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Beatrice wondered, during moments of seriousness, how it was that this handsome cave man of hers rebelled so constantly against the beauty and correctness of the apartment and yet never really disgraced her as her own father would have done. It gave her added admiration for Steve though she felt it would be a mistake to tell him so. She did not believe in letting her husband see that she was too much in love with him.
Despite his growls and protests about this and that, and his ignorance as to the things in life Beatrice counted paramount, Steve adapted himself to the new environment with a certain poise that astonished everyone. The old saying “Every Basque a noble” rang true in this descendant of a dark-haired, romantic young woman whom his grandfather had married. There was blood in Steve which Beatrice might have envied had she been aware of it. But Steve was in ignorance, and very willingly so, regarding his ancestors. There had merely been “my folks”––which began and ended the matter.
Still it was the thoroughbred strain which the Basque woman had given her grandson that enabled Steve to be master of his house even if he knew very little of what it was all about. It was fortunate for his peace of mind––and pocketbook––that Beatrice had accepted the general rumour of a goat-tending ancestry and pried no further. Had she ever glimpsed the genealogy tables of the Benefacio family, from which Steve descended, she would have had the best time of all; coats of arms and family crests and mottoes would have been the vogue; a trip to the Pyrenees would have followed; mantillas and rebozos would have crowded her wardrobe, and Steve97would have been forced to learn Spanish and cultivate a troubadourish air.
Moreover, the Gorgeous Girl was not willing that her husband be buried in business. She could not have so good a time without him––besides, it was meet that he acquired polish. Her father was a different matter; everyone knew his ways and would be as likely to try to change the gruff, harsh-featured man as to try surveying Gibraltar with a penny ruler. Now Beatrice had married Steve because cave men were rather the mode, cave men who were wonderfully successful and had no hampering relatives. Besides, her father favoured Steve and he would not have been amiable had he been forced to accept a son-in-law of whom he did not approve. Mark Constantine had never learned graciousness of the heart, nor had his child.
So Beatrice proceeded to badger Steve whenever he pleaded business, with the result that she kept dropping in at his office, sometimes bringing friends, coaxing him to close his desk and come and play for the rest of the day. Sometimes she would peek in at Mary Faithful’s office and baby talk––for Steve’s edification––something like this:
“Ise a naughty dirl––I is––want somebody to play wif me––want to be amoosed. Do oo care? Nice, busy lady––big brain.”
Often she would bring a gift for Mary in her surface generous fashion––a box of candy or a little silk handkerchief. She pitied Mary as all butterflies pity all ants, and she little knew that as soon as she had departed Mary would open the window to let fresh air drive out distracting perfume, and would look at the useless trifle on her desk with scornful amusement.
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Before the New York trip Steve took refuge in his first deliberate lie to his wife. He had lied to himself throughout his courtship but was most innocent of the offence.
“If Mrs. O’Valley telephones or calls please say I have gone out to the stockyards,” he told Mary. “And will you lend me your office for the afternoon? I’m so rushed I must be alone where I can work without interruption.”
Mary gathered up her papers. “I’ll keep you under cover.” She was smiling.
“What’s the joke?”
“I was thinking of how very busy idle people always are and of how much time busy people always manage to make for the idle people’s demands.”
He did not answer until he had collected his work materials. Then he said: “I should like to know just what these idle people do with themselves but I shall never have the time to find out.” He vanished into Mary’s office, banging the door.
Beatrice telephoned that afternoon, only to be given her husband’s message.
“I’ll drive out to the stockyards and get him,” she proposed.
“He went with some men and I don’t believe I’d try it if I were you,” Mary floundered.
“I see. Well, have him call me up as soon as he comes in. It is very important.”
When Steve reached home that night he found Beatrice in a well-developed pout.
“Didn’t you get my message?” she demanded, sharply.
“Just as I was leaving the office. I looked in99there on––on my way back. I saw no use in telephoning then. What is it, dear?”
“It’s too late now. You have ruined my day.”
“Sorry. What is too late?”
“I wanted you to go to Amityville with me; there is a wonderful astrologer there who casts life horoscopes. He predicted this whole war and the Bolsheviki and bombs and everything, and I wanted him to do ours. Alice Twill says he is positively uncanny.”
Steve shook his head. “No long-haired cocoanut throwers for mine,” he said, briefly, unfolding his paper.
“But I wanted you to go.”
“Well, I do not approve of such things; they are a waste of time and money.”
“I have my own money,” she informed him, curtly.
Steve laid aside the paper. “I have known that for some time.”
“Besides, it is rude to refuse to call me when I have asked you to do so. It makes me ridiculous in the eyes of your employees.”
Recalling the shift of offices Steve suppressed a smile. “It was nothing important, Bea, and I am mighty busy. Your father never had time to play; he worked a great deal harder than I have worked.”
“I can’t help that. You must not expect me to be a little stay-at-home. You knew that before we were even engaged. Besides, I’m no child–––”
“No, but you act like one.” He spoke almost before he thought. “You are a woman nearly twenty-six years old, yet you haven’t the poise of girls eighteen that I have known. Still, they were farm or working girls. I’ve sometimes wondered100what it is that makes you and your friends always seem so childish and naïve––at times. Aren’t you ever going to grow up––any of you?”
“Do you want a pack of old women?” she demanded. “How can you find fault with my friends? You seem to forget how splendidly they have treated you.”
A cave man must be muzzled, handcuffed, and Under the anæsthetic of unreality and indifference to be a satisfactory husband for a modern Gorgeous Girl.
“Why shouldn’t they treat me splendidly? I have never robbed or maltreated any of them. Tell me something. It is time we talked seriously. We can’t exist on the cream-puff kind of conversation. What in the world has your way of going through these finishing schools done for you?”
The dove-coloured eyes flickered angrily. “I had a terribly good time,” she began. “Besides, it’s the proper thing––girls don’t come out at twenty and marry off and let that be the end of it. You really have a much better time now if you wait until you are twenty-five, and then you somehow have learned how to be a girl for an indefinite period. As for the finishing school in America––well, we had a wonderful sorority.”
“I’ve met college women who were clear-headed persons deserving the best and usually attaining it––but I’ve never taken a microscope to the sort of women playing the game from the froth end. I’m wondering what your ideas were.”
“You visited me––you met my friends––my chaperons––you wrote me each day.”
“I was in love and busy making my fortune. I101was as shy as a backwoods product––you know that––and afraid you would be carried off by someone else before I could come up to the sum your father demanded of me. I have nothing but a hazy idea as to a great many girls of all sorts and sizes––and mostly you.”
“Well, we had wonderful lectures and things; and I had a wonderful crush on some of the younger teachers––that is a great deal of fun.”
“Crushes?”
“You must have crushes unless you’re a nobody––and there’s nothing so much a lark. You select your crush and then you rush her. I had a darling teacher, she is doing war work in Paris now. She was a doll. I adored her the moment I saw her and I sent her presents and left flowers in her room, orchids on Sundays, until she made me stop. One day a whole lot of us who had been rushing her clipped off locks of our hair and fastened them in little gauze bags and we strung a doll clothes line across her room and pinned the little bags on it and left a note for her saying: ‘Your scalp line!’”
“What did that amount to?”
“Oh, it was fun. And I had another crush right after that one. Then some of the classes were interesting. I liked psychology best of all because you could fake the answers and cram for exams more easily. Math. and history require facts. There was one perfectly thrilling experience with fish. You know fish distinguish colours, one from the other, and are guided by colour sense rather than a sense of smell. We had red sticks and green sticks and blue sticks in a tank of fish, and for days we put the fish food on the green sticks and the fish would swim102right over to get it, and then we put it on the red sticks and they still swam over to the green sticks and waited round––so it was recognizing colour and not the food. And a lot of things like that.”
Steve laughed. “I hope the fish wised up in time.”
Beatrice looked at him disapprovingly. “If you had gone to college it might have made a great difference,” she said.
“Possibly,” he admitted; “but I’ll let the rest of the boys wait on the fishes. Did you go to domestic science this morning?”
“Yes, it was omelet. Mine was like leather. The gas stove makes my head ache. But we are going to have a Roman pageant to close the season––all about a Roman matron, and that will be lots of fun.”
“You eat too much candy; that is what makes your head ache,” he corrected.
She pretended not to hear him. “It is time to dress.”
“Don’t say there’s a party to-night,” he begged.
“Of course there is, and you know it. The Homers are giving a dinner for their daughter. Everyone is to wear their costumes wrong side out. Isn’t that clever? I laid out a white linen suit for you; it will look so well turned inside out; and I am going to wear an organdie that has a wonderful satin lining. There is no reason why we must be frumps.”
“I’d rather stay home and play cribbage,” Steve said, almost wistfully. “There’s a rain creeping up. Let’s not go!”
“I hate staying home when it is raining.” Beatrice went into her room to try the effect of a sash wrong side out. “It is so dull in a big drawing room103when there are just two people,” she added, as Steve appeared in the doorway.
“Two people make a home,” he found himself answering.
The Gorgeous Girl glanced at him briefly, during which instant she seemed quite twenty-six years old and the spoiled daughter of a rich man, the childish, senseless part of her had vanished. “Would you please take Monster into the kitchen for her supper?” she asked, almost insolently.
So the owner of the O’Valley Leather Works found his solace in tucking the pound-and-a-half spaniel under his arm and trying to convince himself that he was all wrong and a self-made man must keep a watch on himself lest he become a boor!
The day the O’Valleys left for New York in company with three other couples Mr. and Mrs. Gaylord Vondeplosshe arrived in Hanover, having visited until their welcome was not alone worn out but impossible ever to be replaced. A social item in the evening paper stated that they had taken an apartment at the Graystone and would be at home to their friends––whoever they might be.
If Gay’s club and his friends had determined merely to be polite and not welcome his wife, Trudy had determined that they would not only welcome her but insist upon being helpful to them; as for her former associates––they would be treated to a curt bow. This, however, did not include the Faithfuls. Mary was not to be ignored, nor did Trudy wish to ignore her. All the good that was in Trudy responded to Mary’s goodness. She never tried to be to Mary––no one did more than once. Nor did she104try to flatter her. She was truly sorry for Mary’s colourless life, truly grieved that Mary would not consent to shape her eyebrows. But she respected her, and it was to Mary’s house that Mrs. Vondeplosshe repaired shortly after her arrival.
It was quite true that Beatrice Constantine would have developed much as Trudy had were the pampered person compelled to earn her living, and, like Trudy, too, would have married a half portion, bankrupt snob. As Trudy dashed into the Faithful living room, kissing Mary and her mother and shaking a finger at Luke, Mary thought what a splendid imitation she was of Beatrice returning from her honeymoon.
“As pretty as a picture,” Mrs. Faithful declared, quite chirked up by the bridal atmosphere. “How do you do it, Trudy? And why didn’t you write us something besides postals? They always seem like printed handbills to me.”
“Especially mine,” Luke protested. “One of Sing Sing with the line: ‘I am thinking of you.’”
Trudy giggled. “I didn’t have a minute and I bought postals in flocks. Oh, I adore New York! I’m wild to live there. I nearly passed away in New England, but of course we had to stay as long as they would have us.”
She looked at herself in a mirror, conscious of Mary’s amused expression. She wore a painfully bright blue tailored suit––she had made the skirt herself and hunted up a Harlem tailor to do the jacket––round-toed, white leather shoes stitched with bright blue, white silk stockings, an aviatrix cap of blue suéde, and a white fox fur purchased at half price at a fire sale.
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“I haven’t any new jewellery except my wedding ring,” she mourned. “I expected Gay’s sister to give me one of her mother’s diamond earrings––I think she might have. They are lovely stones––but she never made a move that way––she’s horrid. As soon as I can afford to be independent I shall cut her, for she did her best to politely ask us to leave.”
“You were there several weeks, weren’t you?” Mary ventured.
“Yes––I grew tame. I learned a lot from her––I was pretty crude in some ways.” Which was true. Trudy was quite as well-bred looking, at first glance, as the Gorgeous Girl. “It is always better to get your experience where the neighbours aren’t watching. I didn’t lose a minute. If I never did an honest day’s work for Steve O’Valley I worked like a steam engine learning how to be a real lady, the sort Gay tried to marry but couldn’t!”
“As if you weren’t a little lady at all times,” Mrs. Faithful added.
“Of course we are stony broke but Gay’s brother-in-law just had to loan us some money in order to have us go. They gave us fifty dollars for a wedding present. Well, it was better than nothing. Gay has talked to a lot of concert managers and he’s going to have some wonderful attractions next season. People have never taken Gaylord seriously; he really has had to discover himself, and he is–––”
“Are you practising small talk on me?” Mary asked.
“You’ve said it,” Trudy admitted. “That last is the way I’m going to talk about Gaylord to his friends. I’ll make him a success if he will only mind me. Just think––I’ll be calling on Beatrice O’Valley106before long! She will have to know me because Gay helped furnish her apartment and was one of her ushers. It will mean everything for us to know her––and I’m never going to appear at all down and out, either. People never take you seriously if you seem to need money. Debt can’t frighten me. I was raised on it. All I need is Gay’s family reputation and my own hair and teeth and I’ll breeze in before any of the other entries. I came to ask if you won’t come to see where I live?” She smiled her prettiest. “Gay is at his club and we can talk. It was quite a bomb in the enemies’ camp when he married––people just can’t dun a married man like they do a bachelor.”
“I’ll come next week.” Mary tried putting off the evil day.
“No––now. I want your advice––and to show you my clothes.”
“You will have clothes, Trudy, when you don’t have food.”
“You have to these days––no good time unless you do.”
She kissed Mrs. Faithful and promised to have them all up for dinner. Then she tucked her arm in Mary’s and pranced down the street with her, talking at top speed of how horrid it was that they had to walk and not drive in a cab like Beatrice, and concluding with a dissertation on Gaylord’s mean disposition.
“I’m not mean, Mary, unless I want to accomplish something––but Gaylord is mean on general principle. He sulks and tells silly lies when you come to really know him. Oh, I’m not madly in love––but we can get along without throwing things. It’s107better than marrying a clod-hopper who couldn’t show me anything better than his mother’s green-plush parlour.”
“Doesn’t it seem hard to have to pretend to love him?”
“No, he’s so stupid,” said the debonair Mrs. Vondeplosshe as she brought Mary up before the entrance of the Graystone, a cheap apartment house with a marble entrance that extended only a quarter of the way up; from there on ordinary wood and marbleized paper finished the deed. The Vondeplosshes had a rear apartment. Their windows looked upon ash cans and delivery entrances, the front apartments with their bulging bay windows being twenty-five dollars a month more rent. As it was, they were paying forty-five, and very lucky to have the chance to pay it.
Trudy unlocked the door with a flourish. All that Trudy had considered as really essential to the making of a home was a phonograph and a pier glass; the rest was simple––rent a furnished place and wear out someone else’s things. The bandbox of a place with four cell-like rooms was by turns pitiful and amusing to Mary Faithful.
“We are just starting from here,” Trudy reminded her as she watched the gray eyes flicker with humour or narrow with displeasure. “Wait and see––we’ll soon be living neighbour to the O’Valleys. Besides, there is such an advantage in being married. You don’t have to worry for fear you’ll be an–––”
“Old maid,” finished Mary. “Out with it! You can’t frighten me. I hope you and Gay never try changing your minds at the same time, for it would be a squeeze.”
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She selected a fragile gilt chair in the tiny living room with its imitation fireplace and row of painted imitation books in the little bookcase. This was in case the tenants had no books of their own––which the Vondeplosshes had not. If they possessed a library they could easily remove the painted board and give it to the janitor for safekeeping. There were imitation Oriental rugs and imitation-leather chairs and imitation-mahogany furniture, plated silver, and imitations of china and of linen were to be found in the small three-cornered dining room, which resembled a penurious wedge of cake, Mary thought as she tried saying something polite. The imitation extended to the bedroom with its wall bed and built-in chiffonier and dresser of gaudy walnut. Trudy had promptly cluttered up the last-mentioned article with smart-looking cretonne and near-ivory toilet articles. There was even a pathetic little wardrobe trunk they had bought for $28.75 in New York, and Trudy had painstakingly soaked off old European hotel labels she had found on one of Gay’s father’s satchels and repasted them on the trunk to give the impression of travel and money.
The kitchen was nothing but a dark hole with a rusty range and nondescript pots and pans. “Being in the kitchen gets me nothing, so why bother about it?” Trudy explained, hardly opening the door. “We have no halls or furnace to care for, and an apartment house sounds so well when you give an address. I wish we could have afforded a front one; it will be hard to have people climbing through the back halls. I have put in a good supply of canned soups and vegetables and powdered puddings, and we can save a lot on our food. We’ll109be invited out, too, and when we eat at home I can get a meal in a few minutes and I’ll make Gay wash the dishes. Besides, I have a wonderful recipe for vanishing cream that his sister bought in Paris, and I’m going to have a little business myself, making it to supply to a few select customers as a favour. I’ll sell small jars for a dollar and large ones for three, and I can make liquid face powder, too. Oh, we won’t starve. And if you could wait for the money I know I owe you–––”
“Call it a wedding present,” Mary said, briefly.
“You lamb!”
Trudy fell on her neck and was in the throes of explaining how grateful she was and how she had an evening dress modelled after one of Gay’s sister’s, which cost seven hundred dollars before the war, when Gay appeared––very debonair and optimistic in his checked suit, velours hat, and toothpick-toed tan shoes, and his pale little eyes were quite animated as he kissed Trudy and dutifully shook hands with Mary, explaining that the Hunters of Arcadia had just offered him a clerical position at the club, ordering supplies and making out bills and so on––because he was married, very likely. It would pay forty a month and his lunches.
“And only take up your mornings! You can slip extra sandwiches in your pockets for me, deary. I’ll give you a rubber-pocketed vest for a Christmas present,” Trudy exclaimed. “Oh, say everything in front of Mary––she knows what we really are!”
At which Mary fled, with the general after impression of pale, wicked eyes and a checked suit and a dashing, red-haired young matron with a can opener always on hand, and the fact that the Vondeplosshes110were going to lay siege to the O’Valleys as soon as possible.
Mary decided that it was a great privilege to be a profane lady concealing a heartache compared to other alternatives. At least heartaches were quite real.
111CHAPTER VII
It was almost Christmas week before the realization of Trudy’s ambition to have Beatrice call upon her as the wife of Gaylord Vondeplosshe instead of an unimportant employee of her own husband. Trudy counted upon Beatrice to help her far more than Gaylord dared to hope.
“Bea is like all her sort,” he warned Trudy when the point of Beatrice’s having to invite the Vondeplosshes for dinner was close at hand; “she is crazy about herself and her money. She would cheat for ten cents and then turn right round and buy a thousand-dollar dress without questioning the price.”
Which was true. Beatrice had never had to acquire any sense of values regarding either money or character. By turns she was penurious and lavish, suspecting a maid of stealing a sheet of notepaper and then writing a handsome check for a charity in which she had only a passing interest. She would send her soiled finery to relief committees, and when someone told her that satin slippers and torn chiffon frocks were not practical she would say in injured astonishment: “Sell them and use the money. I never have practical clothes.”
If a maid pleased her Beatrice pampered her until she became overbearing, and there would be a scene in which the maid would be told to pack her things and depart without any prospect of a reference; and someone else would be rushed into her place, only112to have the same experience. Beatrice was like most indulged and superfluously rich women, both unreasonable and foolishly lenient in her demands. She had no schedule, no routine, no rules either for herself or others. She had been denied the chance of developing and discovering her own limitations and abilities. She expected her maids and her friends to be at her beck and call twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four, she would not accept an excuse of being unfitted by illness for some task or of not knowing how to do any intricate, unheard-of thing which suddenly it occurred to her must be done.
When a servant would plead her case Beatrice always told her that for days at a time she left her alone in her beautiful home with nothing to do but keep it clean and eat up all her food and very likely give parties and use her talking machine and piano––which was quite true––and that she must consider this when she was asked to stay on duty until three or four o’clock in the morning or be up at five o’clock with an elaborate breakfast for Beatrice and her friends just returning from a fancy-dress ball.
On a sunny day she often sent the maids driving in her car, and if a blizzard came up she was certain to ask them to walk downtown to match yarn for her, not even offering car fare. She would borrow small sums and stamps from them and deliberately forget to pay them back, at the same time giving her cook a forty-dollar hat because it made her own self look too old. She had never had any one but herself to rely upon for discipline, and whenever she wanted anything she had merely to ask for it. When anything displeased her it was removed without question.
American business men do not always toil until113they are middle-aged for the reward of being made a fool by a chorus girl or an adventuress. That belongs to yellow-backed penny-dreadfuls and Sunday supplement tales of breach-of-promise suits. More often the daughter of the business man is both the victim and the vampire of his own shortsighted neglectfulness. The business man expresses it as “working like a slave to give her the best in the land.” And sometimes, as in the case of Steve O’Valley, it is his own wife instead of a blonde soul mate who lures him to destruction in six installments.
When Beatrice first knew of Gaylord’s return she was inclined to pay no attention to his wife, despite her remarks to Steve. Then Gaylord telephoned, and she had him up for afternoon tea, during which he told her all about it. He was very diplomatic in his undertaking. He pictured Trudy as a diamond in the rough, and in subtle, careful fashion gave Beatrice to understand that just as she had married a diamond in the rough––with a Virginia City grandfather and a Basque grandmother and the champion record of goat tending––so he, too, had been democratic enough to put aside precedent and marry a charming, unspoiled little person with both beauty and ability, and certainly he was to be congratulated since he had been married for love alone, Truletta knowing full well his unfortunate and straitened circumstances.... Yes, her people lived in Michigan but were uncongenial. Still, there was good blood in the family only it was a long ways back, probably as far back as the age of spear fighting, and he relied upon Beatrice, his old playmate, to sympathize with and uphold his course.
Secretly annoyed that the tables had been so skillfully114turned, yet not willing to admit it to this bullying morsel, Beatrice was obliged to say she would call upon his wife and ask them for dinner the following week.
Gaylord fairly floated home, to find Trudy remodelling a dress, scraps of fur and shreds of satin on the floor.
“Babseley, she’s coming to call to-morrow!” he said, joyfully, hanging up his velours hat and straddling a little gilt chair.
“Really? I wish we had a better place. I feel at a disadvantage. If it were a man I wouldn’t mind, I could act humble and brave––that sort of dope. But it never goes with a woman; you have to bully a rich woman, and I’m wondering if I can.”
“I did,” he said, his pale eyes twinkling with delight. “It was easy, too. I dragged in O’Valley’s orphan-asylum days and all, and how we both married diamonds in the rough. Woof, how she squirmed!” He rose and went to the absurd little buffet, pouring out two glasses of “red ink” and gulping down one of them. “I wish I had O’Valley’s money; I’d put away a houseful of this stuff. I’m going to dig up a few bottles at the club––in case of illness.” Trudy did not want her glass, so he drank that as well.
“You take too much of that stuff,” Trudy warned, gathering up her débris; “and when you have taken too much you talk too much.”
Gaylord rewarded her by consuming a third glass. “Shall we eat out?”
She shook her head. “Too expensive. There’s no need for it now. I bought some potato salad and I have canned pineapple and sugar cookies.”
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She dumped her work into a basket and flew round the dining room until she summoned Gaylord to join her in a meal laid out on the corner of a dingy luncheon table.
The wine dulled Gay’s appetite and Trudy’s had been taken quite away by Beatrice’s proposed visit. Besides, they put the latest jazz record on their little talking machine, which helped substitute for a decent meal. They danced a little while and then Trudy planned what she should wear for the O’Valley dinner party and Gaylord figured how much money he needed before he would dare try buying an automobile, and they finished the evening by attending the nine-o’clock movie performance and buying fifteen cents’ worth of lemon ice and two sponge cakes to bring home as a pièce de resistance.
Beatrice found herself amused instead of annoyed as she climbed the stairs to the Vondeplosshe residence. At Trudy’s request Gay had discreetly consented to be absent. He had pretty well picked up the threads of his various enterprises and what with his club duties, his second-rate concerts, his gambling, and commissions from antique dealers, he managed to put in what he termed a full day. So he swung out of the house early in the afternoon to buy himself a new winter outfit, wondering if Trudy would row when she discovered the fact.
Gaylord’s theory of married life was “What’s mine is my own, and what’s yours is mine.” He relied on Trudy to mend his clothes and make his neckties, keep house and manage with a laundress a half day a week, yet always be as well dressed and pretty as when she had slacked in the office and116boarded without cares at Mary’s house. She must always seem happy and proud of her husband and have her old pep––being on the lookout for a way to make their fortunes. She must also remain as young looking as ever and always be at his beck and call. Gaylord was rapidly developing into an impossible little bully, the usual result of an impoverished snob who manages to become a barnacle-like fixture on someone a trifle more foolish yet better of nature than himself.
Had he been less aristocratic of family and stronger of brawn he would have beaten Trudy if she displeased him. As it was, after the first flush of romance passed, he began to sneer at her in private when she made mistakes in the ways of the smart set into which Gaylord had been born, and when she protested he only sneered the louder. He felt Trudy should be eternally grateful to him. Trudy found herself bewildered, hurt––yet unable to combat his contemptible little laughs and sneers. Trudy was shallow and she knew not the meaning of the word “ideal,” but for the most part she was rather amiable and unless she had a certain goal to attain she wished everyone about her to be happy and content. As she had married Gaylord only as a stepping-stone she was fair enough to remind herself of this fact when unpleasant developments occurred. As long as he was useful to her she was not going to seize upon pin-pricks and try to make them into actual wounds.
She decided to wear her one decent tea gown when Beatrice called, pleading a bad headache as an excuse for its appearance. She knew the tea gown was an excellent French model, a hand-me-down from Gay’s117sister, and her nimble fingers had cleaned and mended the trailing pink-silk loveliness until it would make quite a satisfactory first impression.
She cleaned the apartment, recklessly bought cut flowers, bonbons, and two fashion magazines to give an impression of plenty. She even set old golf clubs and motor togs in the tiny hall, and she timed Beatrice’s arrival so as to put the one grand-opera record on the talking machine just as she was coming up the stairs.
Then she ran to the door in pretty confusion, to say spiritedly: “Oh, Mrs. O’Valley, so good of you. I’m ever so happy to have you. I’m afraid it isn’t proper to be wearing this old tea gown but I had a bad headache this morning and I stayed in bed until nearly luncheon, then I slipped into the first thing handy.... Oh, no. Only a nervous headache. We took too long a motor trip yesterday, the sun was so bright.... No, indeed; you do not make my headache worse. It’s better right this minute.... Now please don’t laugh at our little place. Can’t you play you’re a doll and this is the house you were supposed to live in? I do––I find myself laughing every time I really take time to stand back and look at the rooms.... Put your coat here. Such a charming one, the skins are so exquisitely matched. I do so want to talk to you.”
She had such an honest, innocent expression that Beatrice found herself won over to the cause. Trudy understood Beatrice at first sight; she knew how to proceed without blundering.
“Sit here, Mrs. Steve, for I can’t call you Mrs. O’Valley with Gay singing the praises of Bea and Beatrice and the Gorgeous Girl.”
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“Then––er––call me Beatrice,” she found herself saying.
“How wonderful! But only on condition that I am Trudy to you. How pleased Gay is going to be! He adores you. You have no idea of how much he talks about you and approves all you do and say. I used to be a teeny weeny bit jealous of you when I was a poor little nobody.” She passed the chocolates, nodding graciously as Beatrice selected the largest one in the box.
Trudy chattered ahead: “I was glancing through these fashion books this afternoon to get an idea for an afternoon dress. Of course I can’t have wonderful things like you have”––looking with envy at the Gorgeous Girl’s black-velvet costume––“still, I don’t mind. When one is happy mere things do not matter, do they––Beatrice?”
Beatrice hesitated. Then she fortified herself by another bonbon. This strange girl was both interesting and dangerous. Certainly she was not to be snubbed or ridiculed. Vaguely Beatrice tried to analyze her hostess, but as she had never been called upon to judge human nature she was sluggish in even trying to exercise her faculties.
In China fathers have their daughters’ feet bound and make them sleep away from the house so their moans will not disturb the family. In America fathers often repress their daughters’ self-sufficiency and intellect by bonds of self-indulgence, and when the daughters realize that a stockade of dollars is a most flimsy fortress in the world against the experiences which come to every man and woman the American girls are the mental complement of their physically tortured Chinese cousins––hopeless and without redress.
119
“You have made this place look well,” Beatrice said, presently, “It is a perfect tinder box. Papa knows the man who built it.”
Trudy flushed. “We are merely trying out love in a cliffette,” she said, sweetly, “instead of the old-style cottage. We can’t expect anything like your apartment. We have that prospect to look forward to. Besides, we have the advantage of knowing just who our real friends are,” she added, smiling her prettiest.
Beatrice disposed of another chocolate. She told herself she was being placed in an awkward position. She had occasion to keep thinking so every moment of her visit, for Trudy hastened to add that she had never liked office work and yet Mr. O’Valley had been so good to her, and wasn’t it splendid that America was a country where one had a chance and could rise to whatsoever place one deserved; and when one thought of Beatrice’s own dear papa and handsome husband, well, it was all quite inspiring and wonderful––until Beatrice was as uncomfortable about Steve’s goat tending and her father’s marital selection of a farmer’s hired girl as Trudy really was of the apartment and her second-hand frock.
Trudy lost no time in introducing the magic vanishing-cream and liquid face power, and before the call ended Beatrice had ordered five dollars’ worth of each and some for Aunt Belle, and she had offered to take Trudy to her bridge club some time soon.
As the door closed Trudy sank back in her chair, informing the imitation fireplace joyously: “It was almost too easy; I didn’t have to work as hard as I really wanted to.” Wearily she dragged off her tea120gown for a bungalow apron and then prepared a supper of delicatessen baked beans and instantaneous pudding for her lord and master.
The dinner with the O’Valleys was equally fruitful of results. Despite Steve’s protests that he did not wish to know Gay and that Trudy was impossible he was forced to listen to their inane jokes and absurd flatteries and to look at Trudy in her taupe chiffon with exclamatory strands of burnt ostrich, and watch her deft fashion of handling his wife, realizing that people with one-cylinder brains and smart-looking, redheaded wives usually get by with things!
After their guests had departed Steve began brusquely: “Do you like’em?”
“No; I told you before that they amused me. She is fun, and poor Gay is a dear.”
“Are you going to have them round all the time? That woman’s laugh gets on my nerves, and I want him shot at sunrise. They can’t talk about anything but the movies and jazz dancing and clothes.”
“What do you want them to talk about? Don’t pace up and down like a wild beast.” Beatrice came up and stood before him to prevent his turning the corner.
He looked down at her without answering. She was clad in shimmering white loveliness cut along the same medieval lines as the gown another Beatrice had worn when Dante first saw her walking by the Arno; her hair was very sunshiny and fragrant and her dove-coloured eyes most appealing.
He burst out laughing at his own protest. “Am I a bear? Come and kiss me. If you like them or they amuse you just tote ’em about, darling. Only121can’t you manage to do it while I am out of town? They do fleck me on the raw.”
“Hermit––beast,” she dimpled and shook her finger at him.
“I just want you,” he said, simply; “or else people who can do something besides spend money or sponge round for it.”
“Sometimes you frighten me––you sound booky.”
“I’m not; I want real things, Bea. I feel hungry for plain people.”
“You have them all day long in your office and your shops; I should think when you come home you’d welcome a good time.”
“Our definitions differ. Anyhow, I’m not going to find fault with your friends. I’ve nothing against them except that they are time wasters.”
“Trudy boarded at your wonderful Miss Faithful’s house.”
“In spite of Mary’s common sense, and not because of it.”
“You think a great deal of that girl, don’t you?” she asked, patting his sleeve.
“She deserves a great deal of credit; she has worked since she was thirteen, and she is as true-blue as they come.”
“Do you think she will ever marry and leave you?” she asked, laying the sunshiny head on his arm.
“I never want her to; I’d feel like buying off any prospective bridegroom.”
“That’s not fair.” Her hand stole up to pat his cheek. “She has the right to be happy––as we are, Steve!”
He stared at her in all her lovely uselessness. “You funny little wife,” he whispered––“fighting122over losing a postage stamp one minute and buying a new motor car the next; going to luncheon with the washed of Hanover and spending the afternoon with Trudy; making fun of Mary Faithful’s shirt waists and then pleading for her woman’s happiness.... Beatrice, you’ve never had half a chance!”
The next afternoon Mary and Luke Faithful were summoned home. Later in the day Steve received word that their mother had succumbed to a violent heart attack. He found himself feeling concerned and truly sorry, wondering if Mary had any one to see to things and relieve her of the responsibility. Then he wondered if this death would cause a dormant affection to become active love as often happens, causing him to lose his right-hand man. He reproached himself for knowing so little of her private life. When he went into her deserted office to find a letter it seemed distinctly lonesome. It was hard to realize how suddenly things happen and how easily the world at large becomes accustomed to radical changes. Already a snub-nosed little clerk was taking up a collection for the flowers.
For the first time in years Steve felt depressed and weary. The anaesthesia was losing its power.
Within the coming week as vital a mental change was to come to Steve as the death of Mrs. Faithful was to cause in Mary’s life. And as Mary, to all purposes, would resume her business routine with not a hint of the change, so would Steve fail to betray the mental revolution that was to take place in his hitherto ambitious and obedient brain.
Briefly what was to happen was this––after visiting Mary in her home and after seeing the Gorgeous Girl123during a test of one’s abilities, Steve was to realize that there are two kinds of person in the world: Those who make brittle, detailed plans, and those who have but a steadfast purpose. His wife belonged to the former class and Mary to the latter, which he was to discover was his choice at all times!
124CHAPTER VIII
The day of Mrs. Faithful’s funeral was the day that Beatrice O’Valley had arranged to introduce Trudy Vondeplosshe to her bridge club, the members of which were keen to see Gay’s wife in order to prove whether or not Bea’s report concerning her was correct––that she was a clever young person quite capable of taking care of both her own and Gay’s futures.
Beatrice particularly looked forward to the afternoon. Introducing Trudy served as an attraction, and besides the hostess had telephoned her that she had just received a box of Russian sweetmeats made by a refugee who was starting life anew in New York, and two barrels of china, each barrel containing but three plates and each plate being valued at six hundred dollars. Furthermore, Beatrice was wearing an afternoon costume that would demand no small share of attention, and there was the additional joy of dazzling Trudy by her tapestry-lined winter car. So when Steve reminded her in a matter-of-fact way that the funeral services for Mrs. Faithful were to be at three she stared in amazement.
“My dear boy, I am very sorry your secretary’s muzzy has died––but I cannot change my plans. I accepted for both Trudy Vondeplosshe and myself more than a week ago.”
Steve wondered if he had heard correctly. “You don’t imagine for an instant that Trudy will not125go? She boarded there; they did everything for her.”
Beatrice shrugged her shoulders. “She was phoning me before lunch and is all agog with excitement. Poor little thing, it means a lot for her. She will be ready at three and I am to call for her.”
“I don’t think she understands the funeral is to-day. I know she is heartless and shallow, but even she would scarcely omit such a duty.”
Beatrice gave a long sigh. “Dear me, you ought to have been an evangelist. I can’t understand why you suddenly become punctilious and altruistic. For years you never did anything but try to make money and wonder if I would marry you––you never cared who was dead or what happened as long as you were secure.”
“Quite true. But I have made a fortune and married you, and it is time for other things.”
“You are welcome to them,” she said, quite enjoying the argument. “Besides, I sent my card with the flowers.”
“It isn’t the same as going yourself, it is your duty to go, Bea. The girl has taken the brunt of business while we played and she has only the reward of a salary. Her mother has died, which means that her home is gone. I call it thick to choose a bridge party instead of paying a humane debt.”
“Why am I dragged into it? She isn’t working for me! Papa never asked me to go when any of his people had relatives who died. I don’t think he ever went himself unless there was a claim to be adjusted.”
“I shouldn’t ask it if it were any one else––but Mary Faithful is different.”
“You are quite ardent in your defence of her. Be126sensible, Steve. What does it matter whether I go or don’t go? I think it quite enough if you appear. Now if she were in need of actual money–––”
“Oh, certainly!” he said, bitterly. “That would give you the chance to play off Lady Bountiful, drive up in state with your check book and accept figurative kisses on the hand! But when a plain American business girl who has served me more loyally than she has herself loses her mother you won’t be a few moments late at a bridge party in order to pay her the respect employers should pay their employees. I don’t blame Trudy––I expect nothing of her––but I do blame you.”
“So my plans are to be set aside–––?”
“Plans!” he interrupted. “If someone else were to tell you that they had an East Indian yogi who was going to give a seance this very afternoon you would hotfoot it to the telephone to inform Trudy that you must break your engagement with her, and send word to your original hostess as well. That is about all your plans amount to.”
Beatrice’s eyes had grown slanting, shining with rage. “I wish you would remember you are speaking to your wife and not to an employee. I would not go to that funeral now if it meant––if it meant a divorce.” She pushed her chair back from the table––they were at luncheon––and stood up indignantly.
Looking at her in her gay light chiffon with its traceries of gold Steve wondered vaguely whether or not he had been wrong in selecting his goal, whether he would ever be able really to understand this Gorgeous Girl now that she belonged to him, or would discover that there was nothing much to understand127about her, that it could all be summed up in the statement that her father by denying her a chance at development had stunted the growth of her ability and her character into raggle-taggle weeds of self-indulgence and willful temper.
“I shall not ask you to go with me,” he knew he answered. It is quite as terrifying to find that one’s goal has been wrongly chosen and ethically unsound as to find a boyhood dream merging into gorgeous reality.
Beatrice swept out of the room. Steve made an elaborate pretense of finishing his meal. Then he went into the drawing room in search of a newspaper. He came upon Beatrice sitting on a floor cushion, feeding Monster some bonbons.
“Have you been at her house?” she said, curiosity overcoming the pique.
“Yes. Where is that paper? I dropped it in this chair when I came in for luncheon.”
“I had it taken away. I abominate newspapers in a drawing room––or muddy shoes,” she added, looking at his own. “What did she say? What sort of a house is it?”
Steve stared at her in bewilderment. “What the devil difference does it make to you?” he demanded, roughly.
She gave a little scream. “Don’t you dare say such things to me.” Then she began to cry very prettily in a singsong, high-pitched voice. “Monster––nobody loves us––nobody loves us––we can’t have a merry Christmas after all.”
“I shan’t be home for dinner,” Steve added more politely. “Miss Faithful’s absence just now makes things quite rushed––I’ll work until late.”