There were four in their party but it was only with Alfred Baldwin that Mary Wollaston danced. The other man—Black his name was, and he came from Iowa City or Dubuque or thereabouts—devoted all his attention to Baldwin's wife. He was very rich, very much married—out in Iowa—and whenever he made his annual business trip to New York, he liked to have a real New York time. They had dined together at the Baldwins' apartment with a vague idea of going afterward to see a play of Baldwin's then drawing toward the close of a successful season's run. But dinner had been late and they had lingered too long over it to make this excursion worth while. It had amused both Mary and Christabel to discover Black's secret hope of being taken back-stage and introduced to the beautiful young star who was playing in the piece and taking her out to supper with them. He didn't know that Baldwin hated her with a perfect hatred and never got within speaking distance of her if he could help it.
So, by way of making up to the western visitor for his disappointment they taxied up-town about ten o'clock to the brightest, loudest and most fantastically expensive of New York's dancing restaurants. Once there, he took command of the party; confidently addressed the head waiter by his first name and began "opening wine" with a lavish hand. He was flirting in what he conceived to be quite a desperate and depraved manner with Christabel, and what enhanced his pleasure in this entertainment was that he did it all right under the nose of the husband, who obviously didn't mind a bit. He would talk eloquently when he got home, with carefully selected corroborative details, about the wickedness of New York.
Mary liked the Baldwins. Christabel was on the executive committee of their Fund and one of the best and steadiest and most sensible supporters it had. She was a real person. Baldwin, himself, whom she hadn't known so long nor so well and had regarded from afar as a rather formidable celebrity, proved on better acquaintance, though witty and sophisticated, to be as comfortable as an old glove. Altogether they were the nearest thing to friends that her long sojourn in New York had given her. She had sometimes thought rather wildly of putting them to the test and seeing whether they were real friends or not.
To-night, though, even they irritated her. She wished Christabel would snub that appalling bounder, Black, as he deserved. How could she go on playing up to him like that! As for Baldwin, she wished he would just dance with her and not talk. She supposed that the amount of alcohol they had consumed since seven o'clock had something to do with his verging upon the vein, the Broadway sentimental vein, that he had got started on and couldn't seem to let alone.
It wasn't new to Mary. Indeed it was a phenomenon familiarly associated in her mind with Forty-second Street restaurants and late hours and strong drink, particularly gin. The crocodile tear for the good woman who stayed at home; who didn't know; who never, please God! should know. The tribute to flower-like innocence—the paper flower-like innocence of the stageingenue!
Baldy wasn't as bad as that, couldn't ever conceivably be as bad as that, no matter how much he had had to drink. Perhaps, if she had not been hypersensitive to-night,—in an impossible mood for any sort of party really—she might have failed to detect the familiar strain in his sensible, rather fatherly talk. As it was, she thought she did detect it and it made her want to scream—or swear!
There is one point to be urged in Baldy's defense that Mary never learned to allow for. Gin or no gin, the effect of contrast she presented to her surroundings in a place like this, her look of a seraphic visitor gone astray, would have given any one the impulse, at least, to rush to the rescue. To begin with, it was not possible to credit her with the twenty-five years she truly claimed; nineteen, in a soft colored evening frock like the one she had on to-night, was about what one would have guessed. Then, you never would have believed, short of discovering the fact yourself, how strong she was; her slenderness and the fine articulation of her joints made her look fragile. Her coloring helped the illusion along, the clear unsophisticated blue of her eyes, the pallor of her hair that the petals of a tea-rose could have got lost in,—it was, literally, just about the tint of unbleached linen—and the pearly translucence of her skin. If you got the opportunity to look close enough to see that there wasn't a grain of powder upon it, not even between the shoulder blades, it made you think of flower petals again. What clenched the effect was her healthy capacity for complete relaxation when no effort was required of her. She drooped a little and people thought she looked tired. She never could see herself like that and never made due allowance for the effect she produced, invariably upon strangers and not infrequently upon an old friend.
To-night, she lacked the name to label her mood by, rejecting rather fiercely the one that kept offering itself. You couldn't be homesick when home was the last place in the world you wanted to go back to—the place you were desperately marshaling reasons for staying away from.
It was the non-appearance of her brother, Rush, that had brought a lot of dispersed feelings to a focus. She had heard nothing later from him than the letter she referred to when she last wrote to her father. She had expected a cable and it hadn't come. She had this morning gone over to Hoboken to meet the transport he had said he expected to sail on, but having got down to the pier a little late, after the debarkation had begun, she could not be sure that she hadn't missed him. So she had gone back to her tiny flat in Waverly Place and had spent the rest of the day there, vainly hoping that he would turn up or at least that she should get some word of him. And sitting around like that for hours and hours she had, which was a silly thing to do, let her thoughts run wild over things—a thing—that there was simply no sense in thinking about at all.
It was an odd fact, which she had noted long before today, that anything connected with home, a letter from her father or her aunt, news of the doings of any of her Chicago friends (the birth of Olive Corbett's second baby, for example), any vivid projection of a bit of the pattern of the life into which she had once been woven, roused that nightmare memory. Or gave, rather, to a memory which normally did not trouble her much, the quality of a nightmare; a moment of paralyzed incredulity that it could have happened to her; a pang of clear horror that it really and truly had happened to her very self; to this Mary Wollaston who still lived in the very place where it had happened.
This afternoon, while she had sat awaiting from moment to moment the appearance of her brother, or at least the sound of his voice over the telephone, the pang had been prolonged into an agony. She had let herself drift into a fantastic speculation of a sort that was perfectly new. What if the boy who had shared that crazy adventure with her, himself an officer bound overseas, had fallen in with Rush, made friends with him, told him the story!
This was pure melodrama, she knew. There was, in any external sense, nothing to be feared. The thing had happened almost a year ago. It had had no consequences—except this inexplicable one that her brother's approach brought back the buried memory of it. Why should it cling like that? Like an acid that wouldn't wash off! She was not, as far as her mind went, ashamed of it. Never had been. But, waiving all the extenuating circumstances—which had really surrounded the act—admitting that it was a sin (this thing that she had done once and had, later, learned the impossibility of ever doing again), was it any worse than what her brother had probably done a score of times?
What was this brother of hers going to be like? It wasn't possible, of course, that she would find him the boy he had been five years ago, before he went to France—though from some of his letters one might have thought he hadn't changed a bit. Wasn't it likely that he'd turn out to be some one she could cling to a little; confide her perplexities to—some of them? Was there a chance that ripened, disillusioned, made gentle and wise by the alchemy of the furnace he had come through, he might prove to be the one person in the world to whom she could confide everything? That would make an end to her nightmare, she felt sure.
The question whether he was or was not going to turn out like that was one presently to be answered. Until she knew the answer she didn't want to think at all, least of all about those things which Baldy's talk to-night kept rousing echoes of.
"Oh, they all look good when they're far away," she said, picking that bit of comic supplement slang deliberately to annoy him. "I don't believe our grandfathers and grandmothers were always such models of decorum as they tried, when they had grown old, to make us think. And the simple primitive joys … I believe an old-fashioned husking bee, if they had plenty of hard cider to go with it, was just as bad as this—coarser if not so vulgar. After all, most of these people will go virtuously home to bed pretty soon and you'd find them back at work to-morrow morning not any the worse, really, for this. It may be a rather poor sort of home they go to, but how do you know that the vine-covered cottage you have been talking about was any better?"
"Not to mention," he added, in humorous concurrence, "that there was probably typhoid in the well the old oaken bucket hung in. It seems odd to be convicted of sentimentality by an innocent babe like you. But if you had been looking at the party down at the end table behind you that I've had under my eye for ten minutes, perhaps you'd feel more as I do. No! don't turn around; they have been looking at us."
"Moralizing over us, perhaps," she suggested. "Thinking how wicked we probably were."
"No," he said, "I happen to know the girls. They live down in our part of town, just over in the Village, that is. They have been here six or eight years. One of them was quite a promising young illustrator once. And they're both well-bred—came obviously from good homes. And they've both gone, well—clean over the edge."
Somehow his innocent euphemism annoyed her. "You mean they are prostitutes?" she asked.
He frowned in protest at her employment of the word but assented unequivocally. He was used—as who is not—to hearing young women discuss outspokenly such topics but he couldn't forgive it from one who looked like Mary Wollaston.
"I have a hunch," he said, "that the two boys who are with them are officers out of uniform. I noticed that they looked the other way pretty carefully when that major who is sitting at the next table to ours came in."
"Let's dance again," she said. "I love this Hawaiian Moonlight thing."
He saw her take the opportunity that rising from the table gave her for a good square look at the party he had been talking about and some change in her manner made him say with quick concern, "What is it?"
But she ignored the question and stepped out upon the floor with him. They had danced half-way round the room when she said quietly, "One of the boys at that table is my brother Rush."
Baldwin said, "He has seen you, I think." He felt her give a sort of gasp before she replied but the words came steadily enough.
"Oh, yes, we saw each other at the same time."
He said nothing more, just went on dancing around the room with her in silence, taking care, without appearing to do so, to cut the corner where Rush was sitting, rather broadly. After two or three rounds of the floor, she flagged a little and without asking any questions, he led her back to their table. Luckily, Christabel and her Iowan had disappeared.
As soon as she was seated she asked him for a pencil and something she could write on—a card of his, the back of an old letter, anything. She wrote, "Won't you please come and ask me to dance?" and she slid it over to him. He read it and understood, picked up a busboy with his eye and despatched him with the folded scrap for delivery to Captain Wollaston at the end table.
Mary meanwhile had cradled her chin in her palms and closed her eyes. She had experienced so clear a premonition before she turned round to look at the party at the end table that one of those officers out of uniform would turn out to be Rush that the verification of it had the quality of something that happens in a dream. She felt a sharp incredulity that it could really be they, staring at each other across that restaurant. More than that, the brother she saw was not—in that first glance—the man she had been trying all day to make up her mind he would be. Not the new Rush with two palms to hisCroix de Guerreand his American D.S.C.; and the scars in his soul from the experiences those decorations must represent; but the Rush she had said good-by to in the autumn of 1914 when he set out to be a freshman at Harvard, the kid brother she had counciled and occasionally admonished, in the vicarious exercise of her father's authority. And in his panic-stricken gaze at her, she had recognized his instinctive acceptance of that position. Exactly so would he have looked five interminable years ago if she had caught him in mischief.
Then, like the undertow of a big wave, the reaction caught her. It was intolerable that he should look at her like that. He who had earned his manhood and its privileges in the long death grapple with the grimmest of realities. Certainly she was not the one to cast the first stone at him. She must contrive somehow, at once, to make that clear to him. The urgency of the thing lay in her belief that the whole of their future relationship depended upon the removing of his misapprehension now—to-night.
She could not go to that table where he sat without seeming more than ever the school mistress in pursuit of a truant, but perhaps he would come to her if she put her request right. They had danced together quite a lot in the old days. She danced so well that not even her status of elder sister had prevented his enjoying the exercise of their combined accomplishment.
A horrible misgiving had attacked her when she had scribbled the note and closed her eyes, that the cocktails and the champagne she herself had consumed since seven o'clock might have clouded her judgment—if, indeed, they were not responsible for the whole nightmare. Would she be equal to following out the line she had set for herself?
But no trace of that misgiving was apparent to her when Rush, after a wait of only two or three minutes, appeared at her table. She greeted him with a smile and a Hello, nodded a fleeting farewell to Baldwin and slipped comfortably into her brother's arms out on the floor. They danced away without a word. There was the same quite beautiful accord between them that there had been in the old days, and the sense of this steadied her. They had gone all the way around the floor before she spoke.
"It is like old times, isn't it?" she said. "And it does seem good. You don't mind, do you,—for ten minutes?"
"Ten minutes?" he echoed dully.
She knew then, as she had indeed been aware from the first, that he was drunk and that only by the most painful effort, could he command his scattered wits at all. It made her want to cry that he should be trying so hard. She must not cry. That would be the final outrage. She must be very simple and clear. She must—mustcontrive to make him understand.
"Will you listen to me, dear, and do exactly what I ask you to? I want you to go back to your people and forget that you have seen me at all."
"I am going to take you home—out of this," he said laboriously.
"I'm going home soon, but not with you. I want you to go back to—to the girl you brought here. No, dear, listen. This is the only reason I sent for you. To tell you that I wasn't going to try to scold you. I don't mind a bit. I want to tell you that, so that when you come back to me to-morrow or next day or whenever your party is quite over, you won't feel that you have anything to try to explain or apologize for. Now take me back to my place and then go on to yours."
"I won't take you back to him," he said doggedly. "What do you think I am? I'm drunk, but not enough for that. I am going to take you home."
She tried to laugh but in spite of herself it was more like a sob.
"Rush, dear, don't be silly. I am perfectly all right—or would be if I hadn't drunk quite so much champagne. They'll take me home. His wife's here with him and they're old friends of mine. They know a lot of our friends in Chicago. Please, Rush…."
"Do you think I'd go back to that—" he managed to pull up on the edge of an ugly word—"back to those people, and leave you here? Is it your wrap on that chair? We'll stop and get it and then we'll go."
She could have wept with vexation over the way her scheme had gone awry but there was clearly nothing else to do. She retrieved her cloak, simply said good night to Christabel and the man named Black, leaving Baldy to explain things as he chose.
Five minutes later she gave a taxi driver the address of her flat and dropped back against the cushions beside her brother. Neither of them spoke a word during that fifteen-minute drive. Mary wept quietly most of the way—it didn't matter there in the dark. The thought of this splendid glorious brother of hers painfully endeavoring to drag himself back into a state of sobriety from his first wild caper after long wearing of the harness of discipline—an escapade she supposed that he must have been looking forward to for days—dragging himself back to protect her—oh, it was too hopeless! Should she ever be able to explain to him why she had sent for him, and that her intentions had been the opposite of those of the moralizing meddler he would take her for? If only she could make it up to him somehow. She would have liked to reach over and pull him down into her arms, mother him and tell him not to mind—there was something so intolerably pathetic about his effort to sit soberly straight—but she resisted this impulse savagely. The alcohol in her own veins was responsible for this. She could not quite trust herself not to go maudlin. So she froze herself tight and huddled away from him into her own corner.
She did not think beyond the address she had given to the chauffeur until they pulled up at her door. Then she turned to Rush and asked, "Where shall he take you? Are you staying at a hotel?"
"I am going to take you home," he said precisely.
She saw she did not dare to let him go. There was no telling what serious trouble he might get into, in his illicit civilian dress, if she turned him adrift now. So she said, simply, "Well, here we are. Come in."
She opened the street door with her latch-key, and punched on the hall lights. She dreaded the two flights of stairs, but with the help of the banister rail he negotiated them successfully enough. And then he was safely brought to anchor in her sitting-room. It was plain he had not the vaguest idea where he was.
"I'll make some coffee," she said. "That will—pull us both together. And it won't take a minute because it's all ready to make for breakfast."
She was not gone, indeed, much longer than that, but when she came back from her kitchenette he had dropped like a log upon her divan, submerged beyond all soundings. So she tugged him around into a more comfortable position, managed to divest him of his dinner-jacket and his waistcoat, unbuttoned his collar and shirt-band, took off his shoes, and covered him up with an eiderdown quilt. Then she kissed him—it was five years since she had done that—and went, herself, to bed.
At ten o'clock the next morning she sat behind her little breakfast table—it was daintily munitioned with a glass coffee machine, a grapefruit and a plate of toast—waiting, overThe Times, for Rush to wake up. She looked more seraphic than ever, enveloped in a white turkish toweling bathrobe and with her hair in a braid. Her brother lay on the divan just as she had left him the night before. Presently the change in his breathing told her that he was struggling up out of the depths of sleep. She looked over at him and saw him blinking at the ceiling. When his gaze started round her way, she turned her attention to the busy little coffee machine which opportunely needed it.
It was a minute or two before he spoke. "Is that really you, Mary?"
She smiled affectionately at him and said, "Hello," adding with just an edge of good-humored mischief, "How do you feel?"
He turned abruptly away from her. "I feel loathsome," he said.
"Poor dear, of course you do. I'll tell you what to do. I've got a nice big bathroom in there. Go in and take a cold one." Then—"You've grown inches, Rush, since you went away but I believe you could still get into a suit of my pajamas—plain ones, not ruffly. Anyhow, I've another big bathrobe like this that you could roll up in. You'll be just in time for the coffee. You won't know yourself by then."
"I wish I didn't," he said morosely.
There wasn't much good arguing with that mood, she knew, so she waited a little.
"Is this where you live?" he asked. "You brought me here last night?"
"You brought me," she amended.
He frowned over that but didn't take it in. The next moment though he sat up suddenly and after a struggle with the giddiness this movement caused, asked, "Who else is here? Where's the other girl that lives with you?"
"She's not here now," Mary said. "We are all by ourselves."
He rose unsteadily to his feet. "I've got to get out of here quick. If anybody came in …"
"Rush, dearest!" she entreated. "Don't be silly. Lie down again—Well, then take that easy chair. Nobody will come in." Then over his air of resolute remorse she cried, on the edge of tears herself, "Oh,pleasedon't be so unhappy. Do let's settle down and be comfy together. I don't have to go to the office to-day. My job's just about played out. But nobody ever comes here to see me in the daytime. And it wouldn't matter if they did."
But this change of attitude was clearly beyond him. "I'll have to ask you to tell me what happened last night. You were there at that restaurant with friends of yours I suppose. I must have disgraced you up to the hilt with them. I should think you'd hate the sight of me."
"You didn't disgrace me at all," she contradicted, and now the tears did came into her eyes. "They knew I was expecting you and I told Mr. Baldwin who you were. You came up in the nicest way and asked me to dance and when we went away together there wasn't a thing—about you—that they could see. I was on the point of tears myself because my plan had gone wrong. But that would have seemed natural enough to them."
He frowned at the name Baldwin, as if he were trying to recover a memory. Now he felt vaguely in his trousers pocket and pulled out the crumpled visiting card that had her note scribbled on the back of it. "You haven't told me yet what happened," he said.
"Oh, I was afraid you wouldn't remember." She looked away from him as she said it and a little unwonted color crept into her cheeks.
"Afraid?" he questioned.
"I wanted you to understand," she said, "and now I'll have to tell you again. It was because I was trying so hard not to meddle that I did. I sent that little note to you just to get a chance to tell you not to mind my seeing you there with those others—not to let it spoil your party. I couldn't bear to have you come to me to-day, or to-morrow or whenever it was, feeling—well, ashamed you know, and explanatory. That's what I tried to tell you last night but couldn't make you understand. So I did, really, just exactly what I was meaning not to. Of course, I loved you for coming away and I love having you here like this, all to myself. But I didn't mean to—to spoil things for you."
He stared at her a moment in blank inapprehension; then a deep blush came burning into his face. "You didn't understand," he said thickly. "You didn't know what those girls were."
"Oh, Rush!" she cried. "Of course I did. I knew exactly what they were—better than you. I even knew who they were. They live not very far from here."
He paled and his look was frightened. "How did you know that?" he demanded. "How could you know a thing like that?"
"They've lived here in the Village for years," she said, summarizing Baldy without quoting him as her authority. "One of them used to be an illustrator—or something—before she went—over the edge. They're two of our celebrities. One can't go about, unless he's stone blind, without picking up things like that."
"You did know what she was, then," he persisted, doggedly pushing through something it was almost impossible for him to say, "and yet, knowing, you asked me to leave you alone and go back to her. You wanted me to do that?"
"I didn't want you to!" she cried. "I hated it, of course. But men—people—do things like that, and I could see how—natural it was that you wanted to. And if you wanted to, I didn't think it fair that it should be spoiled for you just because we happened to recognize each other. I didn't want you to hate me for having spoiled it. That's all."
She gave him the minute or two he evidently needed for turning this over in his mind. Then she turned her back on the window she had withdrawn to and began again.
"I used to be just a big sister to you, of course. Ever so superior, I guess, and a good bit of a prig. And all this time over there in France with nothing but my letters and that silly picture of me in the khaki frame, I suppose you have been thinking of me, well,—as a sort of nice angel. I'm not either, really. I don't want to be either.
"I want to be somebody you feel would understand anything; somebody you could tell anything to. So that it would work the other way as well. Because I've got to have somebody to tell things to,—troubles, and worries. And I've been hoping, ever since your letter came, that it would turn out to be you."
"What sort of troubles?" He shot the question in rather tensely.
There was a breathless moment before she answered, but she shook it off with a laugh and her manner lightened. "There's nothing to be so solemn about as all that. We don't want to wallow. We'll have some breakfast—only you go first and tub."
He was too young and healthy and clean-blooded to resist the effect upon his spirits which the cold water and the fresh white bathrobe and the hot strong coffee with real cream in it produced. And the gloomy, remorseful feeling, which he felt it his moral duty to maintain intact, simply leaked away. She noted the difference in him and half-way through their breakfast she left her chair and came round to him.
"Would you very much mind being kissed now?" she asked.
His answer, with a laugh, was to pull her down upon his knee and hug her up tight in his arms. They looked rather absurdly alike in those two white bathrobes, though this was an appearance neither of them was capable of observing. She disengaged herself presently from his embrace and went to find him some cigarettes, refraining from taking one herself from a feeling that he would probably like it better just then if she did not.
Back in her own place over her coffee and toast, she had no difficulty in launching him upon the tale of his own recent experiences. What the French were like now the war was over; and the Boche he had been living among in the Coblenz area;—the routine of his army life, the friends he made over there, and so on. Altogether she built him up immensely in his own esteem. It was plain he liked having her for a younger sister instead of for an older one, listening so contentedly to his tales, ministering to his momentary wants, visibly wondering at and adoring him.
But she broke the spell when she asked him what he meant to do now.
He turned restlessly in his chair. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know what the deuce there is I can do. Certainly father's idea of my going back to college and then to medical school afterward, is just plain, rank nonsense. I'd be a doddering old man before I got through—thirty years old. I should think that even he would see that. It will have to be business, I suppose, but if any kind friend comes around and suggests that I begin at the bottom somewhere—Mr. Whitney, for instance, offering me a job at ten dollars a week in his bank—I'll kill him. I can't do that. I won't. At the end of about ten days, I'd run amuck. What I'd really like," he concluded, "for about a year would be just this." His gesture indicated the bathrobe, the easy chair and the dainty breakfast table. "This, all the morning and a ball-game in the afternoon. Lord, it will be good to see some real baseball again. We'll go to a lot of games this summer. What are the Sox going to be like this year?"
She discussed the topic expertly with him and with a perfectly genuine interest, at some length. "Oh, it would be fun," she finished with a little sigh, "only I shan't be there, you know. At least I don't think I shall." Then before he could ask her why not, she added in sharper focus, "I can't go home, Rush."
"Can't!" he exclaimed. "What do you mean by that?"
"Oh, nothing to make a fuss about," she said with a frown of irritation."I wish you weren't so jumpy this morning,—or perhaps, it's I that am.All I meant was that home isn't a comfortable place for me and I won't goback there if I can help it—only I am afraid I can't. That's the troubleI wanted to talk to you about."
"I thought you liked the new stepmother," he said. "Hasn't she turned out well?—What am I supposed to call her, anyhow? I wanted to find out about that before I was right up against it."
"Call her?" Mary was a little taken back. "Why, anything you like, I should think. I've always called her Paula.—You weren't thinking of calling her mother, were you?"
"Well," he protested, "how should I know? After all, she is father's wife. And she must be fairly old."
"But, Rush, you'veseenher!"
"Only that once, at the wedding. She was made up to look young then, of course. Painted and dyed and so on, I suppose. I felt so embarrassed and silly over the whole thing—being just a kid—that I hardly looked at her. And that was a long while ago."
Mary laughed at that, though she knew it would annoy him. "She never paints nor dyes nor anything, Ruddy. She doesn't have to. She's such a perfectly raving beauty without it. And she's more beautiful now than she was then. She really is young, you see. Hardly enough older than we are to matter, now that we're grown up."
She saw Rush digesting this idea of a beautiful young stepmother whom he was to be privileged to call—straight off—by her first name, with a certain satisfaction, so she waited—rather conscious that she was being patient—for him to come back from the digression of his own accord. Presently he did.
"What does she do that you don't like?"
"She does nothing that isn't perfectly nice, and good-tempered, and—respectable," Mary assured him, and added on a warmer note, "Oh, and she's really amiable and lovely. I was being a cat. But I am truly fond of her—when I have her to myself. It's when she's with father …"
She broke off there, seeing that she could not make that clear to him (how could she since she would not state it in plain terms to herself?) and hurried on, "It's really father whom I don't get on with, any more. He worries about me and feels sorry for me and wants me to come home. But I'm nothing to him when I do come—but an embarrassment.—No, itisn'trot. He knows it himself and feels horrid about it and raises my allowance when I go away, though it was foolishly big already; and then, as soon as I'm back here he begins worrying again, and urging me to come home. He didn't insist as long as I was doing war work, but now that that's played out, I suppose he will.
"Oh, I know well enough what I ought to do. I ought to answer some advertisement for a typist—I can do that, but not stenography—and take a regular job. The sort you said you'd shoot Mr. Whitney for offering you. And then I ought to take a hall bedroom somewhere in the cross-town twenties and live on what I earned. That's the only thing I can see, and, Rush, I simply haven't the courage to do it. It seems as if I couldn't do it."
His lively horror at the bare suggestion of such a thing drew her into a half-hearted defense of the project. Numbers of the girls she knew down here who had been doing war work were going enthusiastically into things like that—or at least were announcing an invincible determination to do so. Only they were cleverer than she at that sort of thing and could hope for better jobs. They were in luck. They liked it—looked forward to a life of it as one full of engaging possibilities. But to Mary it was nothing, she hardly pretended, but a forlorn last shift. If one couldn't draw nor write nor act nor develop some clever musical stunt, what else was there for a girl to do?
"Well, of course," said Rush, in a very mature philosophical way and lighting a cigarette pretty deliberately between the words,—"of course, what most girls do, is—marry somebody." Then he stole a look around at his sister to see how she had taken it.
There was a queer look that almost frightened him in her blue eyes. Her lips, which were trembling, seemed to be trying to smile.
"That's father's idea," she said raggedly. "He's as anxious now that I should marry somebody—anybody, as he was that I shouldn't five years ago—before he found Paula. You see I am so terribly—left on his hands."
There was, no doubt, something comical about the look of utter consternation she saw on her brother's face, but she should not have tried to laugh at him for a sob caught the laugh in the middle and swept away the last of her self-control. She flung herself down upon the divan and buried her face in one of the pillows. He had seen men cry like that but, oddly enough, never a woman. What he did though was perhaps as much to the point as anything he could have done. He sat down beside her and gathered her up tight in his arms and held her there without a word until the tempest had blown itself out. When the sobs had died away to nothing more than a tremulous catch in each indrawn breath, he let her go back among the pillows and turn so that she could look up at him. By that time the sweat had beaded out upon his forehead, and his hands, which had dropped down upon her shoulders, were trembling.
"Well," she asked unsteadily. "What do you think of me now?"
He wanted to bend down and kiss her but wisely he forbore. "It's easy to see what's the matter," he said. "This war business you have been doing has been too much for you. You're simply all in." Then happily he added, "I'd call you a case of shell-shock."
She rewarded that with a washed-out smile. "What's the treatment going to be?" she asked.
"Why," he said, "as soon as I'm done tucking you up properly in this eiderdown quilt, I'm going out to your icebox and try to find the makings of an egg-nog. Incidentally, I shall scramble up all the rest of the eggs I find and eat them myself. And then I'll find something dull to read to you until you go to sleep. When it's dark enough so that my evening clothes won't attract too much attention, I'll go back and get into uniform; then I'll buy two tickets for Chicago on the fast train to-morrow, and two tickets for a show to-night; and then I'll come back and take you out to dinner. Any criticisms on that program?"
"Not just for this minute," she said contentedly. "I don't know whetherI'm going to Chicago with you, tomorrow, or not."
"That's all right," he said. "I know all about that." He added, "I hope the other girl won't mind—the one who lives here with you. What was her name?"
"Ethel Holland? Oh, she went over to France with the Y.M.C.A. just about a year ago. I've tried to find somebody to take her place, but there didn't seem to be any one I liked well enough. So I've been living alone."
She saw his face stiffen at that but his only comment was that that simplified matters.
There was a good quarter of an hour beginning with the tear-blurred moment when Mary caught sight of her father looking for her and Rush down the railway station platform, during which the whole fabric of misgivings about her home-coming dissolved as dreams do when one wakes. It had not been a dream she knew, nor the mere concoction of her morbid fancy. He had not looked at her like this nor kissed her like this—not once since that fatal journey to Vienna five years ago. Had something happened between him and Paula that made the difference? Or was it her brother's presence, that, serving somehow to take off the edge, worked a mysterious catalysis?
When John, after standing off and gazing wordless for a moment at this new son of his, this man he had never seen, in his captain's uniform with bits of ribbon on the breast of it,—tried to say how proud he was and choked instead, it was for Mary that he reached out an unconscious, embracing arm, the emotion which would not go into words finding an outlet for itself that way.
When they got out to the motor and old Pete, once coachman, now chauffeur, his eyes gleaming over the way Rush had all but hugged him, said to her, "You home to stay, too, Miss Mary?" her father's hand which clasped her arm revealed the thrilling interest with which he awaited her answer to that question. The importunity of the red-cap with the luggage relieved her of the necessity for answering but the answer in her heart just then was "Yes."
It was with a wry self-scornful smile that she recalled, later that day, the emotions of the ride home. If at any time before they got to the house, her father had repeated the old servant's question, "Are you home to stay, Mary?" she would, she knew, have kissed the hand that she held clasped in hers, wept blissfully over it and told him she wanted never to go away again. She hadn't minded his not asking because she thought she knew quite surely why he had not. He was afraid to risk his momentary happiness upon her answer. And why had she not volunteered the assurance he wanted so eagerly and dared not ask for? The beastly answer to that question was that she had enjoyed the thrill of his uncertainty—a miserable sort of feline coquetry.
Well, it had been short-lived, that little triumph of hers. It had stopped against a blank wall just when the car stopped under theports cochèreof the Dearborn Avenue house. John's arm which had been around her was withdrawn and he looked with just a touch of ostentation at his watch. She knew before he spoke that when he did, his tone would ring flat. The old spell was broken. He was once more under the dominion of the newer, stronger one.
"I'm terribly late," he said. "I must drive straight along to the hospital. I'll see you to-night. We're having a few old friends in to dinner. Run along now. Your Aunt Lucile will be waiting for you."
His omission to mention Paula had been fairly palpable. Her reply, "All right, dad, till to-night, then.Au 'voir" had been, she knew, as brittle and sharp-edged as a bit of broken glass. It had cut him;—she had meant it to.
Well it served her right. Paula deserved to own the stronger spell. Paula's emotional channels were open and deep. No choking snags and sandbars, no perverse eddies in them. Look at her with Rush to-day! There was a situation that fairly bristled with opportunities for blundering. She might, with this grown-up son of her husband's whom she had hardly seen, have shown herself shy, embarrassed, at a loss how to take him. She might have tried to be archly maternal with him or elder-sisterly. But she played up none of these sentimental possibilities, seemed, indeed, serenely unaware of them. She treated him just as she had always treated Mary—as a contemporary. From the beginning she had no trouble making him talk. For one thing her acquaintance with France and Germany was intimate enough to enable her to ask him questions which he found it pleasantly stimulating to try to answer. As she felt her way to firmer ground with him, she allowed what was evidently a perfectly spontaneous affection to irradiate the look she turned upon him and to warm her lovely voice.
So she must have begun—as simply and irresistibly as that—in Vienna!
Mary tried hard to think of it as a highly skillful performance, but this was an attitude she could not maintain. It was not a performance at all; it was—just Paula, who, having taken her father away from her was now, inevitably, going to take her brother too. Not because she meant to—quite unconscious that she was doing any harm ("and of course she isn't, except to a cat like me")—that was the maddening, and at the same time, endearing thing about her.
For there was a broad impartiality about her spell that tugged at Mary even while she forlornly watched Rush yielding to it. And the way it affected Aunt Lucile was simply funny. She melted, visibly, like a fragment left on the curb by the iceman, whenever Paula—turned the current on. What made this the more striking was that Aunt Lucile's normal mood to-day impressed Mary as rather aggressively sell-contained. Was it just that Mary had forgotten how straight she sat and how precisely she moved about? Had she always had that discreet significant air, as if there were something she could talk about but didn't mean to—not on any account? Or was there something going on here at home that awaited—breathlessly awaited—discovery? Whatever it was, when Paula turned upon her it went, laughably;—only it would have been a pretty shaky sort of laugh.
It was after lunch that Paula electrified them by suggesting that they all go together to a matinée. That's an illustration of the power she had. To each of the three, to Lucile and to Mary as well as to the now infatuated Rush, she could make a commonplace scheme like that seem an irresistibly enticing adventure. Lucile recovered her balance first, but it was not until Nat had fetched the morning paper and they had discussed their choice of entertainments for two or three minutes that she said of course she couldn't go. She didn't know what she'd been thinking of. The number of things imperatively to be done or seen to in preparation for the party to-night would keep her busy all the afternoon.
Then Mary followed suit. If this was really going to be a party—she hadn't quite got this idea before—she'd have to spend the afternoon unpacking and putting her frocks in order or she wouldn't have anything to wear.
"Well," Paula said comfortably, "until they turn me on like a Victrola at nine o'clock or so, I've nothing to do with the party except not think about it." She made this observation at large, then turned on Rush. "You'll come with me, won't you, and keep me from getting frightened until tea-time?"
Rush would go—rather!—but he laughed at the word "frightened."
"I'm not joking," she said, and reaching out she covered his hand, which rested on the cloth, with one of hers.
He flushed instantly at that; then said to the others with slightly elaborated surprise, "Itis,cold, for a fact."
"So is the other one," said Paula. "For that matter, so are my feet. And getting colder every minute. Come along or we'll be late."
Mary branded this as a bit of rather crude coquetry. It wasn't conceivable that a professional opera singer of Paula's experience could look forward with any sort of emotion to the mere singing of a few songs to a group of familiar friends. It occurred to her, too, that Paula had calculated on her refusal to go to the matinée as definitely as on Aunt Lucile's and for a moment she indulged the idea of changing her mind and going along with them just to frustrate this design. Only, of course, it wouldn't work that way. She couldn't keep Rush from being taken away from her by playing the spoil-sport. She couldn't keep him anyhow she supposed. She made a hasty, rather forlorn retreat to her own room as soon as the departing pair were safely out of the house.
That room of hers exerted now a rather curious effect upon her mood. It had been hers ever since her promotion from the nursery and it, like her brother's adjoining, had been kept unchanged, unoccupied during her long absence.
The furniture and the decoration of it had been her mother's last Christmas present. The first Mrs. Wollaston had lived under the influence of the late Victorian esthetes, and Mary's room looked as if it had been designed for Elaine the lily maid of Astolat, an effect which was heightened by a large brown picture in a broad brown frame of Watts' Sir Galahad. After her mother's death, that winter, Mary added a Botticelli Madonna, the one with the pomegranate, which she hung by itself on a wall panel. There was a narrow black oak table under it to carry a Fra Angelico triptych flanked by two tall candlesticks. It wasn't exactly a shrine, even if there was a crimson cushion conveniently disposed before it, and if Mary for a while said her prayers there instead of in the old childish way at her bedside, and if she genuflected when she passed it, that was her own affair.
Coming to it now, as to port after storms, with the intention almost openly avowed to herself of lying down upon the bed and, for an hour or two, feeling as sorry for herself as she could, she found an appalling strangeness about its very familiarity that pulled her up short. The abyss she stared into between herself and the Mary Wollaston whose image was so sharply evoked by the ridiculously unchanged paraphernalia of that Mary's life, turned her giddy. Even the face which looked back at her from the frame of that mirror seemed the other Mary's rather than her own.
From the doorway she stood, for a moment, staring. Then she managed a smile (it was the only possible attitude to take) at Sir Galahad, above the bed. The notion of flinging herself down for a self-pitying revel upon that bed,—the other Mary's virginal little narrow bed—had become unthinkable. The thing to do was to stop thinking. Quickly.
She stripped off her suit and blouse, slipped on a pongee kimono that she got out of her hand-bag, unlocked her trunk and began discharging its contents all about the room. She covered the chairs with them, the bed, the narrow table—that had never had anything upon it but that Fra Angelico triptych and the two candlesticks—the round table with the reading lamp, the writing desk in the corner, the floor. Then, a little out of breath, she paused.
Which among two or three possible frocks should she wear for the party to-night? What sort of party was it going to be anyhow? It was curious, considering the fact that they had done nothing but sit and talk all the morning, how vague her ideas about it were. Her father had said something out in the car about having a few old friends in for dinner. Paula was going to sing and professed herself frightened by the prospect. Also she had cited it as the reason for an unusually and almost strenuously unoccupied day. On the other hand it was keeping Aunt Lucile distractedly busy.
Was it the chance result of their preoccupation with other things that she had been given no more intelligible account of it, or was it something that all three of them, her father, Paula and Aunt Lucile, were walking round the edge of? The nub of some seriously trivial quarrel? Was that why Paula was so elaborately disengaged and Aunt Lucile so portentous? Was it even perhaps why her father had so abruptly fled this morning without coming into the house?
She treated this surmise kindly. It was something to think about anyhow; something to sharpen her wits upon, just as a cat stretches her claws in the nap of the drawing-room rug. She rescued from oblivion half a dozen remarks heard during the morning, whose significance had gone over her head, and tentatively fitted them together like bits of a picture puzzle. She hadn't enough to go on but she believed there was something there. And when a little later in the afternoon, she heard, along with a knock on her door, her aunt asking if she might come in, she gave her an enthusiastic welcome, scooped an armful of things out of a chair and cleared a sitting space for herself at the foot of the bed.
"Would this blue thing do for to-night?" she asked, "or isn't it enough of an affair? What sort of party is it anyhow?"
"Goodness knows," said Lucile. "Between your father and Paula I find it rather upsetting."
Mary had reached out negligently for her cigarette case, lighted one and letting it droop at a rather impossible angle, supported by the lightest pressure of her lips so that the smoke crept up over her face into her lashes and her hair, folded her hands demurely in her lap and waited for her aunt to go on. She was mischievously half aware of the disturbing effect of this sort of thing upon Lucile.
"What has there been between them?" Mary asked, when it became clear that her aunt needed prompting. "Between father and Paula, I mean. Not a row?"
Mary never used language like this except provocatively. It worked on her aunt as she had meant it to.
"There has been nothing between them," she said, "that requires a rowdy word like that to express. It has not been even a quarrel. But they have been for the last day or two, a little—at …"
"Outs?" Mary suggested.
This had been the word on Lucile's tongue. "At cross purposes," she amended and paused again. But Mary seeing that she was fairly launched waited, economically, meanwhile, inhaling all the smoke from her cigarette. "I suppose after all, it's quite natural," Lucile began, "that Paula should attract geniuses, since she's rather by way of being one herself."
Mary took the cigarette in her fingers so that she could speak a little more crisply than was possible around it. "Who is the genius she's attracting now? Doesn't father like him? And is he being not asked to the party? I'm sorry, aunt, I didn't mean to interrupt."
"He is being asked which, it appears, is what Paula objects to; only not until after dinner. That she insisted upon. Really," she went on, in response to her niece's perplexed frown, "I shall be much more intelligible If you'll let me begin at the beginning."
"Please do," said Mary. "Where did Paula find him?"
"I found him," said Miss Wollaston. "Paula discovered him a little later. I found him on a bench in the park and told him he might come to tune the drawing-room piano. Paula had him tune her piano instead and spent what must have been a rather mad day with him over it. He brought round some songs the next day for her to try and she and Portia Stanton's husband have been practising them with hardly any intermission since. The idea was that when they had 'got them up' as they say, the man,—March his name is, Anthony March, I think,—should be invited round to hear Paula sing them. Paula insists, absurdly it seems to me, that he never has heard a note of them himself; that he can't even play them upon the piano. How he could compose them without playing them on the piano first, is beyond me. But she is inclined to be a little emotional, I think, over the whole episode. Quite naturally—even Paula can't deny that—your father thought he would like to be present when the songs were sung and it was arranged that it should be this evening."
"She may not have been able to deny that it was natural," Mary observed, "but I'd bet she didn't like it."
"It's only fair to Paula to say," Miss Wollaston insisted, "that she did nothing to exhibit a feeling of that sort. But when, at John's suggestion, I spoke of the possibility of having in the Cravens and the Blakes,—the Cravens are very musical, you know—and Wallace Hood who would be really hurt if we left him out, Paula came nearer to being downright rude than she often allows herself to be. She said among other things that she didn't propose to have March subjected to a 'suffocating' affair like that. She said she wanted him free to interrupt as often as he liked and tell them how rotten they were. That was her phrase. When I observed that Mr. March didn't impress me as the sort of person who could conceivably wish to be rude as that she said he could no more remember to be polite when he heard those songs for the first time than she herself could sing them in corsets. She summed it up by saying that it wasn't going to be a polite affair and the fewer polite people there were, hanging about, the better. There was, naturally, nothing I could say to that."
"I should think not," Mary agreed, exhaling rather explosively an enormous cloud of smoke. "Poor Aunt Lucile!" Her commiseration didn't sound more than skin deep.
"The matter rested there," the elder woman went on, "until your father received Rush's telegram that you were coming to-day. Then he took matters into his own hands and gave me a list of the people he wanted asked. There are to be about a dozen besides ourselves at dinner and perhaps as many more are to come after."
"I can see Paula when you told her that," Mary reflected. "Or did you make dad tell her himself? Yes, of course you did! Only what I can't understand is why Paula didn't say, 'All right. Have your party, and I'll sing if you want me to. Only not—what's his name?—March's songs.' And have him all to herself, as she wanted him, later. That would have been mate in one move, I should think."
Then, at the fleeting look she caught in the act of vanishing from her aunt's face, she cried, "You mean shedidsay that? And that father turned to ice, the way he can and—made a point of it? You know it's serious, if he's done that."
With a vigor meant to compensate for a sad lack of conviction, Miss Wollaston protested against this chain of unwarranted assumptions. But she admitted, at last, that her own surmise accorded with that of her niece. John certainly had said to her at breakfast that he saw no reason for foregoing the musical feature of the evening simply because an audience was to be present to hear it. Paula's only comment had been a dispassionate prediction that it wouldn't work. It wouldn't be fair to say she sulked; her rather elaborate detachment had been too good-humored for that. Her statement, at lunch, that she was to be turned on like a Victrola at half past nine, was a fair sample.
"What's he like, this genius of hers?" Mary wanted to know. "Young and downy and helpless, I suppose. With a look as if he was just about to burst into tears. I met one like that last winter." She knew exactly how to get results out of her aunt.
"He's not in the least like that! If he had been I should never have brought him home, not even to tune the piano. He's quite a well behaved, sensible-appearing young man, a little over thirty, I should say. And he does speak nicely, though I think Paula exaggerates about that."
"Sensible or not, he's fallen wildly in love with her, of course," Mary observed. "The more so they are the more instantaneously they do it."
But this lead was one Miss Wollaston absolutely declined to follow. "If that clock's right," she exclaimed, gazing at a little traveling affair Mary had brought home with her, "I haven't another minute." It was not right, for it was still keeping New York time, but the diversion served. "Wallace Hood spoke of coming in to see you about tea-time," she said from the doorway. "I'm going to be to busy even to stop for a cup, so do be down if you can."
Mary was warmly touched by the thought of Wallace's coming to see her in that special sort of way when he was certain of finding her at dinner an hour or two later. Her feelings about him were rather mixed but he dated back to the very earliest of her memories, and his kindly affectionate attitude toward her had never failed, even during those periods when she had treated him most detestably. Even as a little girl, she had been aware of his sentimental attachment to her mother and perhaps in an instinctive way had resented it, though her actual indictment against Wallace in those days had always been that he made her naughty; incited her by his perpetual assumption that she was the angelic little creature she looked, to one desperate misdemeanor after another, for which her father usually punished her. Mary had, superficially anyhow, her mother's looks along with her father's temper.
But for two years after Mrs. Wollaston's death, she and Wallace had been very good friends. She was grateful to him for treating her like a grown-up, for talking to her, as he often did, about her mother and how much she had meant to him. (She owed it, indeed, largely to Wallace that her memories of this sentimental, romantic, passionless lady with whom in life she had never been completely in sympathy, were as sweet and satisfactory as they were.) He had taken infinite pains with her, guiding her reading and her enjoyment of pictures in the paths of good taste. He took her to concerts sometimes, too, though at this point her docility ceased. She wouldn't be musical for anybody. He gave her much-needed advice in dealing with social matters which her sudden prematurity forced her to cope with. And with all this went a placidity which had no part at all in her relations with her father.
She got the idea, during this period, that he meant, when she was a little older, to ask her to marry him, and she sometimes speculated whether, if he did, she would. There would be something beautifully appropriate about it;—like the Professor's Love Story. Usually, though, she terminated the scene with a tender refusal.
She had long known, of course, how unreal all this was. Wallace had faded into complete invisibility at the time when she fell in love with Captain Burch and quarreled with her father about him. She couldn't remember afterward whether he had even been on the scene or not. But the savor of their friendship, though mild, was a pleasant one and there was none of her old acquaintances she'd rather have looked forward to to-day at tea-time in the drawing-room. She knew exactly what he would be like; just what they would say to each other. The only doubt in her mind was whether he'd bring her chocolates or daffodils.
She guessed wrong. It was a box of candied strawberries that he gave her as soon as their double hand-shake set him free. But nothing else came at once to the surface to falsify her prevision. She remembered how he liked his tea and was able to get an affectionate warmth into her voice, that sounded real though strangely enough it wasn't, in agreeing with him how like old times this was and how good it seemed to be home. Then came the joy of having Rush back again, and the war, and the Peace Conference,—only we weren't going to talk about things like that. And then Alan Seeger, Rupert Brooke, Conningsby Dawson.
But oddly enough, she felt herself going back to still older times, to the abominable little girl who had yielded to irresistible desires such as making faces at him and rubbing the nap of his silk hat the wrong way. She repressed, vigorously, this lawless vein. She was determined for this one day to be just as nice as he tried, so hard, to think she was. But with this resolution occupying her mind the talk presently ran rather thin, her contribution to it for whole minutes drying up entirely. It was after a rather blank silence that he said he supposed Paula was lying down, resting for to-night's performance. His inflection struck Mary as a little too casual and reminded her that it was his first mention of her stepmother's name. This roused her attention.
"Oh, Paula's off playing with Rush," she said. "I believe they went to a matinée."
He exclaimed at that, over Paula's stores of energy and her reckless ways of spending them. He said she gave him the impression of being absolutely tireless, superimposing a high speed society existence which John Wollaston and he, in relays, could hardly keep up with, upon the heavy routine of work in her studio. He illustrated this with a schedule of her activities during the last three days. "Oh, yes," he threw in, in parenthesis, "I'm as much in the family as ever. When your father can't do escort duty, they call on me." He added in conclusion that he was glad she had already made a start toward getting acquainted with Rush.
Was this relief, Mary wondered—at learning that she was not at this moment engaged less domestically somewhere with Anthony March? But she doubted whether this was a good guess. If he did feel any such relief, it was not, at all events, from a personal jealousy; for the illuminating conviction had come over her that Wallace could not possibly be one of Paula's conquests. A man still capable of cherishing as the most beautiful event of his life, that sentimental platonic friendship he had enjoyed with her mother, would be immune against Paula's spells.
She wondered if he wasn't a little afraid of Paula. If he did not, in his heart, actually dislike her. But if this were true, why did he willingly devote so many of his hours to squiring her about, substituting for her husband? (She told herself, as one discovering a great truth, that a substitute was exactly what Heaven had ordained Wallace Hood to be.) She kept him going about Paula easily enough, as a sort of obbligato to these meditations and her name was on Wallace's lips when John Wollaston came into the room.
"Where is she?" he asked Mary. "I hoped I'd find her resting for to-night." Evidently he had been up to her room to see. The relief was plainly legible in his face when he got Mary's answer.
"She and Rush, eh," he said. "I'm glad they've made a start together, but they ought to be back by now. They drove, didn't they?"
She couldn't inform him as to that and by way of getting him to come to anchor, offered him his tea.
"Oh, I'll wait for the others," he said. "They can't be much later than this.—I'm glad she's taken a vacation from those songs," he went on presently from the fireplace. "She told me last night she'd been working all day with Novelli over them. Only sent him home about half an hour before it was time for her to dress for dinner. Do you suppose,"—this to Wallace—"that they're as wonderful as she thinks they are?"
It was obvious to Mary that Hood's reply was calculated to soothe; his attitude was indulgent. He talked to Mary about March as just another of Paula's delightful extravagances. March's indignant refusal, at first, to tune the Circassian grand, his trick of sitting on the floor under Paula's piano while she played for him, his forgetting to be paid, though he had not, in all probability, a cent in his pockets, were exhibited as whimsicalities, such as Wallace's favorite author, J.M. Barrie, might have invented. It was just like Paula to take him up as she had done, to work away for days at his songs, proclaiming the wonder of them all the while. "We're all hoping, of course," he concluded, "that when she's finished with them to-night, she'll sing us some of the old familiar music we really love."
The neat finality of all this, produced, momentarily, the effect of ranging Mary on the other side, with Paula and her musician. But just at this point, she lost her character of disinterested spectator, for Wallace, having put March back in his box and laid him deliberately on the shelf, abruptly produced, by way of diversion, another piece of goods altogether.
"I hope Mary's come home to stay," he said to John. "We can't let her go away again, can we?"
Afterward, she was able to see that it was a natural enough thing for him to have said. It would never have occurred to him, pleasant, harmless sentimentalist that he was, that John's second marriage might be a disturbing factor in his relation with Mary and that the question so cheerfully asked as an escape from the more serious matter that he had been talking about, struck straight into a ganglion of nerves.
But at the time, no such excuse for him presented itself. She stared for a moment, breathless, paled a little and locked her teeth so that they shouldn't chatter; then, a wave of bright anger relaxed her stiffened muscles. She did not look at her father but was aware that he was fixedly not looking at her.
"I don't know whether I am going to stay or not," she said casually enough. "There isn't any particular reason why I should, unless I can find something to do. You haven't a job for me, have you?"
"A job?" Wallace gasped.
"In your office," she explained. "Filing and typing, or running the mimeograph. It seems to be a choice between something like that and—millinery."
"That's an extravagant idea," her father said, trying for, but not quite able to manage, a tone that matched hers. "Good lord, Wallace, don't sit there looking as if you thought she meant it!"
"You do look perfectly—consternated," she said with a pretty good laugh. "Never mind; I shan't do anything outrageous for a week or two. Oh, here they come. Will you ring, dad? I want some more hot water."
Rush came into the drawing-room alone, Paula having lingered a moment, probably before the mirror in the hall. Mere professional instinct for arranging entrances for herself, Mary surmised this to be. And she may have been right for Paula was not one of those women who are forever making minute readjustments before a glass. But when she came in, just after Wallace Hood had accomplished his welcome of the returned soldier, it was hard to believe that she was concerned about the effect she produced upon the group about the tea-table. She didn't, indeed, altogether join it, gave them a collective nod of greeting with a faint but special smile for her husband on the end of it and then deliberately seated herself with a "No, don't bother; this is all right," at the end of the little sofa that stood in the curve of the grand piano, rather in the background.
When Mary asked her how she wanted her tea, she said she didn't think she'd have any; and certainly no cakes. No, not even one of Wallace's candied strawberries. There was an exchange of glances between her and Rush over this.
"They have been having tea by themselves, those two," Mary remarked.
"No," said Rush, "not what you could call tea."
Paula smiled vaguely but didn't throw the ball back, did not happen, it appeared, to care to talk about anything. Presently the chatter among the rest of them renewed itself.
Only it would have amused an invisible spectator to note how those three Wollastons, blonde, dolichocephalic, high-strung, magnetically susceptible, responded, as strips of gold-leaf to the static electricity about a well rubbed amber rod, to the influence that emanated from that silent figure on the sofa. Rush, in and out of his chair a dozen times, to flip the ash from his cigarette, to light one for Mary, to hand the strawberries round again, was tugging at his moorings like a captive balloon. When he answered a question it was with the air of interrupting an inaudible tune he was whistling. John still planted before the fireplace, taking, automatically, a small part in the talk just as he went through the minimum of business with his tea, seemed capable of only one significant action, which he repeated at short, irregular intervals. He turned his head enough to enable him to see into a mirror which gave him a reflection of his wife's face; then turned away again, like one waiting for some sort of reassurance and not getting it. Mary, muscularly relaxed, indeed, drooping over the tea-table, had visible about her, nevertheless, a sort of supernormal alertness. Every time her father looked into the mirror she glanced at him, and she rippled, like still water, at all of her brother's sudden movements.
As for Wallace Hood, one look at him sitting there, as unresponsive to the spell as the cup from which he was sipping its third replenishment of tea, would have explained his domestication in that household;—the necessity, in fact, for domesticating among them some one who was always buoyantly upon the surface, whose talk, in comfortably rounded sentences, flowed along with a mild approximation to wit, whose sentiments were never barbed with passion;—who was, to sum him up in one embracing word, appropriate.
Mary, in addition to feeling repentant over her outbreak just before Paula came in, experienced a sort of gratitude to him for being able to sit squarely facing the sofa, untroubled by the absent thoughtful face and the figure a little languorously disposed that confronted him. His bright generalities were addressed to her as much as to the rest of them; his smile asked the same response from her and nothing more.
Nothing short of an explosion that shattered all their surfaces at once could have got a single vibration out of him. By that same token, when the explosion did occur, he was the most helpless person there, the only one of them who could really be called panic-stricken.
John had, at last, crossed the room and seated himself beside his wife. He spoke to her in a low voice but her full-throated reply was audible everywhere in the room.
"No, I'm not tired and I really don't want any tea. I've gone slack on purpose because that's how I want to be till nine o'clock. I've just eaten an enormous oyster stew with Rush. That's what we waited for."
John frowned. "My dear, you'll have ruined your appetite for dinner."