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Title: Linda Condon

Author: Joseph Hergesheimer

Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7171]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on March 20, 2003]
[Date last updated: December 1, 2004]

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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LINDA CONDON ***




This eBook was produced by Anne Folland, Tiffany Vergon,
Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team




THE WORKS OF JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER

THE LAY ANTHONY

MOUNTAIN BLOOD

THE THREE BLACK PENNYS

GOLD AND IRON

JAVA HEAD

THE HAPPY END

LINDA CONDON





LINDA CONDON

BY

JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER



_To_ CARL VAN VECHTEN

_This, Linda Condon's Gravest Bow._





LINDA CONDON




I


A black bang was, but not ultimately, the most notable feature of
her uncommon personality--straight and severe and dense across her
clear pale brow and eyes. Her eyes were the last thing to remember
and wonder about; in shade blue, they had a velvet richness, a
poignant intensity of lovely color, that surprised the heart. Aside
from that she was slim, perhaps ten years old, and graver than gay.

Her mother was gay for them both, and, therefore, for the entire
family. No father was in evidence; he was dead and never spoken of,
and Linda was the only child. Linda's dresses, those significant
trivialities, plainly showed two tendencies--the gaiety of her
mother and her own always formal gravity. If Linda appeared at dinner,
in the massive Renaissance materialism of the hotel dining-room, with
a preposterous magenta hair-ribbon on her shapely head, her mother
had succeeded in expressing her sense of the appropriately decorative;
while if Linda wore an unornamented but equally "unsuitable" frock of
dark velvet, she, in her turn, had been vindicated.

Again, but far more rarely, the child's selection was evident on the
woman. As a rule Mrs. Condon garbed her flamboyant body in large and
expensive patterns or extremely tailored suits; and of the two, the
evening satins and powdered arms barely retaining an admissible
line, and the suits, the latter were the most, well--spectacular.

She was not dark in color but brightly golden; a gold, it must be
said in all honesty, her own, a metallic gold crisply and solidly
marcelled; with hazel-brown eyes, and a mouth which, set against her
daughter's deep-blue gaze, was her particular attraction. It was
rouged to a nicety, the under lip a little full and never quite
against the upper. If Linda's effect was cool and remote, Mrs.
Condon, thanks to her mouth, was reassuringly imminent. She was,
too, friendly; she talked to women--in her not overfrequent
opportunities--in a rapid warm inaccurate confession of almost
everything they desired to hear. The women, of course, were
continually hampered by the unfortunate fact that the questions
nearest their hearts, or curiosity, were entirely inadmissible.

Viewed objectively, they all, with the exception of Linda, seemed
alike; but that might have been due to their common impressive
setting. The Boscombe, in its way, was as lavish as Mrs. Condon's
dresses. The main place of congregation, for instance, was a great
space of white marble columns, Turkey-red carpet and growing palms.
It was lighted at night indirectly by alabaster bowls hanging on
gilded chains--a soft bright flood of radiance falling on the seated
or slowly promenading women with bare shoulders.

Usually they were going with a restrained sharp eagerness toward the
dining-room or leaving it in a more languid flushed repletion. There
were, among them, men; but somehow the men never seemed to be of the
least account. It was a women's paradise. The glow from above always
emphasized the gowns, the gowns like orchids and tea-roses and the
leaves of magnolias. It sparkled in the red and green and crystal
jewels like exotic dew scattered over the exotic human flowers. Very
occasionally there was a complacent or irritable masculine utterance,
and then it was immediately lost in the dominant feminine sibilance.

Other children than Linda sped in the manner of brilliant fretful
tops literally on the elaborate outskirts of the throng; but they
were as different from her as she was from the elders. Indeed Linda
resembled the latter, rather than her proper age, remarkably. She
had an air of responsibility, sometimes expressed in a troubled
frown, and again by the way she hurried sedately through drifting
figures toward a definite purpose and end.

Usually it was in the service of one of her mother's small
innumerable requests or necessities; if the latter were sitting with
a gentleman on the open hotel promenade that overlooked the sea and
needed a heavier wrap, Linda returned immediately with a furred
cloak on her arm; if the elder, going out after dinner, had brought
down the wrong gloves, Linda knew the exact wanted pair in the long
perfumed box; while countless trifles were needed from the
convenient drug-store.

The latter was a place of white mosaic floor and glittering glass,
with a marble counter heaped with vivid fruit and silver-covered
bowls of sirups and creams with chopped nuts. Linda often found time
to stop here for a delectable glass of assorted sweet compounds. She
was on terms of intimacy with the colored man in a crisp linen coat
who presided over the refreshments, and he invariably gave her an
extra spoonful of the marron paste she preferred. When at lunch, it
might be, she cared for very little, her mother would complain
absently:

"You must stop eating those sickening mixtures. They'd ruin any
skin." At this she invariably found the diminutive mirror in the bag
on her lap and glanced at her own slightly improved color. The
burden of the feminine conversations in which Mrs. Condon was
privileged to join, Linda discovered, was directed toward these
overwhelming considerations of appearance. And their importance,
communicated to her, resulted in a struggle between the desire to
preserve her skin from ruin and the seductions of marron paste and
maple chocolates.

Now, with an uncomfortable sense of impending disaster, she would
hastily consume one or the other; again, supported by a beginning
self-imposed inflexibility, she would turn steadily away from
temptation. In the end the latter triumphed; and her normal
appetite, always moderate, was unimpaired.

This spirit of resolution, it sometimes happened, was a cause of
humorous dismay to her mother. "I declare, Linda," she would observe
with an air of helplessness, "you make me feel like the giddy one
and as if you were mama. It's the way you look, so disapproving. I
have to remind myself you're only--just how old are you? I keep
forgetting." Linda would inform her exactly and the other sigh:

"The years slip around disgustingly. It seems only yesterday I was
at my first party." Usually, in spite of Linda's eagerness to hear
of that time when her mother was a girl, the elder would stop
abruptly. On rare occasions solitary facts emerged from the recalled
existence of a small town in the country. There were such details as
buggy-riding and prayer-meetings and excursions to a Boiling Springs
where the dancing-floor, open among the trees, was splendid. At
these memories Mrs. Condon had been known to cry.

But she would recover shortly. Her emotions were like that--easily
roused, highly colored and soon forgotten. She forgot, Linda
realized leniently, a great deal. It wasn't safe to rely on her
promises. However, if she neglected a particular desire of Linda's,
she continually brought back unexpected gifts of candy, boxes of
silk stockings, or lovely half-wilted flowers.

The flowers, they discovered, although they stayed fresh for a long
while pinned to Linda's slim waist, died almost at once if worn by
her mother. "It's my warm nature, I am certain," the latter
proclaimed to her daughter; "while you are a little refrigerator. I
must say it's wonderful how you keep your clothes the same. Neat as
a pin." Somehow, with this commendation, she managed to include a
slight uncomplimentary impatience. Linda didn't specially want to
resemble a pin, a disagreeable object with a sharp point. She
considered this in the long periods when, partly by preference, she
was alone.

Seated, perhaps, in the elaborate marble and deep red of the
Boscombe's reception-rooms, isolated in the brilliant expensive
throng, she would speculate over what passed in the light of her own
special problems. But nothing, really, came out to her satisfaction.
There was, notably, no one she might ask. Her mother, approached
seriously, declared that Linda gave her the creeps; while others
made it plain that it was their duty to repress the forwardness
inevitable from the scandalous neglect of her upbringing.

They, the women of the Boscombe, glancing at their finger-nails
stained and buffed to a shining pale vermilion, lightly rubbing
their rings on the dry palm of a hand, wondered pessimistically
within Linda's hearing what could come out of such an association.
That term, she vaguely gathered, referred to her mother. The latter
evidently interested them tremendously; because, she explained, they
had no affairs of their own to attend to. This was perfectly clear
to Linda until Mrs. Condon further characterized them as "busy."

The women, stopped by conventions from really satisfactory
investigation at the source, drew her on occasion into a laboriously
light inquisition. How long would Linda and her mama stay at the
Boscombe? Had they closed their apartment? Where was it? Hadn't Mrs.
Condon mentioned Cleveland? Wasn't Linda lonely with her mama out so
much--they even said late--in rolling chairs? Had she ever seen Mr.
Jasper before his arrival last week?

No, of course she hadn't.

Here they exchanged skeptical glances beneath relentlessly pulled
eyebrows. He was really very nice, Mr. Jasper. Linda in a matter-of-fact
voice replied that he had given her a twenty-dollar gold piece. Mr.
Jasper was very generous. But perhaps he had rewarded her for being
a good little girl and not--not bothering or hanging about. "Why
should he?" was Linda's just perceptibly impatient response. Then
they told her to be quiet because they wanted to listen to the music.

This consisted in studying, through suspended glasses in chased
platinum, a discreet programme. At the end of a selection they
either applauded condescendingly or told each other that they hadn't
cared for that last--really too peculiar. Whichever happened, the
leader of the small orchestra, an extravagant Italian with a supple
waist, turned and bowed repeatedly with a grimacing smile. The
music, usually Viennese, was muted and emotional; its strains
blended perfectly with the floating scents of the women and the
faintly perceptible pungent odors of dinner. Every little while a
specially insinuating melody became, apparently, tangled in the
women's breathing, and their breasts, cunningly traced and caressed
in tulle, would be disturbed.

Mrs. Condon applauded more vigorously than was sanctioned by the
others' necessity for elegance; the frank clapping of her pink palms
never failed to betray a battery of affected and significant
surprise in eyes like--polished cold agates. Linda, seated beside
her parent, could be seen to lay a hand, narrow and blanched and
marked by an emerald, on the elder's knee. Her pale fine lips moved
rapidly with the shadow of trouble beneath the intense black bang.

"I wish you wouldn't do it so loudly, mother," was what she
whispered.




II


The jealously guarded truth was that, by her daughter at least, Mrs.
Condon was adored. Linda observed that she was not like an ordinary
mother, but more nearly resembled a youthful companion. Mrs. Condon's
gaiety was as genuine as her fair hair. Not kept for formal occasion,
it got out of bed with her, remained through the considerable
difficulties of dressing with no maid but Linda, and if the other
were not asleep called a cheerful or funny good night.

Their rooms were separated by a bath, but Linda was scarcely ever in
her own--her mother's lovely things, acting like a magnet,
constantly drew her to their arrangement in the drawers. When the
laundry came up, crisp and fragile webs heaped on the bed, Linda
laid it away in a sort of ritual. Even with these publicly invisible
garments a difference of choice existed between the two: Mrs.
Condon's preference was for insertions, and Linda's for shadow
embroidery and fine shell edges. Mrs. Condon, shaking into position
a foam of ribbon and lace, would say with her gurgle of amusement,
"I want to be ready when I fall down; if I followed your advice
they'd take me for a nun."

This brought out Linda's low clear laugh, the expression of her
extreme happiness. It sounded, for an instant, like a chime of small
silver bells; then died away, leaving the faintest perceptible flush
on her healthy pallor. At other times her mother's humor made her
vaguely uncomfortable, usually after wine or other drinks that left
the elder's breath thick and oppressive. Linda failed completely to
grasp the allusions of this wit but a sharp uneasiness always
responded like the lingering stale memory of a bad dream.

Once, at the Boscombe, her mother had been too silly for words: she
had giggled and embraced her sweet little girl, torn an expensive
veil to shreds and dropped a French model hat into the tub. After a
distressing sickness she had gone to sleep fully dressed, and Linda,
unable to move or wake her, had sat long beyond dinner into the
night, fearful of the entrance of the chambermaid.

The next day Mrs. Condon had been humble with remorse. Men, she
said, were too beastly for description. This was not an unusual
opinion. Linda observed that she was always condemning men in
general and dressing for them in particular. She offered Linda
endless advice in an abstracted manner:

"They're all liars, Lin, and stingy about everything but their
pleasure. Women are different but men are all alike. You get sick to
death of them! Never bother them when they are smoking a cigar;
cigarettes don't matter. Leave the cigarette-smokers alone, anyhow;
they're not as dependable as the others. A man with a good cigar--you
must know the good from the bad--is usually discreet. I ought to
bring you up different, but, Lord, life's too short. Besides, you
will learn more useful things right with mama, whose eyes are open,
than anywhere else.

"Powder my back, darling; I can't reach. If I'm a little late to-night
go to sleep like a duck. You think Mr. Jasper's nice, don't you?
So does mother. But you mustn't let him give you any more money.
It'll make him conceited."

Linda wondered what she meant by the last phrase. How could it make
Mr. Jasper conceited to give her a gold piece? However, she decided
that she had better not ask.

It was like that with a great many of her mother's mysterious
remarks--Linda had an instinctive feeling of drawing away. The other
kissed her warmly and left a print of vivid red on her cheek.

She examined the mark in the mirror when her mother had gone; it
was, she decided, the kiss made visible. Then she laid away the
things scattered about the room by Mrs. Condon's hasty dressing. Her
own belongings were always in precise order.

A sudden hesitation seized her at the thought of going down to the
crowd at the music. The women made her uncomfortable. It wasn't what
they said, but the way they said it; and the endless questions
wearied her. She was, as well, continually bothered by her inability
to impress upon them how splendid her mother was. Some of them she
was certain did not appreciate her. Mrs. Condon at once admitted and
was entertained by this, but it disturbed Linda. However, she
understood the reason--when any nice men came along they always
liked her mother best. This made the women mad.

The world, she gathered, was a place where women played a game of
men with each other. It was very difficult, she couldn't comprehend
the rules or reason; and Linda was afraid that she would be
unsuccessful and never have the perfect time her mother wanted for
her. In the first place, she was too thin, and then she knew that
she could never talk like her dearest. Perhaps when she had had some
wine it would be different.

She decided, after all, to go down to the assemblage; and, by one of
the white marble pillars, Mrs. Randall captured her. "Why, here's
Linda-all-alone," Mrs. Randall said. "Mama out again?" Linda replied
stoutly, "She has a dreadful lot of invitations."

Mrs. Randall, who wore much brighter clothes than her mother, was
called by the latter an old buzzard. She was very old, Linda could
see, with perfectly useless staring patches of paint on her wrinkled
cheeks, and eyes that look as though they might come right out of
her head. Her frizzled hair supported a dead false twist with a
glittering diamond pin, and her soft cold hands were loaded with
jewels. She frightened Linda, really, although she could not say
why. Mrs. Randall was a great deal like the witch in a fairy-story,
but that wasn't it. Linda hadn't the belief in witches necessary for
dread. It might be her scratching voice; or the way she turned her
head, without any chin at all, like a turtle; or her dresses, which
led you to expect a person very different from an old buzzard.

"Of course she does," said Mrs. Randall, "any number of invitations,
and why shouldn't she? Your mother is very pleasant, to be sure."
She nodded wisely to the woman beside her, Miss Skillern.

Miss Skillern was short and broad and, in the evening, always wore
curled ostrich plumes on tightly filled gray puffs. She reminded
Linda of a wadded chair. Mrs. Randall, after the other's slight
stiff assent, continued:

"Your mama would never be lonely, not she. All I wonder is she
doesn't get married again--with that blondine of hers. Wouldn't you
rather have one papa than, in a way of speaking, a different one at
every hotel?"

Linda, completely at a loss for answer, studied Mrs. Randall with
her direct deep blue gaze. Miss Skillern again inclined her plumes.
With the rest of her immobile she was surprisingly like one of those
fat china figures with a nodding head. Linda was assaulted by the
familiar bewildered feeling of not understanding what was said and,
at the same time, passionately resenting it from an inner sensitive
recognition of something wrong.

"How could I have that?" she finally asked.

"How?" repeated Miss Skillern, breathing loudly.

"Yes, how?" Mrs. Randall echoed. "You can ask your mama. You really
can. And you may say that, as a matter of fact, the question came
from us," she included her companion.

"From you," Miss Skillern exactly corrected her.

"Indeed," the other cried heatedly, "from me! I think not. Didn't
you ask? Answer me that, if you please. I heard you with my own ears
say, 'How?' While now, before my face, you try to deny it." It was
plain to Linda that Miss Skillern was totally unmoved by the charge.
She moved her lorgnette up, gazing stolidly at the musical
programme. "From you," she said again, after a little. Mrs. Randall
suddenly regained her equilibrium.

"If the ladies of this hotel are afraid to face that creature I--I--am
not. I'll tell her in a minute what a respectable person thinks of
her goings-on. More than that, I shall complain to Mr. Rennert. 'Mr.
Rennert,' I'll say, 'either she leaves or me. Choose as you will. The
reputation of your hotel--'" she spluttered and paused.

"Proof," Miss Skillern pronounced judicially; "proof. We know, but
that's not proof."

"He has a wife," Mrs. Randall replied in a shrill whisper; "a wife
who is an invalid. Mrs. Zoock, she who had St. Vitus' dance and left
yesterday, heard it direct. George A. Jasper, woolen mills in
Frankford, Pennsylvania. Mr. Rennert would thank me for that
information."

They had forgotten Linda. She stood rigid and cold--they were
blaming her mother for going out in a rolling chair with Mr. Jasper
because he was married. But her mother didn't know that; probably
Mr. Jasper had not given it a thought. She was at the point of
making this clear, when it seemed to her that it might be better to
say that her mother knew everything there was about Mr. Jasper's
wife; she could even add that they were all friends.

Linda would have to tell her mother the second she came in, and
then, of course, she'd stop going with Mr. Jasper. Men, she thought
in the elder's phrase, were too beastly for words.

"After all," Mrs. Randall was addressing her again, "you needn't say
anything at all to your mama. It might make her so cross that she'd
spank you."

"Mother never spanks me," Linda replied with dignity.

"If you were my little girl," said Miss Skillern, with rolling lips,
"I'd put you over my knee with your skirts up and paddle you."

Never, Linda thought, had she heard anything worse; she was
profoundly shocked. The vision of Miss Skillern performing such an
operation as she had described cut its horror on her mind. There was
a sinking at her heart and a misty threat of tears.

To avert this she walked slowly away. It was hardly past nine o'clock;
her mother wouldn't be back for a long while, and she was too
restless and unhappy to sit quietly above. Instead, she continued
down to the floor where there were various games in the corridor
leading to the billiard-room. The hall was dull, no one was clicking
the balls about the green tables, and a solitary sick-looking man,
with inky shadows under fixed eyes, was smoking a cigarette in a
chair across from the cigar-stand.

He looked over a thick magazine in a chocolate cover, his gaze
arrested by her irresolute passage. "Hello, Bellina," he said.

She stopped. "Linda," she corrected him, "Linda Condon." Obeying a
sudden impulse, she dropped, with a sigh, into a place beside him.

"You're bored," he went on, the magazine put away. "So am I, but my
term is short."

She wondered, principally, what he was doing, among so many women,
at the Boscombe. He was different from Mr. Jasper, or the other men
with fat stomachs, the old men with dragging feet. It embarrassed
her to meet his gaze, it was so--so investigating. She guessed he
was by the sea because he felt as badly as he looked. He asked
surprisingly:

"Why are you here?"

"On the account of my mother," she explained. "But it doesn't matter
much where I am. Places are all alike," she continued conversationally.
"We're mostly at hotels--Florida in winter and Lake George in summer.
This is kind of between."

"Oh!" he said; and she was sure, from that short single exclamation,
he understood everything.

"Like all true beauty," he added, "it's plain that you are durable."

"I don't like the seashore," she went on easily; "I'd rather be in a
garden with piles of flowers and a big hedge."

"Have you ever lived in a garden-close?"

"No," she admitted; "it's just an idea. I told mother but she
laughed at me and said a roof-garden was her choice."

"Some day you'll have the place you describe," he assured her. "It
is written all over you. I would like to see you, Bellina, in a
space of emerald sod and geraniums." She decided to accept without
further protest his name for her. "You are right, too, about the
hedge--the highest and thickest in creation. I should recommend a
pseudo-classic house, Georgian, rather small, a white faade against
the grass. A Jacobean dining-room, dark certainly, the French
windows open on dipping candle flames. You'd wear white, with your
hair low and the midnight bang as it is now."

"That would be awfully nice," Linda replied vaguely. She sighed.

"But a very light drawing-room!" he cried. "White panels and arches
and Canton-blue rugs--the brothers Adam. A fluted mantel, McIntires,
and a brass hod. Curiously enough, I always see you in the evening
... at the piano. I'm not so bored, now." Little flames of red
burned in either thin cheek. "What nonsense!" Suddenly he was tired.
"This is a practical and earnest world," his voice grew thin and
hurt her. "Yet beauty is relentless. You'll have your garden, but I
shouldn't be surprised at difficulties first."

"It won't be so hard to get," she declared confidently. "I mean to
choose the right man. Mother says that's the answer. Women, she
says, won't use their senses."

"Ah."

Linda began to think this was a most unpleasant monosyllable.

"So that's the lay! Has she succeeded?"

"She has a splendid time. She's out tonight with Mr. Jasper in a
rolling chair, and he has loads and loads of money. It makes all the
other women cross."

"Here you are, then, till she gets back?"

"There's no one else."

"But, as a parent, infinitely preferable to the righteous," he
murmured. "And you--"

"I think mother's perfect," she answered simply.

He shook his head. "You won't succeed at it, though. Your mother,
for example, isn't dark."

"The loveliest gold hair," she said ecstatically. "She's much much
prettier than I'll ever be."

"Prettier, yes. The trouble is, you are lovely, magical. You will
stay for a lifetime in the memory. The merest touch of you will be
more potent than any duty or fidelity. A man's only salvation will
be his blindness."

Although she didn't understand a word of this, Linda liked to hear
him; he was talking as though she were grown up, and in response to
the flattery she was magnetic and eager.

"One time," he said, "very long ago, beauty was worshiped. Men, you
see, know better now. They want their dollar's worth. The world was
absolutely different then--there were deep adventurous forests with
holy chapels in the green combe for an orison, and hermits rising to
Paradise on the _Te Deum Laudamus_ of the angels and archangels.
There were black castles and, in the broad meadows, silk tents with
ivory pegs and poles of gold.

"The enchantments were as thick as shadows under the trees: perhaps
the loveliest of women riding a snow-white mule, with a saddle cloth
of red samite, or, wrapped in her shining hair, on a leopard with
yellow eyes, lured you to a pavilion, scattered with rushes and
flowers and magical herbs, and a shameful end. Or a silver doe would
weep, begging you to pierce her with your sword, and, when you did,
there knelt the daughter of the King of Wales.

"But I started to tell you about the worship of beauty. Plato
started it although Cardinal Pietro Bembo was responsible for the
creed. He lived in Italy, in an age like a lily. It developed mostly
at Florence in the Platonic Academy of Cosomo and Pico della
Mirandola. Love was the supreme force, and its greatest expression a
desire beyond the body."

He gazed at Linda with a quizzical light in his eyes deep in shadow.

"Love," he said again, and then paused. "One set of words will do as
well as another. You will understand, or not, with something far
different from intellectual comprehension. The endless service of
beauty. Of course, a woman--but never the animal; the spirit always.
Born in the spirit, served in the spirit, ending in the spirit. A
direct contradiction, you see, to nature and common sense, frugality
and the sacred symbol of the dollar.

"It wouldn't please your Mr. Jasper, with his heaps and heaps of
money. Mr. Jasper would consider himself sold. But Novalis, not so
very long ago, understood.... A dead girl more real than all earth.
You mustn't suppose it to be mere mysticism."

Linda said, "Very well, I won't."

He nodded. "No one could call Michelangelo hysterical. Sometime in
the history of man, of a salt solution, this divinity has touched
them. Touched them hopefully, and perhaps gone--banished by the
other destination. Or I can comprehend nature killing it relentlessly,
since it didn't lead to propagation. Then, too, as much as was useful
was turned into a dogma for politics and priests.

"You saw in the rushlight a woman against the arras; there was a
humming of viola d'amore from the musicians' balcony; she smiled at
you, lingering, and then vanished with a whisper of brocade de Lyons
on a sanded floor. Nothing else but a soft white glove, eternally
fragrant, in your habergeon, an eternally fragrant memory; the dim
vision in stone street and coppice; a word, a message, it might be,
sent across the world of steel at death. And then, in the last
flicker of vision, the arras and the clear insistent strings, the
whispering brocade de Lyons on the landing.

"The philosophy of it," he said in a different tone, "is exact, even
a scientific truth. But men have been more concerned with turning
lead into gold; naturally the spirit has been neglected. The science
of love has been incredibly soiled:

"The old gesture toward the stars, the bridge of perfection, the
escape from the fatality of flesh. Yet it was a service of the body
made incredibly lovely in actuality and still never to be grasped.
Never to be won. It ought to be clear to you that realized it would
diminish into quite a different thing--

"'_La figlia della sua mente, l'amorosa idea._'"

His voice grew so faint that Linda could scarcely distinguish
articulate sounds. All that he said, without meaning for her,
stirred her heart. She was used to elder enigmas of speech; her
normal response was instinctively emotional, and nothing detracted
from the gravity of her attention.

"Not in pious men," he continued, more uncertain; "nor in seminaries
of virtue. They have their reward. But in men whose bitterness of
longing grew out of hideous fault. The distinction of beauty--not a
payment for prayers or chastity. The distinction of love ... above
chests of linen and a banker's talent and patents of nobility....
Divine need. Idiotic. But what else, what better, offers?"

He was, she saw, terribly sick. His hands were clenched and his
entire being strained and rigid, as though he were trying to do
something tremendously difficult. At last, with infinite pain, he
succeeded.

"I must get away," he articulated.

Linda was surprised at the effort necessary for this slight
accomplishment when he had said the most bewildering things with
complete ease. Well, the elevators were right in front of him. He
rose slowly, and, with Linda standing at his side, dug a sharp hand
into her shoulder. It hurt, but instinctively she bore it and,
moving forward, partly supported him. She pressed the bell that
signaled for the elevator and it almost immediately sank into view.
"Hurry," he said harshly to the colored operator in a green uniform;
and quite suddenly, leaving a sense of profound mystery, he disappeared.




III


Linda decided that he had told her a rather stupid fairy story. She
was too old for such ridiculous things as ladies in their shining
hair on a leopard. She remembered clearly seeing one of the latter
at a zoological garden. It had yellow eyes, but no one would care to
ride on it. Her mother, she was certain, knew more about love than
any man. His words faded quickly from her memory, but a confused
rich sense stirred her heart, a feeling such as she experienced
after an unusually happy day: white gloves and music and Mr. Jasper
displeased.

A clock chimed ten, and she proceeded to her mother's room, where
she must wait up with her information about Mr. Jasper's wife. She
was furious at him for a carelessness that had brought her mother
such unfavorable criticism. Everything had been put away before
going down, and there was nothing for her to do. The time dragged
tediously. The hands of the traveling-clock in purple leather on the
dressing-table moved deliberately around to eleven. A ringing of ice
in one of the metal pitchers carried by the bell boys sounded from
the corridor. There was the faint wail of a baby.

Suddenly and acutely Linda was lonely--a new kind of loneliness that
had nothing to do with the fact that she was by herself. It was a
strange cold unhappiness, pressing over her like a cloud and, at the
same time, it was nothing at all. That is, there was no reason for
it. The room was brightly lighted and, anyhow, she wasn't afraid of
"things." She thought that at any minute she must cry like that
baby. After a little she felt better; rather the unhappiness changed
to wanting. What she wanted was a puzzle; but nothing else would
satisfy her. It might be a necklace of little pearls, but it wasn't.
It might be--. Now it was twelve o'clock. Dear, dear, why didn't she
come back!

Music, awfully faint, and a whisper, like a dress, across the floor.
Her emotion changed again, to an extraordinary delight, a glow like
that which filled her at the expression of her adoration for her
mother, but infinitely greater. She was seated, and she lifted her
head with her eyes closed and hands clasped. The clock pointed to
one and her parent came into the room.

"Linda," she exclaimed crossly, "whatever are you doing up? A bad
little girl. I told you to be asleep hours before this."

"There is something you had to know right away," Linda informed her
solemnly. "I only just heard it from Mrs. Randall and Miss
Skillern." Her mother's flushed face hardened. "Mr. Jasper is
married," Linda said.

Mrs. Condon dropped with an angry flounce into a chair. Her broad
scarf of sealskin slipped from one shoulder. Her hat was crooked and
her hair disarranged. "So that's it," she said bitterly; "and they
went to you. The dam' old foxes. They went to you, nothing more than
a child."

Linda put in, "They didn't mean to; it just sort of came out. I knew
you'd stop as soon as you heard. Wasn't it horrid of him?"

"And this," Mrs. Condon declared, "is what I get for being, yes--proper.

"I said to-night, 'George,' I said, 'go right back home. It's the
only thing. They have a right to you.' I told him that only to-night.
And, 'No, I must consider my little Linda.' If I had held up my
finger," she held up a finger to show the smallness of the act
necessary, "where would we have all been?

"But this is what I get. You might think the world would notice a
woman's best efforts. No, they all try to crowd her and see her
slip. If they don't watch out I'll skid, all right, and with some
one they least expect. I have opportunities."

Linda realized with a sense of confusion that her mother had known
of Mr. Jasper's marriage all the while. But she had nobly tried to
save him from something; just what Linda couldn't make out. The
other's breath was heavy with drinking.

"You go to bed, Lin," she continued; "and thank you for taking care
of mama. I hope to goodness you'll learn from all this--pick out
what you want and make for it. Don't bother with the antique frumps,
the disappointed old tabbies. Have your fun. There's nothing else.
If you like a man, be on the level with him--give and take. Men are
not saints and we're better for it; we don't live in a heaven.
You've got a sweet little figure. Always remember mama telling you
that the most expensive corsets are the cheapest in the end."

Linda undressed slowly and methodically, her mother's words ringing
in her head. Always remember--but of course she would have the
nicest things possible.... A keepsake and faint music. She thought,
privately, that she was too thin; she'd rather be her mother, with
shoulders like bunches of smooth pink roses. In bed, just as she was
falling asleep, a sound disturbed her from the corridor above--the
slow tramping of heavy feet, like a number of men carefully bearing
an awkward object. She listened with suspended breath while they
passed. The footfalls seemed to pound on her heart. Slowly, slowly
they went, unnatural and measured. They were gone now, but she still
heard them. The crashing of her mother into bed followed with a deep
sigh. The long fall of a wave on the shore was audible. Two things
contended in her stilled brain--the mysterious feeling of desire and
her mother's advice. They were separate and fought, yet they were
strangely incomprehensibly joined.




IV


In the morning Mrs. Condon, with a very late breakfast-tray in bed,
had regained her usual cheerful manner. "The truth is," she told
Linda, "I'm glad that Jasper man has gone. He had no idea of
discretion; tired of them anyhow." Linda radiated happiness. This
was the mother she loved above all others. Her mind turned a little
to the man who had talked to her the night before. She wondered if
he were better. His thin blanched face, his eyes gleaming uncomfortably
in smudges, recurred to her. Perhaps he'd be down by the cigar-stand
again. She went, presently, to see, but the row of chairs was empty.

However, the neglected thick brown-covered magazine was still on the
ledge by which he had been sitting. There was a name on it, and while,
ordinarily, she couldn't read handwriting, this was so clear and
regular, but minutely small, that she was able to spell it out--Howard
Welles.

It disappointed her not to find him; at lunch she observed nearly
every one present, but still he was lost. He wasn't listening to the
music after dinner, nor below. A deep sense of disappointment grew
within her. Linda wanted to see him, hear him talk; at times a sharp
hurt in the shoulder he had grasped brought him back vividly. The
next day it was the same, and finally, diffidently, she approached
the hotel desk. A clerk she knew, Mr. Fiske, was rapidly sorting
mail, and she waited politely until he had finished.

"Well?" he asked.

"I found this down-stairs," she said, giving him the magazine.
"Perhaps he'll want it." Mr. Fiske looked at the written name, and
then glanced sharply at her. "No," he told her brusquely, "he won't
want it." He turned away with the magazine and left Linda standing
irresolutely. She wanted to ask if Mr. Welles were still at the
Boscombe; if the latter didn't want the magazine she'd love to have
it, Linda couldn't tell why. But the clerk went into the treasurer's
office and she was forced to move away.

Later, lingering inexplicably about the spot where she had heard so
many bewildering words, a very different man spoke to her. He, Linda
observed, was smoking a cigar, a good one, she was certain. He was
smallish and had a short bristling mustache and head partly bald.
His shoes were very shiny and altogether he had a look of prosperity.
"Hello, cutie!" he cried, capturing her arm. She responded listlessly.
The other produced a crisp dollar bill. "Do you see the chocolates
in that case?" he said, indicating the cigar-stand. "Well, get the
best. If they cost more, let me know. Our financial rating is number
one." Linda answered that she didn't think she cared for any. "All
right," the man agreed; "sink the note in the First National Ladies
Bank, if you know where that is."

He engineered her unwillingly onto a knee. "How's papa?" he
demanded. "I suppose he will be here Saturday to take his family
through the stores?"

She replied with dignity, "There is only my mother and me."

At this information he exclaimed "Ah!" and touched his mustache with
a diminutive gold-backed brush from a leather case. "That's more
than I have," he confided to her; "there is only myself. Isn't that
sad? You must be sorry for the lonely old boy."

She wasn't. Probably he, too, had a wife somewhere; men were
beastly. "I guess your mother wants a little company at times
herself?"

Linda, straining away from him, replied, "Oh, dear, no; there are
just packs of gentlemen whenever she likes. But she is tired of them
all." She escaped and he settled his waistcoat.

"You mustn't run away," he admonished her; "nice children don't.
Your mother didn't bring you up like that, I'm sure. She wouldn't
like it."

Linda hesitated, plainly conveying the fact that, if she were to
wait, he would have to say something really important.

"Just you two," he deliberated; "Miss and Mrs. Jones."

"Not at all," Linda asserted shortly; "our name is Condon."

"I wonder if you'd tell her this," he went on: "a gentleman's here
by himself named Bardwell, who has seen her and admires her a whole
lot. Tell her he's no young sprig but he likes a good time all the
better. Dependable, too. Remember that, cutie. And he wouldn't
presume if he had a short pocket. He knows class when he sees it."

"It won't do any good," Linda assured him in her gravest manner.
"She said only this morning she was sick of them."

"That was before dinner," he replied cheerfully. "Things look
different later in the day. You do what I tell you."

All this Linda dutifully repeated. Her mother was at the dressing-table,
rubbing cream into her cheeks, and she paused, surveying her
reflection in the mirror. "He was smoking a big cigar," Linda added.
The other laughed. "What a sharp little thing you are!" she
exclaimed. "A body ought to be careful what they tell you." She
wiped off the cream and rubbed a soft pinkish powder into her skin.

"He saw me, did he?" she apparently addressed the glass. "Admired me
a whole lot. Was he nice, Linda?" she turned. "Were his clothes
right? You must point him out to me to-night. But do it carefully,
darling. No one should notice. Your mother isn't on the shelf yet;
she can hold her own, even in the Boscombe, against the whole
barnyard."

Linda, at the entrance to the dining-room, whispered, "There he is."
But immediately Mr. Bardwell was smiling and speaking to them.

"I had a delightful conversation with your little girl to-day," he
told Mrs. Condon; "such a pretty child and well brought up."

"And good, too," her mother replied; "not a minute's trouble. The
common sense of the grown; you'd never believe it."

"Why shouldn't I?" he protested gallantly. "Every reason to." Mrs.
Condon blushed becomingly.

"She had to make up for a lot," she sighed.

An hour or more after dinner Mrs. Randall stopped Linda in the hall
beyond the music. "Mama out?" she inquired brightly. "I thought Mr.
Jasper left this morning?"

Linda told her that Mr. Jasper had gone; she added nothing else.

"I must look at the register," Mrs. Randall continued; "I really
must."

Obeying an uncontrollable impulse Linda half cried, "I'd like to see
you riding on a leopard!" A flood of misery enveloped her, and she
hurried up to the silence of her mother's deserted room.




V


It was on her fourteenth birthday that Linda noticed a decided
change in her mother; a change, unfortunately, that most of all
affected the celebrated good humors. In the first place Mrs. Condon
spent an increasingly large part of the day before the mirror of her
dressing-table, but without any proportionate pleasure; or, if there
was a proportion kept, it exhibited the negative result of a growing
annoyance. "God knows why they all show at once," she exclaimed
discontentedly, seated--as customary--before the eminently truthful
reflection of a newly discovered set of lines. "I'm not old enough
to begin to look like a hag."

"Oh, mother," Linda protested, shocked, "you mustn't say such horrid
things about yourself. Why, you're perfectly lovely, and you don't
seem a speck older than you did years ago."

The other, biting her full underlip at the unwelcome fact in turn
biting a full lower lip back at her, made no reply. Linda lingered
for a moment at her mother's ruffled pink shoulders; then, with a
sigh, she turned to the reception-room of their small suite at the
Hotel Gontram. It was a somber chamber furnished in red plush, with
a complication of shades and gray-white net curtains at long windows
and a deep green carpet. There was a fireplace, with a grate,
supported by varnished oak pillars and elaborate mantel and glass, a
glittering reddish center-table with a great many small odd shelves
below, a desk with sheaves of hotel writing paper and the telephone.

The Gontram was entirely different from the hotels at the lakes or
seashore or in the South. It was a solid part of a short block west
of Fifth Avenue in the middle of the city. Sherry's filled a corner
with its massive stone bulk and glimpses of dining-rooms with
glittering chandeliers and solemn gaiety, then impressive clubs and
wide entrances under heavy glass and metal, tall porters in splendid
livery, succeeded each other to the Hotel Gontram and the dull
thunder of the elevated trains beyond.

The revolving door, through which Linda sedately permitted herself
to be moved, opened into a high space of numerous columns and
benches, writing-desks and palms. At the back was the white room
where, usually alone, she had breakfast, while the dining-room,
discreetly lighted, was at the left. It was more interesting here
than, for example, at the Boscombe; people were always coming in or
going, and there were quantities of men. She watched them arriving
with shoals of leather bags in the brisk care of the bellboys,
disappear into the elevator, and, if it was evening, come down in
dinner coats with vivid silk scarfs folded over their white shirts.

The women were perpetually in street clothes or muffled in satin
wraps; Linda only regarded them when they were exceptional. Usually
she was intent on the men. It often happened that they returned her
frank gaze with a smile, or stopped to converse with her. Sometimes
it was an actor with a face dryly pink like a woman's from make-up;
they were familiar and pinched her cheeks, calling her endearing
names in conscious echoing voices as if they were quite hollow
within. Then there were simply business men, who never appeared to
take off their derby hats, and spoke to her of their little girls at
home. She was entirely at ease with the latter--so many of her
mother's friends were similar--and critically valued the details of
their dress, the cigar-cases with or without gold corners, the
watch-chains with jeweled insignia, the cuff-links and embroidered
handkerchiefs.

If her mother approached while Linda was so engaged the elder would
linger with a faint smile, at which, now, the girl was conscious of
a growing impatience. She'd rise with dignity and, if possible,
escape with her parent from florid courtesies. This sense of
annoyance oppressed her, too, in the dining-room, where her mother,
a cocktail in her hand, would engage in long cheerful discussions
with the captains or waiters. Other women, Linda observed, spoke
with complete indifference and their attention on the _carte de
jour_. Of course it was much more friendly to be interested in
the servants' affairs--they told her mother about their wives and
the number of their children, the difficulties of bringing both ends
together, and served her with the promptest care; but instinctively
Linda avoided any but the most formal contact.

She had to insist, as well, on paying the tips; for Mrs. Condon, her
sympathies engaged, was quite apt to leave on the table a five-dollar
bill or an indiscriminate heap of silver. "You are a regular little
Jew," she would reply lightly to Linda's protests. This, the latter
thought, was unfair; for the only Jew she knew, Mr. Moses Feldt, an
acquaintance of their present period in New York, was quite the most
generous person she knew. "Certainly you don't take after your mama."

After she said this she always paused with tight lips. It was
charged with the assumption that, while Linda didn't resemble her,
she did very much a mysterious and unfavorably regarded personage.
Her father, probably. More and more Linda wondered about him. He was
dead, she knew, but that, she began to see, was no reason for the
positive prohibition to mention him at all. Perhaps he had done
something dreadful, with money, and had disgraced them all. Yet she
was convinced that this was not so.

She had heard a great many uncomplimentary words applied to
husbands, most of which she had been unable to comprehend; and she
speculated blankly on them in her mother's connection. On the whole
the women agreed that they were remarkably stupid and transparent,
they protested that they understood and guided every move husbands
made; and this surely gave her father no opportunity for independent
crime. She was held from questioning not so much by her mother's
command--at times she calmly and successfully ignored that--as from
its unfortunate effect on the elder.

Mrs. Condon would burn with a generalized anger that sank to a
despondency fortified by the brandy flask. Straining embraces and
tears, painful to support, would follow, or more unbearable
silliness. The old difficulties with giggling or sympathetic
chambermaid;--Linda couldn't decide which was worse--then confronted
her with the necessity for rigid lies, misery, and the procuring of
sums of money from the bag in the top drawer. Altogether, and
specially with the fresh difficulties of her mother's unaccountable
irritation and apprehensions, things were frightfully complicated.

It was late afternoon in November, and the electric lights were on;
however, they were lighted when they rose, whenever they were in the
rooms, for it was always gloomy if not positively dark; the bedroom
looked into a deep exterior well and the windows of the other
chamber opened on an uncompromising blank wall. Yet Linda, now
widely learned in such settings, rather liked her present situation.
They had occupied the same suite before, for one thing; and going
back into it had given her a sense of familiarity in so much that
always shifted.

Linda, personally, had changed very little; she was taller than four
years before, but not a great deal; she was, perhaps, more graceful--her
movements had become less sudden--more assured, the rapidly maturing
qualities of her mind made visible; and she had gained a surprising
repose.

Now, for example, she sat in a huge chair cushioned with black
leather and thought, with a frowning brow, of her mother. It was
clear that the latter was obviously worried about--to put it
frankly--her face. Her figure, she repeatedly asserted, could be
reasoned with; she had always been reconciled to a certain jolly
stoutness, but her face, the lines that appeared about her eyes
overnight, fairly drove her to hot indiscreet tears. She had been to
see about it, Linda knew; and returned from numerous beauty-parlors
marvelously rejuvenated--for the evening.

She had been painted, enameled, vibrated, massaged; she had had
electric treatment, rays and tissue builders; and once she had been
baked. To-day the toilet table would be loaded with milkweed,
cerates and vanishing cream; tomorrow they would all be swept away,
given to delighted chambermaids, while Mrs. Condon declared that,
when all was said, cold water and a rough towel was nature's way.

This afternoon, apparently everything, including hope, had failed.
She was as cross as cross. From the manner in which she spoke it
might have been Linda's fault. The worst of it was that even the
latter saw that nothing could be done. Her mother was growing--well,
a little tired in appearance. Swift tears gathered in Linda's eyes.
She hadn't been quite truthful in that reassuring speech of hers.
She set herself to the examination of various older women with whom
she had more or less lately come in contact. How had they regarded
and met the loss of whatever good looks they had possessed?

It was terribly mixed up, but, as she thought about it, it seemed to
her that the world of women was divided into two entirely different
groups, the ones men liked, and who had such splendid parties; and
the ones who sat together and gossiped in sharp lowered voices. She
hoped passionately that her mother would not become one of the
latter for a long long while. But eventually it seemed that there
was no escape from the circle of brilliantly dressed creatures with
ruined faces who congregated in the hotels and whispered and nodded
in company until they went severally to bed.

The great difference between one and the other, of course, was the
favor of men. Their world revolved about that overwhelming fact. Her
mother had informed her of this on a hundred occasions and in
countless ways; but more by her actions, her present wretchedness,
than by speech. It was perfectly clear to Linda that nothing else
mattered. She was even beginning, in a vague way, to think of it in
connection with herself; but still most of her preoccupation was in
her mother. She decided gravely that a great deal, yet, could be
done. For instance, lunch to-day:

Her mother had given her a birthday celebration at Henri's, the
famous confectioner but a door or two from their hotel, and at the
end, when a plate of the most amazing and delightful little cakes
had been set on the table, the elder had eaten more than half.
Afterwards she had sworn ruefully at her lack of character, begging
Linda--in a momentary return of former happy companionship--never to
let her make such a silly pig of herself again. Then she got so
tired, Linda continued her mental deliberations; if she could only
rest, go away from cities and resorts for a number of months, the
lines in turn would soon vanish.

The elder moved impatiently, with a fretful exclamation, in the
inner room; from outside came the subdued dull ceaseless clamor of
New York. Formerly it had frightened Linda; but her dread had become
a wordless excitement at the thought of so much just beyond the
windows; her hands grew cold and her heart suddenly pounded,
destroying the vicarious image of her mother.




VI


"I wish now I'd been different," Mrs. Condon said, standing in the
door. Her dress was not yet on, but her underthings were fully as
elaborate and shimmering as any gown could hope to be. "And above
everything else, I am sorry for the kind of mother you've had." This
was so unexpected, the other's voice was so unhappy, that Linda was
startled. She hurried across the room and laid a slim palm on her
mother's full bare arm. "Don't say that," Linda begged, distressed;
"you've been the best in the world."

"You know nothing about it," the elder returned, momentarily seated,
her hands clasped on her full silken lap. "But perhaps it's not too
late. You ought to go to a good school, where you'd learn
everything, but principally what a bad thoughtless mama you have."

"I shouldn't stay a second in a place where they said that," Linda
declared. A new apprehension touched her. "You're not really
thinking of sending me away!" she cried. "Why, you simply could not
get along. You know you couldn't! The maids never do up your dresses
right; and you'd be so lonely in the mornings you would nearly die."

"That's true," Mrs. Condon admitted wearily. "I would expire; but I
was thinking of you--you're only beginning life; and the start
you'll get with me is all wrong. Or, anyway, most people think so."

"They are only jealous."

"Will you go into the closet, darling, and pour out a teeny little
sip from my flask; mama feels a thousand years old this evening."

Returning with the silver cup of the flask half full of pale pungent
brandy Linda could scarcely keep the tears from spilling over her
cheeks. She had never before felt so sad. Her mother hastily drank,
the stinging odor was transferred to her lips; and there was a
palpable recovery of her customary spirit.

"I don't know what gets over me," she asserted. "I'm certain, from
what I've heard of them, that you wouldn't be a bit better off in
one of those fashionable schools for girls. Woman, young and older,
were never meant to be a lot together in one place. It's unnatural.
They don't like each other, ever, and it's all hypocritical and
nasty. You will get more from life, yes, and me. I'm honest, too
honest for my own good, if the truth was known."

She rose and unconsciously strayed to the mirror over the mantel
where she examined her countenance in absorbed detail.

"My skin is getting soft like putty," she remarked aloud to herself.
"The thing is, I've had my time and don't want to pay for it.
Blondes go quicker than dark women; you ought to last a long while,
Linda." Mrs. Condon had turned, and her tone was again almost
complaining, almost ill-natured. Linda considered this information
with a troubled face. It was quite clear that it made her mother
cross. "I've seen men stop and look at you right now, too, and you
nothing more than a slip fourteen years old. Of course, when I was
fifteen I had a proposal; but I was very forward; and somehow you're
different--so dam' serious."

She couldn't help it, Linda thought, if she was serious; she really
had a great deal to think about, their income among other things. If
she didn't watch it, pay the bills every three months when it
arrived, her mother would never have a dollar in the gold mesh bag.
Then, lately, the dresses the elder threatened to buy were often
impossible; Linda learned this from the comments she heard after the
wearing of evening affairs sent home against her earnest protests.
They were, other women more discreetly gowned had agreed,
ridiculous.

Linda calmly realized that in this her judgment was superior to her
mother's. In other ways, too, she felt she was really the elder; and
her dismay at the possibility of going away to school had been
mostly made up of the realization of how much her mother's well-being
was dependent on her.

Mrs. Condon, finishing her dressing in the bedroom, at times called
out various injunctions, general or immediate. "Tell them to have a
taxi at the door for seven sharp. Have you talked to that little
girl in the black velvet?" Linda hadn't and made a mental note to
avoid her more pointedly in the future. "Get out mother's carriage
boots from the hall closet; no, the others--you know I don't wear
the black with coral stockings. They come off and the fur sticks to
my legs. It will be very gay to-night; I hope to heaven Ross doesn't
take too much again." Linda well remembered that the last time Ross
had taken too much her mother's Directoire wrap had been completely
torn in half. "There, it is all nonsense about my fading; I look as
well as I ever did."

Mrs. Condon stood before her daughter like a large flame-pink tulle
flower. Her bright gold hair was constrained by black gauze knotted
behind, her bare shoulders were like powdered rosy marble and the
floating skirts gathered in a hand showed marvelously small satin-tied
carriage boots. Indeed Linda's exclamation of delight was entirely
frank. She had never seen her mother more radiant. The cunningly
applied rouge, the enhanced brilliancy of her long-lashed eyes, had
perfectly the illusion of unspent beauty.

"Do stay down-stairs after dinner and play," the elder begged. "And
if you want to go to the theatre, ask Mr. Bendix, at the desk, to
send you with that chauffeur we have had so much. I positively
forbid your leaving the hotel else. It's a comfort after all, that
you are serious. Kiss mama--"

However, she descended with her mother in the elevator; there was a
more public caress; and the captain in the Chinese dining-room placed
Linda at a small table against the wall. There she had clams--she
adored iced clams--creamed shrimps and oysters with potatoes
_bordure_, alligator-pear salad and a beautiful charlotte cream
with black walnuts. After this she sedately instructed the captain
what to sign on the back of the dinner check--Linda Condon, room
five hundred and seven--placed thirty-five cents beside the finger-bowl
for the waiter, and made her way out to the news stand and the
talkative girl who had it in charge. Exhausting the possibilities of
gossip, and deciding not to go out to the theatre--in spite of the
news girl's exciting description of a play called "The New Sin"--she
was walking irresolutely through the high gilded and marble
assemblage space when, unfortunately, she was captured by Mr. Moses
Feldt.




VII


He led her to a high-backed lounge against the wall, where, seated
on its extreme edge, he gazed silently at her with an expression of
sentimental concern. Mr. Moses Feldt was a short round man, bald but
for a fluffy rim of pale hair, and with the palest imaginable eyes
in a countenance perpetually flushed by the physical necessity of
accommodating his rotundity to awkward edges and conditions. As
usual he was dressed with the nicest care--a band of white linen
laid in the opening of his waistcoat, his scarf ornamented by a
pear-shaped pearl on a diamond finished stem; his cloth-topped
varnished black shoes glistened, while his short fat fingers clasped
a prodigious unlighted cigar. At last, in a tone exactly suited to
his gaze, he exclaimed:

"So that naughty mama has gone out again and deserted Moses and her
little Linda!" In what way her mother had deserted Mr. Feldt she
failed to understand. Of course he wanted to marry them--the
comprehensive phrase was his own--but that didn't include him in
whatever they did. Principally it made a joke for their private
entertainment. Mrs. Condon would mimic his eager manner, "Stella,
let me take you both home where you'll have the best in the land,"
And, "Ladies like you ought to have a loving protection." Linda
would laugh in her cool bell-like manner, and her mother add a
satirical comment on the chance any Moses Feldt had of marrying her.

Linda at once found him ridiculous and a being who forced a
slighting warmth of liking. His appearance was preposterous, the
ready emotion often too foolish for words; but underneath there was
a--a goodness, a mysterious quality that stirred her heart to
recognition. Certain rare things in life and experience affected her
like that memory of an old happiness. She could never say what they
might be, they came at the oddest times and by the most extraordinary
means; but at their occurrence she would thrill for a moment as if
in response to a sound of music.

It was, for example, absurd that Mr. Moses Feldt, who was a Jew,
should make her feel like that, but he did. And all the while that
she was disagreeable to him, or mocking him behind his back, she was
as uncomfortable and "horrid" as possible. While this fact, of
course, only served to make her horrider still. At present she
adopted the manner of a patience that nothing could quite exhaust;
she was polite and formal, relentlessly correct in position.

Mr. Moses Feldt, the cigar in his grasp, pressed a hand to the
probable region of his heart. "You don't know how I think of you,"
he protested, tears in his eyes; "just the idea of you exposed to
anything at all in hotels keeps me awake nights. Now it's a drunk,
or a fresh feller on the elevator, or--"

"It's nice of you," Linda said, "but you needn't worry. No one would
dare to bother us. No one ever has."

"You wouldn't know it if they did," he replied despondently, "at
your age. And then your mother is so trustful and pleasant. Take
those parties where she is so much--roof frolics and cocoanut groves
and submarine cafs; they don't come to any good. Rowdy." Linda
studied him coldly; if he criticized them further she would leave.
He mopped a shining brow with a large colorful silk handkerchief.
"It throws me into a sweat," he admitted.

"Really, Mr. Feldt, you mustn't bother," she told him in one of her
few impulses of friendliness. "You see, we are very experienced." He
nodded without visible happiness at this truth. "I'm a jackass!" he
cried. "Judith tells me that all the time. If you could only see my
daughters," he continued with a new vigor; "such lovely girls as
they are. One dark like you and the other fair as a daisy. Judith
and Pansy. And my home that darling mama made before she died." The
handkerchief was again in evidence.

"Women and girls are funny. I can't get you there and not for
nothing will Judith make a step. It may be pride but it seems to me
such nonsense. I guess I'm old-fashioned and love's old-fashioned.
Homes have gone out of style with the rest. It's all these
restaurants and roofs now, yes, and studios. I tell the girls to
stay away from them and from artists and so on. I don't encourage
them at the apartment--a big lump of a feller with platinum
bracelets on his wrists. What kind of a man would that be! I'd like
to know who'd buy goods from him.

"Sometimes, I'm sorry I got a lot of money, but it made mama happy.
When she laid there at the last sick and couldn't live, I said, 'Oh,
if you only won't leave me I'll give you gold to eat.'" He was so
moved, his face so red, that Linda grew acutely embarrassed. People
were looking at them. She rose stiffly but, in spite of her effort
to escape him, he caught both her hands in his:

"You say I'm an old idiot like Judith," he begged. This Linda
declined to do. And, "Ask your mother if you won't come to dinner
with the girls and me, cozy and at home--just once."

"I'm afraid it will do no good," she admitted; "but I'll try." She
realized that he was about to kiss her and moved quickly back. "I am
almost afraid of you," he told her; "you're so distant and elegant.
Judith and Pansy would get on with you first rate. I'll telephone
tomorrow, in the afternoon. If the last flowers I sent you came I
never heard of it."

She thanked him appropriately for the roses and stood, erect and
impersonal, as a man in the hotel livery helped him into a coat. Mr.
Moses Feldt waved the still unlighted cigar at her and disappeared
through the rotating door to the street.

She gave a half-affected sigh of relief. Couldn't he see that her
mother would never marry him. At the same time the strange thrill
touched her; the sense of his absurdity vanished and she no longer
remembered him perched like a painted rubber ball on the edge of the
lounge.

In the somber red plush and varnished wood of the reception-room of
their suite he seemed again charming. Perhaps it was because he,
too, adored her mother. That wasn't the reason. The familiar rare
joy lingered. It seemed now as though she were to capture and
understand it ... there was the vibration of music; and then, as
always, she felt at once sad and brave. But, in spite of her old
effort to the contrary, the feeling died away. Some day it would be
clear to her; in the meanwhile Mr. Moses Feldt became once more only
ridiculous.




VIII


In the morning she was dressed and had returned from breakfast
before her mother stirred. The latter moved sharply, brought an arm
up over her head, and swore. It was a long while before she got up
or spoke again, and Linda never remembered her in a worse temper.
When, finally, she came into the room where the breakfast-tray was
laid, Linda was inexpressibly shocked--all that her mother had
dreaded about her appearance had come disastrously true. Her face
was hung with shadows like smudges of dirt and her eyes were netted
with lines.

Examining the dishes with distaste she told Linda that positively
she could slap her for letting them bring up orange-juice. "How
often must I explain to you that it freezes my fingers." Linda
replied that she had repeated this in the breakfast-room and perhaps
they had the wrong order. Neither her mother nor she said anything
more until Mrs. Condon had finished her coffee and started a second
cigarette. Then Linda related something of Mr. Moses Feldt's call on
the evening before. "He cried right into his handkerchief," she
said, "until I thought I should sink."

Mrs. Condon eyed her daughter speculatively. "Now if you were only
four years older," she declared, "it would be a good thing. He was
simply born to be a husband." Horror filled Linda at the other's
implication. "Yes," the elder insisted; "you couldn't do better;
except, perhaps, for those girls of his. But then you'd have no
trouble making them miserable. It's time to talk to you seriously
about marriage." The smoke from the cigarette eddied in a gray veil
across her unrefreshed face.

"You're old for your age, Linda; your life has made you that; and,
like I said last night, it is rather better than not. Well, for you
marriage, and soon as possible, is the proper thing. Mind, I have
never said a word against it; only what suits one doesn't suit
another. Where it wouldn't be anything more than an old ladies' home
to me you need it early and plenty. You are too intense. That
doesn't go in the world. Men don't like it. They want their pleasure
and comfort without strings tied to them; the intensity has to be
theirs.

"What you must get through your head is that love--whatever it is--and
marriage are two different things, and if you are going to be
successful they must be kept separate. You can't do anything with a
man if you love him; but then you can't do anything with him if he
doesn't love you. That's the whole thing in a breath. I am not
crying down love, either; only I don't want you to think it is the
bread and butter while it's nothing more than those little sweet
cakes at Henri's.

"Now any girl who marries a poor man or for love--they are the same
thing--is a fool and deserves what she gets. No one thanks her for
it, him least of all; because if she does love him it is only to
make them miserable. She's always at him--where did he go and why
did he stay so long, and no matter what he says she knows it's a
lie. More times than not she's right, too. I can't tell you too
often--men don't want to be loved, they like to be flattered and
flattered and then flattered again. You'd never believe how childish
they are.

"Make them think they're it and don't give too much--that's the
secret. Above all else don't be easy on them. Don't say 'all right,
darling, next spring will do as well for a new suit.' Get it then
and let him worry about paying for it, if worry he must. If they
don't give it to you some one smarter will wear it. But I started to
talk about getting married.

"Choose a Moses Feldt, who will always be grateful to you, and keep
him at it. They are so easy to land it's a kind of shame, too. Perhaps
I am telling you this too soon, but I don't want any mistakes. Well,
pick out your Moses--and mama will help you there--and suddenly, at
the right time, show him that you can be affectionate; surprise him
with it and you so staid and particular generally. Don't overdo it,
promise more than you ever give--

"In the closet, dearie, just a little. That's a good girl. Mama's so
dry." She rose, the silver cup of the flask in her hand, and moved
inevitably to the mirror. "My hair's a sight," she remarked; "all
strings. I believe I'll get a permanent wave. They say it lasts for
six months or more, till the ends grow out. Makes a lot of it, too,
and holds the front together. If you've ever had dye in your hair, I
hear, it will break off like grass."

Linda pondered over what she had been told of love and marriage; on
the whole the exposition had been unsatisfactory. The latter she was
able to grasp, but her mother had admitted an inability exactly to
fix love. One fact, apparently, was clear--it was a nuisance and a
hindrance to happiness, or rather to success. Love upset things.
Still she had the strongest objection possible to living forever
with a man like Mr. Moses Feldt. At once all that she had hoped for
from life grew flat and uninteresting. She had no doubt of her
mother's correctness and wisdom; the world was like that; she must
make the best of it.

There was some telephoning, inquiries, and she heard the elder make
an appointment with a hair-dresser for three that afternoon. She
wondered what it would be like to have your hair permanently waved
and hoped that she would see it done. This, too, she realized, was a
part of the necessity of always considering men--they liked your
hair to be wavy. Hers was as straight and stupid as possible. She,
in turn, examined herself in a mirror: the black bang fell exactly
to her eyebrows, her face had no color other than the carnation of
her lips and her deep blue eyes. She moved away and critically
studied her figure; inches and inches too thin, she decided.
Undoubtedly her mother was right, and she must marry at the first
opportunity--if she could find a man, a rich man, who was willing.

Her thoughts returned vaguely to the mystery, the nuisance, of love.
Surely she had heard something before, immensely important, about
it, and totally different from all her mother had said. Her mind was
filled with the fantastic image of a forest, of dangers, and a fat
china figure with curled plumes, a nodding head, that brushed her
with fear and disgust. A shuddering panic took possession of her,
flashes burned before her eyes, and she ran gasping to the perfumed
soft reassurances of her mother.




IX


In a recurrence of her surprising concern of the day before Mrs.
Condon declined to leave her dearest Linda alone; and, their arms
caught together in a surging affection, they walked down Fifth
Avenue toward the hairdresser's. There was a diffused gray sparkle
of sunlight--it was early for the throngs--through which they passed
rapidly to the accompaniment of a rapid eager chatter. Linda wore a
deep smooth camel's hair cape, over which her intense black hair
poured like ink, and her face was shaded by a dipping green velvet
hat. Her mother, in one of the tightly cut suits she affected, had
never been more like a perfect companion.

They saw, in the window of a store for men, a set of violent purple
wool underwear, and barely escaped hysterics at the thought of Mr.
Moses Feldt in such a garb. They giggled idiotically at the
spectacle of a countryman fearfully making the sharp descent from
the top of a lurching omnibus. And then, when they had reached the
place of Mrs. Condon's appointment, stopped at the show of
elaborately waved hair on wax heads and chose which, probably, would
resemble the elder and which, in a very short while now, Linda.

There was an impressive interior, furnished in gray panels and
silvery wood; and the young woman at the desk was more surprisingly
waved than anything they had yet seen. M. Joseph would be ready
almost immediately; and in the meanwhile Mrs. Condon could lay aside
her things in preparation for the hair to be washed. She did this
while Linda followed every movement with the deepest interest.

At the back of the long room was a succession of small alcoves, each
with an important-looking chair and mirror and shelves, a white
basin, water-taps and rubber tubes. Settled, in comfort, Mrs.
Condon's hair was spread out in a bright metal tray fastened to the
back of the chair, and the attendant, a moist tired girl in a
careless waist, sprayed the short thick gold-colored strands.

"My," she observed, "what some wouldn't give for your shade! Never
been touched, I can see, either. A lady comes in with real Titian,
but yours is more select. It positively is Lillian Russell." While
she talked her hands sped with incredible rapidity and skill. "The
gentlemen don't notice it; of course not; oh, no! There was a girl
here, a true blonde, but she didn't stay long--her own car, yes,
indeed. Married her right out of the establishment. There wasn't any
nonsense to her.

"So this is your little girl! I'd never have believed it. Not that
she hasn't a great deal of style, a great deal--almost, you might
say, like an Egyptian. In the movies last night; her all over. It's
a type that will need studying. Bertha Kalich. But for me--"

Already, Linda saw, this part of the operation was done. The girl
wheeled into position a case that had a fan and ring of blue
flickering flames, and a cupped tube through which hot air was
poured over her mother's head. M. Joseph strutted in, a small
carefully dressed man with a diminutive pointed gray beard and
formal curled mustache. He spoke with what Linda supposed was a
French accent, and his manners, at least to them, were beautiful.
But because the girl had not put out the blue flames quickly enough
he turned to her with a voice of quivering rage.

It was so unexpected, in the middle of his bowing and smooth
assurances, that Linda was startled, and had to think about him all
over. The result of this was a surprising dislike; she hated, even,
to see him touch her mother, as he unnecessarily did in directing
them into the enclosure for the permanent wave.

The place itself filled her with the faint horror of instruments and
the unknown. Above the chair where Mrs. Condon now sat there was a
circle in the ceiling like the base of a chandelier and hanging down
from it on twisted green wires were a great number of the strangest
things imaginable: they were as thick as her wrist, but round,
longer and hollow, white china inside and covered with brown
wrapping. The wires of each, she discovered, led over a little wheel
and down again to a swinging clock-like weight. In addition to this
there were strange depressing handles on the wall by a dial with a
jiggling needle and clearly marked numbers.

The skill of the girl who had washed her mother's hair, however, was
slight compared with M. Joseph's dexterity. The comb flashed in his
white narrow hands; in no time at all every knot was urged out into
a shining smoothness. "Just the front?" he inquired. Not waiting for
Mrs. Condon's reply, he detached a strand from the mass over her
brow, impaled it on a hairpin, while he picked up what might have
been a thick steel knitting-needle with one end fastened in the
middle of a silver quarter. The latter, it developed, had a hole in
it, through which he drew the strand of hair, and then wrapped it
with an angry tightness about the long projection.

At this exact moment a new girl, but tired and moist, appeared, took
a hank of white threads from a dressing-table, and tied that
separate lock firmly. This, Linda counted, was repeated fifteen
times; and when it was accomplished she was unable to repress a
nervous laughter. Really, her mother looked too queer for words: the
long rigid projections stood out all over her head like--like a huge
pincushion; no, it was a porcupine. Mrs. Condon smiled in uncertain
recognition of her daughter's mirth.

Then Linda's attention followed M. Joseph to a table against a
partition, where he secured a white cotton strip from a film of them
soaking in a shallow tray, took up some white powder on the blade of
a dessert knife and transferred it to the strip. This he wrapped and
wrapped about the hair fastened on a spindle, tied it in turn, and
dragged down one of the brown objects on wires, which, to Linda's
great astonishment, fitted precisely over the cotton-bound hair.
Again, fifteen times, M. Joseph did this, fastening each connection
with the turn of a screw. When so much was accomplished her mother's
hair, it seemed, had grown fast to the ceiling in a tangle of green
ends. It was the most terrifying spectacle Linda had ever witnessed.
Obscure thoughts of torture, of criminals executed by electricity,
froze her in a set apprehension.

The hair-dresser stepped over to the dials on the wall, and, with a
sharp comprehensive glance at his apparatus, moved a handle as far
as it would go. Nothing immediately happened, and Linda gave a
relaxing sigh of relief. M. Joseph, however, became full of a
painful attention.




X


He brought into view an unsuspected tube, with a cone of paper at
its end, and bent over her mother, directing a stream of cold air
against her head. "How do you feel?" he asked, with, Linda noticed,
a startling loss of his first accent. Mrs. Condon so far felt well
enough. Then, before Linda's startled gaze, every single one of the
fifteen imprisoning tubes began to steam with an extraordinary
vigor; not only did they steam, like teapots, but drops of water
formed and slowly slid over her mother's face. If the process
appeared weird at the beginning, now it was utterly fantastic.

The little white vapor spurts played about Mrs. Condon's dripping
countenance; they increased rather than diminished; actually it
resembled a wrecked locomotive she had once seen. "How are you?" M.
Joseph demanded nervously. "Is it hot anywhere?" With a sudden
gesture she replied in a shaking voice, "Here."

Instantly he was holding the paper cone with its cold air against
her scalp, and the heat was subdued. He glanced nervously at his
watch, and Mrs. Condon managed to ask, "How long?"

"Twenty minutes."

Dangerous as the whole proceeding seemed nothing really happened,
and Linda's fears gradually faded into a mere curiosity and
interest. A curtain hung across the door to the rest of the
establishment, but it had been brushed partly aside; and she could
see, in the compartment they had vacated, another man bending with
waving irons over the liberated mass of a woman's hair. He was very
much like M. Joseph, but he was younger and had only a dark scrap of
mustache. As he caught up the hair with a quick double twist he
leaned very close to the woman's face, whispering with an expression
that never changed, an expression like that of the wax heads in the
show-case. He bent so low that Linda was certain their cheeks had
touched. She pondered at length over this, gazing now at the man
beyond and now at M. Joseph flitting with the cold-air tube about
her mother; wondering if, when she grew older, she would like a
hair-dresser's cheek against hers. Linda decided not. The idea
didn't shock her, the woman in the other space plainly liked it;
still she decided she wouldn't. A different kind of man, she told
herself, would be nicer.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a sharp, unpleasant odor--the odor
of scorched hair; and she was absolutely rigid with horror at an
agonized cry from her mother.

"It's burning me terribly," the latter cried. "Oh, I can't stand it.
Stop! Stop!"

M. Joseph, as white as plaster, rushed to the wall and reversed the
handle, and Mrs. Condon started from the chair, her face now
streaming with actual tears; but before she could escape the man
threw himself on her shoulders.

"You mustn't move," he whispered desperately, "you'll tear your hair
out. I tell you no harm's been done. Everything is all right. Please,
please don't cry like that. It will ruin my business. There are
others in the establishment. Stop!" he shook her viciously.

Linda had risen, terrorized; and Mrs. Condon, with waving plucking
hands, was sobbing an appeal to be released. "My head, my head," she
repeated. "I assure you"--the man motioned to a pallid girl to hold
her in the chair. With a towel to protect his hand he undid a screw,
lifted off the cap and untwisted the cotton from a bound lock of
hair; releasing it, in turn, from the spindle it fell forward in a
complete corkscrew over Mrs. Condon's face.

"Do you see!" he demanded. "Perfect. I give you my word they'll all
be like that. The cursed heat ran up on me," he added in a swift
aside to his assistant. "Has Mrs. Bellows gone? Who's still in the
place? Here, loose that binding ... thank God, that one is all
right, too."

Together they unfastened most of the connections, and a growing
fringe of long remarkable curls marked Mrs. Condon's pain-drawn and
dabbled face. Linda sobbed uncontrollably; but perhaps, after all,
nothing frightful had happened. Her poor mother! Then fear again
tightened about her heart at the perturbed expression that overtook
the hair-dresser. He was trying in vain to remove one of the caps.
She caught enigmatic words--"the borax, crystallized ... solid. It
would take a plumber ... have to go."

The connection was immovable. Even in her suffering Mrs. Condon
implored M. Joseph to save her hair. Nothing, however, could be
done; he admitted it with pale lips. The thing might be chiseled
off; in the end he tried to force a release and the strand, with a
renewal of Mrs. Condon's agony--now, in the interest of her
appearance, heroically withstood--snapped short in the container.

Rapidly recovering her vigor, she launched on a tirade against M.
Joseph and his permanent waving establishment--Linda had never
before heard her mother talk in such a loud brutal manner, nor use
such heated unpleasant words, and the girl was flooded with a
wretched shame. Still another lock, it was revealed, had been
ruined, and crumbled to mere dust in its owner's fingers.

"The law will provide for you," she promised.

"Your hair was dyed," the proprietor returned vindictively. "The
girl who washed it will testify. Every one is warned against the
permanent if their hair has been colored. So it was at your own
risk."

"My head's never been touched with dye," Mrs. Condon shrilly
answered. "You lying little ape. And well does that young woman know
it. She complimented me herself on a true blonde." The girl had,
too, right before Linda.

"You ought to be thrashed out of the city."

"Your money will be given back to you," M. Joseph told her.

Outside they found a taxi, and sped back to their hotel. Above, Mrs.
Condon removed her hat; and, before the uncompromising mirror,
studied her wrecked hair--a frizzled vacancy was directly over her
left brow--and haggard face. When she finally turned to Linda, her
manner, her words, were solemn.

"I'm middle-aged," she said.

A dreary silence enveloped them sitting in the dark reception-room
while Mrs. Condon restlessly shredded unlighted cigarettes on the
floor. She had made no effort to repair the damages to her appearance,
and when the telephone bell sharply sounded, she reached out in a
slovenly negligence of manner. Linda could hear a blurred articulation
and her mother answering listlessly. The latter at last said: "Very
well, at seven then; you'll stop for us." She hung up the receiver,
stared blankly at Linda, and then went off into a harsh mirth. "Oh,
my God!" she cried; "the old ladies' home!"




XI


With her mother away on a wedding-trip with Mr. Moses Feldt, Linda
was suddenly projected into the companionship of his two daughters.
One, as he had said, was light, but a different fairness from Mrs.
Condon's--richly thick, like honey; while Judith, the elder, who
must have been twenty, was dark in skin, in everything but her eyes,
which were a contrasting ashen-violet. She spoke at once of Linda's
flawless whiteness:

"A magnolia," she said, in a deliberate dark voice; "you are quite a
gorgeous child. Do you mind my saying that your clothes are rather
quaint? They aren't inevitable, and yours ought to be that."

They were at lunch in the Feldt dining-room, an interior of heavy
ornately carved black wood, panels of Chinese embroidery in imperial
yellow, and a neutral mauve carpet. The effect, with glittering
iridescent pyramids of glass, massive frosted repouss silver,
burnished gold-plate and a wide table decoration of orchids and
fern, was tropical and intense. It was evident to Linda that the
Feldts were very rich indeed.

The entire apartment resembled the dining-room, while the building
itself filled a whole city block, with a garden and fountains like
an elaborate public square. Linda, however, wasn't particularly
impressed by such show; she saw that Judith and Pansy had expected
that of her; but she was determined not to exhibit a surprise that
would imply any changes in her mother's and her condition. In
addition, Linda calmly took such surroundings for granted. Her
primary conception of possible existence was elegance; its necessity
had so entered into her being that it had departed from her
consciousness.

"I must take you to Lorice," Judith continued; "she will know better
than any one else what you ought to have. You seem terribly pure--at
first. But you're not a snowdrop; oh, no--something very rare in a
conservatory. Much better style than your mother."

"I hope you won't mind Judith," Pansy put in; "she's always like
that." A silence followed in which they industriously dipped the
leaves of mammoth artichokes into a buttery sauce. Linda, as
customary, said very little, she listened with patient care to the
others and endeavored to arrive at conclusions. She liked Pansy, who
was as warm and simple as her father. Judith was harder to understand.
She was absorbed in color and music, and declared that ugliness gave
her a headache at once. Altogether, Linda decided, she was rather
silly, especially about men; and at times her emotions would rise
beyond control until she wept in a thin hysterical gasping.

The room where, mostly, they sat was small, but with a high ceiling,
and hung in black, with pagoda-like vermilion chairs. The light, in
the evening, was subdued; and Pansy and Judith, in extremely
clinging vivid dresses, the former's hair piled high in an amber
mass and Judith's drawn severely across her ears, were lovely. Linda
thought of the tropical butterflies of the river Amazon, of orchids
like those always on the dining-room table. A miniature grand piano
stood against the drapery, and Judith often played. Linda learned to
recognize some of the composers. Pansy liked best the modern
waltzes; Judith insisted that Richard Strauss was incomparable; but
Linda developed an overwhelming preference for Gluck. The older girl
insisted that this was an affectation; for a while she tried to
confuse Linda's knowledge; but finally, playing the airs of "Orpheus
and Eurydice," she admitted that the latter was sincere.

"They sound so cool," Linda said in a clear and decided manner.

There was a man with them, and he shook his head in a mock sadness.
"So young and yet so formal. If, with the rest, you had Judith's
temperament, you would be the most irresistible creature alive. For
see, my dear child, as it is you stir neither tenderness nor desire;
you are remote and perfect, and faintly wistful. I can't imagine
being human or even comfortable with you about. Then, too, you have
too much wisdom."

"She is frightful," Pansy agreed; "she's never upset nor her hair a
sight; and, above all else, Linda won't tell you a thing."

"Some day," Judith informed them from the rippling whisper of the
piano, "she will be magnificently loved."

"Certainly," the man continued; "but what will Linda, Linda Condon,
give in return?"

"It's a mistake to give much," Linda said evenly.

"No, no, no!" Judith cried. "Give everything; spend every feeling,
every nerve."

"You are remarkable, of course; almost no women have the courage of
their emotions." His name was Reynold Chase, a long thin grave young
man in a dinner coat, who wrote brilliant and successful comedies.
"Yet Linda isn't parsimonious." He turned to her. "Just what are
you? What do you think of love?"

"I haven't thought about it much," she replied slowly. "I'm not sure
that I know what it means. At least it hasn't anything to do with
marriage--"

"Ah!" he interrupted her.

Her usually orderly mind grew confused; it eddied as though with the
sound of the piano. "It is not marriage," she vaguely repeated her
mother's instruction. Reynold Chase supported her.

"That destroys it," he asserted. "This love is as different as
possible from the ignominious impulse eternally tying the young into
knots. It's anti-social."

"How stupid you are, Reynold," Pansy protested. "If you want to use
those complicated words take Judith into the drawing-room. I'm sure
Linda is dizzy, too."

The latter's mental confusion lingered; she had a strong sense of
having heard Reynold Chase say these strange things long before.
Judith left the piano, sat beside him, and he lightly kissed her. A
new dislike of Judith Feldt deepened in Linda's being. She had no
reason for it, but suddenly she felt absolutely opposed to her. The
manner in which Judith rested against the man by her was very
distasteful. It offended Linda inexplicably; she wanted to draw into
an infinity of distance from all contact with men and life.

She didn't even want to make one of those marriages that had nothing
to do with love, but was only a sensible arrangement for the
securing of gowns and velvet hangings and the luxury of enclosed
automobiles. Suddenly she felt lonely, and hoped that her mother
would come back soon.




XII


But when her mother, now Mrs. Moses Feldt, did return, Linda was
conscious of a keen disappointment. Somehow she never actually came
back. It wasn't only that, after so many years together, she occupied
a room with another than Linda, but her manner was changed; it had
lost all freedom of heart and speech. The new Mrs. Feldt was heavily
polite to her husband's daughters; Linda saw that she liked Pansy,
but Judith made her uncomfortable. She expressed this in an isolated
return of the old confidences:

"That girl," she said sharply, "likes petting. She can talk all
night about her soul and beauty, and play the piano till her fingers
drop off, but I--I--know. You can't fool me where they are concerned.
I can recognize an unhealthy sign. I never believed in going to all
those concerts and kidding yourself into a fever. I may have shown
myself a time, but you mark my word--I was honest compared to Judith
Feldt. Don't you be impressed with all her art talk and the books
she reads. I was looking into one yesterday, and it made me blush;
you can believe it or not, it takes some book for that!"

At the same time she treated Judith with a studious sweetness. Mr.
Moses Feldt--Linda always thought of him as that--was a miracle of
kindly cheerfulness. He made his wife and her daughter, and his own
girls, an unbroken succession of elaborate and costly presents.
"What's it for if not to spend on those you love?" he would remark,
bringing a small jeweler's box wrapped in creamy-pink paper from his
pocket. "You can't take it with you. I wasn't born with it--mama and
I were as poor as any--you'll forgive me, Stella, I know, for
speaking of her. I got enough heart to love you both. 'Oh, mama!' I
said, and she dying, 'if you only won't go, I'll give you gold to
eat.'"

Curiously, as Linda grew older, the consciousness of her stepfather
as an absurd fat little man dwindled; she lost all sense of his
actual person; and, as the influence of her mother slipped from her
life, the mental conception of Mr. Moses Feldt deepened. She thought
about him a great deal and very seriously; the things he said, the
warm impact of his being, vibrated in her memory. He had the effect
on her of the music of Christopher Gluck--the effect of a pure fine
chord.

Pansy she now thought of with a faint contempt: she was rapidly
growing thick-waisted and heavy, and she was engaged to a dull young
man not rich enough to be interesting. They sat about in frank
embraces and indulged in a sentimental speech that united Judith and
Linda in common oppression.

There were, not infrequently, gatherings of the Feldts at dinner, a
noisy good-tempered uproar of a great many voices speaking at once;
extraordinary quantities of superlative jewels and dresses of
superfine textures; but the latter, Linda thought, were too vivid in
pattern or color for the short full maternal figures they often
adorned. But no one, it seemed, considered himself ageing or even,
in spite of the most positive indications, aged. The wives with
faded but fashionable hair and animated eyes in spent faces talked
with vigorous raillery about the "boys," who, it might have happened,
had gone in a small masculine company to a fervid musical show the
evening before. While they, in their turn, thick like their brother
or cousin Moses, with time-wasted hair and countenances marked with
the shrewdness in the service of which the greater part of their
lives had vanished, had their little jokes about the "girls" and the
younger and handsomer beaux who threatened their happiness.

At times the topic of business crept into the lighter discussion,
and, in an instant, the gaiety evaporated and left expressionless
men and quick sharp sentences steely with decision, or indirect and
imperturbably blank. A memorandum book and a gold pencil would
appear for an enigmatic note, after which the cheerfulness slowly
revived.

The daughters resembled Judith or the slower placidity of Pansy;
while there was still another sort, more vigorous in being, who
consciously discussed riding academies, the bridle-paths of Central
Park, and the international tennis. Their dress held a greater
restraint than the elders; though Linda recognized that it was no
less lavish; and their feminine trifles, the morocco beauty-cases
and powder-boxes, the shoulder-pins, their slipper and garter
buckles were extravagant in exquisite metals and workings.

They arrived in limousines with dove-colored upholstery and crystal
vases of maidenhair fern and moss-roses; and often, in such a car,
Linda went to the theatre with Judith or Pansy and some cousins.
Usually it was a matinee, where their seats were the best procurable,
directly at the stage; and they sat in a sleek expensive row eating
black chocolates from painted boxes ruffled in rose silk. The
audience, composed mostly of their own world, followed the exotic
fortunes of the plays with a complete discrimination in every
possible emotional display and crisis.

Lithe actresses in a revealing severity of attire, like spoiled nuns
with carmine lips, suffering in ingenuous problems of the passions,
agonized in shuddering tones; or else they went to concerts to hear
young violinists, slender, with intense faces and dramatic hair,
play concertos that irritated Linda with little shivers of delight.

Sometimes they had lunch in a restaurant of Circassian walnut and
velvet carpets, with cocktails, and eggs elaborate with truffles and
French pastry. Then, afterward, they would stop at a confectioner's,
or at a cafe where there was dancing, for tea. They all danced in a
perfection of slow graceful abandon, with youths who, it seemed to
Linda, did nothing else.

She accepted her part in this existence as inevitable, yet she was
persistently aware of a feeling of strangeness, of essential
difference from it. She was unable to lose a sense of looking on, as
if morning, noon and night she were at another long play. Linda
regarded it--as she did so much else--with neither enthusiasm nor
marked annoyance. Probably it would continue without change through
her entire life. All that was necessary, and easily obtained, was a
sufficient amount of money.

Her manner, Pansy specially complained, was not intimate and
inviting; in her room Linda usually closed the door; the frank
community of the sisters was distasteful to her. She demanded an
extraordinary amount of personal privacy. Linda never consulted
Judith's opinion about her clothes, nor exchanged the more
significant aspects of feeling. Alone in a bed-chamber furnished in
silvery Hungarian ash, her bed a pale quilted luxury with Madeira
linen crusted in monograms, without head or foot boards, and a
dressing-table noticeably bare, she would deliberately and
delicately prepare for the night.

While Judith's morning bath steamed with the softness and odor of
lavender crystals, Linda slipped into water almost cold. This, with
her clear muslins and heavy black silk stockings, her narrow
unornamented slippers, represented the perfection of niceness.

There were others than Pansy, however, who commented on what they
called her superiority--the young men who appeared in the evening. A
number of them, cousins of the Feldt dinner parties or more casual,
tried to engage her sympathies in their persons and prospects. It
was a society of early maturity. But, without apparent effort, she
discouraged them, principally by her serene lack of interest. It was
a fundamental part of her understanding of things that younger men
were unprofitable; she liked far better the contemporaries of Moses
Feldt.

Reynold Chase had ceased his visits, but his place had been taken by
another and still another emotionally gifted man. The present one
was dark and imperturbable: they knew little of him beyond the facts
that he had been a long while in the Orient, that his manner and
French were unsurpassed, and that practically every considerable
creative talent in New York was entertained in his rooms.

Judith had been to one of his parties; and, the following morning in
bed, she told Pansy and Linda the most remarkable things.

"It would never do for Pansy," she concluded; "but I must get Markue
to ask you sometime, Linda. How old are you now? Well, that's
practically sixteen, and you are very grown up. You would be quite
sensational, in one of your plain white frocks, in his apartment.
You'd have to promise not to tell your mother, though. She thinks
I'm leading you astray now--the old dear. Does she think I am blind?
I met a man last week, a friend of father's, who used to know her.
Of course he wouldn't say anything, men are such idiots about
that--like ostriches with their pasts buried and all the feathers
sticking out--but there was a champagne expression in his smile."

Linda wondered, later, if she'd care to go to a party of Markue's.
There was a great deal of drinking at such affairs; and though she
rather liked cordials, crme de th and Grand Marnier, even stronger
things flavored with limes and an occasional frigid cocktail, she
disliked--from a slight experience--men affected by drink. Judith
had called her a constitutional prude; this, she understood, was a
term of reproach; and she wondered if, applied to her, it were just.

Usually it meant a religious person or one fussy about the edge of
her skirt; neither of which she ever considered. She didn't like to
sit in a corner and be hugged--even that she could now assert with a
degree of knowledge--but it wasn't because she was shocked. Nothing,
she told herself gravely, shocked her; only certain acts and moments
annoyed her excessively. It was as if her mind were a crisp dress
with ribbons which she hated to have mussed or disarranged.

Linda didn't take the trouble to explain this. Now that her mother
had withdrawn from her into a perpetual and uncomfortable politeness
she confided in no one. She would have been at a loss to put her
complicated sensations and thoughts into words. Mr. Moses Feldt, the
only one to whom she could possibly talk intimately, would be upset
by her feelings. He would give her a hug and the next day bring up a
new present from his pocket.

Her clothes, with the entire support of Lorice, were all delicate in
fabric, mostly white with black sashes, and plainly ruffled. She
detested the gray crepe de Chine from which Judith's undergarments
were made and the colored embroidery of Pansy's; while she ignored
scented toilet-waters and extracts. Markue, in finally asking her to
a party at his rooms, said that there she would resemble an Athenian
marble, of the un-painted epoch, in the ballet of Scheherazade.




XIII


"There's nothing special to say about Markue's parties," Judith,
dressing, told Linda. "You will simply have to take what comes your
way. There is always some one serious at them, if you insist, as
usual, on dignity." She stood slim and seductive, like a perverse
pierrot, before the oppressive depths of a black mirror. Linda had
finished her preparations for the evening. There was no departure
from her customary blanched exactness. She studied her reflection
across Judith's shoulder; her intense blue eyes, under the level
blot of her bang, were grave on the delicate pallor of her face.

In the taxi, slipping rapidly down-town, Linda was conscious of a
slight unusual disturbance of her indifference. This had nothing to
do with whether or not she'd be a success; her own social demands
were so small that any considerable recognition of her was
unimportant. Her present feeling came from the fact that to-night,
practically, she was making her first grown-up appearance in the
world, the world from which she must select the materials of her
happiness and success. To-night she would have an opportunity to put
into being all that--no matter how firmly held--until now had been
but convictions.

Her interest was not in whom or what she might meet, but in herself.
Judith, smoking a cigarette in a mist of silver fox, was plainly
excited. "I like Markue awfully," she admitted.

"Does he care for you?" Linda asked.

"That," said Judith, "I can't make out--if he likes me or if it's
just anonymous woman. I wish it were the first, Linda." Her voice
was shadowed; suddenly, in spite of her youth and exhilaration, she
seemed haggard and spent. Linda recognized this in a cold scrutiny.
Privately she decided that the other was a fool--she didn't watch
her complexion at all.

The motor turned west in the low Forties and stopped before a high
narrow stone faade with a massive griffon-guarded door. Judith led
the way directly into the elevator and designated Markue's floor. It
was at the top of the building, where he met them with his
impenetrable courtesy and took them into a bare room evidently
planned for a studio. There were an empty easel, the high blank
dusty expanse of the skylight, and chairs with the somber hats and
coats of men and women's wraps like the glistening shed skins of
brilliant snakes.

They turned through the hall to an interior more remarkable than
anything Linda could have imagined; it seemed to her very high,
without windows and peaked like a tent. Draperies of intricate
Eastern color hung in long folds. There were no chairs, but low
broad divans about the walls, a thick carpet with inlaid stands in
the center laden with boxes of cigarettes, sugared exotic sweets and
smoking incense. It was so dim and full of thick scent, the shut
effect was so complete, that for a moment Linda felt painfully
oppressed; it seemed impossible to breathe in the wavering bluish
atmosphere.

Markue, who had appeared sufficiently familiar outside, now had a
strange portentous air; the gleams of his quick black eyes, the dusky
tone of his cheeks, his impassive grace, startled her. New York was
utterly removed: the taxi that had brought Judith and her, the
swirling traffic of Columbus Circle and smooth undulations of Fifth
Avenue, were lost with a different life. She saw, however, the open
door to another room full of clear light, and her self-possession
rapidly returned. Judith--as she had threatened--at once deserted
her; and Linda found an inconspicuous corner of a divan.

There were, perhaps, twenty people in the two rooms, and each one
engaged her attention. A coffee-colored woman was sitting beyond
her, clad in loose red draperies to which were sewed shining
patterns of what she thought was gold. Markue was introducing
Judith, and the seated figure smiled pleasantly with a flash of
beautiful teeth and the supple gesture of a raised brown palm. That,
Linda decided, was the way she shook hands. Two dark-skinned men,
one in conventional evening dress, were with her; they had small
fine features and hair like carved ebony.

Linda had never before been at an affair with what she was forced to
call colored people; instinctively she was antagonistic and
superior. She turned to a solemn masculine presence with a ruffled
shirt and high black stock; he was talking in a resonant voice and
with dramatic gestures to a woman with a white face and low-drawn
hair. Linda was fascinated by the latter, dressed in a soft clinging
dull garnet. It wasn't her clothes, although they were remarkable,
that held her attention, but the woman's mouth. Apparently, it had
no corners. Like a little band of crimson rubber, or a ring of vivid
flame, it shifted and changed in the oddest shapes. It was an
unhappy mouth, and made her think of pain; but perhaps not so much
that as hunger ... not for food, Linda was certain. What did she
want?

There was a light appealing laugh from another seated on the floor
in a floating black dinner dress with lovely ankles in delicate
Spanish lace stockings; her head was thrown back for the whisper of
a heavy man with ashen hair, a heavenly scarf and half-emptied
glass.

Her bare shoulders, Linda saw, were as white as her own, as white
but more sloping. The other's hair, though, was the loveliest red
possible. The entire woman, relaxed and laughing in the perfumery
and swimming shadows, was irresistible. A man with a huge nose and
blank eyes, his hands disfigured with extraordinary rings, momentarily
engaged her. Then, at the moment when she saw an inviting and
correctly conventional youth, he crossed and sat at her side.

"Quite a show," he said in the manner she had expected and approved.
The glow of his cigarette wavered over firmly cut lips. "We've just
come to New York," he continued. "I don't know any one here but
Markue, do you?" Linda explained her own limitations. "The Victory's
fine and familiar."

She followed his gaze to where a winged statue with flying drapery
was set on a stand. She had seen it before, but without interest.
Now it held her attention. It wasn't a large cast, not over three
feet high, but suddenly Linda thought that it was the biggest thing
in the room; it seemed to expand as she watched it.

Beside the Victory, in a glass case with an enclosed concealed
light, was a statue, greenish gray, a few inches tall, with a
sneering placidity of expression as notable as the sweep of the
other white fragment. "That's Chinese," her companion decided; "it
looks as old as lust." There was the stir of new arrivals--a
towering heavy man with a slight woman in emerald satin. "There's
Pleydon, the sculptor," the youth told her animatedly. "I've seen
him at the exhibitions. It must be Susanna Noda, the Russian singer,
with him. He's a tremendous swell."




XIV


Linda watched Pleydon as he met Markue in the middle of the room. He
was dressed carelessly, improperly for the evening; but she forgave
that as the result of indifference. The informal flannels and soft
collar, too, suited the largeness of his being and gestures. There
was a murmur of meeting, Susanna Noda smiled appealingly; and then,
as Pleydon found a place on a divan, she at once contentedly sat on
his lap. Watching her, Linda thought of a brilliant parrot; but that
was only the effect of her color; for her face, with a tilted nose
and wide golden eyes, generous warm lips, was charming. She lighted
a cigarette, turned her graceful back on the room and company, and
chatted in French to the composed sculptor.

Linda divined that he was the most impressive figure she had
encountered; the quality of his indifference was beautiful and could
only have come in the security of being a "tremendous swell." That
phrase described all for which she had cared most. It included
everything that her mother had indicated as desirable and a lot that
she, Linda, had added. Money, certainly, was an absolute necessity;
but there were other things now that vaguely she desired. She tried
to decide what they were.

Only the old inner confusion resulted, the emotion that might have
been born in music; however, it was sharper than usual, and bred a
new dissatisfaction with the easier accomplishments. Really it was
very disturbing, for the pressure of her entire experience, all she
had been told, could be exactly weighed and held. The term luxury,
too, was revealing; it covered everything--except her present
unformed longing.

There were still newcomers, and Linda was aware of a sudden constraint.
A woman volubly French had appeared with a long pinkish-white dog in
a blanket, and the three Arabians--she had learned that much--had
risen with a concerted expression of surprise and displeasure. Their
anxiety, though, was no more dramatic than that of the dog's proprietor.
The gesture of her hands and lifted eyebrows were keenly expressive of
her impatience with any one who couldn't accept, with her, her dog.

"Markue ought to have it out," some one murmured. "Dogs, to high
caste Mohammedans, are unclean animals." Another added, "Worse than
that, if it should touch them, they would have to make the
pilgrimage to Mecca."

Without any knowledge of the situation of Mecca, Linda yet realized
that it must be a very long journey to result from the mere touch of
a dog. She didn't wonder at the restrained excitement of the
"colored" people. The situation was reduced to a sub-acid argument
between the Frenchwoman and the Begum; Madame couldn't exist without
her "_p'tit_." The Oriental lady could not breathe a common air
with the beast. The former managed a qualified triumph--the
"_p'tit_" was caged with a chair in a corner, and the episode,
for the moment, dropped.

Soon, however, Linda saw that the dog had wriggled out of captivity.
It made a cautious progress to where the candy stood on a low stand
and ran an appreciative tongue over the exposed sweet surfaces.
Rapidly a sugared fig was snapped up. Linda held her breath; no one
had noticed the animal yet--perhaps it would reach one of the
objectors and she would have the thrill of witnessing the departure
for Mecca.

But, as always, nothing so romantic occurred; the dog was
discovered, and the Mohammedans, with a hurried politeness, made
their salaams. Instead, a man with a quizzical scrutiny through
glasses that made him resemble an owl, stopped before her.

"'Here we go 'round the mulberry-bush,'" he chanted. "Hello, Kate
Greenaway. Have you had a drink?"

"Yes, thank you," she replied sedately.

"Certified milk?"

"It was something with gin," she particularized, "and too sweet." He
took the place beside her and solemnly recited a great many nursery
rhymes. On the whole she liked him, deciding that he was very
wicked. Soon he was holding her hand in both of his. "I know you're
not real," he proceeded. "Verlaine wrote you--_'Les Ingenus':_

  "'From which the sudden gleam of whiteness shed
    Met in our eyes a frolic welcoming.'

"What if I'd kiss you?"

"Nothing," she returned coldly.

"You're remarkable!" he exclaimed with enthusiasm. "If you are not
already one of the celebrated beauties you're about to be. As cool
as a fish! Look--Pleydon is going to rise and spill little Russia.
Have you heard her sing Scriabine?" Linda ignored him in a sharp
return of her interest in the big carelessly-dressed man. He put
Susanna Noda aside and moved to the dim middle of the room. His
features, Linda saw, were rugged and pronounced; he was very strong.

For a moment he stood gazing at the Winged Victory, his brow
gathered into a frown, while he made a caressing gesture with his
whole hand. Then he swung about and, from the heavy shadows of his
face, he looked down at her. He was still for a disconcerting length
of time, but through which Linda steadily met his interrogation.
Then he bent over and seriously removed the man beside her.

"Adieu, Louis," he said.

The weight of Pleydon's body depressed the entire divan. "An
ordinary man," he told her, "would ask how the devil you got here.
Then he would take you to your home with some carefully chosen words
for whatever parents you had. But I can see that all this is
needless. You are an extremely immaculate person.

"That isn't necessarily admirable," he added.

"I don't believe I am admirable at all," Linda replied.

"How old are you?" he demanded abruptly.

She told him.

"Age doesn't exist for some women, they are eternal," he continued.
"You see, I call you a woman, but you are not, and neither are you a
child. You are Art--Art the deathless," his gaze strayed back to the
Victory.

As she, too, looked at it, it seemed to Linda that the cast filled
all the room with a swirl of great white wings and heroic robes. In
an instant the incense and the dark colors, the uncertain pallid
faces and bare shoulders, were swept away into a space through which
she was dizzily borne. The illusion was so overpowering that
involuntarily she caught at the heavy arm by her.




XV


"Why did you do that?" he asked quickly, with a frowning regard.
Linda replied easily and directly. "It seemed as if it were carrying
me with it," she specified; "on and on and on, without ever
stopping. I felt as if I were up among the stars." She paused,
leaning forward, and gazed at the statue. Even now she was certain
that she saw a slight flutter of its draperies. "It is beautiful,
isn't it? I think it's the first thing I ever noticed like that. You
know what I mean--the first thing that hadn't a real use."

"But it has," he returned. "Do you think it is nothing to be swept
into heaven? I suppose by 'real' you mean oatmeal and scented soap.
Women usually do. But no one, it appears, has any conception of the
practical side of great art. You might try to remember that it is
simply permanence given to beauty. It's like an amber in which
beautiful and fragile things are kept forever in a lovely glow. That
is all, and it is enough.

"When I said that you were Art I didn't mean that you were skilfully
painted and dressed, but that there was a quality in you which
recalled all the charming women who had ever lived to draw men out
of the mud--something, probably, of which you are entirely
unconscious, and certainly beyond your control. You have it in a
remarkable degree. It doesn't belong to husbands but to those who
create 'Homer's children.'

"That's a dark saying of Plato's, and it means that the
_Alcestis_ is greater than any momentary offspring of the
flesh."

Linda admitted seriously, "Of course, I don't understand, yet it
seems quite familiar--"

"Don't, for Heaven's sake, repeat the old cant about reincarnation;"
he interrupted, "and sitting together, smeared with antimony, on a
roof of Babylon."

She hadn't intended to, she assured him. "Tell me about yourself,"
he directed. It was as natural to talk with him as it was, with
others, to keep still. Her frank speech flowed on and on, supported
by the realization of his attention.

"There really isn't much, besides hotels, all different; but you'd
be surprised how alike they were, too. I mean the things to eat, and
the people. I never realized how tired I was of them until mother
married Mr. Moses Feldt. The children were simply dreadful, the
children and the women; the men weren't much better." She said this
in a tone of surprise, and he nodded. "I can see now--I am supposed
to be too old for my age, and it was the hotels. You learn a great
deal."

"Do you like Mr. Moses Feldt?"

"Enormously; he is terribly sweet. I intend to marry a man just like
him. Or, at least, he was the second kind I decided on: the first
only had money, then I chose one with money who was kind, but now I
don't know. It's very funny: kindness makes me impatient. I'm
perfectly sure I'll never care for babies, they are so mussy. I
don't read, and I can't stand being--well, loved.

"Mother went to a great many parties; every one liked her and she
liked every one back; so it was easy for her. I used to long for the
time when I'd wear a lovely cloak and go out in a little shut motor
with a man with pearls; but now that's gone. They want to kiss you
so much. I wish that satisfied me. Why doesn't it? Is there anything
the matter with me, do you think? I've been told that I haven't any
heart."

As he laughed at her she noticed how absurdly small a cigarette
seemed in his broad powerful hand. "What has happened to you is
this," he explained: "a combination of special circumstances has
helped you in every way to be what, individually, you were. As a
rule, children are brought up in a house of lies, like taking a fine
naked body and binding it into hideous rigid clothes. You escaped
the damnation of cheap ready-cut morals and education. Your mother
ought to have a superb monument--the perfect parent. Of course you
haven't a 'heart.' From the standpoint of nature and society you're
as depraved as possible. You are worse than any one else here--than
all of them rolled together."

Curiously, she thought, this didn't disturb her, which proved at
once that he was right. Linda regarded herself with interest as a
supremely reprehensible person, perhaps a vampire. The latter,
though, was a rather stout woman who, dressed in frightful lingerie,
occupied couches with her arms caught about the neck of a man
bending over her. Every detail of this was distasteful.

What was she?

Her attention wandered to the squat Chinese god in the glass case.
It was clear that he hadn't stirred for ages. A difficult thought
partly formed in her mind--the Chinese was the god of this room, of
Markue's party, of the women seated in the dim light on the floor
and the divans; the low gurgle of their laughter, the dusky
whiteness of their shoulders in the upcoiling incense, the smothered
gleams of their hair, with the whispering men, were the world of the
grayish-green image.

She explained this haltingly to Pleydon, who listened with a
flattering interest. "I expect you're laughing at me inside," she
ended impotently. "And the other, the Greek Victory," he added, "is
the goddess of the other world, of the spirit. It's quaint a heathen
woman should be that."

Linda discovered that she liked Pleydon enormously. She continued
daringly that he might be the sort of man she wanted to marry. But
he wouldn't be easy to manage; probably he could not be managed at
all. Her mother had always insisted upon the presence of that
possibility in any candidate for matrimony. And, until now, Linda's
philosophy had been in accord with her. But suddenly she entertained
the idea of losing herself completely in--in love.

A struggle was set up within her: on one hand was everything that
she had been, all her experience, all advice, and her innate
detachment; on the other an obscure delicious thrill. Perhaps this
was what she now wanted. Linda wondered if she could try it--just a
little, let herself go experimentally. She glanced swiftly at
Pleydon, and his bulk, his heavy features, the sullen mouth,
appalled her.

Men usually filled her with an unaccountable shrinking into her
remotest self. Pleydon was different; her liking for him had
destroyed a large part of her reserve; but a surety of instinct told
her that she couldn't experiment there. It was characteristic that a
lesser challenge left her cold. She had better marry as she had
planned.

Susanna Noda came up petulantly and sank in a brilliant graceful
swirl at his feet. Her golden eyes, half shut, studied Linda
intently.




XVI


"I am fatigued," she complained; "you know how weary I get when you
ignore me." He gazed down at her untouched. "I have left Lao-tze for
Greece," he replied. She found this stupid and said so. "Has he been
no more amusing than this?" she asked Linda. "But then, you are a
child, it all intrigues you. You listen with the flattery of your
blue eyes and mouth, both open."

"Don't be rude, Susanna," Pleydon commanded. "You are so feminine
that you are foolish. I'm not the stupid one--look again at our
'child.' Tell me what you see."

"I see Siberia," she said finally. "I see the snow that seems so
pure while it is as blank and cold as death. You are right, Dodge. I
was the dull one. This girl will be immensely loved; perhaps by you.
A calamity, I promise you. Men are pigs," she turned again to Linda;
"no--imbeciles, for only idiots destroy the beauty that is given to
them. They take your reputation with a smile, they take your heart
with iron fingers; your beauty they waste like a drunken Russian
with gold."

"Susanna, like all spendthrifts, is amazed by poverty."

Even in the gloom Linda could see the pallor spreading over the
other's face; she was glad that Susanna Noda spoke in Russian.
However, with a violent effort, she subdued her bitterness. "Go into
your Siberia!" she cried. "I always thought you were capable of the
last folly of marriage. If you do it will spoil everything. You are
not great, you know, not really great, not in the first rank. You've
only the slightest chance of that, too much money. You were never in
the gutter as I was--"

"Chateaubriand," he interrupted, "Dante, Velasquez."

"No, not spiritually!" she cried again. "What do you know of the
inferno! Married, you will get fat." Pleydon turned lightly to
Linda:

"As a supreme favor do not, when I ask you, marry me."

This, for Linda, was horribly embarrassing. However, she gravely
promised. The Russian lighted a cigarette; almost she was serene
again. Linda said, "Fatness is awful, isn't it?"

Pleydon replied, "Death should be the penalty. If women aren't
lovely--" he waved away every other consideration.

"And if men have fingers like carrots--" Susanna mimicked him.
Judith, flushed, her hair loosened, approached. "Linda," she
demanded, "do you remember when we ordered the taxi? Was it two or
three?" Markue, at her shoulder, begged her not to consider home.

"I'm going almost immediately," Pleydon said, "and taking your
Linda." His height and determined manner scattered all objections.

Linda, at the entrance to the apartment, found to her great
surprise--in place of the motor she had expected--a small graceful
single-horse victoria, the driver buttoned into a sealskin rug. Deep
in furs, beside Pleydon, she was remarkably comfortable, and she was
soothed by the rhythmic beat of the hoofs, the even progress through
the crystal night of Fifth Avenue.

Her companion flooded his being with the frozen air. They had, it
seemed, lost all desire to talk. The memory of Markue's party
lingered like the last vanishing odor of his incense; there was a
confused vision of the murmurous room against the lighted exterior
where the drinks sparkled on a table. Linda made up her mind that
she would not go to another. Then she wondered if she'd see Pleydon
again. The Russian singer had been too silly for words.

It suddenly occurred to her that the man now with her had taken
Susanna Noda, and that he had left her planted. He had preferred
driving her, Linda Condon, home. He wasn't very enthusiastic about
it, though; his face was gloomy.

"The truth is," he remarked at last, "that Susanna is right--I am
not in the first rank. But that was all nonsense about the necessity
of the gutter--sentimental lies."

Linda was not interested in this, but it left her free to explore
her own emotions. The night had been eventful because it had shaken
all the foundation of what she intended. That single momentary
delicious thrill had been enough to threaten the entire rest. At the
same time her native contempt of the other women, of Judith with her
tumbled hair, persisted. Was there no other way to capture such
happiness? Was it all hopelessly messy with drinks and unpleasant
familiarity?

What did Pleydon mean by spirit? Surely there must be more kinds of
love than one--he had intimated that. She gathered that "Homer's
children," those airs of Gluck that she liked so well, were works of
art, sculpture, such as he did. Yet she had never thought of them as
important, important as oatmeal or delicate soap. She made up her
mind to ask him about it, when she saw that they had reached the
Eighties; she was almost home.

"I am going away to-morrow," he told her, "for the winter, to South
America. When I come back we'll see each other. If you should change
address send me a line to the Harvard Club." The carriage had
stopped before the great arched entrance to the apartment-house,
towering in its entire block. He got out and lifted her to the
pavement as if she had been no more than a flower in his hands. Then
he walked with her into the darkness of the garden.

The fountains were cased in boards; the hedged borders, the bushes and
grass, were dead. High above them on the dark wall a window was bright.
Linda's heart began to pound loudly, she was trembling ... from the
cold. There was a faint sound in the air--the elevated trains, or
stirring wings? It was nothing, then, to be lifted into heaven. There
was the door to the hall and elevator. She turned, to thank Dodge
Pleydon for all his goodness to her, when he lifted her--was it
toward heaven?--and kissed her mouth.

She was still in his arms, with her eyes closed. "Linda Condon?" he
said, in a tone of inquiry.

At the same breath in which she realized a kiss was of no importance
a sharp icy pain cut at her heart. It hurt her so that she gasped.
Then, and this was strange, she realized that--as a kiss--it hadn't
annoyed her. Suddenly she felt that it wasn't just that, but
something far more, a part of all her inner longing. He had put her
down and was looking away, a face in shadow with an ugly protruding
lip.

She saw him that way in her dreams--in the court under the massive
somber walls, with a troubled frown over his eyes. It seemed to her
that, reaching up, she smoothed it away as they stood together in a
darkness with the fountains, the hedges, dead, the world with never
a sound sleeping in the prison of winter.




XVII


Linda thought about Dodge Pleydon on a warm evening of the following
May. At four o'clock, in a hotel, Pansy had been married; and the
entire Feldt connection had risen to a greater height of clamorous
cheer than ever before. Extravagant unseasonable dishes, wines and
banked flowers were lavishly mingled with sentimental speeches,
healths and tears. Linda had been acutely restless, impatient of all
the loud good humor and stupid compliments. The sense of her
isolation from their life was unbearably keen. She would have a very
different wedding with a man in no particular like Pansy's.

After dinner--an occasion, with Pansy absent, where Mr. Moses
Feldt's tears persisted in flowing--she had strayed into the formal
chamber across from the dining-room and leaned out of a window,
gazing into the darkening court. Directly below was where Pleydon
had kissed her. She often re-examined her feelings about that; but
only to find that they had dissolved into an indefinite sense of the
inevitable. Not alone had it failed to shock her--she hadn't even
been surprised. Linda thought still further about kissing, with the
discovery that if, while it was happening, she was conscious of the
kiss, it was a failure; successful, it carried her as far as
possible from the actuality.

Pleydon, of course, had not written to her; he had intimated nothing
to the contrary, only asking her to let him know, at the Harvard
Club, if she changed address. That wasn't necessary, and now,
probably, he was back from South America. Where, except by accident,
might she see him? Markue, with his parties, had dropped from
Judith's world, his place taken by a serious older dealer in Dutch
masters with an impressive gallery just off Fifth Avenue.

That she would see him Linda was convinced; this feeling absorbed
any desire; it was no good wanting it or not wanting it;
consequently she was undisturbed. She considered him gravely and in
detail. Had there been any more Susanna Nodas in his stay south? She
had heard somewhere that the women of Argentine were irresistible.
Her life had taught her nothing if not the fact that a number of
women figured in every man's history. It was deplorable but couldn't
be avoided; and whether or not it continued after marriage depended
on the cunning of any wife.

Now, however, Linda felt weary already at the prospect of a married
life that rested on the constant play of her ingenuity. A great many
things that, but a little before, she had willingly accepted, seemed
to her probably not less necessary but distinctly tiresome. Linda
began to think that she couldn't really bother; the results weren't
sufficiently important.

Dodge Pleydon.

She slept in a composed order until the sun was well up. It was
warmer than yesterday; and, going to an afternoon concert with
Judith, she decided to walk. Linda strolled, in a short severe
jacket and skirt, a black straw hat turned back with a cockade and a
crisp flushed mass of sweet peas at her waist. The occasion, as it
sometimes happened, found her in no mood for music. The warmth of
the sunlight, the open city windows and beginning sounds of summer,
had enveloped her in a mood in which the jangling sentimentality of
a street organ was more potent than the legato of banked violins.

She was relieved when the concert was over, but lingered at her seat
until the crowd had surged by; it made Linda furious to be shoved or
indiscriminately touched. Judith had gone ahead, when Linda was
conscious of the scrutiny of a pale well-dressed woman of middle
age. It became evident that the other was debating whether or not to
speak; clearly such an action was distasteful to her; and Linda had
turned away before a restrained voice addressed her:

"You will have to forgive me if I ask your name ... because of a
certain resemblance. Seeing you I--I couldn't let you go."

"Linda Condon," she replied.

The elder, Linda saw, grew even paler. She put out a gloved hand.
"Then I was right," she said in a slightly unsteady voice. "But
perhaps, when I explain, you will think it even stranger,
inexcusable. My dear child, I am your father's sister."

Linda was invaded by a surprise equally made up of interest and
resentment. The first was her own and the second largely borrowed
from her mother. Besides, why had her father's family never made the
slightest effort to see her. This evidently had simultaneously
occurred to the other.

"Of course," she added, quite properly, "we can't undertake family
questions here. I shouldn't blame you a bit, either, if you went
directly away. I had to speak, to risk that, because you were so
unmistakably a Lowrie. It is not a common appearance. We--I--" she
floundered for a painful moment; then she gathered herself with a
considerable dignity. "Seeing you has affected me tremendously,
changed everything. I have nothing to say in our defense, you must
understand that. I am certain, too, that my sister will feel the
same--we live together in Philadelphia. I hope you will give me your
address and let us write to you. Elouise will join with me
absolutely."

Linda told her evenly where she lived, and then allowed Miss Lowrie
to precede her toward the entrance. She said nothing of this to
Judith, nor, momentarily, to her mother. She wanted to consider it
undisturbed by a flood of talk and blame. It was evident to her that
the Lowries had behaved very badly, but just how she couldn't make
out. She recalled her father's sister--her aunt--minutely, forced to
the realization that she was a person of entire superiority. Here,
she suddenly saw, had been the cause of all their difficulties--the
Lowries hadn't approved of the marriage, they had objected to her
mother.

Five years ago she would have been incensed at this; but now,
essentially, she was without personal indignation. She wanted, for
herself, to discover as much as possible about her father and his
family. A need independent of maternal influences stirred her. Linda
was reassured by the fact that her father had been gently born;
while she realized that she had always taken this for granted. Her
mother must know nothing about the meeting with Miss Lowrie until
the latter had written.

That was Friday and the letter came the following Tuesday. Linda,
alone at the breakfast-table, instantly aware of the source of the
square envelope addressed in a delicate regular writing, opened it
and read in an unusual mental disturbance:

"My dear Linda,

 I hope you will not consider it peculiar for me to call you this,
for nothing else seems possible. Meeting you in that abrupt manner
upset me, as you must have noticed. Of course I knew of you, and
even now I can not go into our long unhappy affair, but until I saw
you, and so remarkably like the Lowries, I did not realize how
wicked Elouise and I had been. But I am obliged to add only where
you were concerned. We have no desire to be ambiguous in that.

However, I am writing to say that we should love to have you visit
us here. It is possible under the circumstances that your mother
will not wish you to come. Yet I know the Lowries, a very
independent and decided family, and although it is my last intention
to be the cause of difficulty with your mother, still I hope it may
be arranged.

In closing I must add how happy I was at the evidence of your blood.
But that, I now see, was a certainty. You will have to forgive us
for a large measure of blindness. Affectionately,

AMELIA VIGN LOWRIE."

Almost instantaneously Linda was aware that she would visit the
Lowries. She liked the letter extremely, as well as all that she
remembered of its sender. At the same time she prepared for a scene
with her mother, different from those of the past--with the recourse
to the brandy flask--but no less unpleasant. They had very little to
say to each other now; and, when she went into her mother's room
with an evident definite purpose, the latter showed a constrained
surprise, a palpable annoyance that her daughter had found her at
the daily renovation of her worn face.




XVIII


Linda said directly, "I met Miss Lowrie, father's sister, at a
concert last week, and this morning I had a letter asking me to stay
with them in Philadelphia."

Mrs. Feldt's face suddenly had no need for the color she held poised
on a cloth. Her voice, sharp at the beginning, rose to a shrill
unrestrained wrath.

"I wonder at the brass of her speaking to you at all let alone
writing here. Just you give me the letter and I'll shut her up. The
idea! I hope you were cool to her, the way they treated us. Stay
with them--I guess not!"

"But I thought of going," Linda replied. "It's only natural. After
all, you must see that he was my father."

"A pretty father he was, too good for the girl he married. It's my
fault I didn't tell you long ago, but I just couldn't abide the
mention of him. He deserted me, no, us, cold, without a word--walked
out of the door one noon, taking his hat as quiet as natural, and
never came back. I never saw him again nor heard except through
lawyers. That was the kind of heart he had, and his sisters are
worse. I hadn't a decent speech of any kind out of them. The
Lowries," she managed to inject a surprising amount of contempt into
her pronouncement of that name. "What it was all about you nor any
sensible person would never believe:

"The house smelled a little of boiled cabbage. That's why he left
me, and you expected in a matter of a few months. He said in his
dam' frigid way that it had become quite impossible and took down
his hat."

"There must have been more," Linda protested, suppressing a mad
desire to laugh.

"Not an inch," her mother asserted. "Nothing, after a little, suited
him. He'd sit up like a poker, just as I've seen you, with his lips
tight together in the Lowrie manner. It didn't please him no matter
what you'd do. He wouldn't blow out at you like a Christian and I
never knew where I was at. I'd come down in a matine, the prettiest
I could buy, and then see he didn't like it. He would expect you to
be dressed in the morning like it was afternoon and you going out.
And as for loosening your corsets for a little comfort about the
house, you might as well have slapped him direct.

"That wasn't the worst, though; but his going away without as much
as a flicker of his hand; and with me like I was. Nobody on earth
but would blame him for that. I only got what was allowed me after
we had changed back to my old name, me and you. He never asked one
single question about you nor tried to see or serve you a scrap. For
all he knew, at a place called Santa Margharita in Italy, you might
have been born dead."

She was unable, Linda recognized, to defend him in any way; he had
acted frightfully. She acknowledged this logically with her power of
reason, but somehow it didn't touch her as it had her mother, and
as, evidently, the latter expected. She was absorbed in the vision
of her father sitting, in the Lowrie manner, rigid as a poker; she
saw him quietly take up his hat and go away forever. Linda
understood his process completely; she was capable of doing
precisely the same thing. Whatever was the matter with her--in the
heartlessness so often laid to her account--had been equally true of
her father.

"You ought to know what to say to them," Mrs. Moses Feldt cried, "or
I'll do it for you! If only I had seen her she would have heard a
thing or two not easy forgotten."

Linda's determination to go to Philadelphia had not been shaken, and
she made a vain effort to explain her attitude. "Of course, it was
horrid for you," she said. "I can understand how you'd never never
forgive him. But I am different, and, I expect, not at all nice.
It's very possible, since he was my father, that we are alike. I
wish you had told me this before--it explains so much and would have
made things easier for me. I am afraid I must see them."

She was aware of the bitterness and enmity that stiffened her mother
into an unaccustomed adequate scorn:

"I might have expected nothing better of you, and me watching it
coming all these years. You can go or stay. I had my life in spite
of the both of you, as gay as I pleased and a good husband just the
same. I don't care if I never see you again, and if it wasn't for
the fuss it would make I'd take care I didn't. You'll have your
father's money now I'm married; I wonder you stay around here at all
with your airs of being better than the rest. God's truth is you
ain't near as good, even if I did bring you into the world."

"I am willing to agree with you," Linda answered. "No one could be
sweeter than the Feldts. I sha'n't do nearly as well. But that isn't
it, really. People don't choose themselves; I'm certain father
didn't at that lonely Italian place. If you weren't happy laced in
the morning it wasn't your fault. You see, I am trying to excuse
myself, and that isn't any good, either."

"Unnatural," Mrs. Moses Feldt pronounced. And Linda, weary and
depressed, allowed her the last word.




XIX


Nothing further during the subsequent brief exchange of notes
between Miss Lowrie and Linda was said of the latter's intention to
visit her father's family. Mrs. Feldt, however, whose attitude
toward Linda had been negatively polite, now displayed an animosity
carefully hidden from her husband but evident to the two girls. The
elder never neglected an opportunity to emphasize Linda's selfishness
or make her personality seem ridiculous. But this Linda ignored from
her wide sense of the inconsequence of most things.

Yet she was relieved when, finally, she had actually left New York.
She looked forward with an unusual hopeful curiosity to the Lowries.
To her surprise their house--miles, it appeared, from the center of
the city--was directly on a paved street with electric cars,
unpretentious stores and very humble dwellings nearby. Back from the
thoroughfare, however, there were spacious green lawns. The street
itself, she saw at once, was old--a highway of gray stone with low
aged stone faades, steep eaves and blackened chimney-pots reaching,
dusty with years, into the farther hilly country.

A gable of the Lowrie house, with a dignified white door, a fanlight
of faintly iridescent glass and polished brasses, faced the brick
sidewalk, while to the left there was a high board fence and an
entrance with a small grille open on a somber reach of garden. A
maid in a stiff white cap answered the fall of the knocker; she took
Linda's bag; and, in a hall that impressed her by its bareness,
Linda was greeted by the Miss Lowrie she had seen.

Her aunt was composed, but there was a perceptible flush on her
cheeks, and she said in a rapid voice, after a conventional welcome,
"You must meet Elouise at once, before you go up to your room."

Elouise Lowrie was older than Amelia, but she, too, was slender and
erect, with black hair startling in its density on her wasted
countenance. Linda noticed a fine ruby on a crooked finger and
beautiful rose point lace. "It was good of you," the elder
proceeded, "to come and see two old women. I don't know whether we
have more to say or to keep still about. But I, for one, am going to
avoid explanations. You are here, a fool could see that you were
Bartram's girl, and that is enough for a Lowrie."

The room was nearly as bare as the hall: in place of the deep carpets
of the Feldts' the floor, of dark uneven oak boards, was merely waxed
and covered by a rough-looking oval rug. The walls were paneled
in white, with white ruffled curtains at small windows; and the
furniture, the dull mahogany ranged against the immaculate paint, the
rocking-chairs of high slatted walnut and rush bottoms, the slender
formality of tables with fluted legs, was dignified but austere.
There were some portraits in heavy old gilt--men with florid faces
and tied hair, and the delicate replicas of high-breasted women in
brocades.

There was, plainly, an air of the exceptional in Amelia Lowrie's
conduction of Linda to her room. She waited at the door while the
other moved forward to the center of a chamber empty of all the
luxury Linda had grown to demand. There was a bed with tall graceful
posts supporting a canopy like a frosting of sugar, a solemn set of
drawers with a diminutive framed mirror in which she could barely
see her shoulders, a small unenclosed brass clock with long exposed
weights, and two uninviting painted wooden chairs. This was not,
although very nearly, all. Linda's attention was attracted by a
framed and long-faded photograph of a young man, bareheaded, with a
loosely knotted scarf, a striped blazer and white flannels. His face
was thin and sensitive, his lips level, and his eyes gazed with a
steady questioning at the observer.

"That was Bartram," Amelia Lowrie told her; "your father. This was
his room."

She went down almost immediately and left Linda, in a maze of dim
emotions, seated on one of the uncomfortable painted chairs. Her
father! This was his room; nothing, she realized, had been disturbed.
The mirror had held the vaguely unsteady reflection of his face; he
had slept under the arched canopy of the bed. She rose and went to
a window from which he, too, had looked.

Below her was the garden shut in on its front by the high fence.
There was a magnolia-tree, now covered with thick smooth white
flowers, and, at the back, low-massed rhododendron with fragile
lavender blossoms on a dark glossy foliage. But the space was mainly
green and shadowed in tone; while beyond were other gardens, other
emerald lawns and magnolia-trees, an ordered succession of
tranquillity with separate brick or stone or white dwellings in the
lengthening afternoon shadows of vivid maples.

It was as different as possible from all that Linda had known, from
the elaborate hotels and gigantic apartment houses, the tropical
interiors, of her New York life. She unpacked her bag, putting her
gold toilet things on the chest of drawers, precisely arranging in a
shallow closet what clothes she had brought, and then, changing,
went down to the Lowries.

They surveyed her with eminent approval at a dinner-table lighted
only with candles, beside long windows open on a dusk with a glimmer
of fireflies. Suddenly Linda felt amazingly at ease; it seemed to
her that she had sat here before, with the night flowing gently in
over the candle-flames. The conversation, she discovered, never
strayed far from the concerns and importance of the Lowrie blood.
"My grandmother, Natalie Vign," Elouise informed her, "came with
her father to Philadelphia from France, in eighteen hundred and one,
at the invitation of Stephen Girard, who was French as well. She
married Hallet Lowrie whose mother was a Bartram.

"That, my dear, explains our black hair and good figgers. There
never was a lumpy Lowrie. Well, Hallet built this house, or rather
enlarged it, for his wife; and it has never been out of the family.
Our nephew, Arnaud Hallet--Arnaud was old Vign's name--owns it now.
Isaac Hallet, you may recall, was suspected of being a Tory; at any
rate his brother's descendants, Fanny Rodwell is the only one left,
won't speak."

The placid conversation ran on unchanged throughout dinner and the
evening. Linda was relieved by the absence of any questioning;
indeed nothing contemporary, she realized, was held to be significant.
"I thought Arnaud would be in to-night," Elouise Lowrie said; "he
knew Linda was expected." No one, however, appeared; and Linda went
up early to her room. There, too, were only candles, a pale wavering
illumination in which the past, her father, were extraordinarily
nearby. A sense of pride was communicated to her by so much that
time had been unable to shake. The bed was steeped in the magic of
serene traditions.




XX


Arnaud Hallet appeared for dinner the evening after Linda's arrival;
a quiet man with his youth lost, slightly stooped shoulders,
crumpled shoes and a green cloth bag. But he had a memorable voice
and an easy distinction of manner; in addition to these she
discovered, at the table, a lighter amusing sense of the absurd. She
watched him--as he poured the sherry from a decanter with a silver
label hung on a chain--with a feeling of mild approbation. On the
whole he was nice but uninteresting. What a different man from
Pleydon!

The days passed in a pleasant deliberation, with Arnaud Hallet
constantly about the house or garden, while Linda's thoughts
continually returned to the sculptor. He was clearer than the
actuality of her mother and the Feldts or the recreated image of her
father. At times she was thrilled by the familiar obscure sense of
music, of longing slowly translated into happiness. Then more actual
problems would envelop her in doubt. Mostly she was confused--in her
cool material necessity for understanding--by the temper of her
feeling for Dodge Pleydon. Linda wondered if this were love. Perhaps,
when she saw him again, she'd be able to decide. Then she remembered
promising to let him know if she changed her address. It was possible
that already he had called at the Feldts', or written, and that her
mother had refused to inform him where she had gone.

Linda had been at the Lowries' two weeks now, but they were acutely
distressed when she suggested that her visit was unreasonably
prolonged. "My dear," they protested together, "we hoped you'd stay
the summer. Bartram's girl! Unless, of course, it is dull with us.
Something brighter must be arranged. No doubt we have only thought
of our own pleasure in having you."

Linda replied honestly that she enjoyed being with them extremely.
Her mother's dislike, the heavy luxury of the Feldt apartment, held
little attraction for her. Then, too, losing the sense of the
bareness of the house Hallet Lowrie had built for his French wife,
she began to find it surprisingly appealing.

Her mind returned to her promise to Pleydon. She told herself that
probably he had forgotten her existence, but she had a strong
unreasoning conviction that this was not so. It seemed the most
natural thing in the world to write him and, almost before she was
aware of the intention, she had put "Dear Mr. Pleydon" at the head
of a sheet of note-paper.

I promised to let you know in the spring when you came back from
South America where I was. I did not think I would have to do it,
but here I am in Philadelphia with my father's sisters. I do not
know just how long for, but a month, anyhow. It is very quiet, but
charming. I have the room that was my father's when he was young,
and look out of the window like he must have. If you should come to
Philadelphia my aunts ask me to say that they would be glad to have
you for dinner. This is how you get here....

Very sincerely,

LINDA CONDON.

She walked to a street crossing, where she dropped the envelope into
a letter-box on a lamppost, and returned to find Arnaud Hallet
waiting for her. He said:

"Everyone agrees I'm serious, but actually you are worse than the
Assembly." They went through the dining-room to the garden, and sat
on the stone step of a deep window. It was quite late, perhaps
eleven o'clock, and the fireflies, slowly rising into the night, had
vanished. Linda was cool and remote and grave, silently repeating
and weighing the phrases of her letter to Pleydon.

She realized that Arnaud Hallet was coming to like her a very great
deal; but she gave this only the slightest attention. She liked him,
really, and that dismissed him from serious consideration. Anyhow,
in spite of the perfection of his manner, Arnaud's careless dress
displeased her: his shoes and the shoulders of his coat were
perpetually dusty, and his hair, growing scant, was always ruffled.
Linda understood that he was highly intellectual, and frequently
contributed historical and genealogical papers to societies and
bulletins, but compared with Dodge Pleydon's brilliant personality
and reputation, Pleydon surrounded by the Susanna Nodas of life,
Arnaud was as dingy as his shoes.

She wondered idly when the latter would actually try to love her. He
was holding her hand and it might well be to-night. Linda decided
that he would do it delicately; and when, almost immediately, he
kissed her, she was undisturbed. No, surprisingly, it had been quite
pleasant. He hadn't mussed her ribbons, nor her spirit, a particle.
In addition he did not at once become impossible and urgently
sentimental; there was even a shade of amusement on his heavy face.

"You appear to take a lot for granted," he complained.

"I'd been wondering when it would happen," she admitted coolly.

"It always does, then?"

"Usually I stop it," she continued. "I don't believe I'll ever like
being kissed. Can you tell me why? No one ever has; they all think
they can bring me around to it."

"And to them," he added.

"But they end by being furious at me. I've been sworn at and called
dreadful names. Sometimes they're only silly. One cried; I hated
that the most."

"Do you mean that you were sorry for him?"

"Oh, dear, no. Why should I be? He looked so odious all smeared with
tears."

Arnaud Hallet returned promptly: "Linda, you're a little beast." To
counteract his rude speech he kissed her again. "This," he said with
less security, "threatens to become a habit. I thought, at forty-five,
that I was safely by the island of sirens, but I'll be on the rocks
before I know it."

She laughed with the cool remoteness of running water.

"I wonder you haven't been murdered," he proceeded, "in a moonless
garden by an elderly lawyer. Do you ever think of the lyric day
when, preceded by a flock of bridesmaids and other flowery pagan
truck, you'll meet justice?"

"Marriage?" she asked. "But of course. I have everything perfectly
planned--"

"Then, my dear Linda, describe him."

"Very straight," she said, "with beautiful polished shoes and
brushed hair."

"You ought to have no trouble finding that. Any number of my friends
have one--to open the door and take your things. I might arrange a
very satisfactory introduction for everybody concerned--a steady man
well on his way to preside over the pantry and table."

"You're not as funny as usual," Linda decided critically. "That,
too, disturbs me," he replied. "It looks even more unpromising for
the near future."




XXI


In her room Linda thought, momentarily, of Arnaud Hallet; whatever
might have been serious in her attitude toward him dissolved by the
lightness of his speech. Dodge Pleydon appealed irresistibly to her
deepest feelings. Now her mental confusion was at least clear in
that she knew what troubled her. It was not new, it extended even to
times before Pleydon had entered her life--the difficulties
presented by the term "love."

In her mind it was divided into two or three widely different
aspects, phases which she was unable to reconcile. Her mother, in
the beginning, had informed her that love was a nuisance. To be
happy, a man must love you without any corresponding return; this
was necessary to his complete management, the securing of the
greatest possible amount of new clothes. It was as far as love
should be allowed to enter marriage. But that reality, with a
complete expression in shopping, was distant from the immaterial and
delicate emotions that in her responded to Pleydon.

Linda had been familiar with the materials, the processes, of what,
she had been assured, was veritable love since early childhood. Her
mother's dressing, the irritable hours of fittings and at her
mirror, the paint she put on her cheeks, the crimping of her hair
were for the favor of men. These struggles had absorbed the elder,
all the women Linda had encountered, to the exclusion of everything
else. This, it seemed, must, from its overwhelming predominance, be
the greatest thing in life.

There was nothing mysterious about it. You did certain things
intelligently, if you had the figure to do them with, for a
practical end. The latter, carefully controlled, like an essence of
which a drop was delightful and more positively stifling, was as
real as the methods of approach. Oatmeal or scented soap! The force of
example and association combined to bathe such developments in the
sanest light possible, and Linda had every intention of the successful
grasping of an easy and necessary luxury. She had, until--vaguely--now,
been entirely willing to accept the unescapable conditions of love
used as a means or the element of pleasure at parties. Now, however,
the unexpected element of Dodge Pleydon disturbed her philosophy.

Suddenly all the lacing and painting and crimping, the pretense and
lies and carefully planned accidental effects, filled her with
revolt. The insinuations of women, the bareness of their
revelations, her mother returning unsteady and mussed from a dinner,
were unutterably disgusting. Even to think of them hurt her
fundamentally: so much of what she was, of what she had determined,
had been destroyed by an emotion apparently as slight as echoed
music.

Here was the real mystery and for which nothing in her experience
had prepared her. She began to see why it was called a nuisance--if
this were love--and wondered if she had better not suppress it at
once. It wouldn't be suppressed. Her thoughts continually came back
to Pleydon, and the warmth, the disturbing thrill, always resulted.
It led her away from herself, from Linda Condon; a sufficiently
strange accomplishment. A concern for Dodge Pleydon, little schemes
for his happiness and well-being, put aside her clothes and
complexion and her future.

Until the present her acts had been the result of deliberation. She
had been impressed by the necessity for planning with care; but, in
the cool gloom of the covered bed, a sharp joy held her at the
possibility of flinging caution away. Yet she couldn't quite, no
matter how much she desired it, lose herself. Linda was glad that
Pleydon was rich; and there were, she remembered, moments for
surrender.

As usual these problems, multiplying toward night, were fewer in the
bright flood of morning. She laughed at the memory of Arnaud
Hallet's humor; and then, it was late afternoon, the maid told her
that Pleydon was in the drawing room. Her appearance satisfactory
she was able to see him at once. To her great pleasure neither
Pleydon nor his clothes had changed. He was dressed in light-gray
flannels; a big easy man with a crushing palm, large features and an
expression of intolerance.

"Linda," he said, "what a splendid place to find you. So much better
than Markue's." He was, she realized, very glad to see her, and
dropped at once, as if they had been uninterruptedly together, into
intimate talk. "My work has been going badly," he proceeded; "or
rather not at all. I made a rather decent fountain at Newport;
but--remember what Susanna said?--it's not in the first rank. A happy
balance and strong enough conception; yet it is like a Cellini ewer
done in granite. The truth is, too much interests me; an artist
ought to be the victim of a monomania. I'm a normal animal." He
studied her contentedly:

"How lovely you are. I came over--in an automobile at last--because
I was certain you couldn't exist as I remembered you. But you could
and do. Lovely Linda! And what a gem of a letter. It might have been
copied from 'The Perfect Correspondent for Young Females.' You're
not going to lose me again. When I was a little boy I had a passion
for sherbets."

She smiled at him with half-closed eyes and the conviction that,
with Pleydon, she could easily be different. He leaned forward and
his voice startled her with the impression that he had read her
mind:

"If you could care for any one a lifetime would be short to get you.
Look, you have never been out of my thoughts--or within my reach. It
seems a myth that I kissed you; impossible ... Linda."

"But you did," she told him, gaining happiness from the mere
assurance. They were alone in the drawing-room, and he rose,
sweeping her up into his arms. Yet the expected joy evaded her
desire and the sudden determination to lose utterly her reserve. It
was evident that he as well was conscious of this, for he released
her and stood frowning, his protruding lower lip uglier than ever.

"A lifetime would be nothing," he said again; "or it might be
everything wasted. Which are you--all soul and spirit, or none?"

"I don't know," she replied, in her bitter disappointment, her heart
pinched by the sharpest pain she remembered. There was the stir of
skirts at the door; Linda turned with a sense of relief to Amelia
Lowrie. However, dinner progressed very well indeed. "Then your
aunt," Elouise said to Pleydon, "was Carrie Dodge. I recall her
perfectly." That established, the Lowrie women talked with a
gracious freedom, exploring the furthermost infiltrations of blood
and marriages.

Linda was again serene. She watched Pleydon with an extraordinary
formless conviction--each of them was a part of the other's life;
while in some way marriage and love were now hopelessly confused. It
was beyond effort or planning. That was all she could grasp, but she
was contented. Sometimes when he talked he made the familiar
descriptive gesture with his hand, as if he were shaping the form of
his speech: a sculptor's gesture, Linda realized.

Later they wandered into the garden, a dark enclosure with the long
ivy-covered faade of the house broken by the lighted spaces of
windows. Beyond the fence at regular intervals an electric car
passed with an increasing and diminishing clangor. The white petals
of the magnolia-tree had fallen and been wheeled away; the blossoms
of the rhododendron were dead on their stems. It was, Linda felt, a
very old garden that had known many momentary emotions and lives.

Dodge Pleydon, standing before her, put his hands on her shoulders.
"Would I have any success?" he asked. "Do you think you'd care for
me?"

She smiled confidently up at his intent face. "Oh, yes." Yet she
hoped that he would not kiss her--just then. The delicacy of her
longing and need were far removed from material expressions. This,
of course, meant marriage; but marriage was money, comfort, the cold
thing her mother had impressed on her. Love, her love, was a mistake
here. But in a little it would all come straight and she would
understand. She no longer had confidence in her mother's wisdom.

In spite of her shrinking, of a half articulate appeal, he crushed
her against his face. Whatever that had filled her with hope, she
thought, was being torn from her. A sickening aversion over which
she had no control made her stark in his arms. The memories of the
painted coarse satiety of women and the sly hard men for which they
schemed, the loose discussions of calculated advances and sordid
surrenders, flooded her with a loathing for what she passionately
needed to be beautiful.

Yet deep within her, surprising in its vitality, a fragile ardor
persisted. If she could explain, not only might he understand, but
be able to make her own longing clear and secure. But all she
managed to say was, "If you kiss me again I think it will kill me."
Even that failed to stop him. "You were never alive," he asserted.
"I'll put some feeling into you. It has been done before with
marble."

Linda, unresponsive, suffered inordinately.

Again on her feet she saw that Pleydon was angry, his face grim. He
seemed changed, threatening and unfamiliar; it was exactly as if, in
place of Dodge Pleydon, a secretive impersonal ugliness stood
disclosed before her. He said harshly:

"When will you marry me?"

It was what, above all else, she had wanted; and Linda realized that
to marry him was still the crown of whatever happiness she could
imagine. But her horror of the past recreated by his beating down of
her gossamer-like aspiration, the vision of him flushed and
ruthless, an image of indiscriminate nameless man, made it
impossible for her to reply. An abandon of shrinking fear numbed her
heart and lips.

"You won't get rid of me as you do the others about you," he
continued. "This time you made a mistake. I haven't any pride that
you can insult; but I have all that you--with your character--require.
I have more money even than you can want." She cried despairingly:

"It isn't that now! I had forgotten everything to do with money and
depended on you to take me away from it always."

"When will you marry me?"

In a flash of blinding perception, leaving her as dazed as though it
had been a physical actuality, she realized that marrying him had
become an impossibility. At the barest thought of it the dread again
closed about her like ice. She tried, with all the force of old
valuations, with even an effort to summon back the vanquished
thrill, to give herself to him. But a quality overpowering and
instinctive, the response of her incalculable injury, made any
contact with him hateful. It was utterly beyond her power to
explain. A greater mystery still partly unfolded--whatever she had
hoped from Pleydon belonged to the special emotion that had
possessed her since earliest childhood.

In the immediate tragedy of her helplessness, with Dodge Pleydon
impatient for an assurance, she paused involuntarily to wonder about
that hidden imperative sense. There was a broken mental fantasy
of--of a leopard bearing a woman in shining hair. This was succeeded
by a bright thrust of happiness and, all about her, a surging like the
imagined beat of the wings of the Victory in Markue's room. Almost
Pleydon had explained everything, almost he was everything; and then
the other, putting him aside, had swept her back into the misery of
doubt and loneliness.

"I can't marry you," she said in a flat and dragged voice. He
demanded abruptly:

"Why not?"

"I don't know." She recognized his utter right to the temper that
mastered him. For a moment Linda thought Pleydon would shake her.
"You feel that way now," he declared; "and perhaps next month; but
you will change; in the end I'll have you."

"No," she told him, with a certainty from a source outside her
consciousness. "It has been spoiled."

He replied, "Time will discover which of us is right. I'm almost
willing to stay away till you send for me. But that would only make
you more stubborn. What a strong little devil you are, Linda. I have
no doubt I'd do better to marry a human being. Then I think we both
forget how young you are--you can't pretend to be definite yet."

He captured her hands; too exhausted for any resentment or feeling
she made no effort to evade him. "I'll never say good-bye to you."

His voice had the absolute quality of her own conviction. To her
amazement her cheeks were suddenly wet with tears. "I want to go
now," she said unsteadily; "and--and thank you."

His old easy formality returned as he made his departure. In reply
to Pleydon's demand she told him listlessly that she would be here
for, perhaps, a week longer. Then he'd see her, he continued, in New
York, at the Feldts'.

In her room all emotion faded. Pleydon had said that she was still
young; but she was sure she could never, in experience or feeling,
be older. She became sorry for herself; or rather for the illusions,
the Linda, of a few hours ago. She examined her features in the
limited uncertain mirror--strong sensations, she knew, were a charge
on the appearance--but she was unable to find any difference in her
regular pallor. Then, mechanically conducting her careful
preparations for the night, her propitiation of the only omnipotence
she knew, she put out the candles of her May.




XXII


What welcome Linda met in New York came from Mr. Moses Feldt, who
embraced her warmly enough, but with an air slightly ill at ease. He
begged her to kiss her mama, who was sometimes hurt by Linda's
coldness. She made no reply, and found the same influence and
evidence of the power of suggestion in Judith. "We thought maybe you
wouldn't care to come back here," the latter said pointedly, over
her shoulder, while she was directing the packing of a trunk. The
Feldts were preparing for their summer stay at the sea.

Her mother's room resembled one of the sales of obvious and
expensive attire conducted in the lower salons of pleasure hotels.
There were airy piles of chiffon and satin, inappropriate hats and
the inevitable confections of silk and lace. "It's not necessary to
ask if you were right at home with your father's family," Mrs.
Condon observed with an assumed casual inattention. "I can see you
sitting with those old women as dry and false as any. No one saved
me in the clacking, I'm sure."

"We didn't speak of you," Linda replied. She studied, unsparing, the
loose flesh of the elder's ravaged countenance. Her mother, she
recognized, hated her, both because she was like Bartram Lowrie and
still young, with everything unspent that the other valued and had
lost. In support of herself Mrs. Feldt asserted again that she had
"lived," with stacks of friends and flowers, lavish parties and
devoted attendance.

"You may be smarter than I was," she went on, "but what good it does
you who can say? And if you expect to get something for nothing
you're fooled before you start." She shook out the airy breadths of
a vivid echo of past daring. "From the way you act a person might
think you were pretty, but you are too thin and pulled out. I've
heard your looks called peculiar, and that was, in a manner of
speaking, polite. You're not even stylish any more--the line is full
again and not suitable for bony shoulders and no bust." She still
cherished a complacency in her amplitude.

Linda turned away unmoved. Of all the world, she thought, only Dodge
Pleydon had the power actually to hurt her. She knew that she would
see him soon again and that again he would ask her to marry him. She
considered, momentarily, the possibility of saying yes; and instantly
the dread born with him in the Lowrie garden swept over her. Linda
told herself that he was the only man for whom she could ever deeply
care; that--for every conceivable reason--such a marriage was perfect.
But the shrinking from its implications grew too painful for support.

Her mother's bitterness increased hourly; she no longer hid her
feelings from her husband and Judith; and dinner, accompanied by her
elaborate sarcasm, was a difficult period in which, plainly, Mr.
Moses Feldt suffered most and Linda was the least concerned. This
condition, she admitted silently, couldn't go on indefinitely; it
was too vulgar if for no other reason. And she determined to ask the
Lowries for another and more extended invitation.

Pleydon came, as she had expected, and they sat in the small
reception-room with the high ceiling and dark velvet hangings,
the piano at which, long ago it now seemed, Judith had played the
airs of Gluck for her. He said little, but remained for a long
while spread over the divan and watching her--in a formal
chair--discontentedly. He rose suddenly and stood above her, a
domineering bulk obliterating nearly everything else. In response
to his demand she said, pale and composed, that she was not
"reasonable"; she omitted the "yet" included in his question.
Pleydon frowned. However, then, he insisted no further.

When he had gone Linda was as spent as though there had been a fresh
brutal scene; and the following day she was enveloped in an
unrelieved depression. Her mother mocked her silence as another
evidence of ridiculous pretentiousness. Mr. Moses Feldt regarded her
with a furtive concerned kindliness; while Judith followed her with
countless small irritating complaints. It was the last day at the
apartment before their departure for the summer. Linda was
insuperably tired. She had gone to her room almost directly after
dinner, and when a maid came to her door with a card, she exclaimed,
before looking at it, that she was not in. It was, however, Arnaud
Hallet; and, with a surprise tempered by a faint interest, she told
the servant that she would see him.

There was, Linda observed at once, absolutely no difference in
Arnaud's clothing, no effort to make himself presentable for New
York or her. In a way, it amused her--it was so characteristic of
his forgetfulness, and it made him seem doubly familiar. He waved a
hand toward the luxury of the interior. "This," he declared, "is
downright impressive, and lifted, I'm sure, out of a novel of
Ouida's.

"You will remember," he continued, "complaining about my sense of
humor one evening; and that, at the time, I warned you it might grow
worse. It has. I am afraid, where you are concerned, that it has
absolutely vanished. My dear, you'll recognize this as a proposal. I
thought my mind was made up, after forty, not to marry; and I
specially tried not to bring you into it. You were too young, I
felt. I doubted if I could make you happy, and did everything
possible, exhausted all the arguments, but it was no good.

"Linda, dear, I adore you."

She was glad, without the slightest answering emotion, that Arnaud,
well--liked her. At the same time all her wisdom declared that she
couldn't marry him; and, with the unsparing frankness of youth and
her individual detachment, she told him exactly why.

"I need a great deal of money," she proceeded, "because I am
frightfully extravagant. All I have is expensive; I hate cheap
things--even what satisfies most rich girls. Why, just my satin
slippers cost hundreds of dollars and I'll pay unlimited amounts for
a little fulling of lace or some rare flowers. You'd call it wicked,
but I can't help it--it's me.

"I've always intended to marry a man with a hundred thousand dollars
a year. Of course, that's a lot--do you hate me for telling you?--but
I wouldn't think of any one with less than fifty--"

Arnaud Hallet interrupted quietly, "I have that."

Linda gazed incredulously at his neglected shoes, the wrinkles of
his inconsiderable coat and unstudied scarf. She saw that, actually,
he had spoken apologetically of his possessions; and a stinging
shame spread through her at the possibility that she had seemed
common to an infinitely finer delicacy than hers.




XIII


Most of these circumstances Linda Hallet quietly recalled sitting
with her husband in the house that had been occupied by the
Lowries'. A letter from Pleydon had taken her into a past seven
years gone by; while ordinarily her memory was indistinct;
ordinarily she was fully occupied by the difficulties, or rather
compromises, of the present. But, in the tranquil open glow of a
Franklin stove and the withdrawn intentness of Arnaud reading, her
mind had returned to the distressed period of her wedding.

Elouise Lowrie--Amelia was dead--sunk in a stupor of extreme old
age, her bloodless hands folded in an irreproachable black surah
silk lap, sat beyond the stove; and Lowrie, Linda's elder child,
five and a half, together with his sister Vign, had been long
asleep above. Linda was privately relieved by this: her children
presented enormous obligations. The boy, already at a model school,
appalled her inadequate preparations by his flashes of perceptive
intelligence; while she was frankly abashed at the delicate rosy
perfection of her daughter.

The present letter was the third she had received from Dodge
Pleydon, whom she had not seen since her marriage. At first he had
been enraged at the wrong, he had every reason to feel, she had done
him. Then his anger had dissolved into a meager correspondence of
outward and obvious facts. There was so much that she had been unable
to explain. He had always been impatient, even contemptuous, of the
emotion that made her surrender to him unthinkable--Linda realized
now that it had been the strongest impulse of her life--and, of
course, she had never accounted for the practically unbalanced
enmity of her mother.

The latter had deepened to an incredible degree, so much so that Mr.
Moses Feldt, though he had never taken an actual part in it--such
bitterness was entirely outside his generous sentimentality--had
become acutely uncomfortable in his own home, imploring Linda, with
ready tears, to be kinder to her mama. Judith, too, had grown
cutting, jealous of Linda's serenity of youth, as her appearance
showed the effect of her wasting emotions. Things quite
extraordinary had happened: once Linda's skin had been almost
seriously affected by an irritation that immediately followed the
trace of her powder-puff; and at several times she had had clumsily
composed anonymous notes of a most distressing nature.

She had wondered, calmly enough, which of the two bitter women were
responsible, and decided that it was her mother. At this the
situation at the Feldts', increasingly strained, had become an
impossibility. Arnaud Hallet, after his first visit, had soon
returned. There was no more mention of his money; but every time he
saw her he asked her again, in his special manner--a formality
flavored by a slight diffident humor--to marry him. Arnaud's
proposals had alternated with Pleydon's utterly different demand.

Linda remembered agonized evenings when, in a return of his brutal
manner of the unforgettable night in the Lowrie garden, he tried to
force a recognition of his passion. It had left her cold, exhausted,
the victim of a mingled disappointment at her failure to respond
with a hatred of all essential existence. At last, on a particularly
trying occasion, she had desperately agreed to marry him.

The aversion of her mother, becoming really dangerous, had finally
appalled her; and a headache weighed on her with a leaden pain.
Dodge, too, had been unusually considerate; he talked about the
future--tied up, he asserted, in her--of his work; and suddenly, at
the signal of her rare tears, Linda agreed to a wedding.

In the middle of the night she had wakened oppressed by a dread
resulting in an uncontrollable chill. She thought first that her
mother was bending a malignant face over her; and then realized that
her feeling was caused by her promise to Dodge Pleydon. It had grown
worse instead of vanishing, waves of nameless shrinking swept over
her; and in the morning, further harrowed by the actualities of
being, she had sent a telegram to Arnaud Hallet--to Arnaud's
kindness and affection, his detachment not unlike her own.

They were married immediately; and through the ceremony and the
succeeding days she had been almost entirely absorbed in a sensation
of escape. At the death of Amelia Lowrie, soon after, Arnaud had
suggested a temporary period in the house she remembered with
pleasure; and, making small alterations with the months and years,
they had tacitly agreed to remain.

Linda often wondered, walking about the lower floor, why it seemed
so familiar to her: she would stand in the dining-room, with its
ceiling of darkened beams, and gaze absent-minded through the long
windows at the close-cut walled greenery without. The formal
drawing-room, at the right of the street entrance, equally held her--a
cool interior with slatted wooden blinds, a white mantelpiece with
delicately reeded supports and a bas-relief of Minerva on the
center panel, a polished brass scuttle for cannel-coal and chairs
with wide severely fretted backs upholstered in old pale damask.

The house seemed familiar, but she could never grow accustomed to
the undeniable facts of her husband, the children and her completely
changed atmosphere. She admitted to herself that her principal
feeling in connection with Lowrie and Vign was embarrassment. Here
she always condemned herself as an indifferent, perhaps unnatural,
mother. She couldn't help it. In the same sense she must be an
unsatisfactory wife. Linda was unable to shake off the conviction
that it was like a play in which she had no more than a spectator's
part.

This was her old disability, the result of her habit of sitting, as
a child, apart from the concerns and stir of living. She made every
possible effort to overcome it, to surrender to her new conditions;
but, if nothing else, an instinctive shyness prevented. It went back
further, even, she thought, than her own experience, and she
recalled all she had heard and reconstructed of her father--a man
shut in on himself who had, one day, without a word walked out of
the door and left his wife, never to return. These realizations,
however, did little to clarify her vision; she was continually
trying to adjust her being to circumstances that persistently
remained a little distant and blurred.

In appearance, anyhow, Linda told herself with a measure of
reassurance, she was practically unchanged. She still, with the
support of Arnaud, disregarding current fashion, wore her hair in a
straight bang across her brow and blue gaze. She was as slender as
formerly, but more gracefully round, in spite of the faint
characteristic stiffness that was the result of her mental
hesitation. Her clothes, too, had hardly varied--she wore, whenever
possible, white lawns ruffled about the throat and hem, with broad
soft black sashes, while her more formal dresses were sheaths of
dull unornamented satin extravagant in the perfection of their
simplicity.




XXIV


Arnaud Hallet stirred, sharply closing his book. He had changed--except
for a palpable settling down of grayness--as little as Linda. For a
while she had tried to bring about an improvement in his appearance,
and he had met her expressed wish whenever he remembered it; but this
was not often. In the morning a servant polished his shoes, brushed
and ironed his suits; yet by evening, somehow, he managed to look as
though he hadn't been attended to for days. She would have liked him
to change for dinner; other men of his connection did, it was a part
of his inheritance. Arnaud, however, in his slight scoffing
disparagement, declined individually to annoy himself. He was, she
learned, enormously absorbed in his historical studies and papers.

"Did you enjoy it?" she asked politely of his reading. "Extremely,"
he replied. "The American Impressions of Tyrone Power, the English
actor, through eighteen thirty-three and four. His account of a
European packet with its handbells and Saratoga water and breakfast
of spitch-cock is inimitable. I'd like to have sat at Cato's then,
with a julep or hail-storm, and watched the trotting races."

Elouise Lowrie rose unsteadily, confused with dozing; but almost
immediately she gathered herself into a relentless propriety and a
formal goodnight.

"What has been running through that mysterious mind of yours?"

"I had a letter from Dodge," she told him simply; "and I was
thinking a little about the past." He exhibited the nice unstrained
interest of his admirable personality. "Is he still in France?" he
queried. "Pleydon should be a strong man; I am sure we are both
conscious of a little disappointment in him." She said: "I'll read
you his letter, it's on the table.

"'You will see, my dear Linda, that I have not moved from the Rue de
Penthivre, although I have given up the place at Etretat, and I am
not going to renew the lease here. Rodin insists, and I coming to
agree with him, that I ought to be in America. But the serious
attitude here toward art, how impossible that word has been made, is
charming. And you will be glad to know that I have had some success
in the French good opinion. A marble, Cotton Mather, that I cut from
the stone, has been bought for the Luxembourg.

"'I can hear you both exclaim at the subject, but it is very
representative of me now. I am tired of mythological naiads in a
constant state of pursuit. Get Hallet to tell you something about
Mather. What a somber flame! I have a part Puritan ancestry, as any
Lowrie will inform you. Well, I shall be back in a few months, very
serious, and a politician--a sculptor has to be that if he means to
land any public monuments in America.

"'I hope to see you.'"

The letter ended abruptly, with the signature, "Pleydon."

"Are you happy, Linda?" Arnaud Hallet asked unexpectedly after a
short silence. So abruptly interrogated she was unable to respond.
"What I mean is," he explained, "do you think you would have been
happier married to him? I knew, certainly, that it was the closest
possible thing between us." Now, however, she was able to satisfy
him:

"I couldn't marry Dodge."

"Is it possible to tell me why?"

"He hurt me very much once. I tried to marry him, I tried to forget
it, but it was useless. I was dreadfully unhappy, in a great many
ways--"

"So you sent for me," he put in as she paused reflectively. "I
didn't hurt you, at any rate." It seemed to her that his tone was
shadowed. "You have never hurt me, Arnaud," she assured him,
conscious of the inadequacy of her words. "You were everything I
wanted."

"Except for my hats," he said in a brief flash of his saving humor.
"It would be better for me, perhaps, if I could hurt you. That
ability comes dangerously close to a constant of love. You mustn't
think I am complaining. I haven't the slightest reason in the face
of your devastating honesty. I didn't distress you and I had the
necessary minimum--the fifty thousand." His manner was so even, so
devoid of sting, that she could smile at the expression of her
material ambitions. "I realize exactly your feeling for myself, but
what puzzles me is your attitude toward the children."

"I don't understand it either," she admitted, "except that I am
quite afraid of them. They are so different from all my own
childhood; often they are too much for me. Then I dread the time
when they will discover how stupid and uneducated I am at bottom.
I'm sure you already ask questions before them to amuse yourself at
my doubt. What shall I do, Arnaud, when they are really at school
and bring home their books?"

"Retreat behind your dignity as a parent," he advised. "They are
certain to display their knowledge and ask you to bound things or
name the capital of Louisiana." She cried, "Oh, but I know that,
it's New Orleans!" She saw at once, from his entertained expression,
that she was wrong again, and became conscious of a faint flush of
annoyance. "It will be even worse," she continued, "when Vign looks
to me for advice; I mean when she is older and has lovers."

"She won't seriously; they never do. She'll tell you when it's all
over. Lowrie will depend more on you. I may have my fun about the
capital of Louisiana, Linda, but I have the greatest confidence in
your wisdom. God knows what an unhappy experience your childhood
was, but it has given you a superb worldly balance."

"I suppose you're saying that I am cold," she told him. "It must be
true, because it is repeated by every one. Yet, at times, I used to be
very different--you'd never imagine what a romantic thrill or strange
ideas were inside of me. Like a memory of a deep woods, and--and the
loveliest adventure. Often I would hear music as clearly as possible,
and it made me want I don't know what terrifically."

"An early experience," he replied. Suddenly she saw that he was
tired, his face was lined and dejected. "You read too much," Linda
declared. He said: "But only out of the printed book." She wondered
vainly what he meant. As he stood before the glimmering coals, in
the room saturated in repose, she wished that she might give him
more; she wanted to spend herself in a riot of feeling on Arnaud and
their children. What a detestable character she had! Her desire, her
efforts, were wasted.

He went about putting up the windows and closing the outside
shutters, a confirmed habit. Linda rose with her invariable sense of
separation, the feeling that, bound on a journey with a hidden
destination, she was only temporarily in a place of little
importance. It was like being always in her hat and jacket. Arnaud
shook down the grate; then he gazed over the room; it was all, she
was sure, as it had been a century ago, as it should be--all except
herself.




XXV


Yet her marriage had realized in almost every particular what she
had--so much younger--planned. The early suggestion, becoming
through constant reiteration a part of her knowledge, had been
followed and accomplished; and, as well, her later needs were
served. Linda told herself that, in a world where a very great deal
was muddled, she had been unusually fortunate. And this made her
angry at her pervading lack of interest in whatever she had
obtained.

Other women, she observed, obviously less fortunate than she, were
volubly and warmly absorbed in any number of engagements and
pleasures; she continually heard them, Arnaud's connections--the
whole superior society, eternally and vigorously discussing servants
and bridge, family and cotillions, indiscretions and charities.
These seemed enough for them; their lives were filled, satisfied,
extraordinarily busy. Linda, for the most part, had but little to
do. Her servants, managed with remote exactness, gave no trouble;
she had an excellent woman for the children; her dress presented no
new points of anxiety nor departure ... she was, in short, Arnaud
admitted, perfectly efficient. She disposed of such details
mechanically, almost impatiently, and was contemptuous, no envious,
of the women whose demands they contented.

At the dinners, the balls, to which Arnaud's sense of obligation
both to family and her took them against his inclination, it was the
same--everyone, it appeared to Linda, was flushed with an intentness
she could not share. Men, she found, some of them extremely
pleasant, still made adroit and reassuring efforts for her favor;
the air here, she discovered, was even freer than the bravado of her
earlier surroundings. This love-making didn't disturb her--it was,
ultimately, the men who were fretted--indeed, she had rather hoped
that it would bring her the relief she lacked.

But again the observations and speculation of her mature childhood,
what she had heard revealed in the most skillful feminine
dissections, had cleared her understanding to a point that made the
advances of hopeful men quite entertainingly obvious. Their method
was appallingly similar and monotonous. She liked, rather than not,
the younger ones, whose confidence that their passion was something
new on earth at times refreshed her; but the navigated materialism
of greater experience finally became distasteful. She discussed this
sharply with Arnaud:

"You simply can't help believing that most women are complete
idiots."

"You haven't said much more for men."

"The whole thing is too silly! Why is it, Arnaud? It ought to be
impressive and sweep you off your feet, up--"

"Instead of merely behind some rented palms," he added. "But I must
say, Linda, that you are not a very highly qualified judge of
sentiment." He pronounced this equably, but she was conscious of the
presence of an injury in his voice. She was a little weary at being
eternally condemned for what she couldn't help. Any failure was as
much Arnaud Hallet's as hers; he had had his opportunity, all that
for which he had implored her. Her thoughts returned to Dodge
Pleydon. April was well advanced, and he had written that he'd be
back and see them in the spring. Linda listened to her heart but it
was unhastened by a beat. She would be very glad to have him at
hand, in her life again, of course.

Then the direction of her mind veered--what did he still think of
her? Probably he had altogether recovered from his love for her. It
had been a warm day, and Arnaud had opened a window; but now she was
aware of a cold air on her shoulder and she asked him abruptly to
lower the sash. Linda remembered, with a lingering sense of triumph,
the Susanna Noda whom Dodge had left at a party for her. There had
been a great many Susannas in his life; the reason for this was the
absence of any overwhelming single influence. It might be that now--he
had written of the change in the subjects of his work--such a guide
had come into his existence. She hoped she had. Yet, in view of the
announced silliness of women, she didn't want him to be cheaply
deluded.

He was an extremely human man.

But she, Linda, it seemed, was an inhuman woman. The days ran into
weeks that added another month to spring; a June advanced sultry
with heat; and, suddenly as usual, a maid at the door of her room
announced Pleydon. It was five o'clock in the afternoon, she had to
dress, and she sent him a message that he mustn't expect her in a
hurry. She paused in her deliberate preparations for a long
thoughtful gaze into a mirror; there was not yet a shadow on her
face, the trace of a line at her eyes. The sharp smooth turning and
absolute whiteness of her bare shoulders were flawless.

At first it appeared to Linda that he, too, had not changed. They
were in the library opening into the dining-room, a space shut
against the sun by the Venetian blinds, and faintly scented by a
bowl of early tea roses. He appeared the same--large and informally
clad in gray flannels, with aggressive features and sensitive strong
hands. He was quiet but plainly happy to be with her again and sat
leaning forward on his knees, watching her intently as she chose a
seat.

Then it slowly dawned on her that he had changed, yes--tragically.
Pleydon, in every way, was years older. His voice, less arbitrary,
had new depths of questioning, his mouth was more repressed, his
face notably sparer of flesh. He was immediately aware of the result
of her scrutiny. "I have been working like a fool," he explained. "A
breath of sickness, too, four years ago in Soochow. One of the
damnable Asiatic fevers that a European is supposed to be immune
from. You are a miracle, Linda. How long has it been--nearly eight
years; you have two children and Arnaud Hallet and yet you are the
girl I met at Markue's. I wanted to see you different, just a
little, a trace of something that should have happened to you. It
hasn't. You're the most remarkable mother alive."

"If I am," she returned, "it is not as a success, or at least for
me. Lowrie and Vign are healthy, and happy enough; but I can't lose
myself in them, Dodge; I can't lose myself at all."

He was quiet at this, the smoke of his cigarette climbing bluely in
a space with the aqueous stillness of a lake's depths. "The same,"
he went on after a long pause; "nothing has touched you. I ought to
be relieved but, do you know, it frightens me. You are relentless.
You have no right, at the same time, to be beautiful. I have seen a
great many celebrated women at their best moments, but you are
lovelier than any. It isn't a simple affair of proportion and
features--I wish I could hold it in a phrase, the turn of a chisel.
I can't. It's deathless romance in a bang cut blackly across
heavenly blue." He was silent again, and Linda glad that he still
found her attractive. She discovered that the misery his presence
once caused her had entirely vanished, its place taken by an eager
interest in his affairs, a lightness of spirit at the realization
that, while his love for her might have grown calm, no other woman
possessed it.

At the dinner-table she listened--cool and fresh, Arnaud complained,
in spite of the heat--to the talk of the two men. By her side
Elouise Lowrie occasionally repeated, in a voice like the faint
jangle of an old thin piano, the facts of a family connection or a
commendation of the Dodges. Arnaud really knew a surprising lot, and
his conversation with Pleydon was strung with terms completely
unintelligible to her. It developed, finally, into an argument over
the treatment of the acanthus motive in rococo ornament. France was
summoned against Spain; the architectural degrading of Italy
deplored.... It amazed her that any one could remember so much.

Linda without a conscious reason suddenly stopped the investigation
of her feeling for Pleydon. Even in the privacy of her thoughts an
added obscurity kept her from the customary clear reasoning. After
dinner, out in the close gloom of the garden, she watched the
flicker of the cigarettes. There was thunder, so distant and vague
that for a long while Linda thought she was deceived. She had a keen
rushing sensation of the strangeness of her situation here--Linda
Hallet. The night was like a dream from which she would stir, sigh,
to find herself back again in the past waiting for the return of her
mother from one of her late parties.

But it was Arnaud who moved and, accompanying Elouise Lowrie, went
into the house for his interminable reading. Pleydon's voice began
in a low remembering tone:

"What a fantastic place the Feldt apartment was, with that smothered
room where you said you would marry me. You must have got hold of
Hallet in the devil of a hurry. I've often tried to understand what
happened; why, all the time, you were upset--why, why, why?"

"In a way it was because a ridiculous hairdresser burned out some of
my mother's front wave," she explained.

"Of course," he replied derisively, "nothing could be plainer."

She agreed calmly. "It was very plain. If you want me to try to tell
you don't interrupt. It isn't a happy memory, and I am only doing it
because I was so rotten to you.

"Yes, I can see now that it was the hairdresser and a hundred other
things exactly the same. My mother, all the women we knew, did
nothing but lace and paint and frizzle for men. I used to think it
was a game they played and wonder where the fun was. There were even
hints about that and later they particularized and it made me as
sick as possible. The men, too, were odious; mostly fat and bald;
and after a while, when they pinched or kissed me, I wanted to die.

"That was all I knew about love, I had never heard of any other--men
away from their families for what they called a good time and women
plotting and planning to give it to them or not give it to them.
Then mother, after her looks were spoiled, married Mr. Moses Feldt,
and I met Judith, who only existed for men and men's rooms and told
me worse things, I'm sure, than mother ever dreamed; and, on top of
that, I met you and you kissed me.

"But it was different from any other; it didn't shock me, and it
brought back a thrill I have always had. I wanted, then, to love
you, and have you ask me to marry you, more than anything else in
the world. I was sure, if you would only be patient, that I could
change what had hurt me into a beautiful feeling. I couldn't tell
you because I didn't understand myself." She stopped, and Pleydon
repeated, bitterly and slow:

"Fat old bald men; and I was one with them destroying your exquisite
hope." She heard the creak of the basket chair as he leaned forward,
his face masked in darkness. "Perhaps you think I haven't paid.

"You will never know what love is unless I can manage somehow to
make you understand how much I love you. Hallet will have to endure
your hearing it. This doesn't belong to him; it has not touched the
earth. Every one, more or less, talks about love; but not one in a
thousand, not one in a million, has such an experience. If they did
it would tear the world into shreds. It would tear them as it has
me. I realize the other, the common thing--who experimented more!
This has nothing to do with it. A boy lost in the idealism of his
first worship has a faint reflection. Listen:

"I can always, with a wish, see you standing before me. You
yourself--the folds of your sash, the sharp narrow print of your
slippers on the pavement or the matting or the rug, the ruffles
about your hands. I have the feeling of you near me with your
breathing disturbing the delicacy of your breast. There is the odor
and shimmer of your hair ... your lips move ... but without a sound.

"This vision is more real than reality, than an opera-house full of
people or the Place Vendme; and it, you, is all I care for, all I
think about, all I want. I find quiet places and stay there for
hours, with you; or, if that isn't possible, I turn into a blind
man, a dead man warm again at the bare thought of your face. Listen:

"I've been in shining heaven with you. I have been melted to nothing
and made over again, in you, good. We have been walking together in
a new world with rapture instead of air to breathe. A slow walk
through dark trees--God knows why--like pines. And every time I
think of you it is exactly as though I could never die, as though
you had burned all the corruption out of me and I was made of silver
fire. And listen:

"Nothing else is of any importance, now or afterward, you are now
and the hereafter. I see people and people and hear words and words,
and I forget them the moment they have gone, the second they are
still. But I haven't lost an inflection of your voice. When I work
in clay or stone I model and cut you into every surface and fold. I
see you looking back at me out of marble and bronze. And here, in
this garden, you tried to give me more--"

The infinitely removed thunder was like the continued echo of his
voice. There was a stirring of the leaves above her head; and the
light that had shone against the house in Elouise Lowrie's window
was suddenly extinguished. All that she felt was weariness and a
confused dejection, the weight of an insuperable disappointment. She
could say nothing. Words, even Pleydon's, seemed to her vain. The
solid fact of Arnaud, of what Dodge, more than seven years before,
had robbed her, put everything else aside, crushed it.

She realized that she would never get from life what supremely
repaid the suffering of other women, made up for them the failure of
practically every vision. She was sorry for herself, yes, and for
Dodge Pleydon. Yet he had his figures in metal and stone; his sense
of the importance of his work had increased enormously; and, well,
there were Lowrie and Vign; it would be difficult, every one
agreed, to find better or handsomer children. But they seemed no
more than shadows or colored mist. This terrified her--what a
hopelessly deficient woman she must be! But even in the profundity
of her depression the old vibration of nameless joy reached her
heart.

In the morning there was a telegram from Judith Feldt, saying that
her mother was dangerously sick, and she had lunch on the train for
New York. The apartment seemed stuffy; there was a trace of
dinginess, neglect, about the black velvet rugs and hangings. Her
mother, she found, had pneumonia; there was practically no chance of
her recovering. Linda sat for a short while by the elder's bed,
intent upon a totally strange woman, darkly flushed and ravished in
an agonizing difficulty of breathing. Linda had a remembered vision
of her gold-haired and gay in floating chiffons, and suddenly life
seemed shockingly brief. A serious-visaged clergyman entered the
room as she left and she heard the rich soothing murmur of a
confident phrase.

The Stella Condon who had become Mrs. Moses Feldt had had little
time for the support of the church; although Linda recalled that she
had uniformly spoken well of its offices. To condemn Christianity,
she had asserted, was to invite bad luck. She treated this in
exactly the way she regarded walking under ladders or spilling salt
or putting on a stocking wrong. Linda, however, had disregarded
these possibilities of disaster and, with them, religion.

A great many people, she noticed, talked at length about it; women
in their best wraps and with expensive little prayer books left the
hotels for various Sunday morning services, and ministers came in
later for tea. All this, she understood, was in preparation for
heaven, where everybody, who was not in hell, was to be forever the
same and yet radiantly different. It seemed very vague and far away
to Linda, and, since there was such a number of immediate problems
for her to consider, she had easily ignored the future. When now,
with her mother dying, it was thrust most uncomfortably before her.

She half remembered sentences, admonitions, of the godly--a woman
had once told her that dancing and low gowns were hateful in the
sight of God, some one else that playing-cards were an instrument of
the devil. Pleasure, she had gathered, was considered wrong, and she
instinctively put these opinions, together with a great deal else,
aside as envious.

That expressed her whole experience. She had never keenly associated
the thought of death with herself before, and she was unutterably
revolted by the impending destruction of her fine body, the delicate
care of which formed her main preoccupation in life. Age was
supremely distasteful, but this other ... she shuddered.

Linda wanted desperately to preserve the whiteness of her skin, the
flexible black distinction of her hair, yes--her beauty. Here,
again, with other women the vicarious immortality of children would
be sufficient. But not for her. She was in the room that had been
hers before marriage, with her infinite preparations for the night
at an end; and, her hair loose across the blanched severity of her
attire, her delicately full arms bare, she clasped her cold hands in
stabbing apprehension.

She would do anything, anything, to escape that repulsive fatality
to her lavished care. It was only to be accomplished by being good;
and goodness was in the charge of the minister. She saw clearly and
at once her difficulty--how could she go to a solemn man in a
clerical vest and admit that she was solely concerned by the
impending loss of her beauty. The promised splendor of heaven, in
itself, failed to move her--it threatened to be monotonous; and she
was honest in her recognition that charity, the ugliness of poverty,
repelled her. Linda was certain that she could never change in these
particulars; she could only pretend.

A surprising multiplication of such pretense occurred to her in
people regarded as impressively religious. She had seen men like
that--she vaguely thought of the name Jasper--going off with her
mother in cabs to dinners that must have been "godless." She
wondered if this mere attitude, the public show, were enough. And an
instinctive response told her that it was not. If all she had been
informed about the future were true she decided that her mother's
chance was no worse than that of any false display of virtue.

She, Linda, could do nothing.

The funeral ceremony with its set form--so inappropriate to her
mother's qualities--was even more remote from Linda's sympathies
than was common in her encounters. But Mr. Moses Feldt's grief
appeared to her actual and affecting. He invested every one with the
purity of his own spirit.

She left New York at the first possible moment with the feeling that
she was definitely older. The realization, she discovered, happened
in that way--ordinarily giving the flight of time no consideration
it was brought back to her at intervals of varying length. As she
aged they would grow shorter.

The result of this experience was an added sense of failure; she
tried more than ever to overcome her indifference, get a greater
happiness from her surroundings and activity. Linda cultivated an
attention to Lowrie and Vign. They responded charmingly but her
shyness with them persisted in the face of her inalienable right to
their full possession. She insisted, too, on going about vigorously
in spite of Arnaud's humorous groans and protests. She forced
herself to talk more to the men attracted to her, and assumed, with
disconcerting ease, an air of sympathetic interest. But, unfortunately,
this brought on her a rapid increase of the love-making that she
found so fatiguing.

She studied her husband thoughtfully through the evenings at home,
before the Franklin stove, or, in summer, in the secluded garden.
Absolutely nothing was wrong with him; he had, after several deaths,
inherited even more money; and, in his deprecating manner where it
was concerned, devoted it to her wishes. Except for books, and the
clothes she was forced to remind him to get, he had no personal
expenses. In addition to the money he never offended her, his
relationships and manner were conducted with an inborn nice
formality that preserved her highest self-opinion.

Yet she was never able to escape from the limitations of a calm
admiration; she couldn't lose herself, disregard herself in a flood
of generous emotion. When, desperately, she tried, he, too, was
perceptibly ill at ease. Usually he was undisturbed, but once, when
she stood beside him with her coffee cup at dinner, he disastrously
lost his equanimity. Tensely putting the cup away he caught her with
straining hands.

"Oh, Linda," he cried, "is it true that you love me! Do you really
belong to us--to Vign and Lowrie and me? I can't stand it if you
won't ... some day."

She backed away into the opening of a window, against the night, from
the justice of his desire; and she was cold with self-detestation as
her fingers touched the glass. Linda tried to speak, to lie; but,
miserably still, she was unable to deceive him. The animation, the
fervor of his longing, swiftly perished. His arms dropped to his
side. An unbearable constraint deepened with the silence in the room,
and later he lightly said:

"You mustn't trifle with my ancient heart, Linda, folly and age--"




XXVIII


The only other quantity in her life was Dodge Pleydon. He wrote her
again, perhaps three months after the explanation of his love; but
his letter was devoted wholly to his work, and so technical that she
had to ask Arnaud to interpret it. He added:

"That is the mind of an impressive man. He has developed enormously--
curious, so late in life. Pleydon must be fully as old as myself.
It's clear that he has dropped his women. I saw a photograph of the
Cotton Mather reproduced in a weekly, and it was as gaunt as a
Puritan Sunday. Brimmed with power. Why don't we see him oftener?
Write and say I'd like to contradict him again about the Eastlake
period."

He made no further reference to Pleydon then, and Linda failed to
write as Arnaud suggested. Though she wasn't disturbed at the
possibility of a continuation of his admissions of love she was
weary of the thought of its uselessness. Linda was, she told
herself, damned by practicability. Her husband used the familiar
term of reproach, material. She didn't in the least want to be.
Circumstance, she had a feeling, had forced it upon her.

Arnaud, however, who had met Dodge Pleydon in Philadelphia, brought
him home. Linda saw with a strange constriction of the heart that
Pleydon's hair was definitely gray. He had had a recurrence of the
fever contracted in Soochow. The men at once entered on another
discussion which she was unable to follow; but it was clear that her
husband now listened with an increasing surrender of opinion to the
sculptor. Pleydon, it was true, was correspondingly more impatient
with minds that disagreed with his. He was at once thinner and
bigger, his face deeply lined; but his eyes had a steady vital
intensity difficult to encounter.

She considered him in detail as the talk left dinner, the glasses
and candles spent. He drank, from a tall tumbler with a single piece
of ice, the special whisky Arnaud kept. He had been neglecting
himself, too--there were traces of clay about his finger-nails, and
he ate hurriedly and insufficiently. When she had an opportunity,
Linda decided, she would speak to him about these necessary trifles.
Then, she had no chance; and it was not until the following winter,
at a Thursday afternoon concert during the yearly exhibition of the
Academy of Fine Arts, that she could gently complain.

It was gloomy, with a promise of snow outside; and the great space
of the stairway to the galleries was filled with shadow and the
strains of _Armide_ echoing from the orchestra playing at the
railing above the entrance. Pleydon, together with a great many
others, had spread an overcoat on the masonry of the steps, and they
were seated in the obscurity of the balustrade.

"You look as though you hadn't had enough to eat," she observed.
"You used to be almost thick but now you are a thing of terrifying
grimness. You look like a monk. I wonder why you're like a monk,
Dodge?"

"Linda Condon," he replied.

"That can't be it now; I haven't been Linda Condon for years, but
Mrs. Arnaud Hallet. It's very pretty, of course, and I'd like to
think you could keep a young love alive so long. Experience makes me
doubt anything of the sort; but then I was always skeptical."

"You have never been anyone else," he asserted positively. "You were
born Linda Condon and you'll die that, except for some extraordinary
accident. I can't imagine what it would be--a miracle like quaker-ladies
in the Antarctic."

"It sounds uncomplimentary, and I'm sick of being compared with
polar places. What are quaker-ladies?"

"Fragile little flowers in the spring meadows."

"I'd rather listen to the music than you."

"That is why loving you is so eternal, why it doesn't fluctuate like
a human emotion. You can't exhaust it and rest before a new tide
sweeps back; the timeless ecstasy of a worship of God ... breeding
madness."

She failed to understand and turned a troubled gaze to his bitter
repression. "I don't like to make you unhappy, Dodge," she said in a
low tone. "What can I do? I am a horrid disappointment to all of
you, but most to myself. I can't go over it again."

"Beauty has nothing to do with happiness," he declared harshly. He
rose, without consulting her wishes; and Linda followed him as he
proceeded above, irresistibly drawn to the bronze he was showing in
the Rotunda.

It was the head and part of the shoulders of a very old woman,
infinitely worn, starved by want and spent in brutal labor. There
was a thin wisp of hair pinned in a meager knot on her skull; her
bones were mercilessly indicated, barely covered with drum-like
skin; her mouth was stamped with timid humility; while her eyes
peered weakly from their sunken depths.

"Well?" he demanded, interrogating her in the interest of his work.

"I--I suppose it's perfectly done," she replied, at a loss for a
satisfactory appreciation. "It's true, certainly. But isn't it more
unpleasant than necessary?" Pleydon smiled patiently. "Beauty," he
said, with his mobile gesture. "Pity, _Katharsis_--the wringing
out of all dross."

The helpless feeling of her overwhelming ignorance returned. She was
like a woman held beyond the closed door of treasure. "Come over
here." He unceremoniously led her to the modeling of a ruffled
grouse, faithful in every diversified feather. Linda thought it
admirable, really amazing; but he dismissed it with a passionate
energy. "The dull figuriste!" he exclaimed. "Daguerre. Once I could
have done that, yes, and been entertained by its adroitness and
insolence--before you made me. Do you suppose I was able then to
understand the sheer tragic fortitude to live of a scrubwoman! The
head you thought unpleasant--haven't you seen her going home in the
March slush of a city? Did you notice the gaps in her shoes, the
ragged shawl about a body twisted with forty, fifty, sixty years of
wet stone floors and steps? Did you wonder what she had for supper?"

"No, Dodge, I didn't. They always make me wretched."

"Well, to realize all that, to feel the degradation of her nature,
to lie, sick with exhaustion, on the broken slats of her bed under a
ravelled-out travesty of a quilt, and get up morning after morning
in an iron winter dark--to experience that in your spirit and put it
into durable metal, hard stone--is to hold beauty in your hands."

Her interest in his speech was mingled with the knowledge that, in
order to dress comfortably for dinner, she must leave immediately.
Pleydon helped her into the Hallet open motor landaulet. Linda
demanded quantities of air. He was, he told her at the door, leaving
in an hour for New York. "I wish you could be happier," she
insisted. He reminded her that he had had the afternoon with her. It
was so little, she thought, carried rapidly over a smooth wide
street. His love for her increased rather than lessened. How
wonderful it was.... The woman outside that barred door of treasure.




XXIX


Linda thought frequently about Dodge and his feeling for her;
memories of his words, his appearance, speculations, spread through
her tranquil daily affairs like the rich subdued pattern of a fine
carpet on the bare floor of her life. She was puzzled by the depth
of a passion that, apparently, made no demands other than the
occasional necessity to be with her and the knowledge that she
existed. If she had been a very intelligent woman, and, of course,
not quite bad-looking, she might have understood both Pleydon and
Arnaud, the latter a man whose mind was practically absorbed in the
pages of books. There could be no doubt, no question, of their love
for her.

Then there had always been the others--the men at the parties, in
her garden, through the old days of her childhood in hotels. It was
very stupid, very annoying, but at the same time she became
interested in what, with her candid indifference, affected them. She
had never, really, even when she desired, succeeded in giving them
anything, anything conscious or for which they moved. Judith Feldt,
on the contrary, had been prodigal. And, while certainly numbers of
men had been attracted to her, they all tired of her with marked
rapidity. Men met Judith, Linda recalled, with eagerness, they came
immediately and often to see her ... for, perhaps, a month. Then,
temporarily deserted, she was submerged in depression and nervous
tears.

But, while it was obviously impossible for all lovers to be constant,
two extraordinary and superior men would be faithful to her as long
as she lived, no--as long as they lived. This was beyond doubt. One
was celebrated--she watched with a quiet pride Pleydon's fame
penetrate the country--and the other, her husband, a person of
the most exacting delicacy of habits, intellect and wit.

What was it, she wondered, that made the supreme importance of women
to men worth consideration. Linda was thinking of this now in
connection with her daughter. Vign was fourteen; a larger girl than
she had ever been, with her father's fine abundant cinnamon-brown
hair, a shapely sensitive mouth, and a wide brown gaze with a habit
of straying, at inappropriate moments, from things seen to the
invisible. She was, Linda realized thankfully, transparently honest;
her only affectation was the slight supercilious manner of her
associations; and she read, ridiculously like her father, with
increasing pleasure.

However, what engaged Linda most was the fact that Vign already
liked men; she had been at the fringe, as it were, of young dances,
with a sparkling satisfaction to herself and the securely nice
youths who "cut in" at her brief appearances.

The truth was that Linda saw that more than a trace of Stella
Condon's warm generosity of emotion had been brought by herself to
Arnaud's daughter. The faults of every life, every circumstance,
were endlessly multiplied through all existence. At fourteen, it was
Linda's frowning impression, her mother had very fully instructed
her in the wiles and structure of admirable marriage, and she had
never completely lost some hard pearls of the elder's wisdom. Should
she, in turn, communicate them to Vign?

The moment, the anxiety, she dreaded was arriving, and it found her
no freer of doubt than had the other aspects of her own responses.
Yet here she was possessed by the keenest need for absolute
rectitude; and perhaps this, she thought, with an unusual pleasure,
was an evidence of the affection she had seemed to lack. But in the
end she said nothing.

She was still unable to disentangle the flesh from the spirit, love--the
love that so amazingly illuminated Dodge Pleydon--from comfort. Dodge
had disturbed all her sense of values, even to the point of unsettling
her allegiance to the supremacy of a great deal of money. He had worked
this without giving her anything definite, that she could explain to
Vign, in return. Linda preserved her demand for the actual. If she
could only comprehend the force animating Dodge she felt life would be
clear.

She was tempted to experiment--when had such a possibility occurred
to her before?--and discover just how far in several directions
Pleydon's devotion went. This would be easy now, she was
unrestrained by the fact of Arnaud, and the old shrinking from the
sculptor happily vanished. Yet with him before her, on one of his
infrequent visits to their house, she realized that her courage was
insufficient. Was it that or something deeper--a reluctance to turn
herself like a knife in the source of the profoundest compliment a
woman could be paid. Linda thought too highly of his love for that;
the texture of the carpet had become too gratifying.

They were all three in the library, as customary; and Linda,
restless, saw her reflection in a closed long window. She was
wearing yellow, the color of the jonquils on a candle-stand; but
with her familiar sash tied and the ends falling to the hem of her
skirt. The pointed oval of her face was unchanged, her pallor, the
straight line of her black bang, the blueness of her eyes, were as
they had been a surprisingly long while ago. Arnaud, with a
disconcerting comprehension, demanded, "Well, are you satisfied?"
She replied coolly, "Entirely." Pleydon, seated for over an hour
without moving, or even the trivial relief of a cigarette, followed
her with his luminous uncomfortable gaze, his disembodied passion.




XXX


Linda heard Vign's laugh, the expression of a sheer lightness of
heart, following a low eager murmur of voices in her daughter's
room, and she was startled by its resemblance to the gay pitch of
Mrs. Moses Feldt's old merriment. Three of Vign's friends were with
her, all approximately eighteen, talking, Linda knew, men and--it
was autumn--anticipating the excitements of their bow to formal
society that winter. They had, she silently added, little enough to
learn about the latter. Through the year past they had been to a
dancing-class identical, except for an earlier hour and age, with
mature affairs; but before that they had been practically introduced
to the pleasures of their inheritance.

The men were really boys at the university, past the first year,
receptacles of unlimited worldly knowledge and experience. They
belonged to exclusive university societies and eating clubs, and
Linda found their stiff similarity of correct bigoted pattern highly
entertaining. She had no illusions about what might be called their
morals; they were midway in the period of youthful unrestraint; but
she recognized as well that their attitude toward, for example,
Vign was irreproachable. Such boys affected to disdain the girls of
their associated families ... or imagined themselves incurably in
love.

The girls, for their part, while insisting that forty was the ideal
age for a lover--the terms changed with the seasons, last year
"suitor" had been the common phrase--were occasionally swept in
young company into a high irrational passion. Mostly, through
skillful adult pressure or firm negation, such affairs came to
nothing; but even these were sometimes overcome. And, when Linda had
been disturbed by the echo of old days in her daughter's tones, she
was considering exactly such a state.

One of the nicest youths imaginable, Bailey Sandby, had lost all
trace of superior aloofness in a devotion to Vign. He was short,
squarely built, with clear pink cheeks, steady light blue eyes and
crisp very fair hair. This was his last season of academic
instruction, after which a number of years, at an absurdly low
payment, awaited him in his father's bond brokerage concern.
However, he was, Linda gathered, imperious in his urgent need for
Vign's favor.

Ridiculous, she thought, at the same time illogically rehearsing
the resemblances of Vign to her grandmother. She had no doubt that
the parties Vign shared on the terraces and wide lawns, in the
informal dancing at country houses, were sufficiently sophisticated;
there was on occasion champagne, and--for the masculine element
anyhow--cocktails. The aroma of wine, lightly clinging to her young
daughter's breath, filled her with an old instinctive sickness.

She had spoken to Arnaud who, in turn, severely addressed Vign; but
during this Linda had been oppressed by the familiar feeling of
impotence. The girl, of course, had properly heard them; but she
gave her mother the effect of slipping easily beyond their grasp.
When she had gone to bed Arnaud repeated a story brought to him by
the juvenile Lowrie, under the influence of a temporary indignation
at his sister's unwarranted imposition of superiority. Arnaud went
on:

"Actually they had this kissing contest, it was at Chestnut Hill,
with a watch held; and Vign, or so Lowrie insisted, won the prize
for length of time--something like a minute. Now, when I was young--"

Submerged in apprehensive memory Linda lost most of his account of
the Eden-like youth of his earlier day. When, at last, his
assertions pierced her abstraction, it was only to bring her to the
realization of how pathetically little he knew of either Vign or
her. She weighed the question of utter frankness here--the quality
enhanced by universal obscurity--but she was obliged to check her
desire for perfect understanding. A purely feminine need to hide,
even from Arnaud, any detracting facts about women shut her into a
diplomatic silence. In reality he could offer them no help; their
problems--in a world created more objectively by the hand of man
than God--were singular to themselves. Women were quite like spoiled
captives to foreign princes, masking, in their apparent complacency,
a necessarily secret but insidiously tyrannical control. It wouldn't
do, in view of this, to expose too much.

The following morning it was Arnaud, rather than herself, who had a
letter from Pleydon. "He wants us to come over to New York and his
studio," the former explained. "He has some commission or other from
a city in the Middle West, and a study to show us. I'd like it very
much; we haven't seen this place, and his surroundings are not to be
overlooked."

Pleydon's rooms were directly off Central Park West, in an apartment
house obviously designed for prosperous creative arts, with a hall
frescoed in the tones of Puvis de Chavannes and an elevator cage
beautifully patterned in iron grilling. Dodge Pleydon met them in
his narrow entry and conducted them into a pleasant reception-room.
"It's a duplex," he explained of his quarters; "the dining-room you
see and the kitchen's beyond, while the baths and all that are over
our heads; the studio fills both floors."

There were low book cases with their continuous top used as a shelf
for a hundred various objects, deep long chairs of caressing ease
and chairs of coffee-colored wicker with amazingly high backs woven
with designs of polished shells into the semblance of spread
peacocks' tails. The yellow silk curtains at the windows, the rug
with the intricate coloring of a cashmere shawl, the Russian tea
service, were in a perfection of order; and Linda almost resentfully
acknowledged the skilful efficiency of his maid. It was surprising
that, without a wife, a man could manage such a degree of comfort!

Over tea far better than hers, in china of an infinitely finer
fragility, she studied Pleydon thoughtfully. He looked still again
perceptibly older, his face continued to grow sparer of flesh,
emphasizing the aggressively bony structure of his head. When he
shut his mouth after a decided statement she could see the
projection of the jaw and the knotted sinews at the base of his
cheeks. No, Dodge didn't seem well. She asked if there had been any
return of the fever and he nodded in an impatient affirmative,
returning at once to the temporarily suspended conversation with
Arnaud. There was a vast difference, too, in the way in which he
talked.

His attitude was as assertive as ever, but it had less expression in
words; unaccountable periods of silence, almost ill-natured,
overtook him, spaces of abstraction when it was plain that he had
forgotten the presence of whoever might be by. Even direct questions
sometimes failed to pierce immediately his consciousness. Dodge,
Linda told herself, lived entirely too much alone. Then she said
this aloud, thoughtlessly, and she was startled by the sudden
intolerable flash of his gaze. An awkward pause followed, broken by
the uprearing of Pleydon's considerable length.

"I must take you into the studio before it is too dark," he
proceeded. "Every creative spirit knows when its great moment has
come. Well, mine is here." The men stood aside as Linda, her head
positively ringing with the thrill that was like a strain of Gluck,
the happy sadness, entered the bare high spaciousness of Dodge
Pleydon's workroom.




XXXI


Everything she saw, the stripped floor, the white walls bare but for
some casts like the dismembered fragments of flawless blanched
bodies, the inclined plane of the wide skylight, bore an impalpable
white dust of dried clay. In a corner, enclosed in low boards, a
stooped individual with wood-soled shoes and a shovel was working a
mass of clay over which at intervals he sprinkled water, and at
intervals halted to make pliable lumps of a uniform size which he
added to a pile wrapped in damp cloths. There were a number of
modeling stands with twisted wires grotesquely resembling a child's
line drawing of a human being; while a stand with some modeling
tools on its edge bore an upright figure shapeless in its swathing
of dampened cloths.

"The great moment," Pleydon said again, in a vibrant tone. "But you
know nothing of all this," he directly addressed Linda. "Neither,
probably, will you have heard of Simon Downige. He was born at
Cottarsport, in Massachusetts, about eighteen forty; and, after--in
the support of his hatred of any slavery--he fought through the
Civil War, he came home and found that his town stifled him. He
didn't marry at once, as so many returning soldiers did; instead he
was wedded to a vision of freedom, freedom of opinion, of spirit,
worship--any kind of spaciousness whatever. And, in the pursuit of
that, he went West.

"He told them that he was going to find--but found was the word--a place
where men could live together in a purity of motives and air. No more,
you understand; he hadn't a personal fanatical belief to exploit and
attract the hysteria of women and insufficient men. He was not a
pathological messiah; but only Simon Downige, an individual who
couldn't comfortably breathe the lies and injustice and hypocrisy of
the ordinary community. No doubt he was unbalanced--his sensitiveness
to a universal condition would prove that. Normally people remain
undisturbed by such trivialities. If they didn't an end would come to
one or the other, the lies or the world.

"He traveled part way in a Conestoga wagon--a flight out of Egypt;
they were common then, slow canvas-covered processions with entire
families drawn by the mysterious magnetism of the West. Then,
leaving even such wayfarers, he walked, alone, until he came on a
meadow by a little river and a grove of trees, probably
cottonwoods.... That was Simon Downige, and that, too, was Hesperia.
Yes, he was unbalanced--the old Greek name for beautiful lands. It
is a city now, successful and corruptly administered--what always
happens to such visions.

"It is necessary, Linda, as I've always told you, to understand the
whole motive behind a creation in permanent form. A son of Simon's--yes,
he finally married--a unique and very rich character, wife dead and
no children, commissioned a monument to the founder of Hesperia, in
Ohio, and of his fortune.

"They even have a civic body for the control of public building; and
they came East to approve my statue, or rather the clay sketch for
it. They were very solemn, and one, himself a sculptor, a graduate
of the Beaux Arts, ran a suggestive thumb over Simon and did
incredible damage. But, after a great deal of hesitation, and a
description from the sculptor of what he thought excellently
appropriate for such magnificence, they accepted my study. The
present Downige, really--though I understand there is another
pretentious branch in Hesperia--bullied them into it. He cursed the
Beaux-Arts graduate with the most brutal and satisfactory freedom--the
tyranny of his money; the crown, you see, of Simon's hope."

He unwrapped one by one the wet cloths; and Linda, in an eagerness
sharp like anxiety, finally saw the statue, under life-size, of a
seated man with a rough stick and bundle at his feet. A limp hat was
in his hand, and, beneath a brow to which the hair was plastered by
sweat, his eyes gazed fixed and aspiring into a hidden dream
perfectly created by his desire. Here, she realized at last, she had
a glimmer of the beauty, the creative force, that animated Dodge
Pleydon. Simon Downige's shoes were clogged with mud, his entire
body, she felt, ached with weariness; but his gaze--nothing Linda
discovered but shadows over two depressions--was far away in the
attainment of his place of justice and truth.

She found a stool and, careless of the film of dust, sat absorbed in
the figure. Pleydon again had lost all consciousness of their
presence; he stood, hands in pockets, his left foot slightly
advanced, looking at his work from under drawn brows. Arnaud spoke
first:

"It's impertinent to congratulate you, Pleydon. You know what you've
done better than any one else could. You have all our admiration."
Linda watched the tenderness with which the other covered Simon
Downige's vision in clay. Later, returning home after dinner, Arnaud
speculated about Pleydon's remarkable increase in power. "I had
given him up," he went on; "I thought he was lost in those notorious
debauches of esthetic emotions. Does he still speak of loving you?"

"Yes," Linda replied. "Are you annoyed by it?" He answered, "What
good if I were?" She considered him, turned in his chair to face
her, thoughtfully. "I haven't the slightest doubt of its quality,
however--all in that Hesperia of old Downige's. To love you, my dear
Linda, has certain well-defined resemblances to a calamity. If you
ask me if I object to what you do give him, my answer must shock the
gods of art. I would rather you didn't."

"What is it, Arnaud?" she demanded. "I haven't the slightest idea. I
wish I had."

"Platonic," he told her shortly. "The term has been hopelessly
ruined, yet the sense, the truth, I am forced to believe, remains."

"But you know how stupid I am and that I can't understand you."

"The woman in whom a man sees God," he proceeded irritably:

"'_La figlia della sua mente, l'amorosa, idea_.'"

"Oh," she cried, wrung with a sharp obscure hurt. "I know that, I've
heard it before." Her excitement faded at her absolute inability to
place the circumstances of her memory. The sound of the words
vanished, leaving no more than the familiar deep trouble, the
disappointing sensation of almost grasping--Linda was unable to
think what.

"After all, you are my wife." He had recovered his normal shy humor.
"I can prove it. You are the irreproachable mother of our
unsurpassed children. You have a hopeless vision--like this Simon's--of
seeing me polished and decently pressed; and I insist on your
continuing with the whole show."

Her mind arbitrarily shifted to the thought of her father, who had
walked out of his house, left--yes--his family, without any
intimation. Then, erratically, it turned to Vign, to Vign and
young Sandby with his fresh cheeks and impending penniless years
acquiring a comprehension of the bond market. She said, "I wonder if
she really likes Bailey?" Arnaud's energy of dismay was laughable,
"What criminal folly! They haven't finished Mother Goose yet."




XXII


Linda, who expected to see Pleydon's statue of Simon Downige
finished immediately in a national recognition of its splendor, was
disappointed by his explanation that, probably, it would not be
ready for casting within two years. He intended to model it again,
life-size, before he was ready for the heroic. April, the vivifying,
had returned; and, as always in the spring, Linda was mainly
conscious of the mingled assuaging sounds of life newly admitted
through open windows. A single shaded lamp was lighted by a far
table, where Arnaud sat cutting the pages of _The Living Age_
with an ivory blade; Dodge was blurred in the semi-obscurity.

He came over to see them more frequently now, through what he called
the great moment--so tiresomely extended--of his life. Pleydon came
oftener but he said infinitely less. It was his custom to arrive for
dinner and suddenly depart early or late in the evening. At times
she went up to her room and left the two almost morosely silent men
to their own thoughts or pages; at others she complained--no other
woman alive would stay with such uninteresting and thoroughly
selfish creatures. They never made the pretense of an effort to
consider or amuse her. At this Arnaud would put aside his book and
begin an absurd social conversation in the manner of Vign's
associates. Pleydon, however, wouldn't speak; nothing broke the
somberness of his passionate absorption in invisible tyrannies. She
gave up, finally, a persistent effort to lighten his moods. Annoyed
she told him that if he did not change he'd be sick, and then where
would everything be.

All at once, through the open window, she heard Stella, her mother,
laughing; the carelessly gay sound overwhelmed her with an
instinctive unreasoning dread. Linda rose with a half gasp--but of
course it was Vign in the garden with Bailey Sandby.

She sank back angry because she had been startled; but her
irritation perished in disturbing thought. It wasn't, she told
herself, Vign's actions that made her fear the future so much as
her, Linda's, knowledge of the possibilities of the past. Her
undying hatred of that existence choked in her throat; the chance of
its least breath touching Vign, Arnaud's daughter, roused her to
any embittered hazard.

The girl, she was certain, returned a part at least of Bailey's
feeling. Linda expected no confidences--what had she done to have
them?--and Arnaud was right, affairs of the heart were never
revealed until consummated. Her conclusion had been reached by
indirect quiet deductions. Vign, lately, was different; her
attitude toward her mother had changed to the subtle reserve of
feminine maturity. Her appearance, overnight, it seemed, had
improved; her color was deeper, a delicate flush burned at any
surprise in her cheeks, and the miracle of her body was perfected.

It wasn't, Linda continued silently, that Vign could ever follow the
example of Stella Condon through the hotels and lives of men partly
bald, prodigal, and with distant families. Whatever happened to her
would be in excellent surroundings and taste; but the result--the
sordid havoc, inside and out, the satiety alternating with the points
of brilliancy, and finally, inexorably, sweeping over them in a
leaden tide--would be identical. She wondered a little at the
strength of her detestation for such living; it wasn't moral in any
sense with which she was familiar; in fact it appeared to have a
vague connection with her own revolt from the destruction of death.
She wanted Vign as well to escape that catastrophe, to hold
inviolate the beauty of her youth, her fineness and courage.

She was convinced, too, that if she loved Bailey, and was
disappointed, some of the harm would be done immediately; Linda saw,
in imagination, the pure flame of Vign's passion fanned and then
arbitrarily extinguished. She saw the resemblance of the dead woman,
all those other painted shades, made stronger. A sentence formed so
vividly in her mind that she looked up apprehensively, certain that
she had spoken it aloud:

If Vign does come to care for him they must marry.

Her thoughts left the girl for Arnaud--he would absolutely oppose
her there, and she speculated about the probable length his
opposition would reach. What would he say to her? It couldn't be
helped, in particular it couldn't be explained, neither to him nor
to the friendly correctness of Bailey Sandby's mother. She, alone,
must accept any responsibility, all blame.

The threatened situation developed more quickly than she had
anticipated. Linda met Bailey, obviously disturbed, in the portico,
leaving their house; his manner, mechanically, was good; and then,
with an irrepressible boyish rush of feeling, he stopped her:

"Vign and I love each other and Mr. Hallet won't hear of it. He
insulted us with the verse about the old woman who went to the
cupboard to get a bone, and if he hadn't been her father--" he
breathed a portentous and difficult self-repression. "Then he took a
cowardly advantage of my having no money, just now; right after I
explained how I was going to make wads--with Vign."

An indefinable excitement possessed Linda, accompanied by a sudden
acute fear of what Arnaud might say. She wanted more than anything
else in life to go quickly, inattentively, past Bailey Sandby and up
to her room. Nothing could be easier, more obvious, than her
disapproval of a moneyless boy. She made a step forward with an
assumed resolute ignoring of his disturbed presence. It was useless.
A dread greater than her fright at Arnaud held her in the portico,
her hand lifted to the polished knob of the inner door. Linda turned
slowly, cold and white, "Wait," she said to his shoulder in an
admirable coat; then she gazed steadily into his frank pained eyes.

"How do you know that you love Vign?" she demanded. "You are so
young to be certain it will last always. And Vign--"

"How does any one know?" he replied. "How did you? Married people
always forget their own experiences, the happy way things went with
them. From all I see money hasn't much to do with loving each other.
But, of course, I'm not going to be poor, not with Vign. Nobody
could. She'd inspire them. Mr. Hallet knows all about me, too; and
he's the oldest kind of a friend of the family. I suppose when he
sees father at the Rittenhouse Club they'll have a laugh--a laugh at
Vign and me." His hand, holding the brim of a soft brown hat,
clenched tensely.

"No," Linda told him, "they won't do that." Her obscure excitement
was communicated to him. "Why not?" he demanded.

"Because," she paused to steady her voice, "because I am going to
take a very great responsibility. If it fails, if you let it fail,
you'll ruin ever so much. Yes, Mr. Hallet, I am sure, will consent
to your marrying Vign." She escaped at the first opening from his
incoherent gratitude. Arnaud was in the library, and she stopped in
the hall, busy with the loosening of her veil. Perhaps it would be
better to speak to him after dinner; she ought to question Vign
first; but, as she stood debating, her daughter passed her
tempestuously, blurred with crying, and Arnaud angrily demanded her
presence.




XXXIII


"You were quite right," he cried; "this young idiot Sandby has been
telling Vign that he loves her; and now Vign assures me, with
tears, that she likes it! They want to get married--next week,
tomorrow, this evening." Linda stood by the window; soon the
magnolia-tree would be again laden with flowers. She gathered her
courage into a determined composure of tone. "I saw Bailey outside,"
she admitted. "He told me. It seems excellent to me."

Arnaud Hallet incredulously challenged her. "What do you mean--that
you gave him a trace of encouragement!" Linda replied:

"I said that I was certain you would consent." She halted his
exasperated gesture. "You think Vign is nothing but a child, and
yet she is as old as I was at our wedding. My mother was no older
when Bartram Lowrie married her. I think Vign is very fortunate,
Bailey is as nice as possible; and, as he said, it isn't as if you
knew nothing of the Sandbys; they are as dignified as the Lowries."

An expression she had never before seen hardened his countenance
into a sarcasm that travestied his customary humor. "You realize, of
course, that except for what his father gives him young Sandby is
wretchedly poor. He's nice enough but what has that to do with it?
And, in particular, how does it touch you, Linda Condon? Do you
suppose I can ever forget your answer that time I first asked you to
marry me? You wouldn't consider a poor man; you were worth, really,
a hundred thousand a year; but, if nothing better came along, you
might sacrifice yourself for fifty."

"I remember very well," she answered; "and, curiously enough, I am
not ashamed. I was very sensible then, in a horrible position with
extravagant habits. They were me. I couldn't change myself. Without
money I should have made you, any man, entirely miserable. Arnaud, I
hadn't--I haven't now--the ability to see everything important
through the affections, like so many many women. You often told me
that; who hasn't? I have always admitted it wasn't pleasant nor
praiseworthy. But how, to use your own words, does all that affect
Vign? She isn't cold but very warm-hearted; and, instead of my
experience, she has her own so much better feeling."

"I absolutely refuse to allow anything of the sort," he declared
sharply. "I won't even discuss it--for three years. Tell this Sandby
infant, if you like, to come back then."

"In three years, or in one year, Vign may be quite different, yes-less
lovable. Happiness, too, is queer, Arnaud; there isn't a great deal
of it. Not an overwhelming amount. If it appears for an instant it
must be held as tightly as possible. It doesn't come back, you know.
Don't turn to your book yet--you can't get rid of us, of Vign and
me, like that; and then it's rude; the first time, I believe, you
have ever been impolite to me."

"Forgive me," he spoke formally. "You seem to think that I am as
indifferent as yourself. You might be asking the day of the week to
judge from your calm appearance. The emotion of a father, or even of
a mother, perhaps, you have never explored. On the whole you are
fortunate. And you are always protected by your celebrated honesty."
She said:

"I promised Bailey your consent."

"Why bother about that? It isn't necessary for your new romantic
mood. An elopement, with you to steady the ladder, would be more
appropriate."

She repeated the fact of her engagement. Her dread for him had
vanished, its place now taken by a distrust of what, in her merged
detachment and suffering, she might blunderingly do. At the back of
this she realized that his case, his position, was hopeless. Without
warning, keen and undimmed, his love for her flashed through his
resentful misery. There was no spoken acknowledgement of surrender;
he sank into his chair dejected and pitiable, infinitely gray. His
shoes, on the brightness of the hooked rug, were dingy, his coat
drawn and wrinkled.

Linda saw herself on her knees before him, before his patience and
generosity, sobbing her contrition into his forgiving hands. She
longed with every nerve--as she had so often before--to lose herself
in passionate emotion. She had never been more erect or withdrawn,
never essentially less touched. After a little, waiting for him to
speak, she saw that he, too, had retreated into the profound depths
of his own illusions and despairs.




XXXIV


For a surprising while--even in the face of Vign's radiance--Arnaud
was as still and shadowed as the inert surface of a dammed stream.
Then slowly, the slenderest trickle at first, his wit revived his
spirit; and he opened an unending mock-solemn attack on Bailey
Sandby's eminently serious acceptance of the responsibilities of his
allowed love.

The boy had left the university, and his father--a striking replica
of Arnaud's prejudices, impatience and fundamental kindness--exchanged
with Vign's male parent the most dismal prophecies together with
concrete plans for their children's future security. This, inevitably,
resulted in Vign's marriage; a ceremony unattended by Pleydon except
by the presence of a very liberal check.

The life-size version of his Simon Downige was again under way--it
had been torn down, Linda knew, more than once--and he was in a
fever of composition. Nor was this, she decided with Arnaud, his
only oppression: the Asiatic fever clung to him with disquieting
persistence. Pleydon himself admitted he had a degree or two in the
evening.

Linda was seated in his studio near Central Park West, perhaps a
year later, and she observed aloud that so much wet clay around was
bad for him. He laughed: nothing now could happen to him, he was
forever beyond accident, sickness, death--his statue for the
monument in Hesperia was finished. It stood revealed before them,
practically as Linda had first seen it, but enlarged, towering, as
if the vision it portrayed had grown, would continue to grow
eternally, because of the dignity of its hope, the necessity of its
realization.

"Now," she said, "it will go to the foundry and be cast." He
corrected her. "You will go to the foundry and be cast ... in
bronze." A distinct graceful happiness possessed her at the
knowledge that his love for her was as constant as though it, too,
were metal. Not flesh but bronze, spirit, he insisted.

The multiplying years made that no more comprehensible than when, a
child, she had thrilled in a waking dream. Love, spirit, death.
Three mysteries. But only one, she thought, was inevitably hers, the
last. To be loved was not love itself, but only the edge of its
cloak; response was an indivisible part of realization. No,
sterility was the measure--of its absence. And she was, Linda felt,
in spite of Vign and Lowrie, the latter a specially vigorous
contradiction, the most sterile woman alive. There were always
Dodge's assurances, but clay, stone, metal, were cold for a belief
to embrace. And she was, she knew, lovelier now than she had ever
been before, than she would ever be again.




XXXV


The faint ringing of the bell from outside that probably announced
Arnaud sounded unreal, futile, to Linda. He came into the studio,
and at once a discussion began between the two men of the difference
in the surfaces of clay and bronze. The talk then shifted to the
pictorial sources of the heroic Simon Downige before them, and Linda
declared, "Dodge, you have never made a head of me. How very
unflattering!"

"You're an affair for a painter," he replied; "Goya or Alfred
Stevens. No one but Goya could have found a white for you, with the
quality of flower petals; and Stevens would have fixed you in an
immortality of delicate color, surrounded by your Philadelphia
garden." He stood quite close to her, with his jacket dragged
forward by hands thrust into its pockets, and he added at the end of
a somber interrogation, "But if you would really like to know why--"

In a moment more, she recognized, Dodge would explain his feeling
for her--to Arnaud, to any one who might be present. The gleam in
his eyes, his remoteness from earthly concern, were definitely not
normal. Pleydon, his love, terrified her. "No," she said with an
assumed hurried lightness, "don't try to explain. I must manage to
survive the injury to my vanity."

They left New York almost immediately, Pleydon suddenly determining
to go with them; and later were scattered through the Hallet
household. Vign and her husband were temporarily living there; with
their heads close together they were making endless computations,
numerous floor plans and elevations. Linda, at the piano in the
drawing-room, could hear them through the hall. Pleydon was lounging
in a chair beyond her. She couldn't play but she was able, slowly,
to pick out the notes of simple and familiar airs--echoes of Gluck
and blurred motives of Scarlatti. It was for herself, she explained;
the sounds, however crude and disconnected, brought things back to
her. What things, she replied to Pleydon's query, she didn't in the
least know; but pleasant.

The fact that she understood so little depressed her with increasing
frequency. It was well enough to be ignorant as a girl, or even as a
young woman newly married; but she had left all that behind; she had
lost her youth without any compensating gain of knowledge. Linda
could not assure herself that life was clearer than it had been to
her serious childhood. It had always been easily measured on the
surface; she had had a very complete grasp of its material aspects
almost at once, accomplishing exactly what she had planned. Perhaps
this was all; and her trouble an evidence of weakness--the
indecision, she saw with contempt, that kept so many people in a
constant agitation of disappointment.

Perhaps this was enough; more than the majority had or accomplished.
She made, again, a resolute effort to be contented, at rest. Her
straying fingers clumsily wrought a fragmentary refrain that mocked
her determination. It wasn't new, this--this dissatisfaction; but it
had grown sharper. As she was older her restlessness increased at
the realization that life, opportunity, were slipping from her. Soon
she would be forty.

The conviction seized her that most lives reflected hers in that
their questioning was never answered. The fortunate, then, were the
incurious and the hearts undisturbed by a maddening thrill. She said
aloud, "The ones who never heard music." Pleydon was without a sign
that she had spoken. Her emotions were very delicate, very fragile,
and enormously difficult to perceive. They were like plants in stony
ground. Where had she heard that--out of the Bible? Then she thought
of her failure to get anything from religion--a part of her
inability to drink at the springs which others declared so
refreshing. Linda pressed her hands more sharply on the keys and the
answering discord had the effect of waking her to reality.

Pleydon remained until the following afternoon, and then was lost--in
the foundry casting his statue--for six months. Arnaud went over to
view the completion of the bronze and returned filled with enthusiasm.
"Its simplicity is the surprising part," he told her. "The barest
statement possible. But Pleydon himself is in a disturbing condition;
I can't decide if it is mental or physical. The fever of course; yet
that doesn't account for his distance from ordinary living. The truth
is, I suppose, that men weren't designed for great arts, and nature,
like the jealous God of the Hebrews, retaliates. It is absurd, but
Pleydon reminds me of you; you're totally different. I suppose it's
because of the detachment you have in common." He veered to a detail
of Lowrie's first year at a university, and exhibited, against a
decent endeavor to the contrary, his boundless pride in their son.

The boy was, Linda acknowledged, more than commonly dependable and
able. He was heavy, like his father, and so diffident that he almost
stuttered; but his mental processes flashed in quick intuitive
perceptions. Lowrie was an easy and brilliant student; and, perhaps
because of this, of his mental certainty, he was not intimate with
her as Arnaud had hoped and predicted. It seemed to Linda that he
instinctively penetrated her inner doubt and regarded it without
sympathy. In this he was her son. Lowrie was a confident and
unsympathetic critic of humanity.

Even now, so soon, there was no question of his success in the law
his fitness had elected. The springs of his being were purely
intellectual, reasoning. In him Linda saw magnified her own
coldness; and, turned on herself, she viewed it with an arbitrary
feminine resentment. He was actually courteous to her; but under all
their intercourse there was a perceptible impatience. His scorn of
other women, girls, however, was openly expressed and honest; it had
no trace of the mere affectation of pessimism natural to his age.
Arnaud, less thoughtful than she, was vastly entertained by this,
and drew Lowrie out in countless sly sallies and contradictions.

Yes, he would succeed, but, after all, what would his success be
worth--placed, that was, against Vign's radiant happiness, Bailey
Sandby's quiet eyes and the quality of his return home each evening?

Her thoughts came back to Pleydon--she had before her a New York
paper describing the ceremony of unveiling his Simon Downige at
Hesperia. There was a long learned article praising its beauty and
emphasizing Pleydon's eminence. He was, it proceeded, an anomaly in
an age of momentary experimental talents--a humanized Greek force.
He didn't belong to to-day but to yesterday and to-morrow. This gave
her an uncomfortable vision of Dodge in space, with no warm points
of contact. She, too, was suspended in that vague emptiness. Linda
had the sensation of grasping at streamers, forms, of sparkling
mist. A strange position in view of her undeniable common sense, the
solid foundations of her temperament and experience. She saw from
the paper, further, that the Downige who had commissioned the
monument was dead.




XXXVI


In the middle of the festive period that connected Christmas with
the new year Arnaud turned animatedly from his breakfast scanning of
the news. "It seems," he told her, "that a big rumpus has developed
in Hesperia over the Pleydon statue--the present Downige omnipotence,
never friendly with our old gentleman, has condemned its bronze founder.
You know what I mean. It's an insult to their pride, their money and
position, to see him perpetuated as a tramp. On the contrary he was a
very respectable individual from a prominent family and town.

"They have been moving the local heavens, ever since the monument
was placed, to have it set aside. I suppose they would have
succeeded, too, if a large amount given to the city were not
contingent on its preservation. But then they can always donate more
money in the cause of their sacred respectability."

Linda had never, she exclaimed, heard of anything more disgusting.
It was plain that Hesperia knew nothing of art. "Every one," she ran
on in the heat of her resentment, "every one, that is, who should
decide, agrees it's magnificent. They were frightfully lucky to get
it--Dodge's finest work." She wrote at once to Pleydon commanding
his presence and expressing her contempt of such depravity of
opinion. To her surprise he was undisturbed, apparently, by the
condemnation of his monument.

He even laughed at her energy of scorn. She was hurt, perceptibly
silenced, with a feeling of having been misunderstood or rather
undervalued. Her disturbance at any blame attached to the statue of
Simon Downige was extremely acute. But, she thought, if it failed to
worry Dodge why should she bother. She did, in spite of this
philosophy; Simon was tremendously important to her.

He stood for things: she had watched his evolution from the clay
sketch, and in Pleydon's mind, to the final heroic proportions; and
she had taken for granted that a grateful world would see him in her
light. A woman, she decided, had made the trouble; and she hated her
with a personal vigor. Pleydon said:

"I told you that old Simon was unbalanced; now you can see it by his
reception in a successful city. The sculptor--do you remember him, a
Beaux-Arts graduate?--admits that he had always opposed it, but that
political motives overbore his pure protest. There is a scheme now
to build a pavilion, for babies, and shut out the monument from open
view. They may do that but time will sweep away their walls. If I
had modeled Simon Downige, yes, he would go; but I modeled his
vision, his aspiration--the hope of all men for release and purity.

"Downige and the individual babies are unimportant compared to a
vision of perfection, of escape. As long as men live, if they live,
they'll reach up; and that gesture in itself is heaven. Not
accomplishment. The spirit dragging the flesh higher; but spirit
alone--empty balloons. A dream in bronze, harder even than men's
heads, more durable than their prejudices, so permanent that it will
wear out their ignorance; and in the end--always in the end--they'll
bring their wreath.

"A replica has gone to Cottarsport, from me; and you ought to see it
there, on a block of New England granite. It's in the Common, a
windswept reach with low houses and a white steeple and the sea. It
might have been there from the beginning, rising on rock against the
pale salt day. They can go to hell in Hesperia."

Still Linda's hurt persisted; she saw the unfortunate occurrence as
a direct blow at her pride. Arnaud, too, failed her; he was splendid
in his assault upon such rapacious stupidity; but it was only an
impersonal concern. His manner expressed the conviction that it
might have been expected. He was blind to her special enthusiasm,
her long intimate connection with the statue. Exasperated she almost
told him that it was more real to her than their house, than Vign
and Lowrie, than he. She was stopped, fortunately, by the perception
that, amazingly, the statue was more actual than Dodge Pleydon. It
touched the center of her life more nearly.

Why, she didn't know.

If her mental confusion increased by as much as a feeling, Linda
thought, she would be close to madness. It was unbearable at
practically forty.

Lowrie said, at the worst possible moment, that he found the entire
episode ridiculously overemphasized. A statue more or less was of
small importance. If the Downige family were upset why didn't they
employ an able lawyer to dispose of it? There were many ways for
such a proceeding--

"I have no desire to hear them," she interrupted. "You seem to know
a tremendous lot, but what good it will do you in the end who can
say! And, with all your cleverness, you haven't an ounce of
appreciation for art. Besides, I hate to see any one as young as you
so sure of himself. Often I suspect you are patronizing your father
and me. It's not pretty nor polite."

Lowrie was obviously embarrassed by her attack, and managed the
abrupt semblance of an apology. Arnaud, who had put down his eternal
book, said nothing until the boy had vanished. "Wasn't that rather
sharp?" he asked mildly. "Perhaps," she replied in a tone without
warmth or regret. "Somehow I am never comfortable with Lowrie."

"You are too much alike," he shrewdly observed. "It is laughable at
times. Did you expect your children to be fountains of sentiment?
And, look here--if I can get along in comfort with you for life you
in particular ought to put up peacefully with Lowrie. He is a damned
sight more human than, at bottom, you are; a woman of alabaster."

"I loathe quarrels," she admitted; "they are so vulgar. You know
that they are not like me and just said so. Oh, Arnaud, why does
life get harder instead of easier?"

He put his book aside completely and gazed at her in patient
thought. "Linda," he said finally, "I have never heard anything that
stirred me so much; not what you said, my dear, but the recognition
in your voice." A wistfulness of love for her enveloped him; an
ineffable desire as vain as the passion she struggled to give him in
return. She smiled in an unhappiness of apology.

"Perhaps--" he stopped, waiting any assurance whatever, his face
eager like a dusty lamp in which the light had been turned sharply
up. She was unable to stir, to move her gaze from his hopeful eyes,
to mitigate by a breath her slender white aloofness. A smile
different from hers, tender with remission, lingered in his fading
irradiation. The dusk was gathering, adding its melancholy to his
age--sixty-five now. Why that was an old man! Her sympathy vanished
in her shrinking from the twilight that was, as well, slowly,
inevitably, deepening about her.

It was laughable that, as she approached an age whose only resource
was tranquillity, she grew more restless. Her present vague
agitation belonged ridiculously to youth. The philosophy of the
evident that had supported her so firmly was breaking at the most
inopportune time. And it was, she told herself, too late for
anything new; the years for that had been spent insensibly with
Arnaud. Linda was very angry with herself, for, in all her shifting
state of mind, she preserved an inner necessity for the quality of
exactness expressed in her clothes. There were literally no
neglected spaces in her conscious living.

Her thoughts finally centered about the statue in Hesperia--it
presented an actual mark for her fleeting resentments. She wondered
why it so largely occupied her thoughts, moved her so personally.
She watched the papers for the scattered reports of the progress of
the contention it had roused, some ill-natured, others supposedly
humorous, and nearly all uninformed. She became, Arnaud said, the
champion of the esthetic against Dagon. He elaborated this picture
until she was forced to smile against her inclination, her profound
seriousness. Linda had the feeling that she, too, was on the
pedestal that held the bronze effigy of Simon Downige challenging
the fog that obscured men. Its fate was hers. She didn't pretend to
explain how.

As time passed it seemed to her that it took her longer and longer
to dress in the morning, while her preparations couldn't be simpler;
her habit of deliberation had become nearly a vice, the precision of
her ruffles, her hair, a tyranny. She never quite lost the
satisfaction of her mirror's faultless reflection; and stopped, now,
for a moment's calm interrogation of the being--hardly more silvery
cool than the reality--before her.

Arnaud was at the table, and the gaze with which he met her was
troubled. The morning paper, she saw, was, against custom, at her
place, and she picked it up with an instinctive sense of calamity.
The blackly printed sensational headline that immediately
established her fear sank vivid and entire into her brain: an
anonymous inflamed mob in Hesperia had pulled down and destroyed
Pleydon's statue. Their act was described as a tribute to the
liberality of the present Downige family in the light of its
objection to the monument.

As if in the development of her feeling Linda had a sensation of
crashing with a sickening violence from a pedestal to the ground.
Actually, it seemed, the catastrophe had happened to her. She heard,
with a sense of inutility, Arnaud denouncing the outrage; he had a
pencil in his hand for the composition of a telegram to Dodge. He
paid--but perhaps only naturally--no attention to her, suffering
dully from her fall. She shuddered before the recreated lawless
approaching voice of the mob; the naked ugly violence froze her with
terror; she felt the gross hurried hands winding ropes about her,
the rending brutality of force--

She sat and automatically took a small carved glass of orange-juice
from a bed of ice, and her chilled fingers recalled a dim image of
her mother. Arnaud was speaking, "I'm afraid this will cut through
Pleydon's security, it was such a wanton destruction of his unique
power. You see, he worked lovingly over the cast with little files
and countless finite improvements. The mold, I think, was broken.
What a piece of luck the thing's at Cottarsport." He paused,
obviously expecting her to comment; but suddenly phrases failed her.

In place of herself she should be considering Dodge; her sympathy
even for him was submerged in her own extraordinary injury. However,
she recovered from her first gasping shock, and made an utterly
commonplace remark. Never had her sense of isolation been stronger.
"I must admit," her husband continued, "that I looked for some small
display of concern. I give you my word there are moments when I
think Pleydon himself cut you out of stone. He isn't great enough
for that, though; in the way of perfection you successfully gild the
lily. A thing held to be impossible."

Linda told him with amazing inanity that his opinion of her was
unreliable; and, contented, he lightly pursued his admiration of
what he called her boreal charm. At intervals she responded
appropriately and proceeded with breakfast. She had entered a region
of dispassionate consideration, her characteristic detachment, she
thought, regained. She mentally, calmly, reconstructed the motives
and events that had led to the destruction of the statue; they, at
least, were evident to her. She reaffirmed silently her conviction
that it had resulted from the stupidity, the vanity, of a woman. The
limitations of men, fully as narrow, operated in other directions.

Then, with an incredulous surprise, she was aware that the clear
space of her reason was filling with anger. Never before had such a
flood of emotion possessed her; and she surrendered herself, in an
enormous relief, to the novelty of its obliterating tide. It
deepened immeasurably, sweeping her far from the security of old
positions of indifference and critical self-possession. Linda became
enraged at a world that had concentrated all its degraded vulgarity
in one unspeakable act.




XXXVII


It was fall, October, and the day was a space of pale gold foliage
wreathed in blue garlands of mist. The gardener was busy with a
wooden rake and wheelbarrow in which he carted away dead leaves for
burning. The fire was back of the low fence, in the rear, and Linda,
at the dining-room window, could hear the fierce small crackle of
flames; the drifting pungent smoke was like a faint breath of
ammonia. Arnaud had left for the day, Lowrie was at the university,
while Vign and her husband--moving toward their ultimate colonial
threshold--had taken a small house. She was alone.

As usual.

However, in her present state her solitude had lost its
inevitability; she failed to see why it must continue until the end
of time. She could no longer discover a sufficient reason for her
limitless endurance, her placid acceptance of all that chance, or
any inconsiderable person, happened to dictate. She wasn't like that
in the least. Her temper had solidified as though it were ice,
taking everywhere the form in which it was held. It was a reality.
She determined, as well, that her feeling should not melt back into
the familiar acceptance of a routine that had led her blindfolded
across such an extent of life.

She understood now, in a large part, her disturbance at the
indignity to Dodge's monument--he had assured her that she was its
inspiration; except for her it would never have been realized, he
would have kept on modeling those Newport fountains, continued with
the Susanna Nodas, spending himself ignobly. He loved her, and that
love had resulted in a statue the world of art, of taste, honored.
But it was she all the while they were approving, discussing,
writing about, Linda Condon.

She had always been that, Pleydon had informed her, never Linda
Hallet--in spite of Arnaud and their children. It sounded like
nonsense; but, at the bottom, it was truth. Of course it couldn't be
explained, for example, to the man who had every right, every
evidence, to consider himself her husband. Nothing was susceptible
of explanation. Absolutely nothing! There was the earth, which
appeared to be everything, the houses you entered, the streets you
passed over, the people among whom you lived, yet that wasn't all.
Heavens, no! It was quite unimportant compared with--with other
facts latent in the mind and blood.

Dodge Pleydon's love was one of those other facts; it was simply
impossible to deny its existence, its power. Dodge had been totally
changed by it, born over again. But she, who had been the source,
had had no good from it, nothing except the thrill that had always
been hers. No one knew of it, counted it as her achievement, paid
the slightest attention to her. Arnaud smiled indulgently, Lowrie
scoffed. When the statue had been thrown down they thought of it
merely as a deplorable part of the day's news. They hadn't seen that
she, Linda Condon, was unspeakably insulted.

She doubted if she could bring them to comprehend what had happened--to
her. Or if Arnaud understood, if she made it plain, what good would be
done! That wouldn't save her, put her back again on the pedestal. The
latter was necessary. Linda recognized that a great deal of her feeling
was based on pride; but it was a pride entirely justified. She had no
intention of submitting to the coarse hands and ropes of public affront.
Throughout her life she had rebelled against any profanation of her
person, she had hated to be touched.

Every instinct, she found, every delicate self-opinion, was bound
into Pleydon's success; the latter had kept her alive. Without it
existence would have been intolerable. It was unbearable now.

She discharged the small daily duties of her efficient housekeeping
with a contemptuous exactness; for years she had accomplished, in
herself, nothing more. But at last a break had come. Linda
recognized this without any knowledge of what reparation it would
find. She wasn't concerned with that, a small detail. It would be
apparent. Arnaud was silent through dinner; tired, it seemed. She
saw him as if at the distant end of a dull corridor--as she looked
back. There was no change in her liking for him. Mechanically she
noticed the disorder of his scant hair and rumpled sleeves.

Not until, waking sharply, in the middle of the night, did she have
a glimpse of a possible course--she might live with Dodge and
perfectly express both her retaliation and her accomplishment. In
that way she would reestablish herself beside him and place their
vision in bronze on an elevation beyond the spite of the envious and
the blind.

It was so directly simple that she was surprised it hadn't occurred
to her before. The possibility had always been a part, unsuspected
and valuable, of her special being; the largely condemned faults of
her character and experience had at least brought her this--a not
inconsiderable freedom in a world everywhere barred by the necessity
for upholding a hypocritical show of superiority to honest desire.
The detachment that deprived her of life's conventional joys
released her from its common obligations. That conviction, however,
was too intimately connected with all her inheritance to bring her
any conscious dramatic sense of rebellion or high feeling of
justified indignation.

Sleep had deserted her, and she waited for the dawn in the windows
that would bring her escape. It was very slow coming; the blackness
took on a grayer tone, like ink with added faint infusions of water.
Slowly the blackness dissolved and she heard the stir of the
sparrows in the ivy. There was the passing rumble of an early
electric car on the paved aged street, the blurred hurried shuffle
of a workman's clumsy shoes. The brightening morning was cool with a
premonitory touch of frost; at the window she saw a vanishing silver
sheen on the lawn and board fence.

A sensation of youth pervaded her; and while, perhaps, it was out of
keeping with her years, she had still her vitality unspent; she was
without a trace of the momentary frost on the grass. She was
tranquil, leisurely; her heart evenly sent its life through her
unflushed body. Piece by piece she put on her web-like garments,
black and white; brushing the heavy stream of her hair and tying the
inevitable sash about her supple waist.

Below she met Arnaud with an unpleasant shock--she hadn't given him
a thought. Her feeling now was hardly more than annoyance at her
forgetfulness. He would be terribly distressed at her going, and she
was genuinely sorry for this, poised at the edge of an explanation
of her purpose. Arnaud was putting butter and salt into his egg-cup,
after that he would grind the pepper from a French mill--pure spices
were a precision of his--and she waited until the operation was
completed.

Then it occurred to her that all she could hope to accomplish by
admitting her intention was the ruin of his last hour alone with
her. He was happier, gayer, than usual. But his age was evident in
his voice, his gestures. Linda marveled at her coldness, her
ruthless disregard of Arnaud's claim on her, of his affection as
deep as Pleydon's, perhaps no less fine but not so imperative. Yet
Arnaud had had over twenty years of her life, the best; and she had
never deceived him about the quality of her gift. It was right, now,
for Dodge to have the remainder. But whether it were right or wrong,
there was no failure of her determination to go to Pleydon in the
vindication of her existence.

She delayed speaking to Arnaud until, suddenly, breakfast was over.
He seldom went to the law office where he had been a partner, but
stayed about the lower floor of his house, in the library or
directing small outside undertakings. Either that or he left, late,
for the Historical Society, with which his connection and interest
were uninterrupted. As Linda passed him in the hall he was fumbling
in the green bag that accompanied all his journeyings into the city;
and she gathered that he intended to make one of his occasional
sallies. She proceeded above, to her room, where with steady hands
she pinned on her hat. It would be impossible to take any additional
clothes, and she'd have to content herself with something ready-made
until she could order others in the establishment of her living with
Dodge. Her close-fitting jacket, gloves, and a short cape of sables
were collected; she gazed finally, thoughtfully, about the room, and
then, with a subdued whisper of skirts, descended the stair. Arnaud
was in the library, bending over the table that bore his accumulation
of papers and serious journals. A lingering impulse to speak was
overborne by the memory of what, lately, she had endured--she saw him
at the dusty end of that long corridor through which she had
monotonously journeyed, denied of her one triumph, lost in
inconsequential shadows--and she continued firmly to the door which
closed behind her with a normal mute smoothness, an inanimate
silence.




XXXVIII


The maid who admitted Linda to Pleydon's apartment, first replying,
"Yes, Mrs. Hallet. No, Mrs. Hallet," to her questions, continued in
fuller sentences expressing a triumph of sympathy over mere
correctness. She lingered at the door of the informal drawing-room,
imparting the information that Mr. Pleydon had become very irregular
indeed about his meals, and that his return for lunch was uncertain.
Something, however, would be prepared for her. Linda acknowledged
this briefly. Often, with Mr. Pleydon at home, he wouldn't so much
as look at his dinner. Times, too, it seemed as though he had been
in the studio all night. He went out but seldom now, and rarely
remained away for more than an hour or two. Linda heard this without
an indication of responsive interest, and the servant, returning
abruptly from the excursion into humanity, disappeared.

She was glad to have this opportunity alone to accustom herself to a
novel position. But she was once more annoyingly calm. Annoyingly,
she reiterated; the fervor of her anger, which at the same time had
been bitterly cold, had lessened. She was practically normal. She
regarded this, the loss of her unprecedented emotion, in the light
of a fraud on her sanguine decision. Linda had counted on its
support, its generous irresistible tide, to carry her through the
remainder of her life with the exhilaration she had so largely
missed.

Here in Dodge's room she was as placid, almost, as though she were
in the library at home. That customary term took its place in her
thoughts before she recognized that, with her, it had shifted.
However, it was unimportant--home had never been a magical word to
her; it belonged in the vast category which, of such universal
weight, left her unstirred. She resembled those Eastern people
restlessly and perpetually moving across sandy deserts as they
exhausted, one after another, widely separated scanty oases.

She studied the objects around her with the pleased recognition that
they were unique, valuable, and in faultless taste. Then she fell to
wondering at the difference had Dodge been poor: she would have come
to him, Linda knew, just the same. But, she admitted frankly, it
would have been uncomfortable. Perhaps that--actual poverty, actual
deprivation--was what her character needed. A popular sentiment
upheld such a view; she decided it was without foundation. There was
no reason why beauty, finely appropriate surroundings, should damage
the spirit.

Her mind turned to an examination of her desertion of Arnaud, but
she could find no trace of conventional regret; of what, she felt,
her sensation ought to be. The instinctive revolt from oblivion was
an infinitely stronger reality than any allegiance to abstract duty.
She was consumed by the passionate need to preserve the integrity of
being herself. The word selfish occurred to her but to be met
unabashed by the query, why not? Selfishness was a reproach applied
by those who failed to get what they wanted to all who succeeded.
Linda wasn't afraid of public opinion, censure; she didn't shrink
even from the injury to her husband. What Dodge would think,
however, was hidden from her.

She had no doubt of his complete acceptance of all she offered;
ordinary obligations to society bound him as little as they held
her. It would be enough that she wanted to come to him.

She would bother him, change his habit of living, very little. Long
years of loneliness had taught her to be self-sufficient. Linda
would be too wise to insist on distasteful regularity in the
interest of a comparatively unimportant well-being. In short, she
wouldn't bother him. That must be made clear at once.

More than anything else he would be inexpressibly delighted to have
her with him, to find--at last--his love. Little intimacies of satin
mules, glimpses, charming to an artist! He'd be faultless, too, in
the relationships where Arnaud as well had never for a moment
deviated from beautiful consideration. Two remarkable men. While her
deficiency in humor was admitted, she saw a glimmer of the absurd in
her attitude and present situation. The combination, at least, was
uncommon. There had been no change in her feeling for either Arnaud
or Dodge, their places in her being were undisturbed; she liked her
husband no less, Dodge no better.

Lunch was announced, a small ceremony of covered silver dishes,
heavy crystal, Nankin china, and flowers. The linen, which was old,
bore a monogram unfamiliar to her--that of Dodge's mother, probably.
When she had finished, but was still lingering at the narrow
refectory table, she heard Pleydon enter the hall and the
explanatory voice of the servant. An unexpected embarrassment
pervaded her, but she overcame it by the realization that there was
no need for an immediate announcement of her purpose. Dodge would
naturally suppose that she was in New York shopping.

He did, to her intense relief, with a moving pleasure that she had
lunched with him. "It's seldom," he went on, "that you are so
sensible. I hope you haven't any plans or concerts to drag you away
immediately. I owe you a million strawberries; but, aside from that,
I'd like you to stay as long as possible."

"Very well," she replied quietly; "I will."

She hadn't seen him since the statue at Hesperia had been destroyed,
and she tried faintly to tell him how much that outrage had hurt
her. It had injured him too, she realized; just as Arnaud predicted.
He showed his age more gauntly, more absolutely, than the other. His
skin was dry as though the vitality of his countenance had been
burned out by the flame visible in his eyes.

"The drunken fools!" he exclaimed of the mob that had torn Simon
Downige from his eminence; "they came by way of all the saloons in
the city. Free drinks! That is the disturbing thing about what the
optimistic call civilization--the fact that it is always at the
mercy of the ignorant and the brutal. There is no security; none,
that is, except in the individual spirit. And they, mostly, are the
victims of a singular insane resentment--Savonarola and there were
greater.

"But you mustn't think, you mustn't suppose, that I mean it's
hopeless. How could I? Who has had more from living? Love and
complete self-expression. That exhausts every possibility. Three
words. Remember Cottarsport. But the love--ah," he smiled, but not
directly at her. Linda was at once reassured and disturbed; and she
rose, proceeding into the drawing-room.

There she sat gracefully composed and with still hands; she never
embroidered or employed her leisure with trivial useful tasks.
Pleydon was extended on a chair, his fingers caught beyond his head
and his long legs thrust out and crossed at the ankles. His gaze was
fixed on her unwaveringly; and yet, when she tried to meet its
focus, it went behind her as though it pierced the solidity of her
body and the walls in the contemplation of a far-removed shining
image. Her disturbance grew to the inclusion of a degree of
fretfulness at his unbroken silence, his apparent absorption in
whatever his meditation projected or found.




XXXIX


Now, she decided, was the moment for her revelation; or rather, it
couldn't very well be further deferred, for it promised to be
halting. But, with her lips forming the words, he abruptly spoke:

"I have lived so long with your spirit, it has become so familiar--I
mean the ability of completely making you out of my heart--that when
you are here the difference isn't staggering. You see, you are never
away. I have that ability; it came out of the other wreck. But you
know about it--from years back. Time has only managed a greater
power. Lately, and I have nothing to do with it, I have been seeing
you again as a girl; as young as at Markue's party; younger. Not
more than ten. I don't mean that there is anything--isn't the
present fashionable word subliminal?--esoteric. God forbid. You'll
remember my hatred of that brutal deception.

"No, it's only a part of my ability to create the shape of feeling,
of Simon's hope. I see things as realities capable of exact
statement; and, naturally, more than all the rest, you come to me
that way. But as a child--who knows why?" he relinquished the answer
with an opened palm. "And young like that, perhaps ten, I love you
more sharply, more unutterably, than at any other age. What is it I
love? Not your adorable plastic body, not that. It isn't necessary
to understand.

"You have, as a child, a quality of blinding loveliness in a world I
absolutely distrust. An Elysian flower. Is it possible, do you
suppose, to worship an abstract idea? It's not important to insist
on my sanity."

The question of that had occurred independently to Linda; his
hurried voice and lost gaze filled her with apprehension. A dull
reddish patch, she saw, burned in either thin cheek; and she told
herself that the fever had revived in him. Pleydon continued:

"Yet it is a timeless vision, because you never get old. I see
Hallet failing year by year, and your children, only yesterday dabs
of soft flesh, grow up and pass through college and marry. I hear
myself in the studio with an old man's cough; the chisels slip under
the mall and I can't move the clay about without help--all fading,
decaying, but you. Candles burn out, hundreds of them, while your
whiteness, your flame--

"Strange, too, how you light a world, a sky, eternity. A word we
have no business with; a high-sounding word for a penny purpose.
Look, we try to keep alive because it's necessary to life, to
nature; and the effort, the struggle, breeds the dream. You can
understand that. Men who ought to know say that love is nothing
more." He rose and stood over her, towering and portentous against
the curtained light. "I don't pretend to guess. I'm a creative
artist--Simon Downige at Cottarsport--I have you. If it's God so
much the better."

What principally swept over Linda was the knowledge that his
possession of her must keep them always apart. The reality, all
realities, were veils to Pleydon. Her momentary vision of things
beyond brick and earth was magnified in him until everything else
was obliterated. The fever! Oh, yes, that and his passion for work
merged in his passion for her. She could bring him nothing; and she
had a curious picture of two Lindas visible to him here--the Linda
that was actual and the other, the child. And of them it was the
latter he cared most for, recreated out of his desire to defraud his
loneliness, to repay the damage to his spirit realized in bronze.

She was, suddenly, too weary to stir or lift her hand; a depression
as absolute as her flare of rage enveloped her. Now the reason for
her coming seemed inexplicable, as if, for the while, her mind had
failed. She repressed a shudder at the thought of being, through the
long nights of his restlessness and wandering voice, alone with
Pleydon. She hadn't, Linda discovered, any of the transmuting
feeling for him which alone made surrender possible. She calculated
mentally how long it would take her to reach the station, what train
would be available.

Linda accepted dumbly the fatality to her own hope; for a few hours
she had thought it possible to break out of the prison of
circumstance, to walk free from all hindrance; but it had been vain.
She gazed at Dodge Pleydon intensely--a comprehensive view of the
man she had so nearly married, and who, more than any other force,
dominated her being. It was already too late for anything but
memory; she saw--filled with pity for them both--hardly more than a
strange old man with deadened hair and a yellow parchment-like skin.
His suit of loose gray flannel gave her a feeling that it had been
borrowed from some one she lovingly knew. The gesture of his hand,
too, had been copied from a brilliant personage with a consuming
impatience at all impotence.

"Remember me to Arnaud," he said, holding her gloves and the short
fur cape. "Wait!" he cried sharply, turning to the bookcase against
the wall. Pleydon fumbled in a box of lacquered gilt with a silk
cord and produced a glove once white but now brown and fragile with
age. "You never missed it," he proceeded in a gleeful triumph; "but
then you had so many pairs. Once I sent you nine dozen together from
Grenoble. They were nothing, but this you had worn. For a long while
it kept the shape of your hand."

"Dodge," she tried without success to steady her voice, "it stayed
with you anyhow, my--my hand."

"But yes," he answered impatiently. He returned the glove to its
box, carefully tying the tasselled cord. Then, after clumsily
helping her with the cape, he accompanied her to the elevator.
"There were other things," he told her. "Did you see the letters
about the Hesperia affair? Heaps of them. Rodin.... But what can you
expect in a world where there is no safety--" The stopping cage cut
off his remark. She held out the hand that was less real to him than
the dream.

"Good-by, Dodge."

"Yes, Linda. But watch that door, your skirt might easily be caught
in it." He fussed over her safety until, abruptly, he seemed to rise
in space, shut out from her by the limitations of her faith.

The evening overshadowed her in the train, as though she were
whirling in the swiftest passage possible, through an indeterminate
grayness, from day to night. The latter descended on her as she
reached the steps of her home. It was still that; now it would
continue to be until death. Nothing could ever again offer her
change, release, vindication; nothing, that was, which might give
her, for a day, what even her mother had plentifully experienced--the
igniting exultation of the body.

It was inevitable, she thought, for Arnaud to be in the library. He
rose unsteadily as she stood in the doorway. "Linda," he articulated
with difficulty. A book had rested open on the table beside him and,
closing it, he put it back in its place. His arm trembled so that it
took a painfully long while. Then he moved forward, still confused.

"What a confounded time you were gone. I had the most idiotic fancy.
You see, it was so unlike you; none more exact in habit. All day. I
didn't get to the Historical Society, it seemed so devilish far off.
I'd never blame you for leaving an old man without any gumption." He
must never think that again, she replied. Wasn't she, too, middle-aged?




XL


Linda admitted, definitely, the loss of her youth; and yet a
stubborn inner conviction remained that she was unchanged. In this
she had for support her appearance; practically she was as freshly
and gracefully pale as the girl who had married Arnaud Hallet. Even
Vign, with indelible traces of her motherhood, had faint lines
absent from Linda's flawless countenance. Her children, and Arnaud,
were immensely proud of her beauty; it had become a part--in the
form of her ridiculously young air--of the family conversational
resources. She was increasingly aware of its supreme significance to
her.

One of her few certainties had been the discovery that, while small
truths might be had from others, all that intimately and deeply
concerned her was beyond questioning and advice. The importance of
her attractiveness, for example, which seemed the base of her entire
being, was completely out of accord with the accepted standard of
values for middle-aged women. Other things, called moral and spiritual,
she inferred, should take up her days and thoughts. There was a
course of discipline--exactly like exercises in the morning--for the
preparation of the willingness to die.

But such an attitude was eternally beyond her; she repudiated it
with a revolt stringing every nerve indignantly tense. She had had,
on the whole, singularly little from life but her fine body; it had
always been the temple and altar of her service, and no mere wordy
reassurance could now repay her for its swift or gradual
destruction. The latter, except for accident, would be her fate; she
was remarkably sound. In her social adventures, the balls to which,
without Arnaud, she occasionally went, she was morbid in her
sensitive dread of discovering, through a waning admiration, that
she was faded.

It would be impossible to spend more care on her person than she had
in the past; but that was unrelenting. Linda was inexorable in her
demands on the establishments that made her suits and dresses. The
slightest imperfection of fit exasperated her; and she regarded the
endless change of fashions with contempt. This same shifting, she
observed, occurred not only in women's clothes but in the women
themselves.

Linda remembered her mother, eternal in gaiety, but very obviously
different from her in states of mind affecting her appearance. She
was unable to define the change; but it was unmistakable--Stella
Condon seemed a little old-fashioned. When now, to Lowrie's wife,
Linda was unmistakably out-of-date. Lowrie, fast accomplishing all
that had been predicted for him, had married a girl incomprehensible
to his mother. Observing this later feminine development she had the
baffled feeling of inspecting a creature of a new order.

To Linda, Jean Tynedale, now a Hallet, seemed harder than ever her
own famous coldness had succeeded in being. This came mostly from
Jean's imposing education; there had been, in addition to the
politest of finishing schools, college--a woman's concern, Bryn
Mawr--and then post-graduate honors in a noteworthy university. She
was entirely addressed, in a concrete way, to the abstract problems
of social progress and hygiene; and, under thirty, the animating
spirit, as well as financial support, of an incredible number of
Settlements and allied undertakings. She spoke crisply before civic
and other clubs; even, in the interest of suffrage, addressing
nondescript audiences from a box on the street.

But it was her unperturbed dissection of the motives of sex, the
denouncement of a criminal mysterious ignorance, that most daunted
Linda. She listened to Jean with a series of distinct shocks to her
sense of propriety. What she had agreed to consider a nameless
attribute of women, or, if anything more exact, the power of their
charm over men, the other defined in unequivocal scientific terms.
She understood every impulse veiled for Linda in a reticence
absolutely needful to its appeal.

This, of course, the elder distrusted; just as she had no approval
for Jean's public activities. Linda didn't like public women; her
every instinct cried for a fine seclusion, fine in the meaning of an
appropriate setting for feminine distinction, the magic of dress and
cut roses. Her private inelegant word for Lowrie's wife was "bold;"
indeed, describing to herself the younger woman's patronage of her
bearing, she descended to her mother's colloquialism "brass."

She thought this sitting at a dinner-table which held Vign and her
husband and Lowrie and Jean Hallet. Arnaud, drawing life from the
vitality of an atmosphere charged with youth, was unflagging in
splendid spirits and his valorous wit. Jean would never inspire the
affection Arnaud had given her; nor the passion that, in Pleydon,
had burned unfed even by hope.

Her thoughts slipped away from the present to the sculptor. Three
years had vanished since she had gone with an intention of finality
to his apartment, and in that time he had neither been in their
house nor written. Linda had expected this; she was without the
desire to see or hear from him. Dodge Pleydon was finished for her;
as a man, a potentiality, he had departed from her life. He was a
piece with her memories, the triumphs of her young days. Without an
actual knowledge of the moment of its accomplishment she had passed
over the border of that land, leaving it complete and fair and
radiant for her lingering view. Whether or not she had been happy
was now of no importance; the magic of its light showed only a
garden and a girl in white with a black bang against her blue eyes.

The bang, the blueness of gaze, were still hers; but, only this
morning, brush in hand, the former had offered less resistance in
its arrangement; it was thinner, and the color perceptibly not so
dense. At this, with a chill edge of fear, she had determined to go
at once to her hairdresser; no one, neither Arnaud, who loved its
luster, nor an unsympathetic bold scrutiny, a scrutiny of brass,
should see that she was getting gray. There was no fault about her
figure; she had that for her satisfaction; she was more graceful
than Jean's square thinness, more slim than Vign's maternal
presence.

Linda had the feeling that she was engaged in a struggle with time,
a ruthless antagonist whom she viewed with a personal enmity. Time
must, would, of course, triumph in the end; but there would be no
sign of her surrender in the meanwhile; she wouldn't bend an inch,
relinquish by a fraction the pride and delicacy of her person. The
skilful dyeing of her hair to its old absolute blackness, as natural
and becoming in appearance as ever, was a symbol of her
determination to cheat an intolerable tyranny.

The process, dismaying her soul, she bore with a rigid fortitude; as
she endured the coldness of a morning bath from which, often, she
was slow to react. This, to her, was widely different from the
futile efforts of her mother, those women of the past, to preserve
for practical ends their flushes of youth and exhilaration. She felt
obscurely that she was serving a deeper reality created by the hands
of Pleydon, Arnaud's faith and pure pleasure, all that countless men
had seen in her for admiration, solace and power.

But it was inevitable, she told herself bitterly, that she should
hear the first intimation of her decline from Jean Hallet. Rather,
she overheard it, the discussion of her, from the loiterers at
breakfast as she moved about the communicating library. Jean's
emphatic slightly rough-textured voice arrested her in the
arrangement of a bowl of zinnias:

"You can't say just where she has failed, but it's evident. Perhaps
a general dryness. Perfectly natural. Thoroughly silly to fight
against it--" Vign interrupted her. "I think mother's wonderful. I
can't remember any other woman nearly her age who looks so
enchanting in the evening."

Linda quietly left the flowers as they were and went up to the room
that had been her father's. It was now used as a spare bedroom; and
she had turned into it, in place of her own chamber, instinctively,
without reason. She had kept it exactly as it had been when Amelia
Lowrie first conducted her there, as it was when her father, a boy,
slept under the white canopy.

Linda advanced to the mirror; and, her hands so tightly clenched
that the finger-nails dug into the palms, forced herself to gaze
steadily at the wavering reflection. It seemed to her that there had
been a malicious magic in Jean's detraction; for immediately, as
though the harm had been wrought by the girl's voice, she saw that
her clear freshness had gone. Her face had a wax-like quality, the
violet shadows under her eyes were brown. Who had once called her a
gardenia? Now she was wilting--how many gardenias had she seen
droop, turn brown. Her heart beat with a disturbing echo in her
ears, and, with a slight gasp that resembled a sob, she sank on one
of the uncomfortable painted chairs.

What, above every other sensation, oppressed her was a feeling of
terrific loneliness--the familiar isolation magnified until it was
past bearing. Yet, there was Arnaud, infallible in his tender
comprehension, she ought to go to him at once and find support. But
it was impossible; all that he could give her was, to her special
necessity, useless. She had never been able to establish herself in
his sympathy; the reason for that lay in the fact that she could
bring nothing similar in return.

The room--except for the timed clangor of the electric cars, like
the measure of lost minutes--was quiet. The photograph of Bartram
Hallet in cricketing clothes had faded until it was almost
indistinguishable. Soon the faint figure would disappear entirely,
as though the picture were amenable to the relentless principle
operating in her.

The peace about her finally lessened her acute suffering, stilled
her heart. She told herself with a show of vigor that she was a
coward, a charge that roused an unexpected activity of denial. She
discovered that cowardice was intolerable to her. What had happened,
too, was so far out of her hands that a trace of philosophical
acceptance, recognition, came to her support. The loveliest woman
alive must do the same, meet in a looking-glass--that eternal
accompanying sibyl--her disaster. She rose, her lips firmly set,
composed and pale, and returned to the neglected flowers in the
library.

Vign entered and put an affectionate arm about her shoulders,
repeating--unconscious that Linda had heard the discussion which had
given it being--the conviction that her mother was wonderful,
specially in the black dinner dress with the girdle of jet. With no
facility of expression she gave her daughter's arm a quick light
pressure.

From then she watched the slow progress of age with a new
realization, but an unabated distaste and, wherever it was possible,
a determined artifice. Arnaud had failed swiftly in the past months;
and, while she was inspecting the impaired supports of an arbor in
the garden, he came to her with an unopened telegram. "I abhor these
things," he declared fretfully; "they are so sudden. Why don't
people write decent letters any more! It's like the telephone....
Good manners have been ruined."

She tore open the envelope, read the brief line within, and, a hand
suddenly put out to the arbor, sank on its bench. There had been
rain, but a late sun was again pouring over the sparkling grass, and
robins were singing with a lyrical clearness. "What is it?" Arnaud
demanded anxiously, tremulous in the unsparing sunlight. She
replied:

"Dodge died this morning."

His concern was as much for her as for Pleydon's death. "I'm sorry,
Linda," his hand was on her shoulder. "It is a shock to you. A fine
man, a genius--none stronger in our day. When you were young and for
so long after.... I was lucky, Linda, to get you; have you all this
while. Nothing in Pleydon's life, not even his success, could have
made up for your loss."

She wondered dully if Dodge had missed her, if Arnaud Hallet had
ever had her in his possession. The robins filled the immaculate air
with song. It was impossible that Dodge, who was so imperious in his
certainty that he would never say good-by to her, was dead.




XLI


There was a revival of public interest in the destruction of
Pleydon's statue at Hesperia, the papers again printed accounts
colored by a variety of attitudes unembarrassed by fact; and the
serious journals united in a dignity of eminently safe praise. At
first Linda made an effort to preserve these; but soon their
similarity, her inability to find, among sonorous periods, any trace
of Dodge's spirit--in reality she knew so blindingly much more than
the most penetrating critical intellect--caused her to leave the
reviews unread. No one else living had understood Pleydon; and when
descriptions of his life spoke of the austerity in his later years,
his fanatical aversion to women, Linda thought of the brittle glove
in the gilt-lacquer box.

Her own emotion, it seemed to her, was the most confused of all the
unintelligible pressures that had converted her life into an enigma.
She had a distinct sense of overwhelming loss--of something, Linda
was obliged to add, she had never owned. However, she realized that
during Pleydon's life she had dimly expected a happy accident of
explanation; until almost the last, yes--after she had returned from
that ultimate journey, she had been conscious of the presence of
hope. The hope had been for herself, created out of her constant
baffled dissatisfaction.

But now the man in whom solely she had been expressed, the only
possible reason for her obstinate pride, had left her in a world
that, but for Arnaud's fondness, looked on her without remark. The
loss of her distinction had been finally evident at balls, in the
dresses in which Vign had thought her so wonderful, and she dropped
them. Here, she repeated, was when affection, generously radiated
through life, should have reflected over her a tranquil and
contented joy. She had never given it, and she was without the
ability to receive. She admitted to herself, with a little annoyed
laugh, that her old desire for inviolable charm, for the integrity
of a memorable slimness, was unimpaired. It was, she thought, too
ridiculously inappropriate for words.

Yet it had changed slightly into the recognition that what so often
had been called her beauty was all she now had for sustenance, all
she had ever had. Her mind returned continually to Pleydon, and--
deep in the mystery of his passion--she was suddenly invaded by an
insistent desire to see the monument at Cottarsport. She spoke to
Arnaud at once about this; and alone, through his delicacy of
perception, Linda went to Boston the following day.

The further ride to Cottarsport followed the sea--a brilliant serene
blue, fretted on the landward side by innumerable bare promontories,
hideous towns and factories, but bowed in a far unbroken arc at the
immaculate horizon. She left the train for a hilly cluster of
houses, gray and low like the rock everywhere apparent, dropping to
a harbor that bore a company of motionless boats with half-spread
drying sails.

The day was at noon, and the sky, blue like the sea, held, still as
the anchored schooners, faint, chalky symmetrical clouds. Linda
found the Common without guidance; and at once saw, on its immovable
base of rugged granite, the bronze statue of Simon Downige. It stood
well in advance of what, evidently, was the court-house, the white
steeple Dodge had described. She found a bench by a path in the thin
grass; and there, her gloved hands folded, at rest in her lap, her
gaze and longing were lifted to the fixed aspiration.

From where she sat the seated figure was projected against the sky;
Simon's face was turned toward the west; the West that, for him, was
the future, but which for Linda represented all the past. This
conviction flooded her with unutterable sadness. A sense of failure
weighed on her, no less heavy for the fact that it was perpetually
vague. Her thoughts gathered about Dodge himself; and she recalled
the curious vividness of his vision of her as a child, perhaps ten.
She, too, tried to remember that time and age. It was almost in her
grasp, but her realization was spoiled by absurd mental fragments--
the familiar illusion of a leopard and a rider with bright hair, a
forest with the ascending voices of angels, and an ominous squat
figure with a slowly nodding plumed head.

The vista of a hotel returned, a fleet recollection of marble
columns and a wide red carpet ... the white gleam and carbolized
smell of a drug-store ... a thick magazine in a brown cover. These,
changed into emotions of mingled joy and pain, shifted in bright or
dim colors and sensations. There was a slow heavy plodding of feet,
now above her head, the passage of a carried weight; and, in a flash
of perception, she knew it was a coffin. She raised her clasped
hands to her breast, crying into the sunny silence, to the figure of
Simon Downige lost in dream:

"He died that night, at the Boscombe, after he had told me about the
meadows with silk tents--"

Her memory, thrilling with the echoed miraculous chord of the child
of ten, sitting gravely, alone, among the shrill satins and caustic
voices of a feminine throng, was complete. She saw herself, Linda
Condon, as objectively as Pleydon's described vision: there was a
large bow on her straight black hair, and, from under the bang, her
gaze was clear and wondering. How marvelously young she was! The
vindictive curiosity of the questioning women, intent on their
rings, brought out her eager defense of her mother, the effort to
explain away the ugly fact that--that Mr. Jasper was married.

She saw Linda descending the marble stairs to the lower floor where
the games were kept in a somber corridor, and heard a voice halting
her irresolute passage:

"Hello, Bellina."

That wasn't her name, and she corrected him, waiting afterward to
listen to a strange fairy-like tale. The solitary, sick-looking man,
with inky shadows under fixed eyes, was so actual that she
recaptured the pungent drift of his burning cigarette. He talked
about love in a bitter intensity that hurt her. Yet, at first, he
had said that she was lovely, a touch of her ... forever in the
memory. Mostly, however, he spoke of a beautiful passion. It had
largely vanished, his explanation continued; men had come to worship
other things. Plato started it.

She recalled Plato, as well, in connection with Dodge; now, it
appeared to her, that remote name had always been at the back of her
consciousness. There were other names, other men, of an age long ago
in Italy. Their ideal, religion, was contained in the adoration of a
woman, but not her body--it was a love of her spirit, the spirit
their purity of need recognized, perhaps helped to create. It was a
passion as different as possible in essence from all she had
observed about her. It was useless for common purposes, withheld
from Arnaud Hallet.

The man, seriously addressing the serious uncomprehending interest
of ten, proceeded with a description of violins--but she had heard
them through all her life--and a parting that left only a white
glove for remembrance. Then he had repeated that line, in Italian,
which, not long back, her husband had recalled. The old gesture
toward the stars, the need to escape fatality--how she had suffered
from that!

Yet it was a service of the body, a faith spiritual because, here,
it was never to be won, never to be realized in warm embrace. It had
no recognition in flesh, and it was the reward of no prayer or
humility or righteousness. Only beauty knew and possessed it. His
image grew dim like the blurring of his voice by pain and the shadow
of death. Linda's thoughts and longing turned again to Dodge; it
seemed to her that he no more than took up the recital where the
other was silent.

Pleydon--was it at Markue's party or later?--talking about "Homer's
children" had meant the creations of great artists, in sound or
color or words or form, through that supreme love unrealized in
other life. The statue of Simon Downige, towering before her against
the sky and above the sea, held in immutable bronze his conviction.
The meager bundle and crude stick rested by shoes clogged with mud;
Simon's body was crushed with weariness; but under the sweat-plastered
brow his gaze pierced indomitable and undismayed to the vision of a
place of truth.

She was choked by a sharp rush of joy at Dodge's accomplishment, an
entire understanding of the beauty he had vainly explained, the
deathless communication of old splendid courage, an unshaken divine
need, to succeeding men and hope. This had been hers. She had always
felt her presence in his success; but, until now, it had belonged
exclusively to him. Dodge had, in his love, absorbed her, and that
resulted in the statues the world applauded. She, Linda thought, had
been an element easily dismissed. It had hurt her pride almost
beyond endurance, the pride that took the form of an inner necessity
for the survival of her grace--all she had.

She had even asked him, in a passing resentment, why he had never
directly modeled her, kept, with his recording genius, the shape of
her features. She had gone to him in a blinder vanity for the
purpose of stamping her participation in his triumph on the stupid
insensibility of their world. How incredible! But at last she could
see that he had preserved her spirit, her secret self, from
destruction. He had cheated death of her fineness. The delicate
perfection of her youth would never perish, never be dulled by old
age or corrupted in death. It had inspired and entered into
Pleydon's being, and he had lifted it on the pedestal rising between
the sea and sky.

She was in the Luxembourg, in that statue of Cotton Mather, the
somber flame, about which he had written with a comment on the
changing subjects of his creations. From the moment when he sat
beside her on the divan in that room stifling with incense, with the
naked glimmer of women's shoulders, she had been the source of his
power. She had been his power. Linda smiled quietly, in retrospect,
at her years of uncertainty, the feeling of waste, that had robbed
her of peace. How complete her mystification had been! And, all the
while, she had had the thrill of delight, of premonition, born in
her through the forgotten hour with the man who had died.

The sun, moving in celestial space, shifted the shadow about the
base of Simon Downige's monument. The afternoon was advancing. She
rose and turned, looking out over the sea to the horizon as brightly
sharp as a curved sword. The life of Cottarsport, below her,
proceeded in detached figures, an occasional unhurried passage. The
boats in the harbor were slumberous. It was time to go. She gazed
again, for a last view, at the bronze seated figure; and a word of
Pleydon's, but rather it was Greek, wove its significance in the
placid texture of her thoughts. Its exact shape evaded her, a
difficult word to recall--_Katharsis_, the purging of the
heart. About her was the beating of the white wings of a Victory
sweeping her--a faded slender woman in immaculate gloves and a small
matchless hat--into a region without despair.




THE END





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