In gaining the attention of women, he believed in the gentle siege and then the grand assault; it was, in truth, the only "system" with which he had any familiarity, and it had generally proved successful.
Jesse returned to his office, summoned his car, went to his suite at the Plaza, gave himself over to the grooming activities of his man for an hour; then, resuming his car, he went to the house on Riverside Drive.
Louise, in brown walking suit and brown turban, her cheeks ruddy from a long and rapid walk from one end of the Park to the other, had just returned when Jesse's card was brought up. She was studying the card, trying to devise an excuse—for she shrank from the thought of seeing him—when her mother, ready for her motor airing, entered the room.
"I just caught sight of Mr. Jesse's car from my window," said Mrs. Treharne to Louise. Louise observed that her mother was in the same fluttered state that she had been in when she had found Jesse talking to her on the previous Sunday night. "He has sent his card to you? Of course you are going to see him?"
"I think I shall not see him, mother," said Louise, ringing for Heloise with the purpose of sending word that she was indisposed, not at home—anything.
Mrs. Treharne looked annoyed and there was irritation in her question:
"Why not, my dear?"
"I don't care for him, mother," said Louise, frankly. "In fact, I believe I rather dislike him. Do you think he is the sort of man I should meet?"
Louise was intensely disappointed that her mother should care to have her meet Jesse. She tried to assure herself that her mother did not know or realize the character of the man as she herself had heard it briefly described by Laura; but she found that a bit difficult to believe.
"Tell me, please, Louise, why you ask me such a question as that," said Mrs. Treharne, irritatedly. "What do you know about Mr. Jesse? Who has been telling you things about him?"
Louise, remaining silent, plainly showed that she did not care to answer her mother's question.
"It was Laura, no doubt," went on Mrs. Treharne. "Laura, I begin to fear, is growing garrulous. You must not permit her to put absurd ideas into your head, my dear. I must speak to her about it."
"Pray do not, mother," said Louise, earnestly. "She is one of the dearest women in the world, and everything that she tells me, I know, is not only perfectly true, but for my good. It is not anything said to me by Laura that makes me dislike the idea of receiving Mr. Jesse. It is simply that I don't like him. There is a boldness, an effrontery, a cynicism, about him that make me distrust him. I don't care for his type of man. That is all."
"You must not fall into the habit of forming sudden prejudices, my dear," said her mother, diplomatically assuming an air of grave persuasiveness. "Mr. Jesse no doubt has had his fling at life. What worth-while man of his age hasn't? But he is a man of mark. He has made his way as few men have. Of course you found him handsome,distingué? Most women do, my dear. And I could see that he was greatly struck with you. You will soon be twenty, Louise; and Mr. Jesse, perhaps I should remind you, is a greatparti."
Louise felt herself crimsoning. Her mother did know Jesse's record, then. That was manifest from her words. And yet she was calmly exalting him as an "eligible!"
The girl so shrank from having any further conversation with her mother on the subject just then that she turned to her and said:
"I would not see him of my own volition, mother; but if you very much wish it, I shall see him."
"For heaven's sake, Louise, don't look so terribly austere and crushed over it!" broke out Mrs. Treharne. "The man will not kidnap you! I very much wish that you should be sensible and receive eligible men, of course. Isn't that a perfectly natural wish?"
Louise, without another word, not stopping to remove her turban or even glance in the glass, went down-stairs to receive Jesse. Her mother fluttered past the drawing-room door a moment later, merely stopping for a word of over-effusive greeting to Jesse before joining the waiting Judd in his car. Jesse, whether by accident or from foreknowledge, had timed his visit well. He was quite alone on the floor with Louise Treharne. She caught the gleam of his upraised eyes and noted the bold persistence of the question in them when, still in his fur overcoat, he turned from the contemplation of a picture to greet her.
"Ah," he said with an attempt at airiness, slipping out of the overcoat and extending his hand, "our Empress already has been out?" glancing at her turban and her wind-freshened cheeks. "That is unfortunate. I was about to place my car at her disposal——"
He withdrew his hand, not seeming to notice that Louise had failed to see it.
"Yes, I have been walking," put in Louise, in no wise stiffly, but with an air of preoccupied withdrawal which she genuinely felt. "As to what you call me, I believe I should prefer to be known by my name."
Jesse, remembering what Judd had said as to the likelihood of his being frozen or shrivelled, laughed inwardly. He rather enjoyed being rebuffed by women—at first. It made the game keener. None of them, he remembered now with complaisancy, continued to rebuff him for very long.
"Pardon me, Miss Treharne," he said, with a certain languishing air which Louise found even more offensive than his initial familiarity. "I thought, when the title was so spontaneously applied to you on Sunday night, that perhaps you found it agreeable. But it is difficult to gauge—women." He dwelt upon the word "women," thinking that, considering how recently she had left school, it might flatter her.
Louise chose to talk commonplaces. Her bed-rock genuineness made it impossible for her to affect an interest in a visitor which she did not feel. And her lack of interest in Jesse was complicated by her growing dislike for him.
"I am doubly disappointed," said Jesse after a pause which he did not find embarrassing. Nothing embarrassed Jesse when he had his mind definitely set upon a purpose. "First, I had hoped, as I say, that, not having been out, you would honor me by accepting the use of my car. Second, I am desolated because you are wearing a hat. I had been promising myself another glimpse of your superb hair. Is itbanalto put it that way? I am afraid so. But consider the temptation! Was it Aspasia or Cleopatra whose hair was of the glorious shade of yours—or both?"
"Mr. Jesse," said Louise, now quitedégagé, facing him squarely and speaking with the greatest deliberation, "I seem to find, from my two limited conversations with you, that you are suffering under some sort of a misapprehension as to me. You will discover that yourself, I think, if you will take the trouble to recur to several things you already have said to me after an acquaintanceship, all told, of perhaps ten minutes. Suppose we seek a less personal plane? I am too familiar with my hair to care to have it made a subject of extended remarks on the part of men whom I scarcely know. There are less pointed themes. Permit me to suggest that we occupy ourselves in finding them."
"By God, a broadside!" said Jesse to himself, not in the least abashed; his admiration always grew for women who trounced him—at first. "I didn't think she had it in her! And Judd, the fat imbecile, called her an iceberg! She is a volcano!"
Aloud, he said, with a neatly-assumed air of subjection and penitence:
"Well delivered, Miss Treharne. But I merit it. I have made the error of supposing—"
"That my comparatively recent return from school, and the open-mindedness naturally associated with that," Louise quietly interrupted, "made me a fair target for your somewhat labored and not particularly apt compliments. Yes, you erred decisively there."
"Again!" thought Jesse, bubbling with finely-concealed delight. "Sheisan empress right enough, whether she likes to be called that or not! What a prize!"
Aloud, he said with an air of chastened gravity:
"You do me scant justice there, Miss Treharne, but that is easily passed, seeing how chagrinedly conscious I am that I deserved your rebuke in the first instance. You are fond of motoring?" changing the subject with no great deftness.
"No," replied Louise, sufficiently out of hand. "I don't in the least care for it." The conversation was irksome to her and she would not pretend that it was not.
"I inquired," said Jesse, looking chapfallen though he did not in the least feel so, "because I had been hoping you might do me the honor to accept the use—the steady use—of one of my cars. I have several," this last with an ostentation that rather sickened Louise. But she could not allow the carefully veiled suggestion in his words to pass.
"Mr. Jesse," she said, reverting to her tone of deliberation and again gazing straight at him, "aside from the fact that, as I have told you, I don't in the least care for motoring, will you be good enough to suggest to me just one fairly intelligible reason why I should accept your proffer of the use—'the steady use'—of one of your cars? It may be that you will have some reason to offer for what, otherwise, I should deem a distinct impertinence."
Jesse's eyes gleamed with the joy of it. "What a prize!" he thought again.
"I seem, Miss Treharne," he said with a laugh which he purposely made uneasy, "to be stumbling upon one blunder after another. There is no reason for my having offered you the use of one of my cars—and I hasten to withdraw the offer, since it seems to offend you—other than my friendship of long standing with your mother and my desire—my hope, I was about to say—that you, too, might consider me worthy of your friendship."
It was rather adroitly turned, but it completely missed fire.
"I don't seem to recall that it is necessary for one to adopt one's mother's friends as one's own," said Louise, without the least hesitancy. His assumption of an easily-penetrated ingratiating manner had thoroughly disgusted her; she wanted him to take his departure; and she chose the most straightout means to that end. There was no possible way for her to know that Jesse enjoyed the early taunts of some women much as he relished the cocktails with which he preceded his dinners, and for very much the same reason—they were appetizers.
He rose with an air of irresolution which he was far from feeling.
"I fear," he said, resignedly, "that something has happened—or perhaps that something has been said—to predispose or prejudice you against me, Miss Treharne. It is a conclusion to which I am driven."
He paused, then faced her with an appearance of frankness which he was adept at assuming.
"Miss Treharne," he went on, cleverly adopting a tone with a tremolo note in it, "you will grant, I think, that men—men, that is to say, who cut any sort of figure in affairs"—a flourish here—"often are misjudged. Without in the least desiring to pose as one who has been a victim of such misjudgment, I feel, nevertheless——" Here he stopped, having carefully calculated his stopping point, and, with impulsively extended hands, he went on with a beautifully acted semblance of real feeling: "Miss Treharne, I merely ask you to give me a chance to prove myself; a chance at least to wear the candidate's stripes for your friendship."
Despite her youthfulness and her utter inexperience with men of Jesse's type, Louise, aided by an unusually subtle intuition, and mindful of what she had heard of Jesse, caught the hollow ring in his tone, detected the false shifty light in his now furtive, eager eyes.
She rose.
"You are quite overpoweringly in earnest over what seems to me a very trivial matter, Mr. Jesse," she said with a little laugh that sounded harsh even to her own ears.
"You gravely underestimate the value of your friendship in calling it trivial, Miss Treharne," said Jesse, rising also; for at length he was ready to accept the dismissal which a less thick-skinned man, even of his type, would have taken long before.
"I have not been in the habit of placing any sort of an appraisal upon the value of my friendship," she replied, succinctly.
He thrust his arms into the sleeves of his greatcoat of fur and strolled, with a downcast air, to the drawing-room door.
"This is not your normal mood, Miss Treharne," he said, turning upon her a smile that he meant to be wan. "You see what unresentful justice I do you. There are to be other days. I shall find you in a humor less inclined to magnify my candidly professed demerits. I hope to have an opportunity to prove to you that I have at least a few merits to balance the faults."
The hint was sufficiently broad, but Louise appeared to be momentarily obtuse. At any rate she did not extend the invitation he too patently fished for. Her reticence in that respect, however, did not in the least abash Jesse.
"At least I have the cheering knowledge that this door is open to me," he said, entering the foyer on his way out. "Have I not?"
Unavailingly Louise strove to steady herself in order to thrust back the color which she felt mounting to her face.
"It is not my door," she said in a low tone; and instantly was keenly sorry for having said it.
"Oh, I quite understand that," he said, with an air of lightness, though at the moment he did not dare to turn and look at her. "But it is all the same, since it is your mother's, is it not?"
She made no reply. She felt that she deserved the barb for having given him the opportunity to discharge it. He bowed low, essayed the smile that he considered his most engaging one, and went out to his waiting car.
For the second time after having been in the presence of Langdon Jesse, Louise went to her rooms and threw all the windows wide; then stood in the wintry eddies and permitted the cold, sweet air to enwrap and purify her.
When Mrs. Treharne, after leaving Louise and Jesse together, stepped into the car with Judd, she found that adipose man of finance chuckling softly to himself. She deigned not to inquire of him the reason for his chuckling—knowing, of course, that presently he would be volunteering that information himself.
"That was Jesse's car in front of the house, wasn't it, Tony?" he asked her, still chuckling unpleasantly as the car pulled away from the curb.
"Yes," she replied, alert of a sudden, but disdaining to appear so.
"Jesse is calling to see—er—your daughter, eh?" Judd asked, continuing his rumbling manifestations of joviality.
"He is," replied Mrs. Treharne, carefully screening her impatience to catch Judd's drift. "But I fail to see why that fact should incite you to give vent to such a harrowing series of low comedy chuckles."
"Quite so, quite so, my dear Antoinette," said Judd, soothingly, but not in the least diminishing his choppy cachinnatory performance.
Mrs. Treharne, with an air of disgust which merely screened her worried curiosity, permitted him to continue for a while. Then she said, with an air of gravity intended to drag him back to his naturally sullen state, but assumed also for the purpose of sounding him:
"Jesse was plainly struck with Louise on Sunday night last. Her position now, of course, is hideous. Jesse may be the solution."
Judd straightened himself in his seat and suddenly stopped chuckling. Then he glanced with quizzical keenness out of slitted eyes at his companion.
"Meaning, I suppose," he said, "that you have an idea that Jesse might take it into his head to marry her?"
"What else could I mean?" she asked him huskily.
"Quite so, quite so, my dear Antoinette," said Judd, leaning back in his seat again. "Of course. Certainly. I fully understand you," and he closed his eyes as if about to lapse into a refreshing nap.
Mrs. Treharne, distinctly wrought up, grasped one of the lapels of his seal-lined greatcoat and shook him determinedly.
"Be good enough to explain to me, and at once, precisely what you mean," she said rapidly, a growing hoarseness in her tone.
Judd, for his part, promptly relapsed into his chuckling.
"It is nothing, my dear—nothing at all, I assure you," he said, between wheezes. "Only it strikes me as rather diverting that anybody should consider Jesse in the light of a matrimonial eligible. When, by the way, did you gather the idea that Jesse was a marrying man? Since that—er—somewhat widely-exploited little affair of his in the West Indies last year? Or more recently?"
Judd generally won in the little skirmishes they had in the motor car. The fact that he had won again was plainly indicated by the fact that she remained silent for the remainder of the ride.
Louise, still bound by the discipline of school, was not a late sleeper. As early as seven o'clock on the morning following Langdon Jesse's call she was lying awake, striving to dispel, by the process of optimistic reasoning, the sinister nimbus that seemed to be enshrouding her, when the telephone bell in her dressing room began to ring persistently. Louise sprang up to answer the call.
"I know it is a barbarous hour, dear," Laura's cheerful contralto came over the wire, "but I've just been aroused from my juvenile slumbers by the telephone, and of course I must have revenge upon somebody. Listen, dear: I know that it only takes you about fifteen minutes to dress—of course you are not dressed yet? Well, begin this instant. Put on something for tramping and fussing around in the country. You must be over here by eight o'clock. We are going to have a romping day in the country. Now, hurry, won't you?"
"Just you and I, Laura?" asked Louise, delighted. A day in the country! Open fields to dispel vapors! The thought of it made her eager and excited.
"No, there'll be another," replied Laura. "I disregard the axiom, you know, that 'Three is a crowd.' Three needn't be a crowd if one of the three has a little tact and—and the knack of opportunely vanishing," and Louise heard her soft laughter. "A man I know has what he calls a little tumbledown place, with some ground around it, over in Jersey. He calls it Sullen Manor, because he says he always goes over there, in preference to all other places, when he feels the imperative need to sulk. Now, there is not another moment to be wasted in 'phoning. Start to dress this very instant! Will you solemnly promise me to be here on the stroke of eight? Very well. I shall be waiting. Goodbye."
Louise, "very trig and complete," as Laura remarked, in a suit of grey with a matching fur-trimmed grey toque, was with the astonished Laura a good quarter of an hour before eight.
"Heaven knows how you do it," said Laura, still in the hands of her maid. "Go into the dining-room and have some coffee, dear. I shall be with you directly."
Louise, humming happily at the thought of the care-free day ahead of her, sped into the bright dining room. John Blythe, sipping coffee at the table, rose to meet her. He looked fine and upstanding in his fresh, rough tweeds, his close-shaven face ruddy and his clear grey eyes showing an agate sparkle from the brisk walk to Laura's apartment from his own.
Louise halted abruptly in her astonishment when she saw him. But she was extremely glad to see him and said so frankly, resting her hand in his muscular but gentle clasp for a moment.
"Laura packed me off here to take some coffee," she said. "Does she know you are here? And how early you are abroad in the world. We are stirring about at this sunrise hour because we are going for a day in the country—and I am mad to get there! In my previous incarnation I must have been a milkmaid, for I dearly love the country." Then she added, with a little air of disappointment: "I do wish you were coming with us!"
"That," replied Blythe, smiling his wide smile as he poured coffee for her, "is precisely what I am going to do."
Louise, in the act of taking the cup from him, looked into his face with an expression of pleased mystification on her own.
"Why, what is—how can—" She broke off suddenly and rose from her chair in the intensity of a pleasure which she herself, at that moment, could scarcely have analyzed. "Surely," she went on in a lower tone, her face irradiated by a smile which it thrilled him to observe, "Surely you are not the man who sulks?"
"One of Laura's agreeable fictions," he pronounced. "She calls my little place Sullen Manor, and declares that it is my sulking cave, because I've not had her over there to see it. I've had no chance to ask her until now. Do you mean to say she did not tell you that I was the organizer of this expedition?"
"The secretive creature did not even hint at such a thing," declared Louise, not very successfully pretending to be miffed.
"Now I call that downright neglect of orders," said Blythe, also striving to show a serious face. "I particularly charged Laura to tell you who the party of the third part was to be in order that you might have the privilege of refusing to accompany the expedition in case you so desired. A shocking departure from discipline on Laura's part."
"Then it was you," said Louise, lighter in spirits than she had been for a long time, "who invited me?"
"My dear, don't you know he would say so to you no matter whether it were true or not?" said Laura, who had caught Louise's question, breezing into the dining-room at that moment. "Come on, children. Your antique chaperone is impatient to be on her disregarded way. Louise, have you had your coffee? And some toast? Finish them this instant! Even so ascetic and imaginative a person as Mr. Blythe knows that a girl must have a little breakfast before venturing upon an expedition into the jungles of Jersey."
Laura, perfect in a walking suit of shepherd's plaid and tan walking shoes, had, on this morning, the animation as well as the beauty of a girl. Blythe compared the two as they stood side by side, hastily sipping coffee. Laura, with her Judith-black, glossy hair and fresh, youthful color, and Louise with her thick coils of vivid, velvety auburn and glowing ivory pallor—Blythe thought, studying them for a moment over the rim of his cup, that he had never seen so splendid a contrast.
"Allons!" Laura broke in upon his reflection. "Are we to dawdle here until luncheon time? Already it is," looking at her watch, "twenty-four seconds past eight!"
Blythe, slipping into his greatcoat, turned a solemn face upon Laura when they had reached the hall, outward-bound.
"There is one thing, Laura, in connection with this expedition, that I am keenly sorry for," he said, assuming a sepulchral tone.
"Why, what is that?" asked Laura, a little alarmedly, taken off her guard.
"Well," replied Blythe, still solemn, "you'll only be away from here for about fifteen hours, and how are you possibly going to have your apartment completely redecorated, from forepeak to mizzen, alow and aloft, in that space of time?"
"Tush!" laughed Laura. "There will be plenty of time to have the place done over—and it really does sorely need it, now doesn't it?" this with a wistfulness at which Blythe and Louise laughed, "—when I take Louise to Europe with me in May—less than three months off."
"Am I to go to Europe with you, dear—really?" asked Louise, surprised and pleased; for Laura had said nothing about it before.
"Most assuredly you are," replied Laura, entirely in earnest. "If, that is, you can make up your mind to be burdened by the companionship of one so aged."
The topic was lost in the excitation of their arranging themselves in Laura's car, which was to take them to the ferry. But the thought of it recurred to Louise several times during the ride to the ferry. It was an alluring prospect, barring the obstacles. How could she leave her mother, even for a short time, now that she had rejoined her after a separation of years? Finally she was able to dismiss such cogitations and yield herself to the enjoyment of the day ahead.
It was one of those unseasonably mild days in late February that occasionally "drop in" to point an accusing finger at the harshness of winter. A brilliant sun swam in a cloudless sky, and the soft yet invigorating balminess of late April was, as they noticed when they sped by the Park, deluding the buds of tree and hedge into swelling prematurely and even seducing the willows into a vague, timidly displayed elusive green. Hardy, pioneering robins, advance couriers sent forth to investigate the senile endurance of winter, hopped about the Park sward. School-ward bound boys, out of sight of their homes, were doffing their irksome overcoats, and thrusting them, blanket-wise, at demure little schoolgirls who, in turn, were carrying their stuffy jackets over their arms. Motormen and truckmen were smothering yawns that denoted a premature spring fever. Business-bound men, going more slowly than usual, glancing occasionally at the sky of sapphire, and feeling on their cheeks gusty little zephyrs from the South, thought of fishing "where the wild stream sings." Belated shopgirls, sensing the morning's benign balm as they hurried through crowds, thought of hats and furbelows for the season that, they surmised, was almost upon them.
In the ferry-bound automobile, John Blythe was thinking about a letter hid in the pocket of his coat and wondering how the person whom the letter most concerned would regard its contents. Louise was wondering if her mother would be annoyed over the word she had left with her maid that she would be with Laura for the entire day and part of the evening; occasionally she glanced sidelongwise at John Blythe, when there was no possibility of his catching her at it, and strove vaguely to analyze the sense of power, mingled with kindliness, which his presence diffused. Laura, leaning back, emitting an occasional absurdity, studied them both and wondered, her eyes a little dreamy, if matters ever actually turned out in real life as they did in novels.
They stood on the ferryboat's prow, bathing in the sun's relenting glow and blinking at the gold-tipped river crests; and it was only ten o'clock when, after half an hour's ride on the slam-bang little accommodation train, they debarked at the spick-and-span little station, at the side of which Blythe's care-taker, a grinning but stolid German, had drawn up a fine and comfortable, if old-fashioned, surrey to which was hitched a pair of glossy, mettlesome sorrels.
Louise and Laura felt like clapping their hands when, after the two-mile drive through woodlands and past neat, well-cared-for little farms the clean, sweet-smelling soil of which already was being turned up, they drove on a firm, natural road through a wide wooden gate and came in sight of the pretty Colonial house, with four bright yellow pillars, topped by a balcony of snowy white, with wide-open shutters of an intense green, and a big white double door at the sides of which were little grooved columns surmounted by the inevitable Corinthian capitals. The house, fresh and smart in its old-fashioned way, was roomier than it looked from the front. It was divided by a wide hall which ran its entire length on the ground floor; and a wide stairway ran from the hall in front to the second floor, where, after the Colonial fashion, the balcony gave upon sleeping rooms.
"Sullen Manor," announced Laura, assuming the megaphonic utterance of the sight-seeing car's expounder. "But doesn't it beautifully belie its name and its owner's doldrumish use of it? Why, it is as pretty and cheerful as a pigeon-cote snuggling under sifting cherry blossoms! How much ground is there around the place, John?"
"Twenty acres," replied Blythe, smiling a little gravely. "I suppose I know every foot of the twenty acres, too, though I left here—it is where I was born, you know—when I was seven years old. My father lost the place, you see, through bad investments and what not, when I was at that age. We moved to New Orleans, and a year later both my father and mother were swept off by yellow fever. I only remember them in a shadowy way. Oddly enough, I remember this old place much better than I do my parents; its corners, clumps of trees, and that sort of thing. I had a chance to get the place back a couple of years ago, and I seized it. A good deal of the gear that was here when I was a tyke is still here, stowed in the attic; for the place has not been often occupied since we left it. I've refurnished it in a sort of a way. I hope you'll not find it so bad, Laura; but I'm prepared right now to wilt under your superior, and, I might say, your inveterate knowledge of interior decoration."
Blythe looked a bit self-disdainful over what had been rather a long speech for him, particularly when he observed that Louise had been waiting to ask him something.
"You will not think me inquisitive, Mr. Blythe?" she prefaced. "But what you said about the—the carrying away of your people by yellow fever not only touched me but aroused my curiosity. You were only a child then, of course. What did you do then? Were you taken in hand by relatives? You are not annoyed because I ask?"
"Why should I be?" Blythe laughed. "Particularly when the reply is so simple. I have no relatives—had none then. When my people died I was on the streets. I believe I hold the record yet for the number ofNew Orleans PicayunesandTimes-Democratssold in a given time. Whatever else I became later, I certainly was a hustling newsboy. Then I came up here and I've been working ever since. My annals, you see, Miss Treharne, are distinctly dry."
"But your education?" Louise asked, her eyes alight with an interest which caused Laura to smile.
"Well," said Blythe, "there are plenty of people living in Princeton yet, I think, who will tell you, if ever you take the pains to inquire, that I was an exceptionally successful furnace-tender, tinker, chore-doer, and all-round roustabout. Oh, yes, I forget. I was a persuasive peddler of soap and starch before the Lord, too. Likewise, I acquired the knack of mending umbrellas. Not to overlook the fact that, odd times, I drove a village hack. At Princeton, in short, I was virtually everything and anything you can think of except a barber and a policeman. I shied at those two occupations."
"And you took your degree?" inquired Louise.
"Just squeezed through," replied Blythe.
"Don't you believe anything of the sort, Louise," put in Laura. "He was valedictorian of his class, and, worse than that, he played full-back with his eleven, and a sensational full-back too. I ought to know. I am old enough, woe is me, to have been a woman grown the year John Blythe contributed a good three-fifths to the Tigers' victory over Yale."
Blythe, flushing embarrassedly, was holding up a protesting hand when the surrey drew up in front of the clean, scrubbed porch and the care-taker's wife, a freshly-ginghamed, bright-eyed German woman of middle age, appeared to receive them. Then, from around the left side of the house, a terrific yipping began. Two hysterically joyous fox terriers, scenting their master, came tearing around the porch and literally leaped upon Blythe. Then they "side-wheeled" in circles over the lawn, first listing precariously over on starboard legs and then on port, whimpering in their sheer delight as they tore around. A huge Angora cat, as they entered the hall, made two bounds of it from the huge fireplace, from which a pair of smouldering logs diffused a red glow that contrasted oddly with the streaming sunlight, to rub her sides, purring almost vociferously as she did so, against Blythe's trousers legs. Later in the day, she was solemnly to conduct Blythe and his guests to the cellar for the purpose of exhibiting a litter which kept the women chained around the basket for nearly an hour.
In the lives of most men and women there are days—usually unanticipated days—so encompassed, aureoled, by a memorable happiness that, ever afterward, in hours of retrospection, they mark the beginning or denote the closing of the eventful periods.
This was such a day for Blythe and Louise and Laura. They rambled through miles of field and forest, chattering and laughing like children a-berrying; the women's hair blowing free or tumbling down altogether, their skirts caught by brambles, their deadliest fears aroused by the inevitable ruminative cow. They climbed fences, while Blythe pretended that something had just dropped out of his pocket back of him. They romped with the dogs, they tossed pebbles at a mark in a garrulous little just-thawed stream, they even sat down on an inviting little mound, beneath an old elm, and played at mumblety-peg with Blythe's jack-knife and quarrelled laughingly over the score of the game.
When they returned to the house in mid-afternoon, they found the German woman preparing a meal for them. Laura and Louise insisted upon helping her. In fact, they banished her from the kitchen altogether and did it all themselves. Louise announced, her features set rather determinedly, that she was going to make some biscuits, whereupon Blythe, asking her if she'd learned that in the cooking class at Miss Mayhew's school, incontinently fled in well-simulated alarm. But he came back to the spotless kitchen to watch the two women, aproned to the neck, and their arms bared to the shoulders, breeze about with their preparations. He was repaid for his inquisitiveness by being swaddled in an apron and set to peel the potatoes.
The meal was an unqualified success, including the biscuits, which, to Louise's intense surprise, were superb, although Blythe impertinently maintained that the German woman really had made them and that Louise had merely heated them over. The light began to fall as they chatted around the table, and Blythe, having no great liking for oil lamps, tossed logs on to the dining-room fireplace for the flickering glow of their light. Blythe lighted a cigar with his coffee and fell into a silence of content when Louise and Laura began to hum, very low, snatches of old songs in unison; Laura in her deep, moving contralto, with an appealing little "break" in it, and Louise in a clear, sweet soprano—she had been the honor girl of her school for her singing.
"More," Blythe would give the repressed command when they ceased; and they would willingly obey. After a while, darkness having quite fallen, Laura went to another part of the house for her after-dinner cigarette. She made it a practice not to take her cigarettes in the presence of quite young women.
Blythe, silent enough now, and his silence tacitly concurred in by Louise, who also had become preoccupied, under the spell of the flickering fire-light and her nearness, alone, to a man who made a strong appeal to her imagination, brought up a deep leather chair before the logs and motioned to Louise to take it. But she pulled an old-fashioned three-legged footstool before the fire, and Blythe himself had to take the chair. Thus they sat silent for a while, listening to the sputtering of the green logs.
"Louise."
It was the first time he had called her that. But she did not even turn her head. She was sitting near him on the low stool, chin in palm, her face illumined by the fire's glow. It was agreeable to hear him call her Louise. He knew her father. She had been thinking of her father while she and Laura were singing softly.
"Yes," she said, quietly.
"I am to be your guardian, Louise. Does that please you?"
Blythe, leaning back in the deep chair, did not take his eyes from the murmuring logs. Louise, chin still in palm, turned to look at him calmly. Then she gazed back into the fire.
"Yes," she replied, no surprise in her tone. Perhaps, she thought whimsically, the dancing, leaping flames had hypnotized her. But she was not surprised. She was, instead, swept by a surge of deep gladness. "You have a letter from my father?"
"Two," said Blythe. "One of them is for you."
She moved her little stool close to his chair and he handed her the packet. The letter for her was under cover of the letter addressed to Blythe. Louise studied, in the fire's glow, the bold, clear address on the envelope. It was the first time she had ever seen her father's handwriting. Her eyes became slightly suffused at that thought. Her letter dropped out of the larger envelope.
"If you care to, read the one addressed to me first, Louise," said Blythe.
Louise, turning a bit the better to catch the fire's glow, read her father's letter addressed to Blythe—as far as she could read it. She was nearly at the end when her unshed tears blinded her. Blythe's hand, which she then felt, without surprise, softly clasping both of her own as they rested in her lap, felt very cool and soothing to her.
After a while, nothing having been said by either, she broke the envelope and read her father's letter to her. It was not a long letter, but it took her a long time to read it; the tears would blot out the words, try as she would to crowd them back.
Her father's letter to Blythe was couched in the tone a man assumes in addressing his lawyer who also is his friend. It bore the postmark of Lahaina, Island of Maui, Hawaii—George Treharne's sugar plantations were on that island of the Hawaiian group. The letter concerned Louise wholly. He was tied to his plantations, owing to labor troubles with the Japanese, and there was no possibility of his visiting the States for some time. He had been surprised to hear that Louise had left school. She was now a woman grown. He had looked forward to the time when, he hoped, she might feel an impulse to come to him. If that time had not yet come he trusted implicitly to Blythe to see that she should be properly bestowed, placed in a fitting environment, and shielded from baneful influences. He knew that Blythe, the young partner of his old lawyer, now dead, would not fail him in this. He desired that Blythe should apply immediately for a court order appointing him his daughter's legal guardian. He inclosed the necessary papers for the accomplishment of that purpose. He was eager to see his daughter, and hoped to see her within a year. In the meantime he confidently committed her to Blythe's watchful guardianship.
His letter to Louise bespoke a deep and solicitous affection. He told her of Blythe, adverting to him in terms of praise as a man of exalted honor ("Poor father! as if I did not know that," thought Louise, when she came to that passage), and beseeching her to follow Blythe's advice in all matters in which his large experience would be invaluable to her. He added that he felt that she would not find Blythe's suggestions irksome. He inclosed a draft on a Honolulu bank for five thousand dollars, which would suffice for her needs until she heard from him again. He hoped to see her within a year. And he was hoping that she would be glad to see her "always-affectionate father, George Treharne."
At length Louise conquered her tears and turned a fire-illumined smile upon Blythe.
"I am glad," she said simply. "Even before you told me, this had been the happiest day of my life. Now it is beautiful. I cannot even begin to tell you how beautiful it is."
"Then I shall apply for the guardianship, Louise," said Blythe. "I wish I could say how it pleases me to know you are willing that I should."
"Willing?" said Louise. "Do you know that, aside from Laura, you are the only—" She had been close to saying "friend;" but she could not leave her mother out in that way;—"the only adviser I have?"
Blythe, glancing from the logs into her eyes as she said that, longed to take her in his arms.
Laura, at the piano in the music room on the other side of the hall, began softly to play the barcarole from "The Tales of Hoffmann." They listened for a little while, and then Blythe said, smiling gravely:
"As your father says, I shall not be, I hope, an exacting guardian. There are many things upon which I shall not touch at all. I shall not affect to believe that you do not know what I mean."
"I know," said Louise.
"Your duty is that to which your heart prompts you—I know that," said Blythe. "It is not for me, nor for anyone else, to seek to alter your conception of your duty. All that I ask is that you call upon me in your time of need, if that time should ever come; and I hope it never shall. For the rest, nothing is to be changed at my suggestion. The scroll is in your hands, Louise. Only when you need me—I shall not fail you then."
"Would it be unworthy," she asked him after a pause, "if I were not to tell my father—just yet—that I am living with my mother?"
Blythe knew what a hard question that had been for her to ask.
"Not unworthy, or anything like it, I think," he replied promptly, "when the motive is so pure and fine."
Impulsively she rose and held out both of her hands and he took them in his.
"Call Laura," she said. "I want to tell her. I want my guardian angel to meet my guardian."
Laura came into the room as she spoke. She walked over to Louise and placed an arm around her.
"I knew it, dear," she said to Louise. "John told me last night. That is why we are over here. He thought, and I agreed with him, that it would be better to tell you at the close of a happy day. And was thereeversuch a happy day since the world began?"
Blythe looked at his watch and whistled.
"We've half an hour to make the last New York train tonight, and a two-mile drive to the station," he said. "If we miss the train we'll have to stay here all night."
Laura gathered up her skirts and raced for her hat, Louise after her.
"Stay here all night!" gasped Laura. "You are making a glorious beginning as a guardian, aren't you!"
It was past ten o'clock when Louise, in Laura's car, which had been waiting at the ferry, reached the house on the Drive, Laura having been dropped at her apartment. The sheer happiness of the day still absorbed her. Up to the moment when the car pulled up at the curb she had been going over and over, since parting with Blythe and Laura, the incidents of the day that had made it such an oasis of happiness.
But it all disappeared like a suddenly-vanishing mirage when, upon stepping to the pavement, she saw Langdon Jesse's car drawn up at the curb.
Jesse's car looming suddenly upon her, instantly dissolved Louise's happy absorption and aroused within her the foreboding that she was upon the threshold of something sinister; and the premonition caused her to become physically and mentally tense as she ascended the steps.
The impact of the hall's stream of light slightly blinded and confused her as she entered; but she very soon discerned Jesse and Judd standing before the wide, brassy fireplace. Both were in shaggy automobile coats and plainly were about to leave the house. Judd, his burnished bald pate mottledly rosy from the heat of the blazing logs, was standing with his back to the fire, his hands thrust in the greatcoat pockets, his heavy under-shot jaw working upon an imaginary cud. Jesse, towering over the other man, but his own increasing over-bulkiness made more manifest by his bulging coat of fur, was the first to see Louise, who, with an inclination of the head, was for passing them to gain the stairs. Neither Jesse nor Judd intended that this should be. The two had dined together. The blitheness of their humor, therefore, contained also a seasoning of carelessness.
Without the least movement of his grotesquely-paunched body, Judd turned his head sidewise and viewed Louise quizzically through his sharp, red-rimmed, oddly small eyes.
"Evening—er—daughter," he said to her in an experimental but sufficiently matter-of-fact tone.
The greeting sounded so incredible that Louise, coming to a sudden halt, rested her hands on the back of a chair and stared curiously at him without a word. She felt very cold, in spite of the excessive heat of the hall; but she was amazed quite beyond the power of speech. While thus she stood, staring puzzledly at Judd, Jesse faced her, and, bringing his heels together with a click, made her a low bow accompanied by a sweeping cross-wise gesture with his cap of fur. It is a dangerous thing for a man to attempt the grand manner unless he is very sure of his practice or at least of the indulgence of his gallery. Louise, startled as she was, could not fail to notice the inadequacy of his attempt.
"Glad I haven't missed you, after all, Lou—Miss Treharne," said Jesse, catching himself before he had quite finished addressing her by her first name. His tone was grossly familiar; and Louise, merely glancing at him, saw that the question that was always in his eyes when he looked at her now was made more searching and persistent by his potations. "I've been dallying a-purpose. I came to offer you the use of my box for 'Pelleas and Melisande'—it's being done at the Manhattan tonight for the first time here, of course you know. They're repeating it Friday night, though. Mary Garden's a dream in it, they say—she's a dream in any old thing—or hardly anything, when it comes to that," and he laughed boldly at the suggestiveness of the remark. "The box is yours for Friday night. May I hope to join——"
Louise, as he spoke, had been steadying herself to make reply. Now she raised a hand for him to desist. The gesture was simple, but he obeyed the implied command. Perhaps it was the picture that she made in her anger that warned him. She stood straight, shoulders back, head up, eyes gazing unflinchingly into his; a moving figure of womanly dauntlessness, had there been eyes there thus to appraise her attitude.
"Mr. Jesse," she said in a clear tone, picking her words with a cutting deliberation, "you are not, I have heard, deficient in intelligence. A very short time ago you had the hardihood to proffer me the use of one of your cars. I declined for the same reason that I now repeat in refusing your proffer of the use of your opera box. There is no imaginable reason why I should accept such favors at your hands. I told you that before. And you knew it before I told you. My acquaintanceship with you is merely casual. But, since you force me to it by disregarding what I said before, permit me to say now, explicitly and I hope finally, that I am not conscious of the least desire to become further acquainted with you."
Judd choked on a gloatful cough. While Louise had been speaking he had been grinning malevolently at Jesse, the grin saying, as plainly as words: "Well, I was right, wasn't I? You're properly shrivelled, aren't you?"
Jesse smiled chagrinedly and, as he imagined, conciliatingly. But he evaded her direct gaze, and his wholly unconvincing assumption of the grand manner had quite departed. He was not, however, appreciably disturbed. Jesse had a habit of discounting such setbacks in advance. The stock market and women required deft manipulation, he considered, and his fame as a manipulator was established. The citadel, finally scaled, would be the more inviting for the difficulty of the besiegement. He entertained no doubts as to the outcome. In the meantime Louise could enjoy her schoolgirl heroics. He was not unfamiliar with that sort of thing. But in time they all sensed the glamour of the advantages he so well knew how to dangle before them. These thoughts danced agreeably before Jesse's mental vision even at the moment when he felt himself, with no sense of degradation, to be the target of Louise's scorn.
"Well, I am sorry, Miss Treharne, that you still seem to misunderstand me," said Jesse, attempting the tone of one whose sorrow overtops his mortification.
"It is because I do understand you that I speak as I do," replied Louise with perfect self-possession. Judd choked again in the gleefulness of his vindication and Jesse shot him a malignant glance. Then and there Jesse began to outline a little plan whereby, by means of "market" pressure, he calculated that he could promptly and effectually change Judd's attitude.
"I prefer to believe, Miss Treharne," said Jesse, "that you are indisposed and that upon reflection you will be sorry that——"
"I am perfectly well," interposed Louise in a tone of cold finality, "and I shall not be sorry." Then she passed up the stairs to her mother's apartments.
"Now will you be good!" broke out Judd, chuckling vindictively, when she had gone. "Say, Jesse, I wonder if you feel so much like a clipped and trimmed Lothario as you look?"
Jesse, his mask off, growled something inarticulate by way of reply. Then: "Are you for the club?" he asked Judd. He decided that he might as well test the strength of the screws upon Judd at once. They went out together.
Mrs. Treharne, dressed for a restaurant supper party that was to assemble at midnight, was reading, with the wistfulness of one debarred, the "society news" in a chattery and generally wrong weekly publication when Louise entered her sitting room. She was wonderfully coiffured, and encased in adécollettédress that somewhat too liberately exploited the chisellings of her still milky arms and shoulders. She stiffened slightly in her chair at the sight of Louise; and the dimplings which had been creasing her plastic face in her enjoyment of the publication's malevolent gossip gave way to the expression of peevishness with which her daughter was becoming all too well acquainted.
"Well, my dear," she started to say as Louise, in whose eyes the embers of the wrath Jesse's words had aroused still slumbered, "I must say that you have a cool way of walking off and——"
"No reproaches just now, mother, please," interposed Louise, sinking wearily into a chair. "I never had a happier day until, returning here——"
She paused, passing a hand before her eyes. She was loth to enter upon the topic of Judd and Jesse with her mother. But Mrs. Treharne, looking at her more closely, saw her perturbation.
"Oh, you met Mr. Judd and Mr. Jesse as you came in?" she asked, a note of slightly worried curiosity in her tone. "Were they——?" She broke off. "Men are men, my dear," she resumed, placatingly. "They had been dining—I noticed that. But of course they said nothing to——"
"Your business adviser," said Louise—she could not bring herself to mention Judd's name—"greeted me as 'daughter.' I remember now that I was too much startled to tell him that he must not repeat that."
"Tush, Louise—a slip of the tongue, of course," said Mrs. Treharne, appeasingly. Privately, however, she already began to contrive the things she intended to say to Judd on the morrow. "And Mr. Jesse—did he——"
"Mr. Jesse," interposed Louise, "caught himself as he was about to address me as Louise. He offered me the use of his box at the opera. Several days ago—I was too chagrined to tell you—he insisted upon my accepting the use of one of his automobiles. I hope I made it plain to him tonight—and I tried hard enough to make it plain to him before—that there is not the remotest chance that I shall ever accept his sinister civilities."
"Why 'sinister,' Louise?" put Mrs. Treharne, bridling. "How can you possibly put such a construction upon it when one of my friends generously extends to you courtesies that are commonly and with perfect propriety accepted by——"
Louise sighed wearily and held up a pleading hand.
"Don't ask me such a question—please, mother," she entreated. "You don't know how the subject revolts me."
"But, my dear," her mother persisted, "what is it that you have against Mr. Jesse? I am entitled to know."
"I am not sufficiently interested in the man to have anything against him," replied Louise. "Is it not enough that I loathe him?"
"No, Louise, it is not enough," pronounced her mother, plainly ready for argument on the subject. "You are too young a woman to be forming prejudices or leaping to conclusions. What do you know about Mr. Jesse that has caused you to form such an opinion of him?"
Louise hesitated. Her intimacy with her mother had never been very great. There had never been any plain talk, or even mother-and-daughter confidences, between them. The theme as she had said, was revolting to her. But her mother deliberately chose to remain on that ground. There was no path around the point her mother dwelt upon. Louise entertained no thought of evading it.
"Mother," she said, leaning forward in her earnestness, "it is natural enough, I know, that you still regard me as a child. But, before I answer your question, are you willing to grant, at least for the time, that I am a woman?"
"Don't be so unmitigatedly solemn about it, Louise," demurred her mother, evasively. "My question was simple enough."
"Simple enough to put, but not so simple for me to answer," was Louise's quiet reply. "But I shall answer it nevertheless. The reason, then, why I do not intend to have any further contact with Langdon Jesse is that he is one of the most notorious libertines in New York; a man who regards women from a single angle—as his prey. Everybody seems to know that, mother, except you: and you don't know it, do you?" There was a pathos in the eagerness with which the girl asked the question; it spoke of a dim hope she yet had that perhaps, after all, her mother did not know about Langdon Jesse. Her mother's harsh, dodging reply quickly dashed that hope.
"Who has been telling you such scandalous things, child?" Mrs. Treharne demanded. "Laura Stedham?"
"You must not ask me that question," replied Louise, quietly firm. "But if nobody had told me about Langdon Jesse—and I shall not deny that I was told—I am sure my instinct would have taught me to suspect him of being—precisely what he is."
Mrs. Treharne shook her head dismally.
"It is exactly as I feared it would be, Louise," she said, sighing drearily. "You are narrow, restricted, pent-in; you haven't even a symptom of bigness of view; your horizon is no wider than the room in which you happen to be. I always feared they would make a prude of you. Now I see that my forebodings were right."
Louise, very much wrought upon, rose rather unsteadily and walked over to her mother's chair.
"You repel me a little, mother," she said in a low tone. "It hurts me to say that: but it is the truth. If I am a prude, then I am unconscious of it. It may be that I don't know your definition of the word." She paused and gazed about the room wearily. "If to be a prude," she resumed, "is to be conscious of the desire and the intention to be an honest woman, then, mother, I am a prude," her voice breaking a little. "And if one must be a prude to recoil from the hideous advances of a man like Langdon Jesse, then again I am a prude."
She had been unfairly placed on the defensive. She had not meant to wound. But, while her words cut her mother like the impact of thongs, they did not arouse within her a sense of the humiliation of her position.
"Louise," she asked, hoarsely, moistening her dry lips, "are you saying these—these stinging things with the deliberate purpose of reflecting upon your mother?"
Addressed to anybody else but Louise, the question would have been absurd in the opening it afforded.
"I should hate to have you think that," replied Louise, flushing hotly and taking her mother's hands. "You don't think such a thing, do you?"
"I don't know what to think," said her mother, taking the martyred tone, "when you say such horrid things. I never heard you say such—such flaying things before. I can't think what is coming over you."
"I am very lonesome, for one thing," said Louise, looking at her mother through suffused eyes. "I see so little of you. Perhaps I become moody. But I never mean, never meant, to say anything to hurt you, dear."
"But you see enough, if not too much, of—of others, Louise," put in her mother, slightly mollified. "You have been with Laura ever since early this morning?"
"Yes; with Laura—and another," replied Louise, unfailingly candid.
"Another?" said Mrs. Treharne, querulously. "Whom do you mean?"
"Mr. John Blythe," replied Louise, coloring.
"John Blythe?" said her mother, wonderingly. "You were with Laura and John Blythe? So that is the direction of the wind? Laura is trying to——" She broke off when she saw the expression of pain on her daughter's face.
"Please don't say that," said Louise, her face and forehead a vivid crimson. "I have often met Mr. Blythe at Laura's. I couldn't begin to tell you how I esteem him. And, mother, he is to be my guardian." She had meant to tell her mother that at a more fitting time; but, since Blythe's name had come up, she discerned that there could be no excuse for a postponement of the revelation.
Mrs. Treharne gazed at her daughter with mouth agape. When she finally spoke her words were almost inarticulate.
"Your guardian?" she gasped. "John Blythe is to be your guardian? At whose direction? Upon whose application?"
"My father's, mother."
"But are you sure that you are not being tricked—that——"
"John Blythe is not the man to trick anybody, dear—everybody, of course, knows that," said Louise, very prompt to a defense in that quarter. "Moreover, I saw the letters from my father. One of them is to me. So there is no mistake about it."
"What does your father say in his letter?" asked Mrs. Treharne, suspiciously. "Does he mention me? say anything to my detriment?"
"Nothing of that sort, mother," replied Louise, disliking exceedingly the drift of the conversation. "Mr. Blythe's guardianship is to be largely a matter of form. I—I am glad the arrangement has been made. There are times when I feel that I need guidance. You are so busy and I so much dislike to worry you. Often, since I came home, I've found myself wishing that I had a brother." She stopped, her voice faltering.
Mrs. Treharne started slightly, swept by the thought of how often she had wished that Louise herself had been a son. Now, for the moment, she repented that thought; the dignity and strength of her daughter were making their appeal to her. She had her periods of fairness, and she could not throttle her consciousness of the wretchedness of Louise's position under that roof nor subdue the accusing inner voice that held her solely responsible for it. She trembled with indignation when she remembered that Judd had dared to address Louise as "daughter." She raged at herself for not possessing the strength to cast the Judd incubus from her once and forever. And she ended, as usual, by giving way to an effusion of dismal tears and by promising herself that "some time—some day——"
Louise went to bed with a disturbed mind. She was trying not to face the indubitable fact that her mother was proving herself but a reed to lean upon. Then her drowsy thoughts wandered to the fire-lit dining-room of the serene old house in the country in and around which she had spent a day marked by a sort of placid happiness which she could not quite analyze; and her last thought, before succumbing to unquiet dreams based upon the events at the end of the day, were of a rugged, kindly-faced man quietly watching her as she read her father's letter by the flickering light of the droning logs.
Judd, still chuckling viciously, continued to taunt the rebuked but by no means cast-down Jesse after the two had got into Jesse's car.
"Not saying much, are you, old top?" he gurgled joyously as the car throbbed away from the curb. "Well, I don't blame you. Not, of course, that I didn't give you fair warning. I told you you'd be frozen stiff if you tried on any of your Don Juanish airs and graces in that quarter. But don't take it to heart—don't grieve over it. You'll thaw out again in time. Right now I wouldn't dare take a chance on touching you for fear one of your arms or something'd drop off. But you'll thaw—you'll thaw," and he squirmed and wabbled around in his seat in the excess of his mirth.
Jesse, gnawing on an unlighted cigar as was his wont when temporarily eclipsed or engaged in blocking out a campaign, listened in silence. When it becomes the unfailing habit of a man to enjoy the last laugh he learns to pay little heed to the too-previous chirrupings of those over whom he feels confident of eventually triumphing. So he permitted Judd to enjoy himself. When the chuckles of his companion gradually ceased, however, he said, drily enough:
"To all intents and purposes she's a dependent of yours, isn't she?"
Judd parried the question. He was indifferent enough as to what might happen to Louise Treharne: he regarded her as an interloper, and he was disgruntled over her studiously aloof treatment of him. But it had become a habit with him to parry Jesse's questions since the occasion when his over-expansiveness in replying to a few seemingly innocent and unmeditated questions from Jesse had resulted in the sound "market" trouncing which his one-time pupil had inflicted upon him.
"What the devil difference does it make?" was Judd's reply. "She has your number all right, and that's all you need to know, isn't it?" and he chuckled again.
Jesse waited again until Judd's glee had subsided, then resumed.
"She has to look to you to make provision for her needs—clothes, hats, ribbons, furbelows, that sort of thing—doesn't she?" he inquired with the coolness of one who does not mean to be rebuffed.
"Oh, forget it," said Judd, a little grumpily now. "Don't try to pin me, Jesse. I don't spout about these things. She's living under one of my roofs, is a member of one of my households. And she regards you as—well, as a considerably-drowned water-bug. Why don't you let it go at that? There are more women in the world than there are red ants or railroad ties. Can't you take your medicine—stand for the defeat?"
"Not in this particular case," was Jesse's perfectly frank reply; he could be frank when there was no possibility of a "come-back." "What's more, I don't intend to. Just make up your mind to that, will you?"
"Oho!" said Judd, struck by the intentional rawness which Jesse had put into his last phrase. "That's the tune, is it?"
"That house of yours on the Drive isn't the place for the young woman," said Jesse. Judd knew that he wasn't assuming any virtuous strain, but merely leading up to a point. "You ought to know that—as the father of a family."
"You're becoming confoundedly erect in your ideas, aren't you?" snorted Judd. "And I've told you before that I won't have you dabbling in my private affairs. Just cut out your harpings, in this connection, upon my family and all of that sort of thing, understand?"
"Damn your private affairs," said Jesse, quietly, but with a note of meaningfulness in his tone that caused Judd to sit up and take immediate notice. "I am no more interested in your private affairs than I am in the transactions of the Congo Missionary Society. But I repeat that your—er—that Mrs. Treharne's daughter doesn't belong under that Riverside Drive roof. Do you understand me?"
"No," said Judd, "I don't," nor did he. But he no longer chuckled.
"I think you've told me several times," Jesse went on calmly, "that the young woman flaunts you?"
Judd made some inarticulate reply which Jesse took for an affirmative.
"That being the case," inquired Jesse, "why do you keep her around the place?"
"What's your idea—that I should turn her into the street?" asked Judd, gradually getting a hold on Jesse's thread.
"Oh, she wouldn't be in the street very long," said Jesse with significant emphasis. "But, since on your own say-so she scarcely even nods to you, and you are paying the freight, what's the answer? Doesn't she know that she's dependent upon you?"
"How the devil could she help knowing it?" broke out Judd impatiently. "She has eyes and what belongs to her by way of brains, I suppose."
"Well," said Jesse, "if she cuts in on your—your game, and is such a nuisance to you, why don't you exert your authority—the authority of the provider—and——" He hesitated.
"And what?" inquired Judd, proddingly.
"Make provision for her—not necessarily luxurious provision—under some other roof?" said Jesse. "In a modest little apartment, for example, with just the necessaries and that sort of thing. That would alter her demeanor toward you—and toward others. Once they've enjoyed the gewgaws of life the other thing is a come-down and they feel the sordid misery of it."
Judd studied.
"You're a deep sort of a reprobate, Jesse," he said, musingly, after a pause. "I don't profess to be able to plumb some features of your scoundrelism, and yet I've never been accused of being uncommonly dense. How the devil would my planting the young woman in a miserable little six-by-eight flat help your case?"
"That," coolly replied Jesse, "is my affair; but you exhibit your denseness, at that, in asking such a fool question. It wouldn't take her long to begin to pine for the light and laughter and lavishness of life after she'd had a taste of the miserable little six-by-eight flat as you call it, would it?"
"And when she did begin to pine that's where you'd come in, eh?" said Judd. "Yes, it was pretty thick of me not to catch your drift, I'll admit. But I guess I'll keep out of it. You can conduct your own damned round-ups. You've got your nerve with you to ask me to figure in any such a dirty subtle scheme as that, haven't you?" He spoke more in resentment of Jesse's overbearing tone than from any profound sense of the contemptibleness of Jesse's suggestion.
Jesse lit his cigar and said nothing for a while. Then, puffing hard so that the glow of his cigar lit up his stolid waxy face, he said:
"I hear you're carrying a pretty nifty line of cotton, Judd, and that you're still buying. Waiting for cotton to touch sixteen cents, eh?"
Judd cocked his ears.
"Well," he said, moistening his lips, "I haven't got anything on you. You're carrying ten bales when I'm only carrying one."
"Is that so?" lied Jesse with perfect serenity. "Well, you're entitled to have your dream out, of course. But it so happens that I am not carrying even one bale."
Judd sat up straight in his seat.
"Well?" he asked, huskily.
"Well, what?" asked Jesse.
"What are you shooting at?" inquired Judd. "Do you mean to say you're going to take the bear end of it?"
"I don't mean to say anything of the sort," replied Jesse. "And you don't suppose I'd go around placarding the fact if that was my intention, do you? I'm merely out of the market for the present, that's all. But you're in, eh, and waiting for sixteen cent cotton?"
The screws were working all right. Jesse saw that. It was chilly in the automobile, but Judd was mopping a damp brow.
"If I ever do break into that market," Jesse went on clinchingly but in the same even tone he had been using, "you want to watch my smoke. That's all."
Judd, in a cold tremor, resolved to unload his line of cotton as soon as the market opened on the morrow. Also he decided that it wouldn't be any impolitic thing for him to placate Jesse in the immediate meanwhile.
"Well, if I have been dense, I'm not now," he said, reflectively. "I understand you all right."
"I thought you would," said Jesse, tossing his cigar out of the car window.
Despite her natural reserve and the reticence, born of keen humiliation, which she maintained in respect of her mother's affairs, Louise, feeling the need of an experienced woman's counsel, gave to Laura Stedham, her one woman friend in need, a somewhat guarded account of her meeting with Jesse and Judd upon her return from the day in the country. Laura listened to the story in a sort of silent rage. She was not a woman to rant, and even if she had been, the recital that Louise gave her, with the wretched details which Laura could guess at, of her gradual hemming in at the Riverside Drive house, filled the other woman with a sense of anger and disgust beyond the mere power of words. Louise had not previously told Laura of Langdon's proffering her the use of an automobile; she feared that Laura's wrath and alarm over that would be directed against her mother for having made such a situation possible; and her loyalty to her mother never wavered.
At the close of her story, which she gave to Laura in a quiet, rather hopeless way that the older woman found pathetic to a degree, Louise, in a moment of inadvertence, let fall how Judd had greeted her as "daughter." Laura flared at that. But she held herself in, and she asked Louise, quietly enough:
"My dear, there is one thing that I want to ask you. I hope you won't think me intrusive for asking it. It is this: Just why are you remaining at that house? You know the—the circumstances there. I am not trying to influence you. But I want you to tell me just why, since you cannot change the conditions, you deem it necessary to go on living there?"
Louise replied without hesitation.
"I don't lose hope that I may be able to change the conditions some time, dear," she replied. "There would be no use in my staying with my mother if I did not possess that hope."
"But," asked Laura, not pressingly, but with a grave, interested earnestness, "don't you think your chance to change the conditions is almost negligible? Just how can you possibly expect such a change ever to come about?"
"I am hoping," Louise answered bravely, but coloring, "that, if I stay on with my mother, sooner or later she will become ash——"; she could not finish the word "ashamed;"——"she will come to a realization of herself," she took up the thread, "of what the conditions in which she lives mean; of what, eventually, they must bring her to, and bring me to, also. Often I think that she doesn't view it as I do—as we do. She is drifting. She told me that she was. She has lost her moorings. I want to bring her back. I am the only one who could bring her back, am I not? And I can't leave her as long as there is a chance to do that."