He brought into view an unsuspected tube, with a cone of paper at its end, and bent over her mother, directing a stream of cold air against her head. “How do you feel?” he asked, with, Linda noticed, a startling loss of his first accent. Mrs. Condon so far felt well enough. Then, before Linda's startled gaze, every single one of the fifteen imprisoning tubes began to steam with an extraordinary vigor; not only did they steam, like teapots, but drops of water formed and slowly slid over her mother's face. If the process appeared weird at the beginning, now it was utterly fantastic.
The little white vapor spurts played about Mrs. Condon's dripping countenance; they increased rather than diminished; actually it resembled a wrecked locomotive she had once seen. “How are you?” M. Joseph demanded nervously. “Is it hot anywhere?” With a sudden gesture she replied in a shaking voice, “Here.”
Instantly he was holding the paper cone with its cold air against her scalp, and the heat was subdued. He glanced nervously at his watch, and Mrs. Condon managed to ask, “How long?”
“Twenty minutes.”
Dangerous as the whole proceeding seemed nothing really happened, and Linda's fears gradually faded into a mere curiosity and interest. A curtain hung across the door to the rest of the establishment, but it had been brushed partly aside; and she could see, in the compartment they had vacated, another man bending with waving irons over the liberated mass of a woman's hair. He was very much like M. Joseph, but he was younger and had only a dark scrap of mustache. As he caught up the hair with a quick double twist he leaned very close to the woman's face, whispering with an expression that never changed, an expression like that of the wax heads in the show-case. He bent so low that Linda was certain their cheeks had touched. She pondered at length over this, gazing now at the man beyond and now at M. Joseph flitting with the cold-air tube about her mother; wondering if, when she grew older, she would like a hair-dresser's cheek against hers. Linda decided not. The idea didn't shock her, the woman in the other space plainly liked it; still she decided she wouldn't. A different kind of man, she told herself, would be nicer.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a sharp, unpleasant odor—the odor of scorched hair; and she was absolutely rigid with horror at an agonized cry from her mother.
“It's burning me terribly,” the latter cried. “Oh, I can't stand it. Stop! Stop!”
M. Joseph, as white as plaster, rushed to the wall and reversed the handle, and Mrs. Condon started from the chair, her face now streaming with actual tears; but before she could escape the man threw himself on her shoulders.
“You mustn't move,” he whispered desperately, “you'll tear your hair out. I tell you no harm's been done. Everything is all right. Please, please don't cry like that. It will ruin my business. There are others in the establishment. Stop!” he shook her viciously.
Linda had risen, terrorized; and Mrs. Condon, with waving plucking hands, was sobbing an appeal to be released. “My head, my head,” she repeated. “I assure you”—the man motioned to a pallid girl to hold her in the chair. With a towel to protect his hand he undid a screw, lifted off the cap and untwisted the cotton from a bound lock of hair; releasing it, in turn, from the spindle it fell forward in a complete corkscrew over Mrs. Condon's face.
“Do you see!” he demanded. “Perfect. I give you my word they'll all be like that. The cursed heat ran up on me,” he added in a swift aside to his assistant. “Has Mrs. Bellows gone? Who's still in the place? Here, loose that binding ... thank God, that one is all right, too.”
Together they unfastened most of the connections, and a growing fringe of long remarkable curls marked Mrs. Condon's pain-drawn and dabbled face. Linda sobbed uncontrollably; but perhaps, after all, nothing frightful had happened. Her poor mother! Then fear again tightened about her heart at the perturbed expression that overtook the hair-dresser. He was trying in vain to remove one of the caps. She caught enigmatic words—“the borax, crystallized ... solid. It would take a plumber ... have to go.”
The connection was immovable. Even in her suffering Mrs. Condon implored M. Joseph to save her hair. Nothing, however, could be done; he admitted it with pale lips. The thing might be chiseled off; in the end he tried to force a release and the strand, with a renewal of Mrs. Condon's agony—now, in the interest of her appearance, heroically withstood—snapped short in the container.
Rapidly recovering her vigor, she launched on a tirade against M. Joseph and his permanent waving establishment—Linda had never before heard her mother talk in such a loud brutal manner, nor use such heated unpleasant words, and the girl was flooded with a wretched shame. Still another lock, it was revealed, had been ruined, and crumbled to mere dust in its owner's fingers.
“The law will provide for you,” she promised.
“Your hair was dyed,” the proprietor returned vindictively. “The girl who washed it will testify. Every one is warned against the permanent if their hair has been colored. So it was at your own risk.”
“My head's never been touched with dye,” Mrs. Condon shrilly answered. “You lying little ape. And well does that young woman know it. She complimented me herself on a true blonde.” The girl had, too, right before Linda.
“You ought to be thrashed out of the city.”
“Your money will be given back to you,” M. Joseph told her.
Outside they found a taxi, and sped back to their hotel. Above, Mrs. Condon removed her hat; and, before the uncompromising mirror, studied her wrecked hair—a frizzled vacancy was directly over her left brow—and haggard face. When she finally turned to Linda, her manner, her words, were solemn.
“I'm middle-aged,” she said.
A dreary silence enveloped them sitting in the dark reception-room while Mrs. Condon restlessly shredded unlighted cigarettes on the floor. She had made no effort to repair the damages to her appearance, and when the telephone bell sharply sounded, she reached out in a slovenly negligence of manner. Linda could hear a blurred articulation and her mother answering listlessly. The latter at last said: “Very well, at seven then; you'll stop for us.” She hung up the receiver, stared blankly at Linda, and then went off into a harsh mirth. “Oh, my God!” she cried; “the old ladies' home!”
With her mother away on a wedding-trip with Mr. Moses Feldt, Linda was suddenly projected into the companionship of his two daughters. One, as he had said, was light, but a different fairness from Mrs. Condon's—richly thick, like honey; while Judith, the elder, who must have been twenty, was dark in skin, in everything but her eyes, which were a contrasting ashen-violet. She spoke at once of Linda's flawless whiteness:
“A magnolia,” she said, in a deliberate dark voice; “you are quite a gorgeous child. Do you mind my saying that your clothes are rather quaint? They aren't inevitable, and yours ought to be that.”
They were at lunch in the Feldt dining-room, an interior of heavy ornately carved black wood, panels of Chinese embroidery in imperial yellow, and a neutral mauve carpet. The effect, with glittering iridescent pyramids of glass, massive frosted repoussé silver, burnished gold-plate and a wide table decoration of orchids and fern, was tropical and intense. It was evident to Linda that the Feldts were very rich indeed.
The entire apartment resembled the dining-room, while the building itself filled a whole city block, with a garden and fountains like an elaborate public square. Linda, however, wasn't particularly impressed by such show; she saw that Judith and Pansy had expected that of her; but she was determined not to exhibit a surprise that would imply any changes in her mother's and her condition. In addition, Linda calmly took such surroundings for granted. Her primary conception of possible existence was elegance; its necessity had so entered into her being that it had departed from her consciousness.
“I must take you to Lorice,” Judith continued; “she will know better than any one else what you ought to have. You seem terribly pure—at first. But you're not a snowdrop; oh, no—something very rare in a conservatory. Much better style than your mother.”
“I hope you won't mind Judith,” Pansy put in; “she's always like that.” A silence followed in which they industriously dipped the leaves of mammoth artichokes into a buttery sauce. Linda, as customary, said very little, she listened with patient care to the others and endeavored to arrive at conclusions. She liked Pansy, who was as warm and simple as her father. Judith was harder to understand. She was absorbed in color and music, and declared that ugliness gave her a headache at once. Altogether, Linda decided, she was rather silly, especially about men; and at times her emotions would rise beyond control until she wept in a thin hysterical gasping.
The room where, mostly, they sat was small, but with a high ceiling, and hung in black, with pagoda-like vermilion chairs. The light, in the evening, was subdued; and Pansy and Judith, in extremely clinging vivid dresses, the former's hair piled high in an amber mass and Judith's drawn severely across her ears, were lovely. Linda thought of the tropical butterflies of the river Amazon, of orchids like those always on the dining-room table. A miniature grand piano stood against the drapery, and Judith often played. Linda learned to recognize some of the composers. Pansy liked best the modern waltzes; Judith insisted that Richard Strauss was incomparable; but Linda developed an overwhelming preference for Gluck. The older girl insisted that this was an affectation; for a while she tried to confuse Linda's knowledge; but finally, playing the airs of “Orpheus and Eurydice,” she admitted that the latter was sincere.
“They sound so cool,” Linda said in a clear and decided manner.
There was a man with them, and he shook his head in a mock sadness. “So young and yet so formal. If, with the rest, you had Judith's temperament, you would be the most irresistible creature alive. For see, my dear child, as it is you stir neither tenderness nor desire; you are remote and perfect, and faintly wistful. I can't imagine being human or even comfortable with you about. Then, too, you have too much wisdom.”
“She is frightful,” Pansy agreed; “she's never upset nor her hair a sight; and, above all else, Linda won't tell you a thing.”
“Some day,” Judith informed them from the rippling whisper of the piano, “she will be magnificently loved.”
“Certainly,” the man continued; “but what will Linda, Linda Condon, give in return?”
“It's a mistake to give much,” Linda said evenly.
“No, no, no!” Judith cried. “Give everything; spend every feeling, every nerve.”
“You are remarkable, of course; almost no women have the courage of their emotions.” His name was Reynold Chase, a long thin grave young man in a dinner coat, who wrote brilliant and successful comedies. “Yet Linda isn't parsimonious.” He turned to her. “Just what are you? What do you think of love?”
“I haven't thought about it much,” she replied slowly. “I'm not sure that I know what it means. At least it hasn't anything to do with marriage—”
“Ah!” he interrupted her.
Her usually orderly mind grew confused; it eddied as though with the sound of the piano. “It is not marriage,” she vaguely repeated her mother's instruction. Reynold Chase supported her.
“That destroys it,” he asserted. “This love is as different as possible from the ignominious impulse eternally tying the young into knots. It's anti-social.”
“How stupid you are, Reynold,” Pansy protested. “If you want to use those complicated words take Judith into the drawing-room. I'm sure Linda is dizzy, too.”
The latter's mental confusion lingered; she had a strong sense of having heard Reynold Chase say these strange things long before. Judith left the piano, sat beside him, and he lightly kissed her. A new dislike of Judith Feldt deepened in Linda's being. She had no reason for it, but suddenly she felt absolutely opposed to her. The manner in which Judith rested against the man by her was very distasteful. It offended Linda inexplicably; she wanted to draw into an infinity of distance from all contact with men and life.
She didn't even want to make one of those marriages that had nothing to do with love, but was only a sensible arrangement for the securing of gowns and velvet hangings and the luxury of enclosed automobiles. Suddenly she felt lonely, and hoped that her mother would come back soon.
But when her mother, now Mrs. Moses Feldt, did return, Linda was conscious of a keen disappointment. Somehow she never actually came back. It wasn't only that, after so many years together, she occupied a room with another than Linda, but her manner was changed; it had lost all freedom of heart and speech. The new Mrs. Feldt was heavily polite to her husband's daughters; Linda saw that she liked Pansy, but Judith made her uncomfortable. She expressed this in an isolated return of the old confidences:
“That girl,” she said sharply, “likes petting. She can talk all night about her soul and beauty, and play the piano till her fingers drop off, but I—I—know. You can't fool me where they are concerned. I can recognize an unhealthy sign. I never believed in going to all those concerts and kidding yourself into a fever. I may have shown myself a time, but you mark my word—I was honest compared to Judith Feldt. Don't you be impressed with all her art talk and the books she reads. I was looking into one yesterday, and it made me blush; you can believe it or not, it takes some book for that!”
At the same time she treated Judith with a studious sweetness. Mr. Moses Feldt—Linda always thought of him as that—was a miracle of kindly cheerfulness. He made his wife and her daughter, and his own girls, an unbroken succession of elaborate and costly presents. “What's it for if not to spend on those you love?” he would remark, bringing a small jeweler's box wrapped in creamy-pink paper from his pocket. “You can't take it with you. I wasn't born with it—mama and I were as poor as any—you'll forgive me, Stella, I know, for speaking of her. I got enough heart to love you both. 'Oh, mama!' I said, and she dying, 'if you only won't go, I'll give you gold to eat.'”
Curiously, as Linda grew older, the consciousness of her stepfather as an absurd fat little man dwindled; she lost all sense of his actual person; and, as the influence of her mother slipped from her life, the mental conception of Mr. Moses Feldt deepened. She thought about him a great deal and very seriously; the things he said, the warm impact of his being, vibrated in her memory. He had the effect on her of the music of Christopher Gluck—the effect of a pure fine chord.
Pansy she now thought of with a faint contempt: she was rapidly growing thick-waisted and heavy, and she was engaged to a dull young man not rich enough to be interesting. They sat about in frank embraces and indulged in a sentimental speech that united Judith and Linda in common oppression.
There were, not infrequently, gatherings of the Feldts at dinner, a noisy good-tempered uproar of a great many voices speaking at once; extraordinary quantities of superlative jewels and dresses of superfine textures; but the latter, Linda thought, were too vivid in pattern or color for the short full maternal figures they often adorned. But no one, it seemed, considered himself ageing or even, in spite of the most positive indications, aged. The wives with faded but fashionable hair and animated eyes in spent faces talked with vigorous raillery about the “boys,” who, it might have happened, had gone in a small masculine company to a fervid musical show the evening before. While they, in their turn, thick like their brother or cousin Moses, with time-wasted hair and countenances marked with the shrewdness in the service of which the greater part of their lives had vanished, had their little jokes about the “girls” and the younger and handsomer beaux who threatened their happiness.
At times the topic of business crept into the lighter discussion, and, in an instant, the gaiety evaporated and left expressionless men and quick sharp sentences steely with decision, or indirect and imperturbably blank. A memorandum book and a gold pencil would appear for an enigmatic note, after which the cheerfulness slowly revived.
The daughters resembled Judith or the slower placidity of Pansy; while there was still another sort, more vigorous in being, who consciously discussed riding academies, the bridle-paths of Central Park, and the international tennis. Their dress held a greater restraint than the elders; though Linda recognized that it was no less lavish; and their feminine trifles, the morocco beauty-cases and powder-boxes, the shoulder-pins, their slipper and garter buckles were extravagant in exquisite metals and workings.
They arrived in limousines with dove-colored upholstery and crystal vases of maidenhair fern and moss-roses; and often, in such a car, Linda went to the theatre with Judith or Pansy and some cousins. Usually it was a matinee, where their seats were the best procurable, directly at the stage; and they sat in a sleek expensive row eating black chocolates from painted boxes ruffled in rose silk. The audience, composed mostly of their own world, followed the exotic fortunes of the plays with a complete discrimination in every possible emotional display and crisis.
Lithe actresses in a revealing severity of attire, like spoiled nuns with carmine lips, suffering in ingenuous problems of the passions, agonized in shuddering tones; or else they went to concerts to hear young violinists, slender, with intense faces and dramatic hair, play concertos that irritated Linda with little shivers of delight.
Sometimes they had lunch in a restaurant of Circassian walnut and velvet carpets, with cocktails, and eggs elaborate with truffles and French pastry. Then, afterward, they would stop at a confectioner's, or at a cafe where there was dancing, for tea. They all danced in a perfection of slow graceful abandon, with youths who, it seemed to Linda, did nothing else.
She accepted her part in this existence as inevitable, yet she was persistently aware of a feeling of strangeness, of essential difference from it. She was unable to lose a sense of looking on, as if morning, noon and night she were at another long play. Linda regarded it—as she did so much else—with neither enthusiasm nor marked annoyance. Probably it would continue without change through her entire life. All that was necessary, and easily obtained, was a sufficient amount of money.
Her manner, Pansy specially complained, was not intimate and inviting; in her room Linda usually closed the door; the frank community of the sisters was distasteful to her. She demanded an extraordinary amount of personal privacy. Linda never consulted Judith's opinion about her clothes, nor exchanged the more significant aspects of feeling. Alone in a bed-chamber furnished in silvery Hungarian ash, her bed a pale quilted luxury with Madeira linen crusted in monograms, without head or foot boards, and a dressing-table noticeably bare, she would deliberately and delicately prepare for the night.
While Judith's morning bath steamed with the softness and odor of lavender crystals, Linda slipped into water almost cold. This, with her clear muslins and heavy black silk stockings, her narrow unornamented slippers, represented the perfection of niceness.
There were others than Pansy, however, who commented on what they called her superiority—the young men who appeared in the evening. A number of them, cousins of the Feldt dinner parties or more casual, tried to engage her sympathies in their persons and prospects. It was a society of early maturity. But, without apparent effort, she discouraged them, principally by her serene lack of interest. It was a fundamental part of her understanding of things that younger men were unprofitable; she liked far better the contemporaries of Moses Feldt.
Reynold Chase had ceased his visits, but his place had been taken by another and still another emotionally gifted man. The present one was dark and imperturbable: they knew little of him beyond the facts that he had been a long while in the Orient, that his manner and French were unsurpassed, and that practically every considerable creative talent in New York was entertained in his rooms.
Judith had been to one of his parties; and, the following morning in bed, she told Pansy and Linda the most remarkable things.
“It would never do for Pansy,” she concluded; “but I must get Markue to ask you sometime, Linda. How old are you now? Well, that's practically sixteen, and you are very grown up. You would be quite sensational, in one of your plain white frocks, in his apartment. You'd have to promise not to tell your mother, though. She thinks I'm leading you astray now—the old dear. Does she think I am blind? I met a man last week, a friend of father's, who used to know her. Of course he wouldn't say anything, men are such idiots about that—like ostriches with their pasts buried and all the feathers sticking out—but there was a champagne expression in his smile.”
Linda wondered, later, if she'd care to go to a party of Markue's. There was a great deal of drinking at such affairs; and though she rather liked cordials, crême de thé and Grand Marnier, even stronger things flavored with limes and an occasional frigid cocktail, she disliked—from a slight experience—men affected by drink. Judith had called her a constitutional prude; this, she understood, was a term of reproach; and she wondered if, applied to her, it were just.
Usually it meant a religious person or one fussy about the edge of her skirt; neither of which she ever considered. She didn't like to sit in a corner and be hugged—even that she could now assert with a degree of knowledge—but it wasn't because she was shocked. Nothing, she told herself gravely, shocked her; only certain acts and moments annoyed her excessively. It was as if her mind were a crisp dress with ribbons which she hated to have mussed or disarranged.
Linda didn't take the trouble to explain this. Now that her mother had withdrawn from her into a perpetual and uncomfortable politeness she confided in no one. She would have been at a loss to put her complicated sensations and thoughts into words. Mr. Moses Feldt, the only one to whom she could possibly talk intimately, would be upset by her feelings. He would give her a hug and the next day bring up a new present from his pocket.
Her clothes, with the entire support of Lorice, were all delicate in fabric, mostly white with black sashes, and plainly ruffled. She detested the gray crepe de Chine from which Judith's undergarments were made and the colored embroidery of Pansy's; while she ignored scented toilet-waters and extracts. Markue, in finally asking her to a party at his rooms, said that there she would resemble an Athenian marble, of the un-painted epoch, in the ballet of Scheherazade.
“There's nothing special to say about Markue's parties,” Judith, dressing, told Linda. “You will simply have to take what comes your way. There is always some one serious at them, if you insist, as usual, on dignity.” She stood slim and seductive, like a perverse pierrot, before the oppressive depths of a black mirror. Linda had finished her preparations for the evening. There was no departure from her customary blanched exactness. She studied her reflection across Judith's shoulder; her intense blue eyes, under the level blot of her bang, were grave on the delicate pallor of her face.
In the taxi, slipping rapidly down-town, Linda was conscious of a slight unusual disturbance of her indifference. This had nothing to do with whether or not she'd be a success; her own social demands were so small that any considerable recognition of her was unimportant. Her present feeling came from the fact that to-night, practically, she was making her first grown-up appearance in the world, the world from which she must select the materials of her happiness and success. To-night she would have an opportunity to put into being all that—no matter how firmly held—until now had been but convictions.
Her interest was not in whom or what she might meet, but in herself. Judith, smoking a cigarette in a mist of silver fox, was plainly excited. “I like Markue awfully,” she admitted.
“Does he care for you?” Linda asked.
“That,” said Judith, “I can't make out—if he likes me or if it's just anonymous woman. I wish it were the first, Linda.” Her voice was shadowed; suddenly, in spite of her youth and exhilaration, she seemed haggard and spent. Linda recognized this in a cold scrutiny. Privately she decided that the other was a fool—she didn't watch her complexion at all.
The motor turned west in the low Forties and stopped before a high narrow stone façade with a massive griffon-guarded door. Judith led the way directly into the elevator and designated Markue's floor. It was at the top of the building, where he met them with his impenetrable courtesy and took them into a bare room evidently planned for a studio. There were an empty easel, the high blank dusty expanse of the skylight, and chairs with the somber hats and coats of men and women's wraps like the glistening shed skins of brilliant snakes.
They turned through the hall to an interior more remarkable than anything Linda could have imagined; it seemed to her very high, without windows and peaked like a tent. Draperies of intricate Eastern color hung in long folds. There were no chairs, but low broad divans about the walls, a thick carpet with inlaid stands in the center laden with boxes of cigarettes, sugared exotic sweets and smoking incense. It was so dim and full of thick scent, the shut effect was so complete, that for a moment Linda felt painfully oppressed; it seemed impossible to breathe in the wavering bluish atmosphere.
Markue, who had appeared sufficiently familiar outside, now had a strange portentous air; the gleams of his quick black eyes, the dusky tone of his cheeks, his impassive grace, startled her. New York was utterly removed: the taxi that had brought Judith and her, the swirling traffic of Columbus Circle and smooth undulations of Fifth Avenue, were lost with a different life. She saw, however, the open door to another room full of clear light, and her self-possession rapidly returned. Judith—as she had threatened—at once deserted her; and Linda found an inconspicuous corner of a divan.
There were, perhaps, twenty people in the two rooms, and each one engaged her attention. A coffee-colored woman was sitting beyond her, clad in loose red draperies to which were sewed shining patterns of what she thought was gold. Markue was introducing Judith, and the seated figure smiled pleasantly with a flash of beautiful teeth and the supple gesture of a raised brown palm. That, Linda decided, was the way she shook hands. Two dark-skinned men, one in conventional evening dress, were with her; they had small fine features and hair like carved ebony.
Linda had never before been at an affair with what she was forced to call colored people; instinctively she was antagonistic and superior. She turned to a solemn masculine presence with a ruffled shirt and high black stock; he was talking in a resonant voice and with dramatic gestures to a woman with a white face and low-drawn hair. Linda was fascinated by the latter, dressed in a soft clinging dull garnet. It wasn't her clothes, although they were remarkable, that held her attention, but the woman's mouth. Apparently, it had no corners. Like a little band of crimson rubber, or a ring of vivid flame, it shifted and changed in the oddest shapes. It was an unhappy mouth, and made her think of pain; but perhaps not so much that as hunger ... not for food, Linda was certain. What did she want?
There was a light appealing laugh from another seated on the floor in a floating black dinner dress with lovely ankles in delicate Spanish lace stockings; her head was thrown back for the whisper of a heavy man with ashen hair, a heavenly scarf and half-emptied glass.
Her bare shoulders, Linda saw, were as white as her own, as white but more sloping. The other's hair, though, was the loveliest red possible. The entire woman, relaxed and laughing in the perfumery and swimming shadows, was irresistible. A man with a huge nose and blank eyes, his hands disfigured with extraordinary rings, momentarily engaged her. Then, at the moment when she saw an inviting and correctly conventional youth, he crossed and sat at her side.
“Quite a show,” he said in the manner she had expected and approved. The glow of his cigarette wavered over firmly cut lips. “We've just come to New York,” he continued. “I don't know any one here but Markue, do you?” Linda explained her own limitations. “The Victory's fine and familiar.”
She followed his gaze to where a winged statue with flying drapery was set on a stand. She had seen it before, but without interest. Now it held her attention. It wasn't a large cast, not over three feet high, but suddenly Linda thought that it was the biggest thing in the room; it seemed to expand as she watched it.
Beside the Victory, in a glass case with an enclosed concealed light, was a statue, greenish gray, a few inches tall, with a sneering placidity of expression as notable as the sweep of the other white fragment. “That's Chinese,” her companion decided; “it looks as old as lust.” There was the stir of new arrivals—a towering heavy man with a slight woman in emerald satin. “There's Pleydon, the sculptor,” the youth told her animatedly. “I've seen him at the exhibitions. It must be Susanna Noda, the Russian singer, with him. He's a tremendous swell.”
Linda watched Pleydon as he met Markue in the middle of the room. He was dressed carelessly, improperly for the evening; but she forgave that as the result of indifference. The informal flannels and soft collar, too, suited the largeness of his being and gestures. There was a murmur of meeting, Susanna Noda smiled appealingly; and then, as Pleydon found a place on a divan, she at once contentedly sat on his lap. Watching her, Linda thought of a brilliant parrot; but that was only the effect of her color; for her face, with a tilted nose and wide golden eyes, generous warm lips, was charming. She lighted a cigarette, turned her graceful back on the room and company, and chatted in French to the composed sculptor.
Linda divined that he was the most impressive figure she had encountered; the quality of his indifference was beautiful and could only have come in the security of being a “tremendous swell.” That phrase described all for which she had cared most. It included everything that her mother had indicated as desirable and a lot that she, Linda, had added. Money, certainly, was an absolute necessity; but there were other things now that vaguely she desired. She tried to decide what they were.
Only the old inner confusion resulted, the emotion that might have been born in music; however, it was sharper than usual, and bred a new dissatisfaction with the easier accomplishments. Really it was very disturbing, for the pressure of her entire experience, all she had been told, could be exactly weighed and held. The term luxury, too, was revealing; it covered everything—except her present unformed longing.
There were still newcomers, and Linda was aware of a sudden constraint. A woman volubly French had appeared with a long pinkish-white dog in a blanket, and the three Arabians—she had learned that much—had risen with a concerted expression of surprise and displeasure. Their anxiety, though, was no more dramatic than that of the dog's proprietor. The gesture of her hands and lifted eyebrows were keenly expressive of her impatience with any one who couldn't accept, with her, her dog.
“Markue ought to have it out,” some one murmured. “Dogs, to high caste Mohammedans, are unclean animals.” Another added, “Worse than that, if it should touch them, they would have to make the pilgrimage to Mecca.”
Without any knowledge of the situation of Mecca, Linda yet realized that it must be a very long journey to result from the mere touch of a dog. She didn't wonder at the restrained excitement of the “colored” people. The situation was reduced to a sub-acid argument between the Frenchwoman and the Begum; Madame couldn't exist without her “p'tit.” The Oriental lady could not breathe a common air with the beast. The former managed a qualified triumph—the “p'tit” was caged with a chair in a corner, and the episode, for the moment, dropped.
Soon, however, Linda saw that the dog had wriggled out of captivity. It made a cautious progress to where the candy stood on a low stand and ran an appreciative tongue over the exposed sweet surfaces. Rapidly a sugared fig was snapped up. Linda held her breath; no one had noticed the animal yet—perhaps it would reach one of the objectors and she would have the thrill of witnessing the departure for Mecca.
But, as always, nothing so romantic occurred; the dog was discovered, and the Mohammedans, with a hurried politeness, made their salaams. Instead, a man with a quizzical scrutiny through glasses that made him resemble an owl, stopped before her.
“'Here we go 'round the mulberry-bush,'” he chanted. “Hello, Kate Greenaway. Have you had a drink?”
“Yes, thank you,” she replied sedately.
“Certified milk?”
“It was something with gin,” she particularized, “and too sweet.” He took the place beside her and solemnly recited a great many nursery rhymes. On the whole she liked him, deciding that he was very wicked. Soon he was holding her hand in both of his. “I know you're not real,” he proceeded. “Verlaine wrote you—'Les Ingenus':
“'From which the sudden gleam of whiteness shedMet in our eyes a frolic welcoming.'
“What if I'd kiss you?”
“Nothing,” she returned coldly.
“You're remarkable!” he exclaimed with enthusiasm. “If you are not already one of the celebrated beauties you're about to be. As cool as a fish! Look—Pleydon is going to rise and spill little Russia. Have you heard her sing Scriabine?” Linda ignored him in a sharp return of her interest in the big carelessly-dressed man. He put Susanna Noda aside and moved to the dim middle of the room. His features, Linda saw, were rugged and pronounced; he was very strong.
For a moment he stood gazing at the Winged Victory, his brow gathered into a frown, while he made a caressing gesture with his whole hand. Then he swung about and, from the heavy shadows of his face, he looked down at her. He was still for a disconcerting length of time, but through which Linda steadily met his interrogation. Then he bent over and seriously removed the man beside her.
“Adieu, Louis,” he said.
The weight of Pleydon's body depressed the entire divan. “An ordinary man,” he told her, “would ask how the devil you got here. Then he would take you to your home with some carefully chosen words for whatever parents you had. But I can see that all this is needless. You are an extremely immaculate person.
“That isn't necessarily admirable,” he added.
“I don't believe I am admirable at all,” Linda replied.
“How old are you?” he demanded abruptly.
She told him.
“Age doesn't exist for some women, they are eternal,” he continued. “You see, I call you a woman, but you are not, and neither are you a child. You are Art—Art the deathless,” his gaze strayed back to the Victory.
As she, too, looked at it, it seemed to Linda that the cast filled all the room with a swirl of great white wings and heroic robes. In an instant the incense and the dark colors, the uncertain pallid faces and bare shoulders, were swept away into a space through which she was dizzily borne. The illusion was so overpowering that involuntarily she caught at the heavy arm by her.
“Why did you do that?” he asked quickly, with a frowning regard. Linda replied easily and directly. “It seemed as if it were carrying me with it,” she specified; “on and on and on, without ever stopping. I felt as if I were up among the stars.” She paused, leaning forward, and gazed at the statue. Even now she was certain that she saw a slight flutter of its draperies. “It is beautiful, isn't it? I think it's the first thing I ever noticed like that. You know what I mean—the first thing that hadn't a real use.”
“But it has,” he returned. “Do you think it is nothing to be swept into heaven? I suppose by 'real' you mean oatmeal and scented soap. Women usually do. But no one, it appears, has any conception of the practical side of great art. You might try to remember that it is simply permanence given to beauty. It's like an amber in which beautiful and fragile things are kept forever in a lovely glow. That is all, and it is enough.
“When I said that you were Art I didn't mean that you were skilfully painted and dressed, but that there was a quality in you which recalled all the charming women who had ever lived to draw men out of the mud—something, probably, of which you are entirely unconscious, and certainly beyond your control. You have it in a remarkable degree. It doesn't belong to husbands but to those who create 'Homer's children.'
“That's a dark saying of Plato's, and it means that theAlcestisis greater than any momentary offspring of the flesh.”
Linda admitted seriously, “Of course, I don't understand, yet it seems quite familiar—”
“Don't, for Heaven's sake, repeat the old cant about reincarnation;” he interrupted, “and sitting together, smeared with antimony, on a roof of Babylon.”
She hadn't intended to, she assured him. “Tell me about yourself,” he directed. It was as natural to talk with him as it was, with others, to keep still. Her frank speech flowed on and on, supported by the realization of his attention.
“There really isn't much, besides hotels, all different; but you'd be surprised how alike they were, too. I mean the things to eat, and the people. I never realized how tired I was of them until mother married Mr. Moses Feldt. The children were simply dreadful, the children and the women; the men weren't much better.” She said this in a tone of surprise, and he nodded. “I can see now—I am supposed to be too old for my age, and it was the hotels. You learn a great deal.”
“Do you like Mr. Moses Feldt?”
“Enormously; he is terribly sweet. I intend to marry a man just like him. Or, at least, he was the second kind I decided on: the first only had money, then I chose one with money who was kind, but now I don't know. It's very funny: kindness makes me impatient. I'm perfectly sure I'll never care for babies, they are so mussy. I don't read, and I can't stand being—well, loved.
“Mother went to a great many parties; every one liked her and she liked every one back; so it was easy for her. I used to long for the time when I'd wear a lovely cloak and go out in a little shut motor with a man with pearls; but now that's gone. They want to kiss you so much. I wish that satisfied me. Why doesn't it? Is there anything the matter with me, do you think? I've been told that I haven't any heart.”
As he laughed at her she noticed how absurdly small a cigarette seemed in his broad powerful hand. “What has happened to you is this,” he explained: “a combination of special circumstances has helped you in every way to be what, individually, you were. As a rule, children are brought up in a house of lies, like taking a fine naked body and binding it into hideous rigid clothes. You escaped the damnation of cheap ready-cut morals and education. Your mother ought to have a superb monument—the perfect parent. Of course you haven't a 'heart.' From the standpoint of nature and society you're as depraved as possible. You are worse than any one else here—than all of them rolled together.”
Curiously, she thought, this didn't disturb her, which proved at once that he was right. Linda regarded herself with interest as a supremely reprehensible person, perhaps a vampire. The latter, though, was a rather stout woman who, dressed in frightful lingerie, occupied couches with her arms caught about the neck of a man bending over her. Every detail of this was distasteful.
What was she?
Her attention wandered to the squat Chinese god in the glass case. It was clear that he hadn't stirred for ages. A difficult thought partly formed in her mind—the Chinese was the god of this room, of Markue's party, of the women seated in the dim light on the floor and the divans; the low gurgle of their laughter, the dusky whiteness of their shoulders in the upcoiling incense, the smothered gleams of their hair, with the whispering men, were the world of the grayish-green image.
She explained this haltingly to Pleydon, who listened with a flattering interest. “I expect you're laughing at me inside,” she ended impotently. “And the other, the Greek Victory,” he added, “is the goddess of the other world, of the spirit. It's quaint a heathen woman should be that.”
Linda discovered that she liked Pleydon enormously. She continued daringly that he might be the sort of man she wanted to marry. But he wouldn't be easy to manage; probably he could not be managed at all. Her mother had always insisted upon the presence of that possibility in any candidate for matrimony. And, until now, Linda's philosophy had been in accord with her. But suddenly she entertained the idea of losing herself completely in—in love.
A struggle was set up within her: on one hand was everything that she had been, all her experience, all advice, and her innate detachment; on the other an obscure delicious thrill. Perhaps this was what she now wanted. Linda wondered if she could try it—just a little, let herself go experimentally. She glanced swiftly at Pleydon, and his bulk, his heavy features, the sullen mouth, appalled her.
Men usually filled her with an unaccountable shrinking into her remotest self. Pleydon was different; her liking for him had destroyed a large part of her reserve; but a surety of instinct told her that she couldn't experiment there. It was characteristic that a lesser challenge left her cold. She had better marry as she had planned.
Susanna Noda came up petulantly and sank in a brilliant graceful swirl at his feet. Her golden eyes, half shut, studied Linda intently.