CHAPTER XII"SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS""Phil? That you, my boy? Come up and take dinner with us to-night, won't you? I have a proposition to make to you."Thus the smooth voice of Justin Huntley over the telephone. Justin Huntley was a famous nerve specialist, a classmate and lifelong friend of Phil Lorrimer's father, who had kept a friendly eye on the young man ever since he had come to the city.Phil accepted the invitation, and later, as he left the Subway and strolled down Seventy-second Street toward the river, he speculated vaguely as to what the proposition might be likely to be. Doctor Huntley was quite capable of initiating any kind of a suggestion, from proposing a marriage to an heiress to the use of a new serum. Consequently Phil had little to go upon in his speculations.It was an agreeable dinner. Dinner at the Huntleys' always was agreeable, moving by pleasant stages to a perfect end, gastronomically speaking. There were no other guests to-night and presently, Mrs. Huntley, a frail tired looking little lady who always seemed to be deprecating the weight of her silks and the brilliancy of her jewels, rose and left the two men together."Any curiosity about the proposition I baited my hook with to get you here to-night?" Dr. Huntley surveyed his guest a little quizzically as he launched the question."I didn't need any bait," said Phil. "But I admit the curiosity."The older man leaned forward and deliberately lit his cigarette from a candle that stood close at hand."You don't smoke?" he remarked irrelevantly."No," admitted Phil. "At least, not often. Bad for the operating table.""Bad! It's the devil. You have a deal of sense, young man. How would you like to be my partner?" The question was put as casually as if he were offering a fellow traveler, caught in the rain, a share of his umbrella, but his shrewd eyes took full account of the face of the young man. Phil flushed and his mouth opened slightly. It was a proposition to make any ambitious young man drop his jaw. Justin Huntley had one of the largest and most remunerative practices in the city. It was a dazzling prospect to open suddenly before the eyes of a small-salaried worker in a free clinic. It meant success, money--Sylvia, something to offer her, at last."Well?""It is a wonderful chance," said Phil steadily, "but I should like to think it over, if you don't mind.""Eh?" It was Dr. Huntley's jaw that dropped this time. He had scarcely expected a young man in Phil Lorrimer's position to need to think over an offer such as he had just made. Most young men would have jumped at it quickly as a trout leaps at a shining fly lest the fascinating thing disappear from view before it could be apprehended. "What did you say?""I said I should have to think it over," repeated Phil. "Your kind of practice isn't the kind I am interested in, to speak frankly.""Interested! Good Lord! Who expects to be interested in anything nowadays? A lot of damn women with nothing on earth the matter with them except fool notions, and having nothing on earth or in Heaven to occupy themselves with, dyspeptics, neurasthenics, hypochondriacs, dope fiends, gentlemen drunkards and worse! That is my kind of practice, boy. Pah! Interesting! Of course, they aren't interesting. They are fools. But they pay. Lord, how they pay! They wouldn't be sick if they didn't have so much money. You would open your eyes if you saw my books. But I've had 'most enough of 'em. I want somebody to take the brunt of their damn foolnesses off of me. That is what I want a partner for. Some day I'll be telling 'em what I really think of 'em and it wouldn't do--it wouldn't do. I've got to have an understudy. You've a close mouth and a good head and you'd like the money. Don't tell me you wouldn't like it," querulously. "Everybody wants money these days. The whole world's after it.""Oh, I want it all right," said Phil Lorrimer honestly. "I happen to want it like the devil just at present. But I am not sure I want it--that bad. That is what I have to think over."He took a hasty swallow of water from the glass beside his plate, then rose and made a few quick, nervous turns, up and down the room. Finally he came to a halt opposite his host."I don't know whether I can make you understand, Dr. Huntley, but it is like this," he said. "I have a drop or so of missionary blood in me. My father is in China now. My mother would be, if she could stand the climate. My sister is teaching in a missionary school in Turkey. I chose the kind of work I am doing here in New York partly because it interested me, but I believe it was a little bit too because of the missionary strain. Anyway, it seems to me a worth-while job. But this thing you are offering me-- Pardon me if I sound rude. I don't mean to disparage your work. It is fine--some of it, but well, the truth of it is, it doesn't look to me to measure up to what we are doing in the clinic and what some other doctors and surgeons are doing in other places. The finest man I know--doing the finest work I know--is in Greendale, a little place just outside Baltimore. He has always been a sort of standard for me--he and my father. If I went in with you, it would be not because my heart was in it, but because the money was in it, and wanted the money worse than I wanted to hang onto my dreams. That is about the whole story."Justin Huntley smoked in silence during this, for Phil, rather long speech. Phil was not much given to eloquence."Well," he said. "Even so. Put it as baldly as that, if you like. It is up to you. A man can't afford to sentimentalize much in this day and generation. Let me remind you, the money is not to be despised. It buys a good deal."Phil's eyes were lowered. Well he knew, or thought he knew, what it could buy for him. Not Sylvia, of course, Sylvia could not be bought, but the right to go in and try to win her against Jack, against the world, yes, against even his own ideals. The last thought crowded in, an unbidden guest. Suddenly he loathed his father's friend, loathed his smug success, his cynical sureness that he himself could be bought. For it was buying, and Phil knew it. If he took this offer, he sold out, to the highest bidder, his own high ideals. Was it worth it? Was even Sylvia worth it? Had he the right to win her that way? Could he do it?"Don't give your final answer to-night." Justin Huntley's bland voice interrupted the boy's reflections. "There is no hurry. Take a week. Two--three--if you like."Phil pulled himself together."Thank you. I will, if you don't object--a few days, anyway. Please don't think I am ungrateful, or don't appreciate the compliment you have paid me--or rather the kindness, for, of course, I know I'm not experienced enough to be much of a partner at present. I--"But Huntley waved the words aside."It's not kindness--nothing but selfishness. I happen to want you. Come on in if you will. Anyway think it over. The madame is alone. Shall we go to her?"Phil fancied there was an odd, wistful inquiry in Mrs. Huntley's pale eyes as she turned to meet the men as they entered the room. It was almost as if she were making some kind of plea. Whether she wanted him to accept or refuse her husband's offer was not at all clear to Phil. He made his adieus as early as he politely could on the score of a previous engagement and passed out into the night trying to adjust as best he could the confused bundle of thoughts and emotions he carried."Wonder if old Mephisto had any qualms," muttered Justin Huntley as the door had closed upon the tall young doctor."Did you speak, dear?" inquired his wife. "I didn't understand.""No, I didn't say anything--worth repeating.""How like Philip is to his father, isn't he?""Very like," somewhat dryly. "Did you say there was a girl?""A girl?" Mrs. Huntley always dealt in mild interrogatives as if to disclaim the responsibility of assertion. "Oh, yes. His mother told us he was devoted to Sylvia Arden--wasn't it? That lovely young girl we met once--in Baltimore, I think? She is a great heiress, isn't she?""H-mm. Maybe he will be back, after all," remarked her husband irrelevantly.Phil's restlessness gave him no peace, and though the engagement had been fiction he decided to run around and see Barb a few moments before he turned in for the night. He had gotten in the habit of using Barb as an anæsthetic of late, though he had no idea he was doing it. To-night he found her alone, curled up like a sleepy kitten before the fire. She rose with a happy little exclamation of surprise as Phil came in.For once the flood gates of his reserve were down for Phil. In five minutes he had poured out the whole story of his evening's experience, omitting nothing except the mention of Sylvia. In fact, he, hardly thought it necessary to mention Sylvia. She so fully possessed his own mind he had no conception that Barbara did not fully understand how inextricably Sylvia was woven in with the whole matter."But Phil," wondered Barb, "it isn't the kind of work you like, is it? I can't imagine you dealing with that kind of patients exclusively." Barb's eyes blinked and crinkled, Barb-like, as she made the statement."Nor I. I should be all too likely to tell 'em to go plum to thunder." He grinned a little as he made the admission."Then why? Phil, it can't be the money that appeals to you?" Barb's voice was startled, incredulous.Phil had been on his feet, marching to and fro in the little room, as was his custom when excited. But suddenly he dropped into a chair before the hearth."Listen, Barbie. Listen hard," he said. "Suppose a chap wanted to marry a girl and he didn't have any money, at least not as much as he thought he ought to have, not to look like a fool and a knave, asking for her, and then suppose that, right out of a clear sky, the chap saw a chance to make a big income, perfectly respectably, if not, well, we'll say exhilaratingly, wouldn't he just naturally grab at the chance?"Phil was not looking at Barb. He was staring into the gas log with all his might, but in any case it didn't matter much. Wherever he looked Phil saw only Sylvia that night. Barb's cheeks were pink and her breath came a little more quickly than usual. She couldn't help wondering if Phil could hear the "Blop! Blop! Blop!" her heart was making. It seemed as if he must hear, it was such a queer, loud sound, but he did not appear to notice. He did not even turn toward her."He might grab, but I think he would put his hand down quick again as soon as he realized the girl wouldn't want him--that way. She wouldn't want to be bought at a price--like that." Barb managed to keep her voice steady in spite of the queer thing her heart was doing."Maybe not," said Phil. "Somehow I thought that is what you would say, Barbie. Thank you." And suddenly Phil was on his feet. "'Night, Barb. I've got to telephone a man before it gets any later."And before Barb caught her breath he was gone. It did not matter any more now how her heart behaved, but somehow, oddly enough it stopped "blopping" and seemed suddenly to be very, very tired and heavy, as if it were going to sink straight down into her stomach which, of course, was no place for a heart to be located.Yet it was all perfectly natural and like Phil not to have said anything more at the moment. He had to get the taint of barter off his hands before he came to her. "Suppose a chap wanted to marry a girl." "Suppose a chap wanted to marry a girl." The clock on the mantel seemed to be ticking out the words very distinctly. And suddenly Barb felt very happy and contented and curled up in her chair again like a kitten. Here her aunt found her a half hour later."Asleep, Kiddie?" she asked, and Barbara looked up with a shy, radiant little smile."No, just dreaming," she said.CHAPTER XIIIINTO HAVENChristmas was over, and Sylvia had hardly breathed for a week so engrossed had she been in all kinds of festivities. Even now she was preparing to depart on the morrow for an even gayer round, on the long promised visit to Jeanette Latham, Jack's sister. Perhaps it was to keep the "Booing" questions at a distance that Sylvia chose to fly from one mad whirl to another that winter."I almost wish you weren't going to New York, just now, Sylvia. You look tired to death and your nerves are 'jumpy,' as Doctor Tom says."Thus Felicia addressed Sylvia at breakfast the morning of the twenty-sixth, after the children had scampered off to the delights of yesterday's new harvest of toys."It is nothing but the day-after feeling," said Sylvia. "I've danced until morning for four nights running. I'll be all right as soon as I can get some sleep.""I don't know," Felicia looked dubious. "If you were seventeen instead of twenty-two, I believe I should order you to stay at home.""Isn't it lucky, I'm not?" smiled Sylvia. "Felicia, dear, you never did really boss me in all the years you might have done it. Are you going to begin now?""I am afraid it wouldn't be much use at this late date," sighed Felicia. "Sometimes I wonder why you aren't more spoiled than you are. Seriously, child, you have gotten a little of your shining splendor rubbed off. Anything the matter?""Nothing in the world, except maybe I wish I knew whether I were going to marry Jack or not. It is a little distracting not to know. You don't happen to possess any inside information on the subject, do you?" Sylvia's smile was whimsical but her eyes were tired. It was true. She had lost a little of her "shining splendor," as Felicia described it, in the past few weeks."I do not. But I should on the whole say you were not going to marry him. You have seen too much of him lately. You need to get away and get a perspective.""Well, who wanted to order me to stay away from New York, just now?""I retract. Go ahead with my blessing. I hope you will meet a hundred young men and let Jack Amidon get put in his place.""That is just it. Whatishis place?""Sylvia!" Felicia's tone was faintly exasperated. "You are no more in love with Jack Amidon than I am. Some day you will wake up and find it out.""Will I? Sometimes, Felicia, I have a horrible suspicion I am just a taster--like tea tasters, you know. Only I like to go round tasting experience. I never thought I was a bit of a flirt until lately. But I'm just finding out there are ways and ways of flirting, having 'adventures in personality' as Suzanne calls it. Jack says my 'Damnable sympathetic ways' are vicious. Maybe they are. I think I must be a sort of chameleon--all things to all men, you know. I shouldn't wonder if I couldn't really love anybody--grand style.""You goose! When the right man comes along you will know the difference.""I wonder." And suddenly Sylvia remembered how she had felt that night on Lover's Leap, when she and Philip Lorrimer had been the only two individuals in a whole spacious, shining universe. It seemed now as if she had heard a kind of Hallelujah chorus, or was it that the silence had been a strange kind of music itself?And then on the heels of this blinding sweet memory had come another, bringing with it a bitter taste, a memory of those long days after Phil had gone back to the city and she had watched the mails and pretended to ignore them.And then she remembered Gus and Jack and Doctor Tom. Had they all been just understudies for somebody else she really wanted in her heart of hearts? How many other understudies would there be? And would she marry one of them sooner or later?"Women are rather like cats, after all, aren't they, Felicia? They will pat their mice and keep putting their paws on them, even if they don't want to eat them."Felicia laughed."What a traveler you are! Have you been half round the world since you spoke last? Shall we ask Tom and Lois over to dinner to-night? We haven't seen either of them for an age.""Yes," said Sylvia. "You telephone, Felicia. I have to pack."Sylvia had seen practically nothing of Doctor Tom for the past few weeks. Never once in that time had she been alone with him. Twice Doctor Tom had been over when she was in, which was not often during those full holiday evenings, and she had taken pains to be sure Felicia was present on those two occasions. Once he had called to her to come for a drive but she had had a genuine engagement with Jack to plead. She felt silly enough placing any sort of a barrier between herself and Doctor Tom but she was afraid for her own part it would be some time before she could meet him quite naturally again. Sometimes she wished Jack had kept his "darned impertinence" to himself and other times she owned it was safer this way. Better that children should not play with matches at all, since matches did sometimes ignite. At any rate, she did not mean to see her neighbor alone again until after she got back from New York.But Fate ruled otherwise. That very afternoon, after her breakfast table philosophizing, she had gone downtown to attend to a few last errands and the delicious, crisp frostiness of the day tempted her to walk instead of having the car out. She had hardly finished her tasks and started homeward when she heard Doctor Tom's familiar whistle, and, turning, saw him reigning in black Bess by the curb."Game for a spin?" he asked. "I have to go a few miles out in the country and was looking for company."His tone was so natural that Sylvia herself lost her self-consciousness and was so thankful for the loss that she was very gay and talkative. If only he needn't find out that it had not been accidental that he had seen so little of herself of late all would be well."Seems to me you are turning into a regular society Miss after all," he teased. "Bet you've been cutting Red Cross and everything else since this dance mania set in.""I am afraid I have. I've been an awful backslider in pretty much everything lately," she told him soberly.He flashed one of his quick, shrewd glances at her."What's this, Miss Christmas? Your own special season here and you in the dumps without even a solitary star sparkle?""You are as bad as Felicia," said Sylvia a little crossly. "Do you all expect me to grin like a Cheshire cat every minute?"He chuckled."Sylvia touchy! What next? Indigestion or bad conscience?""Neither--well, maybe a bit of the latter," admitted Sylvia. "Anyway, I am not at all pleased with myself lately. I'm getting to be a selfish pig, and that's the ungarnished truth.""Indeed! I hadn't noticed it. The McGuires had a powerful good dinner yesterday and--""Do hush. It is nothing to send dinners to McGuire's. It doesn't cost me anything--not even much thought. You needn't try to smooth it over. I know. I haven't been thinking about a single soul in the world lately except Sylvia Arden. I set Jack to work and I've just diddled round myself doing next to nothing. I haven't even learned to cook as I said I was going to, and since Gus went I haven't practiced and--""And since three weeks ago Thursday you haven't even played me a psalm tune," he jested.Then suddenly he stared. For out of the corner of his eye he perceived that Sylvia was unmistakably blushing, blushing, of course, the more hotly because she was so furiously angry at herself for so doing."So it isn't my imagination. There has been some kind of fool talk somewhere. Confound me for an idiot! Poor kid! We'll settle that." So thought Tom Daly. Then aloud, "See here, Sylvia, may I say a little speech? You needn't look at me. I was a manger dog all right, a few weeks ago, without meaning to be. I had no business to be keeping the young chaps away from you. I didn't even see I was doing it. I was down and out for a while, and you, bless your kind heart, saw it and came to the rescue, like the Christmas girl you are. I shan't forget what you did for me. If you pulled me out of a rut--and you did--maybe we both came somewhere near being pulled into a bigger one. So far as I know, no man is ever old enough to be sure he's passed the fool limit, and maybe I was nearer the edge than I knew. Anyway, you were a trump as usual. The blame, if there is any, is mine. All right, little sister?" Then, at last, he turned to face Sylvia.And suddenly and disconcertingly her eyes filled with tears. She was very tired and her nerves were unstrung by too much gayety and mental uneasiness."Of course it is all right. There never was anything much wrong, only--well, I thought I was beginning to plume myself and get complacent because I was the only one who patted you and smoothed your fur the right way and maybe I'd better stop before--Doctor Tom, I hate things to be as they are.""Meaning?""Lots of things, but mostly why can't people--men and women--just be friends and not have anything else snarled up with it?""They can." Tom Daly's steady voice was like oil to the troubled waters of Sylvia's soul.Nor did she guess that it cost him something of an effort to throw precisely the right amount of big-brotherness into his words. As he admitted, no man could safely boast that he had passed the fool limit, but he could and would be man enough himself to be sure no girl like Sylvia was going to be bothered by the folly."Wecan anyway," he smiled down at Sylvia to add in the old friendly way, a friendliness whose very familiarity was steadying.She smiled back mistily."Of course we can. I'm a silly idiot to-day. Ghosts seem to walk even in the sunniest, most everyday places. Thank you, Doctor Tom. I don't know why I wept. My spirit isn't weepy. It was just my eyes. My spirit feels like singing 'Yankee Doodle' this minute.""Let her go," he approved gayly, and directed the conversation through the rest of the ride so skillfully to safe and sane and neutral matters that long before they reached the Hill Sylvia had lost the last vestige of self-consciousness, and was her old, merry, natural self, with a good many of the "star sparkles" back in their places.This process was so salutary that later when Tom and Lois were at the Hall to dinner it hardly seemed possible to Sylvia that she had had any queer feelings at all about the matter and teased and joked with the doctor in precisely her old merry, audacious way, exactly as she had been accustomed to doing since she was a naughty little schoolgirl at St. Anne's. When they were walking home together in the starlight Lois turned to her husband with a curious question."Tom, don't you ever wish you had waited for Sylvia? She is so lovely and full of life. She is much more your kind than I am."Tom Daly shook his head, and added with all honesty that there never had been but one girl he had wanted to marry and he had been lucky enough to get her. And Lois, suddenly lifting her face to his, gave him one of her rare love looks; a look which he would have crossed the very fires of Hell to gain.As they entered the house she turned to him again."Tom, I am cold and indifferent and I don't always care about the things you care so much for but I do care--about you. I wish you would try to remember that, even when I hurt you. Do you mind kissing me?"Tom Daly had not "minded." But it was not until they were upstairs in their own room that the whole of Lois' slow speech evolved. She turned from the mirror before which she had been letting down her long, ash blond hair."Tom," she said."Yes, Lois.""Do you know I have been having a feeling for a long time that you and Sylvia were beginning to care for each other? It began that night she was here and played to you all the evening while I wrote out checks. I went out to cover the flowers and I saw you on her steps, with her hands in yours looking so exactly like lovers something just froze in me. I hate jealous women and I wouldn't say it or hardly think it, but that is why I have been holding you so far off. If you could love Sylvia, I didn't want to keep you. I wouldn't fight for anything--even love. But to-night I saw it had all been just my imagination. I have hurt myself and you just for nothing. I might have known Sylvia wasn't that kind. Oh, Tom!"But even as he drew Lois into his arms Tom Daly knew that it is sometimes a woman's business to fight for love. Humbly he admitted that it had been Sylvia and not himself nor Lois who had saved the day. As honest a man as ever lived was Tom Daly, but neither then nor at any other time did he tell his wife how narrowly her fears had escaped realization. Nor did Sylvia Arden ever guess how slight an impetus would have set herself and the fine man she knew as neighbor and brother drifting into perilous seas, instead of being as they now were, anchored safely in the haven of old friendship. That was Tom Daly's secret, and he was used to keeping secrets, even his own.CHAPTER XIV"AND HAVING EYES"After the night when Phil Lorrimer played with opportunity a minute, then set it aside as not for his taking, things began to be different. Human relations have a way of shifting into new combinations of form and color like a kaleidoscope just when you think they have become as fixed as the stars in their courses.That night brought a reaction with Phil. He was actuated by a fierce and relentless energy which only work could appease. Hence he came less often to Miss Josephine Murray's pleasant apartment, but kept burrowing deeper and deeper like a mole into the professional soil, working like a demon by day, and studying, reading, experimenting doggedly by night, trying his best to fill his mind so full that the thought of Sylvia could not find a cranny in which to creep and grow. But the less vacuum he left in his mind the bigger seemed the emptiness of his heart, or rather its fullness, for was it not full to overflowing with love for Sylvia? Like a mole, too, in his blindness, it did not occur to Phil that his stubborn silence might be hurting Sylvia. Still less in his humble unselfconsciousness did it occur to him that he might also be hurting Barbara Day. He had supposed always she understood. His love for Sylvia seemed as obvious and inevitable as rain and sun. It was incredible that any one should be unaware of it. So he would perhaps have reasoned, if it had seemed necessary to reason at all on the subject, which it did not.And while Phil burrowed and blundered Barbara grew up. Her cheeks shed their soft childlike curves. Her eyes lost their dewy morning-glory look. They seemed not to wonder any more, but to know. The city had set its seal upon her, fed her youth to its strange gods. But the city was not all to blame. What had happened to Barb might have happened anywhere. The little drama in which she was playing out her part might have been staged in any other place quite as well. Nor was it at all an original drama. Its plot is curiously old though it has infinite variations.It came to Barb that winter that, after all, happiness wasn't the essential thing she had believed. One could, it seemed, go on eating and sleeping and walking and talking and typing and even laughing, just the same, even if one did feel a little like an empty goblet, turned bowl down, with all its sparkling contents spilled out. It was queer, but it was so.Yet way down in the bottom of Barb's heart there still nestled a little winged creature called Hope, just as there had been in the bottom of Pandora's box. Maybe things were not as strange as they seemed. Maybe it was just that people were very busy about Christmas time. Possibly after New Year's it would be different again.But before New Year's Barb discovered that things would never be different, and the way she found out was very simple.On the second evening of her visit to Jeanette, Sylvia had run away from the stately "Duplex on the Drive" to take supper with Barb, and Miss Murray, for purposes of her own, had asked Doctor Lorrimer to join them also. He had been a little late in arriving and as the others had already gone into the dining-room Barb opened the door for him. He greeted her with the old friendly terrible grip which crushed Barb's ring into her finger and set the blood singing through her. He started to make a remark about the weather but his opinion of that commodity was never completed for suddenly from the room beyond Sylvia's laughter rippled out.Did you ever happen to be engaged in decorous conversation with a man and suddenly see a change sweep over his face, and an arrested, listening, illuminated look take possession of it, just because somewhere in the distance he had heard a step, a voice, a laugh, belonging to somebody who was not yourself? That was what Barbara Day saw, and the little winged creature used her wings then and there and never came back. Barb heard the clock tick out as before, "Suppose a chap wants to marry a girl," but she knew now, once and for all, that the clock had never been talking about Barbie Day. It had always meant Sylvia Arden from the beginning.But Barb's fathers had been fighting men and she herself was game to her little brown fingertips."Hurry!" she said gayly, just a shadetoogayly, perhaps, only Phil did not notice. "Sylvia's here and soup's served." And as she pushed aside the curtains into the dining-room she announced with a gallant flourish, "Doctor Lorrimer, ladies."But while Phil and Sylvia shook hands she did not look at them, busying herself instead with rearranging the scarlet carnations which stood in the center of the table, complaining to her aunt as she did so that the flowers looked "stiff" and "old-maidish" and needed a "touch."It was Barb who was the blithest of them all that night at the little supper party, bestowing to it the "touch" just as she had to the carnations. Sylvia and Phil were both slightly self-conscious and not very conversational. Miss Josephine Murray was somewhat silent too, watching the young people with eyes that saw all there was to see and understanding things at which she had been able only to guess hitherto.That night after Sylvia and Phil had gone, Barb slipped quickly away to bed, a little afraid of what her aunt's keen gaze might have discovered, and longing, in any case, to be alone with the dark and the Thing she had been dodging all the evening, the Thing which sooner or later had to be faced and grappled with.Later Miss Murray found her wide awake and stooped to kiss her with unwonted tenderness."Good night, Barbie. Anything I can do to--put you to sleep?"Barb shook her head with a tired little smile. Then suddenly she sat up."If you don't mind, I think I'd like you to put your arms around me and hold me tight for a minute. Mother used to hold me that way when I felt--achey."Miss Josephine's arms went around the girl, holding her very "tight" indeed for a few moments of silence."Do you feel very achey, Barbie?" she asked presently."Oh, no," lied Barb. "I just wanted to be petted a little weeny mite, that was all. I'm all right. Thank you, Aunt Jo. Don't bother. Do go to bed. I know you are tired."That was the nearest the two ever came to speaking of the Thing but neither fell asleep until dawn, and when Barb awoke from her brief, heavy slumber she was entirely grown up.Out in the crisp chill of the December night, after leaving Miss Murray and Barb, Phil and Sylvia had found their tongues. All the hurt and estrangement of the past months seemed magically to have shed itself, leaving only the old happy intimacy with perhaps a touch of something new and even more exhilarating about it.As they walked along the river front they talked of many things, of Phil's work, of Jack's unprecedented diligence, of Gus Nichols' success on the road, of Felicia's designs, and Lois Daly's novel, of "Hester house" and Phil's mother, of Barb's services to the Cause, and Suzanne's mysterious journeyings; of everything indeed, it seemed, except the subject which was nearest the surface, their own selves.When they reached the Lathams' apartment they were still as far from having said the really important things that trembled on their lips as they had been at the beginning. Sylvia knew perfectly well what she wanted to say but being a woman could not say it. Phil also knew perfectly well what he wanted to say but being a man set his lips and did not say it. It was only as Sylvia paused in the doorway and held out her hand to Phil that the thing came near to getting said in spite of them both."Sylvia!" Phil's voice had a quick little catch in it very unlike his usual rather deliberate speech. "If I don't see much of you while you are here you will understand, won't you? It won't be because I don't want to but because I--don't dare." And his frank blue eyes implored her to understand and forgive."Are you sure--there is anything--to be afraid of?" Sylvia's words had jerked a little, too, and as she drew her hand away to press the bell her eyes expressed more even than her tongue had said."Sylvia!" Phil took a swift step nearer but before he could say any more a solemn liveried person had appeared in the doorway and stood at blinking attention while Sylvia shot one dazzling glance at the young doctor and vanished into the dim spaces of the hall, whence it seemed to Phil, though he could not be sure, she kissed her hand to him behind the liveried person's back, before she was lost in the elevator. Phil stared after her a moment in dazed silence then went out into the night.The next day, when he came in from the clinic, he found a little note from Sylvia inviting him to take tea with her the following afternoon. "Of course it is all nonsense about your not seeing much of me while I am here," the note had added. "Phil, can't you understand there isn't anything to be afraid of?" The last was underscored. And then the writer subscribed herself conventionally his as ever.Phil read the note hungrily several times and puzzled more than a little over its contents, which he perceived were open to more than one interpretation, especially the underscored portion. And then he had sat down and written an answer which he dispatched by special messenger. The answer expressed thanks and polite regret that the writer had a previous engagement.Sylvia had run away into her own room to read the note and grew first a little rosy, then a little white as she read. Then she tore the missive into bits, and going to the window, deliberately let the fragments flutter away in the December blast outside."I might as well have proposed and done with it," she thought hotly. "Phil Lorrimer needn't worry. I won't endanger his precious peace of mind again while I'm here. Previous engagement, indeed! He's afraid of my money and he makes me tired."As a matter of fact she did Phil injustice in one particular at least. The previous engagement had been perfectly authentic. The Washington Square Players were giving that afternoon a first performance of a play which had been translated from the Russian by a friend of Phil's and he had promised to be present and had long ago invited Barb to go with him. And Barb being fully determined that Phil should never guess how things were had kept her engagement and succeeded in behaving so comradely and sisterly, which was precisely the way she had been behaving all along only more so, that her escort was allowed to continue in his state of innocence and ignorance as to things better left unknown, which was quite according to code.But it was one of those odd coincidences that sometimes occur that Sylvia and Jeanette should have been whirling swiftly toward the park on their way home from the matinée just at the moment when Phil and Barb were transferring to the Subway at the Circle. Very much absorbed the latter appeared to be in each other's society, so much so that neither saw the limousine pass them, but Sylvia had not been so blind, and Jeanette also had taken in the scene."Wasn't that your little friend with Phil Lorrimer?" the latter had asked. "Somebody was telling me he goes everywhere with her. I shouldn't wonder if they were engaged, should you? They certainly looked devoted enough." So Jeanette had rattled on and never noticed that Sylvia had not answered.That night Sylvia had gone to a big ball and worn a wonderful, sophisticated Paquin gown of sea green satin and pearls. She looked very young and lovely. The men flocked around her and she managed them all like a seasoned coquette and had three proposals during the course of the evening. Of course it was perfectly well known that she was an heiress as well as a beauty, so the proposers was not so romantically rash as might have been thought.And from that time on Sylvia "went the pace" as madly as Jeanette herself, without pause or rest. After that one supper party Barb was never able to capture her friend again, her engagements piled up so fast and high. It looked as if Suzanne's prophecy about the "labyrinth" were being fulfilled. As for Phil, never once was he able to see her again. She was always out when he called or telephoned and always had previous engagements when he tried to get her for the theater or a concert. She was as invisible, so far as he was concerned, as if some fairy's wand had drawn a magic circle about her, a fact which made him burrow deeper than ever in his work and made him look a little older and grimmer than his twenty-five years warranted.CHAPTER XVTHE CITY AND SYLVIASylvia had supposed herself sufficiently grown up and wise and modern when she came to the city but she had not been there a week before she knew that she had been a veritable innocent, an infant in swaddling clothes, so to speak. Here was life, of a sort, with a vengeance.In Jeanette's circle, Sylvia saw Mammon worship executed on so prodigious a scale and with such sacrificial ardor it fairly took her breath away. Everything was of the superlative degree. Sheer wealth, sheer elaboration, sheer success, sheer bigness, sheer speed, were all that counted it seemed. And in the mêlée the old-fashioned virtues, spiritual values, ideals, were somehow either dimmed beyond recognition or totally extinguished. Love showed itself chiefly in the guise of passion, often frankly illicit, and in lust frequently but thinly veiled. The motley throng of young-old men and old-young men who paid court to herself were obviously actuated by one of two motives or a combination of the two, the impulse of passion, or the impulse of avarice. Both points of view Sylvia loathed and thought degrading to herself as well as the men who held them. Nearly all of the group of more or less importunate suitors who thronged about her she frankly despised. The men she might have liked and respected did not come near her, much less enter the lists. No doubt they classed her with the other women with whom she appeared, women butterfly clad, butterfly souled, obviously unfit for the serious purposes of life. Sylvia did not wonder that the real men kept away. They showed their realness by so doing she thought.Once, at a dinner, fate and her hostess allotted a different kind of companion, a grim looking person with very broad shoulders and very clear blue eyes, who let her severely alone during three courses and then when she was getting desperately bored by the over-assiduous attentions of the receding-chinned, narrow-browed scion of wealth who sat at her other elbow had suddenly turned to explode a question in her direction."What the devil do you see in all this?"Sylvia had retorted that she didn't know what she saw but was trying to find out."When the pumpkin coach arrives I shall skip back home and think it over," she had added whimsically with a Sylvia smile.Her neighbor had grunted a little at that and eyed her sharply from under his heavy brows."I thought as much," he said. "You don't belong.""Don't I?" Sylvia had inquired dubiously. "Isn't my gown all right?" She was wearing a New York creation this time, of white tulle and gold tissue, a frock which Jeanette had pronounced a "dream," so her anxiety was not very deep-seated. "Or is it my hair? Ears are out just now, aren't they. They told me they were.""Oh, you are protectively colored all right. It isn't that. Superficially you might be any one of this sea of ninnies that surround us. But, my dear young lady, your eyes betray you. You have a brain.""Dear me!" sighed Sylvia, looking around her apprehensively. "Is it so bad as that? I hope nobody else suspects.""No danger. They aren't looking for brains. Bodies content 'em. I hope you don't think this Punch and Judy show is the real New York? You are a stranger, I take it?""A pilgrim and a stranger. Where is the real New York?""Downtown, a good deal of it. Some of it is in the universities, especially in the night classes. Some of it is in the laboratories where they are fighting disease and achieving chemical miracles. Some of it is in the little back bedrooms where the chap from the up-state village has come down to peddle his dreams in the market place. The real New York--the real America--is made up of just two things--the dream and the deed. Those that make dreams their masters fail and go to pieces and that is a tragedy. Those that build without the vision will see the work of their hands filter to dust. And that's a worse tragedy. But those who can dream and transmute the dream to human gain, in tangible form--they are the real thing. These people here haven't the decency to dream nor the energy to do. They are the scum on the surface. They are punk--most of 'em. Rotten."Sylvia had looked around her a little startled. The scene had looked brilliant and appealing to her a moment ago. Somehow now she saw it through this brutal stranger's eyes a "Punch and Judy show.". She shivered slightly. Suddenly she felt a bit like a little girl at a party, grown homesick, all at once, ready to be taken home quick. For she could not help believing her neighbor was right. Underneath the glamour and the beauty and the poise and the breeding around her there was a good deal that was more or less "rotten." She had seen it in men's eyes and heard it in their voices, yes, in the women's, too. She was filled with a great disgust and with some shame as well. For in her zest for experience had she not let her own shield get a little dented and tarnished? She turned back to her companion, her new knowledge in her eyes."Why did you tell me?" she reproached."Why, indeed? You knew it without my telling you. See here, girl, I'm going to Alaska myself to-morrow. I can't stand much of this sort of thing. I'd like to think you were going to pull out, too, before the taint gets you. I said your eyes betrayed you. They did. But it isn't only that you have brains. The brains are there but there is something else too. You have faith. You've lived in a decent sort of world where people are straight and kind and honest and simple. Better go back to it while there is still time."Sylvia drew a long breath."Thank you," she said. "I believe I will."Later Jeanette asked her what she had found to say to Archibald Grant."He's the Arctic Explorer Grant, you know. Quite the biggest toad in the puddle there, to-night.""Was he?" Sylvia had looked thoughtful. "I didn't know who he was but we had rather an interesting talk. Jeanette, I've got to go home.""Go home! Why, Sylvia, you haven't been here two weeks yet!""I know. But I'm incurably a home person. I've had a wonderful time but I want to see Arden Hall and Felicia and--""Jack?" teased Jack's sister languidly.Sylvia flushed a little. At the moment it did seem as if she would be very glad, indeed, to see Jack. Jack was so clean and young and joyous and wholesome. He seemed to her to belong to a different world from that which his sister inhabited. But, after all, at Jeanette's insistence, Sylvia agreed to stay another week.Jeanette herself was almost feverish in her gayety these days. It seemed, indeed, as if she could not stop if she tried, as if "all the devils of Hell were loose and after her" as Jack had said. She was a puzzle to Sylvia. That she was not happy was apparent, but she was always gay, talkative, full of quick laughter and brilliant plans for new pleasures, something fresh every hour. There were always many men in her wake. Usually they were men of brains, men "who did things," as the phrase goes, musicians, writers, artists and the like. Jeanette did not affect fools, as she had said curtly to Sylvia once. She had brains herself and used them. She was rather famous and rather feared for her somewhat satirical wit. Her husband was a quiet, scholarly aristocrat, who spent most of his time reading memoirs of somebody or other, or bringing out elegant "privately printed" monographs. In Jeanette's scheme of things he seemed scarcely to count at all, beyond the essential facts of having provided her with an extravagant income and an assured place in New York society. To do her justice, however, Jeanette was by no means dependent upon her husband for these things. She made her own circle wherever she went. She did not need either the Latham money or name to assure her leadership. She was a born queen. These factors were merely contributing circumstances.Among Jeanette's varied and numerous retinue was one young man whom Sylvia found less easy than the others to place. This was an artist, Charlton Haynes by name, a newcomer in the city who had been for some time engaged in "doing" Jeanette's portrait. Wherever Jeanette was, the young portrait painter appeared to be also by some magic process. The two had little to say to each other in public but Sylvia had noticed more than once how the painter's rather gloomy face lit up when Jeanette approached, giving an effect much like a sudden sunshine after a passing cloud. More than once, too, Sylvia had seen a flash of some quick, wordless communication pass between them. They spent long hours together mornings in the great ball-room where he worked in the north light. When Sylvia was with them, as she sometimes was, the artist was rather silent and absorbed in his work and Sylvia thought if he were always so quiet he must be rather dull company.One morning she suffered an abrupt enlightenment as to the relations between her hostess and the artist. Jeanette had been detained and had asked Sylvia to go to the ballroom and explain to Mr. Haynes that she would be with him as soon as possible. As Sylvia opened the door he had turned with outstretched arms and an impulsive "Sweetheart, you are dreadfully late." And then his hands had fallen and a shamed, hang-dog, caught-in-the-act expression banished the eager look of expectant joy on his face as he met Sylvia's eyes and saw her quick flush.He shrugged and tried to make the best of the situation by a hasty "Beg pardon, Miss Sylvia. I didn't see it was you.""So I judged," said Sylvia and delivered her message gravely and departed. She wondered if this was what Jack had guessed and if that was why he had wanted her to go to Jeanette. Had he thought she could save her? Poor Jeanette! Could any one save her but herself?Two hours later Jeanette came to Sylvia, writing letters in her own room at the little teakwood desk."Sylvia.""Yes?" Sylvia had turned, wondering what Jeanette would say, wondering almost more what she herself was going to say."Charlton says he gave himself away awhile ago, did he?""Rather.""I'm sorry. I didn't mean you to know for fear it might bother you. Otherwise, of course, I don't mind your knowing. We have been in love for some time. There doesn't seem to be anything to do about it at present."Jeanette's tone was impersonal. She might as easily have been discussing the relation between the moon and the tides as the relation between herself and Charlton Haynes. The facts existed. That was all apparently. At least all Jeanette cared to admit."Couldn't he go away?" asked Sylvia, equally matter of fact."He could, but it would make talk if he went before the portrait was done. Besides, I don't want him to go. He offered to. It is I who am keeping him. I hope you are not too much shocked, Sylvia.""I'm not shocked at all, but I am sorry. Does Jack know?""Jack!" For the first time, Jeanette showed a quaver of emotion in her voice. "Jack! Good gracious, no! Why should he? I wouldn't have Jack know for anything. What made you ask that?""Jack tried to warn me something about you before I came. He seemed to think you needed me."And suddenly Jeanette's calm broke. She flung herself face down among the silken cushions of the couch. Sylvia came and knelt beside her putting both arms around her. In a moment Jeanette sat up, flushed but tearless. Sylvia slipped back upon the floor, her hands clasped around her knees, her eyes pitiful."I do need you. I need somebody. Sylvia, listen to me. It is a dreadful thing for a girl to marry if she isn't in love. Fate is sure to strike back at her sooner or later. That is what happened to me. I married Francis because I thought he could give me the things I wanted--the things I thought I wanted. And he has, but it isn't what I really wanted at all. I am just beginning to understand what I do want--what life might mean, if one deserved to have it mean anything. I hate this house and the servants and the hideous kind of existence we live--the kind I elected to live. It wasn't Francis' choice. It was mine. But I hate it all now. I'd like to leave it this minute. But I can't. I'm bound, hand and foot, by conventions and fears and selfishness. I couldn't live now without luxury, I've had it so long. I couldn't stand poverty or shame or sacrifice or honesty of any kind. I'm a sham. I love Charlton. But I shan't try to get a divorce and I shan't run off with him because I'm not big enough. I'm just big enough to squirm and suffer and hate myself for being such a pitiful little coward. I'm not even big enough to send him away. I'm not worth his wrecking his life and ideals for, but I don't tell him that. I tell him I love him and that is enough to keep him here like a lap dog. Pah! He isn't very big either or he would make me go with him or leave me outright.""But, Jeanette, it is all such a tangle. If you really care, why don't you go to Francis and tell him the truth? Surely nothing can be so bad as going on like this.""You don't know what you are talking about, Sylvia. I'd die before I would go to Francis and I'd die if he found out, but I'm going on risking everything until something happens. I don't know what."And in the face of such reasoning or non-reasoning, Sylvia had no answer to make. She was beginning to hate the city heartily. It seemed to be weaving nothing but misery for everybody. Was there any happiness in it? Surely she herself had found none. She desired more than anything else in the world to run away from it all, to get back to Felicia and, yes, to Jack. They two seemed the only refuge in a heaving sea of trouble.
CHAPTER XII
"SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS"
"Phil? That you, my boy? Come up and take dinner with us to-night, won't you? I have a proposition to make to you."
Thus the smooth voice of Justin Huntley over the telephone. Justin Huntley was a famous nerve specialist, a classmate and lifelong friend of Phil Lorrimer's father, who had kept a friendly eye on the young man ever since he had come to the city.
Phil accepted the invitation, and later, as he left the Subway and strolled down Seventy-second Street toward the river, he speculated vaguely as to what the proposition might be likely to be. Doctor Huntley was quite capable of initiating any kind of a suggestion, from proposing a marriage to an heiress to the use of a new serum. Consequently Phil had little to go upon in his speculations.
It was an agreeable dinner. Dinner at the Huntleys' always was agreeable, moving by pleasant stages to a perfect end, gastronomically speaking. There were no other guests to-night and presently, Mrs. Huntley, a frail tired looking little lady who always seemed to be deprecating the weight of her silks and the brilliancy of her jewels, rose and left the two men together.
"Any curiosity about the proposition I baited my hook with to get you here to-night?" Dr. Huntley surveyed his guest a little quizzically as he launched the question.
"I didn't need any bait," said Phil. "But I admit the curiosity."
The older man leaned forward and deliberately lit his cigarette from a candle that stood close at hand.
"You don't smoke?" he remarked irrelevantly.
"No," admitted Phil. "At least, not often. Bad for the operating table."
"Bad! It's the devil. You have a deal of sense, young man. How would you like to be my partner?" The question was put as casually as if he were offering a fellow traveler, caught in the rain, a share of his umbrella, but his shrewd eyes took full account of the face of the young man. Phil flushed and his mouth opened slightly. It was a proposition to make any ambitious young man drop his jaw. Justin Huntley had one of the largest and most remunerative practices in the city. It was a dazzling prospect to open suddenly before the eyes of a small-salaried worker in a free clinic. It meant success, money--Sylvia, something to offer her, at last.
"Well?"
"It is a wonderful chance," said Phil steadily, "but I should like to think it over, if you don't mind."
"Eh?" It was Dr. Huntley's jaw that dropped this time. He had scarcely expected a young man in Phil Lorrimer's position to need to think over an offer such as he had just made. Most young men would have jumped at it quickly as a trout leaps at a shining fly lest the fascinating thing disappear from view before it could be apprehended. "What did you say?"
"I said I should have to think it over," repeated Phil. "Your kind of practice isn't the kind I am interested in, to speak frankly."
"Interested! Good Lord! Who expects to be interested in anything nowadays? A lot of damn women with nothing on earth the matter with them except fool notions, and having nothing on earth or in Heaven to occupy themselves with, dyspeptics, neurasthenics, hypochondriacs, dope fiends, gentlemen drunkards and worse! That is my kind of practice, boy. Pah! Interesting! Of course, they aren't interesting. They are fools. But they pay. Lord, how they pay! They wouldn't be sick if they didn't have so much money. You would open your eyes if you saw my books. But I've had 'most enough of 'em. I want somebody to take the brunt of their damn foolnesses off of me. That is what I want a partner for. Some day I'll be telling 'em what I really think of 'em and it wouldn't do--it wouldn't do. I've got to have an understudy. You've a close mouth and a good head and you'd like the money. Don't tell me you wouldn't like it," querulously. "Everybody wants money these days. The whole world's after it."
"Oh, I want it all right," said Phil Lorrimer honestly. "I happen to want it like the devil just at present. But I am not sure I want it--that bad. That is what I have to think over."
He took a hasty swallow of water from the glass beside his plate, then rose and made a few quick, nervous turns, up and down the room. Finally he came to a halt opposite his host.
"I don't know whether I can make you understand, Dr. Huntley, but it is like this," he said. "I have a drop or so of missionary blood in me. My father is in China now. My mother would be, if she could stand the climate. My sister is teaching in a missionary school in Turkey. I chose the kind of work I am doing here in New York partly because it interested me, but I believe it was a little bit too because of the missionary strain. Anyway, it seems to me a worth-while job. But this thing you are offering me-- Pardon me if I sound rude. I don't mean to disparage your work. It is fine--some of it, but well, the truth of it is, it doesn't look to me to measure up to what we are doing in the clinic and what some other doctors and surgeons are doing in other places. The finest man I know--doing the finest work I know--is in Greendale, a little place just outside Baltimore. He has always been a sort of standard for me--he and my father. If I went in with you, it would be not because my heart was in it, but because the money was in it, and wanted the money worse than I wanted to hang onto my dreams. That is about the whole story."
Justin Huntley smoked in silence during this, for Phil, rather long speech. Phil was not much given to eloquence.
"Well," he said. "Even so. Put it as baldly as that, if you like. It is up to you. A man can't afford to sentimentalize much in this day and generation. Let me remind you, the money is not to be despised. It buys a good deal."
Phil's eyes were lowered. Well he knew, or thought he knew, what it could buy for him. Not Sylvia, of course, Sylvia could not be bought, but the right to go in and try to win her against Jack, against the world, yes, against even his own ideals. The last thought crowded in, an unbidden guest. Suddenly he loathed his father's friend, loathed his smug success, his cynical sureness that he himself could be bought. For it was buying, and Phil knew it. If he took this offer, he sold out, to the highest bidder, his own high ideals. Was it worth it? Was even Sylvia worth it? Had he the right to win her that way? Could he do it?
"Don't give your final answer to-night." Justin Huntley's bland voice interrupted the boy's reflections. "There is no hurry. Take a week. Two--three--if you like."
Phil pulled himself together.
"Thank you. I will, if you don't object--a few days, anyway. Please don't think I am ungrateful, or don't appreciate the compliment you have paid me--or rather the kindness, for, of course, I know I'm not experienced enough to be much of a partner at present. I--"
But Huntley waved the words aside.
"It's not kindness--nothing but selfishness. I happen to want you. Come on in if you will. Anyway think it over. The madame is alone. Shall we go to her?"
Phil fancied there was an odd, wistful inquiry in Mrs. Huntley's pale eyes as she turned to meet the men as they entered the room. It was almost as if she were making some kind of plea. Whether she wanted him to accept or refuse her husband's offer was not at all clear to Phil. He made his adieus as early as he politely could on the score of a previous engagement and passed out into the night trying to adjust as best he could the confused bundle of thoughts and emotions he carried.
"Wonder if old Mephisto had any qualms," muttered Justin Huntley as the door had closed upon the tall young doctor.
"Did you speak, dear?" inquired his wife. "I didn't understand."
"No, I didn't say anything--worth repeating."
"How like Philip is to his father, isn't he?"
"Very like," somewhat dryly. "Did you say there was a girl?"
"A girl?" Mrs. Huntley always dealt in mild interrogatives as if to disclaim the responsibility of assertion. "Oh, yes. His mother told us he was devoted to Sylvia Arden--wasn't it? That lovely young girl we met once--in Baltimore, I think? She is a great heiress, isn't she?"
"H-mm. Maybe he will be back, after all," remarked her husband irrelevantly.
Phil's restlessness gave him no peace, and though the engagement had been fiction he decided to run around and see Barb a few moments before he turned in for the night. He had gotten in the habit of using Barb as an anæsthetic of late, though he had no idea he was doing it. To-night he found her alone, curled up like a sleepy kitten before the fire. She rose with a happy little exclamation of surprise as Phil came in.
For once the flood gates of his reserve were down for Phil. In five minutes he had poured out the whole story of his evening's experience, omitting nothing except the mention of Sylvia. In fact, he, hardly thought it necessary to mention Sylvia. She so fully possessed his own mind he had no conception that Barbara did not fully understand how inextricably Sylvia was woven in with the whole matter.
"But Phil," wondered Barb, "it isn't the kind of work you like, is it? I can't imagine you dealing with that kind of patients exclusively." Barb's eyes blinked and crinkled, Barb-like, as she made the statement.
"Nor I. I should be all too likely to tell 'em to go plum to thunder." He grinned a little as he made the admission.
"Then why? Phil, it can't be the money that appeals to you?" Barb's voice was startled, incredulous.
Phil had been on his feet, marching to and fro in the little room, as was his custom when excited. But suddenly he dropped into a chair before the hearth.
"Listen, Barbie. Listen hard," he said. "Suppose a chap wanted to marry a girl and he didn't have any money, at least not as much as he thought he ought to have, not to look like a fool and a knave, asking for her, and then suppose that, right out of a clear sky, the chap saw a chance to make a big income, perfectly respectably, if not, well, we'll say exhilaratingly, wouldn't he just naturally grab at the chance?"
Phil was not looking at Barb. He was staring into the gas log with all his might, but in any case it didn't matter much. Wherever he looked Phil saw only Sylvia that night. Barb's cheeks were pink and her breath came a little more quickly than usual. She couldn't help wondering if Phil could hear the "Blop! Blop! Blop!" her heart was making. It seemed as if he must hear, it was such a queer, loud sound, but he did not appear to notice. He did not even turn toward her.
"He might grab, but I think he would put his hand down quick again as soon as he realized the girl wouldn't want him--that way. She wouldn't want to be bought at a price--like that." Barb managed to keep her voice steady in spite of the queer thing her heart was doing.
"Maybe not," said Phil. "Somehow I thought that is what you would say, Barbie. Thank you." And suddenly Phil was on his feet. "'Night, Barb. I've got to telephone a man before it gets any later."
And before Barb caught her breath he was gone. It did not matter any more now how her heart behaved, but somehow, oddly enough it stopped "blopping" and seemed suddenly to be very, very tired and heavy, as if it were going to sink straight down into her stomach which, of course, was no place for a heart to be located.
Yet it was all perfectly natural and like Phil not to have said anything more at the moment. He had to get the taint of barter off his hands before he came to her. "Suppose a chap wanted to marry a girl." "Suppose a chap wanted to marry a girl." The clock on the mantel seemed to be ticking out the words very distinctly. And suddenly Barb felt very happy and contented and curled up in her chair again like a kitten. Here her aunt found her a half hour later.
"Asleep, Kiddie?" she asked, and Barbara looked up with a shy, radiant little smile.
"No, just dreaming," she said.
CHAPTER XIII
INTO HAVEN
Christmas was over, and Sylvia had hardly breathed for a week so engrossed had she been in all kinds of festivities. Even now she was preparing to depart on the morrow for an even gayer round, on the long promised visit to Jeanette Latham, Jack's sister. Perhaps it was to keep the "Booing" questions at a distance that Sylvia chose to fly from one mad whirl to another that winter.
"I almost wish you weren't going to New York, just now, Sylvia. You look tired to death and your nerves are 'jumpy,' as Doctor Tom says."
Thus Felicia addressed Sylvia at breakfast the morning of the twenty-sixth, after the children had scampered off to the delights of yesterday's new harvest of toys.
"It is nothing but the day-after feeling," said Sylvia. "I've danced until morning for four nights running. I'll be all right as soon as I can get some sleep."
"I don't know," Felicia looked dubious. "If you were seventeen instead of twenty-two, I believe I should order you to stay at home."
"Isn't it lucky, I'm not?" smiled Sylvia. "Felicia, dear, you never did really boss me in all the years you might have done it. Are you going to begin now?"
"I am afraid it wouldn't be much use at this late date," sighed Felicia. "Sometimes I wonder why you aren't more spoiled than you are. Seriously, child, you have gotten a little of your shining splendor rubbed off. Anything the matter?"
"Nothing in the world, except maybe I wish I knew whether I were going to marry Jack or not. It is a little distracting not to know. You don't happen to possess any inside information on the subject, do you?" Sylvia's smile was whimsical but her eyes were tired. It was true. She had lost a little of her "shining splendor," as Felicia described it, in the past few weeks.
"I do not. But I should on the whole say you were not going to marry him. You have seen too much of him lately. You need to get away and get a perspective."
"Well, who wanted to order me to stay away from New York, just now?"
"I retract. Go ahead with my blessing. I hope you will meet a hundred young men and let Jack Amidon get put in his place."
"That is just it. Whatishis place?"
"Sylvia!" Felicia's tone was faintly exasperated. "You are no more in love with Jack Amidon than I am. Some day you will wake up and find it out."
"Will I? Sometimes, Felicia, I have a horrible suspicion I am just a taster--like tea tasters, you know. Only I like to go round tasting experience. I never thought I was a bit of a flirt until lately. But I'm just finding out there are ways and ways of flirting, having 'adventures in personality' as Suzanne calls it. Jack says my 'Damnable sympathetic ways' are vicious. Maybe they are. I think I must be a sort of chameleon--all things to all men, you know. I shouldn't wonder if I couldn't really love anybody--grand style."
"You goose! When the right man comes along you will know the difference."
"I wonder." And suddenly Sylvia remembered how she had felt that night on Lover's Leap, when she and Philip Lorrimer had been the only two individuals in a whole spacious, shining universe. It seemed now as if she had heard a kind of Hallelujah chorus, or was it that the silence had been a strange kind of music itself?
And then on the heels of this blinding sweet memory had come another, bringing with it a bitter taste, a memory of those long days after Phil had gone back to the city and she had watched the mails and pretended to ignore them.
And then she remembered Gus and Jack and Doctor Tom. Had they all been just understudies for somebody else she really wanted in her heart of hearts? How many other understudies would there be? And would she marry one of them sooner or later?
"Women are rather like cats, after all, aren't they, Felicia? They will pat their mice and keep putting their paws on them, even if they don't want to eat them."
Felicia laughed.
"What a traveler you are! Have you been half round the world since you spoke last? Shall we ask Tom and Lois over to dinner to-night? We haven't seen either of them for an age."
"Yes," said Sylvia. "You telephone, Felicia. I have to pack."
Sylvia had seen practically nothing of Doctor Tom for the past few weeks. Never once in that time had she been alone with him. Twice Doctor Tom had been over when she was in, which was not often during those full holiday evenings, and she had taken pains to be sure Felicia was present on those two occasions. Once he had called to her to come for a drive but she had had a genuine engagement with Jack to plead. She felt silly enough placing any sort of a barrier between herself and Doctor Tom but she was afraid for her own part it would be some time before she could meet him quite naturally again. Sometimes she wished Jack had kept his "darned impertinence" to himself and other times she owned it was safer this way. Better that children should not play with matches at all, since matches did sometimes ignite. At any rate, she did not mean to see her neighbor alone again until after she got back from New York.
But Fate ruled otherwise. That very afternoon, after her breakfast table philosophizing, she had gone downtown to attend to a few last errands and the delicious, crisp frostiness of the day tempted her to walk instead of having the car out. She had hardly finished her tasks and started homeward when she heard Doctor Tom's familiar whistle, and, turning, saw him reigning in black Bess by the curb.
"Game for a spin?" he asked. "I have to go a few miles out in the country and was looking for company."
His tone was so natural that Sylvia herself lost her self-consciousness and was so thankful for the loss that she was very gay and talkative. If only he needn't find out that it had not been accidental that he had seen so little of herself of late all would be well.
"Seems to me you are turning into a regular society Miss after all," he teased. "Bet you've been cutting Red Cross and everything else since this dance mania set in."
"I am afraid I have. I've been an awful backslider in pretty much everything lately," she told him soberly.
He flashed one of his quick, shrewd glances at her.
"What's this, Miss Christmas? Your own special season here and you in the dumps without even a solitary star sparkle?"
"You are as bad as Felicia," said Sylvia a little crossly. "Do you all expect me to grin like a Cheshire cat every minute?"
He chuckled.
"Sylvia touchy! What next? Indigestion or bad conscience?"
"Neither--well, maybe a bit of the latter," admitted Sylvia. "Anyway, I am not at all pleased with myself lately. I'm getting to be a selfish pig, and that's the ungarnished truth."
"Indeed! I hadn't noticed it. The McGuires had a powerful good dinner yesterday and--"
"Do hush. It is nothing to send dinners to McGuire's. It doesn't cost me anything--not even much thought. You needn't try to smooth it over. I know. I haven't been thinking about a single soul in the world lately except Sylvia Arden. I set Jack to work and I've just diddled round myself doing next to nothing. I haven't even learned to cook as I said I was going to, and since Gus went I haven't practiced and--"
"And since three weeks ago Thursday you haven't even played me a psalm tune," he jested.
Then suddenly he stared. For out of the corner of his eye he perceived that Sylvia was unmistakably blushing, blushing, of course, the more hotly because she was so furiously angry at herself for so doing.
"So it isn't my imagination. There has been some kind of fool talk somewhere. Confound me for an idiot! Poor kid! We'll settle that." So thought Tom Daly. Then aloud, "See here, Sylvia, may I say a little speech? You needn't look at me. I was a manger dog all right, a few weeks ago, without meaning to be. I had no business to be keeping the young chaps away from you. I didn't even see I was doing it. I was down and out for a while, and you, bless your kind heart, saw it and came to the rescue, like the Christmas girl you are. I shan't forget what you did for me. If you pulled me out of a rut--and you did--maybe we both came somewhere near being pulled into a bigger one. So far as I know, no man is ever old enough to be sure he's passed the fool limit, and maybe I was nearer the edge than I knew. Anyway, you were a trump as usual. The blame, if there is any, is mine. All right, little sister?" Then, at last, he turned to face Sylvia.
And suddenly and disconcertingly her eyes filled with tears. She was very tired and her nerves were unstrung by too much gayety and mental uneasiness.
"Of course it is all right. There never was anything much wrong, only--well, I thought I was beginning to plume myself and get complacent because I was the only one who patted you and smoothed your fur the right way and maybe I'd better stop before--Doctor Tom, I hate things to be as they are."
"Meaning?"
"Lots of things, but mostly why can't people--men and women--just be friends and not have anything else snarled up with it?"
"They can." Tom Daly's steady voice was like oil to the troubled waters of Sylvia's soul.
Nor did she guess that it cost him something of an effort to throw precisely the right amount of big-brotherness into his words. As he admitted, no man could safely boast that he had passed the fool limit, but he could and would be man enough himself to be sure no girl like Sylvia was going to be bothered by the folly.
"Wecan anyway," he smiled down at Sylvia to add in the old friendly way, a friendliness whose very familiarity was steadying.
She smiled back mistily.
"Of course we can. I'm a silly idiot to-day. Ghosts seem to walk even in the sunniest, most everyday places. Thank you, Doctor Tom. I don't know why I wept. My spirit isn't weepy. It was just my eyes. My spirit feels like singing 'Yankee Doodle' this minute."
"Let her go," he approved gayly, and directed the conversation through the rest of the ride so skillfully to safe and sane and neutral matters that long before they reached the Hill Sylvia had lost the last vestige of self-consciousness, and was her old, merry, natural self, with a good many of the "star sparkles" back in their places.
This process was so salutary that later when Tom and Lois were at the Hall to dinner it hardly seemed possible to Sylvia that she had had any queer feelings at all about the matter and teased and joked with the doctor in precisely her old merry, audacious way, exactly as she had been accustomed to doing since she was a naughty little schoolgirl at St. Anne's. When they were walking home together in the starlight Lois turned to her husband with a curious question.
"Tom, don't you ever wish you had waited for Sylvia? She is so lovely and full of life. She is much more your kind than I am."
Tom Daly shook his head, and added with all honesty that there never had been but one girl he had wanted to marry and he had been lucky enough to get her. And Lois, suddenly lifting her face to his, gave him one of her rare love looks; a look which he would have crossed the very fires of Hell to gain.
As they entered the house she turned to him again.
"Tom, I am cold and indifferent and I don't always care about the things you care so much for but I do care--about you. I wish you would try to remember that, even when I hurt you. Do you mind kissing me?"
Tom Daly had not "minded." But it was not until they were upstairs in their own room that the whole of Lois' slow speech evolved. She turned from the mirror before which she had been letting down her long, ash blond hair.
"Tom," she said.
"Yes, Lois."
"Do you know I have been having a feeling for a long time that you and Sylvia were beginning to care for each other? It began that night she was here and played to you all the evening while I wrote out checks. I went out to cover the flowers and I saw you on her steps, with her hands in yours looking so exactly like lovers something just froze in me. I hate jealous women and I wouldn't say it or hardly think it, but that is why I have been holding you so far off. If you could love Sylvia, I didn't want to keep you. I wouldn't fight for anything--even love. But to-night I saw it had all been just my imagination. I have hurt myself and you just for nothing. I might have known Sylvia wasn't that kind. Oh, Tom!"
But even as he drew Lois into his arms Tom Daly knew that it is sometimes a woman's business to fight for love. Humbly he admitted that it had been Sylvia and not himself nor Lois who had saved the day. As honest a man as ever lived was Tom Daly, but neither then nor at any other time did he tell his wife how narrowly her fears had escaped realization. Nor did Sylvia Arden ever guess how slight an impetus would have set herself and the fine man she knew as neighbor and brother drifting into perilous seas, instead of being as they now were, anchored safely in the haven of old friendship. That was Tom Daly's secret, and he was used to keeping secrets, even his own.
CHAPTER XIV
"AND HAVING EYES"
After the night when Phil Lorrimer played with opportunity a minute, then set it aside as not for his taking, things began to be different. Human relations have a way of shifting into new combinations of form and color like a kaleidoscope just when you think they have become as fixed as the stars in their courses.
That night brought a reaction with Phil. He was actuated by a fierce and relentless energy which only work could appease. Hence he came less often to Miss Josephine Murray's pleasant apartment, but kept burrowing deeper and deeper like a mole into the professional soil, working like a demon by day, and studying, reading, experimenting doggedly by night, trying his best to fill his mind so full that the thought of Sylvia could not find a cranny in which to creep and grow. But the less vacuum he left in his mind the bigger seemed the emptiness of his heart, or rather its fullness, for was it not full to overflowing with love for Sylvia? Like a mole, too, in his blindness, it did not occur to Phil that his stubborn silence might be hurting Sylvia. Still less in his humble unselfconsciousness did it occur to him that he might also be hurting Barbara Day. He had supposed always she understood. His love for Sylvia seemed as obvious and inevitable as rain and sun. It was incredible that any one should be unaware of it. So he would perhaps have reasoned, if it had seemed necessary to reason at all on the subject, which it did not.
And while Phil burrowed and blundered Barbara grew up. Her cheeks shed their soft childlike curves. Her eyes lost their dewy morning-glory look. They seemed not to wonder any more, but to know. The city had set its seal upon her, fed her youth to its strange gods. But the city was not all to blame. What had happened to Barb might have happened anywhere. The little drama in which she was playing out her part might have been staged in any other place quite as well. Nor was it at all an original drama. Its plot is curiously old though it has infinite variations.
It came to Barb that winter that, after all, happiness wasn't the essential thing she had believed. One could, it seemed, go on eating and sleeping and walking and talking and typing and even laughing, just the same, even if one did feel a little like an empty goblet, turned bowl down, with all its sparkling contents spilled out. It was queer, but it was so.
Yet way down in the bottom of Barb's heart there still nestled a little winged creature called Hope, just as there had been in the bottom of Pandora's box. Maybe things were not as strange as they seemed. Maybe it was just that people were very busy about Christmas time. Possibly after New Year's it would be different again.
But before New Year's Barb discovered that things would never be different, and the way she found out was very simple.
On the second evening of her visit to Jeanette, Sylvia had run away from the stately "Duplex on the Drive" to take supper with Barb, and Miss Murray, for purposes of her own, had asked Doctor Lorrimer to join them also. He had been a little late in arriving and as the others had already gone into the dining-room Barb opened the door for him. He greeted her with the old friendly terrible grip which crushed Barb's ring into her finger and set the blood singing through her. He started to make a remark about the weather but his opinion of that commodity was never completed for suddenly from the room beyond Sylvia's laughter rippled out.
Did you ever happen to be engaged in decorous conversation with a man and suddenly see a change sweep over his face, and an arrested, listening, illuminated look take possession of it, just because somewhere in the distance he had heard a step, a voice, a laugh, belonging to somebody who was not yourself? That was what Barbara Day saw, and the little winged creature used her wings then and there and never came back. Barb heard the clock tick out as before, "Suppose a chap wants to marry a girl," but she knew now, once and for all, that the clock had never been talking about Barbie Day. It had always meant Sylvia Arden from the beginning.
But Barb's fathers had been fighting men and she herself was game to her little brown fingertips.
"Hurry!" she said gayly, just a shadetoogayly, perhaps, only Phil did not notice. "Sylvia's here and soup's served." And as she pushed aside the curtains into the dining-room she announced with a gallant flourish, "Doctor Lorrimer, ladies."
But while Phil and Sylvia shook hands she did not look at them, busying herself instead with rearranging the scarlet carnations which stood in the center of the table, complaining to her aunt as she did so that the flowers looked "stiff" and "old-maidish" and needed a "touch."
It was Barb who was the blithest of them all that night at the little supper party, bestowing to it the "touch" just as she had to the carnations. Sylvia and Phil were both slightly self-conscious and not very conversational. Miss Josephine Murray was somewhat silent too, watching the young people with eyes that saw all there was to see and understanding things at which she had been able only to guess hitherto.
That night after Sylvia and Phil had gone, Barb slipped quickly away to bed, a little afraid of what her aunt's keen gaze might have discovered, and longing, in any case, to be alone with the dark and the Thing she had been dodging all the evening, the Thing which sooner or later had to be faced and grappled with.
Later Miss Murray found her wide awake and stooped to kiss her with unwonted tenderness.
"Good night, Barbie. Anything I can do to--put you to sleep?"
Barb shook her head with a tired little smile. Then suddenly she sat up.
"If you don't mind, I think I'd like you to put your arms around me and hold me tight for a minute. Mother used to hold me that way when I felt--achey."
Miss Josephine's arms went around the girl, holding her very "tight" indeed for a few moments of silence.
"Do you feel very achey, Barbie?" she asked presently.
"Oh, no," lied Barb. "I just wanted to be petted a little weeny mite, that was all. I'm all right. Thank you, Aunt Jo. Don't bother. Do go to bed. I know you are tired."
That was the nearest the two ever came to speaking of the Thing but neither fell asleep until dawn, and when Barb awoke from her brief, heavy slumber she was entirely grown up.
Out in the crisp chill of the December night, after leaving Miss Murray and Barb, Phil and Sylvia had found their tongues. All the hurt and estrangement of the past months seemed magically to have shed itself, leaving only the old happy intimacy with perhaps a touch of something new and even more exhilarating about it.
As they walked along the river front they talked of many things, of Phil's work, of Jack's unprecedented diligence, of Gus Nichols' success on the road, of Felicia's designs, and Lois Daly's novel, of "Hester house" and Phil's mother, of Barb's services to the Cause, and Suzanne's mysterious journeyings; of everything indeed, it seemed, except the subject which was nearest the surface, their own selves.
When they reached the Lathams' apartment they were still as far from having said the really important things that trembled on their lips as they had been at the beginning. Sylvia knew perfectly well what she wanted to say but being a woman could not say it. Phil also knew perfectly well what he wanted to say but being a man set his lips and did not say it. It was only as Sylvia paused in the doorway and held out her hand to Phil that the thing came near to getting said in spite of them both.
"Sylvia!" Phil's voice had a quick little catch in it very unlike his usual rather deliberate speech. "If I don't see much of you while you are here you will understand, won't you? It won't be because I don't want to but because I--don't dare." And his frank blue eyes implored her to understand and forgive.
"Are you sure--there is anything--to be afraid of?" Sylvia's words had jerked a little, too, and as she drew her hand away to press the bell her eyes expressed more even than her tongue had said.
"Sylvia!" Phil took a swift step nearer but before he could say any more a solemn liveried person had appeared in the doorway and stood at blinking attention while Sylvia shot one dazzling glance at the young doctor and vanished into the dim spaces of the hall, whence it seemed to Phil, though he could not be sure, she kissed her hand to him behind the liveried person's back, before she was lost in the elevator. Phil stared after her a moment in dazed silence then went out into the night.
The next day, when he came in from the clinic, he found a little note from Sylvia inviting him to take tea with her the following afternoon. "Of course it is all nonsense about your not seeing much of me while I am here," the note had added. "Phil, can't you understand there isn't anything to be afraid of?" The last was underscored. And then the writer subscribed herself conventionally his as ever.
Phil read the note hungrily several times and puzzled more than a little over its contents, which he perceived were open to more than one interpretation, especially the underscored portion. And then he had sat down and written an answer which he dispatched by special messenger. The answer expressed thanks and polite regret that the writer had a previous engagement.
Sylvia had run away into her own room to read the note and grew first a little rosy, then a little white as she read. Then she tore the missive into bits, and going to the window, deliberately let the fragments flutter away in the December blast outside.
"I might as well have proposed and done with it," she thought hotly. "Phil Lorrimer needn't worry. I won't endanger his precious peace of mind again while I'm here. Previous engagement, indeed! He's afraid of my money and he makes me tired."
As a matter of fact she did Phil injustice in one particular at least. The previous engagement had been perfectly authentic. The Washington Square Players were giving that afternoon a first performance of a play which had been translated from the Russian by a friend of Phil's and he had promised to be present and had long ago invited Barb to go with him. And Barb being fully determined that Phil should never guess how things were had kept her engagement and succeeded in behaving so comradely and sisterly, which was precisely the way she had been behaving all along only more so, that her escort was allowed to continue in his state of innocence and ignorance as to things better left unknown, which was quite according to code.
But it was one of those odd coincidences that sometimes occur that Sylvia and Jeanette should have been whirling swiftly toward the park on their way home from the matinée just at the moment when Phil and Barb were transferring to the Subway at the Circle. Very much absorbed the latter appeared to be in each other's society, so much so that neither saw the limousine pass them, but Sylvia had not been so blind, and Jeanette also had taken in the scene.
"Wasn't that your little friend with Phil Lorrimer?" the latter had asked. "Somebody was telling me he goes everywhere with her. I shouldn't wonder if they were engaged, should you? They certainly looked devoted enough." So Jeanette had rattled on and never noticed that Sylvia had not answered.
That night Sylvia had gone to a big ball and worn a wonderful, sophisticated Paquin gown of sea green satin and pearls. She looked very young and lovely. The men flocked around her and she managed them all like a seasoned coquette and had three proposals during the course of the evening. Of course it was perfectly well known that she was an heiress as well as a beauty, so the proposers was not so romantically rash as might have been thought.
And from that time on Sylvia "went the pace" as madly as Jeanette herself, without pause or rest. After that one supper party Barb was never able to capture her friend again, her engagements piled up so fast and high. It looked as if Suzanne's prophecy about the "labyrinth" were being fulfilled. As for Phil, never once was he able to see her again. She was always out when he called or telephoned and always had previous engagements when he tried to get her for the theater or a concert. She was as invisible, so far as he was concerned, as if some fairy's wand had drawn a magic circle about her, a fact which made him burrow deeper than ever in his work and made him look a little older and grimmer than his twenty-five years warranted.
CHAPTER XV
THE CITY AND SYLVIA
Sylvia had supposed herself sufficiently grown up and wise and modern when she came to the city but she had not been there a week before she knew that she had been a veritable innocent, an infant in swaddling clothes, so to speak. Here was life, of a sort, with a vengeance.
In Jeanette's circle, Sylvia saw Mammon worship executed on so prodigious a scale and with such sacrificial ardor it fairly took her breath away. Everything was of the superlative degree. Sheer wealth, sheer elaboration, sheer success, sheer bigness, sheer speed, were all that counted it seemed. And in the mêlée the old-fashioned virtues, spiritual values, ideals, were somehow either dimmed beyond recognition or totally extinguished. Love showed itself chiefly in the guise of passion, often frankly illicit, and in lust frequently but thinly veiled. The motley throng of young-old men and old-young men who paid court to herself were obviously actuated by one of two motives or a combination of the two, the impulse of passion, or the impulse of avarice. Both points of view Sylvia loathed and thought degrading to herself as well as the men who held them. Nearly all of the group of more or less importunate suitors who thronged about her she frankly despised. The men she might have liked and respected did not come near her, much less enter the lists. No doubt they classed her with the other women with whom she appeared, women butterfly clad, butterfly souled, obviously unfit for the serious purposes of life. Sylvia did not wonder that the real men kept away. They showed their realness by so doing she thought.
Once, at a dinner, fate and her hostess allotted a different kind of companion, a grim looking person with very broad shoulders and very clear blue eyes, who let her severely alone during three courses and then when she was getting desperately bored by the over-assiduous attentions of the receding-chinned, narrow-browed scion of wealth who sat at her other elbow had suddenly turned to explode a question in her direction.
"What the devil do you see in all this?"
Sylvia had retorted that she didn't know what she saw but was trying to find out.
"When the pumpkin coach arrives I shall skip back home and think it over," she had added whimsically with a Sylvia smile.
Her neighbor had grunted a little at that and eyed her sharply from under his heavy brows.
"I thought as much," he said. "You don't belong."
"Don't I?" Sylvia had inquired dubiously. "Isn't my gown all right?" She was wearing a New York creation this time, of white tulle and gold tissue, a frock which Jeanette had pronounced a "dream," so her anxiety was not very deep-seated. "Or is it my hair? Ears are out just now, aren't they. They told me they were."
"Oh, you are protectively colored all right. It isn't that. Superficially you might be any one of this sea of ninnies that surround us. But, my dear young lady, your eyes betray you. You have a brain."
"Dear me!" sighed Sylvia, looking around her apprehensively. "Is it so bad as that? I hope nobody else suspects."
"No danger. They aren't looking for brains. Bodies content 'em. I hope you don't think this Punch and Judy show is the real New York? You are a stranger, I take it?"
"A pilgrim and a stranger. Where is the real New York?"
"Downtown, a good deal of it. Some of it is in the universities, especially in the night classes. Some of it is in the laboratories where they are fighting disease and achieving chemical miracles. Some of it is in the little back bedrooms where the chap from the up-state village has come down to peddle his dreams in the market place. The real New York--the real America--is made up of just two things--the dream and the deed. Those that make dreams their masters fail and go to pieces and that is a tragedy. Those that build without the vision will see the work of their hands filter to dust. And that's a worse tragedy. But those who can dream and transmute the dream to human gain, in tangible form--they are the real thing. These people here haven't the decency to dream nor the energy to do. They are the scum on the surface. They are punk--most of 'em. Rotten."
Sylvia had looked around her a little startled. The scene had looked brilliant and appealing to her a moment ago. Somehow now she saw it through this brutal stranger's eyes a "Punch and Judy show.". She shivered slightly. Suddenly she felt a bit like a little girl at a party, grown homesick, all at once, ready to be taken home quick. For she could not help believing her neighbor was right. Underneath the glamour and the beauty and the poise and the breeding around her there was a good deal that was more or less "rotten." She had seen it in men's eyes and heard it in their voices, yes, in the women's, too. She was filled with a great disgust and with some shame as well. For in her zest for experience had she not let her own shield get a little dented and tarnished? She turned back to her companion, her new knowledge in her eyes.
"Why did you tell me?" she reproached.
"Why, indeed? You knew it without my telling you. See here, girl, I'm going to Alaska myself to-morrow. I can't stand much of this sort of thing. I'd like to think you were going to pull out, too, before the taint gets you. I said your eyes betrayed you. They did. But it isn't only that you have brains. The brains are there but there is something else too. You have faith. You've lived in a decent sort of world where people are straight and kind and honest and simple. Better go back to it while there is still time."
Sylvia drew a long breath.
"Thank you," she said. "I believe I will."
Later Jeanette asked her what she had found to say to Archibald Grant.
"He's the Arctic Explorer Grant, you know. Quite the biggest toad in the puddle there, to-night."
"Was he?" Sylvia had looked thoughtful. "I didn't know who he was but we had rather an interesting talk. Jeanette, I've got to go home."
"Go home! Why, Sylvia, you haven't been here two weeks yet!"
"I know. But I'm incurably a home person. I've had a wonderful time but I want to see Arden Hall and Felicia and--"
"Jack?" teased Jack's sister languidly.
Sylvia flushed a little. At the moment it did seem as if she would be very glad, indeed, to see Jack. Jack was so clean and young and joyous and wholesome. He seemed to her to belong to a different world from that which his sister inhabited. But, after all, at Jeanette's insistence, Sylvia agreed to stay another week.
Jeanette herself was almost feverish in her gayety these days. It seemed, indeed, as if she could not stop if she tried, as if "all the devils of Hell were loose and after her" as Jack had said. She was a puzzle to Sylvia. That she was not happy was apparent, but she was always gay, talkative, full of quick laughter and brilliant plans for new pleasures, something fresh every hour. There were always many men in her wake. Usually they were men of brains, men "who did things," as the phrase goes, musicians, writers, artists and the like. Jeanette did not affect fools, as she had said curtly to Sylvia once. She had brains herself and used them. She was rather famous and rather feared for her somewhat satirical wit. Her husband was a quiet, scholarly aristocrat, who spent most of his time reading memoirs of somebody or other, or bringing out elegant "privately printed" monographs. In Jeanette's scheme of things he seemed scarcely to count at all, beyond the essential facts of having provided her with an extravagant income and an assured place in New York society. To do her justice, however, Jeanette was by no means dependent upon her husband for these things. She made her own circle wherever she went. She did not need either the Latham money or name to assure her leadership. She was a born queen. These factors were merely contributing circumstances.
Among Jeanette's varied and numerous retinue was one young man whom Sylvia found less easy than the others to place. This was an artist, Charlton Haynes by name, a newcomer in the city who had been for some time engaged in "doing" Jeanette's portrait. Wherever Jeanette was, the young portrait painter appeared to be also by some magic process. The two had little to say to each other in public but Sylvia had noticed more than once how the painter's rather gloomy face lit up when Jeanette approached, giving an effect much like a sudden sunshine after a passing cloud. More than once, too, Sylvia had seen a flash of some quick, wordless communication pass between them. They spent long hours together mornings in the great ball-room where he worked in the north light. When Sylvia was with them, as she sometimes was, the artist was rather silent and absorbed in his work and Sylvia thought if he were always so quiet he must be rather dull company.
One morning she suffered an abrupt enlightenment as to the relations between her hostess and the artist. Jeanette had been detained and had asked Sylvia to go to the ballroom and explain to Mr. Haynes that she would be with him as soon as possible. As Sylvia opened the door he had turned with outstretched arms and an impulsive "Sweetheart, you are dreadfully late." And then his hands had fallen and a shamed, hang-dog, caught-in-the-act expression banished the eager look of expectant joy on his face as he met Sylvia's eyes and saw her quick flush.
He shrugged and tried to make the best of the situation by a hasty "Beg pardon, Miss Sylvia. I didn't see it was you."
"So I judged," said Sylvia and delivered her message gravely and departed. She wondered if this was what Jack had guessed and if that was why he had wanted her to go to Jeanette. Had he thought she could save her? Poor Jeanette! Could any one save her but herself?
Two hours later Jeanette came to Sylvia, writing letters in her own room at the little teakwood desk.
"Sylvia."
"Yes?" Sylvia had turned, wondering what Jeanette would say, wondering almost more what she herself was going to say.
"Charlton says he gave himself away awhile ago, did he?"
"Rather."
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean you to know for fear it might bother you. Otherwise, of course, I don't mind your knowing. We have been in love for some time. There doesn't seem to be anything to do about it at present."
Jeanette's tone was impersonal. She might as easily have been discussing the relation between the moon and the tides as the relation between herself and Charlton Haynes. The facts existed. That was all apparently. At least all Jeanette cared to admit.
"Couldn't he go away?" asked Sylvia, equally matter of fact.
"He could, but it would make talk if he went before the portrait was done. Besides, I don't want him to go. He offered to. It is I who am keeping him. I hope you are not too much shocked, Sylvia."
"I'm not shocked at all, but I am sorry. Does Jack know?"
"Jack!" For the first time, Jeanette showed a quaver of emotion in her voice. "Jack! Good gracious, no! Why should he? I wouldn't have Jack know for anything. What made you ask that?"
"Jack tried to warn me something about you before I came. He seemed to think you needed me."
And suddenly Jeanette's calm broke. She flung herself face down among the silken cushions of the couch. Sylvia came and knelt beside her putting both arms around her. In a moment Jeanette sat up, flushed but tearless. Sylvia slipped back upon the floor, her hands clasped around her knees, her eyes pitiful.
"I do need you. I need somebody. Sylvia, listen to me. It is a dreadful thing for a girl to marry if she isn't in love. Fate is sure to strike back at her sooner or later. That is what happened to me. I married Francis because I thought he could give me the things I wanted--the things I thought I wanted. And he has, but it isn't what I really wanted at all. I am just beginning to understand what I do want--what life might mean, if one deserved to have it mean anything. I hate this house and the servants and the hideous kind of existence we live--the kind I elected to live. It wasn't Francis' choice. It was mine. But I hate it all now. I'd like to leave it this minute. But I can't. I'm bound, hand and foot, by conventions and fears and selfishness. I couldn't live now without luxury, I've had it so long. I couldn't stand poverty or shame or sacrifice or honesty of any kind. I'm a sham. I love Charlton. But I shan't try to get a divorce and I shan't run off with him because I'm not big enough. I'm just big enough to squirm and suffer and hate myself for being such a pitiful little coward. I'm not even big enough to send him away. I'm not worth his wrecking his life and ideals for, but I don't tell him that. I tell him I love him and that is enough to keep him here like a lap dog. Pah! He isn't very big either or he would make me go with him or leave me outright."
"But, Jeanette, it is all such a tangle. If you really care, why don't you go to Francis and tell him the truth? Surely nothing can be so bad as going on like this."
"You don't know what you are talking about, Sylvia. I'd die before I would go to Francis and I'd die if he found out, but I'm going on risking everything until something happens. I don't know what."
And in the face of such reasoning or non-reasoning, Sylvia had no answer to make. She was beginning to hate the city heartily. It seemed to be weaving nothing but misery for everybody. Was there any happiness in it? Surely she herself had found none. She desired more than anything else in the world to run away from it all, to get back to Felicia and, yes, to Jack. They two seemed the only refuge in a heaving sea of trouble.