“I am fatigued,” she complained; “you know how weary I get when you ignore me.” He gazed down at her untouched. “I have left Lao-tze for Greece,” he replied. She found this stupid and said so. “Has he been no more amusing than this?” she asked Linda. “But then, you are a child, it all intrigues you. You listen with the flattery of your blue eyes and mouth, both open.”
“Don't be rude, Susanna,” Pleydon commanded. “You are so feminine that you are foolish. I'm not the stupid one—look again at our 'child.' Tell me what you see.”
“I see Siberia,” she said finally. “I see the snow that seems so pure while it is as blank and cold as death. You are right, Dodge. I was the dull one. This girl will be immensely loved; perhaps by you. A calamity, I promise you. Men are pigs,” she turned again to Linda; “no—imbeciles, for only idiots destroy the beauty that is given to them. They take your reputation with a smile, they take your heart with iron fingers; your beauty they waste like a drunken Russian with gold.”
“Susanna, like all spendthrifts, is amazed by poverty.”
Even in the gloom Linda could see the pallor spreading over the other's face; she was glad that Susanna Noda spoke in Russian. However, with a violent effort, she subdued her bitterness. “Go into your Siberia!” she cried. “I always thought you were capable of the last folly of marriage. If you do it will spoil everything. You are not great, you know, not really great, not in the first rank. You've only the slightest chance of that, too much money. You were never in the gutter as I was—”
“Chateaubriand,” he interrupted, “Dante, Velasquez.”
“No, not spiritually!” she cried again. “What do you know of the inferno! Married, you will get fat.” Pleydon turned lightly to Linda:
“As a supreme favor do not, when I ask you, marry me.”
This, for Linda, was horribly embarrassing. However, she gravely promised. The Russian lighted a cigarette; almost she was serene again. Linda said, “Fatness is awful, isn't it?”
Pleydon replied, “Death should be the penalty. If women aren't lovely—” he waved away every other consideration.
“And if men have fingers like carrots—” Susanna mimicked him. Judith, flushed, her hair loosened, approached. “Linda,” she demanded, “do you remember when we ordered the taxi? Was it two or three?” Markue, at her shoulder, begged her not to consider home.
“I'm going almost immediately,” Pleydon said, “and taking your Linda.” His height and determined manner scattered all objections.
Linda, at the entrance to the apartment, found to her great surprise—in place of the motor she had expected—a small graceful single-horse victoria, the driver buttoned into a sealskin rug. Deep in furs, beside Pleydon, she was remarkably comfortable, and she was soothed by the rhythmic beat of the hoofs, the even progress through the crystal night of Fifth Avenue.
Her companion flooded his being with the frozen air. They had, it seemed, lost all desire to talk. The memory of Markue's party lingered like the last vanishing odor of his incense; there was a confused vision of the murmurous room against the lighted exterior where the drinks sparkled on a table. Linda made up her mind that she would not go to another. Then she wondered if she'd see Pleydon again. The Russian singer had been too silly for words.
It suddenly occurred to her that the man now with her had taken Susanna Noda, and that he had left her planted. He had preferred driving her, Linda Condon, home. He wasn't very enthusiastic about it, though; his face was gloomy.
“The truth is,” he remarked at last, “that Susanna is right—I am not in the first rank. But that was all nonsense about the necessity of the gutter—sentimental lies.”
Linda was not interested in this, but it left her free to explore her own emotions. The night had been eventful because it had shaken all the foundation of what she intended. That single momentary delicious thrill had been enough to threaten the entire rest. At the same time her native contempt of the other women, of Judith with her tumbled hair, persisted. Was there no other way to capture such happiness? Was it all hopelessly messy with drinks and unpleasant familiarity?
What did Pleydon mean by spirit? Surely there must be more kinds of love than one—he had intimated that. She gathered that “Homer's children,” those airs of Gluck that she liked so well, were works of art, sculpture, such as he did. Yet she had never thought of them as important, important as oatmeal or delicate soap. She made up her mind to ask him about it, when she saw that they had reached the Eighties; she was almost home.
“I am going away to-morrow,” he told her, “for the winter, to South America. When I come back we'll see each other. If you should change address send me a line to the Harvard Club.” The carriage had stopped before the great arched entrance to the apartment-house, towering in its entire block. He got out and lifted her to the pavement as if she had been no more than a flower in his hands. Then he walked with her into the darkness of the garden.
The fountains were cased in boards; the hedged borders, the bushes and grass, were dead. High above them on the dark wall a window was bright. Linda's heart began to pound loudly, she was trembling ... from the cold. There was a faint sound in the air—the elevated trains, or stirring wings? It was nothing, then, to be lifted into heaven. There was the door to the hall and elevator. She turned, to thank Dodge Pleydon for all his goodness to her, when he lifted her—was it toward heaven?—and kissed her mouth.
She was still in his arms, with her eyes closed. “Linda Condon?” he said, in a tone of inquiry.
At the same breath in which she realized a kiss was of no importance a sharp icy pain cut at her heart. It hurt her so that she gasped. Then, and this was strange, she realized that—as a kiss—it hadn't annoyed her. Suddenly she felt that it wasn't just that, but something far more, a part of all her inner longing. He had put her down and was looking away, a face in shadow with an ugly protruding lip.
She saw him that way in her dreams—in the court under the massive somber walls, with a troubled frown over his eyes. It seemed to her that, reaching up, she smoothed it away as they stood together in a darkness with the fountains, the hedges, dead, the world with never a sound sleeping in the prison of winter.
Linda thought about Dodge Pleydon on a warm evening of the following May. At four o'clock, in a hotel, Pansy had been married; and the entire Feldt connection had risen to a greater height of clamorous cheer than ever before. Extravagant unseasonable dishes, wines and banked flowers were lavishly mingled with sentimental speeches, healths and tears. Linda had been acutely restless, impatient of all the loud good humor and stupid compliments. The sense of her isolation from their life was unbearably keen. She would have a very different wedding with a man in no particular like Pansy's.
After dinner—an occasion, with Pansy absent, where Mr. Moses Feldt's tears persisted in flowing—she had strayed into the formal chamber across from the dining-room and leaned out of a window, gazing into the darkening court. Directly below was where Pleydon had kissed her. She often re-examined her feelings about that; but only to find that they had dissolved into an indefinite sense of the inevitable. Not alone had it failed to shock her—she hadn't even been surprised. Linda thought still further about kissing, with the discovery that if, while it was happening, she was conscious of the kiss, it was a failure; successful, it carried her as far as possible from the actuality.
Pleydon, of course, had not written to her; he had intimated nothing to the contrary, only asking her to let him know, at the Harvard Club, if she changed address. That wasn't necessary, and now, probably, he was back from South America. Where, except by accident, might she see him? Markue, with his parties, had dropped from Judith's world, his place taken by a serious older dealer in Dutch masters with an impressive gallery just off Fifth Avenue.
That she would see him Linda was convinced; this feeling absorbed any desire; it was no good wanting it or not wanting it; consequently she was undisturbed. She considered him gravely and in detail. Had there been any more Susanna Nodas in his stay south? She had heard somewhere that the women of Argentine were irresistible. Her life had taught her nothing if not the fact that a number of women figured in every man's history. It was deplorable but couldn't be avoided; and whether or not it continued after marriage depended on the cunning of any wife.
Now, however, Linda felt weary already at the prospect of a married life that rested on the constant play of her ingenuity. A great many things that, but a little before, she had willingly accepted, seemed to her probably not less necessary but distinctly tiresome. Linda began to think that she couldn't really bother; the results weren't sufficiently important.
Dodge Pleydon.
She slept in a composed order until the sun was well up. It was warmer than yesterday; and, going to an afternoon concert with Judith, she decided to walk. Linda strolled, in a short severe jacket and skirt, a black straw hat turned back with a cockade and a crisp flushed mass of sweet peas at her waist. The occasion, as it sometimes happened, found her in no mood for music. The warmth of the sunlight, the open city windows and beginning sounds of summer, had enveloped her in a mood in which the jangling sentimentality of a street organ was more potent than the legato of banked violins.
She was relieved when the concert was over, but lingered at her seat until the crowd had surged by; it made Linda furious to be shoved or indiscriminately touched. Judith had gone ahead, when Linda was conscious of the scrutiny of a pale well-dressed woman of middle age. It became evident that the other was debating whether or not to speak; clearly such an action was distasteful to her; and Linda had turned away before a restrained voice addressed her:
“You will have to forgive me if I ask your name ... because of a certain resemblance. Seeing you I—I couldn't let you go.”
“Linda Condon,” she replied.
The elder, Linda saw, grew even paler. She put out a gloved hand. “Then I was right,” she said in a slightly unsteady voice. “But perhaps, when I explain, you will think it even stranger, inexcusable. My dear child, I am your father's sister.”
Linda was invaded by a surprise equally made up of interest and resentment. The first was her own and the second largely borrowed from her mother. Besides, why had her father's family never made the slightest effort to see her. This evidently had simultaneously occurred to the other.
“Of course,” she added, quite properly, “we can't undertake family questions here. I shouldn't blame you a bit, either, if you went directly away. I had to speak, to risk that, because you were so unmistakably a Lowrie. It is not a common appearance. We—I—” she floundered for a painful moment; then she gathered herself with a considerable dignity. “Seeing you has affected me tremendously, changed everything. I have nothing to say in our defense, you must understand that. I am certain, too, that my sister will feel the same—we live together in Philadelphia. I hope you will give me your address and let us write to you. Elouise will join with me absolutely.”
Linda told her evenly where she lived, and then allowed Miss Lowrie to precede her toward the entrance. She said nothing of this to Judith, nor, momentarily, to her mother. She wanted to consider it undisturbed by a flood of talk and blame. It was evident to her that the Lowries had behaved very badly, but just how she couldn't make out. She recalled her father's sister—her aunt—minutely, forced to the realization that she was a person of entire superiority. Here, she suddenly saw, had been the cause of all their difficulties—the Lowries hadn't approved of the marriage, they had objected to her mother.
Five years ago she would have been incensed at this; but now, essentially, she was without personal indignation. She wanted, for herself, to discover as much as possible about her father and his family. A need independent of maternal influences stirred her. Linda was reassured by the fact that her father had been gently born; while she realized that she had always taken this for granted. Her mother must know nothing about the meeting with Miss Lowrie until the latter had written.
That was Friday and the letter came the following Tuesday. Linda, alone at the breakfast-table, instantly aware of the source of the square envelope addressed in a delicate regular writing, opened it and read in an unusual mental disturbance:
“My dear Linda,
I hope you will not consider it peculiar for me to call you this, for nothing else seems possible. Meeting you in that abrupt manner upset me, as you must have noticed. Of course I knew of you, and even now I can not go into our long unhappy affair, but until I saw you, and so remarkably like the Lowries, I did not realize how wicked Elouise and I had been. But I am obliged to add only where you were concerned. We have no desire to be ambiguous in that.
However, I am writing to say that we should love to have you visit us here. It is possible under the circumstances that your mother will not wish you to come. Yet I know the Lowries, a very independent and decided family, and although it is my last intention to be the cause of difficulty with your mother, still I hope it may be arranged.
In closing I must add how happy I was at the evidence of your blood. But that, I now see, was a certainty. You will have to forgive us for a large measure of blindness. Affectionately,
AMELIA VIGNÉ LOWRIE.”
Almost instantaneously Linda was aware that she would visit the Lowries. She liked the letter extremely, as well as all that she remembered of its sender. At the same time she prepared for a scene with her mother, different from those of the past—with the recourse to the brandy flask—but no less unpleasant. They had very little to say to each other now; and, when she went into her mother's room with an evident definite purpose, the latter showed a constrained surprise, a palpable annoyance that her daughter had found her at the daily renovation of her worn face.
Linda said directly, “I met Miss Lowrie, father's sister, at a concert last week, and this morning I had a letter asking me to stay with them in Philadelphia.”
Mrs. Feldt's face suddenly had no need for the color she held poised on a cloth. Her voice, sharp at the beginning, rose to a shrill unrestrained wrath.
“I wonder at the brass of her speaking to you at all let alone writing here. Just you give me the letter and I'll shut her up. The idea! I hope you were cool to her, the way they treated us. Stay with them—I guess not!”
“But I thought of going,” Linda replied. “It's only natural. After all, you must see that he was my father.”
“A pretty father he was, too good for the girl he married. It's my fault I didn't tell you long ago, but I just couldn't abide the mention of him. He deserted me, no, us, cold, without a word—walked out of the door one noon, taking his hat as quiet as natural, and never came back. I never saw him again nor heard except through lawyers. That was the kind of heart he had, and his sisters are worse. I hadn't a decent speech of any kind out of them. The Lowries,” she managed to inject a surprising amount of contempt into her pronouncement of that name. “What it was all about you nor any sensible person would never believe:
“The house smelled a little of boiled cabbage. That's why he left me, and you expected in a matter of a few months. He said in his dam' frigid way that it had become quite impossible and took down his hat.”
“There must have been more,” Linda protested, suppressing a mad desire to laugh.
“Not an inch,” her mother asserted. “Nothing, after a little, suited him. He'd sit up like a poker, just as I've seen you, with his lips tight together in the Lowrie manner. It didn't please him no matter what you'd do. He wouldn't blow out at you like a Christian and I never knew where I was at. I'd come down in a matinée, the prettiest I could buy, and then see he didn't like it. He would expect you to be dressed in the morning like it was afternoon and you going out. And as for loosening your corsets for a little comfort about the house, you might as well have slapped him direct.
“That wasn't the worst, though; but his going away without as much as a flicker of his hand; and with me like I was. Nobody on earth but would blame him for that. I only got what was allowed me after we had changed back to my old name, me and you. He never asked one single question about you nor tried to see or serve you a scrap. For all he knew, at a place called Santa Margharita in Italy, you might have been born dead.”
She was unable, Linda recognized, to defend him in any way; he had acted frightfully. She acknowledged this logically with her power of reason, but somehow it didn't touch her as it had her mother, and as, evidently, the latter expected. She was absorbed in the vision of her father sitting, in the Lowrie manner, rigid as a poker; she saw him quietly take up his hat and go away forever. Linda understood his process completely; she was capable of doing precisely the same thing. Whatever was the matter with her—in the heartlessness so often laid to her account—had been equally true of her father.
“You ought to know what to say to them,” Mrs. Moses Feldt cried, “or I'll do it for you! If only I had seen her she would have heard a thing or two not easy forgotten.”
Linda's determination to go to Philadelphia had not been shaken, and she made a vain effort to explain her attitude. “Of course, it was horrid for you,” she said. “I can understand how you'd never never forgive him. But I am different, and, I expect, not at all nice. It's very possible, since he was my father, that we are alike. I wish you had told me this before—it explains so much and would have made things easier for me. I am afraid I must see them.”
She was aware of the bitterness and enmity that stiffened her mother into an unaccustomed adequate scorn:
“I might have expected nothing better of you, and me watching it coming all these years. You can go or stay. I had my life in spite of the both of you, as gay as I pleased and a good husband just the same. I don't care if I never see you again, and if it wasn't for the fuss it would make I'd take care I didn't. You'll have your father's money now I'm married; I wonder you stay around here at all with your airs of being better than the rest. God's truth is you ain't near as good, even if I did bring you into the world.”
“I am willing to agree with you,” Linda answered. “No one could be sweeter than the Feldts. I sha'n't do nearly as well. But that isn't it, really. People don't choose themselves; I'm certain father didn't at that lonely Italian place. If you weren't happy laced in the morning it wasn't your fault. You see, I am trying to excuse myself, and that isn't any good, either.”
“Unnatural,” Mrs. Moses Feldt pronounced. And Linda, weary and depressed, allowed her the last word.
Nothing further during the subsequent brief exchange of notes between Miss Lowrie and Linda was said of the latter's intention to visit her father's family. Mrs. Feldt, however, whose attitude toward Linda had been negatively polite, now displayed an animosity carefully hidden from her husband but evident to the two girls. The elder never neglected an opportunity to emphasize Linda's selfishness or make her personality seem ridiculous. But this Linda ignored from her wide sense of the inconsequence of most things.
Yet she was relieved when, finally, she had actually left New York. She looked forward with an unusual hopeful curiosity to the Lowries. To her surprise their house—miles, it appeared, from the center of the city—was directly on a paved street with electric cars, unpretentious stores and very humble dwellings nearby. Back from the thoroughfare, however, there were spacious green lawns. The street itself, she saw at once, was old—a highway of gray stone with low aged stone façades, steep eaves and blackened chimney-pots reaching, dusty with years, into the farther hilly country.
A gable of the Lowrie house, with a dignified white door, a fanlight of faintly iridescent glass and polished brasses, faced the brick sidewalk, while to the left there was a high board fence and an entrance with a small grille open on a somber reach of garden. A maid in a stiff white cap answered the fall of the knocker; she took Linda's bag; and, in a hall that impressed her by its bareness, Linda was greeted by the Miss Lowrie she had seen.
Her aunt was composed, but there was a perceptible flush on her cheeks, and she said in a rapid voice, after a conventional welcome, “You must meet Elouise at once, before you go up to your room.”
Elouise Lowrie was older than Amelia, but she, too, was slender and erect, with black hair startling in its density on her wasted countenance. Linda noticed a fine ruby on a crooked finger and beautiful rose point lace. “It was good of you,” the elder proceeded, “to come and see two old women. I don't know whether we have more to say or to keep still about. But I, for one, am going to avoid explanations. You are here, a fool could see that you were Bartram's girl, and that is enough for a Lowrie.”
The room was nearly as bare as the hall: in place of the deep carpets of the Feldts' the floor, of dark uneven oak boards, was merely waxed and covered by a rough-looking oval rug. The walls were paneled in white, with white ruffled curtains at small windows; and the furniture, the dull mahogany ranged against the immaculate paint, the rocking-chairs of high slatted walnut and rush bottoms, the slender formality of tables with fluted legs, was dignified but austere. There were some portraits in heavy old gilt—men with florid faces and tied hair, and the delicate replicas of high-breasted women in brocades.
There was, plainly, an air of the exceptional in Amelia Lowrie's conduction of Linda to her room. She waited at the door while the other moved forward to the center of a chamber empty of all the luxury Linda had grown to demand. There was a bed with tall graceful posts supporting a canopy like a frosting of sugar, a solemn set of drawers with a diminutive framed mirror in which she could barely see her shoulders, a small unenclosed brass clock with long exposed weights, and two uninviting painted wooden chairs. This was not, although very nearly, all. Linda's attention was attracted by a framed and long-faded photograph of a young man, bareheaded, with a loosely knotted scarf, a striped blazer and white flannels. His face was thin and sensitive, his lips level, and his eyes gazed with a steady questioning at the observer.
“That was Bartram,” Amelia Lowrie told her; “your father. This was his room.”
She went down almost immediately and left Linda, in a maze of dim emotions, seated on one of the uncomfortable painted chairs. Her father! This was his room; nothing, she realized, had been disturbed. The mirror had held the vaguely unsteady reflection of his face; he had slept under the arched canopy of the bed. She rose and went to a window from which he, too, had looked.
Below her was the garden shut in on its front by the high fence. There was a magnolia-tree, now covered with thick smooth white flowers, and, at the back, low-massed rhododendron with fragile lavender blossoms on a dark glossy foliage. But the space was mainly green and shadowed in tone; while beyond were other gardens, other emerald lawns and magnolia-trees, an ordered succession of tranquillity with separate brick or stone or white dwellings in the lengthening afternoon shadows of vivid maples.
It was as different as possible from all that Linda had known, from the elaborate hotels and gigantic apartment houses, the tropical interiors, of her New York life. She unpacked her bag, putting her gold toilet things on the chest of drawers, precisely arranging in a shallow closet what clothes she had brought, and then, changing, went down to the Lowries.
They surveyed her with eminent approval at a dinner-table lighted only with candles, beside long windows open on a dusk with a glimmer of fireflies. Suddenly Linda felt amazingly at ease; it seemed to her that she had sat here before, with the night flowing gently in over the candle-flames. The conversation, she discovered, never strayed far from the concerns and importance of the Lowrie blood. “My grandmother, Natalie Vigné,” Elouise informed her, “came with her father to Philadelphia from France, in eighteen hundred and one, at the invitation of Stephen Girard, who was French as well. She married Hallet Lowrie whose mother was a Bartram.
“That, my dear, explains our black hair and good figgers. There never was a lumpy Lowrie. Well, Hallet built this house, or rather enlarged it, for his wife; and it has never been out of the family. Our nephew, Arnaud Hallet—Arnaud was old Vigné's name—owns it now. Isaac Hallet, you may recall, was suspected of being a Tory; at any rate his brother's descendants, Fanny Rodwell is the only one left, won't speak.”
The placid conversation ran on unchanged throughout dinner and the evening. Linda was relieved by the absence of any questioning; indeed nothing contemporary, she realized, was held to be significant. “I thought Arnaud would be in to-night,” Elouise Lowrie said; “he knew Linda was expected.” No one, however, appeared; and Linda went up early to her room. There, too, were only candles, a pale wavering illumination in which the past, her father, were extraordinarily nearby. A sense of pride was communicated to her by so much that time had been unable to shake. The bed was steeped in the magic of serene traditions.
Arnaud Hallet appeared for dinner the evening after Linda's arrival; a quiet man with his youth lost, slightly stooped shoulders, crumpled shoes and a green cloth bag. But he had a memorable voice and an easy distinction of manner; in addition to these she discovered, at the table, a lighter amusing sense of the absurd. She watched him—as he poured the sherry from a decanter with a silver label hung on a chain—with a feeling of mild approbation. On the whole he was nice but uninteresting. What a different man from Pleydon!
The days passed in a pleasant deliberation, with Arnaud Hallet constantly about the house or garden, while Linda's thoughts continually returned to the sculptor. He was clearer than the actuality of her mother and the Feldts or the recreated image of her father. At times she was thrilled by the familiar obscure sense of music, of longing slowly translated into happiness. Then more actual problems would envelop her in doubt. Mostly she was confused—in her cool material necessity for understanding—by the temper of her feeling for Dodge Pleydon. Linda wondered if this were love. Perhaps, when she saw him again, she'd be able to decide. Then she remembered promising to let him know if she changed her address. It was possible that already he had called at the Feldts', or written, and that her mother had refused to inform him where she had gone.
Linda had been at the Lowries' two weeks now, but they were acutely distressed when she suggested that her visit was unreasonably prolonged. “My dear,” they protested together, “we hoped you'd stay the summer. Bartram's girl! Unless, of course, it is dull with us. Something brighter must be arranged. No doubt we have only thought of our own pleasure in having you.”
Linda replied honestly that she enjoyed being with them extremely. Her mother's dislike, the heavy luxury of the Feldt apartment, held little attraction for her. Then, too, losing the sense of the bareness of the house Hallet Lowrie had built for his French wife, she began to find it surprisingly appealing.
Her mind returned to her promise to Pleydon. She told herself that probably he had forgotten her existence, but she had a strong unreasoning conviction that this was not so. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to write him and, almost before she was aware of the intention, she had put “Dear Mr. Pleydon” at the head of a sheet of note-paper.
I promised to let you know in the spring when you came back from South America where I was. I did not think I would have to do it, but here I am in Philadelphia with my father's sisters. I do not know just how long for, but a month, anyhow. It is very quiet, but charming. I have the room that was my father's when he was young, and look out of the window like he must have. If you should come to Philadelphia my aunts ask me to say that they would be glad to have you for dinner. This is how you get here....
Very sincerely,
She walked to a street crossing, where she dropped the envelope into a letter-box on a lamppost, and returned to find Arnaud Hallet waiting for her. He said:
“Everyone agrees I'm serious, but actually you are worse than the Assembly.” They went through the dining-room to the garden, and sat on the stone step of a deep window. It was quite late, perhaps eleven o'clock, and the fireflies, slowly rising into the night, had vanished. Linda was cool and remote and grave, silently repeating and weighing the phrases of her letter to Pleydon.
She realized that Arnaud Hallet was coming to like her a very great deal; but she gave this only the slightest attention. She liked him, really, and that dismissed him from serious consideration. Anyhow, in spite of the perfection of his manner, Arnaud's careless dress displeased her: his shoes and the shoulders of his coat were perpetually dusty, and his hair, growing scant, was always ruffled. Linda understood that he was highly intellectual, and frequently contributed historical and genealogical papers to societies and bulletins, but compared with Dodge Pleydon's brilliant personality and reputation, Pleydon surrounded by the Susanna Nodas of life, Arnaud was as dingy as his shoes.
She wondered idly when the latter would actually try to love her. He was holding her hand and it might well be to-night. Linda decided that he would do it delicately; and when, almost immediately, he kissed her, she was undisturbed. No, surprisingly, it had been quite pleasant. He hadn't mussed her ribbons, nor her spirit, a particle. In addition he did not at once become impossible and urgently sentimental; there was even a shade of amusement on his heavy face.
“You appear to take a lot for granted,” he complained.
“I'd been wondering when it would happen,” she admitted coolly.
“It always does, then?”
“Usually I stop it,” she continued. “I don't believe I'll ever like being kissed. Can you tell me why? No one ever has; they all think they can bring me around to it.”
“And to them,” he added.
“But they end by being furious at me. I've been sworn at and called dreadful names. Sometimes they're only silly. One cried; I hated that the most.”
“Do you mean that you were sorry for him?”
“Oh, dear, no. Why should I be? He looked so odious all smeared with tears.”
Arnaud Hallet returned promptly: “Linda, you're a little beast.” To counteract his rude speech he kissed her again. “This,” he said with less security, “threatens to become a habit. I thought, at forty-five, that I was safely by the island of sirens, but I'll be on the rocks before I know it.”
She laughed with the cool remoteness of running water.
“I wonder you haven't been murdered,” he proceeded, “in a moonless garden by an elderly lawyer. Do you ever think of the lyric day when, preceded by a flock of bridesmaids and other flowery pagan truck, you'll meet justice?”
“Marriage?” she asked. “But of course. I have everything perfectly planned—”
“Then, my dear Linda, describe him.”
“Very straight,” she said, “with beautiful polished shoes and brushed hair.”
“You ought to have no trouble finding that. Any number of my friends have one—to open the door and take your things. I might arrange a very satisfactory introduction for everybody concerned—a steady man well on his way to preside over the pantry and table.”
“You're not as funny as usual,” Linda decided critically. “That, too, disturbs me,” he replied. “It looks even more unpromising for the near future.”
In her room Linda thought, momentarily, of Arnaud Hallet; whatever might have been serious in her attitude toward him dissolved by the lightness of his speech. Dodge Pleydon appealed irresistibly to her deepest feelings. Now her mental confusion was at least clear in that she knew what troubled her. It was not new, it extended even to times before Pleydon had entered her life—the difficulties presented by the term “love.”
In her mind it was divided into two or three widely different aspects, phases which she was unable to reconcile. Her mother, in the beginning, had informed her that love was a nuisance. To be happy, a man must love you without any corresponding return; this was necessary to his complete management, the securing of the greatest possible amount of new clothes. It was as far as love should be allowed to enter marriage. But that reality, with a complete expression in shopping, was distant from the immaterial and delicate emotions that in her responded to Pleydon.
Linda had been familiar with the materials, the processes, of what, she had been assured, was veritable love since early childhood. Her mother's dressing, the irritable hours of fittings and at her mirror, the paint she put on her cheeks, the crimping of her hair were for the favor of men. These struggles had absorbed the elder, all the women Linda had encountered, to the exclusion of everything else. This, it seemed, must, from its overwhelming predominance, be the greatest thing in life.
There was nothing mysterious about it. You did certain things intelligently, if you had the figure to do them with, for a practical end. The latter, carefully controlled, like an essence of which a drop was delightful and more positively stifling, was as real as the methods of approach. Oatmeal or scented soap! The force of example and association combined to bathe such developments in the sanest light possible, and Linda had every intention of the successful grasping of an easy and necessary luxury. She had, until—vaguely—now, been entirely willing to accept the unescapable conditions of love used as a means or the element of pleasure at parties. Now, however, the unexpected element of Dodge Pleydon disturbed her philosophy.
Suddenly all the lacing and painting and crimping, the pretense and lies and carefully planned accidental effects, filled her with revolt. The insinuations of women, the bareness of their revelations, her mother returning unsteady and mussed from a dinner, were unutterably disgusting. Even to think of them hurt her fundamentally: so much of what she was, of what she had determined, had been destroyed by an emotion apparently as slight as echoed music.
Here was the real mystery and for which nothing in her experience had prepared her. She began to see why it was called a nuisance—if this were love—and wondered if she had better not suppress it at once. It wouldn't be suppressed. Her thoughts continually came back to Pleydon, and the warmth, the disturbing thrill, always resulted. It led her away from herself, from Linda Condon; a sufficiently strange accomplishment. A concern for Dodge Pleydon, little schemes for his happiness and well-being, put aside her clothes and complexion and her future.
Until the present her acts had been the result of deliberation. She had been impressed by the necessity for planning with care; but, in the cool gloom of the covered bed, a sharp joy held her at the possibility of flinging caution away. Yet she couldn't quite, no matter how much she desired it, lose herself. Linda was glad that Pleydon was rich; and there were, she remembered, moments for surrender.
As usual these problems, multiplying toward night, were fewer in the bright flood of morning. She laughed at the memory of Arnaud Hallet's humor; and then, it was late afternoon, the maid told her that Pleydon was in the drawing room. Her appearance satisfactory she was able to see him at once. To her great pleasure neither Pleydon nor his clothes had changed. He was dressed in light-gray flannels; a big easy man with a crushing palm, large features and an expression of intolerance.
“Linda,” he said, “what a splendid place to find you. So much better than Markue's.” He was, she realized, very glad to see her, and dropped at once, as if they had been uninterruptedly together, into intimate talk. “My work has been going badly,” he proceeded; “or rather not at all. I made a rather decent fountain at Newport; but—remember what Susanna said?—it's not in the first rank. A happy balance and strong enough conception; yet it is like a Cellini ewer done in granite. The truth is, too much interests me; an artist ought to be the victim of a monomania. I'm a normal animal.” He studied her contentedly:
“How lovely you are. I came over—in an automobile at last—because I was certain you couldn't exist as I remembered you. But you could and do. Lovely Linda! And what a gem of a letter. It might have been copied from 'The Perfect Correspondent for Young Females.' You're not going to lose me again. When I was a little boy I had a passion for sherbets.”
She smiled at him with half-closed eyes and the conviction that, with Pleydon, she could easily be different. He leaned forward and his voice startled her with the impression that he had read her mind:
“If you could care for any one a lifetime would be short to get you. Look, you have never been out of my thoughts—or within my reach. It seems a myth that I kissed you; impossible ... Linda.”
“But you did,” she told him, gaining happiness from the mere assurance. They were alone in the drawing-room, and he rose, sweeping her up into his arms. Yet the expected joy evaded her desire and the sudden determination to lose utterly her reserve. It was evident that he as well was conscious of this, for he released her and stood frowning, his protruding lower lip uglier than ever.
“A lifetime would be nothing,” he said again; “or it might be everything wasted. Which are you—all soul and spirit, or none?”
“I don't know,” she replied, in her bitter disappointment, her heart pinched by the sharpest pain she remembered. There was the stir of skirts at the door; Linda turned with a sense of relief to Amelia Lowrie. However, dinner progressed very well indeed. “Then your aunt,” Elouise said to Pleydon, “was Carrie Dodge. I recall her perfectly.” That established, the Lowrie women talked with a gracious freedom, exploring the furthermost infiltrations of blood and marriages.
Linda was again serene. She watched Pleydon with an extraordinary formless conviction—each of them was a part of the other's life; while in some way marriage and love were now hopelessly confused. It was beyond effort or planning. That was all she could grasp, but she was contented. Sometimes when he talked he made the familiar descriptive gesture with his hand, as if he were shaping the form of his speech: a sculptor's gesture, Linda realized.
Later they wandered into the garden, a dark enclosure with the long ivy-covered façade of the house broken by the lighted spaces of windows. Beyond the fence at regular intervals an electric car passed with an increasing and diminishing clangor. The white petals of the magnolia-tree had fallen and been wheeled away; the blossoms of the rhododendron were dead on their stems. It was, Linda felt, a very old garden that had known many momentary emotions and lives.
Dodge Pleydon, standing before her, put his hands on her shoulders. “Would I have any success?” he asked. “Do you think you'd care for me?”
She smiled confidently up at his intent face. “Oh, yes.” Yet she hoped that he would not kiss her—just then. The delicacy of her longing and need were far removed from material expressions. This, of course, meant marriage; but marriage was money, comfort, the cold thing her mother had impressed on her. Love, her love, was a mistake here. But in a little it would all come straight and she would understand. She no longer had confidence in her mother's wisdom.
In spite of her shrinking, of a half articulate appeal, he crushed her against his face. Whatever that had filled her with hope, she thought, was being torn from her. A sickening aversion over which she had no control made her stark in his arms. The memories of the painted coarse satiety of women and the sly hard men for which they schemed, the loose discussions of calculated advances and sordid surrenders, flooded her with a loathing for what she passionately needed to be beautiful.
Yet deep within her, surprising in its vitality, a fragile ardor persisted. If she could explain, not only might he understand, but be able to make her own longing clear and secure. But all she managed to say was, “If you kiss me again I think it will kill me.” Even that failed to stop him. “You were never alive,” he asserted. “I'll put some feeling into you. It has been done before with marble.”
Linda, unresponsive, suffered inordinately.
Again on her feet she saw that Pleydon was angry, his face grim. He seemed changed, threatening and unfamiliar; it was exactly as if, in place of Dodge Pleydon, a secretive impersonal ugliness stood disclosed before her. He said harshly:
“When will you marry me?”
It was what, above all else, she had wanted; and Linda realized that to marry him was still the crown of whatever happiness she could imagine. But her horror of the past recreated by his beating down of her gossamer-like aspiration, the vision of him flushed and ruthless, an image of indiscriminate nameless man, made it impossible for her to reply. An abandon of shrinking fear numbed her heart and lips.
“You won't get rid of me as you do the others about you,” he continued. “This time you made a mistake. I haven't any pride that you can insult; but I have all that you—with your character—require. I have more money even than you can want.” She cried despairingly:
“It isn't that now! I had forgotten everything to do with money and depended on you to take me away from it always.”
“When will you marry me?”
In a flash of blinding perception, leaving her as dazed as though it had been a physical actuality, she realized that marrying him had become an impossibility. At the barest thought of it the dread again closed about her like ice. She tried, with all the force of old valuations, with even an effort to summon back the vanquished thrill, to give herself to him. But a quality overpowering and instinctive, the response of her incalculable injury, made any contact with him hateful. It was utterly beyond her power to explain. A greater mystery still partly unfolded—whatever she had hoped from Pleydon belonged to the special emotion that had possessed her since earliest childhood.
In the immediate tragedy of her helplessness, with Dodge Pleydon impatient for an assurance, she paused involuntarily to wonder about that hidden imperative sense. There was a broken mental fantasy of—of a leopard bearing a woman in shining hair. This was succeeded by a bright thrust of happiness and, all about her, a surging like the imagined beat of the wings of the Victory in Markue's room. Almost Pleydon had explained everything, almost he was everything; and then the other, putting him aside, had swept her back into the misery of doubt and loneliness.
“I can't marry you,” she said in a flat and dragged voice. He demanded abruptly:
“Why not?”
“I don't know.” She recognized his utter right to the temper that mastered him. For a moment Linda thought Pleydon would shake her. “You feel that way now,” he declared; “and perhaps next month; but you will change; in the end I'll have you.”
“No,” she told him, with a certainty from a source outside her consciousness. “It has been spoiled.”
He replied, “Time will discover which of us is right. I'm almost willing to stay away till you send for me. But that would only make you more stubborn. What a strong little devil you are, Linda. I have no doubt I'd do better to marry a human being. Then I think we both forget how young you are—you can't pretend to be definite yet.”
He captured her hands; too exhausted for any resentment or feeling she made no effort to evade him. “I'll never say good-bye to you.”
His voice had the absolute quality of her own conviction. To her amazement her cheeks were suddenly wet with tears. “I want to go now,” she said unsteadily; “and—and thank you.”
His old easy formality returned as he made his departure. In reply to Pleydon's demand she told him listlessly that she would be here for, perhaps, a week longer. Then he'd see her, he continued, in New York, at the Feldts'.
In her room all emotion faded. Pleydon had said that she was still young; but she was sure she could never, in experience or feeling, be older. She became sorry for herself; or rather for the illusions, the Linda, of a few hours ago. She examined her features in the limited uncertain mirror—strong sensations, she knew, were a charge on the appearance—but she was unable to find any difference in her regular pallor. Then, mechanically conducting her careful preparations for the night, her propitiation of the only omnipotence she knew, she put out the candles of her May.