. The scientific spirit of resentment. Dee is still unawakened.James has no appeal for her; of that I am satisfied. It will not be he who interprets for her her womanhood. Perhaps it will not be anyone. Nevertheless, our proud Dee has grown inexplicably docile, almost meek. And Jimmy inspires me with a daily desire to kick him, by adopting a condescending attitude toward her, as if he were doing quite a noble thing in marrying her. Such is the position in which she has been put by that infernal 'Dangerfield Dip' episode, as it is generally called. In some way, though I don't know how, the engagement was the result of that party. From what I can learn, the swimau naturelwas playful rather than vicious; but the scandal has been lively. There was a strange passage between Dee and a workman who seems to be a gentleman under cover, which puzzled me. Disturbs me, too, a bit.... How you may be laughing at all this, my darling, with your wider, deeper vision!
"Holiday Knoll will be duller when Dee leaves. To me it has been an empty shell since your bright spirit went out of it. Yet I derive my sad satisfactions in looking after the girls as best I may and in trying to make myself hold to the belief of some intangible contact with you through these letters. Ralph is at home very little. When Pat comes back the place will liven up again. Perhaps my tired old ears will recapture from her some of the music of life with which you filled the place.... I wish that Dee were less still and self-contained. She doesn't talk to me any more; not as she used to."
To all the Fentriss household Dee was a puzzle in the days following her engagement, not less to herself, Osterhout suspected, than to the others. Home early from school, because of an outbreak of scarlet fever there,Pat complained to him, sitting perched on an arm of his chair with a hand on his shoulder.
"Bobs, Dee is moony."
"Is she? And what is 'moony'?"
"You know she is," returned Pat, scorning to waste time on obvious definitions. "Isn't her engagement going all right?"
"So far as I can judge. She hasn't confided in me."
"Bad sign. In some girls it would be a good sign. Not in Dee," pronounced the oracular Pat with her head on one side like a considering and sagacious bird.
"Has she talked to you?"
"No; she hasn't. Bet you she will, though. Dee's a lot more chummish with me than she used to be."
"Because Connie is married. That throws Dee back on you."
"It ought to throw her back on Jimmiejams. I'm not wild about T. Jameson James, Bobs. He's rather a sob."
"What have you got against your future brother-in-law?"
"Oh, he's so stiff and bumpy. So darn impressed with his own correctness. And it's mostly bluff. He tried to kiss me last night."
Osterhout's face darkened for the moment, but he said: "Why not? You're only a child to him, and one of the family."
"Brotherly stuff; I know. Only it wasn't too brotherly. Well," she laughed knowingly, "I don't suppose he gets much of that sort of thing from Dee."
"Dee's a strange little person," said the doctor absently.
"She'd be my idea of nothing to be engaged to if I were a man."
Which opinion she later expressed, in slightly modified terms, to the subject of it.
"Oh, well, Jimmy understands," responded Dee negligently.
"I don't believe any man understands. I don't believe you understand anything about it yourself."
"Don't I!" muttered Dee.
Pat stared with all her big eyes. "Well,doyou?"
"Pat," said the other, fidgetting with an unlighted cigarette—she had taken to smoking, although it was bad for her golf, since her engagement—"you've kissed men."
"What if I have?" retorted Pat, instantly on the sullen defensive. "Everyone does. You have."
"Men have kissed me. It's different."
"I'll cable the Emperor of Japan it's different," chuckled the slangy Pat.
"What do you get out of it?"
"You've got a nerve to ask me that; you, an engaged girl!"
"I'm asking because I don't know."
"Tell you one thing, then," said Pat earnestly. "I wouldn't marry any man that couldn't make me know."
Dee murmured something that sounded like "Might just as well."
Thus interpreting it the younger sister returned: "Yes; you might. You're different."
"I'm not different. I always thought I was, until——"
"Until!" cried Pat in great excitement. "Until what? Who's the man? And when did it happen?"
"It never happened."
"Then you're a dam' fool," replied the other with conviction. "If I was crazy about a man I bet I'd kiss him if it was only for—for experiment."
"I've always thought that sort of thing was imbecile. Sort of sickening."
"Do I know him?" demanded the practical Pat.
"No."
"Evens and odds I do. Tell Pattie," she wheedled.
With face gloomily averted, Dee pursued her main preoccupation. "Do you feel when you kiss a man as if all your nerves were strung wires and an electric shock went flaming along them and then died out and left youplah?"
"Oh!" jeered Pat softly. "And you claim that you've never been really kissed."
"I haven't. But he—he lifted me in his arms once. And I felt his heart beating.... And then afterwards, do you hate and despise yourself for letting it affect you that way?" queried the neophyte of passion, interpreting dimly the sharp revulsion of her undefeated maidenhood against its own first weakening toward surrender.
"No. Of course I don't. Why should I?" Pat reflected. "I have been ashamed, though—a little. But that was because of what someone said to me about it. A friend. He made it seem cheap."
"Cheap? Oh, no; it wasn't cheap. But that's what I felt; that ashamedness afterward. As strongly as I felt the other. Stronger."
Instinctive psychologist enough to know that the rebound is never as powerful as the impact, Pat disbelieved this. "Just the same I think you're taking a big chance marrying Jimmy. Why don't you marry the—the thriller?"
"Don't!" snapped Dee. "You're making it cheap now."
"But why don't you?" persisted the junior.
"I couldn't."
"Is he married already? Thatwouldbe binding!"
"No. I don't know," Dee amended with a startled realisation of how little she did know in comparison with what she felt. "He might just as well be. I'll never see him again."
"I would," asserted Pat. "If it was that way with me. If he was the only one."
"Of course he's the only one. Could you feel that with any man? I can't understand that," marvelled Dee.
"Oh, no! Not with just anyone. I'd have to like him. Quite a good deal. It isn't so hard to like 'em when they make love to you. But I'm off'n that stuff," sighed Pat, turning demure. "There's nothing in it." Again she thought of Mr. Scott and that evening of disastrous revelation at the club. His influence had persisted. She quite prided herself that it had. She had thought much about him as one might think of a benign guardian and had written once to bespeak the continuance of their friendship. "How's Con's affair coming on?" she asked, as a logical mental sequitur.
"With Cary Scott? He's away. Back in Paris for a couple of months' stay."
"Do you like him, Dee?"
"Yes. A lot."
"He isn't the man, is he?" demanded Pat sharply.
Dee's laughter was refutation enough. "Catch me poaching Connie's game. It couldn't be done."
"Oh, I don't know," replied the other airily. "Mr. Scott's got too much brains for old Con. Do you think she's crazy over him?"
"I think she misses him."
"When's he coming back?"
"In time for the wedding, anyway."
"The wedding! When is it, Dee?"
"Second week in July," said Dee without enthusiasm.
"So soon! Am I going to be a bridesmaid?"
"No."
"Oh-h-h-h-h!" wailed Pat. "Pig!"
"You're to be maid of honour."
Pat gave her little, hoarse crow of ecstasy. "How darling of you! That'stoodivine! Are you going to give me my frock?"
Dee nodded. They talked clothes, absorbedly. When she got up to go Pat leaned over and kissed her sister, the first time since they were children that she had done this except as a formality of family life.
"I almost wish you weren't going to do it, though, Dee," she murmured.
"I don't," said Dee resolutely.
"If I could find it in my heart, dearest one, to blame you for anything, it would be for sending little Pat to the Sisterhood School." (So wrote Robert Osterhout to Mona Fentriss.) "With the best of intentions they wreck a mind as thoroughly as house-wreckers gut a building. It was your choice and I dare not change it. Even if I could persuade Ralph to take her out of that environment and send her to Bryn Mawr or Vassar or Smith, which is where she ought to be, she would rebel. She has a contempt for 'those rah-rah girls,' a prejudice bred of the shallow and self-sufficient snobbery which is the basic lesson of her scholastic experience. To be sure, they have finished her in the outward attributes of good form, but most of that is a natural heritage which any daughter of yours would have. She can be, when on exhibition, the most impeccable little creature, sparkling, and easy and natural and charmingly deferential toward the older people with whom she comes in contact—when she chooses. For the most part she elects to be calmly careless, slovenly of speech and manner, or lightly impudent. To have good breeding at call but not to waste it on most people—that is the cachet of her set.
"But these are surface matters. It is the inner woman—yes, beloved—our little Pat is coming to conscious and dynamic womanhood—which concerns me now and would concern you could you be here. Appalls me, too. But perhaps that is because my standards are the clumsy man-standards. What is she going to get out of life for herself? What does all this meaningless preparation,aside from the polishing process, look to? If hers were just a stupid, satisfied mind, a pattern intellect like Constance's, it would not so much matter. Or if she had the self-discipline and control which Dee's athletics have given her, I should be less troubled. But Pat's is a strange little brain; hungry, keen and uncontrolled. It really craves food, and it is having its appetite blunted by sweets and drugs. Is there nothing that I can do? I hear you ask it. Yes; now that she is at home I can train her a little, but not rigorously, for her mind is too soft and pampered to set itself seriously to any real task. In the days of her childish gluttony I used to drive her into a fury by mocking her for her pimples, and finally, by excoriating her vanity, got her to adopt a reasonable diet. The outer pimples are gone. But if one could see her mind, it would be found pustulous with acne. And there can I do little against the damnable influence of the school which has taught her that a hard-trained, clean-blooded mind is not necessary. The other girls do not go in for it. Why be a highbrow? She is so easily a leader in the school, and, as she boasts, puts it over the teachers in any way she pleases. In the days before she became aware of herself it used to be hard to get her to brush her teeth. To-day I presume that her worthy preceptresses would expel her if she did not use the latest dentifrice twice a day. But they are quite willing to let her mind become overlaid with foul scum for want of systematic brushing up.
"Dynamite for that institution and all like it! Nothing else would serve. With all your luxuriousness, Mona, your love of excitement, yourcarpe diemphilosophy of life (Pat, who has 'taken' Latin, does not know whatcarpe diemsignifies), your eagerness for the immediate satisfactions of the moment, you never let your brainbecome softened and untrained and fat. The higher interests were just as much a part of the embellishment of life to you as were flowers or games, music or friends. What inner friends will little Pat have? Not literature. Shakespeare she knows because she must; the school course requires it. But he is a task, not a delight. Thackeray is slow and Dickens a bore. Poetry is a mechanical exercise; I doubt whether a single really beautiful line of Shelley or Keats or Coleridge remains in her memory, though she can chant R. W. Service and Walt Mason. Swinburne she has read on the sly, absorbing none of the luminousness of his flame; only the heat. Similarly, Balzac means to her the 'Contes Drolatiques,' also furtively perused. Conrad and Wells are vague names; something to save until she is older. But O. Henry she dutifully deems a classic and is quite familiar with his tight-rope performances; proud of it, too, as evincing an up-to-date erudition. As for 'the latest books of the day,' she is keen on them, particularly if they happen to be some such lewd and false achievement as the intolerable 'Arab.' Any book spoken of under the breath has for her the stimulus of a race; she must absorb it first and look knowing and demure when it is mentioned. The age of sex, Mona.... Her standards of casual reading are of like degree; she considersTown Topicsan important chronicle andVanity Faira symposium of pure intellect.
"Yet she has been taking a course in Literature at the school!
"Science has no thrill for Pat; therefore she ignores it. Futile little courses in 'How to Know' things like flowers and birds and mushrooms have gone no deeper than the skin. No love of nature has been inculcated by them. She hardly knows the names of the greatscientists. Einstein she recognises through having seen his travels chronicled and heard vaudeville jokes about him. But mention Pasteur or Metchnikoff and you would leave her groping; and she doubtless would identify Lister as one who achieved fame by inventing a mouth wash. However, she could at once tell you the name of the fashionable physician to go to for nervous breakdown.
"Her economics are as vague as her science. Politics are a blank. But to be found ignorant of the most recent trend of the movies or the names of their heroes, or not to know the latest gag of some unspeakable vulgarian of the revues—that would overwhelm her with shame. Her speech and thought are largely a reflection of the contemporary stage. Not the stage of Shaw and O'Neill, but of bedroom farce and trite musical comedy. Thus far she compares unfavourably in education with the average shop girl.
"In music and art the reckoning is better. But this again is largely inherited. If the sap-headed sisterhood have not fostered, they at least have not tainted her sound instincts in these directions. She has followed her own bent.
"As it is a professedly denominational school she has, of course, specialised or been specialised upon as a churchwoman. A very sound and correct churchwoman, but not much of a Godwoman. No philosophy and very little ethics are to be found in her religion. Worship is for her a bargain of which the other consideration is prayer. She gives to God certain praises and observances and asks in return special favours. 'I'll do this for you, God, and you do as much for me some day.' Her expectancy of assured returns she regards as a praiseworthy and pious quality known as faith. Blasphemy, of course. Not the poor child's. The sin, whichis a sin of ignorance and loose thinking, is upon the sanctified sisterhood. They have classified the Deity for Pat: God as a social arbiter.
"The sisterhood are purists. Naturally. But purists only by negation. All the essential facts they dodge. True, there is a course in hygiene. It is conducted by a desiccated virgin who minces about the simple and noble facts of sex life as if she were afraid of getting her feet wet, and whose soul would shrivel within her could she overhear the casual conversation of the girls whom she purports to instruct. All that side of knowledge and conjecture they absorb from outside contacts. A worse medium would be hard to conceive. From what Pat indicates of the tittle-tattle of ingénues' luncheons, it would enlighten Rabelais and shock Pepys! And the current jokes between the girls and their boy associates of college age are chiefly innuendo anddouble ententebased on sex. Pat cannot say 'bed' or 'leg' or 'skin' without an expectant self-consciousness. Some reechy sort of bedroom story has been lately going the rounds, the point of which is involved in the words 'nudge' and 'phone.' Every time either word is used in Pat's set, there are knowing looks and sniggers, and some nimble wit makes a quick turn of the context and gets his reward in more or less furtive laughter. It is not so much the moral side, it is the nauseous bad taste that sickens one. The mind decays in that atmosphere. Once Pat said to me: 'Bobs, you and Mr. Scott are the only clean-minded men I know.' Think of what that means, Mona! The viciousness of such an environment. Yet the youngsters themselves are not essentially vicious; not many of them. They are curious with the itchy curiosity of their explorative time of life, and they have no proper guidance. The girls are worse off than the boys who do gain somestandards in college. But our finishing schools, churchly or otherwise! Hell is paved with their good intentions. Pat's is not worse than the others, I suppose. But the pity of it; the waste of it for her. Hers is such a vivid mind; such a brave, straightforward little mind; at war with that hungry, passionate temperament of hers, yet instinctively clean if it could be protected from befoulment. I have been talking biology with her and she absorbs it with such swift, sure appreciation. The day of trial for her will come when the lighter amusements pall and her brain demands something to feed on—unless before that time it becomes totally encysted.
"Cary Scott's influence on her is good. She likes and respects him and is a little afraid of him, too. He has a quality of quiet contempt for cheap and shoddy things to which she responds, though not always without bursts of her fiery little temper. If he were less of the natural aristocrat in all the outer attributes he would not impress her so. Meantime I am glad to see him take some interest even though it be but a playfully intellectual one, in anyone who will divert his mind from Constance. Sometimes I have thought disaster imminent in that quarter. Disaster! How readily one falls into the moralist's speech, and how your dear lips would quirk at that tone from me, dearest. Yet a liaison between those two would be potentially disastrous. For Connie has nothing to give to a man like Cary Scott except her beauty. If he is the man I think him, he will never take her for that alone; or, if he does, be long satisfied with it. Yet her charm is terribly strong.... I wonder whether you really loved Cary Scott, Mona, as I have loved and still love you...."
Coming downstairs after writing this letter, from the dead woman's room where a desk had been set aside forhim as executor of her estate, Osterhout found Cary Scott, dressed in evening clothes, waiting in the library. On his return from his trip abroad Scott had unobtrusively resumed his established place at Holiday Knoll. He had seen as much of Constance as before, perhaps more, because Dee, between whom and Scott a very frank and easy friendship had grown up, was occupied with Jameson James to the partial exclusion of other associations, and therefore Scott was less with her than formerly. He did not like James.
Scott and the doctor greeted each other cordially.
"You have a festive air to-night," remarked Osterhout.
"Yes. It's the special symphony concert this evening. I'm taking Constance."
"No, you're not," contradicted a hoarse and gay voice. Pat smiled upon them from the entrance.
The two men turned to look at her. She stood, one hand above the tousled shimmer of her short, dark hair, lightly holding by the lintel. In her eyes were laughter, anticipation, and a plea. Her strong, young figure preserving still much of the adorable awkwardness of undeveloped youth, had fallen into a posture of stilled expectancy. She wore a sweater of some exotic, metallic blue, a short, barred skirt, and woollen stockings, displaying the firm, rounded legs.
"You're takingme. Aren't you?" she added in the husky, breaking sweetness of her voice.
Into the minds of the two men darted diverse responses to the appeal of the interrupter. Cary Scott thought, "What a child it is!" Wiser and more cognisant, through experience of the years, Robert Osterhout said within himself, "Good Lord! It's a woman."
"Why the charming substitution?" inquired Scott inthe manner which, to her unfailing delight, he used toward Pat as toward any of his older associates.
"Con's got a headache."
Cary Scott understood perfectly. This was subterfuge on Constance's part. She was unready to face the issue. There had been a preamble between them on the previous evening; tacitly it was understood that this evening was to determine their future relations. And now she was shirking the crisis. Or was she merely playing the part of the "teaser," drawing back the more to inflame his ardour—and perhaps her own? Of the two hypotheses Scott inclined to the former. It was more in consonance with her natural inertia of character. If she were in love with him it was not the kind of love which justified itself by daring, by taking the risks, by boldly facing sacrifice. Inexplicably he felt a quality of relief mingling with his natural pique. He was well satisfied to postpone, to let the decision go, to find relaxation in taking Pat to the concert. In the companionship of this eager, acute, vivid child he would breathe a clearer atmosphere, with something of a mental stimulus, a tingle in it, that which he most missed in his association with the married sister. All of this rapid cogitation was quite without reflected effect upon his imperturbable manner as he said:
"Tell Constance that I'm so sorry, won't you? And that I appreciate her sending so delightful a substitute."
"Oh, she didn't send me," answered Pat composedly. "It's all my own idea."
"A very good one," grunted Osterhout. "Pat's a connoisseur of music. But don't keep my infant out too late, Scott."
"All right, Pop," returned Scott with mocking deference, as the older man left.
"How long can you wait?" demanded Pat of her escort.
"I can't wait at all. My car is champing at the leash now."
Pat's illumined face fell. "But I can't go this way."
"Why not? I like you that way."
"But you're always so awfully correct. I look like a mess."
"You look like"—he searched for and found the picture—"like a mediæval page."
She made a grimace. "Yes. A boy." In frank unconsciousness she set her hands with spread fingers against her breasts. "Flat, like a board," she said disconsolately.
"I like it," he reassured her. "It's part of the charm."
She gave her characteristic soft crow of pleasure. "That'sthe nicest thing you could possibly say to me. D'you mean it? Really?"
"Of course I mean it. Why not?"
"I thought men liked girls to be just the other way. All rounded." She peered at him doubtfully. "Perhaps it's because you're old," she surmised.
Taken aback for the moment he interpreted the innocent speech too literally. "I'm not as old as that. Though I don't suppose—I rather wonder what you meant by that."
"Oh, nothing! Just that the point of view must be different. Isn't it? Less personal."
"It's very personal in this case," he retorted with a real warmth of friendliness for this strange and appealing child, "and quite simple. You're a very delightful little Pat. I like your type.Petite gamine."
"What's that?"
"Isn't French taught in your school?"
"It's taught; but it isn't necessarily learned," sheanswered, summing up in that flash of criticism the essential falsity of the whole finishing school system.
"I see. You know what a gamin is?"
"Gamin?" She gave it the English pronunciation. "Oh, yes."
"Gamineis the feminine. But there's a suggestion in it of something more delicate and fetching; of verve, of—of diablerie. As there is in you. It's hard to say in English. I could describe you better in French."
"Could you? Then I'll learn French. And I think it's divine of you," said she, employing her favourite adjective, "to like my funny, flat figure. You know," she added, sparkling at him mischievously, "you're taking a chance on this concert thing."
"Any special chance other than that of being late?"
"Oh, I shan't be a minute, now that I needn't dress. Yes; you're taking a big chance. I'm an awful nut over music. It does all kinds of things to me. I'm quite capable of falling on your neck and bursting into sobs if they play anything I awfully like."
Beneath the lightness he sensed a real emotion. "Are you really so fond of it? Then I'm doubly glad that you're going."
"Iadoreit. Really good music, I mean. Oh, I do wish I could play or sing or do something worth while."
"Have you ever tried?"
She shrugged her shoulders. "Too lazy. If it wasn't for the boring practice I might do something." She raised her voice and sang the opening bars of the Hindu Sleep-Song.
"The devil!" exclaimed Cary Scott.
All the huskiness had passed from the voice, which issued from the full throat, pure, fresh-toned, deep and effortless.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," he declared so vehemently that she pouted.
"Now you're scolding me."
"Because you're letting a voice like that go untrained."
"Lots of people like it as it is," she said resentfully.
"Then they don't recognise what a really lovely thing it might be, properly handled. Why haven't you taken lessons?"
Again the shrug. "I did. But I stopped. Too much trouble. Will you teach me?"
"I? Heavens, no! You want a professional."
"What! and practice an hour every day?" cried the horrified Pat.
"Two hours. Three probably. It would be worth it."
"I'd be bored to a frazz."
"You're bored with anything that means work, discipline, self-restraint. Aren't you, Pat?"
"Are you going to lecture me again? I love it," she observed unexpectedly and with a brilliant smile.
In spite of himself he laughed. "No. I'm going to take you to the concert. Get your hat."
Settling herself in the car like a contented kitten, Pat presently said: "There's something I want to tell you, Mr. Scott. Only it isn't too easy to begin."
"Why not? We're friends, aren't we?"
"Right! That makes it easier. You remember at the club; what we talked about?"
"Yes."
"I've been awfully good—about that. I haven't, at all. At least, nothing serious."
"I am flattered to have been so good an influence," he remarked with his faintly ironic inflection. Constance would not have caught it. But little Pat's ear was truer.
"Don't josh me about it," she protested. "Nobody'sever tried to be a good influence for me really. Except Bobs. And he doesn't know."
"Why doesn't he know?"
"Too old. But," she added in afterthought, "you're old, too, aren't you!"
"Terribly."
"I'd almost forgotten that," she said thoughtfully.
Coming out of the concert hall after the last, culminating burst of harmony, Cary Scott drew a deep breath of the night air. Lover and connoisseur of music though he had always been, never in his recollection had it so penetrated his being as now. Better programmes he had listened to, more perfectly rendered. But the companionship of the intensely responsive young girl, her superb and poignant vitality concentrated upon the great waves of sensation which had swept over their spirits, interpreted the numbers for him in a new measure. Timidly, tentatively at first, then more boldly as the ardent influences took hold upon her, Pat had yearned to him in the semi-darkness which surrounded them. The sweet, firm curve of her shoulder first, then the close pressure of her knee; soon her fingers, creeping to his hand, clasping and being enfolded, the fragrance of her light, quick breath, rhythmic upon his cheek. It seemed as if she had become subtly the medium and instrument of all the splendour of sound, as if the music were flowing in the currents of her woman's body out upon him and around him in a submerging flood.
Now they were in the open air. She walked beside him, her face dreamy and demure, the faintest of smiles implicit in the up-slanted corners of her mouth.
"Wasn't it—magic!" she breathed.
"Yes, magic," he assented.
They located and entered his car. For a time the intricacies of the traffic engrossed his attention. As they passed into the light-shot spaciousness of the park he turned to her.
"Well?"
"Don't let's talk. I want to just remember."
He nodded and she leaned to him momentarily again, kitten-like, caressing, grateful for his understanding. He, too, was glad of the respite, for, man of the world though he was, he had been strangely, unexpectedly shaken. It was Pat who, long minutes later, sighed and broke the silence with the hoarse, enticing sweetness of her tones.
"What did you do it for, Mr. Scott?"
"I? Do what?" He was surprised by the directness of the attack.
"Oh, well! I, then. You know. What did you let me do it for?"
He made no reply. In his stillness was a sense of expectancy to which she responded.
"I warned you what music did to me. But you—you needn't have let me——" She paused. "Do you like me a little?" she murmured.
"Yes. A little."
"Only a little?" she teased, half child demanding the comfort of affection, half conscious coquette. "Not more than that?"
"Perhaps a little more," he smiled.
"But not half as much as you do Con," she said deliberately.
He was silent, his attention apparently engrossed in a heavy truck which gave them bare passing room.
"Do you?" she insisted, daring greatly.
"Do I what?"
"Like me as much as you do Con? Half as much, I mean."
"If I did do you think I should tell you?"
"Why shouldn't you? But I thought you were crazy over Con. She thinks so."
Scott hummed one of the passages from the final number of the concert.
"Oh,verywell. I'm only making conversation. I don't really want to talk at all. I'd rather think. All the rest of the way home."
Arrived at Holiday Knoll, he stepped from the car and held out a hand to her. "Good-night, Pat."
"Aren't you coming in?"
"I think not."
"Ah, do," she wheedled. "Just for a minute."
He turned to look at the broad, rambling house. A dim light burned in the library; a brighter one in Dee's room overhead. Constance's room was dark. He was vaguely glad of that.
"I haven't even thanked you yet," she observed.
"You needn't."
"Then you ought to thank me," she asserted daringly, "for taking Connie's place. Do come in. Perhaps I can find you a drink."
"I don't want a drink, thank you," he returned; but he followed her through the door.
"It's us, Dee," called the girl, projecting her voice up the stairway as she led the way to the library. "Mr. Scott and me."
"All right," Dee responded. "I'm in my nightie or I'd come down. Have a good time?"
"Gee-lorious!" said Pat. She took off her hat, fluffed up her short, heavy hair with a double-handed scuffle characteristic of her, and moved forward to the table.
In the diffused soft radiance of the one light, Scott stared at her. Her pose was languid, her eyes sombrewith the still passion of lovely sounds remembered. Slowly the lids drooped over them. She tilted her chin and in her effortless, liquid voice of song gave out the exquisite rhythm of a melody from the Tschaikowsky Fifth which they had just heard.
"Don't, Pat," muttered Scott.
"Don't you like it?"
"I love it. So—don't."
She moved toward him, her throat still quivering with the beauty of sound, and lifted her hand to the bright, curt waves of hair at his temple, brushing them lightly back. A dusky colour glowed in her cheeks. As the dim echo of the music died, she leaned to him. Her lips, light, fervent, cool, softly firm, met his, lingered upon them for the smallest, sweetest moment as a moth hovers in its flight from a flower. Then she, too, was in flight.
"Good-night," she whispered back to him from the doorway.
Pat's challenge to Stancia's supremacy gave Scott plenty to speculate about. His first sentiment was amusement that this daring child should have deliberately elected to enter the lists against her older and more beautiful sister. But what was Pat's interest in him? Flirtation? Evidently. He guessed that it was the dash of diablerie in her that had inspired the experiment. Nevertheless, he was conscious of a rather excited interest in and curiosity about her, not as a precocious child, but as a reckonable woman with distinct provocations of person and mind. In comparison with her, Scott reflected (and was shocked at his own disloyalty in so reflecting) Stancia was becoming insipid.
He discovered, in thinking it over, that there had grown up an impalpable embarrassment between Stancia and himself, and that it seemed to have been growing for sometime; an inexplicable thing between those two who had approached so near to embarkation upon the love-adventure perilous. Had she noticed it? He wondered. Had he been so bold as to put the query to her, she would have hardly known how to reply. She was conscious that at times she failed to hold his interest; that his mind seemed to wander away from her; but, in the self-sufficiency of her beauty, she set that down to a quality of vagueness in his character. He was unfailingly gentle, considerate, and helpful wherever, in her luxurious and hard-pressed life, she allowed him to help. And he asked nothing in return.
This piqued, even while it relieved her. For she was no longer adventurous. The layers of fat were insulating that soft and comfort-enslaved soul. Scott, striving to maintain the appearances of a loyalty which he did not really owe (how he thanked his gods for that now!) found her loveliness growing monotonous, her inertia of mind, irritant. "Nothing above the ears," Pat had said; wicked little Pat, whose vividness so far outshone the mere beauty of the elder. The harsh truth of the slang had stuck.
His next encounter with the girl was several days later when he was keeping an appointment with Stancia in the library at the Knoll; the merest fleeting glimpse of the boyish girl-figure as it passed through the hallway, followed by the heart-troubling, deep thrill of her voice raised in the Tschaikowsky melody.... "I've asked you twice," he was conscious of Stancia saying plaintively, "and you don't pay any attention."
"I really beg your pardon," apologised Scott. "Awfully stupid of me. Of course, I shall be delighted to stay to luncheon."
As he was leaving early in the afternoon, Pat hurried after him to intercept the car.
"Take me down to the village with you, Mr. Scott?"
"Indeed I will."
She jumped in. "I don't want to go to the village," said she in quite a different tone, as the car took the curve. "I want to talk."
"It's a worthy ambition. So do I. Where shall we go?"
"Anywhere."
He whirled the car around an abrupt corner and headed for the open country.
"I cried that night after the concert," Pat informed him. She was staring straight in front of her.
"My dear!" he murmured.
"I'mnotyour dear."
"No. You're not. I must remember that."
"Not a bit—to-day. I've had time to think."
"So have I."
She whirled on him. "Have you changed, too?" she demanded with animation and dismay, quaintly negligent of the implied inconsistency.
"No. I haven't changed."
"I'm glad," said she naïvely. Then, stealing a glance at him, "Do you still like me—a little?"
A little? How much did he "like" this bewitching child? Was "like" a sufficient word at all for the feeling which had taken such puzzling growth within him? He could not have answered the query to himself satisfactorily, and had no intention of defining his attitude for her benefit.
"Tell me," she whispered. "I think you might."
"I have many things to tell you, little Pat," he replied with his foreign precision of speech; "but that is not one of them."
"It's the one I want to hear," said willful Pat.
"First, do you tell me: why did you cry that night?"
"Conscience. No," she contradicted herselfthoughtfully; "that's a bluff. I don't know. Sort of nervousness, I expect."
"That is what I feared for you; that you would brood over it and make yourself unhappy——"
"It wasn't that at all," interrupted Pat simply and promptly. "But I did want to see you again and know that you didn't think—that I wasn't too awfully—that I didn't seem just a fresh kid to you."
"No. You didn't."
"Was that being 'petite gamine'?" She threw a sidelong glance at him.
"Was it? You should know."
"After all, it was only a white kiss."
"Awhat?"
"White kiss. There are white kisses and red kisses," she explained unconcernedly.
"You have no right to that kind of knowledge," said he sternly. "Where did you come by it?"
"I told you," she muttered gloomily, "that I used to be a terrible necker."
"Yes. But—that sort of thing! Don't you know that's dangerous?"
"Would it be with you?" she asked with direct and naïve curiosity.
"There is no question of it with me," he answered rigidly. "But, so far as that goes, no. I am old enough to know how to control myself."
"Then you're different from most men," she returned bitterly.
"Good God, child! Have you learned that already? At your age?"
"Since we're telling each other our real names," said Pat in her levelest tones, "the first time I was kissed I was hardly fifteen."
"You seem to have been unfortunately precocious."
She flashed a smile at him. "Are you jealous?"
The amazing realisation came to him that he was. But he answered steadily: "What right should I have to be jealous of what you might do?"
"Suppose Iwantyou to be?"
This he chose to disregard. "I don't believe that you understand yourself, your temperament." He was trying to hold himself to a tone of cool diagnosis. "I wish I were your Dr. Bobs for fifteen minutes."
"Well, I don't," she retorted. "Bobs's middle names are Sterling Worth; but I'd rather have you lecture me.Youunderstand."
"I understand that you are of a very high-strung, neurotic, excitable temperament."
Gloom overshadowed her face again. "You're not telling me any news about myself."
"Then you must see how perilous it is for a girl like you to be what you call a necker."
"Oh, as far as that goes," she answered coolly, "I've always got my foot on the brake. Every minute. If things get too hectic I can always see the ridiculous side of it and get up a laugh. It's a grand little safeguard, being able to laugh at yourself."
"I suppose it is. As long as youareable."
"Anyway, I've been terribly proper ever since you talked to me that night at the party. Wise virgin stuff! Do you know you've got a lot of influence over me, Mr. Scott?"
"Have I? I'm glad of that."
"So am I. But I don't quite know why you should have." She pondered. "Unless it's because there's something about you that makes the other men seem clumsy and—andlocal."
He laughed. "I'm very flattered."
"Don't make fun of me," pouted Pat. "I'm serious. Particularly about your having influence over me. Since our talk I've passed up all sorts of chances to have a flutter. I don't believe I've kissed three boys, in all."
Despite himself Scott queried acidly: "And were they red or white kisses?"
"Well, one of them might have had a dash of pink in it. No; I just said that to tease you," she added impulsively. "I really have been boringly good. It isn't too easy, either."
"Pat, why don't you talk to Dr. Bobs about yourself?"
"I will if you want me to," said she submissively.
"It would be a good thing, assuming that you would talk frankly."
"Where shall I begin? By telling him about us?" she inquired demurely.
Upon this Scott's inner commentary was, "You little devil!" Aloud he said composedly: "If you think it significant. But what I said was about yourself."
"Oh, I'm well enough," said she carelessly.
"Are you happy enough?"
She gave him a startled glance. "Why should you think I'm not happy?"
"I didn't say I thought so. I simply asked you."
"Well, I am." But there was a hint of defiance in her tone. "And youdothink I'm not."
"I think you're restless and discontented."
"What makes you think that?" she asked, curiously, leaning over to him so that the warm curve of her arm pressed his.
He glanced not at her but at her encroaching shoulder. "Because of just that sort of thing."
She snatched her arm away. "I hate you!"
"Better hate me than yourself. As you did that night at the club."
Tears welled up in her eyes. Her chin trembled and there was a soft, heart-thrilling catch in the huskiness of her voice, barely controlled enough to enunciate: "I don't see why you're so mean to me."
"Why, it's a child!" he exclaimed in mock self-reproach. "And I keep forgetting and treating it like a grown-up."
"That's why I love to be with you. I want to be treated that way."
"Oh, no! You merely think you do. In reality you want to be petted and flattered and coddled and approved in all your cunning and silly little ways. That would be very easy. Only—it isn't part of our compact."
With one of her mercurial changes she flashed a smile at him. "I'd nearly forgotten. You were to be my wise and guiding friend, weren't you? Is that why you're telling me that I'm restless and discontented?"
"Well, aren't you?"
"Not more than the other girls."
"Is that an answer?"
"No. Yes, it is, too! Why should I be different?"
"Because you're you."
"'Be-causeyou'reyou,'" she sang gaily to the measure of an elderly but still popular song. "I like to have you say that. How do you think I'm different?"
"Ah, that I can't say. You see, I don't know the girls of your age much."
"No; you're always playing around with the married women," she remarked calmly. "Well, you don't miss much. They're a lot of dimwits, the girls of my age here. No snap. If they can get a couple of rounds of bridge in the afternoon and a cocktail before dinner and a speed-limit whizz around the country in somebody's car, or afew hours of jazz, or a snuggling party with some good-looking boy on the porch, that'll keep them from suicide for quite a spell."
"I see. They seek the same distractions from the prevailing restlessness——"
"You needn't finish," she broke in. "Yes; we're all alike. There isn't a girl that doesn't go in for spooning if she likes the boy—and a lot of 'em aren't even too particular about that—except maybe the Standish girls, and they've been brought up as if their house was a convent. At that, Ailsa Standish told me the conundrum about why girls wear their hair covering their ears. D'you know it?" she enquired with a palpable effect of brazen hardihood. But she turned her head away from the quiet disgust of his look as he answered:
"Yes, I know it. But you've no business to. It strikes me that you're in a pretty rotten set."
"It's the only set in Dorrisdale," defended Pat sullenly. "And we're slow compared to some of the other towns."
"Well, if you think it's worth it," he began slowly when she cut in, with a sort of cry, throwing out her hands, those large, supple, shapely, capable hands, in a gesture of despair and appeal. "But what's a girl to do?"
"Doesn't your school give you anything?"
"Not a dam' thing that I don't want to get and get easy. All they try to do is make it easy for you to get through. They won't even issue diplomas for fear some of the girls couldn't pass the exams and their people would get sore on the school. I study when I feel like it, and that isn't too often."
"Will you do something for me, Pat?"
"Yes; I'd love to," was the eager reply.
"Make something of your voice. You can do it with a little work."
At the last word she assumed an expression of distrust. "How much work?"
"Two hours a day, perhaps."
"Two hours a day! For how long?"
"A year of it would give you a start."
"Two whole hours out of every day for a year? What do you take me for; a machine?" Scott's nerves quivered with the strident rasp of the voice, like the squawk of a dismayed and indignant hen. "Why, I wouldn't have any time for anything else."
"Some days have as much as twenty-four hours in them," he pointed out. "However, you might make a start with an hour."
"I might," she admitted dubiously, "while I'm in school. But when I get out I want to have some fun. And I'm going to."
"So, it seems this influence which I am supposed to have over you doesn't go very far."
"Now you're disgusted with me again. But I can't help it. I'm not going to be aslavejust to be able to sing a little."
"It might be more than a little. And it seems to be the one quality you have which might be susceptible of development."
"Now you're talking like a school teacher. And you're not too flattering, are you? Don't you think I've got any brains?"
"Yes. But I don't think you're going to find them of much use."
"I suppose you'd like me to go to college," said Pat contemptuously, "and learn the college cheer and how to play basketball."
"You might even learn more than that. However, ifyou're satisfied with your present status, that settlesthat. Suppose we talk of something else."
This did not suit Pat at all. She promptly said so. "I want to talk about me. You almost always do talk to me about myself. I wonder if that's why I like to be with you more than anyone else," she concluded with one of her accesses of insight.
"It's an extremely interesting subject."
"Now you're laughing at me again. And a moment ago you were angry. But you're still disappointed, aren't you?"
"A little."
"I think that's rotten of you!" she murmured. "I suppose we ought to be going back." She sighed. "I don't want to a bit. Can you turn here?"
It was a narrow and tricky road. As the car came to a stop after backing she laid her hand on his. "Kiss little Pattie and tell her to be a good child and she'll be awfully good," she murmured elfishly.
Scott completed the turn before he answered: "No, little Pat. No more of that between you and me."
On the return journey she was silent and thoughtful. At the post office in the village she asked to be set down, and, getting out, looked up at him, her eyes limpid with sincerity.
"Please, Mr. Scott, keep on liking me," she said. "It's awfully good for me."