SHE let herself in with her latch-key, glanced at the notes and letters on the hall-table (the old habit of allowing nothing to escape her), and stole up through the darkness to her room.
A fire still glowed in the chimney, and its light fell on two vases of crimson roses. The room was full of their scent.
Mrs. Hazeldean frowned, and then shrugged her shoulders. It had been a mistake, after all, to let it appear that she was indifferent to the flowers; she must remember to thank Susan for rescuing them. She began to undress, hastily yet clumsily, as if her deft fingers were allthumbs; but first, detaching the two faded pink roses from her bosom, she put them with a reverent touch into a glass on the toilet-table. Then, slipping on her dressing-gown, she stole to her husband’s door. It was shut, and she leaned her ear to the keyhole. After a moment she caught his breathing, heavy, as it always was when he had a cold, but regular, untroubled.... With a sigh of relief she tiptoed back. Her uncovered bed, with its fresh pillows and satin coverlet, sent her a rosy invitation; but she cowered down by the fire, hugging her knees and staring into the coals.
“Sothat’swhat it feels like!” she repeated.
It was the first time in her life that she had ever been deliberately “cut”; and the cut was a deadly injury in old New York. For Sabina Wesson to have used it, consciously, deliberately—for there was no doubt that she had purposely advanced toward her victim—she must have done so with intent to kill. And to risk that, she must have been sure of her facts, sure of corroborating witnesses, sure of being backed up by all her clan.
Lizzie Hazeldean had her clan too—but it was a small and weak one, and she hung on its outer fringe by a thread of little-regarded cousinship. As for the Hazeldean tribe, which was larger and stronger (though nothing like the great organized Wesson-Parrettgens, with half New York and all Albany at its back)—well, the Hazeldeans were not much to be counted on, and would even, perhaps, in a furtive negative way, be not too sorry (“if it were not for poor Charlie”) that poor Charlie’s wife should at last be made to pay for her good looks, her popularity,above all for being, in spite of her origin, treated by poor Charlie as if she were one of them!
Her origin was, of course, respectable enough. Everybody knew all about the Winters—she had been Lizzie Winter. But the Winters were very small people, and her father, the Reverend Arcadius Winter, the sentimental over-popular Rector of a fashionable New York church, after a few seasons of too great success as preacher and director of female consciences, had suddenly had to resign and go to Bermuda for his health—or was it France?—to some obscure watering-place, it was rumoured. At any rate, Lizzie, who went with him (with a crushed bed-ridden mother), was ultimately, after the mother’s death, fished out of a girls’ school in Brussels—they seemed to have been in so many countries at once!—and broughtback to New York by a former parishioner of poor Arcadius’s, who had always “believed in him,” in spite of the Bishop, and who took pity on his lonely daughter.
The parishioner, Mrs. Mant, was “one of the Hazeldeans.” She was a rich widow, given to generous gestures which she was often at a loss how to complete; and when she had brought Lizzie Winter home, and sufficiently celebrated her own courage in doing so, she did not quite know what step to take next. She had fancied it would be pleasant to have a clever handsome girl about the house; but her housekeeper was not of the same mind. The spare-room sheets had not been out of lavender for twenty years—and Miss Winter always left the blinds up in her room, and the carpet and curtains, unused to such exposure, suffered accordingly. Then young men began to call—they called innumbers. Mrs. Mant had not supposed that the daughter of a clergyman—and a clergyman “under a cloud”—would expect visitors. She had imagined herself taking Lizzie Winter to Church Fairs, and having the stitches of her knitting picked up by the young girl, whose “eyes were better” than her benefactress’s. But Lizzie did not know how to knit—she possessed no useful accomplishments—and she was visibly bored by Church Fairs, where her presence was of little use, since she had no money to spend. Mrs. Mant began to see her mistake; and the discovery made her dislike her protégée, whom she secretly regarded as having intentionally misled her.
In Mrs. Mant’s life, the transition from one enthusiasm to another was always marked by an interval of disillusionment, during which, Providence having failed tofulfill her requirements, its existence was openly called into question. But in this flux of moods there was one fixed point: Mrs. Mant was a woman whose life revolved about a bunch of keys. What treasures they gave access to, what disasters would have ensued had they been forever lost, was not quite clear; but whenever they were missed the household was in an uproar, and as Mrs. Mant would trust them to no one but herself, these occasions were frequent. One of them arose at the very moment when Mrs. Mant was recovering from her enthusiasm for Miss Winter. A minute before, the keys had been there, in a pocket of her work-table; she had actually touched them in hunting for her buttonhole-scissors. She had been called away to speak to the plumber about the bath-room leak, and when she left the room there was no one in it but Miss Winter. When she returned, the keys were gone. The house had been turned inside out; everyone had been, if not accused, at least suspected; and in a rash moment Mrs. Mant had spoken of the police. The housemaid had thereupon given warning, and her own maid threatened to follow; when suddenly the Bishop’s hints recurred to Mrs. Mant. The Bishop had always implied that there had been something irregular in Dr. Winter’s accounts, besides the other unfortunate business....
Very mildly, she had asked Miss Winter if she might not have seen the keys, and “picked them up without thinking.” Miss Winter permitted herself to smile in denying the suggestion; the smile irritated Mrs. Mant; and in a moment the floodgates were opened. She saw nothing to smile at in her question—unless it was ofa kind that Miss Winter was already used to, prepared for ... with that sort of background ... her unfortunate father....
“Stop!” Lizzie Winter cried. She remembered now, as if it had happened yesterday, the abyss suddenly opening at her feet. It was her first direct contact with human cruelty. Suffering, weakness, frailties other than Mrs. Mant’s restricted fancy could have pictured, the girl had known, or at least suspected; but she had found as much kindness as folly in her path, and no one had ever before attempted to visit upon her the dimly-guessed shortcomings of her poor old father. She shook with horror as much as with indignation, and her “Stop!” blazed out so violently that Mrs. Mant, turning white, feebly groped for the bell.
And it was then, at that very moment,that Charles Hazeldean came in—Charles Hazeldean, the favourite nephew, the pride of the tribe. Lizzie had seen him only once or twice, for he had been absent since her return to New York. She had thought him distinguished-looking, but rather serious and sarcastic; and he had apparently taken little notice of her—which perhaps accounted for her opinion.
“Oh, Charles, dearest Charles—that you should be here to hear such things said to me!” his aunt gasped, her hand on her outraged heart.
“What things? Said by whom? I see no one here to say them but Miss Winter,” Charles had laughed, taking the girl’s icy hand.
“Don’t shake hands with her! She has insulted me! She has ordered me to keep silence—in my own house. ‘Stop!’ she said, when I was trying, in the kindness ofmy heart, to get her to admit privately.... Well, if she prefers to have the police....”
“I do! I ask you to send for them!” Lizzie cried.
How vividly she remembered all that followed: the finding of the keys, Mrs. Mant’s reluctant apologies, her own cold acceptance of them, and the sense on both sides of the impossibility of continuing their life together! She had been wounded to the soul, and her own plight first revealed to her in all its destitution. Before that, despite the ups and downs of a wandering life, her youth, her good looks, the sense of a certain bright power over people and events, had hurried her along on a spring tide of confidence; she had never thought of herself as the dependent, the beneficiary, of the persons who were kind to her. Now she saw herself, at twenty, apenniless girl, with a feeble discredited father carrying his snowy head, his unctuous voice, his edifying manner from one cheap watering-place to another, through an endless succession of sentimental and pecuniary entanglements. To him she could be of no more help than he to her; and save for him she was alone. The Winter cousins, as much humiliated by his disgrace as they had been puffed-up by his triumphs, let it be understood, when the breach with Mrs. Mant became known, that they were not in a position to interfere; and among Dr. Winter’s former parishioners none was left to champion him. Almost at the same time, Lizzie heard that he was about to marry a Portuguese opera-singer and be received into the Church of Rome; and this crowning scandal too promptly justified his family.
The situation was a grave one, andcalled for energetic measures. Lizzie understood it—and a week later she was engaged to Charles Hazeldean.
She always said afterward that but for the keys he would never have thought of marrying her; while he laughingly affirmed that, on the contrary, but for the keys she would never have looked athim.
But what did it all matter, in the complete and blessed understanding which was to follow on their hasty union? If all the advantages on both sides had been weighed and found equal by judicious advisers, harmony more complete could hardly have been predicted. As a matter of fact, the advisers, had they been judicious, would probably have found only elements of discord in the characters concerned. Charles Hazeldean was by nature an observer and a student, brooding and curious of mind: Lizzie Winter (as she looked back at herself)—what was she, what would she ever be, but a quick, ephemeral creature, in whom a perpetual and adaptable activity simulated mind, as her grace, her swiftness, her expressiveness simulated beauty? So others would have judged her; so, now, she judged herself. And she knew that in fundamental things she was still the same. And yet she had satisfied him: satisfied him, to all appearances, as completely in the quiet later years as in the first flushed hours. As completely, or perhaps even more so. In the early months, dazzled gratitude made her the humbler, fonder worshipper; but as her powers expanded in the warm air of comprehension, as she felt herself grow handsomer, cleverer, more competent and more companionable than he had hoped, or she had dreamed herself capable of becoming, the balance was imperceptibly reversed, and the triumph in his eyes when they rested on her.
The Hazeldeans were conquered; they had to admit it. Such a brilliant recruit to the clan was not to be disowned. Mrs. Mant was left to nurse her grievance in solitude, till she too fell into line, carelessly but handsomely forgiven.
Ah, those first years of triumph! They frightened Lizzie now as she looked back. One day, the friendless defenceless daughter of a discredited man; the next, almost, the wife of Charlie Hazeldean, the popular successful young lawyer, with a good practice already assured, and the best of professional and private prospects. His own parents were dead, and had died poor; but two or three childless relatives were understood to be letting their capital accumulate for his benefit, and meanwhile in Lizzie’s thrifty hands his earnings were largely sufficient.
Ah, those first years! There had been barely six; but even now there were moments when their sweetness drenched her to the soul.... Barely six; and then the sharp re-awakening of an inherited weakness of the heart that Hazeldean and his doctors had imagined to be completely cured. Once before, for the same cause, he had been sent off, suddenly, for a year of travel in mild climates and distant scenes; and his first return had coincided with the close of Lizzie’s sojourn at Mrs. Mant’s. The young man felt sure enough of the future to marry and take up his professional duties again, and for the following six years he had led, without interruption, the busy life of a successful lawyer; then had come a second breakdown, more unexpectedly, and with more alarming symptoms. The “Hazeldean heart” was a proverbial boast in the family; the Hazeldeans privately considered it more distinguished than the Sillerton gout, and far more refined than the Wesson liver; and it had permitted most of them to survive, in valetudinarian ease, to a ripe old age, when they died of some quite other disorder. But Charles Hazeldean had defied it, and it took its revenge, and took it savagely.
One by one, hopes and plans faded. The Hazeldeans went south for a winter; he lay on a deck-chair in a Florida garden, and read and dreamed, and was happy with Lizzie beside him. So the months passed; and by the following autumn he was better, returned to New York, and took up his profession. Intermittently but obstinately, he had continued the struggle for two more years; but before they were over husband and wife understood that the good days were done.
He could be at his office only at lengthening intervals; he sank gradually into invalidism without submitting to it. His income dwindled; and, indifferent for himself, he fretted ceaselessly at the thought of depriving Lizzie of the least of her luxuries.
At heart she was indifferent to them too; but she could not convince him of it. He had been brought up in the old New York tradition, which decreed that a man, at whatever cost, must provide his wife with what she had always “been accustomed to”; and he had gloried too much in her prettiness, her elegance, her easy way of wearing her expensive dresses, and his friends’ enjoyment of the good dinners she knew how to order, not to accustom her to everything which could enhance such graces. Mrs. Mant’s secret satisfaction rankled in him. She sent him Baltimoreterrapin, and her famous clam broth, and a dozen of the old Hazeldean port, and said “I told you so” to her confidants when Lizzie was mentioned; and Charles Hazeldean knew it, and swore at it.
“I won’t be pauperized by her!” he declared; but Lizzie smiled away his anger, and persuaded him to taste the terrapin and sip the port.
She was smiling faintly at the memory of the last passage between him and Mrs. Mant when the turning of the bedroom door-handle startled her. She jumped up, and he stood there. The blood rushed to her forehead; his expression frightened her; for an instant she stared at him as if he had been an enemy. Then she saw that the look in his face was only the remote lost look of excessive physical pain.
She was at his side at once, supporting him, guiding him to the nearest armchair.He sank into it, and she flung a shawl over him, and knelt at his side while his inscrutable eyes continued to repel her.
“Charles ... Charles,” she pleaded.
For a while he could not speak; and she said to herself that she would perhaps never know whether he had sought her because he was ill, or whether illness had seized him as he entered her room to question, accuse, or reveal what he had seen or heard that afternoon.
Suddenly he lifted his hand and pressed back her forehead, so that her face lay bare under his eyes.
“Love, love—you’ve been happy?”
“Happy?” The word choked her. She clung to him, burying her anguish against his knees. His hand stirred weakly in her hair, and gathering her whole strength into the gesture, she raised her head again,looked into his eyes, and breathed back: “And you?”
He gave her one full look; all their life together was in it, from the first day to the last. His hand brushed her once more, like a blessing, and then dropped. The moment of their communion was over; the next she was preparing remedies, ringing for the servants, ordering the doctor to be called. Her husband was once more the harmless helpless captive that sickness makes of the most dreaded and the most loved.
IT was in Mrs. Mant’s drawing-room that, some half-year later, Mrs. Charles Hazeldean, after a moment’s hesitation, said to the servant that, yes, he might show in Mr. Prest.
Mrs. Mant was away. She had been leaving for Washington to visit a new protégée when Mrs. Hazeldean arrived from Europe, and after a rapid consultation with the clan had decided that it would not be “decent” to let poor Charles’s widow go to an hotel. Lizzie had therefore the strange sensation of returning, after nearly nine years, to the house from which her husband had triumphantly rescued her; of returning there, to be sure, in comparative independence, and without danger of falling into her former bondage, yet with every nerve shrinking from all that the scene revived.
Mrs. Mant, the next day, had left for Washington; but before starting she had tossed a note across the breakfast-table to her visitor.
“Very proper—he was one of Charlie’s oldest friends, I believe?” she said, with her mild frosty smile. Mrs. Hazeldean glanced at the note, turned it over as if to examine the signature, and restored it to her hostess.
“Yes. But I don’t think I care to see anyone just yet.”
There was a pause, during which the butler brought in fresh griddle-cakes, replenished the hot milk, and withdrew. As the door closed on him, Mrs. Mant said,with a dangerous cordiality: “No one would misunderstand your receiving an old friend of your husband’s ... like Mr. Prest.”
Lizzie Hazeldean cast a sharp glance at the large empty mysterious face across the table. Theywantedher to receive Henry Prest, then? Ah, well ... perhaps she understood....
“Shall I answer this for you, my dear? Or will you?” Mrs. Mant pursued.
“Oh, as you like. But don’t fix a day, please. Later—”
Mrs. Mant’s face again became vacuous. She murmured: “You must not shut yourself up too much. It will not do to be morbid. I’m sorry to have to leave you here alone—”
Lizzie’s eyes filled: Mrs. Mant’s sympathy seemed more cruel than her cruelty.Every word that she used had a veiled taunt for its counterpart.
“Oh, you mustn’t think of giving up your visit—”
“My dear, how can I? It’s aduty. I’ll send a line to Henry Prest, then.... If you would sip a little port at luncheon and dinner we should have you looking less like a ghost....”
Mrs. Mant departed; and two days later—the interval was “decent”—Mr. Henry Prest was announced. Mrs. Hazeldean had not seen him since the previous New Year’s day. Their last words had been exchanged in Mrs. Struthers’s crimson boudoir, and since then half a year had elapsed. Charles Hazeldean had lingered for a fortnight; but though there had been ups and downs, and intervals of hope when none could have criticised hiswife for seeing her friends, her door had been barred against everyone. She had not excluded Henry Prest more rigorously than the others; he had simply been one of the many who received, day by day, the same answer: “Mrs. Hazeldean sees no one but the family.”
Almost immediately after her husband’s death she had sailed for Europe on a long-deferred visit to her father, who was now settled at Nice; but from this expedition she had presumably brought back little comfort, for when she arrived in New York her relations were struck by her air of ill-health and depression. It spoke in her favour, however; they were agreed that she was behaving with propriety.
She looked at Henry Prest as if he were a stranger: so difficult was it, at the first moment, to fit his robust and splendidperson into the region of twilight shades which, for the last months, she had inhabited. She was beginning to find that everyone had an air of remoteness; she seemed to see people and life through the confusing blur of the long crape veil in which it was a widow’s duty to shroud her affliction. But she gave him her hand without perceptible reluctance.
He lifted it toward his lips, in an obvious attempt to combine gallantry with condolence, and then, half-way up, seemed to feel that the occasion required him to release it.
“Well—you’ll admit that I’ve been patient!” he exclaimed.
“Patient? Yes. What else was there to be?” she rejoined with a faint smile, as he seated himself beside her, a little too near.
“Oh, well ... of course! I understood all that, I hope you’ll believe. But mightn’t you at least have answered my letters—one or two of them?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t write.”
“Not to anyone? Or not to me?” he queried, with ironic emphasis.
“I wrote only the letters I had to—no others.”
“Ah, I see.” He laughed slightly. “And you didn’t consider that letters tomewere among them?”
She was silent, and he stood up and took a turn across the room. His face was redder than usual, and now and then a twitch passed over it. She saw that he felt the barrier of her crape, and that it left him baffled and resentful. A struggle was still perceptibly going on in him between his traditional standard of behaviour at such a meeting, and primitive impulses renewed by the memory of theirlast hours together. When he turned back and paused before her his ruddy flush had paled, and he stood there, frowning, uncertain, and visibly resenting the fact that she made him so.
“You sit there like a stone!” he said.
“I feel like a stone.”
“Oh, come—!”
She knew well enough what he was thinking: that the only way to bridge over such a bad beginning was to get the woman into your arms—and talk afterward. It was the classic move. He had done it dozens of times, no doubt, and was evidently asking himself why the deuce he couldn’t do it now.... But something in her look must have benumbed him. He sat down again beside her.
“What you must have been through, dearest!” He waited and coughed. “Ican understand your being—all broken up. But I know nothing; remember, I know nothing as to what actually happened....”
“Nothing happened.”
“As to—what we feared? No hint—?”
She shook her head.
He cleared his throat before the next question. “And you don’t think that in your absence he may have spoken—to anyone?”
“Never!”
“Then, my dear, we seem to have had the most unbelievable good luck; and I can’t see—”
He had edged slowly nearer, and now laid a large ringed hand on her sleeve. How well she knew those rings—the two dull gold snakes with malevolent jewelled eyes! She sat as motionless as if theircoils were about her, till slowly his tentative grasp relaxed.
“Lizzie, you know”—his tone was discouraged—“this is morbid....”
“Morbid?”
“When you’re safe out of the worst scrape ... and free, my darling,free! Don’t you realize it? I suppose the strain’s been too much for you; but I want you to feel that now—”
She stood up suddenly, and put half the length of the room between them.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” she almost screamed, as she had screamed long ago at Mrs. Mant.
He stood up also, darkly red under his rich sunburn, and forced a smile.
“Really,” he protested, “all things considered—and after a separation of six months!” She was silent. “My dear,” he continued mildly, “will you tell me what you expect me to think?”
“Oh, don’t take that tone,” she murmured.
“What tone?”
“As if—as if—you still imagined we could go back—”
She saw his face fall. Had he ever before, she wondered, stumbled upon an obstacle in that smooth walk of his? It flashed over her that this was the danger besetting men who had a “way with women”—the day came when they might follow it too blindly.
The reflection evidently occurred to him almost as soon as it did to her. He summoned another propitiatory smile, and drawing near, took her hand gently. “But I don’t want to go back.... I want to go forward, dearest.... Now that at last you’re free.”
She seized on the word as if she had been waiting for her cue. “Free! Oh, that’s it—free! Can’t you see, can’t you understand, that I mean to stay free?”
Again a shadow of distrust crossed his face, and the smile he had begun for her reassurance seemed to remain on his lips for his own.
“But of course! Can you imagine that I want to put you in chains? I want you to be as free as you please—free to love me as much as you choose!” He was visibly pleased with the last phrase.
She drew away her hand, but not unkindly. “I’m sorry—Iamsorry, Henry. But you don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand?”
“That what you ask is quite impossible—ever. I can’t go on ... in the old way....”
She saw his face working nervously.“In the old way? You mean—?” Before she could explain he hurried on with an increasing majesty of manner: “Don’t answer! I see—I understand. When you spoke of freedom just now I was misled for a moment—I frankly own I was—into thinking that, after your wretched marriage, you might prefer discreeter ties ... an apparent independence which would leave us both.... I sayapparent, for on my side there has never been the least wish to conceal.... But if I was mistaken, if on the contrary what you wish is ... is to take advantage of your freedom to regularize our ... our attachment....”
She said nothing, not because she had any desire to have him complete the phrase, but because she found nothing to say. To all that concerned their common past she was aware of offering a numbedsoul. But her silence evidently perplexed him, and in his perplexity he began to lose his footing, and to flounder in a sea of words.
“Lizzie! Do you hear me? If I was mistaken, I say—and I hope I’m not above owning that at times Imaybe mistaken; if I was—why, by God, my dear, no woman ever heard me speak the words before; but here I am to have and to hold, as the Book says! Why, hadn’t you realized it? Lizzie, look up—!I’m asking you to marry me.”
Still, for a moment, she made no reply, but stood gazing about her as if she had the sudden sense of unseen presences between them. At length she gave a faint laugh. It visibly ruffled her visitor.
“I’m not conscious,” he began again, “of having said anything particularly laughable—” He stopped and scrutinized her narrowly, as though checked by the thought that there might be something not quite normal.... Then, apparently reassured, he half-murmured his only French phrase: “La joie fait peur... eh?”
She did not seem to hear. “I wasn’t laughing at you,” she said, “but only at the coincidences of life. It was in this room that my husband asked me to marry him.”
“Ah?” Her suitor appeared politely doubtful of the good taste, or the opportunity, of producing this reminiscence. But he made another call on his magnanimity. “Really? But, I say, my dear, I couldn’t be expected to know it, could I? If I’d guessed that such a painful association—”
“Painful?” She turned upon him. “A painful association? Do you think thatwas what I meant?” Her voice sank. “This room is sacred to me.”
She had her eyes on his face, which, perhaps because of its architectural completeness, seemed to lack the mobility necessary to follow such a leap of thought. It was so ostensibly a solid building, and not a nomad’s tent. He struggled with a ruffled pride, rose again to playful magnanimity, and murmured: “Compassionate angel!”
“Oh, compassionate? To whom? Do you imagine—did I ever say anything to make you doubt the truth of what I’m telling you?”
His brows fretted: his temper was up. “Sayanything? No,” he insinuated ironically; then, in a hasty plunge after his lost forbearance, added with exquisite mildness: “Your tact was perfect ... always. I’ve invariably done you that justice. No one could have beenmore thoroughly the ... the lady. I never failed to admire your good-breeding in avoiding any reference to your ... your other life.”
She faced him steadily. “Well, that other lifewasmy life—my only life! Now you know.”
There was a silence. Henry Prest drew out a monogrammed handkerchief and passed it over his dry lips. As he did so, a whiff of his eau de Cologne reached her, and she winced a little. It was evident that he was seeking what to say next; wondering, rather helplessly, how to get back his lost command of the situation. He finally induced his features to break again into a persuasive smile.
“Not youronlylife, dearest,” he reproached her.
She met it instantly. “Yes; so you thought—because I chose you should.”
“You chose—?” The smile became incredulous.
“Oh, deliberately. But I suppose I’ve no excuse that you would not dislike to hear.... Why shouldn’t we break off now?”
“Break off ... this conversation?” His tone was aggrieved. “Of course I’ve no wish to force myself—”
She interrupted him with a raised hand. “Break off for good, Henry.”
“For good?” He stared, and gave a quick swallow, as though the dose were choking him. “For good? Are you really—? You and I? Is this serious, Lizzie?”
“Perfectly. But if you prefer to hear ... what can only be painful....”
He straightened himself, threw back his shoulders, and said in an uncertain voice: “I hope you don’t take me for a coward.”
She made no direct reply, but continued: “Well, then, you thought I loved you, I suppose—”
He smiled again, revived his moustache with a slight twist, and gave a hardly perceptible shrug. “You ... ah ... managed to produce the illusion....”
“Oh, well, yes: a womancan—so easily! That’s what men often forget. You thought I was a lovelorn mistress; and I was only an expensive prostitute.”
“Elizabeth!” he gasped, pale now to the ruddy eyelids. She saw that the word had wounded more than his pride, and that, before realizing the insult to his love, he was shuddering at the offence to his taste. Mistress! Prostitute! Such words were banned. No one reproved coarseness of language in women more than Henry Prest; one of Mrs. Hazeldean’s greatest charms (as he had just told her) had been her way of remaining,“through it all,” so ineffably “the lady.” He looked at her as if a fresh doubt of her sanity had assailed him.
“Shall I go on?” she smiled.
He bent his head stiffly. “I am still at a loss to imagine for what purpose you made a fool of me.”
“Well, then, it was as I say. I wanted money—money for my husband.”
He moistened his lips. “For your husband?”
“Yes; when he began to be so ill; when he needed comforts, luxury, the opportunity to get away. He saved me, when I was a girl, from untold humiliation and wretchedness. No one else lifted a finger to help me—not one of my own family. I hadn’t a penny or a friend. Mrs. Mant had grown sick of me, and was trying to find an excuse to throw me over. Oh, you don’t know what a girl has to put upwith—a girl alone in the world—who depends for her clothes, and her food, and the roof over her head, on the whims of a vain capricious old woman! It was becauseheknew, because he understood, that he married me.... He took me out of misery into blessedness. He put me up above them all ... he put me beside himself. I didn’t care for anything but that; I didn’t care for the money or the freedom; I cared only for him. I would have followed him into the desert—I would have gone barefoot to be with him. I would have starved, begged, done anything for him—anything.” She broke off, her voice lost in a sob. She was no longer aware of Prest’s presence—all her consciousness was absorbed in the vision she had evoked. “It washewho cared—who wanted me to be rich and independent and admired! He wanted to heap everything on me—during the first years I could hardly persuade him to keep enough money for himself.... And then he was taken ill; and as he got worse, and gradually dropped out of affairs, his income grew smaller, and then stopped altogether; and all the while there were new expenses piling up—nurses, doctors, travel; and he grew frightened; frightened not for himself but for me.... And what was I to do? I had to pay for things somehow. For the first year I managed to put off paying—then I borrowed small sums here and there. But that couldn’t last. And all the while I had to keep on looking pretty and prosperous, or else he began to worry, and think we were ruined, and wonder what would become of me if he didn’t get well. By the time you came I was desperate—I would have done anything, anything! He thought the moneycame from my Portuguese stepmother. She really was rich, as it happens. Unluckily my poor father tried to invest her money, and lost it all; but when they were first married she sent a thousand dollars—and all the rest, all you gave me, I built on that.”
She paused pantingly, as if her tale were at an end. Gradually her consciousness of present things returned, and she saw Henry Prest, as if far off, a small indistinct figure looming through the mist of her blurred eyes. She thought to herself: “He doesn’t believe me,” and the thought exasperated her.
“You wonder, I suppose,” she began again, “that a woman should dare confess such things about herself—”
He cleared his throat. “About herself? No; perhaps not. But about her husband.”
The blood rushed to her forehead. “About her husband? But you don’t dare to imagine—?”
“You leave me,” he rejoined icily, “no other inference that I can see.” She stood dumbfounded, and he added: “At any rate, it certainly explains your extraordinary coolness—pluck, I used to think it. I perceive that I needn’t have taken such precautions.”
She considered this. “You think, then, that he knew? You think, perhaps, that I knew he did?” She pondered again painfully, and then her face lit up. “He never knew—never! That’s enough for me—and for you it doesn’t matter. Think what you please. He was happy to the end—that’s all I care for.”
“There can be no doubt about your frankness,” he said with pinched lips.
“There’s no longer any reason for not being frank.”
He picked up his hat, and studiously considered its lining; then he took the gloves he had laid in it, and drew them thoughtfully through his hands. She thought: “Thank God, he’s going!”
But he set the hat and gloves down on a table, and moved a little nearer to her. His face looked as ravaged as a reveller’s at daybreak.
“You—leave positively nothing to the imagination!” he murmured.
“I told you it was useless—” she began; but he interrupted her: “Nothing, that is—if I believed you.” He moistened his lips again, and tapped them with his handkerchief. Again she had a whiff of the eau deCologne. “But I don’t!” he proclaimed. “Too many memories ... too many ... proofs, my dearest ...” He stopped, smiling somewhat convulsively. She saw that he imagined the smile would soothe her.
She remained silent, and he began once more, as if appealing to her against her own verdict: “I know better, Lizzie. In spite of everything,I know you’re not that kind of woman.”
“I took your money—”
“As a favour. I knew the difficulties of your position.... I understood completely. I beg of you never again to allude to—all that.” It dawned on her that anything would be more endurable to him than to think he had been a dupe—and one of two dupes! The part was not one that he could conceive of having played. His pride was up in arms to defend her, not so much for her sake as for his own. The discovery gave her a baffling sense of helplessness; against that impenetrable self-sufficiency all her affirmations might spend themselves in vain.
“No man who has had the privilege of being loved by you could ever for a moment....”
She raised her head and looked at him. “You have never had that privilege,” she interrupted.
His jaw fell. She saw his eyes pass from uneasy supplication to a cold anger. He gave a little inarticulate grunt before his voice came back to him.
“You spare no pains in degrading yourself in my eyes.”
“I am not degrading myself. I am telling you the truth. I needed money. I knew no way of earning it. You were willing to give it ... for what you call the privilege....”
“Lizzie,” he interrupted solemnly, “don’t go on! I believe I enter into allyour feelings—I believe I always have. In so sensitive, so hypersensitive a nature, there are moments when every other feeling is swept away by scruples.... For those scruples I only honour you the more. But I won’t hear another word now. If I allowed you to go on in your present state of ... nervous exaltation ... you might be the first to deplore.... I wish to forget everything you have said.... I wish to look forward, not back....” He squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and fixed her with a glance of recovered confidence. “How little you know me if you believe that I could fail younow!”
She returned his look with a weary steadiness. “You are kind—you mean to be generous, I’m sure. But don’t you see that Ican’tmarry you?”
“I only see that, in the natural rush of your remorse—”
“Remorse? Remorse?” She broke in with a laugh. “Do you imagine I feel any remorse? I’d do it all over again tomorrow—for the same object! I got what I wanted—I gave him that last year, that last good year. It was the relief from anxiety that kept him alive, that kept him happy. Oh, hewashappy—I know that!” She turned to Prest with a strange smile. “I do thank you for that—I’m not ungrateful.”
“You ... you ...ungrateful? This ... is really ... indecent....” He took up his hat again, and stood in the middle of the room as if waiting to be waked from a bad dream.
“You are—rejecting an opportunity—” he began.
She made a faint motion of assent.
“You do realize it? I’m still prepared to—to help you, if you should....” She made no answer, and he continued: “How do you expect to live—since you have chosen to drag in such considerations?”
“I don’t care how I live. I never wanted the money for myself.”
He raised a deprecating hand. “Oh, don’t—again! The woman I had meant to....” Suddenly, to her surprise, she saw a glitter of moisture on his lower lids. He applied his handkerchief to them, and the waft of scent checked her momentary impulse of compunction. That Cologne water! It called up picture after picture with a hideous precision. “Well, it was worth it,” she murmured doggedly.
Henry Prest restored his handkerchief to his pocket. He waited, glanced about the room, turned back to her.
“If your decision is final—”
“Oh, final!”
He bowed. “There is one thing more—which I should have mentioned if you had ever given me the opportunity of seeing you after—after last New Year’s day. Something I preferred not to commit to writing—”
“Yes?” she questioned indifferently.
“Your husband, you are positively convinced, had no idea ... that day ...?”
“None.”
“Well, others, it appears, had.” He paused. “Mrs. Wesson saw us.”
“So I supposed. I remember now that she went out of her way to cut me that evening at Mrs. Struthers’s.”
“Exactly. And she was not the only person who saw us. If people had not been disarmed by your husband’s falling ill that very day you would have found yourself—ostracized.”
She made no comment, and he pursued, with a last effort: “In your grief, your solitude, you haven’t yet realized what your future will be—how difficult. It is what I wished to guard you against—it was my purpose in asking you to marry me.” He drew himself up and smiled as if he were looking at his own reflection in a mirror, and thought favourably of it. “A man who has had the misfortune to compromise a woman is bound in honour—Even if my own inclination were not what it is, I should consider....”
She turned to him with a softened smile. Yes, he had really brought himself to think that he was proposing to marry her to save her reputation. At this glimpse of the old hackneyed axioms on which he actually believed that his conduct was based, she felt anew her remoteness from the life he would have drawn her back to.
“My poor Henry, don’t you see how far I’ve got beyond the Mrs. Wessons? If all New York wants to ostracize me, let it! I’ve had my day ... no woman has more than one. Why shouldn’t I have to pay for it? I’m ready.”
“Good heavens!” he murmured.
She was aware that he had put forth his last effort. The wound she had inflicted had gone to the most vital spot; she had prevented his being magnanimous, and the injury was unforgivable. He was glad, yes, actually glad now, to have her know that New York meant to cut her; but, strive as she might, she could not bring herself to care either for the fact, or for his secret pleasure in it. Her own secret pleasures were beyond New York’s reach and his.
“I’m sorry,” she reiterated gently. Hebowed, without trying to take her hand, and left the room.
As the door closed she looked after him with a dazed stare. “He’s right, I suppose; I don’t realize yet—” She heard the shutting of the outer door, and dropped to the sofa, pressing her hands against her aching eyes. At that moment, for the first time, she asked herself what the next day, and the next, would be like....
“If only I cared more about reading,” she moaned, remembering how vainly she had tried to acquire her husband’s tastes, and how gently and humorously he had smiled at her efforts. “Well—there are always cards; and when I get older, knitting and patience, I suppose. And if everybody cuts me I shan’t need any evening dresses. That will be an economy, at any rate,” she concluded with a little shiver.
“SHE wasbad... always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.”
I must go back now to this phrase of my mother’s—the phrase from which, at the opening of my narrative, I broke away for a time in order to project more vividly on the scene that anxious moving vision of Lizzie Hazeldean: a vision in which memories of my one boyish glimpse of her were pieced together with hints collected afterward.
When my mother uttered her condemnatory judgment I was a young man of twenty-one, newly graduated from Harvard, and at home again under the family roof in New York. It was long since I had heard Mrs. Hazeldean spoken of. I had been away, at school and at Harvard, for the greater part of the interval, and in the holidays she was probably not considered a fitting subject of conversation, especially now that my sisters came to the table.
At any rate, I had forgotten everything I might ever have picked up about her when, on the evening after my return, my cousin Hubert Wesson—now towering above me as a pillar of the Knickerbocker Club, and a final authority on the ways of the world—suggested our joining her at the opera.
“Mrs. Hazeldean? But I don’t know her. What will she think?”
“That it’s all right. Come along. She’s the jolliest woman I know. We’ll goback afterward and have supper with her—jolliest house I know.” Hubert twirled a self-conscious moustache.
We were dining at the Knickerbocker, to which I had just been elected, and the bottle of Pommery we were finishing disposed me to think that nothing could be more fitting for two men of the world than to end their evening in the box of the jolliest woman Hubert knew. I groped for my own moustache, gave a twirl in the void, and followed him, after meticulously sliding my overcoat sleeve around my silk hat as I had seen him do.
But once in Mrs. Hazeldean’s box I was only an overgrown boy again, bathed in such blushes as used, at the same age, to visit Hubert, forgetting that I had a moustache to twirl, and knocking my hat from the peg on which I had just hungit, in my zeal to pick up a programme she had not dropped.
For she was really too lovely—too formidably lovely. I was used by now to mere unadjectived loveliness, the kind that youth and spirits hang like a rosy veil over commonplace features, an average outline and a pointless merriment. But this was something calculated, accomplished, finished—and just a little worn. It frightened me with my first glimpse of the infinity of beauty and the multiplicity of her pit-falls. What! There were women who need not fear crow’s-feet, were more beautiful for being pale, could let a silver hair or two show among the dark, and their eyes brood inwardly while they smiled and, chatted? But then no young man was safe for a moment! But then the world I had hitherto known had been only a warm pink nursery, whilethis new one was a place of darkness, perils and enchantments....
It was the next day that one of my sisters asked me where I had been the evening before, and that I puffed out my chest to answer: “With Mrs. Hazeldean—at the opera.” My mother looked up, but did not speak till the governess had swept the girls off; then she said with pinched lips: “Hubert Wesson took you to Mrs. Hazeldean’s box?”
“Yes.”
“Well, a young man may go where he pleases. I hear Hubert is still infatuated; it serves Sabina right for not letting him marry the youngest Lyman girl. But don’t mention Mrs. Hazeldean again before your sisters.... They say her husband never knew—I suppose if hehadshe would never have got old Miss Cecilia Winter’s money.” And it was then thatmy mother pronounced the name of Henry Prest, and added that phrase about the Fifth Avenue Hotel which suddenly woke my boyish memories....
In a flash I saw again, under its quickly-lowered veil, the face with the exposed eyes and the frozen smile, and felt through my grown-up waistcoat the stab to my boy’s heart and the loosened murmur of my soul; felt all this, and at the same moment tried to relate that former face, so fresh and clear despite its anguish, to the smiling guarded countenance of Hubert’s “jolliest woman I know.”
I was familiar with Hubert’s indiscriminate use of his one adjective, and had not expected to find Mrs. Hazeldean “jolly” in the literal sense: in the case of the lady he happened to be in love with the epithet simply meant that she justified his choice. Nevertheless, as I compared Mrs. Hazeldean’s earlier face to this one, I had my first sense of what may befall in the long years between youth and maturity, and of how short a distance I had travelled on that mysterious journey. If only she would take me by the hand!
I was not wholly unprepared for my mother’s comment. There was no other lady in Mrs. Hazeldean’s box when we entered; none joined her during the evening, and our hostess offered no apology for her isolation. In the New York of my youth every one knew what to think of a woman who was seen “alone at the opera”; if Mrs. Hazeldean was not openly classed with Fanny Ring, our one conspicuous “professional,” it was because, out of respect for her social origin, New York preferred to avoid such juxtapositions. Young as I was, I knew this social law, and had guessed, before the evening wasover, that Mrs. Hazeldean was not a lady on whom other ladies called, though she was not, on the other hand, a lady whom it was forbidden to mention to other ladies. So I did mention her, with bravado.
No ladies showed themselves at the opera with Mrs. Hazeldean; but one or two dropped in to the jolly supper announced by Hubert, an entertainment whose jollity consisted in a good deal of harmless banter over broiled canvas-backs and celery, with the best of champagne. These same ladies I sometimes met at her house afterward. They were mostly younger than their hostess, and still, though precariously, within the social pale: pretty trivial creatures, bored with a monotonous prosperity, and yearning for such unlawful joys as cigarettes, plain speaking, and a drive home in the smallhours with the young man of the moment. But such daring spirits were few in old New York, their appearances infrequent and somewhat furtive. Mrs. Hazeldean’s society consisted mainly of men, men of all ages, from her bald or grey-headed contemporaries to youths of Hubert’s accomplished years and raw novices of mine.
A great dignity and decency prevailed in her little circle. It was not the oppressive respectability which weighs on the reformeddéclassée, but the air of ease imparted by a woman of distinction who has wearied of society and closed her doors to all save her intimates. One always felt, at Lizzie Hazeldean’s, that the next moment one’s grandmother and aunts might be announced; and yet so pleasantly certain that they wouldn’t be.
What is there in the atmosphere of suchhouses that makes them so enchanting to a fastidious and imaginative youth? Why is it that “those women” (as the others call them) alone know how to put the awkward at ease, check the familiar, smile a little at the over-knowing, and yet encourage naturalness in all? The difference of atmosphere is felt on the very threshold. The flowers grow differently in their vases, the lamps and easy-chairs have found a cleverer way of coming together, the books on the table are the very ones that one is longing to get hold of. The most perilous coquetry may not be in a woman’s way of arranging her dress but in her way of arranging her drawing-room; and in this art Mrs. Hazeldean excelled.
I have spoken of books; even then they were usually the first objects to attract me in a room, whatever else of beauty itcontained; and I remember, on the evening of that first “jolly supper,” coming to an astonished pause before the crowded shelves that took up one wall of the drawing-room. What! The goddess read, then? She could accompany one on those flights too? Lead one, no doubt? My heart beat high....
But I soon learned that Lizzie Hazeldean did not read. She turned but languidly even the pages of the last Ouida novel; and I remember seeing Mallock’sNew Republicuncut on her table for weeks. It took me no long time to make the discovery: at my very next visit she caught my glance of surprise in the direction of the rich shelves, smiled, coloured a little, and met it with the confession: “No, I can’t read them. I’ve tried—Ihavetried—but print makes me sleepy. Even novels do....” “They” were theaccumulated treasures of English poetry, and a rich and varied selection of history, criticism, letters, in English, French and Italian—she spoke these languages, I knew—books evidently assembled by a sensitive and widely-ranging reader. We were alone at the time, and Mrs. Hazeldean went on in a lower tone: “I kept just the few he liked best—my husband, you know.” It was the first time that Charles Hazeldean’s name had been spoken between us, and my surprise was so great that my candid cheek must have reflected the blush on hers. I had fancied that women in her situation avoided alluding to their husbands. But she continued to look at me, wistfully, humbly almost, as if there were something more that she wanted to say, and was inwardly entreating me to understand.
“He was a great reader: a student.And he tried so hard to make me read too—he wanted to share everything with me. And Ididlike poetry—some poetry—when he read it aloud to me. After his death I thought: ‘There’ll be his books. I can go back to them—I shall find him there.’ And I tried—oh, so hard—but it’s no use. They’ve lost their meaning ... as most things have.” She stood up, lit a cigarette, pushed back a log on the hearth. I felt that she was waiting for me to speak. If life had but taught me how to answer her, what was there of her story I might not have learned? But I was too inexperienced; I could not shake off my bewilderment. What! This woman whom I had been pitying for matrimonial miseries which seemed to justify her seeking solace elsewhere—this woman could speak of her husband in such a tone! I had instantlyperceived that the tone was not feigned; and a confused sense of the complexity—or the chaos—of human relations held me as tongue-tied as a schoolboy to whom a problem beyond his grasp is suddenly propounded.
Before the thought took shape she had read it, and with the smile which drew such sad lines about her mouth, had continued gaily: “What are you up to this evening, by the way? What do you say to going to the “Black Crook” with your cousin Hubert and one or two others? I have a box.”
It was inevitable that, not long after this candid confession, I should have persuaded myself that a taste for reading was boring in a woman, and that one of Mrs. Hazeldean’s chief charms lay in her freedom from literary pretensions. The truth was, of course, that it lay in her sincerity; in her humble yet fearless estimate of her own qualities and short-comings. I had never met its like in a woman of any age, and coming to me in such early days, and clothed in such looks and intonations, it saved me, in after years, from all peril of meaner beauties.
But before I had come to understand that, or to guess what falling in love with Lizzie Hazeldean was to do for me, I had quite unwittingly and fatuously done the falling. The affair turned out, in the perspective of the years, to be but an incident of our long friendship; and if I touch on it here it is only to illustrate another of my poor friend’s gifts. If she could not read books she could read hearts; and she bent a playful yet compassionate gaze on mine while it still floundered in unawareness.
I remember it all as if it were yesterday. We were sitting alone in her drawing-room, in the winter twilight, over the fire. We had reached—in her company it was not difficult—the degree of fellowship when friendly talk lapses naturally into a friendlier silence, and she had taken up the evening paper while I glowered dumbly at the embers. One little foot, just emerging below her dress, swung, I remember, between me and the fire, and seemed to hold her all in the spring of its instep....
“Oh,” she exclaimed, “poor Henry Prest—“. She dropped the paper. “His wife is dead—poor fellow,” she said simply.
The blood rushed to my forehead: my heart was in my throat. She had named him—named him at last, the recreant lover, the man who had “dishonoured” her! My hands were clenched: if he hadentered the room they would have been at his throat....
And then, after a quick interval, I had again the humiliating disheartening sense of not understanding: of being too young, too inexperienced, to know. This woman, who spoke of her deceived husband with tenderness, spoke compassionately of her faithless lover! And she did the one as naturally as the other, not as if this impartial charity were an attitude she had determined to assume, but as if it were part of the lesson life had taught her.
“I didn’t know he was married,” I growled between my teeth.
She meditated absently. “Married? Oh, yes; when was it? The year after ...” her voice dropped again ... “after my husband died. He married a quiet cousin, who had always been in love with him, I believe. They had two boys.—You knew him?” she abruptly questioned.
I nodded grimly.
“People always thought he would never marry—he used to say so himself,” she went on, still absently.
I burst out: “The—hound!”
“Oh!” she exclaimed. I started up, our eyes met, and hers filled with tears of reproach and understanding. We sat looking at each other in silence. Two of the tears overflowed, hung on her lashes, melted down her cheeks. I continued to stare at her shamefacedly; then I got to my feet, drew out my handkerchief, and tremblingly, reverently, as if I had touched a sacred image, I wiped them away.
My love-making went no farther. In another moment she had contrived to put a safe distance between us. She did not want to turn a boy’s head; long since (shetold me afterward) such amusements had ceased to excite her. But she did want my sympathy, wanted it overwhelmingly: amid the various feelings she was aware of arousing, she let me see that sympathy, in the sense of a moved understanding, had always been lacking. “But then,” she added ingenuously, “I’ve never really been sure, because I’ve never told anyone my story. Only I take it for granted that, if I haven’t, it’stheirfault rather than mine....” She smiled half-deprecatingly, and my bosom swelled, acknowledging the distinction. “And now I want to tellyou—” she began.
I have said that my love for Mrs. Hazeldean was a brief episode in our long relation. At my age, it was inevitable that it should be so. The “fresher face” soon came, and in its light I saw my old friend as a middle-aged woman, turninggrey, with a mechanical smile and haunted eyes. But it was in the first glow of my feeling that she had told me her story; and when the glow subsided, and in the afternoon light of a long intimacy I judged and tested her statements, I found that each detail fitted into the earlier picture.
My opportunities were many; for once she had told the tale she always wanted to be retelling it. A perpetual longing to relive the past, a perpetual need to explain and justify herself—the satisfaction of these two cravings, once she had permitted herself to indulge them, became the luxury of her empty life. She had kept it empty—emotionally, sentimentally empty—from the day of her husband’s death, as the guardian of an abandoned temple might go on forever sweeping and tending what had once been the god’s abode. But this duty performed, she had no other. She had done one great—or abominable—thing; rank it as you please, it had been done heroically. But there was nothing in her to keep her at that height. Her tastes, her interests, her conceivable occupations, were all on the level of a middling domesticity; she did not know how to create for herself any inner life in keeping with that one unprecedented impulse.
Soon after her husband’s death, one of her cousins, the Miss Cecilia Winter of Washington Square to whom my mother had referred, had died also, and left Mrs. Hazeldean a handsome legacy. And a year or two later Charles Hazeldean’s small estate had undergone the favourable change that befell New York realty in the ’eighties. The property he had bequeathed to his wife had doubled,then tripled, in value; and she found herself, after a few years of widowhood, in possession of an income large enough to supply her with all the luxuries which her husband had struggled so hard to provide. It was the peculiar irony of her lot to be secured from temptation when all danger of temptation was over; for she would never, I am certain, have held out the tip of her finger to any man to obtain such luxuries for her own enjoyment. But if she did not value her money for itself, she owed to it—and the service was perhaps greater than she was aware—the power of mitigating her solitude, and filling it with the trivial distractions without which she was less and less able to live.
She had been put into the world, apparently, to amuse men and enchant them; yet, her husband dead, her sacrifice accomplished, she would have preferred, I am sure, to shut herself up in a lonely monumental attitude, with thoughts and pursuits on a scale with her one great hour. But what was she to do? She had known of no way of earning money except by her graces; and now she knew no way of filling her days except with cards and chatter and theatre-going. Not one of the men who approached her passed beyond the friendly barrier she had opposed to me. Of that I was sure. She had not shut out Henry Prest in order to replace him—her face grew white at the suggestion. But what else was there to do, she asked me; what? The days had to be spent somehow; and she was incurably, disconsolately sociable.
So she lived, in a cold celibacy that passed for I don’t know what licence; so she lived, withdrawn from us all, yet needing us so desperately, inwardly faithful to her one high impulse, yet so incapable of attuning her daily behaviour to it! And so, at the very moment when she ceased to deserve the blame of society, she found herself cut off from it, and reduced to the status of the “fast” widow noted for her jolly suppers.
I bent bewildered over the depths of her plight. What else, at any stage of her career, could she have done, I often wondered? Among the young women now growing up about me I find none with enough imagination to picture the helpless incapacity of the pretty girl of the ’seventies, the girl without money or vocation, seemingly put into the world only to please, and unlearned in any way of maintaining herself there by her own efforts. Marriage alone could save such a girl from starvation, unless she happened to run across an old lady who wanted her dogs exercised and herChurchmanread aloud to her. Even the day of painting wild-roses on fans, of colouring photographs to “look like” miniatures, of manufacturing lamp-shades and trimming hats for more fortunate friends—even this precarious beginning of feminine independence had not dawned. It was inconceivable to my mother’s generation that a portionless girl should not be provided for by her relations until she found a husband; and that, having found him, she should have to help him to earn a living, was more inconceivable still. The self-sufficing little society of that vanished New York attached no great importance to wealth, but regarded poverty as so distasteful that it simply took no account of it.
These things pleaded in favour of poorLizzie Hazeldean, though to superficial observers her daily life seemed to belie the plea. She had known no way of smoothing her husband’s last years but by being false to him; but once he was dead, she expiated her betrayal by a rigidity of conduct for which she asked no reward but her own inner satisfaction. As she grew older, and her friends scattered, married, or were kept away from one cause or another, she filled her depleted circle with a less fastidious hand. One met in her drawing-room dull men, common men, men who too obviously came there because they were not invited elsewhere, and hoped to use her as a social stepping-stone. She was aware of the difference—her eyes said so whenever I found one of these newcomers installed in my arm-chair—but never, by word or sign, did she admit it. She said to me once: “You find it dullerhere than it used to be. It’s my fault, perhaps; I think I knew better how to draw out my old friends.” And another day: “Remember, the people you meet here now come out of kindness. I’m an old woman, and I consider nothing else.” That was all.