Heloise's intentional noisiness in rearranging the toilet articles on the dressing table aroused Louise. The brilliant sunlight of a sparkling winter morning was pouring into the room. Half-awake and the brightness of the room filtering through her still-closed eyelids, she was obsessed for an instant with the fear that, over-sleeping, she was late for the exercises attending the beginning of a day at Miss Mayhew's school. She smiled at the thought, in spite of a brooding, indefinable trouble that had burdened her sleep, when, with wide eyes, she quickly sensed the lavishness of the room and saw the invincibly trig Heloise moving about.
"Mademoiselle is awake at last?" said Heloise in French, a trace of irritation in her tone. "One considered that Mademoiselle contemplated sleeping until the end of time."
Louise disarmed her with a laugh.
"Perhaps I should have," she said, lightly, but on her guard with her French in the presence of so meticulous a critic, "had I not just this moment dreamt of coffee. Am I too late for breakfast?"
Of course Mademoiselle should have her coffee instantly, said the appeased Heloise, ringing. The maid mentally pronounced that Louise's finishing-school French was almost intelligible to one understanding that language.
Mrs. Treharne had sent Heloise to look after Louise until a maid should be obtained for her. Louise, sitting up in bed, her fresh, clear-colored face aureoled by her agreeably awry mass of bronzed hair, the nocturnal braids of which she already had begun to unplait, laughed again at the thought of being attended by a maid.
"I shall have to be trained for that," she said to the mollified Heloise. "I never had a maid. I doubt if I should know how to behave with a maid doing my hair. I think I should find myself tempted to do the maid's instead; especially if her hair were as pretty as yours."
Heloise was Louise's sworn, voluble, tooth-and-nail, right-or-wrong, everlasting friend from that moment. She 'phoned to the butler, demanding to know why Mademoiselle's coffee had not been sent, although she had only called for it three minutes before, and she buzzed about the tractable Louise, arranging her hair with expert fingers, cheerful and chirpful, nothing whatever like the austere, croaking Heloise who scowled so threateningly over the slightest unruliness of her actual mistress. Heloise was prepared to give an enthusiastic recommendation of Louise to the maid who should be engaged to attend her mistress's daughter. And she began already to be envious of Louise's unobtained maid.
When Heloise had finished with her Louise, inspecting herself in the glass with frank approval, decided that never before had she looked so astonishingly well at that hour of the morning. But, when the garrulous maid had gone, Louise, sipping her coffee, sat in the streaming sunlight of the bowed window, watching the sparkling ice floes drift down the bleak Hudson, and the trouble that had weighted her sleep returned upon her, slowly taking shape with her consciousness. She had been too tired the night before to engage in much reflection, before losing herself in sleep, upon the incidents—one incident particularly—of the previous night. Now she was face to face with the gravamen of her depression, with an alert morning mind to sift over its elements. It was characteristic of her that she did not seek to thrust aside her consciousness of conditions which she imperfectly understood. She understood them, however, sufficiently to grasp at least the essentials of the situation.
Louise, whose native shrewdness was tempered by an innate and unconquerable tendency to look upon the bright side of the world and of such of the world's people as she came into contact with, was far better acquainted with her mother than her mother was with her; which was natural enough, considering that she had the receptive mind of youth, and that her mother's major trait was a sort of all-inclusive indifference. Many things in connection with her mother's manner of life, her almost hysterical love of admiration, her restlessness and her habitual secretiveness with Louise during the girl's early girlhood years, had become all too plain to the daughter as she developed into womanhood at the finishing school. Perhaps it may be added that a twentieth century finishing school for young women commonly is an institution wherein all of the pupils' deductions are not made from their text books nor from the eminently safe premises laid down by their instructors. The young woman who has spent four years at such a school does not step through a nimbus of juvenile dreams when she enters into the world that is waiting for her. It is true that, when she takes her place in the uncloistered world, she has a great deal to unlearn; but this is balanced by the indubitable fact she has not very much to learn. Those who expect her to be utterly surprised over the departures that she sees from the rules of the social game are merely wasting their surprise. It is mere futility to suppose that several hundreds of young women of the highly intelligent and eager type who attend exclusive schools of the so-termed finishing kind, thrust constantly upon each other for companionship and the comparison of notes, are going to occupy all of their leisure in discussing the return of Halley's comet, or the profounder meaning of Wagner, or even the relative starchiness of their hair ribbons.
Louise, participating in the whispered precocities of the school, had often caught herself on the defensive in her mother's behalf. To seek to brush away imputations that seemed to fit her mother's personality and way of life had become almost a habit with her.
The habit, however, was availing her little on this her first morning after leaving school in her mother's sumptuous home—"that is, if it is mother's home." She flushed when she found herself saying that. But the doubt propelled itself through her consciousness, and she resolutely refused to expel it, once it had found lodgment in her mind, merely because it caused her cheeks to burn. Her mother's favorite word, in contemptuously denominating people who lived in accordance with convention, was "smug;" Mrs. Treharne considered that she had pilloried, for the world's derision, persons to whom she had adverted as "smug." Of the smugness of the kind Mrs. Treharne meant when she employed the word, there was not an atom in Louise's composition. Her nature, her upbringing, were opposed to the thought of a narrow, restrained, buckram social rule.
But here was a situation—the investiture of almost garish splendor in which she found her mother living, considered in connection with subconscious doubts as to certain quite visible flaws in her mother's character which had been forming themselves in the girl's mind for years—here, indeed, was a situation with respect to which Louise's unquietude had no need of being based upon mere smugness.
The girl knew quite well that, up to the time of her going away to school at any rate, her mother's income had been a limited one—some three thousand a year voluntarily contributed by the father for his daughter's support and education. It had not been, in fact, her mother's income at all, but Louise's; and it had been voluntarily contributed by the father because, as he had been the plaintiff in the divorce suit, the decree had not required him to aid his detached wife or his daughter at all; the court had given him the custody of the child, and he had surrendered that custody to the mother out of sheer pity for her.
How, then, had her mother provided herself, on an income which, with a daughter to educate, called for frugality, if not positive scrimping, with such a sheerly extravagant setting?
And Judd! Louise flushed again when she remembered Judd. She did not know his name. She had never seen or even heard of him before. She only remembered him—and the thought caused her to draw her negligée more closely about her, for she experienced a sudden chill—as the girthy, red-eyed individual who, with the proprietary arrogance of an intoxicated man who seemed perfectly to know his position under that roof, had lurched into her mother's apartments on the previous night without the least attempt at announcing himself.
How would her mother explain these things? Would she, indeed, explain to her daughter at all? In any case, Louise formed the resolve not to question her mother. She possessed, what is unusual in woman, an instinctive appreciation of the rights of others, even when such rights are perversely altered to wrongs. She considered that her mother's affairs were her own, in so far as they did not involve herself, Louise Treharne, in any tacit copartnership; and as to this point she purposed ascertaining, before very long, to just what extent she had become or was expected to become involved. For the rest, she was conscious of a distinct sympathy for and a yearning toward her mother. In her reflections she gave her mother the benefit of every mitigating circumstance.
Turning from the window, Louise saw her mother standing before the dresser glass studying her haggard morning face, now lacking all of the sorely-required aids to the merely pretty regularity of her features, with a head-shaking lugubriousness that might have had its comic appeal to an unconcerned onlooker. Louise, however, was scarcely in a mood of mirth.
"I knocked, my dear, but you were too much absorbed," said Mrs. Treharne, offering her daughter her cheek. "You were in a veritable trance. Did you get enough sleep, child? Was Heloise in a scolding humor? She makes my life a misery to me with her tongue. What beautiful hair you have! And what a perfect skin! A powder puff would mar that wonderful pallor. Yet you are not too white. It becomes you, with your hair. Appreciate these things while you have them, dear; look at your mother, a hag, a witch, at thirty-nine! But, then, you will keep your looks longer than I; you pattern after the women of your——"
She came perilously close to saying "your father's family," but adroitly turned the phrase when she caught herself in time. Louise, putting on a cheerful mask, replied to her mother's trivialities and devised some of her own. Her mother had not lost her banting-killed bloom when Louise had last seen her at such an hour in the morning; and the girl was inwardly pained to note how all but the mere vestiges of her remembered prettiness had disappeared. Mrs. Treharne caught her looking at her with a certain scrutinizing reflectiveness, and she broke out petulantly:
"Don't pick me apart with your eyes in that way, Louise! I know that I am hideous, but for heaven's sake don't remind me of it with your criticizing, transfixing gazes!"
She was of the increasing type of women who, long after they have the natural right to expect adulation on account of their looks, still hate to surrender. Louise quickly perceived this and provided unguents for her mother's sensitiveness.
They chatted upon little matters, Mrs. Treharne so ill at ease (yet striving to hide her restlessness) that she found it impossible to sit still for more than a minute; she fluttered incessantly about the room, her wonderful negligée of embroidered turquoise sailing after her like the outspread wings of a moth. After many pantheress-like rounds of the room, during which Louise somehow felt her old diffidence in her mother's presence returning upon her, Mrs. Treharne, after her evident casting about for an opening, stopped before Louise and pinched her cheek between dry fingers.
"At any rate, my dear," she said with a trace of her old amiability and animation, "you are not a frump or a bluestocking! There was a time when I had two fears: that you would not grow up pretty and that you would become bookish. And here I find myself towered over by a young princess, and you don't talk in the least like a girl with crazy notions of keeping up her inane school studies." Then, after a slight pause: "Are you religious, my dear, or—er—well, broad-minded?"
Louise smothered her mounting laugh, for fear of offending her mother in her mood of amiability; but her smile was eloquent enough.
"Is there any incompatibility between those two states of mind, mother?" she asked.
"Don't dissect my words, child; you quite understand what I mean," said the mother, with a slight reversion to peevishness. "Your father, you know, was—no doubt still is—shockingly narrow; he hadn't the slightest conception of the broad, big view; he belonged in this respect, I think, in the Middle Ages; and I have been tortured by the fear that you might—might—"
She hesitated. She had not meant to mention Louise's father, much less to speak of him even in mild derogation; and she suddenly recalled how, years before, there had been a tacit agreement between them that Louise's father was not to be mentioned. The agreement had been entered into after an occasion when Louise, then a child of eleven, with the memory of her vanished father still very keen in her mind, had rushed from the room, in blinding tears, upon hearing her mother speak of him in terms of dispraise.
"I did not have much time at school for self-analysis, mother," said Louise, coming to her mother's aid. "I suppose I am normal and neutral enough. I am not conscious of any particular leaning." She flushed, swept by a sudden sense of the difficulty, the incongruity, of such a conversation with her mother amid such surroundings. "Mother," she resumed, hastily, "I am so keen to see New York again that I am hardly capable of thinking of anything else just now. Are we to go out?"
"The car is yours when you wish it, Louise," said Mrs. Treharne, absently. "I rarely go out until late in the afternoon."
"The car?" said Louise. "You have a car, then?"
Her mother glanced at her sharply. It was sufficiently obvious that she was on the lookout for symptoms of inquisitiveness on Louise's part; though Louise had not meant her question to be in the least inquisitive.
"I have the use of a car," said Mrs. Treharne, a little frigidly. "It belongs to Mr. Judd."
Instinctively Louise felt that "Mr. Judd" was the sealskinned Falstaff whose unceremonious appearance the night before had startled her. But she remained silent. Nothing could have induced her to ask her mother about Mr. Judd. Her mother did not fail to notice her silence, which of course put her on the defensive.
"Mr. Judd," she said, "is—a—" she hesitated painfully—"my business adviser. He has been very good and kind in making some investments in—in mining stocks for me; investments that have proved very profitable. He is alert in my interest. It was Mr. Judd, my dear, whom you saw last night. He was not quite himself, I fear, or he would not have made his appearance as he did. He has helped me so much that of course it would be ungrateful of me not to permit him the run of the place." She rambled on, as persons will who feel themselves to be on the defensive. "In fact, he—he—But of course, if you have formed a prejudice against him on account of last night, there will be no occasion for you to meet him except occasionally."
Louise caught the hollowness, the evasiveness, of the explanation. Not one word of it had rung true. Louise had never felt sorrier for her mother than she did at that moment. She noticed a certain hunted expression in her mother's face, and it cut her to the quick. She placed a long, finely-chiselled arm, from which the sleeve of the negligée had slipped back to the shoulder, around her mother's neck.
"But I haven't the least use for a car, dearie," she said. It was not with deliberation that she ignored altogether what her mother had been saying as to Judd; it was simply that she could not bring herself to offer any comment on that subject. "I am a walker; every day at Miss Mayhew's I did ten miles—even in rain and snow, and it is clouding for snow now, I think. You will not mind my going out for a long walk? I am wild for air and exercise."
Mrs. Treharne was grateful to the girl for turning it off in that way even if, by so doing, Louise indicated that she was of more than one mind with respect to what had been told her regarding Judd. And Mrs. Treharne, careless and indifferent as she was, could not visualize her daughter in the gigantic yellow-bodied Judd car without being swept by a feeling that was distinctly to her credit.
Laura Stedham, over her cocoa, was weaving with careless rapidity through her morning mail when John Blythe arrived shortly before noon. Laura's apartment overlooked the west side of the Park. Its dominant color scheme now was based upon a robin's egg blue; but there was a jest among Laura's friends that they never had seen her apartment look the same on two visits running; they declared that every time Laura left the city for as long a period as a fortnight, she left orders with her decorator to have her apartment completely done over so that even she herself quite failed to recognize it when she returned.
Blythe, throwing his snow-sprinkled stormcoat over the extended arm of Laura's brisk maid, strolled over to a window and watched the still, unflurried flakes sift through the bare branches of the Park trees. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets and his eyes were so unusually meditative that Laura, used to his absorption as she was, laughed quietly as she turned from her escritoire.
"Yes, John, it is snowing," she said, thrusting away a heap of still-unopened letters.
Blythe turned to her with a twinkling look of inquiry.
"I thought perhaps you might not have noticed it," chaffed Laura, "seeing that you were looking right at it. You require an excessive amount of forgiveness from your friends. I believe you have not even seen me yet, although I've employed a good hour that I might have spent in bed in devising additional fascinations in anticipation of your coming."
"Meaning, for one thing, I suppose," said Blythe with rather an absorbed smile, "that—that—"
"Don't you dare call it a kimono," interrupted Laura. "It's a mandarin's coat—a part of the Peking loot. Of course you are crazy over it?"
It was a magnificent pale blue, ermine-padded garment, with a dragon of heavy gold embroidery extending from nape to hem down the loose back.
Blythe studied it for a moment and then glanced significantly at the faint-blue walls and ceiling of the room.
"I presume," he said, solemnly, "you had your rooms done this last time to match the Mother Hub—I mean the mandarin's coat?"
They did not need thus to spar, for they were (what, unhappily, is so unusual between men and women in a world devoid of mid-paths) close friends; even comrades, in so far as Blythe's hard work permitted him to assume his share of such a relationship; and they understood each other thoroughly, with no complication differing from a genuine mutual esteem to mar their understanding. Nevertheless, both of them found it a trifle difficult to undertake the lead on the subject that was uppermost in their minds and the occasion of Blythe's forenoon visit.
Laura with her customary helpfulness, finally gave him an opening.
"She told us of having met you on the train," said Laura, as if in continuation of a conversation already begun on the theme. "An odd chance, wasn't it? I wonder if you were so enormously struck with her as I was?"
"You met her at the station, did you not?" said Blythe, quietly. "That was like you; like your all-around fineness."
"Thanks," said Laura, appreciatively. "But you evade my question. Isn't she a perfect apparition of loveliness?"
"I wish she were less so," said Blythe, not convincingly.
"No, you don't wish that," said Laura. "I know what you wish; but it is not that."
Blythe was silent for a space and then he fell to striding up and down the room.
"Did you ever come upon such an unspeakable situation, Laura?" he broke out, stopping to face her. "What is Antoinette Treharne thinking of? Is she utterly lost to any sense of—"
"I wouldn't say that, John," put in Laura, holding up a staying hand. "It is natural enough, I know, for you to reach such a conclusion; on a cursory view the case seems to be against her; but you must remember that Louise came home without warning. Antoinette had no opportunity to devise a plan. She is horribly humiliated. I know that."
"Your usual method of defending everybody—and you know how I like you for that as for so many other things," said Blythe. "But, Laura, Louise's mother knew that the girl must leave school in half a year at all events. She must have considered some way out of the hideous mess?"
"None that she ever mentioned to me," said Laura. "You know her habit of procrastination. I grazed the subject two or three times in talking with her. She dodged, or was downright brusque. She has no plan, I am sure. But she is sorely distressed over it all, now that the situation has come to a head. I am very sorry for her."
"But the girl?" said Blythe, a slight note of irritation in his tone. "How about her?"
"I should be more worried if I were not so entirely confident that Louise is amply competent to take care of herself," said Laura. "She is no longer a girl, John. She is a woman, and a woman with more than her share of plain sense. Her position, of course, is positively outrageous, heartrending. But I am at a loss to suggest a single thing that her friends—that you or I, or both of us—could do just now to better it."
"That," said Blythe, a little hoarsely, "is just the devil of it."
"I should like to have Louise with me," Laura went on, "but I doubt if she would come, although I believe she is fond of me. Not just yet, at any rate. She would not care to leave her mother after her long separation from her. Louise will find out the situation herself. No doubt she already has sensed a part of its sinister aspect. I am horribly sorry for her. But, as I say, she is a woman of character. She will know what to do. All that we can do, for the present at any rate, is to be on guard for her, without seeming to be. Of course she shall know that we are her friends. She already knows that I am her friend. Did you, on the train—"
"Yes," put in Blythe, apprehending what Laura was going to ask. "I told her that I knew her father. The matter came about in an odd way. I wish, Laura, that you'd make it clear to her, if you have the chance, that she—that I—"
He halted embarrassedly.
"I quite understand," Laura aided him, smiling. "That you mean to be her friend, too—of course I shall tell her that," and Laura looked reflective when she observed how Blythe's face brightened. It soon clouded again, however, when he broke out:
"She will find out, of course, sooner or later, that she has been taken care of and educated for the past five years and odd with Judd's money," he said, worriedly. "You can imagine how intense her mortification will be over that discovery. Judd, you know, in contempt of George Treharne, forced Mrs. Treharne to return to me the quarterly checks that Treharne sent me from Hawaii for Louise—for of course I sent the checks to Antoinette. I explained this to Treharne when I saw him in Honolulu a few years ago. He was badly cut up over it But of course he was powerless to do anything about it. He refused to take the checks back, though, and directed me to deposit the money to Louise's account. I have nearly fifteen thousand dollars—five years' accrued checks, for Treharne has never stopped sending them—on deposit for Louise now. Don't you think she had better be told this?"
"Wait a while," advised Laura. "Wait until she discovers how the land lies. Then she will be coming to you. If you told her now it would involve your telling her also that she had been educated with Judd's money. I think it better that she discover that for herself—if she must discover it. Then she will know what to do. She will be seeking you out then," and Laura smiled inwardly when again she noted how Blythe's face cleared at her last words.
"There is only one thing to do, of course, and that is to follow your advice and let the matter stand as it is for the present," said Blythe, preparing to go. "But the thing is going to sit pretty heavily upon me. I have been Treharne's legal man ever since my senior partner died, as you know, and, although it isn't of course expected of me, I can't help but feel a certain responsibility for his daughter when she is thrust into such a miserable situation as this. I wonder," catching at a new and disturbing idea, "if her mother will expect Louise to meet the wretched crew of near-poets, maybe-musicians and other rag-tag-and-bobtail that assemble at what Antoinette calls her Sunday evening 'salon?'"
"Antoinette's 'zoo,' I call it," laughed Laura. "What if Louise does meet them? They can't harm her. They, the unfortunate make-believes, will only appeal to her risibles, if I mistake not. Louise must have got her sense of humor from her father. Antoinette hasn't a particle of humor in her composition. If she had how long do you suppose she would continue her absurd 'salon?"
Laura, in extending her hand to Blythe, who had resumed his stormcoat, gazed quizzically into his rugged face.
"John," she said, "is your solicitude for Louise solely on account of the—er—sense of responsibility you feel toward her father?"
Blythe caught the twinkle in her eyes.
"Humbug!" he ejaculated, striding out to the obligato of Laura's laugh.
When they were settled in the car for their snowy ride that afternoon, Mrs. Treharne turned in her seat to face Judd.
"You will understand," she said in a tone quite as hard as it was meant to be, "that I am not wasting words. If you repeat your grossness of last night in my daughter's presence, our—our friendship is at an end. That is understood?"
"Now, now, shush, shush, Tony," said the Gargantuan Judd, soothingly, and resorting to his habit of patting her hands, "not so severe, not so terrifically severe, you know. How did I know that your daughter would be there? Didn't know the least thing about it—forgot, I mean, that she was coming. Got a bit screwed at the club, and—"
"I don't elect to listen to that sort of an explanation," interrupted Mrs. Treharne, with cold deliberation. "I am unutterably weary of your porcine manners. It is bad enough that I have permitted myself to endure them. You are not imbecile enough to suppose that my daughter is to endure them, too? You are to meet her only when it is absolutely necessary; be good enough to remember that. While she is with me—I don't now know how long that is to be—you are to curtail your visits; and if you come even once again in the sodden condition that you were in last night, I am done with you from that instant. I make myself plain, I hope?"
"'Pon honor, Tony, you are horribly severe," blurted Judd, whiningly. "You know very well that if you were to cut and run I'd blow my head off." He felt that he meant it, too; for Judd was tremendously fond of the fading woman seated beside him, as he had been for years. He was blind to her departing prettiness; to him she was the one woman in the world—his prim, elderly wife, the mother of his family of grown children, being utterly negligible in his view; and Mrs. Treharne knew her complete power over him as well as she knew the lines of her face.
"I wish," she said, with a cutting way of dwelling upon each word, "that you had blown your head off before ever I met you. I might then have been able to cling to at least the shreds of self-respect."
Judd had no reply to make to that, and they rode the rest of the way in silence.
By mid-January Louise had completed her inventory of the situation. She faced her position without flinching and with no visible sign of the distress the gradually unfolding picture caused her, save a certain silent preoccupation from which Laura vainly sought to rouse her by taking her on incessant rounds of the theatres, whisking her off on short up-State and Long Island motor tours, and providing other means of distraction and excitement. Laura's heart ached for Louise. Her own girlhood had been clouded by trouble. Orphaned at sixteen, an heiress with no disinterested advisors save those who were the legal guardians of her person and estate, she had yielded shortly after leaving school to a girlish infatuation and entered upon a surreptitious marriage with a man who, with his child-wife's large wealth at his disposal, had surrendered to one dissipation after another until, eventually becoming a drug fiend, he had, in his treatment of her, developed into such an utterly savage and irresponsible brute that she was compelled to divorce him, after which he had been put under permanent restraint. It had taken Laura long years to recover her natural equipoise after her bitter disillusionment. Louise's trouble, Laura could not help apprehending, was even more grievous than her own had been, intensified as she knew it must be by the girl's carefully-screened feeling of humiliation.
Laura admired Louise beyond words for her uncomplaining acceptance of her bitter bolus.
"I never saw such pluck," she told John Blythe time and again. "It is the pluck of a thoroughbred. I believe she thoroughly understands everything now, except that she is in Judd's debt for her education. Her loyalty to her mother is wonderful, beautiful; far greater than Antoinette really deserves. I don't remember ever meeting a girl or woman whom I admired so much as I do Louise Treharne."
Laura could not fail to note how Blythe's clear grey eyes would glisten when thus she praised the girl.
"Louise is like her father," he would say in reply to Laura's enthusiasm. "You know what a fine, game man George Treharne was and is. I'll never forget how generous he was in his treatment of me—and he tried to prevent me from knowing it, too—when, as a cub lawyer, I was first starting out on my own hook; and there wasn't the least reason in life why he should have been so decent to me, either. You remember how he never whimpered when Antoinette dragged his—Oh, well, no use in referring to that. But, when I first met the grown-up Louise on the train—after I accidentally discovered her identity, I mean—I couldn't help but observe how her resemblance to her father—"
"To whom," Laura watched him with twinkling eyes, "your sense of responsibility is so great that—er—that—"
Whereupon Blythe would flush hotly and proceed to shrivel Laura with whatever in the way of polite invective occurred to him in his confusion.
The thought of leaving her mother for the sake of extricating herself from a difficult and taxing situation never entered Louise's mind. Her mother, she felt, needed her. It was not, she considered, a problem for her interposition; she shrank from the thought of even mentioning it. She knew that it was an utterly impossible situation; she had a profound belief that it was not, from its very nature, destined to last; but she preferred that her mother should take the initiative in casting off the evil. She clearly saw how, from day to day, her mother was becoming increasingly conscious of the grave trouble she was heaping upon her daughter's young shoulders; she perceived how her mother, not inherently vicious, simply was in the bondage of an ingrained, luxury-loving selfishness, and that, having been cast out of the social realm in which she formerly had moved, she was now possessed by a sort of despair which, more than anything else, prevented her from making the attempt to extricate herself from the slough.
Louise, then, schooled herself to wait. It was a sort of waiting that drew heavily upon her natural store of equanimity. But she could see no other course, and hopefulness is the tandem mate of youth.
"I have lived long enough," Laura said to her one afternoon, when they were driving, during this trying period when Louise was testing her adaptability to the utmost, "to have discovered that nothing matters very much except one's own peace of mind. If one have that, the rest is all a mirage. I don't mean the peace of mind that proceeds from a priggish sense of superiority to human weaknesses. That, I am pleased to say, is a sort of mental peace that I haven't yet experienced, and I hope I never shall. But when one's hands are just decently clean, and one at least has tried to shake off the shackles forged by one's own little meannesses, a sort of satisfying mental quiet ensues that is worth, I think, more than anything else one finds in life."
"But one's worry for others?" quietly suggested Louise, putting it in the form of a question.
Laura pressed the girl's hands between her own.
"All of us, dear, must know the meaning of solicitude—often painful solicitude—for others at some period of our lives," she said, tenderly. "I know what you mean. You are carrying yourself nobly through a difficult ordeal. Let that consciousness suffice. You will have the right to feel proud, in the coming time, to remember that you stood the test—as we are proud of you now."
"'We?'" said Louise, puzzling.
"We," repeated Laura, steadfastly. "I think you scarcely understand, dear, how profoundly interested—yes, and chivalrously interested, too—John Blythe is in your—your problem."
Louise felt the blood rushing to her face.
"Does Mr. Blythe know?" she asked, her cheeks tingling.
"How could he avoid knowing, dear?" rejoined Laura, gently. "He is your father's lawyer. He is an occasional visitor at your—" she hesitated; "—visitor on Riverside Drive," she resumed. "And so of course he knows—everything. You may be glad of that, dear. There is no man in the world whose friendship I value more highly than that of John Blythe. I think he would like to have you feel—I know, in fact, that he would—that he is interested in your—your concerns; that, indeed, in a way, he is standing guard for you."
Louise studied for a little while.
"I should have understood, of course, that he knew," she said, hesitatingly. "But it did not occur to me. I am afraid that I should have been a little reluctant to meet him on those two or three occasions at your home if I had known that he—" She paused.
"Why, dear child, should you have such a feeling when a man of innate nobility, who knew you when you were a little girl——"
"It is wrong, I know," put in Louise, hastily. "But I find it so hard to regard him as—as just a lawyer, you know, Laura. He is not like a lawyer at all—at least I have not found him so. He is——"
Laura pointed a teasing finger at her, which caused the color to reappear on Louise's face.
"Don't try to tell me what he is, Louise," said Laura, smiling. "Don't you suppose I know? But you don't know how intensely glad I am to hear that you can't regard Mr. Blythe as—as 'just a lawyer.' I shall tell him that you are going about criticizing his professional ability."
"Don't do that—please!" said Louise in such an obvious panic that Laura pinched her cheek reassuringly.
The meetings with Blythe to which Louise referred were casual ones in Laura's apartment. Blythe was in the habit of dropping in occasionally for coffee—he abominated tea—and a chat at Laura's tea hour in the late afternoon; and Laura duly noted, not without slyly chaffing him over it, that he had made this an almost daily habit since his discovery that he stood a pretty fair gambling chance of finding Louise there almost any afternoon. Once, when Laura and Louise came in from a drive which had been prolonged rather later than usual, they entered the library quietly, to find Blythe, looking decidedly glum, browsing among the books without the least seeming of being interested in any of them, for his hands were thrust deep into his pockets and they caught him yawning most deplorably. But at sight of the two women—one woman, Laura said, accusingly, to him after Louise had gone home in Laura's car—he had brightened so suddenly and visibly that Laura had to profess that her rippling laugh was occasioned by something she had seen during her drive.
On these occasions Laura had found it imperatively necessary to leave them together in order to confer with her servants. Louise and Blythe had talked easily on detached, somewhat light matters, finding an agreeable mutual plane without effort. Louise, remembering his somewhat sober preoccupation on the train, had been surprised and pleased—though she could not have told why—to note his possession of a rather unusual social charm. She was pleased, too, that, except in the matter of a remarkable physique, he was not to be rated as a handsome man. His features were too rugged for that. Strength, keenness and kindliness shone from his masterful countenance; but he was anything but handsome judged from the magazine-cover standard. Louise had amused Laura one day by saying that she found Blythe's face "restful." She had not the least partiality for men of the generally-accepted straightout handsome type of features; she was, in truth, a little inclined to be contemptuous of an excessive facial pulchritude in men. But—again for a reason which she could scarcely have explained—she was glad that Blythe was perhaps two inches more than six feet in height, that he was as straight as a lance, and that he found it necessary to walk sidewise in order to get his shoulders through some of Laura's lesser doors.
On her last meeting with Blythe Louise had asked him, with a certain hesitancy which he noticed, if he had written to her father.
"Yes," Blythe had replied, simply, "and I sent him your love." He had not offered to become more communicative; and Louise, concluding that his reticence on the subject might be based on a considerateness for her which it might be unfair for her to seek to fathom, did not mention the matter to him again. She had an oddly resolute confidence in him, considering how short the time had been since he had come into her life; and she felt that, if he now exhibited a taciturnity which puzzled her, it would be explained in due time.
Louise Treharne belonged to that rare (and therefore radiant) type of women who know how to wait.
Louise's life at the house on the Drive quickly resolved itself into a daily programme tinctured with a monotony that could not but wear upon the spirits of a young woman of a naturally cheerful and gregarious temperament.
Her mother, generally in a state of feverish unrest that marked her strained incertitude over a situation which, in a way, was more intolerable to her than to her daughter because she was guiltily conscious that she was the maker of it, usually dropped into Louise's room for an hour's chat during the forenoon. She was alternately affectionate, stilted, indifferent and petulant in her attitude toward her daughter. She did not seek, in her brooding self-communings, to thrust aside the keen consciousness that she was utterly and hopelessly in the wrong; but this consciousness did not serve to allay her irritation, even if it was directed against herself. Like most women, she hated to be in the wrong; and she particularly loathed the thought of confessing herself in the wrong. She was less immoral than unmoral; her descent had been due to a sort of warped view as to forbidden relationships, nourished by an inborn and intense dislike for the sovereignty of convention—"the tyranny of the smug," she habitually called it—and based essentially upon her love of luxurious and extravagant living. But a consciousness of these facts only made her self-contempt the more keen. She measured and despised her sordidness. She was not, she fell into the habit of reflecting after her daughter's return, the victim of anybody but herself; her days of ardor had slipped away; she well knew that she had not even the excuse of a fondness for the man who had made her a social pariah. If she had ever experienced any such a fondness that fact might have mitigated, at least in her own self-view, the rawness of her course. But she cared nothing for Judd, which made her case abominable, and she knew it.
Yet her weakened will, her character rendered flaccid by years of careless self-indulgence, made it acutely difficult for her to contemplate the thought of abandoning her way of living, even for the sake of her daughter. Her prettiness was now purely a matter of meretricious building up; she would soon be forty; she fumed inwardly at the thought of middle age, which now, for her, was only around the corner, so to speak; she had been cast off by her own kind; and the terminal idea of her self-communings always was that, since there was no hope for her in any event, no matter what she might do, she might as well finish the scroll. She pushed aside Louise's involvement in the difficulty as something that would—that would have to—adjust itself. A way out for Louise must present itself sooner or later; but the way out for her daughter must be one that would not demand too great a sacrifice—if any sacrifice at all—on her own part. Perhaps a good marriage could be contrived for Louise; that would be the easiest and most natural solution; and she would cast about in her mind for eligibles on whose sensitive social concepts perhaps her own method of life would not grate. Her dreary meditations usually terminated with futilities of this sort.
Louise, fighting back the oppressiveness that had clutched her ever since her return from school, was cheerful and sunny when her mother was with her. She made no allusion of any sort to the conditions of her environment. Her mother, noticing this, was grateful for it, and she was conscious of a genuine and growing admiration for the mingled dignity and delicacy of her daughter's behavior. On one of her forenoon visits to Louise's dressing room the mother herself, swept by a feeling of remorse in the contemplation of the girl's fragrant, pure-eyed beauty, could not refrain from touching impulsively upon the nub of her own unrest.
"My dear," she said to Louise, passing a white and still prettily rounded arm around her daughter, "do you hate your little mother?"
Louise fought back the tears that suffused her eyes.
"Why do you ask such a thing, dear?" she asked in a voice the hoarseness of which she strove to disguise.
Her mother did not reply to the question, but went on, turning her head away:
"Because there are circumstances, conditions that you can't have failed to notice here that maybe—" She struggled for words. "It has never been in my heart to do anything except what was right and fair by you, child, but one drifts, drifts, always drifts——"
She could not proceed.
Louise wrapped her arms about her mother. Neither spoke for a space.
"Nothing can ever change me, dear," said Louise then in her quiet tone. "It is not for me to judge or condemn. I can—wait. We shall not speak of it again, shall we, mother?"
Her mother, haggard and with pain-drawn features, smoothed Louise's face with her hand for a little while and went away without another word. The girl's eyes were swollen when Laura came for her in her car an hour later. But Laura did not ask her why.
Louise went nowhere with her mother. Mrs. Treharne made it plain from the beginning that this was her intention. Louise, for her part, required no reason. She understood. Nor did Louise seek to re-establish the friendships she had formed with girls at Miss Mayhew's school, many of whom now were living in New York or visiting their homes there during the holiday vacation.
One afternoon, at an opera matinée, Louise, strolling out the entr'acte in the foyer with Laura, came face to face with Bella Peyton, a girl who had been graduated from the finishing school with the class ahead of Louise's. Miss Peyton was with her mother, a stony-eyed, granite-featured dowager who had often met Louise on her frequent visits at the school; for her daughter and Louise had been school inseparables.
Bella rushed up cordially to Louise and kissed her enthusiastically.
"You darling!" she exclaimed in the abandonment of her delight at coming upon the chum of her school days so unexpectedly. "When did you reach town? And why didn't you come to see me the very instant you returned?"
Mrs. Peyton, who, at sight of Louise, had purposely lagged in the rear, and whose adamantine countenance reflected intensifying degrees of frozenness with each word that her daughter was saying to Louise, drew her adipose person into a posture of icy rigidity, and croaked:
"Bella!"
Mrs. Peyton had not so much as nodded to Louise.
"Why, mamma," Bella broke out, "don't you remember Louise Treharne, my sworn and subscribed and vowed and vummed chum at Miss Mayhew's?"
"Bella!"
This time it was not merely an adjuration, it was a command.
Bella, perceiving then that something was wrong, flushed. But she was loyal to her friend.
"You are coming to see me immediately, dear?" she said, hurriedly shaking hands with Louise in order to obey her mother's command.
"Bella! Come to me at once!" Mrs. Peyton croaked with cutting, unconscionable rudeness, seizing her daughter by the arm and incontinently marching her off.
Louise, crimsoning, took the stab without a word.
"The tabby!" broke out Laura, her eyes flashing with indignation. "Gracious heaven, is it any wonder that men privately sneer at the way women treat each other? Don't you mind the shocking old cat, Louise; she'll tear herself to pieces with her own claws some day;" and Laura was unusually tender and kind in her treatment of Louise for the remainder of the afternoon. But, after that encounter, Louise learned to avoid meeting her school friends when, as occasionally happened, she saw them before they caught sight of her. She felt that they all "knew" or "would know," and she did not elect to take chances on additional snubs.
Her first formal meeting with Judd had been a trial. It had been an accidental encounter, happening about a week after Louise's return from school, and at a time when Mrs. Treharne was in more than one mind as to whether she would permit Louise to meet Judd at all. Mrs. Treharne and Judd were stepping out of the huge yellow car at the close of their late afternoon ride just at the moment when Louise, alone, was returning in Laura's car. Their meeting on the pavement was inevitable. For a moment Louise hoped that her mother would permit her to lag behind on pretense of returning to Laura's car to find some imaginary forgotten article; but Mrs. Treharne, suddenly deciding that the meeting had best be over with, since no way of avoiding it, sooner or later, had suggested itself, called to her; and Louise, very beautiful with her cold-ruddied cheeks nimbussed by her breeze-blown hair of bronze, walked erect to where her mother stood with the bulky, red-eyed Judd, who regarded Louise with a stare of disconcerting admiration.
"My dear Louise," said Mrs. Treharne, obviously quelling a certain tremulousness in her tone, "permit me to present Mr. Judd; Mr. Judd, my daughter Louise."
Judd, his mouth still unpleasantly agape, started the preliminary gesture toward extending his hand. But he made no further progress with the hand, for he was quick to notice that Louise, at that very instant, was inserting her loose right hand in her muff. Louise bowed and then returned to Laura's car in quest of the imaginary article; she desired to give Judd time to resume his place in his car before she joined her mother on the steps.
"Demmed handsome, that daughter of yours," Judd commented on Louise to Mrs. Treharne when he saw her the next afternoon, "but—er—uppish, what?"
"I can dispense with your generalities on that subject," Mrs. Treharne had replied.
After that Louise had met Judd casually in the wide, fire-lit down-stairs hall on two or three occasions, and once at the only one of her mother's extraordinary Sunday night receptions—the "salon" which at once provoked and amused Laura—which she attended; but she had exchanged no word with him. She was not lacking in diplomacy, but there were some stultifications that she found to be wholly beyond her; and she was conscious of a certain previously unexperienced difficulty with her neck when she even inclined her head to Judd.
"Would you care to meet some of my Sunday night people, Louise?" her mother had asked her. "I dare say Laura has told you they are freaks. Perhaps some of them are. But there are clever ones among them, and one must take the gifted with the mediocre. It would not harm you to meet a few of them. They are not wicked. They only think they are; some of them, that is. Their wickedness is an amiable abstraction. Shall you be down?"
It was on a Sunday morning, in Louise's apartments, that Mrs. Treharne made the suggestion. Louise was conscious of the need of a laugh, even if it were a politely smothered one; and Laura had comically depicted her mother's "salon" to her. She told her mother that she had been waiting for that invitation, which caused Mrs. Treharne to glance sharply at her to ascertain if Louise already had adopted Laura's point of view as to the Sunday evening gatherings.
"Do you entertain your people yourself, mother, or is there a—" Louise stumbled on the word "host."
But her mother was quick to catch her meaning.
"I should not ask you down, else, my dear—you should credit me that far," she had replied, a tinge of reproach in her tone. And so, an hour or so after dinner on Sunday night, Louise, willowy yet full-blossomed and splendid in a simple princesse dress of white broadcloth, a gardenia nestling in an embrasure of her velvety auburn hair, and a tiny-linked chain of gold, with aquamarine pendants—a gift from Laura—around her firm white neck, went, for the first time since she had been in the house, to the already crowded main floor.
Louise, in her inexperience, could not know that the gathering really was little less than an apotheosis of thedeclasée; she merely found some of the people agreeable, others of them unconsciously naïve in their ebullient enthusiasm over their imaginary achievements or accomplishments, still others frankly laughable for their indurated habit of self laudation.
It was in the main, so far as its social side went, an assemblage of persons, men and women, who, thrust outside the genuine social breastworks for various and more or less highly-tinctured lapses, thus foregathered in response to an instinct of gregariousness—an instinct around which the "birds of a feather" aphorism no doubt was framed. Having no choice in the matter, these persons were willing to accept the shadow for the reality. It might almost be said that on every uptown square of New York there is at least one common meeting point for similar assemblages of social exiles. Nearly all of the figurantes in Mrs. Treharne's Sunday evening affairs weredivorcéesof more or less note; the "cases" of some of whom had been blazoned in huge red block type in the yellow newspapers, and "illustrated," in default of genuine portraits, with blurred "cuts" of no less benevolent or redoubtable females than the late Mrs. Pinkham or Carrie Nation. The men in the company who had not already rocketed through the divorce court were willing, it appeared from their frank method of expressing themselves, to make that by no means perilous passage; though there was a sprinkling of younger men, still factors in a social world from which there are no voluntary expatriates, who attended Mrs. Treharne's Sunday evening affairs in a spirit of larkishness and glad of the chance to forsake, for a little while, regions more austere and still under the domination of at least a tacit repression.
For the rest, there were poetasters who fidgetted until they were called upon, out of pure sympathy, to read their own verse—some of the latter obviously "lifted;" temperamental musicians, male and female, who preferred to sway at or with their instruments with the rooms darkened while they performed; manufacturers and proselytizers of personally-conducted and generally quite unintelligible cults, physical, moral or ethical, all of the cults extending a maximum of "freedom of action" to the individual; devisers of impromptu or extemporaneous religions or near-religions, none of which boasted so inconvenient a restriction as a Decalogue; fashionable or striving-to-be-fashionable palmists and chiromancers, "swamis," "yogis;" burnoosed, sullen, white-robed exploiters, from the Near or Far East, of women who mistook their advanced symptoms of neuresthenia for a hankering for the occult; and the other unclassified, sycophantic factors of a "Bohemianism" whose seams were perfectly visible to the naked eye and whose sawdust was only held in place with the all-together co-operation of the whole artificial assemblage.
Louise's entrance upon the scene created a stir which caused her to feel distinctly uncomfortable. She longed for Laura; but Laura had "sworn off" attending Mrs. Treharne's Sunday evening parties; not from any selfish motives of caution—for Laura was in keen demand in the social circle in which she had been born and reared; but simply because she had at length ceased to extract amusement from the self-idolizing vagaries of Mrs. Treharne's crew; more briefly still, because they bored her to extinction.
When the word was buzzed around among the slowly-moving, chattering assemblage to whom the entire lower floor of the house, including the conservatory, had been thrown open—that "the tall girl with the air and the hair" was Mrs. Treharne's daughter—the more privileged ones adverted to their hostess as Tony—there was a sudden cluttering of the passageways leading to the room in which Louise was standing with her mother. In their keenness to catch a glimpse of the "just-bloomed daughter of Tony" many of them even forsook the long and generously-provided buffet, than which no greater sign of a consuming interest or curiosity could be given; for not a few of the raffish guests appeared to be so patently in need of nourishment—and stimulant—that they spent the major portion of the evening at the buffet.
A woman whose vision seemed to be slightly filmed from her inordinate devotion to the punch lifted her glass, after studying Louise in a sort of open-mouthed daze for a moment or so, and sang out, in a tone that she apparently had some difficulty in controlling:
"To Tony's daughter—the Empress Louise!"
The men and women in her neighborhood grabbed for glasses to fill from the punchbowls and took up the refrain:
"The Empress Louise!"
Louise felt the blood swirling to her head, but she braced herself to stand the volleying of eyes. Her mother was intensely annoyed and made not the least effort to conceal her annoyance. When the incident had been merged in a diversion afforded by a recitation of a Portuguese madrigal in another room by a man with unkempt hair and untidy fingernails, Mrs. Treharne glided away from Louise's side for a moment and found the woman who had proposed the toast. She was still absorbedly busy at the buffet.
"You are to leave at once, Ethel," she said in a low but determined tone to the toast-proposer, a woman whose divorce story in the newspapers had been remarkable for the detailed account of liquid refreshments she had consumed up and down the world, at foreign hotels and on board yachts, for a number of years at a stretch. "I shall never forgive you if you make another scene here."
"All right, Tony," the woman replied, with a vacuous smile. "Not angry at me, are you, for wishing luck to your little girl—your big girl, I mean; sheisan empress, you know, and—"
Mrs. Treharne guided her to the cloak room and stayed by her side until she bade her goodnight at the door.
Louise, in the meantime, had been approached by a man whose eyes, she had noticed with a certain vague disquietude, had been following her about since her entrance upon the scene.
He was a handsome man of the florid type, with a sweeping blonde mustache and oddly-restless light brown eyes in which Louise, catching him devouring her with his gaze at frequent intervals, nervously thought that she detected certain felinely-topaz glints. He was tall and a trifle over-heavy; but there was a certain slow-moving, easy air of adventitious distinction about him which might have been in part lent by the immaculateness of his evening clothes and his facile way of disposing of his hands without requiring any article to give them employment; an art in which even practiced courtiers and carpet knights occasionally are deficient. Louise did not like his face; she observed, when she saw, not without a certain vague trepidation, that he was approaching her, that his over-red and over-full lips, from which the sweeping mustache was brushed away, were curved in a sort of habitual sneer which by no stretch of charity could be called a smile; though that, no doubt, was the desired intent of it.
He bowed low, keeping his eyes upraised on Louise's face, when he reached her side, and said:
"Miss Treharne?"
Louise, used to more formal methods of meeting new men, inclined her head.
"You will condone, I hope, Miss Treharne, my seeming breach of formality in presuming to address you without a presentation," he said, even his intensified smile failing to efface the sneering curve from his too visible lips. "But your mother is generous enough to permit her guests at times—on such occasions as these, for example—to forego formality. I have been ineffectually trying to reach her for an hour in order to—"
"In order to ask me to do that which you have already done," said Mrs. Treharne, with quite unusual affability, coming up at that moment and catching his final words. "Louise, dear, permit me—Mr. Langdon Jesse. Don't expect her to know, Mr. Jesse, that you are a cotton king. I doubt if her routine at school permitted her to read the newspapers, even if they interested her; which I sincerely hope they did not and will not."
Louise had not often seen her mother in so gracious a humor toward any man; but this fact did not in any sense serve to quell the instinctive dislike which she immediately felt for Jesse, the "cotton king" of her mother's somewhat too purposely-significant introduction. She noticed that his hands were small and obtrusively white; that there was a wave in his burnished blonde hair; that his large clear-cut features were of a chiselled regularity; and her natural aversion to the merely handsome man promptly asserted itself. The sneer of his mouth, and his fixed way of gazing squarely into her eyes as if his own eyes were forming a question, disquieted her. She replied in purposed monosyllables to his rather trivial yet studied questions about her school life. She knew perfectly well that he was in no wise interested in her school life, but that he merely was seeking what he considered might be the most engaging method of capturing her attention. Five minutes after his meeting with her she devised an excuse and went to her apartments. She threw her windows wide and let the wintry air bulge the curtains when she reached her sleeping room; perhaps it was her subconsciousness that told her that she needed some such a bath of purifying air to obliterate what intangible traces there might remain of her brief contact with Langdon Jesse. That night she dreamt persistently of a leopard with large, blazing eyes of topaz; and an hour after she awoke a large basket of superb orchids, with Langdon Jesse's card attached, was brought to her. Laura was with her at the time.
"From Langdon Jesse?" said Laura, knitting her brow. "Did you meet him last night, Louise?"
"Yes. I disliked him intensely."
"If I were you, dear," suggested Laura, "I should send these orchids to a hospital. They can of course have no sinister effect upon those who have not met their donor. But I should be afraid to have you keep any flowers sent you by Langdon Jesse. They might poison the air. The bald impudence of him in sending you flowers at all!"
A footman was carrying the orchids to a nearby hospital five minutes later.
Langdon Jesse and his one-time associate and co-partner in lamb-shearing "deals," Frederick Judd, met at luncheon in a restaurant in the financial district a few days later.
Judd, one of the powers of "the Street," was past fifty-five, and he had no great toleration for the vacuities of young men. This fact, however, placed no inhibition on the admiration—it could scarcely be called a liking—which he felt for Langdon Jesse; for Jesse, whatever else he may have been, certainly was not vacuous in the matter of business; and it was from the angle of their success in business that Judd exclusively judged men. Jesse, well under forty, already was a veteran of the stock market; and on at least one occasion he had deftly "trimmed" no less a person than his former associate, Mr. Judd; wherefore Judd, with the breadth of vision of the financial general in considering the strategy of the general who has beaten him, admired Jesse, who had been virtually his pupil, all the more; resolving, at the same time, not to permit his quondam pupil to "trim" him again.
Jesse, accepting the nodded invitation, took a seat at the table at which Judd, alone, was eating his heavy luncheon. They exchanged market talk in brief, brittle phrases, for a while. Then Jesse, his too-prominent lips curving, and seeming to be gazing over the top of Judd's bare poll, said:
"Sumptious, isn't she?"
Judd, used to Jesse's adversions to the sumptuosity of women—many women—went on doggedly eating. After a space he replied with a monosyllable:
"Who?"
Jesse did not answer for a moment; nor did Judd seem to be particularly worried over that fact.
"I dropped into your—er—your place on the Drive on Sunday night," said Jesse, fastening an abnormally long cigarette into a remarkably long cigarette holder of amber and gold.
Judd, his fork poised in the air, looked up at Jesse. There was a question in his red-rimmed eyes; but Judd made it a point not to submit questions of any consequence until he had turned them over in his mind several times.
"So I heard," said Judd, with no obvious interest, pronging away again with his fork.
"Who told you," asked Jesse, with a sharp glance at Judd. "Not——"
"How the devil should I remember who told me?" replied Judd in a matter-of-fact tone. "What's the difference who told me, anyhow?"
But it made considerable difference, as a matter of fact, to Jesse; his self-satisfaction and his serene belief in his ability to make an immediate "impression" were very great; and when Judd told him he had "heard" he had been at the Riverside Drive house he took it for granted that Judd had "heard" it from the person on whom his thoughts were dwelling; Louise Treharne, that is to say.
"Oh, no particular difference," said Jesse, blowing a cloud of acrid Turkish cigarette smoke at Judd, which caused Judd to scowl. "I thought perhaps——"
Judd knew perfectly well what he thought; but Judd often failed even to mention things that he knew perfectly well.
"You take in those bear-garden affairs at Tony's—at Mrs. Treharne's," catching himself, "right along, don't you?" said Judd. "How the devil you can endure that pack of imbecile, loquacious what-are-theys is more than I can make out. One of those Sundays nights cured me."
Jesse, however, had not the least intention of being side-tracked.
"Well, she is—er—well, ripping; isn't she?" he said, after a pause.
Judd, perceiving the futility of evasion, gave way.
"Yes—if that's what you want me to say—and all ice, besides," said Judd. "You're up against it there, son," he went on, judicially. "Or are you looking for a death by freezing? Why, I'm afraid that she's going to fracture one of her upper vertebrae even when she nods to me! And that's all the recognition she ever gives me—a nod."
"She doesn't strike me as being so hopelessly Arctic as all that," said Jesse, inordinately proud of what he considered his keen judgment of women. "Did you ever happen to meet a woman with auburn hair who possessed a—er—a frozen or freezing temperament? And, by the way, why do you dwell upon her rigidity, so to speak, when she nods 'even to you?' Why 'even to you?'"
Judd, a little choler showing in his purpling face, broke out:
"Because a man naturally expects a little manners, a little common politeness, from people he's taking care of, doesn't he? She's living in my house, by God!"
"That," said Jesse, quietly, "is precisely what I am getting at: since she is living in your house—if she knows it is your house—she can't be so—er—well, stupendously straight-laced, can she? And, by frozen, of course you meant straight-laced."
"I meant exactly what I said," replied Judd, sulkily. "Stop twisting my words around, will you? I said that she was ice, and that is what I meant to say. You're on a blind trail, Jesse, if that's what you're getting at. Take it from me. You're a hit with 'em, I know, and all that sort of rot. But this one is more than your match. She'll shrivel you good and plenty if you try anything on with her. At that, why can't you let her alone? There are plenty of the other kind—your kind. What's the matter, anyhow? Have all the show girls moved out of New York?"
Jesse didn't relish the slap. It was not exactly a truthful slap, moreover. Jesse had withdrawn his devotions to "show girls" several years before; since doing which he had quarried in entirely different quarters.
"Let the girl alone—that's my advice," went on Judd, seized for the moment by a flickering sense of fairness. "I don't fancy her particularly—because she's so damned haughty with me, I suppose, and looks down upon me from a mountain. But she's all right. I know that, and I'm telling it to you for your information. Better forget it. There isn't a chance on earth for you, anyhow."
Jesse didn't appear to be in the least thrown off the quest by the advice.
"Are you sure," he inquired of Judd after a short silence, "that she knows just where you figure in the Riverside Drive establishment?"
"Well, you could see for yourself that she is more than seven years of age, couldn't you?" briefly replied Judd.
"But," observed Jesse, obviously seeking to get hold of all of the threads of the situation, "she is only recently out of school, I understand, and perhaps she hasn't yet fully grasped——"
"I don't know what she has grasped, and I don't care a damn," thrust in Judd, tired of the colloquy. "She must know a good deal about the way things stand or she wouldn't treat me as if I were rubbish. I can see how I stick in her throat. When it comes to that, why shouldn't I? She's only a schoolgirl, if she is a head taller than I am. Her mother made an idiotic mistake in having the girl around the place. But that's none of my affair. I take the game as it stands. Only I advise you to stand clear. You might as well be decent for once in your life. Unless, of course," and Judd shot a glance of inquiry at Jesse, "you mean to turn respectable—it's about time—and go in for the marrying idea?"
Jesse's somewhat waxy, excessively smooth face flushed at Judd's afterthought.
"I marry?" he said, with a distinctly disagreeable laugh. "Well, it may come to that, some day or other. But can you see me marrying the daughter of your acknowledged——" He fumbled for the word; "mistress" was what he wanted to say, but he discarded it out of sheer timidity; "—your acknowledged companion?" he finished.
"Be good enough to keep out of my personal affairs, Jesse," said Judd, coldly. "I don't dip into your private concerns. You may take my advice or leave it. But you want to go pretty slow, if you're asking me. Nobody has yet forgotten that West Indian affair of yours; just remember that."
With Judd, one shot called for another. Jesse gave a start and paled slightly at Judd's allusion to "the West Indian affair." Judd waited only long enough to see that the shot found its mark; then, with an amused leer, he rose from the table, his luncheon finished, and lumbered away with a nod.
Jesse, discarding his cigarette, bit off the end of a cigar and fumed. The "West Indian affair" was a sore subject with him solely because the world knew all about it. He had not the least feeling of self-condemnation over it; it was the thought that, for once, he had been found out that caused him to rage internally when the matter was adverted to; for the newspapers had been full of it at the time of the occurrence.
"The West Indian affair," Jesse well knew, had not been forgotten, as Judd had said, nor was it likely to be forgotten. It threw a raking light upon his general attitude toward and his treatment of women. A year before, after one of his periodical triumphs in the cotton market, in which, to quote the newspapers' way of putting it, he had "cleaned up millions," Jesse had made a midwinter cruise of the West Indies on his yacht. A girl of unusual beauty, whom he had met by accident on an automobile tour on Long Island, had been his companion on the cruise. She was inexperienced, of humble parentage, and he had overborne her objections by vaguely intimating something as to a marriage when they should arrive in the West Indies. She had protested when, upon the yacht's touching at many ports, he had of course shown not the least inclination to make good his merely intimated promise; and, in his wrath over her attitude, he had not only committed the indefensible crime, but he had made the stupendous mistake, viewed from the politic point of view, of deserting the girl in a West Indian city, without money or resources, without even her clothing, and sailing back to New York alone.
The girl, thus stranded amid new and unfriendly surroundings, had but one resource—the American consul. The consul provided for her passage back to New York. The correspondents of the New York newspapers in the West Indian city had got hold of the details, adding a few neatly whimsical touches of their own, and for days the newspapers had reeked with the story. There had been talk of prosecuting Jesse for abduction, but he had employed the underground method, rendered easily available to him owing to his wealth, to smother that suggestion. But the grisly affair had thrown a cloud over Jesse from which he knew, raging as he knew it, there was no emerging. Several of his clubs—the good ones—had dropped him; men and women of the world to which he aspired, and in which he had been making progress, cut him right and left; his name had been erased from most of the worth-while invitation lists; and the hole in his armor was wide open to the shafts of the kind Judd had just discharged at him.
Jesse sat at the table and gnawed angrily at his unlighted cigar for a long time after Judd had gone; it was characteristic of him that his compunction was all for himself. He had been found out and pilloried. That was what cut him. He never gave a thought to the young woman whose life he had destroyed.
Jesse had been instantly struck by the beauty of Louise Treharne. He surmised that it was through no complaisance on her part, but purely because she had been helpless in the matter, that she had found herself living with her ostracised mother in the house on the Drive. That situation, he was confident, had been thrust upon her. But this consideration, and the additional one that she was, as he could not have failed to note, nobly undergoing the ordeal, which might have aroused the admiration and excited the sympathy of a man of merely average fairness, had touched no compassionate chord in Langdon Jesse. Adopting the trivial and far-fetched methods of analysis which are employed by men who consider themselves expert in their knowledge of women, he had calmly concluded that in all likelihood Louise Treharne's manner was a skillfully-studied pose. At any rate he meant to find out. He meant to "know her better." It was thus that his determination framed itself in his mind; he would "know her better."