The calm male observer might marvel at Bessie's elation over the prospect of sitting in Mrs. Anstruthers Leason's box at the performance of "Faust" given by the French Opera Company on tour. But no candid woman will. It could be explained partly by the natural desire to associate with entertaining, well-dressed folk, who were generally considered to be "the best," "the leaders" of local society. Sitting there in the stuffy box, which was a poor place for seeing or hearing, Bessie felt the satisfaction of being in the right company. She had discovered in one of the serried rows of the first balcony Kitty Sanders, whom she had known as a girl in Kansas City, where Bessie had once lived in the peregrinations of the Bissell family. Kitty had married a prosperous dentist and enjoyed with him an income nearly twice that of Rob Falkner. Kitty, scanning the boxes closely, also spied Bessie, and exclaimed to her husband:—
"Why, there's Bessie Bissell in that box! You know she married a young fellow, an engineer or something." And she added either aloud or to herself, "They seem to bein it,—that's the Leason box." While the alluring strains of the overture floated across the house, she mused at the strange mutations of fortune, which had landed Bessie Bissell there and herself here beside the dentist,—with some envy, in spite of three beloved children at home and a motorcar….
To the dispassionate male observer this state of mind might be more comprehensible if Bessie had appeared in Mrs. Corporation's box on a gala night at the Metropolitan, or in the Duchess of Thatshire's box at Covent Garden. But the strange fact of democracy is that instead of discouraging social desires it has multiplied them ten thousand fold. Every city in the land has its own Mrs. Anstruthers Leason or Mrs. Corporation, to form the local constellation, towards which the active-minded women of a certain type will always strive or gravitate, as you choose to put it. This being so, the American husband, one might suppose, would sigh for an absolute monarchy, where there is but one fixed social firmament, admission to which is determined by a despot's edict. Then the great middle class could rest content, knowing that forever, no matter what their gifts might be, their wives could not aspire to social heights. With us the field is clear, the race open to money and brains, and the result? Each one can answer for himself.
Isabelle, returning to her home that fall, with a slight surplus of vitality, was eager for life. "I have been dead so long," she said to her husband. "I want to see people!" Born inside the local constellation, as she had been, that was not difficult. Yet she realized soon enough that the Prices, prominent as they were, had never belonged to the heart of the constellation. It remained for her to penetrate there, under the guidance of the same Nannie Lawton whom as a girl she had rather despised. For every constellation has its inner circle, the members of which touch telepathically all other inner circles. The fact that Nannie Lawton called her by her first name would help her socially more, than the Colonel's record as a citizen or her husband's position in the railroad or their ample means. Before her second winter of married life had elapsed, she had begun to exhaust this form of excitement, to find herself always tired. After all, although the smudge of St. Louis on the level alluvial plains of America was a number of times larger than the smudge of Torso, the human formula, at least in its ornamental form, remained much the same. She was patroness where she should be patroness, she was invited where she would have felt neglected not to be invited, she entertained very much as the others she knew entertained, and she and her husband had more engagements than they could keep. She saw this existence stretching down the years with monotonous iteration, and began to ask herself what else there was to satisfy the thirst for experience which had never been assuaged.
Bessie, with a keener social sense, kept her eye on the game,—she had to, and her little triumphs satisfied her. Nan Lawton varied the monotony of "the ordinary round" by emotional dissipations that Isabelle felt herself to be above. Other women of their set got variety by running about the country to New York or Washington, to a hotel in Florida or in the mountains of Carolina, or as a perpetual resource to Paris and Aix and Trouville and London….
Isabelle was too intelligent, too much the daughter of her father, to believe that a part of the world did not exist outside the social constellation, and an interesting part, too. Some of those outside she touched as time went on. She was one of the board of governors for the Society of Country Homes for Girls, and here and on the Orphanage board she met energetic and well-bred young married women, who apparently genuinely preferred their charities, their reading clubs, the little country places where they spent the summers, to the glory of Mrs. Anstruthers Leason's opera box or dinner dance. As she shot about the city on her errands, social and philanthropic, Isabelle sometimes mused on the lives of the "others,"—all those thousands that filled the streets and great buildings of the city. Of course the poor,—that was simple enough; the struggle for life settled how one would live with ruthless severity. If it was a daily question how you could keep yourself housed and fed, why it did not matter what you did with your life. In the ranks above the poor, the little people who lived in steam-heated apartments and in small suburban boxes had their small fixed round of church and friends, still closely circumscribed and to Isabelle, in her present mood,—simply dreadful. When she expressed this to Fosdick, whom she was taking one morning to a gallery to see the work of a local artist that fashionable people were patronizing, he had scoffed at her:—
"Madame la princesse," he said, waving his hand towards the throng of morning shoppers, "don't you suppose that the same capacity for human sensation exists in every unit of that crowd bent towards Sneeson's as in you?"
"No," protested Isabelle, promptly; "they haven't the same experience."
"As thrilling a drama can be unrolled in a twenty-five dollar flat as in a palace."
"Stuff! There isn't one of those women who wouldn't be keen to try the palace!"
"As you ought to be to try the flat, in a normally constituted society."
"What do you mean by a normally constituted society?"
"One where the goal of ease is not merely entertainment."
"You are preaching now, aren't you?" demanded Isabelle. "Society has always been pretty much the same, hasn't it? First necessities, then comforts, then luxuries, and then—"
"Well, what?"
"Oh, experience, art, culture, I suppose."
"Isabelle," the big man smilingly commented, "you are the same woman you were six years ago."
"I am not!" she protested, really irritated. "I have done a lot of thinking, and I have seen a good deal of life. Besides I am a good wife, and a mother, which I wasn't six years ago, and a member of the Country Homes Society and the Orphanage, and a lot more." They laughed at her defence, and Isabelle added as a concession: "I know that there are plenty of women not in society who lead interesting lives, are intelligent and all that. But I am a good wife, and a good mother, and I am intelligent, and what is more, I see amusing people and more of them than the others,—the just plain women. What would you have me do?"
"Live," Fosdick replied enigmatically.
"We all live."
"Very few do."
"You mean emotional—heart experiences, like Nan's affairs? … Sometimes I wonder if that wouldn't be—interesting. But it would give John such a shock! … Well, here are the pictures. There's Mrs. Leason's portrait,—flatters her, don't you think?"
Fosdick, leaning his fat hands on his heavy stick, slowly made the round of the canvasses, concluding with the portrait of Mrs. Leason.
"Got some talent in him," he pronounced; "a penny worth. If he can only keep away from this sort of thing," pointing with his stick to the portrait, "he might paint in twenty years."
"But why shouldn't he do portraits? They all have to, to live."
"It isn't the portrait,—it's the sort of thing it brings with it. You met him, I suppose?"
"Yes; dined with him at Mrs. Leason's last week."
"I thought so. That's the beginning of his end."
"You silly! Art has always been parasitic,—why shouldn't the young man go to pleasant people's houses and have a good time and be agreeable and get them to buy his pictures?"
"Isabelle, you have fallen into the bad habit of echoing phrases. 'Art has always been parasitic.' That's the second commonplace of the drawing-room you have got off this morning."
"Come over here and tell me something…. I can't quarrel with you,Dickie!" Isabelle said, leading the way to a secluded bench.
"If I were not modest, I should say you were flirting with me."
"I never flirt with any man; I am known as the Saint, the Puritan,—I might try it, but I couldn't—with you…. Tell me about Vick. Have you seen him?"
"Yes," Fosdick replied gravely. "I ran across him in Venice."
"How was he?"
"He looked well, has grown rather stout…. The first time I saw him was on the Grand Canal; met him in a smart gondola, with men all togged out, no end of a get-up!"
"You saw themboth?"
"Of course,—I looked him up at once. They have an old place on the Giudecca, you know. I spent a week with them. He's still working on the opera,—it doesn't get on very fast, I gather. He played me some of the music,—it's great, parts of it. And he has written other things."
"I know all that," Isabelle interrupted impatiently. "But is he happy?"
"A man like Vickers doesn't tell you that, you know."
"But you can tell—how did they seem?"
"Well," Fosdick replied slowly, "when I saw them in the gondola the first time, I thought—it was too bad!"
"I was afraid so," Isabelle cried. "Why don't they marry and come to New York or go to London or some place and make a life?—people can't live like that."
"I think he wants to marry her," Fosdick replied.
"But she won't?"
"Precisely,—not now."
"Why—what?"
Fosdick avoided the answer, and observed, "Vick seems awfully fond of the little girl, Delia."
"Poor, poor Vick!" Isabelle sighed. "He ought to leave that creature."
"He won't; Vick was the kind that the world sells cheap,—it's best kind. He lives the dream and believes his shadows; it was always so. It will be so until the end. Life will stab him at every corner."
"Dear, dear Vick!" Isabelle said softly; "some days I feel as if I would have done as he did."
"But fortunately there is John to puncture your dream with solid fact."
"John even might not be able to do it! … I am going over to see Vick this summer."
"Wouldn't that make complications—family ones?"
Isabelle threw up her head wilfully.
"Dickie, I think there is something in me deeper than my love for John or for the child,—and that is the feeling I have about Vick!"
Fosdick looked at her penetratingly.
"You ought not to have married, Isabelle."
"Why? Every one marries—and John and I are very happy…. Come; there are some people I don't want to meet."
As they descended the steps into the murky light of the noisy city,Isabelle remarked:—
"Don't forget to-night, promptly at seven,—we are going to the theatre afterwards. I shall show you some of our smart people and let you see if they aren't more interesting than the mob."
She nodded gayly and drove off. As she went to a luncheon engagement, she thought of Vickers, of Fosdick's remarks about living, and a great wave of dissatisfaction swept over her. "It's this ugly city," she said to herself, letting down the window. "Or it's nerves again,—I must do something!" That phrase was often on her lips these days. In her restlessness nothing seemed just right,—she was ever trying to find something beyond the horizon. As Fosdick would have said, "The race vitality being exhausted in its primitive force, nothing has come to take its place." But at luncheon she was gay and talkative, the excitement of human contact stimulating her. And afterwards she packed the afternoon with trivial engagements until it was time to dress for her guests.
The dinner and the theatre might have passed off uneventfully, if it had not been for Fosdick. That unwieldy social vessel broke early in the dinner. Isabelle had placed him next Mrs. Leason because the lady liked celebrities, and Fosdick, having lately been put gently but firmly beyond the confines of the Tzar's realm for undue intimacy with the rebellious majority of the Tzar's subjects, might be counted such. For the time being he had come to a momentary equilibrium in the city of his birth. Fosdick and Mrs. Leason seemed to find common ground, while the other men, the usual speechless contingent of tired business men, allowed themselves to be talked at by the women. Presently Fosdick's voice boomed forth:—
"Let me tell you a story which will illustrate my point, Mrs. Leason. Some years ago I was riding through the Kentucky mountains, and after a wretched luncheon in one of the log-and-mud huts I was sitting on the bench in front of the cabin trying to make peace with my digestion. The ground in that spot sloped down towards me, and on the side of this little hill there lay a large hog, a razor-back sow. There were eight little pigs clustered in voracious attitudes about her, and she could supply but six at a time,—I mean that she was provided by nature with but six teats."
Mrs. Leason visibly moved away from her neighbor, and for the rest of his story Fosdick had a silent dinner table.
"The mother was asleep," Fosdick continued, turning his great head closer to Mrs. Leason, "probably attending to her digestion as I was to mine, and she left her offspring to fight it out among themselves for the possession of her teats. There was a lively scrap, a lot of hollerin' and squealin' from that bunch of porkers, grunts from the ins and yaps from the outs, you know. Every now and then one of the outs would make a flying start, get a wedge in and take a nip, forcing some one of his brothers out of the heap so that he would roll down the hill into the path. Up he'd get and start over, and maybe he would dislodge some other porker. And the old sow kept grunting and sleeping peacefully in the sun while her children got their dinner in the usual free-fight fashion.
"Now," Fosdick raised his heavy, square-pointed finger and shook it at the horrified Mrs. Leason and also across the table, noticing what seemed to him serious interest in his allegory, "I observed that there was a difference among those little porkers,—some were fat and some were peaked, and the peaked fellers got little show at the mother. Now what I ask myself is,—were they weak because they couldn't manage to get a square feed, or were they hustled out more than the others because they were naturally weak? I leave that to my friends the sociologists to determine—"
"Isabella," Lane interposed from his end of the table, "if Mr. Fosdick has finished his pig story, perhaps—"
Isabelle, divided between a desire to laugh and a very vivid sense of Mrs. Leason's feelings, rose, but Fosdick had not finished and she sat down again.
"But what I meant to say was this, madam,—there's only one difference between that old sow and her brood and society as it is run at present, and that is there are a thousand mouths to every teat, and a few big, fat fellows are getting all the food."
He looked up triumphantly from his exposition. There was a titter at Mrs. Lawton's end of the table. This lady had been listening to an indecent story told in French-English when Fosdick had upset things. Now she remarked in an audible tone:—
"Disgusting, I say!"
"Eh! What's the matter? Don't you believe what I told you?" Fosdick demanded.
"Oh, yes, Dickie,—anything you say,—only don't repeat it!" Isabelle exclaimed, rising from the table.
"Does he come from a farm?" one woman murmured indignantly. "Suchgros mots!" She too had been listening to the story of adultery at Mrs. Lawton's end of the table. Isabelle, who had taken in the whole situation from her husband's shocked face, Nan Lawton's sly giggle over the salacious tidbit, and Mrs. Leason's offended countenance, felt that she must shriek to relieve her feelings.
The party finally reached the theatre and saw a "sex" play, which caused a furious discussion among the women. "No woman would have done that." "The man was not worth the sacrifice," etc. And Fosdick gloomily remarked in Isabelle's ears: "Rot like this is all you see on the modern stage. And it's because women want it,—they must forever be fooling with sex. Why don't they—"
"Hush, Dickie! you have exploded enough to-night. Don't say that to Mrs.Leason!"
Her world appeared to her that night a harlequin tangle, and, above all, meaningless—yes, dispiritedly without sense. John, somehow, seemed displeased with her, as if she were responsible for Dickie's breaks. She laughed again as she thought of the sow story, and the way the women took it. "What a silly world,—talk and flutter and gadding, all about nothing!"
Isabelle did not see much of the Falkners as time went on. Little lines of social divergence began to separate them more and more widely. "After all, one sees chiefly the people who do the same things one does," Isabelle explained to herself. Bessie thought Isabelle "uncertain," perhaps snobbish, and felt hurt; though she remarked to Rob merely, "The Lanes are very successful, of course."
Affairs in the Buena Vista Pleasance house had progressed meantime. There were, naturally, so many meals to be got and eaten, so many little illnesses of the children, and other roughnesses of the road of life. There was also Bessie's developing social talent, and above all there was the infinitely complex action and reaction of the man and the wife upon each other. Seen as an all-seeing eye might observe, with all the emotional shading, the perspective of each act, the most commonplace household created by man and woman would be a wonderful cosmography. But the novelist, even he who has the courage to write a dull book, can touch but here and there, on the little promontories of daily life, where it seems to him the spiritual lava boils up near the surface and betrays most poignantly the nature of the fire beneath….
It was a little over three years since the Falkners had moved into the Buena Vista Pleasance house. Husband and wife sat in the front room after their silent dinner alone, with the September breeze playing through the windows, which after a hot day had been thrown open. There was the debris of a children's party in the room and the hall,—dolls and toys, half-nibbled cakes and saucers of ice-cream. Bessie, who was very neat about herself, was quite Southern in her disregard for order. She was also an adorable hostess for children, because she gave them loose rein.
"What is it you wish to say?" she asked her husband in a cold, defensive tone that had grown almost habitual.
Though pale she was looking very pretty in a new dress that she had worn at a woman's luncheon, where she had spent the first part of the afternoon. She had been much admired at the luncheon, had taken the lead in the talk about a new novel which was making a ten days' sensation. Her mind was still occupied partly with what she had said about the book. These discussions with Rob on household matters, at increasingly frequent periods, always froze her. "He makes me show my worst side," she said to herself. At the children's tea, moreover, an attack of indigestion had developed. Bessie was fond of rich food, and in her nervous condition, which was almost chronic, it did not agree with her, and made her irritable.
"I have been going over our affairs," Falkner began in measured tones. That was the usual formula! Bessie thought he understood women very badly. She wondered if he ever did anything else those evenings he spent at home except "go over their affairs." She wished he would devote himself to some more profitable occupation.
"Well?"
Falkner looked tired and listless. The summer was always his hardest time, and this summer the road had been pushing its terminal work with actual ferocity. He wore glasses now, and was perceptibly bald. He was also slouchy about dress; Bessie could rarely induce him to put on evening clothes when they dined alone.
"Well?" she asked again. It was not polite of him to sit staring there as if his mind were a thousand miles away. A husband should show some good manners to a woman, even if she was his wife!
Their chairs were not far apart, but the tones of their voices indicated an immeasurable gulf that had been deepening for years. Falkner cleared his voice.
"As I have told you so often, Bessie, we are running behind all the time.It has got to a point where it must stop."
"What do you suggest?"
"You say that three servants are necessary?"
"You can see for yourself that they are busy all the time. There's work for four persons in this house, and there ought to be a governess beside. I don't at all like the influence of that school on Mildred—"
"Ought!" he exclaimed.
"If people live in a certain kind of house, in a certain neighborhood, they must live up to it,—that is all. If you wish to live as the Johnstons live, why that is another matter altogether."
Her logic was imperturbable. There was an unexpressed axiom: "If you want a dowd for your wife who can't dress or talk and whom nobody cares to know,—why you should have married some one else." Bessie awaited his reply in unassailable attractiveness.
"Very well," Falkner said slowly. "That being so, I have made up my mind what to do."
Mildred entered the room at this moment, looking for a book. She was eight, and one swift glance at her parents' faces was enough to show her quick intelligence that they were "discussing."
"What is it, Mildred?" Bessie asked in the cooing voice she always had for children.
"I want myJungle Book," the little girl replied, taking a book from the table.
"Run along, girlie," Bessie said; and Mildred, having decided that it was not an opportune moment to make affectionate good-nights, went upstairs.
"Well, what is it?" Bessie demanded in the other tone.
"I have a purchaser for the house, at fair terms."
"Please remember that it ismyhouse."
"Wait! Whatever remains after paying off the mortgage and our debts, not more than six thousand dollars, I suppose, will be placed to your credit in the trust company."
"Why should I pay all our debts?"
Her husband looked at her, and she continued hastily:—
"What do you mean to do then? We can't live on the street."
"We can hire a smaller house somewhere else, or live in a flat."
Bessie waved her hand in despair; they had been over this so many times and she had proved so conclusively the impossibility of their squeezing into a flat. Men never stay convinced!
"Or board."
"Never!" she said firmly.
"You will have to choose."
This was the leading topic of their discussion, and enough has been said to reveal the lines along which it developed. There was much of a discursive nature, naturally, introduced by Bessie, who sought thereby to fog the issue and effect a compromise. She had found that was a good way to deal with a husband. But to-night Falkner kept steadily at his object.
"No, no, no!" he iterated in weary cadence. "It's no use to keep on expecting; five thousand is all they will pay me, and it is all I am really worth to them. And after this terminal work is finished, they may have nothing to offer me…. We must make a clean sweep to start afresh, right, on the proper basis." After a moment, he added by way of appeal, "And I think that will be the best for us, also."
"You expect me to do all the work?"
"Expect!" Falkner leaned his head wearily against the chair-back. Words seemed useless at this point. Bessie continued rather pitilessly:—
"Don't you want a home? Don't you want your children brought up decently with friends about them?"
"God knows I want a home!" the husband murmured.
"I think I have made a very good one,—other people think so."
"That's the trouble—too good for me!"
"I should think it would be an incentive for a man—"
"God!" Falkner thundered; "that you should say that!"
It had been in her heart a long time, but she had never dared to express it before,—the feeling that other men, no abler than Rob, contrived to give their wives, no more seductive than she, so much more than she had had.
"Other men find the means—"
She was thinking of John Lane, of Purrington,—a lively young broker of their acquaintance,—of Dr. Larned,—all men whose earning power had leaped ahead of Falkner's. Bessie resented the economic dependence of married women on their husbands. She believed in the foreigndotsystem. "My daughters shall never marry as I did," she would say frankly to her friends. "There can be no perfectly happy marriage unless the woman is independent of her husband in money matters to a certain extent." … For she felt that she had a right to her ideals, so long as they were not bad, vicious; a right to her own life as distinct from her husband's life, or the family life. "The old idea of the woman's complete subordination has gone," she would say. "It is better for the men, too, that women are no longer mere possessions without wills of their own." It was such ideas as this that earned for Bessie among her acquaintances the reputation of being "intelligent" and "modern."
And Falkner, a vision of the mountains and the lonely cabin before his eyes, remarked with ironic calm:—
"And why should I earn more than I do, assuming that I could sell myself at a higher figure?"
For the man, too, had his dumb idea,—the feeling that something precious inside him was being murdered by this pressing struggle to earn more, always more. As man he did not accept the simple theory that men were better off the harder they were pushed, that the male brute needed the spur of necessity to function, that all the man was good for was to be the competent forager. No! Within him there was a protest to the whole spirit of his times,—to the fierce competitive struggle. Something inside him proclaimed that he was not a mere maker of dollars, that life was more than food and lodging, even for those he loved most.
"What do I get out of it?" he added bitterly. "Perhaps I have done too much."
"Oh, if that is the way you feel,—if you don't love me!" Bessie exclaimed with wounded pride. "Probably you are tired of me. When a man is sick of his wife, he finds his family a burden, naturally."
And there they paused at the brink of domestic vulgarity.
Falkner saw the girl on the veranda of the mountain hotel, with her golden hair, her fresh complexion, her allurement. Bessie, most men would think, was even more desirable this minute than then as an unformed girl. The arched eyebrows, so clearly marked, the full lips, the dimpled neck, all spake:—
"Come kiss me, and stop talking like that!"
For a moment the old lure seized the man, the call of the woman who had once been sweet to him. Then his blood turned cold within him. That was the last shame of marriage,—that a wife should throw this lure into the reasoning, a husband to console himself—that way! Falkner rose to his feet.
"I shall make arrangements to sell the house."
"Very well; then I shall take the children and go to my mother in Denver."
"As you please."
Without looking again at his wife, he left the room.
Bessie had played blindly her last card, the wife's last card, and lost! There was bitterness and rebellion in her heart. She had loved her husband,—hadn't she shown it by marrying him instead of the mine owner? She had been a good woman, not because she hadn't had her chances of other men's admiration, as she sometimes let her husband know. Dickie Lawton had made love to her outrageously, and the last time the old Senator had been in St. Louis,—well, he would never come again to her house. Not a shadow of disloyalty had ever crossed her heart.
Bessie thought that a good wife must be chaste, of course; other matters of wifely duty were less distinct.
No! her husband did not care for her any more,—that was the real cause of their troubles. It was hard to wake up to such a fact after nine years of marriage with a man whom you loved!
There was a tragedy between, but not the one that Bessie suspected, nor the mere tragedy of extravagance. Each realized dimly that the other hindered rather than promoted that something within which each held tenaciously as most precious. Instead of giving mutually, they stole mutually, and the end of that sort of life must be concubinage or the divorce court—or a spiritual readjustment beyond the horizon of either Falkner or his wife.
* * * * *
"Did you know that the Falkners were going to give up their house?" Lane asked his wife.
"No, indeed. I saw Bessie at the symphony the other day, and she spoke of going out to Denver to visit her mother; but she didn't say anything about the house. Are you sure?"
"Yes; Falkner told Bainbridge he was selling it. And he wanted Bainbridge to see if there was an opening for him on the road in the East. I am afraid things haven't gone well with them."
"After all the trouble they had building, and such a pretty house! What a shame!"
Lane was in his outing clothes, about to go to the country club for an afternoon of golf with the Colonel. He looked very strong and handsome in his Scotch tweeds. Lately he had begun to take more exercise than he had found time for the first years of his marriage, had developed a taste for sport, and often found a day or two to fish or hunt when friends turned up from the East. Isabelle encouraged this taste, though she saw all the less of her husband; she had a feeling that it was good for him to relax, made him more of the gentleman, less of the hard-working clerk. The motor was at the door, but he dawdled.
"It is a pity about the Falkners,—I am afraid they are not getting on well together. He's a peculiar fellow. Bainbridge tells me his work is only pretty good,—doesn't put his back into it the way a man must who means to get up in his profession these days. There is a lot doing in his line, too. It will be a shame if trouble comes to Bessie."
"The old difficulty, I suppose," Isabelle remarked; "not enough money—same story everywhere!"
It was the same story everywhere, even in these piping times of prosperity, with fortunes doubling, salaries going up, and the country pouring out its wealth. So few of her friends, even the wealthy ones, seemed to have enough money for their necessities or desires. If they had four servants, they needed six; if they had one motor, they must have two; and the new idea of country houses had simply doubled or trebled domestic budgets. It wasn't merely in the homes of ambitious middle-class folk that the cry went up,—"We must have more!" Isabelle herself had begun to feel that the Colonel might very well have given her a package of stocks and bonds at her wedding. Even with her skilful management, and John's excellent salary, there was so much they could not do that seemed highly desirable to do. "Everything costs so these days!" And to live meant to spend,—to live!
Isabelle did not go to Vickers as she firmly intended to that summer. Lane offered a stubborn if silent opposition to the idea of her joining her brother,—"so long as that woman is with him." He could not understand Isabelle's passionate longing for her brother, nor the fact that his loyalty to his mistake endeared Vickers all the more to her. She divined the ashes in her brother's heart, the waste in which he dwelt, and the fact that he "had made a complete mess of life" did not subtract from her love. After all, did the others, their respectable acquaintance, often make much of living?
It was not John's opposition, however, that prevented the journey, but the alarming weakness of the Colonel. In spite of his activity and his exercise the old man had been growing perceptibly weaker, and his digestive trouble had developed until the doctors hinted at cancer. To leave the Colonel now and go to the son he had put out of his life would be mere brutality. Vickers might come back, but Mrs. Price felt that this would cause the Colonel more pain than pleasure.
During the spring Isabelle made many expeditions about the city in company with her father, who gave as an excuse for penetrating all sorts of new neighborhoods that he wished to look at his real estate, which was widely scattered. But this was merely an excuse, as Isabelle easily perceived; what he really cared about was to see the city itself, the building, the evidences of growth, of thriving.
"When your mother and I came to live in the city," he would say, laying a large white hand on his daughter's knee, "it was all swamp out this way,—we used to bring Ezra with us in the early spring and pick pussy-willows. Now look at it!" And what Isabelle saw, when she looked in the direction that the old man waved his hand, was a row of ugly brick apartment houses or little suburban cottages, or brick stores and tenements. There was nothing in the scene, for her, to inspire enthusiasm, and yet the Colonel would smile and gaze fondly out of those kindly blue eyes at the acres of human hive. It was not pride in his shrewd foresight in investing his money, so much as a generous sympathy for the growth of the city, the forthputting of a strong organism.
"I bought this tract in eighty-two," he said, pointing to a stretch of factories and grain elevators. "Had to borrow part of the money to do it. Parrott thought I was a fool, but I knew the time would come when it would be sold by the foot,—folks are born and must work and live," he mused. He made the man drive the car slowly through the rutty street while he looked keenly at the hands pouring from the mills, the elevators, the railroad yards. "Too many of those Polaks," he commented, "but they are better than niggers. It is a great country!"
In the old man's pride there was more than selfish satisfaction, more than flamboyant patriotism over his "big" country; there was an almost pathetic belief in the goodness of life, merely as life. These breeding millions, in this teeming country, were working out their destiny,—on the whole a better destiny than the world had yet seen. And the old man, who had lived his life and fought vitally, felt deep in the inner recesses of his being that all was good; the more chance for the human organism to be born and work out its day, the better. In the eyes of the woman of the newer generation this was a singular-pantheism,—incomprehensible. Unless one were born under favorable conditions, what good was there in the struggle? Mere life was not interesting.
They went, too, to see the site of the coming Exposition. The great trees were being cut down and uprooted to give space for the vast buildings. The Colonel lamented the loss of the trees. "Your mother and I used to come out here Sundays in summer," he said regretfully. "It was a great way from town then—there was only a steam road—and those oaks were grateful, after the heat. I used to lie on the ground and your mother would read to me. She had a very sweet voice, Isabelle!"
But he believed in the Exposition, even if the old trees must be sacrificed for it. He had contributed largely to the fund, and had been made a director, though the days of his leadership were over. "It is good for people to see how strong they are," he said. "These fairs are our Olympic games!"
* * * * *
At first he did not wish to leave the city, which was part of his bone and flesh; but as the summer drew on and he was unable to endure the motor his thoughts turned back to his Connecticut hills, to the old farm and the woods and the fields. Something deeper than all was calling to him to return to the land that was first in his blood. So they carried him—now a bony simulacrum of his vigorous self—to the old house at Grafton. For a few weeks he lay wrapped in rugs on the veranda, his eyes on Dog Mountain. At first he liked to talk with the farm-hands, who slouched past the veranda. But more and more his spirit withdrew even from this peaceful scene of his activity, and at last he died, as one who has no more concern about life….
To Isabelle, who had been with him constantly these last fading months, there was much that remained for a long time inexplicable in her father's attitude towards life. He seemed to regret nothing, not even the death of his elder son, nor his estrangement from Vickers, and he had little of the old man's pessimism. There were certain modern manifestations that she knew he disliked; but he seemed to have a fine tolerance even for them, as being of no special concern to him. He had lived his life, such as it was, without swerving, without doubts or hesitations, which beset the younger generation, and now that it was over he had neither regret nor desire to grasp more.
When the Colonel's will was opened, it caused surprise not only in his family, but in the city where he had lived. It was long talked about. In the first place his estate was much larger than even those nearest him had supposed; it mounted upwards from eight millions. The will apparently had been most carefully considered, largely rewritten after the departure of Vickers. His son was not mentioned in the document. Nor were there the large bequests, at least outright, to charities that had been expected of so public spirited a man. The will was a document in the trust field. To sum it all up, it seemed as if the old man had little faith in the immediate generation, even in his daughter and her successful husband. For he left Isabelle only the farm at Grafton and a few hundred thousand dollars. To be sure, after his wife's death the bulk of the estate would be held in trust for her child, or children, should her marriage prove more fruitful in the future. Failing heirs, he willed that the bulk of the estate should go to certain specified charities,—an Old Man's Home, The Home for Crippled Children, etc. And it was arranged that the business should be continued under the direction of the trustees. The name of Parrott and Price should still stand for another generation!
"A singular will!" Lane, who was one of the trustees, said to his wife.
Isabelle was more hurt than she cared to have known. She had always supposed that some day she would be a rich woman in her own right. But it was the silent comment, the mark of disapproval, that she read in the lines of the will which hurt. The Colonel had never criticised, never chided her; but she had felt at times that he did not like the kind of life she had elected to lead latterly.
"He thought we were extravagant, probably," she replied to her husband.
"I can't see why,—we never went to him for help!"
She knew that was not exactly the reason,—extravagance. The old man did not like the modern spirit—at least the spirit of so many of her friends—of spending for themselves. The Colonel did not trust the present generation; he preferred that his money should wait until possibly the passing of the years had brought wisdom.
"A selfish will!" the public said.
Fosdick had called Cornelia Woodyard the "Vampire,"—why, none of her admirers could say. She did not look the part this afternoon, standing before the fire in her library, negligently holding a cup of tea in one hand, while she nibbled gourmandizingly at a frosted cake. She had come in from an expedition with Cairy, and had not removed her hat and gloves, merely letting her furs slip off to the floor. While she had her tea, Cairy was looking through the diamond panes of a bank of windows at a strip of small park, which was dripping in the fog of a dubious December day. Conny, having finished her tea, examined lazily some notes, pushed them back into their envelopes with a disgusted curl of her long lips, and glancing over her shoulder at Cairy drawled in an exhausted voice:—
"Poke the fire, please, Tommy!"
Cairy did as he was told, then lighted a cigarette and stood expectantly. Conny seemed lost in a maze of dreary thoughts, and the man looked about the room for amusement. It was a pleasant little room, with sufficient color of flowers and personal disorderliness of letters and books and papers to soften the severity of the Empire furniture. Evidently the architect who had done over this small down-town house had been supplemented by the strong hand of its mistress. Outside and inside he had done his best to create something French out of the old-fashioned New York block house, but Cornelia Woodyard had Americanized his creation enough to make it intimate, livable.
"Can't you say something, Tommy?" Conny murmured in her childish treble.
"I have said a good deal first and last, haven't I?"
"Don't be cross, Tommy! I am down on my job to-day."
"Suppose you quit it! Shall we go to the Bahamas? Or Paris? Or Rio?"
"Do you think that you could manage the excursion, Tommy?" Although she smiled good-naturedly, the remark seemed to cut. The young man slumped into a chair and leaned his head on his hands.
"Besides, where would Percy come in?"
Cairy asked half humorously, "And where, may I ask, do I come in?"
"Oh, Tommy, don't look like that!" Conny complained. "Youdocome in, you know!"
Cairy brought his chair and placed himself near the fire; then leaned forward, looking intently into the woman's eyes.
"I think sometimes the women must be right about you, you know."
"What do they say?"
… "That you are a calculating machine,—one of those things they have in banks to do arithmetic stunts!"
"No, you don't, … silly! Tell me what Gossom said about the place."
"He didn't say much about that; he talked about G. Lafayette Gossom andThe People's Magazinechiefly…. The mess of pottage is three hundred a month. I am to be understudy to the great fount of ideas. When he has an inspiration he will push a bell, and I am to run and catch it as it flows red hot from his lips and put it into shape,—if I can."
Cairy nursed his injured leg with a disgusted air.
"Don't sniff, Tommy,—there are lots of men who would like to be in your shoes."
"I know…. Oh, I am not ungrateful for my daily bread. I kiss the hand that found it,—the hand of power!"
"Silly! Don't be literary with me. Perhaps I put the idea into old NoddyGossom's head when he was here the other night. You'll have to humor him,listen to his pomposity. But he has made a success of thatPeople'sMagazine. It is an influence, and it pays!"
"Four hundred thousand a year, chiefly automobile and corset ads, I should say."
"Nearly half a million a year!" Conny cried with the air of 'See what I have done for you!'
"Yes!" the Southerner remarked with scornful emphasis … "I shall harness myself once more to the car of triumphant prosperity, and stretch forth my hungry hands to catch the grains that dribble in the rear. Compromise! Compromise! All is Compromise!"
"Now you are literary again," Conny pronounced severely. "Your play wasn't a success,—there was no compromise about that! The managers don't want your new play. Gossom does want your little articles. You have to live, and you take the best you can get,—pretty good, too."
"Madam Materialist!"
Conny made a little face, and continued in the same lecturing tone.
"Had you rather go back to that cross-roads in the Virginia mountains—something Court-house—or go to London and write slop home to the papers, as Ted Stevens does?"
"You know why I don't go back to the something Courthouse and live on corn-bread and bacon!" Cairy sat down once more very near the blond woman and leaned forward slowly. Conny's mouth relaxed, and her eyes softened.
"You are dear," she said with a little laugh; "but you are silly about things." As the young man leaned still farther forward, his hand touching her arm, Conny's large brown eyes opened speculatively on him….
The other night he had kissed her for the first time, that is, really kissed her in unequivocal fashion, and she had been debating since whether she should mention the matter to Percy. The right moment for such a confidence had not yet come. She must tell him some day. She prided herself that her relation with her husband had always been honest and frank, and this seemed the kind of thing he ought to know about, if she were going to keep that relation what it had been. She had had tender intimacies—"emotional friendships," her phrase was—before this affair with Cairy. They had always been perfectly open: she had lunched and dined them, so to speak, in public as well as at the domestic table. Percy had rather liked her special friends, had been nice to them always.
But looking into the Southerner's eyes, she felt that there was something different in this case; it had troubled her from the time he kissed her, it troubled her now—what she could read in his eyes. He would not be content with that "emotional friendship" she had given the others. Perhaps, and this was the strangest thrill in her consciousness, she might not be content to have him satisfied so easily…. Little Wrexton Grant had sent her flowers and written notes—and kissed her strong fingers, once. Bertie Sollowell had dedicated one of his books to her (the author's copy was somewhere in Percy's study), and hinted that his life missed the guiding hand that she could have afforded him. He had since found a guiding hand that seemed satisfactory. Dear old Royal Salters had squired her, bought her silver in Europe, and Jevons had painted her portrait the year he opened his studio in New York, and kissed a very beautiful white shoulder,—purely by way of compliment to the shoulder. All these marks of gallantry had been duly reported to Percy, and laughed at together by husband and wife in that morning hour when Conny had her coffee in bed. Nevertheless, they had touched her vanity, as evidences that she was still attractive as a woman. No woman—few women at any rate—of thirty-one resents the fact that some man other than her husband can feel tenderly towards her. And "these friends"—the special ones—had all been respecters of the law; not one would have thought of coveting his neighbor's wife, any more than of looting his safe.
But with Tom Cairy it was different. Not merely because he was Southern and hence presumably ardent in temperament, nor because of his reputation for being "successful" with women; not wholly because he appealed to her on account of his physical disability,—that unfortunate slip by the negro nurse. But because there was in this man the strain of feminine understanding, of vibrating sentiment—the lyric chord of temperament—which made him lover first and last! That is why he had stirred most women he had known well,—women in whom the emotional life had been dormant, or unappeased, or petrified.
"You are such a dear!" Conny murmured, looking at him with her full soft eyes, realizing in her own way that in this fragile body there was the soul of the lover,—born to love, to burn in some fashion before some altar, always.
The special aroma that Cairy brought to his love-making was this sense that for the time it was all there was in life, that it shut out past and future. The special woman enveloped by his sentiment did not hear the steps of other women echoing through outer rooms. She was, for the moment, first and last. He was able to create this emotional delusion genuinely; for into each new love he poured himself, like a fiery liquor, that swept the heart clean.
"Dearest," he had murmured that night to Conny, "you are wonderful,—woman and man,—the soul of a woman, the mind of a man! To love you is to love life."
And Conny, in whose ears the style of lover's sighs was immaterial, was stirred with an unaccountable feeling. When Cairy put his hand on hers, and his lips quivered beneath his mustache, her face inevitably softened and her eyes widened like a child's eyes. For Conny, even Conny, with her robust intelligence and strong will to grasp that out of life which seemed good to her, wanted to love—in a way she had never loved before. Like many women she had passed thirty with a husband of her choice, two children, and an establishment entirely of her making before she became aware that she had missed something on the way,—a something that other women had. She had seen Severine Wilson go white when a certain man entered the room—then light brilliantly with joy when his eyes sought her…. That must be worth having, too! …
Her relations with her husband were perfect,—she had said so for years and every one said the same thing about the Woodyards. They were very intimate friends, close comrades. She knew that Percy respected and admired her more than any woman in the world, and paid her the last flattery of conceding to her will, respecting her intelligence. But there was something that he had not done, could not do, and that was a something that Cairy seemed able to do,—give her a sensation partly physical, wholly emotional, like the effect of stimulant, touching every nerve. Conny, with her sure grasp of herself, however, had no mind to submit blindly to this intoxication; she would examine it, like other matters,—was testing it now in her capacious intelligence, as the man bent his eyes upon her, so close to her lips.
Had she only been the "other sort," the conventional ordinary sort, she would have either gulped her sensation blindly,—"let herself go,"—or trembled with horror and run away as from some evil thing. Being as she was, modern, intellectual, proudly questioning all maxims, she kept this new phenomenon in her hand, saying, "What does it mean forme?" The note of the Intellectuals!
There was the soft sound of a footstep on the padded stairs, and PercyWoodyard glanced into the room.
"Hello, Tom!" he said briskly, and crossed to Conny, whose smooth brow he touched softly with the tips of his fingers. "How goes it, Tom?"
"You are home early," Conny complained in her treble drawl.
"Must go to Albany to-night," Percy explained, a weary note in his voice."Not dining out to-night, Tom?"
It was a little joke they had, that when Cairy was not with them he was "dining out."…
When Cairy had left, Conny rose from her lounging position as if to resume the burden of life.
"It's the Commission?" she inquired.
"Yes! I sent you the governor's letter."
For a time they discussed the political situation in the new Commission, to which Woodyard had recently been appointed, his first conspicuous public position. Then his wife observed wearily: "I was at Potts's this morning and saw Isabelle Lane there. She was in mourning."
"Her father died,—you know we saw it in the papers."
"She must be awfully rich."
"He left considerable property,—I don't know to whom."
"Well, they are in New York. Her husband has been made something or other in the railroad, so they are going to live here."
"He is a very able man, I am told."
After a time Conny drawled: "I suppose we must have 'em here to dinner,—they are at a hotel up town. Whom shall we have?"
Evidently after due consideration Conny had concluded that the Lanes must come under her cognizance. She ran over half a dozen names from her best dinner list, and added, "And Tom."
"Why Tom this time?" Percy demanded.
"He's met Isabelle—and we always have Tommy! You aren't jealous, are you,Percy?" She glanced at him in amusement.
"I must dress," Percy observed negligently, setting down his cup of tea.
"Come here and tell me you are not jealous," Conny commanded. As her husband smiled and brushed her fair hair with his lips, she muttered, "You silly!" just as she had to Cairy's unreasonableness. Why! She was Percy's destiny and he knew it…. She had a contempt for people who ruffled themselves over petty emotions. This sex matter had been exaggerated by Poets and Prudes, and their hysterical utterances should not inhibit her impulses.
Nevertheless she did not consider it a suitable opportunity to tell Percy about the kiss.
* * * * *
Percy Woodyard and Cornelia Pallanton had married on a new, radical basis. They had first met in the house of an intellectual woman, the wife of a university professor, where clever young persons were drawn in and taught to read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Ibsen and George Moore, and to engage gracefully in perilous topics. They had been rather conscious that they were radicals,—"did their own thinking," as they phrased it, these young persons. They were not willing to accept the current morality, not even that part of it engraved in law; but so far as regarded all of morality that lay outside the domain of sex their actions were not in conflict with society, though they were Idealists, and in most cases Sentimentalists. But in the matter of sex relation, which is the knot of the tangle for youth, they believed in the "development of the individual." It must be determined by him, or her, whether this development could be obtained best through regular or irregular relations. The end of all this individual development? "The fullest activity, the largest experience, the most complete presentation of personality," etc. Or as Fosdick railed, "Suck all and spit out what you don't like!"
So when these two young souls had felt sufficiently moved, one to the other, to contemplate marriage, they had had an "understanding": they would go through with the customary formula and oaths of marriage, to please their relatives and a foolish world; but neither was to be "bound" by any such piece of silly archaism as the marriage contract. Both recognized that both had diversified natures, which might require in either case more varied experience than the other could give. In their enlightened affection for each other, neither would stand in the light of the other's best good…. There are many such young people, in whom intellectual pride has erased deeper human instincts. But as middle life draws on, they conform—or seek refuge in the divorce court.
Neither Percy nor Cornelia had any intention of practising adultery as a habit: they merely wished to be honest with themselves, and felt superior to the herd in recognizing the errant or variant possibilities in themselves. Conny took pleasure in throwing temptation in Percy's way, in encouraging him to know other women,—secretly gratified that he proved hopelessly domestic. And on her side we have seen the innocent lengths to which she had hitherto gone.
For it proved as life began in earnest for these two that much of their clear philosophy crumbled. Instead of the vision of feminine Idealism that the young lawyer had worshipped, Conny developed a neat, practical nature, immensely capable of "making things go." As her husband was the most obvious channel through which things could move, her husband became her chief care. She had no theory of exploiting him,—she had no theories at all. She saw him as so much capacity to be utilized. Just as she never was entrapped into a useless acquaintance, never had a "wrong person" at her house, never wasted her energies on the mere ebullition of good feeling, so she never allowed Percy to waste his energies on fruitless works. Everything must count. Their life was a pattern of simple and pronounced design, from the situation of their house to the footing on which it was established and the people who were encouraged to attach themselves there.
Woodyard had been interested in social good works, and as a young man had served the Legal Aid Society. A merely worldly woman would have discouraged this mild weakness for philanthropy. But Conny knew her material; out of such as Percy, corporation lawyers—those gross feeders at the public trough—were not made. Woodyard was a man of fine fibre, rather unaggressive. He must either be steered into a shady pool of legal sinecure, or take the more dangerous course through the rapids of public life. It was the moment of Reform. Conny realized the capabilities of Reform, and Percy's especial fitness for it; Reform, if not remunerative, was fashionable and prominent.
So Conny had steered their little bark, hoisting sail to every favorable wind, no matter how slight the puff, until Woodyard now was a minor figure in the political world. When his name occurred in the newspapers, a good many people knew who he was, and his remarks at dinners and his occasional speeches were quoted from, if there was not more valuable matter. He had been spoken of for Congress. (Conny, of course, would never permit him to engulf himself in that hopeless sea.) Just what Conny designed as the ultimate end, she herself did not know; like all great generals, she was an opportunist and took what seemed to her worth taking from the fortunes of the day. The last good thing which had floated up on her shore was this Commissionership. She had fished that up with the aid of the amiable Senator, who had spoken a word here and a word there in behalf of young Woodyard.
Conny was very well pleased with herself as a wife, and she knew that her husband was pleased with her. Moreover, she had not the slightest intention of permitting anything to interfere with her wifely duties as she saw them….
Percy had gone upstairs to that roof story where in New York children are housed, to see his boy and girl. He was very fond of his children. When he came down, his thoughtful face was worried.
"The kids seem always to have colds," he remarked.
"I know it," Conny admitted. "I must take them to Dr. Snow to-morrow."(They had their own doctor, and also their own throat specialist.)
"I wonder if it is good for them here, so far down in the city,—they have only that scrap of park to play in."
Conny, who had been over this question a good many times, answered irrefutably,—
"There seem to be a good many children growing up all right in the same conditions."
She knew that Percy would like some excuse to escape into the country. Conny had no liking for suburban life, and with her husband's career at the critical point the real country was out of the question.
"I suppose Jack will have to go to boarding school another year," Percy said with a sigh.
He was not a strong man himself, though of solid build and barely thirty. He had that bloodless whiteness of skin so often found among young American men, which contrasted with his dark mustache, and after a long day's work like this his step dragged. He wore glasses over his blue eyes, and when he removed them the dark circles could be seen. Conny knew the limits of his strength and looked carefully to his physical exercise.
"You didn't get your squash this afternoon?"
When Percy was worried about anything, she immediately searched for a physical cause.
"No! I had to finish up things at the office so that I could get away to-night."
Then husband and wife went to their dinner, and Woodyard gave Conny a short-hand account of his doings, the people he had seen, what they had said, the events at the office. Conny required this account each day, either in the morning or in the evening. And Woodyard yielded quite unconsciously to his wife's strong will, to her singularly definite idea of "what is best." He admired her deeply, was grateful to her for that complete mastery of the detail of life which she had shown, aware that if it were not for the dominating personality of this woman he had somehow had the good fortune to marry, life would have been a smaller matter for him.
"Con," he said when they had gone back to the library for their coffee, "I am afraid this Commission is going to be ticklish business."
"Why?" she demanded alertly.
"There are some dreadful grafters on it,—I suspect that the chairman is a wolf. I suspect further that it has been arranged to whitewash certain rank deals."
"But why should the governor have appointed you?"
"Possibly to hold the whitewash brush."
"You think that the Senator knows that?"
"You can't tell where the Senator's tracks lead."
"Well, don't worry! Keep your eyes open. You can always resign, you know."
Woodyard went off to his train after kissing his wife affectionately. Conny called out as he was getting into his coat:—
"Will you be back Sunday? Shall I have the Lanes then?"
"Yes,—and you will go to the Hillyers to-morrow?"
"I think so,—Tom will take me."
After the door closed Conny went to her desk and wrote the note to Isabelle. Then after meditating a few moments, more notes of invitation. She had decided on her combination,—Gossom, the Silvers, the Hillyers (to get them off her mind), Senator Thomas, and Cairy. She did not take Percy's objection to Tom seriously.
She had decided to present a variety of people to the Lanes. Isabelle and she had never been intimate, and Conny had a woman's desire to show an accomplished superiority to the rich friend, who had been inclined to snub her in boarding school. Conny was eminently skilful in "combinations." Every one that composed her circle or even entered it might some day be of use in creating what is called "publicity." That, as Cornelia Woodyard felt, was the note of the day. "You must be talked about by the right people, if you want to be heard, if you want your show!" she had said to Cairy. Thanks to Lane's rapid rise in the railroad corporation, Isabelle had come legitimately within the zone of interest.
After she had settled this matter to her satisfaction, she turned to some house accounts and made various calculations. It was a wonder to every one who knew them how the Woodyards "could do so much on what they had." As a matter of fact, with the rising scale of living, it required all Conny's practical adroitness to make the household come out nearly even. Thanks to a great-aunt who admired Percy, they had been able to buy this house and alter it over, and with good business judgment it had been done so that the property was now worth nearly a third more than when they took it. But a second man-servant had been added, and Conny felt that she must have a motor; she pushed away the papers and glanced up, thinking, planning.
The Senator and she had talked investments the last time they had met. She had a little money of her own. If the old fox would only take it and roll it up into a big snowball! Isabelle, now, with all that wealth! Conny pursed her lips in disgust to think that so much of the ammunition of war had fallen into such incompetent hands. "Yes," she said to herself, "the Senator must show me how to do it." Perhaps it flitted vaguely through her mind that Percy might object to using stock market tips from the Senator. But Percy must accept her judgment on this matter. They could not go on any longer with only twenty thousand a year.
Turning out the lights, she went to her bedroom. It was very plain and bare, with none of the little toilette elegances or chamber comforts that women usually love. Conny never spent except where it showed saliently. Her evening gowns were sometimes almost splendid, but her dressing gowns were dowdy, and poor little Bessie Falkner spent twice as much on lingerie.
Having discharged the duties of her day, her mind returned to Cairy, to his work for Gossom, to his appealing self, and her lips relaxed in a gentle smile. Hers was a simple nature, the cue once caught. She had come of rather plain people, who knew the worth of a dollar, and had spent their lives saving or investing money. The energy of the proletariat had been handed to her undiminished. The blood was evident in the large bones, the solid figure, and tenacious fingers, as well as in the shrewdness with which she had created this household. It was her instinct to push out into the troubled waters of the material world. She never weakened herself by questioning values. She knew—what she wanted.
Nevertheless, as she reached up her hand to turn out the night light, she was smiling with dreamy eyes, and her thoughts were no longer practical!