The Bent Twig by Dorothy Canfield (page 7)

excellent in color. Those for the staircase …”

He spoke with no more animation than was his custom, with no more relish than was seemly; his carefully chosen words succeeded each other in their usual exquisite precision, no complacency showed above the surface; his attitude was, as always, composed of precisely the right proportion of dignity and ease; but as he talked, some untarnished instinct in Sylvia shrank away in momentary distaste, the first she had ever felt for him.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith evidently did not at all share this feeling. “Oh, what a house that will be!” she cried, lost in forecasting admiration. “_You!_ with a free hand! A second house of Jacques Coeur!” Sylvia stood up, rather abruptly. “I think I’ll go for a walk beside the river,” she said, reaching for her parasol.

“May I tag along?” said Page, strolling off beside her with the ease of familiarity.

Sylvia turned to wave a careless farewell to the two thus left somewhat unceremoniously in the pergola. She was in brown corduroy with suede leather sailor collar and broad belt, a costume which brought out vividly the pure, clear coloring of her face. “Good-bye,” she called to them with a pointedly casual accent, nodding her gleaming head.

“She’s a _very_ pretty girl, isn’t she?” commented Mrs. Marshall-Smith. Morrison, looking after the retreating figures, agreed with her briefly. “Yes, very. Extraordinarily perfect specimen of her type.” His tone was dry.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith looked with annoyance across the stretch of lawn to the house. “I think I would better go to see where Arnold is,” she said. Her tone seemed to signify more to the man than her colorless words. He frowned and said, “Oh, is Arnold …?”

She gave a fatigued gesture. “No–not yet–but for the last two or three days …”

He began impatiently, “Why can’t you get him off this time before he….”

“An excellent idea,” she broke in, with some impatience of her own. “But slightly difficult of execution.”

CHAPTER XXXI

SYLVIA MEETS WITH PITY

Under the scarlet glory of frost-touched maples, beside the river strolled Sylvia, conscious of looking very well and being admired; but contrary to the age-old belief about her sex and age, the sensation of looking very well and being admired by no means filled the entire field of her consciousness. In fact, the corner occupied by the sensation was so small that occasional efforts on her part to escape to it from the less agreeable contents of her mind were lamentable failures. Aloud, in terms as felicitous as she could make them, she was commenting on the beauty of the glass-smooth river, with the sumptuously colored autumn trees casting down into it the imperial gold and crimson of their reflections. Silently she was struggling to master and dominate and suppress a confusion of contradictory mental processes. At almost regular intervals, like a hollow stroke on a brazen gong, her brain resounded to the reverberations of “The wedding is on the twenty-first.” And each time that she thrust that away, there sprang up with a faint hissing note of doubt and suspicion, “Why does Aunt Victoria want Arnold married?” A murmur, always drowned out but incessantly recurring, ran: “What about Father and Mother? What about their absurd, impossible, cruel, unreal, and beautiful standards?” Contemptible little echoes from the silly self-consciousness of the adolescence so recently left behind her … “I must think of something clever to say. I must try to seem different and original and independent and yet must attract,” mingled with an occasional fine sincerity of appreciation and respect for the humanity of the man beside her. Like a perfume borne in gusts came reaction to the glorious color about her. Quickly recurring and quickly gone, a sharp cymbal-clap of alarm … “What shall I do if Austin Page now … today … or tomorrow … tells me …!” And grotesquely, the companion cymbal on which this smote, gave forth an antiphonal alarm of, “What shall I do if he does not!” While, unheard of her conscious ear, but coloring everything with its fundamental note of sincerity, rose solemnly from the depths of her heart the old cry of desperate youth, “What am I to do with my life?”

No, the eminently successful brown corduroy, present though it was to the mind of the handsome girl wearing it, was hardly the sure and sufficient rock of refuge which tradition would have had it.

With an effort she turned her attention from this confused tumult in her ears, and put out her hand, rather at random, for an introduction to talk. “You spoke, back there in the pergola, of another kind of beauty–I didn’t know what you meant.” He answered at once, with his usual direct simplicity, which continued to have for Sylvia at this period something suspiciously like the calmness of a reigning sovereign who is above being embarrassed, who may speak, without shamefacedness, of anything, even of moral values, that subject tabu in sophisticated conversation. “Ah, just a notion of mine that perhaps all this modern ferment of what’s known as ‘social conscience’ or ‘civic responsibility,’ isn’t a result of the sense of duty, but of the old, old craving for beauty.”

Sylvia looked at him, astonished. “Beauty?”

“Why yes, beauty isn’t only a matter of line and color, is it? There’s the desire for harmony, for true proportions, for grace and suavity, for nobility of movement. Perhaps the lack of those qualities is felt in human lives as much as on canvases … at least perhaps it may be felt in the future.”

“It’s an interesting idea,” murmured Sylvia, “but I don’t quite see what it means, concretely, as applied to our actual America.”

He meditated, looking, as was his habit when walking, up at the trees above them. “Well, let’s see. I think I mean that perhaps our race, not especially inspired in its instinct for color and external form, may possibly be fumbling toward an art of living. Why wouldn’t it be an art to keep your life in drawing as well as a mural decoration?” He broke off to say, laughing, “I bet you the technique would be quite as difficult to acquire,” and went on again, thoughtfully: “In this modern maze of terrible closeness of inter-relation, to achieve a life that’s happy and useful and causes no undeserved suffering to the untold numbers of other lives which touch it–isn’t there an undertaking which needs the passion for harmony and proportion? Isn’t there a beauty as a possible ideal of aspiration for a race that probably never could achieve a Florentine or Japanese beauty of line?” He cast this out casually, as an idea which had by chance been brought up to the top by the current of the talk, and showed no indication to pursue it further when Sylvia only nodded her head. It was one of the moments when she heard nothing but the brazen clangor of “the wedding is on the twenty-first,” and until the savage constriction around her heart had relaxed she had not breath to speak. But that passed again, and the two sauntered onward, in the peaceable silence which was one of the great new pleasures which Page was able to give her. It now seemed like a part of the mellow ripeness of the day.

They had come to a bend in the slowly flowing river, where, instead of torch-bright maples and poplars, rank upon rank of somber pines marched away to the summit of a steeply ascending foothill. The river was clouded dark with their melancholy reflections. On their edge, overhanging the water, stood a single sumac, a standard-bearer with a thousand little down-drooping flags of crimson.

“Oh,” said Sylvia, smitten with admiration. She sat down on a rock partly because she wanted to admire at her leisure, partly because she was the kind of a girl who looks well sitting on a rock; and as she was aware of this latter motive, she felt a qualm of self-scorn. What a cheap vein of commonness was revealed in her–in every one–by the temptation of a great fortune! Morrison had succumbed entirely. She was nowadays continually detecting in herself motives which made her sick.

Page stretched his great length on the dry leaves at her feet. Any other man would have rolled a cigarette. It was one of his oddities that he never smoked. Sylvia looked down at his thoughtful, clean face and reflected wonderingly that he seemed the only person not warped by money. Was it because he had it, or was it because he was a very unusual person?

He was looking partly at the river, at the pines, at the flaming tree, and partly at the human embodiment of the richness and color of autumn before him. After a time Sylvia said: “There’s Cassandra. She’s the only one who knows of the impending doom. She’s trying to warn the pines.” It had taken her some moments to think of this.

Page accepted it with no sign that he considered it anything remarkable, with the habit of a man for whom people produced their best: “She’s using some very fine language for her warning, but like some other fine language it’s a trifle misapplied. She forgets that no doom hangs over the pines. _She’s_ the fated one. They’re safe enough.”

Sylvia clasped her hands about her knees and looked across the dark water at the somber trees. “And yet they don’t seem to be very cheerful about it.” It was her opinion that they were talking very cleverly.

“Perhaps,” suggested Page, rolling over to face the river–“perhaps she’s not prophesying doom at all, but blowing a trumpet-peal of exultation over her own good fortune. The pines may be black with envy of her.”

Sylvia enjoyed this rather macabre fancy with all the zest of healthful youth, secure in the conviction of its own immortality. “Yes, yes, life’s ever so much harder than death.”

Page dissented with a grave irony from the romantic exaggeration of this generalization. “I don’t suppose the statistics as to the relative difficulty of life and death are really very reliable.”

Sylvia perceived that she was being, ever so delicately, laughed at, and tried to turn her remark so that she could carry it off. “Oh, I don’t mean for those who die, but those who are left know something about it, I imagine. My mother always said that the encounter with death is the great turning-point in the lives of those who live on. She said you might miss everything else irrevocable and vital–falling in love, having children, accomplishing anything–but that sooner or later you have to reckon with losing somebody dear to you.” She spoke with an academic interest in the question.

“I should think,” meditated Page, taking the matter into serious consideration, “that the vitalness of even that experience would depend somewhat on the character undergoing it. I’ve known some temperaments of a proved frivolity which seemed to have passed through it without any great modifications. But then I know nothing about it personally. I lost my father before I could remember him, and since then I haven’t happened to have any close encounter with such loss. My mother, you know, is very much alive.”

“Well, I haven’t any personal experience with death in my immediate circle either,” said Sylvia. “But I wasn’t brought up with the usual cult of the awfulness of it. Father was always anxious that we children should feel it something as natural as breathing–you are dipped up from the great river of consciousness, and death only pours you back. If you’ve been worth living, there are more elements of fineness in humanity.”

Page nodded. “Yes, that’s what they all say nowadays. Personal immortality is as out of fashion as big sleeves.”

“Do you believe it?” asked Sylvia, seeing the talk take an intimate turn, “or are you like me, and don’t know at all what you do believe?” If she had under this pseudo-philosophical question a veiled purpose analogous to that of the less subtle charmer whose avowed expedient is to get “a man to talk about himself” the manoeuver was eminently successful.

“I’ve never had the least chance to think about it,” he said, sitting up, “because I’ve always been so damnably beset by the facts of living. I know I am not the first of my race to feel convinced that his own problems are the most complicated, but …”

“_Yours!_” cried Sylvia, genuinely astonished.

“And one of the hardships of my position,” he told her at once with a playful bitterness, “is that everybody refuses to believe in the seriousness of it. Because my father, after making a great many bad guesses as to the possible value of mining stock in Nevada, happened to make a series of good guesses about the value of mining stock in Colorado, it is assumed that all questions are settled for me, that I can joyously cultivate my garden, securely intrenched in the certainty that this is the best possible of all possible worlds,”

“Oh yes–labor unions–socialism–I.W.W.,” Sylvia murmured vaguely, unable, in spite of her intelligence, to refrain from marking, by a subsidence of interest, her instinctive feeling that those distant questions could not in the nature of things be compared to present, personal complications.

“No–no–!” he protested. “That’s no go! I’ve tried for five years now to shove it out of sight on some one of those shelves. I’ve learned all the arguments on both sides. I can discuss on both sides of those names as glibly as any other modern quibbler. I can prove the rights of all those labels or I can prove the wrongs of them, according to the way my dinner is digesting. What stays right there, what I never can digest (if you’ll pardon an inelegant simile that’s just occurred to me), a lump I never can either swallow entirely down or get up out of my throat, is the fact that there are men, hundreds of men, thousands of men, working with picks underground all day, every day, all their lives, and that part of their labor goes to provide me with the wherewithal to cultivate my taste, to pose as a patron of the arts, to endow promising pianists–to go through all the motions suitable to that position to which it has pleased Providence to call me. It sticks in my crop that my only connection with the entire business was to give myself the trouble to be born my father’s son.”

“But you _do_ work!” protested Sylvia. “You work on your farm here. You run all sorts of lumbering operations in this region. The first time I saw you, you certainly looked less like the traditional idea of a predatory coal-operator.” She laughed at the recollection.

“Oh yes, I work. When my undigested lump gets too painful I try to work it off–but what I do bears the same relation to real sure-enough work that playing tennis does to laying brick. But such as it is, it’s real satisfaction I get out of my minute Vermont holdings. They come down to me from my farmer great-grandfather who held the land by working it himself. There’s no sore spot there. But speak of Colorado or coal–and you see me jump with the same shooting twinge you feel when the dentist’s probe reaches a nerve. An intelligent conscience is a luxury a man in my position can’t afford to have.” He began with great accuracy to toss small stones at a log showing above the surface of the water.

Sylvia, reverting to a chance remark, now said: “I never happened to hear you speak of your mother before. Does she ever come to Lydford?”

He shook his head. “No, she vibrates between the Madison Avenue house and the Newport one. She’s very happy in those two places. She’s Mr. Sommerville’s sister, you know. She’s one of Morrison’s devotees too. She collects under his guidance.”

“Collects?” asked Sylvia, a little vaguely.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter much what–the instinct, the resultant satisfaction are the same. As a child, it’s stamps, or buttons, or corks, later on–As a matter of fact, it’s lace that my mother collects. She specializes in Venetian lace–the older the better, of course. The connection with coal-mines is obvious. But after all, her own fortune, coming mostly from the Sommerville side, is derived from oil. The difference is great!”

“Do you live with her?” asked Sylvia.

“My washing is said to be done in New York,” he said seriously. “I believe that settles the question of residence for a man.”

“Oh, how quaint!” said Sylvia, laughing. Then with her trained instinct for contriving a creditable exit before being driven to an enforced one by flagging of masculine interest, she rose and looked at her watch.

“Oh, don’t go!” he implored her. “It’s so beautiful here–we never were so–who knows when we’ll ever again be in so …”

Sylvia divined with one of her cymbal-claps that he had meant, perhaps, that very afternoon to–She felt a dissonant clashing of triumph and misgiving. She thought she decided quite coolly, quite dryly, that pursuit always lent luster to the object pursued; but in reality she did not at all recognize the instinct which bade her say, turning her watch around on her wrist: “It’s quite late. I don’t think I’d better stay longer. Aunt Victoria likes dinner promptly.” She turned to go.

He took his small defeat with his usual imperturbable good nature, in which Sylvia not infrequently thought she detected a flavor of the unconscious self-assurance of the very rich and much-courted man. He scrambled to his feet now promptly, and fell into step with her quick-treading advance. “You’re right, of course. There’s no need to be grasping. There’s tomorrow–and the day after–and the day after that–and if it rains we can wear rubbers and carry umbrellas.”

“Oh, I don’t carry an umbrella for a walk in the rain,” she told him. “It’s one of our queer Marshall ways. We only own one umbrella for the whole family at home, and that’s to lend. I wear a rubber coat and put on a sou’wester and _let_ it rain.”

“You would!” he said in an unconscious imitation of Arnold’s accent.

She laughed up at him. “Shall I confess why I do? Because my hair is naturally curly.”

“Confession has to be prompter than that to save souls,” he answered. “I knew it was, five weeks ago, when you splashed the water up on it so recklessly there by the brook.”

She was astonished by this revelation of depths behind that well-remembered clear gaze of admiration, and dismayed by such unnatural accuracy of observation.

“How cynical of you to make such a mental comment!”

He apologized. “It was automatic–unconscious. I’ve had a good deal of opportunity to observe young ladies.” And then, as though aware that the ice was thin over an unpleasant subject, he shifted the talk. “Upon my word, I wonder how Molly and Morrison _will_ manage?”

“Oh, Molly’s wonderful. She’d manage anything,” said Sylvia with conviction.

“Morrison is rather wonderful himself,” advanced Page. “And that’s a magnanimous concession for me to make when I’m now so deep in his bad books. Do you know, by the way,” he asked, looking with a quick interrogation at the girl, “_why_ I’m so out of favor with him?”

Sylvia’s eyes opened wide. She gazed at him, startled, fascinated. Could “it” be coming so suddenly, in this casual, abrupt manner? “No, I don’t know,” she managed to say; and braced herself.

“I don’t blame him in the least. It was very vexing. I went back on him–so to speak; dissolved an aesthetic partnership, in which he furnished the brains, and my coal-mines the sinews of art. _I_ was one of his devotees, you know. For some years after I got out of college I collected under his guidance, as my mother does, as so many people do. I even specialized. I don’t like to boast, but I dare affirm that no man knows more than I about sixteenth century mezza-majolica. It is a branch of human knowledge which you must admit is singularly appropriate for a dweller in the twentieth century. And of great value to the world. My collection was one of Morrison’s triumphs.”

Sylvia felt foolish and discomfited. With an effort she showed a proper interest in his remarks. “Was?” she asked. “What happened to it?”

“I went back on it. In one of the first of those fits of moral indigestion. One day, I’d been reading a report in one of the newspapers on the status of the coal-miner, and the connection between my bright-colored pots and platters, and my father’s lucky guess, became a little too dramatic for my taste. I gave the collection to the Metropolitan, and I’ve never bought a piece since. Morrison was immensely put out. He’d been to great trouble to find some fine Fontana specimens for me. And then not to have me look at them–He was right too. It was a silly, pettish thing to do. I didn’t know any better then. I don’t know any better now.”

It began to dawn on Sylvia that, under his air of whimsical self-mockery he was talking to her seriously. She tried to adjust herself to this, to be sympathetic, earnest; though she was still smarting with the sense of having appeared to herself as undignified and ridiculous.

“And besides that,” he went on, looking away, down the dusty highroad they were then crossing on their way back to the house–“besides that, I went back on a great scheme of Morrison’s for a National Academy of Aesthetic Instruction, which I was to finance and he to organize. He had gone into all the details. He had shown wonderful capacity. It’s really very magnanimous of him not to bear me more of a grudge. He thought that giving it up was one of my half-baked ideas. And it was. As far as anything I’ve accomplished since, I might as well have been furthering the appreciation of Etruscan vases in the Middle West. But then, I don’t think he’ll miss it now. If he still has a fancy for it, he can do it with Molly’s money. She has plenty. But I don’t believe he will. It has occurred to me lately (it’s an idea that’s been growing on me about everybody) that Morrison, like most of us, has been miscast. He doesn’t really care a continental about the aesthetic salvation of the country. It’s only the contagion of the American craze for connecting everything with social betterment, tagging everything with that label, that ever made him think he did. He’s far too thoroughgoing an aesthete himself. What he was brought into the world for, was to appreciate, as nobody else can, all sorts of esoterically fine things. Now that he’ll be able to gratify that taste, he’ll find his occupation in it. Why shouldn’t he? It’d be a hideously leveled world if everybody was, trying to be a reformer. Besides, who’d be left to reform? I love to contemplate a genuine, whole-souled appreciator like Morrison, without any qualms about the way society is put together. And I envy him! I envy him as blackly as your pines envied the sumac. He’s got out of the wrong role into the right one. I wish to the Lord I could!”

They were close to the house now, in the avenue of poplars, yellow as gold above them in the quick-falling autumn twilight. Sylvia spoke with a quick, spirited sincerity, her momentary pique forgotten, her feeling rushing out generously to meet the man’s simple openness. “Oh, that’s the problem for all of us! To know what role to play! If you think it hard for you who have only to choose–how about the rest of us who must–?” She broke off. “What’s that? What’s that?”

She had almost stumbled over a man’s body, lying prone, half in the driveway, half on the close-clipped grass on the side; a well-dressed man, tall, thin, his limbs sprawled about broken-jointedly. He lay on his back, his face glimmering white in the clear, dim dusk. Sylvia recognized him with a cry. “Oh, it’s Arnold! He’s been struck by a car! He’s dead!”

She sprang forward, and stopped short, at gaze, frozen.

The man sat up, propping himself on his hands and looked at her, a wavering smile on his lips. He began to speak, a thick, unmodulated voice, as though his throat were stiff. “Comingtomeetyou,” he articulated very rapidly and quite unintelligibly, “an ‘countered hill in driveway … no hill _in_ driveway, and climbed and climbed”–he lost himself in repetition and brought up short to begin again, “–labor so ‘cessive had to rest–“

Sylvia turned a paper-white face on her companion. “What’s the matter with him?” she tried to say, but Page only saw her lips move. He made no answer. That she would know in an instant what was the matter flickered from her eyes, from her trembling white lips; that she did know, even as she spoke, was apparent from the scorn and indignation which like sheet-lightning leaped out on him. “Arnold! For _shame_! Arnold! Think of Judith!”

At the name he frowned vaguely as though it suggested something extremely distressing to him, though he evidently did not recognize it. “Judish? Judish?” he repeated, drawing his brows together and making a grimace of great pain. “What’s Judish?”

And then, quite suddenly the pain and distress were wiped from his face by sodden vacuity. He had hitched himself to one of the poplars, and now leaned against this, his head bent on his shoulder at the sickening angle of a man hanged, his eyes glassy, his mouth open, a trickle of saliva flowing from one corner. He breathed hard and loudly. There was nothing there but a lump of uncomely flesh.

Sylvia shrank back from the sight with such disgust that she felt her flesh creep. She turned a hard, angry face on Page. “Oh, the beast! The beast!” she cried, under her breath. She felt defiled. She hated Arnold. She hated life.

Page said quietly: “You’ll excuse my not going with you to the house? I’ll have my car and chauffeur here in a moment.” He stepped away quickly and Sylvia turned to flee into the house.

But something halted her flying feet. She hesitated, stopped, and pressed her hands together hard. He could not be left alone there in the driveway. A car might run over him in the dusk. She turned back.

She stood there, alone with the horror under the tree. She turned her back on it, but she could see nothing but the abject, strengthless body, the dreadful ignominy of the face. They filled the world.

And then quickly–everything came quickly to Sylvia–there stood before her the little boy who had come to see them in La Chance so long ago, the little honest-eyed boy who had so loved her mother and Judith, who had loved Pauline the maid and suffered with her pain; and then the bigger boy who out of his weakness had begged for a share of her mother’s strength and been refused; and then the man, still honest-eyed, who, aimless, wavering, had cried out to her in misery upon the emptiness of his life; and who later had wept those pure tears of joy that he had found love. She had a moment of insight, of vision, of terrible understanding. She did not know what was taking place within her, something racking–spasmodic throes of sudden growth, the emergence for the first time in all her life of the capacity for pity …

When, only a moment or two later, Page’s car came swiftly down the driveway, and he sprang out, he found Sylvia sitting by the drunkard, the quiet tears streaming down her face. She had wiped his mouth with her handkerchief, she held his limp hand in hers, his foolish staring face was hidden on her shoulder….

The two men lifted him bodily, an ignoble, sagging weight, into the car. She stood beside him and, without a word, stooped and gently disposed his slackly hanging arms beside him.

Dark had quite fallen by this time. They were all silent, shadowy forms. She felt that Page was at her side. He leaned to her. Her hand was taken and kissed.

CHAPTER XXXII

MUCH ADO …

The rest of October was a period never clear in Sylvia’s head. Everything that happened was confusing and almost everything was painful; and a great deal happened. She had thought at the time that nothing would ever blur in her mind the shock of finding Aunt Victoria opposed to what seemed to her the first obvious necessity: writing to Judith about Arnold. She had been trying for a long time now with desperate sincerity to take the world as she found it, to see people as they were with no fanatic intolerance, to realize her own inexperience of life, to be broad, to take in without too much of a wrench another point of view; but to Aunt Victoria’s idea, held quite simply and naturally by that lady, that Judith be kept in ignorance of Arnold’s habits until after marriage, Sylvia’s mind closed as automatically, as hermetically as an oyster-shell snaps shut. She could not discuss it, she could not even attend with hearing ears to Mrs. Marshall-Smith’s very reasonable presentation of her case; the long tradition as to the justifiability of such ignorance on a bride’s part; the impossibility that any woman should ever know all of any man’s character before marriage; the strong presumption that marriage with a woman he adored would cure habits contracted only through the inevitable aimlessness of too much wealth; the fact that, once married, a woman like Judith would accept, and for the most part deal competently with, facts which would frighten her in her raw girlish state of ignorance and crudeness. Sylvia did not even hear these arguments and many more like them, dignified with the sanction of generations of women trying their best to deal with life. She had never thought of the question before. It was the sort of thing from which she had always averted her moral eyes with extreme distaste; but now that it was forced on her, her reaction to it was instantaneous. From the depths of her there rose up fresh in its original vigor, never having been dulled by a single enforced compliance with a convention running counter to a principle, the most irresistible instinct against concealment. She did not argue; she could not. She could only say with a breathless certainty against which there was no holding out: “Judith must know! Judith must know!”

Mrs. Marshall-Smith, alarmed by the prospect of a passage-at-arms, decreed quietly that they should both sleep on the question and take it up the next morning. Sylvia had not slept. She had lain in her bed, wide-eyed; a series of pictures passing before her eyes with the unnatural vividness of hallucinations. These pictures were not only of Arnold, of Arnold again, of Arnold and Judith. There were all sorts of odd bits of memories–a conversation overheard years before, between her father and Lawrence, when Lawrence was a little, little boy. He had asked–it was like Lawrence’s eerie ways–apropos of nothing at all, “What sort of a man was Aunt Victoria’s husband?”

His father had said, “A rich man, very rich.” This prompt appearance of readiness to answer had silenced the child for a moment: and then (Sylvia could see his thin little hands patting down the sand-cake he was making) he had persisted, “What kind of a rich man?” His father had said, “Well, he was bald–quite bald–Lawrence, come run a race with me to the woodshed.” Sylvia now, ten years later, wondered why her father had evaded. What kind of a man _had_ Arnold’s father been?

But chiefly she braced herself for the struggle with Aunt Victoria in the morning. It came to her in fleeting glimpses that Aunt Victoria would be only human if she resented with some heat this entire disregard of her wishes; that the discussion might very well end in a quarrel, and that a quarrel would mean the end of Lydford with all that Lydford meant now and potentially. But this perception was swept out of sight, like everything else, in the singleness of her conviction: “Judith must know! Judith must know!”

There was, however, no struggle with Aunt Victoria in the morning. Mrs. Marshall-Smith, encountering the same passionate outcry, recognized an irresistible force when she encountered it; recognized it, in fact, soon enough to avoid the long-drawn-out acrimony of discussion into which a less intelligent woman would inevitably have plunged; recognized it almost, but not quite, in time to shut off from Sylvia’s later meditations certain startling vistas down which she had now only fleeting glimpses. “Very well, my dear,” said Mrs. Marshall-Smith, her cherished clarity always unclouded by small resentments,–“very well, we will trust in your judgment rather than my own. I don’t pretend to understand present-day girls, though I manage to be very fond of one of them. Judith is your sister. You will do, of course, what you think is right. It means, of course, Judith being what she is, that she will instantly cast him off; and Arnold being what he is, that means that he will drink himself into delirium tremens in six months. His father …” She stopped short, closing with some haste the door to a vista, and poured herself another cup of coffee. They were having breakfast in her room, both in negligee and lacy caps, two singularly handsome representatives of differing generations. Mrs. Marshall-Smith looked calm, Sylvia extremely agitated. She had been awake at the early hour of deadly pale dawn when a swift, long-barreled car had drawn up under the porte-cochere and Arnold had been taken away under the guard of a short, broad, brawny man with disproportionately long arms. She was not able to swallow a mouthful of breakfast.

During the night, she had not looked an inch beyond her blind passion of insistence. Now that Aunt Victoria yielded with so disconcerting a suddenness, she faced with a pang what lay beyond. “Oh, Judith wouldn’t cast him off! She loves him so! She’ll give him a chance. You don’t know Judith. She doesn’t care about many things, but she gives herself up absolutely to those that do matter to her. She adores Arnold! It fairly frightened me to see how she was burning up when he was near. She’ll insist on his reforming, of course–she ought to–but–“

“Suppose he doesn’t reform to suit her,” suggested Mrs. Marshall-Smith, stirring her coffee. “He’s been reformed at intervals ever since he was fifteen. He never could stay through a whole term in any decent boys’ school.” Here was a vista, ruthlessly opened. Sylvia’s eyes looked down it and shuddered. “Poor Arnold!” she said under her breath, pushing away her untasted cup.

“I’m dull enough to find you take an odd way to show your sympathy for him,” murmured Mrs. Marshall-Smith, with none of the acidity the words themselves seemed to indicate. She seemed indeed genuinely perplexed. “It’s not been exactly a hilarious element in _my_ life either. But I’ve always tried to hold on to Arnold. I thought it my duty. And now, since Felix Morrison has found this excellent specialist for me, it’s much easier. I telegraph to him and he comes at once and takes Arnold back to his sanitarium, till he’s himself again.” For the first time in weeks Morrison’s name brought up between them no insistently present, persistently ignored shadow. The deeper shadow now blotted him out.

“But Aunt Victoria, it’s for Judith to decide. _She_’ll do the right thing.”

“Sometimes people are thrown by circumstances into a situation where they wouldn’t have dreamed of putting themselves–and yet they rise to it and conquer it,” philosophized Aunt Victoria. “Life takes hold of us with strong hands and makes us greater than we thought. Judith will _mean_ to do the right thing. If she were married, she’d _have_ to do it! It seems to me a great responsibility you take, Sylvia–you may, with the best of intentions in the world, be ruining the happiness of two lives.”

Sylvia got up, her eyes red with unshed tears. It was not the first time that morning. “It’s all too horrible,” she murmured. “But I haven’t any right to conceal it from Judith.”

Her eyes were still red when, an hour later, she stepped into the room again and said, “I’ve mailed it.”

Her aunt, still in lavender silk negligee, so far progressed towards the day’s toilet as to have her hair carefully dressed, looked up from the _Revue Bleue_, and nodded. Her expression was one of quiet self-possession.

Sylvia came closer to her and sat down on a straight-backed chair. She was dressed for the street, and hatted, as though she herself had gone out to mail the letter. “And now, Tantine,” she said, with the resolute air of one broaching a difficult subject, “I think I ought to be planning to go home very soon.” It was a momentous speech, and a momentous pause followed it. It had occurred to Sylvia, still shaken with the struggle over the question of secrecy, that she could, in decency, only offer to take herself away, after so violently antagonizing her hostess. She realized with what crude intolerance she had attacked the other woman’s position, how absolutely with claw and talon she had demolished it. She smarted with the sense that she had seemed oblivious of an “obligation.” She detested the sense of obligation. And having become aware of a debt due her dignity, she had paid it hastily, on the impulse of the moment. But as the words still echoed in the air, she was struck to see how absolutely her immediate future, all her future, perhaps, depended on the outcome of that conversation she herself had begun. She looked fixedly at her aunt, trying to prepare herself for anything. But she was not prepared for what Mrs. Marshall-Smith did.

She swept the magazine from her lap to the floor and held out her arms to Sylvia. “I had hoped–I had hoped you were happy–with me,” she said, and in her voice was that change of quality, that tremor of sincerity which Sylvia had always found profoundly moving. The girl was overcome with astonishment and remorse–and immense relief. She ran to her. “Oh, I am! I am! I was only thinking–I’ve gone against your judgment.” Her nerves, stretched with the sleepless night and the strain of writing the dreadful letter to Judith, gave way. She broke into sobs. She put her arms tightly around her aunt’s beautiful neck and laid her head on her shoulder, weeping, her heart swelling, her mind in a whirling mass of disconnected impressions. Arnold–Judith … how strange it was that Aunt Victoria really cared for her–did she really care for Aunt Victoria or only admire her?–did she really care for anybody, since she was agreeing to stay longer away from her father and mother?–how good it would be not to have to give up Helene’s services–what a heartless, materialistic girl she was–she cared for nothing but luxury and money–she would be going abroad now to Paris–Austin Page–he had kissed her hand … and yet she felt that he saw through her, saw through her mean little devices and stratagems–how astonishing that he should be so very, very rich–it seemed that a very, very rich man ought to be different from other men–his powers were so unnaturally great–girls could not feel naturally about him … And all the while that these varying reflections passed at lightning speed through her mind, her nervous sobs were continuing.

Aunt Victoria taking them, naturally enough, as signs of continued remorse, lifted her out of this supposed slough of despond with affectionate peremptoriness. “Don’t feel so badly about it, darling. We won’t have any more talk for the present about differing judgments, or of going away, or of anything uncomfortable”; and in this way, with nothing clearly understood, on a foundation indeed of misunderstanding, the decision was made, in the haphazard fashion which characterizes most human decisions.

The rest of the month was no more consecutive or logical. Into the midst of the going-away confusion of a household about to remove itself half around the world, into a house distracted with packing, cheerless with linen-covers, desolate with rolled-up rugs and cold lunches and half-packed trunks, came, in a matter-of-fact manner characteristic of its writer, Judith’s answer to Sylvia’s letter. Sylvia opened it, shrinking and fearful of what she would read. She had, in the days since hers had been sent, imagined Judith’s answer in every possible form; but never in any form remotely resembling what Judith wrote. The letter stated in Judith’s concise style that of course she agreed with Sylvia that there should be no secrets between betrothed lovers, nor, in this case, were there any. Arnold had told her, the evening before she left Lydford, that he had inherited an alcoholic tendency from his father. She had been in communication with a great specialist in Wisconsin about the case. She knew of the sanitarium to which Arnold had been taken and did not like it. The medical treatment there was not serious. She hoped soon to have him transferred to the care of Dr. Rivedal. If Arnold’s general constitution were still sound, there was every probability of a cure. Doctors knew so much more about that sort of thing than they used to. Had Sylvia heard that Madame La Rue was not a bit well, that old trouble with her heart, only worse? They’d been obliged to hire a maid–how in the world were the La Rues going to exist on American cooking? Cousin Parnelia said she could cure Madame with some Sanopractic nonsense, a new fad that Cousin Parnelia had taken up lately. Professor Kennedy had been elected vice-president of the American Mathematical Association, and it was funny to see him try to pretend that he wasn’t pleased. Mother’s garden this autumn was …

“_Well_!” ejaculated Sylvia, stopping short. Mrs. Marshall-Smith had stopped to listen in the midst of the exhausting toil of telling Helene which dresses to pack and which to leave hanging in the Lydford house. She now resumed her labors unflaggingly, waving away to the closet a mauve satin, and beckoning into a trunk a favorite black-and-white chiffon. To Sylvia she said, “Now I know exactly how a balloon feels when it is pricked.”

Sylvia agreed ruefully. “I might have known Judith would manage to make me feel flat if I got wrought up about it. She hates a fuss made over anything, and she can always take you down if you make one.” She remembered with a singular feeling of discomfiture the throbbing phrases of her letter, written under the high pressure of the quarrel with Aunt Victoria. She could almost see the expression of austere distaste in the stern young beauty of Judith’s face. Judith was always making her appear foolish!

“We were both of us,” commented Mrs. Marshall-Smith dryly, “somewhat mistaken about the degree of seriousness with which Judith would take the information.”

Sylvia forgot her vexation and sprang loyally to Judith’s defense. “Why, of course she takes it like a trained nurse, like a doctor–feels it a purely medical affair–as I suppose it is. We might have known she’d feel that way. But as to how she really feels inside, personally, you can’t tell anything by her letter! You probably couldn’t tell anything by her manner if she were here. You never can. She may be simply wild about a thing inside, but you’d never guess.”

Mrs. Marshall-Smith ventured to express some skepticism as to the existence of volcanic feelings always so sedulously concealed. “After all, can you be so very sure that she is ever ‘simply wild’ if she never shows anything?”

“Oh, you’re _sure_, all right, if you’ve lived with her–you feel it. And then, after about so long a time of keeping it down, she breaks loose and _does_ something awful, that I’d never have the nerve to do, and tears into flinders anything she doesn’t think is right. Why, when we were little girls and went to the public schools together, two of our little playmates, who turned out to have a little negro blood, we …” Sylvia stopped, suddenly warned by some instinct that Aunt Victoria would not be a sympathetic listener to that unforgotten episode of her childhood, that episode which had seemed to have no consequences, no sequel, but which ever since that day had insensibly affected the course of her growth, like a great rock fallen into the Current of her life.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith, deliberating with bated breath between broadcloth and blue panama, did not notice the pause. She did, however, add a final comment on the matter, some moments later, when she observed, “How any girl in her senses can go on studying, when she’s engaged to a man who needs her as much as Arnold needs Judith!” To which Sylvia answered irrelevantly with a thought which had just struck her thrillingly, “But how perfectly fine of Arnold to tell her himself!”

“She must have hypnotized him,” said Mrs. Marshall-Smith with conviction, “but then I don’t pretend to understand the ways of young people nowadays.” She was now forty-five, in the full bloom of a rarely preserved beauty, and could afford to make remarks about the younger generation. “At any rate,” she went on, “it is a comfort to know that Judith has set her hand to the wheel. I have not in years crossed the ocean with so much peace of mind about Arnold as I shall have this time,” said his stepmother. “No, leave that blue voile, Helene, the collar never fitted.”

“Oh, he doesn’t spend the winters in Paris with you?” asked Sylvia.

“He’s been staying here in Lydford of late–crazy as it sounds. He was simply so bored that he couldn’t think of anything else to do. He has, besides, an absurd theory that he enjoys it more in winter than in summer. He says the natives are to be seen then. He’s been here from his childhood. He knows a good many of them, I suppose. Now, Helene, let’s see the gloves and hats.”

It came over Sylvia with a passing sense of great strangeness that she had been in this spot for four months and, with the exception of the men at the fire, she had not met, had not spoken to, had not even consciously seen a single inhabitant of the place.

And in the end, she went away in precisely the same state of ignorance. On the day they drove to the station she did, indeed, give one fleeting glimpse over the edge of her narrow prison-house of self-centered interest. Surrounded by a great many strapped and buckled pieces of baggage, with Helene, fascinatingly ugly in her serf’s uniform, holding the black leather bag containing Aunt Victoria’s jewels, they passed along the street for the last time, under the great elms already almost wintry with their bare boughs. Now that it was too late, Sylvia felt a momentary curiosity about the unseen humanity which had been so near her all the summer. She looked out curiously at the shabby vehicles (it seemed to her that there were more of them than in the height of the season), at the straight-standing, plainly dressed, briskly walking women and children (there seemed to be a new air of life and animation about the street now that most of the summer cottages were empty), and at the lounging, indifferent, powerfully built men. She wondered, for a moment, what they were like, with what fortitude their eager human hearts bore the annual display of splendor they might never share. They looked, in that last glimpse, somehow quite strong, as though they would care less than she would in their places. Perhaps they were only hostile, not envious.

“I dare say,” said Aunt Victoria, glancing out at a buck-board, very muddy as to wheels, crowded with children, “that it’s very forlorn for the natives to have the life all go out of the village when the summer people leave. They must feel desolate enough!”

Sylvia wondered.

The last thing she saw as the train left the valley was the upland pass between Windward and Hemlock mountains. It brought up to her the taste of black birch, the formidably clean smell of yellow soap, and the rush of summer wind past her ears.

CHAPTER XXXIII

“WHOM GOD HATH JOINED …”

They were to sail on the 23d, and ever since the big square invitation had come it had been a foregone conclusion, conceded with no need for wounding words, that there was no way out of attending the Sommerville-Morrison wedding on the 21st. They kept, of course, no constrained silence about it. Aunt Victoria detested the awkwardness of not mentioning difficult subjects as heartily as she did the mention of them; and as the tree toad evolves a skin to answer his needs, she had evolved a method all her own of turning her back squarely on both horns of a dilemma. No, there was no silence about the wedding, only about the possibility that it might be an ordeal, or that the ordeal might be avoided. It could not be avoided. There was nothing to be said on that point. But there was much talk, during the few days of their stay in New York, about the elaborate preparations for the ceremony. Morrison, who came to see them in their temporary quarters, kept up a somewhat satirical report as to the magnificence of the performance, and on the one occasion when they went to see Molly they found her flushed, excited, utterly inconsecutive, distracted by a million details, and accepting the situation as the normal one for a bride-to-be. There were heart-searchings as to toilets to match the grandeur of the occasion; and later satisfaction with the moss-green chiffon for Sylvia and violet-colored velvet for her aunt. There were consultations about the present Aunt Victoria was to send from them both, a wonderfully expensive, newly patented, leather traveling-case for a car, guaranteed to hold less to the square inch and pound than any other similar, heavy, gold-mounted contrivance. Mrs. Marshall-Smith told Morrison frankly, in this connection, that she had tried to select a present which Molly herself would enjoy.

“Am I not to have a present myself?” asked Morrison. “Something that you selected expressly for me?”

“No,” said Sylvia, dropping the sugar into his tea with deliberation. “You are not to have any present for yourself.”

She was guiltily conscious that she was thinking of a certain scene in “The Golden Bowl,” a scene in which a wedding present figures largely; and when, a moment later, he said, “I have a new volume of Henry James I’d like to loan you,” she knew that the same scene had been in his head. She would not look at him lest she read in his eyes that he had meant her to know. As she frequently did in those days, she rose, and making an excuse of a walk in the park, took herself off.

She was quite calm during this period, her mind full of trivial things. She had the firm conviction that she was living in a dream, that nothing of what was happening was irrevocable. And besides, as at Lydford, for much of the day, she was absorbed in the material details of her life, being rubbed and dressed and undressed, and adorned and fed and catered to. They were spending the few days before sailing in a very grand hotel, overlooking Central Park. Sylvia had almost every day the thought that she herself was now in the center of exactly the same picture in which, as a child, she had enviously watched Aunt Victoria. She adored every detail of it. It was an opening-out, even from the Lydford life. She felt herself expanding like a dried sponge placed in water, to fill every crack and crevice of the luxurious habits of life. The traveling along that road is always swift; and Sylvia’s feet were never slow. During the first days in Vermont, it had seemed a magnificence to her that she need never think of dish-washing or bed-making. By this time it seemed quite natural to her that Helene drew and tempered the water for her bath, and put on her stockings. Occasionally she noticed with a little surprise that she seemed to have no more free time than in the laborious life of La Chance; but for the most part she threw out, in all haste, innumerable greedy root-tendrils into the surcharged richness of her new soil and sent up a rank growth of easeful acquiescence in redundance.

The wedding was quite as grand as the Sommervilles had tried to make it. The street was crowded with staring, curious, uninvited people on either side of the church, and when the carriage containing the bride drove up, the surge forward to see her was as fierce as though she had been a defaulting bank-president being taken to prison. The police had to intervene. The interior, fern and orchid swathed, very dimly lighted by rich purple stained glass and aristocratic dripping wax candles instead of the more convenient electric imitations, was murmurous with the wonderful throbbing notes of a great organ and with the discreet low tones of the invited guests as they speculated about the relative ages and fortunes of the bride and bridegroom. The chancel was filled with a vested choir which, singing and carrying a cross, advanced down the aisle to meet the bridal party. Molly, who had not been in a church since her childhood, had needed to be coached over and over again in the ins and outs of the complicated service.

Sylvia, seated several guests away from the aisle, saw little of the procession as it went up into the chancel. She caught a glimpse of a misty mass of white and, beside it, old Mr. Sommerville’s profile, very white and nervous and determined. She did not at that time see the bridegroom at all. The ceremony, which took place far within the chancel, was long and interspersed with music from the choir. Sylvia, feeling very queer and callous, as though, under an anaesthetic, she were watching with entire unconcern the amputation of one of her limbs, fell to observing the people about her. The woman in front of her leaned against the pew and brought her broad, well-fed back close under Sylvia’s eyes. It was covered with as many layers as a worm in a cocoon. There were beads on lace, the lace incrusted on other lace, chiffon, fish-net, a dimly seen filmy satin, cut in points, and, lower down, an invisible foundation of taffeta. Through the interstices there gleamed a revelation of the back itself, fat, white, again like a worm in a cocoon.

Sylvia began to plan out a comparison of dress with architecture, bringing out the insistent tendency in both to the rococo, to the burying of structural lines in ornamentation. The cuff, for instance, originally intended to protect the skin from contact with unwashable fabrics, degenerated into a mere bit of “trimming,” which has lost all its meaning, which may be set anywhere on the sleeve. Like a strong hand about her throat came the knowledge that she was planning to say all this to please Felix Morrison, who was now within fifty feet of her, being married to another woman.

She flamed to fever and chilled again to her queer absence of spirit…. There was a chorister at the end of the line near her, a pale young man with a spiritual face who chanted his part with shining rapt eyes. While he sang he slipped his hand under his white surplice and took out his watch. Still singing “Glory be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” he cast a hasty eye on the watch and frowned impatiently. He was evidently afraid the business in hand would drag along and make him late to another appointment, “–is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen!” he sang fervently. Sylvia repressed an hysterical desire to laugh.

The ceremony was over; the air in the building beat wildly against the walls, the stained-glass windows, and the ears of the worshipers in the excited tumult of the wedding-march; the procession began to leave the chancel. This time Sylvia caught one clear glimpse of the principals, but it meant nothing to her. They looked like wax effigies of themselves, self-conscious, posed, emptied of their personalities by the noise, the crowds, the congestion of ceremony. The idea occurred to Sylvia that they looked as though they had taken in as little as she the significance of what had happened. The people about her were moving in relieved restlessness after the long immobility of the wedding. The woman next her went down on her knees for a devout period, her face in her white gloves. When she rose, she said earnestly to her companion, “Do you know if I had to choose one hat-trimming for all the rest of my life, I should make it small pink roses in clusters. It’s perfectly miraculous how, with black chiffon, they _never_ go out!” She settled in place the great cluster of costly violets at her breast which she seemed to have exuded like some natural secretion of her plump and expensive person. “Why don’t they let us out!” she said complainingly.

A young man, one of those born to be a wedding usher, now came swiftly up the aisle on patent leather feet and untied with pearl-gray fingers the great white satin ribbon which restrained them in the pew. Sylvia caught her aunt’s eye on her, its anxiety rather less well hidden than usual. With no effort at all the girl achieved a flashing smile. It was not hard. She felt quite numb. She had been present only during one or two painful, quickly passed moments.

But the reception at the house, the big, old-fashioned, very rich Sommerville house, was more of an ordeal. There was the sight of the bride and groom in the receiving-line, now no longer badly executed graven images, but quite themselves–Molly starry-eyed, triumphant, astonishingly beautiful, her husband distinguished, ugly, self-possessed, easily the most interesting personality in the room; there was the difficult moment of the presentation, the handclasp with Felix, the rapturous vague kiss from Molly, evidently too uplifted to have any idea as to the individualities of the people defiling before her; then the passing on into the throng, the eating and drinking and talking with acquaintances from the Lydford summer colony, of whom there were naturally a large assortment. Sylvia had a growing sense of pain, which was becoming acute when across the room she saw Molly, in a lull of arrivals, look up to her husband and receive from him a smiling, intimate look of possession. Why, they were _married_! It was done!

The delicate food in Sylvia’s mouth turned to ashes.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith’s voice, almost fluttered, almost (for her) excited, came to her ears: “Sylvia–here is Mr. Page! And he’s just told me the most delightful news, that he’s decided to run over to Paris for a time this fall.”

“I hope Miss Marshall will think that Paris will be big enough for all of us?” asked Austin Page, fixing his remarkably clear eyes on the girl.

She made a great effort for self-possession. She turned her back on the receiving-line. She held out her hand cordially. “I hope Paris will be quite, quite small, so that we shall all see a great deal of each other,” she said warmly.

CHAPTER XXXIV

SYLVIA TELLS THE TRUTH

They left Mrs. Marshall-Smith with a book, seated on a little yellow-painted iron chair, the fifteen-centime kind, at the top of the great flight of steps leading down to the wide green expanse of the Tapis Vert. She was alternately reading Huysmans’ highly imaginative ideas on Gothic cathedrals, and letting her eyes stray up and down the long facade of the great Louis. Her powers of aesthetic assimilation seemed to be proof against this extraordinary mixture of impressions. She had insisted that she would be entirely happy there in the sun, for an hour at least, especially if she were left in solitude with her book. On which intimation Sylvia and Page had strolled off to do some exploring. It was a situation which a month of similar arrangements had made very familiar to them.

“No, I don’t know Versailles very well,” he said in answer to her question, “but I believe the gardens back of the Grand and Petit Trianon are more interesting than these near the Chateau itself. The conscientiousness with which they’re kept up is not quite so formidable.”

So they walked down the side of the Grand Canal, admiring the rather pensive beauty of the late November woods, and talking, as was the proper thing, about the great Louis and his court, and how they both detested his style of gilded, carved wall ornamentation, although his chairs weren’t as bad as some others. They turned off at the cross-arm of the Canal towards the Great Trianon; they talked, again dutifully in the spirit of the place, about Madame de Maintenon. They differed on this subject just enough to enjoy discussing it. Page averred that the whole affair had always passed his comprehension, “–what that ease-loving, vain, indulgent, trivial-minded grandson of Henri Quatre could ever have seen for all those years in that stiff, prim, cold old school-ma’am–“

But Sylvia shook her head. “I know how he felt. He _had_ to have her, once he’d found her. She was the only person in all his world he could depend on.”

“Why not depend on himself?” Page asked.

“Oh, he couldn’t! He couldn’t! She had character and he hadn’t.”

“What do you mean by character?” he challenged her.

“It’s what I haven’t!” she said.

He attempted a chivalrous exculpation. “Oh, if you mean by character such hard, insensitive lack of imagination as Madame de Maintenon’s–“

“No, not that,” said Sylvia. “_You_ know what I mean by character as well as I.”

By the time they were back of the Little Trianon, this beginning had led them naturally enough away from the frivolities of historical conversation to serious considerations, namely themselves. The start had been a reminiscence of Sylvia’s, induced by the slow fall of golden leaves from the last of the birches into the still water of the lake in the midst of Marie Antoinette’s hamlet. They stopped on an outrageously rustic bridge, constructed quite in the artificially rural style of the place, and, leaning on the railing, watched in a fascinated silence the quiet, eddying descent of the leaves. There was not a breath of wind. The leaves detached themselves from the tree with no wrench. They loosened their hold gradually, gradually, and finally out of sheer fullness of maturity floated down to their graves with a dreamy content.

“I never happened to see that effect before,” said Page. “I supposed leaves were detached only by wind. It’s astonishingly peaceful, isn’t it?”

“I saw it once before,” said Sylvia, her eyes fixed on the noiseless arabesques traced by the leaves in their fall–“at home in La Chance. I’ll never forget it.” She spoke in a low tone as though not to break the charmed silence about them, and, upon his asking her for the incident, she went on, almost in a murmur: “It isn’t a story you could possibly understand. You’ve never been poor. But I’ll tell you if you like. I’ve talked to you such a lot about home and the queer people we know–did I ever mention Cousin Parnelia? She’s a distant cousin of my mother’s, a queer woman who lost her husband and three children in a train-wreck years ago, and has been a little bit crazy ever since. She has always worn, for instance, exactly the same kind of clothes, hat and everything, that she had on, the day the news was brought to her. The Spiritualists got hold of her then, and she’s been one herself for ever so long–table-rapping–planchette-writing–all the horrid rest of it, and she makes a little money by being a “medium” for ignorant people. But she hardly earns enough that way to keep her from starving, and Mother has for ever so long helped her out.

“Well, there was a chance to buy a tiny house and lot for her–two hundred and twenty dollars. It was just a two-roomed cottage, but it would be a roof over her head at least. She is getting old and ought to have something to fall back on. Mother called us all together and said this would be a way to help provide for Cousin Parnelia’s old age. Father never could bear her (he’s so hard on ignorant, superstitious people), but he always does what Mother thinks best, so he said he’d give up the new typewriter he’d been hoping to buy. Mother gave up her chicken money she’d been putting by for some new rose-bushes, and she loves her roses too! Judith gave what she’d earned picking raspberries, and I–oh, how I hated to do it! but I was ashamed not to–I gave what I’d saved up for my autumn suit. Lawrence just stuck it out that he hated Cousin Parnelia and he wouldn’t give a bit. But he was so little that he only had thirty cents or something like that in a tin bank, so it didn’t matter. When we put it all together it wasn’t nearly enough of course, and we took the rest out of our own little family savings-bank rainy-day savings and bought the tiny house and lot. Father wanted to ‘surprise’ Cousin Parnelia with the deed. He wanted to lay it under some flowers in a basket, or slip it into her pocket, or send it to her with some eggs or something. But Mother–it was so like her!–the first time Cousin Parnelia happened to come to the house, Mother picked up the deed from her desk and said offhand, ‘Oh, Parnelia, we bought the little Garens house for you,’ and handed her the paper, and went to talking about cutworms or Bordeaux mixture.”

Page smiled, appreciative of the picture. “I see her. I see your mother–Vermont to the core.”

“Well, it was only about two weeks after that, I was practising and Mother was rubbing down a table she was fixing over. Nobody else happened to be at home. Cousin Parnelia came in, her old battered black straw hat on one ear as usual. She was all stirred up and pleased about a new ‘method’ of using planchette. You know what planchette is, don’t you? The little heart-shaped piece of wood spiritualists use, with a pencil fast to it, to take down their silly ‘messages,’ Some spiritualistic fake was visiting town conducting seances and he claimed he’d discovered some sort of method for inducing greater receptivity–or something like that. I don’t know anything about spiritualism but little tags I’ve picked up from hearing Cousin Parnelia talk. Anyway, he was ‘teaching’ other mediums for a big price. And it came out that Cousin Parnelia had mortgaged the house for more than it was worth, and had used the money to take those ‘lessons.’ I couldn’t believe it for a minute. When I really understood what she’d done, I was so angry I felt like smashing both fists down on the piano keys and howling! I thought of my blue corduroy I’d given up–I was only fourteen and just crazy about clothes. Mother was sitting on the floor, scraping away at the table-leg. She got up, laid down her sandpaper, and asked Cousin Parnelia if she’d excuse us for a few minutes. Then she took me by the hand, as though I was a little girl. I felt like one too, I felt almost frightened by Mother’s face, and we both marched out of the house. She didn’t say a word. She took me down to our swimming-hole in the river. There is a big maple-tree leaning over that. It was a perfectly breathless autumn day like this, and the tree was shedding its leaves like that birch, just gently, slowly, steadily letting them go down into the still water. We sat down on the bank and watched them. The air was full of them, yet all so quiet, without any hurry. The water was red with them, they floated down on our shoulders, on our heads, in our laps–not a sound–so peaceful–so calm–so perfect. It was like the andante of the Kreutzer.

“I knew what Mother wanted, to get over being angry with Cousin Parnelia. And she was. I could see it in her face, like somebody in church. I felt it myself–all over, like an E string that’s been pulled too high, slipping down into tune when you turn the peg. But I didn’t _want_ to feel it. I _wanted_ to hate Cousin Parnelia. I thought it was awfully hard in Mother not to want us to have even the satisfaction of hating Cousin Parnelia! I tried to go on doing it. I remember I cried a little. But Mother never said a word–just sat there in that quiet autumn sunshine, watching the leaves falling–falling–and I had to do as she did. And by and by I felt, just as she did, that Cousin Parnelia was only a very small part of something very big.

“When we went in, Mother’s face was just as it always was, and we got Cousin Parnelia a cup of tea and gave her part of a boiled ham to take home and a dozen eggs and a loaf of graham bread, just as though nothing had happened.”

She stopped speaking. There was no sound at all but the delicate, forlorn whisper of the leaves.

“That is a very fine story!” said Page finally. He spoke with a measured, emphatic, almost solemn accent.

“Yes, it’s a very fine story,” murmured Sylvia a little wistfully. “It’s finer as a story than it was as real life. It was years before I could look at blue corduroy without feeling stirred up. I really cared more about my clothes than I did about that stupid, ignorant old woman. If it’s only a cheerful giver the Lord loves, He didn’t feel much affection for me.”

They began to retrace their steps. “You gave up the blue corduroy,” he commented as they walked on, “and you didn’t scold your silly old kinswoman.”

“That’s only because Mother hypnotized me. _She_ has character. I did it as Louis signed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, because Madame de Maintenon thought he ought to.”

“But she couldn’t hypnotize your brother Lawrence, althought he was so much younger. He didn’t give up his thirty-seven cents. I think you’re bragging without cause if you claim any engaging and picturesque absence of character.”

“Oh, Lawrence–he’s different! He’s extraordinary! Sometimes I think he is a genius. And it’s Judith who hypnotizes him. _She_ supplies his character.”

They emerged into an opening and walked in silence for some moments towards the Grand Trianon.

“You’re lucky, very lucky,” commented Page, “to have such an ample supply of character in the family. I’m an only child. There’s nobody to give me the necessary hypodermic supply of it at the crucial moments.” He went on, turning his head to look at the Great Trianon, very mellow in the sunshine. “It’s my belief, however, that at the crucial moments you have plenty of it of your own.”

“That’s a safe guess!” said Sylvia ironically, “since there never have _been_ any crucial moments in a life so uninterestingly eventless as mine. I wonder what I _would_ do,” she mused. “My own conviction is that–suppose I’d lived in the days of the Reformation–in the days of Christ–in the early Abolition days–” She had an instant certainty: “Oh, I have been entirely on the side of whatever was smooth, and elegant, and had amenity–I’d have hated the righteous side!”

Page did not look very deeply moved by this revelation of depravity. Indeed, he smiled rather amusedly at her, and changed the subject. “You said a moment ago that I couldn’t understand, because I’d always had money. Isn’t it a bit paradoxical to say that the people who haven’t a thing are the only ones who know anything about it?”

“But you couldn’t realize what _losing_ the money meant to us. You can’t know what the absence of money can do to a life.”

“I can know,” said Page, “what the presence of it cannot do for a life.” His accent implied rather sadly that the omissions were considerable.

“Oh, of course, of course,” Sylvia agreed. “There’s any amount it can’t do. After you have it, you must get the other things too.”

He brought his eyes down to her from a roving quest among the tops of the trees. “It seems to me you want a great deal,” he said quizzically.

“Yes, I do,” she admitted. “But I don’t see that you have any call to object to my wanting it. You don’t have to wish for everything at once. You have it already.”

He received this into one of his thoughtful silences, but presently it brought him to a standstill. They were within sight of the Grand Canal again, looking down from the terrace of the Trianon. He leaned against the marble balustrade and thrust his hands deep into his pockets. His clear eyes were clouded. He looked profoundly grave. “I am thirty-two years old,” he said, “and never for a moment of that time have I made any sense out of my position in life. If you call that ‘having everything’–“

It occurred to Sylvia fleetingly that she had never made any sense out of her position in life either, and had been obliged to do a great many disagreeable things into the bargain, but she kept this thought to herself, and looked conspicuously what she genuinely felt, a sympathetic interest. The note of plain direct sincerity which was Page’s hallmark never failed to arrest her attention, a little to arouse her wonder, and occasionally, for a reason that she did not like to dwell upon, somewhat to abash her. The reason was that he never spoke for effect, and she often did. He was not speaking for effect now: he seemed scarcely even to be speaking to her, rather to be musingly formulating something for his own enlightenment. He went on. “The fact is that there _is_ no sense to be made out of my situation in life. I am like a man with a fine voice, who has no ear.”

He showed surprise that Sylvia failed to follow this, and explained. “I mean the voice is no good to that kind of a man, it’s no good to anybody. It’s the craziest, accidental affair anyhow, haven’t you ever noticed it?–who draws the fine voices. Half the time–more than half the time, _most_ of the time it seems to me when I’ve been recently to a lot of concerts, the people who have the voices haven’t any other qualifications for being singers. And it’s so with coal-mines, with everything else that’s inherited. For five years now I’ve given up what I’d like to do, and I’ve tried, under the best _maestri_ I could find, to make something out of my voice, so to speak. And it’s no go. It’s in the nature of things that I can’t make a go of it. Over everything I do lies the taint that I’m the ‘owner’! They are suspicious of me, always will be–and rightly so. Anybody else not connected with the mediaeval idea of ‘possession’ could do better than I. The whole relation’s artificial. I’m in it for the preposterous reason that my father, operating on Wall Street, made a lucky guess,–as though I should be called upon to run a locomotive because my middle initial is L!”

Sylvia still felt the same slight sense of flatness when this recurring topic thrust itself into a personal talk; but during the last month she had adjusted herself to Page so that this no longer showed on the surface. She was indeed quite capable of taking an interest in the subject, as soon as she could modulate herself into the new key. “Yes, of course,” she agreed, “it’s like so many other things that are perfectly necessary to go on with, perfectly absurd when you look closely at them. My father nearly lost his position once for saying that all inheritance was wrong. But even he never had the slightest suggestion as to what to do about it, how to get an inheritance into the hands of the people who might make the best use of it.” She was used from her childhood to this sort of academic doubt of everything, conducted side by side with a practical acceptance of everything. Professor and Madame La Rue, in actual life devotedly faithful married lovers, staid, stout, habit-ridden elderly people, professed a theoretical belief in the flexibility of relationships sanctioned by the practice of free love. It was perhaps with this recollection in her mind that she suggested, “Don’t you suppose it will be like the institution of marriage, very, very gradually altered till it fits conditions better?”

“In the meantime, how about the cases of those who are unhappily married?”

“I don’t see anything for them but just to get along the best they can,” she told him.

“You think I’d better give up trying to do anything with my Colorado–?” he asked her, as though genuinely seeking advice.

“I should certainly think that five years was plenty long enough for a fair trial! You’d make a better ambassador than an active captain of industry, anyhow,” she said with conviction. Whereupon he bestowed on her a long, thoughtful stare, as though he were profoundly pondering her suggestion.

They moved forward towards the Grand Canal in silence. Privately she was considering his case hardly one of extreme hardship. Privately also, as they advanced nearer and nearer the spot where they had left Mrs. Marshall-Smith, she was a little dreading the return to the perfect breeding with which Aunt Victoria did not ask, or intimate, or look, the question which was in her mind after each of these strolling tete-a-tetes which consistently led nowhere. There were instants when Sylvia would positively have preferred the vulgar openness of a direct question to which she might have answered, with the refreshing effect to her of a little honest blood-letting: “Dear Aunt Victoria, I haven’t the least idea myself what’s happening! I’m simply letting myself go because I don’t see anything else to do. I have even no very clear idea as to what is going on inside my own head. I only know that I like Austin Page so much (in spite of a certain quite unforgotten episode) there would be nothing at all unpleasant about marrying him; but I also know that I didn’t feel the least interest in him until Helene told me about his barrels of money: I also know that I feel the strongest aversion to returning to the Spartan life of La Chance; and it occurs to me that these two things may throw considerable light on my ‘liking’ for Austin. As for what’s in _his_ mind, there is no subject on which I’m in blacker ignorance. And after being so tremendously fooled, in the case of Felix, about the degree of interest a man was feeling, I do not propose to take anything for granted which is not on the surface. It is quite possible that this singularly sincere and simple-mannered man may not have the slightest intention of doing anything more than enjoy a pleasant vacation from certain rather hair-splitting cares which seem to trouble him from time to time.” As they walked side by side along the stagnant waters, she was sending inaudible messages of this sort towards her aunt; she had even selected the particular mauve speck at the top of the steps which might be Mrs. Marshall-Smith.

In the glowing yellow gold of the sky, a faintly whirring dark-gray spot appeared: an airman made his way above the Grand Canal, passed above the Chateau, and disappeared. They had sat down on a bench, the better to crane their heads to watch him out of sight. Sylvia was penetrated with the strangeness of that apparition in that spot and thrilled out: “Isn’t it wonderful! Isn’t it wonderful! _Here!_”

“There’s something _more_ wonderful!” he said, indicating with his cane the canal before them, where a group of neat, poorly dressed, lower middle-class people looked proudly out from their triumphal progress in the ugly, gasping little motor-boat which operates at twenty-five centimes a trip.

She had not walked and talked a month with him for nothing. She knew that he did not refer to motor-boats as against aeroplanes. “You mean,” she said appreciatively, “you mean those common people going freely around the royal canal where two hundred years ago–“

He nodded, pleased by her quickness. “Two hundred years from now,” he conjectured, “the stubs of my checkbook will be exhibited in an historical museum along with the regalia of the last hereditary monarch.”

Here she did not follow, and she was too intelligent to pretend she did.

He lifted his eyebrows. “Relic of a quaint old social structure inexplicably tolerated so late as the beginning of the twentieth century,”

“Oh, coal-mines forever!” she said, smiling, her eyes brilliant with friendly mockery.

“Aye! _Toujours perdrix!_” he admitted. He continued to look steadily and seriously into her smiling, sparkling face, until, with a sudden pulse of premonition, she was stricken into a frightened gravity. And then, with no prelude, no approach, quite simply and directly, he spoke. “I wonder how much you care for me?” he said musingly, as he had said everything else that afternoon: and as she positively paled at the eeriness of this echo from her own thought, he went on, his voice vibrating in the deep organ note of a great moment, “You must know, of course, by this time that I care everything possible for you.”

Compressed into an instant of acute feeling Sylvia felt the pangs which had racked her as a little girl when she had stood in the schoolyard with Camilla Fingal before her, and the terrifying hostile eyes about her. Her two selves rose up against each other fiercely, murderously, as they had then. The little girl sprang forward to help the woman who for an instant hesitated. The fever and the struggle vanished as instantly as they had come. Sylvia felt very still, very hushed. Page had told her that she always rose to crucial moments. She rose to this one. “I don’t know,” she said as quietly as he, with as utter a bravery of bare sincerity, “I don’t know how much I care for you–but I think it is a great deal.” She rose upon a solemn wing of courage to a greater height of honesty. Her eyes were on his, as clear as his. The mere beauty of her face had gone like a lifted veil. For a instant he saw her as Sylvia herself did not dream she could be. “It is very hard,” said Sylvia Marshall, with clear eyes and trembling lips of honest humility, “for a girl with no money to know how much she cares for a very rich man.”

She had never been able to imagine what she would say if the moment should come. She had certainly not intended to say this. But an unsuspected vein of granite in her rang an instant echo to his truth. She was bewildered to see his ardent gaze upon her deepen to reverence. He took her hand in his and kissed it. He tried to speak, but his voice broke.

She was immensely moved to see him so moved. She was also entirely at a loss. How strangely different things always were from forecasts of them! They had suddenly taken the long-expected stride away from their former relation, but she did not know where they had arrived. What was the new status between them? What did Austin think she meant? It came to her with a shock that the new status between them was, on the surface, exactly what it was in reality; that the avowed relation between them was, as far as it went, precisely in accord with the facts of the case. The utter strangeness of this in any human relationship filled her with astonishment, with awe, almost with uneasiness. It seemed unnatural not to have to pretend anything!

Apparently it did not seem unnatural to the man beside her. “You are a very wonderful woman,” he now said, his voice still but partly under his control. “I had not thought that you could exist.” He took her hand again and continued more steadily: “Will you let me, for a little while longer, go on living near you? Perhaps things may seem clearer to us both, later–“

Sylvia was swept by a wave of gratitude as for some act of magnanimity. “_You_ are the wonderful one!” she cried. Not since the day Helene had told her who he was, had she felt so whole, so sound, so clean, as now. The word came rushing on the heels of the thought: “You make one feel so _clean_!” she said, unaware that he could scarcely understand her, and then she smiled, passing with her free, natural grace from the memorable pause, and the concentration of a great moment forward into the even-stepping advance of life. “That first day–even then you made me feel clean–that soap! that cold, clean water–it is your aroma!”

Their walk along the silent water, over the great lawn, and up the steps was golden with the level rays of the sun setting back of them, at the end of the canal, between the distant, sentinel poplars. Their mood was as golden as the light. Sometimes they spoke, sometimes they were silent. Truth walked between them.

Sylvia’s mind, released from the tension of that great moment, began making its usual, sweeping, circling explorations of its own depths. Not all that it found was of an equal good report. Once she thought fleetingly: “This is only a very, very pretty way of saying that it is all really settled. With his great wealth, he is like a reigning monarch–let him be as delicate-minded as he pleases, when he indicates a wish–” More than once–many, many times–Felix Morrison’s compelling dark eyes looked at her penetratingly, but she resolutely turned away her head from them, and from the impulse to answer their reproach even with an indignant, well-founded reproach of her own. Again and again she felt a sweet strangeness in her new position. The aroma of utter sincerity was like the scent of a wildflower growing in the sun, spicy, free. She wondered at a heart like his that could be at once ardent and subtle, that could desire so profoundly (the deep vibrations of that voice of yearning were in her ears still) and yet pause, and stand back, and wait, rather than force a hair’s breadth of pretense. How he had liberated her! And once she found herself thinking, “I shall have sables myself, and diamonds, and a house as great as Molly’s, and I shall learn how to entertain ambassadors, as she will never know.” She was ashamed of this, she knew it to be shockingly out of key with the grand passage behind them. But she had thought it.

And, as these thoughts, and many more, passed through her mind, as she spoke with a quiet peace, or was silent, she was transfigured into a beauty almost startling, by the accident of the level golden beams of light back of her. Her aureole of bright hair glowed like a saint’s halo. The curiously placed lights and unexpected shadows brought out new subtleties in the modeling of her face. Her lightened heart gleamed through her eyes, like a lighted lamp. After a time, the man fell into a complete silence, glancing at her frequently as though storing away a priceless memory….

CHAPTER XXXV

“A MILESTONE PASSED, THE ROAD SEEMS CLEAR”

As the “season” heightened, the beautiful paneled walls of Mrs. Marshall-Smith’s salon were frequently the background for chance gatherings of extremely appropriate callers. They seemed a visible emanation of the room, so entirely did they represent what that sort of a room was meant to contain. They were not only beautifully but severely dressed, with few ornaments, and those few a result of the same concentrated search for the rare which had brought together the few bibelots in the room, which had laid the single great dull Persian rug on the unobtrusively polished oaken floor, which had set in the high, south windows the boxes of feathery green plants with delicate star-like flowers.

And it was not only in externals that these carefully brushed and combed people harmonized with the mellow beauty of their background. They sat, or stood, moved about, took their tea, and talked with an extraordinary perfection of manner. There was not a voice there, save perhaps Austin Page’s unstudied tones, which was not carefully modulated in a variety of rhythm and pitch which made each sentence a work of art. They used, for the most part, low tones and few gestures, but those well chosen. There was an earnest effort apparent to achieve true conversational give-and-take, and if one of the older men found himself yielding to the national passion for lengthy monologues on a favorite theme, or to the mediocre habit of anecdote, there was an instant closing in on him of carefully casual team-work on the part of the others which soon reduced him to the tasteful short comment and answer which formed the framework of the afternoon’s social activities.

The topics of the conversation were as explicitly in harmony with the group-ideal as the perfectly fitting gloves of the men, or the smooth, burnished waves of the women’s hair. They talked of the last play at the Francais, of the exhibitions then on view at the Petit Palais, of a new tenor in the choir of the Madeleine, of the condition of the automobile roads in the Loire country, of the restoration of the stained glass at Bourges.

On such occasions, a good deal of Sylvia’s attention being given to modulating her voice and holding her hands and managing her skirts as did the guests of the hour, she usually had an impression that the conversation was clever. Once or twice, looking back, she had been somewhat surprised to find that she could remember nothing of what had been said. It occurred to her, fleetingly, that of so much talk, some word ought to stick in her usually retentive memory; but she gave the matter no more thought. She had also been aware, somewhat dimly, that Austin Page was more or less out of drawing in the carefully composed picture presented on those social afternoons. He had the inveterate habit of being at his ease under all circumstances, but she had felt that he took these great people with a really exaggerated lack of seriousness, answering their chat at random, and showing no chagrin when he was detected in the grossest ignorance about the latest move of the French Royalist party, or the probabilities as to the winner of the Grand Prix. She had seen in the corners of his mouth an inexplicable hidden imp of laughter as he gravely listened, cup in hand, to the remarks of the beautiful Mrs. William Winterton Perth about the inevitable promiscuity of democracy, and he continually displayed a tendency to gravitate into the background, away from the center of the stage where their deference for his name, fortune, and personality would have placed him. Sylvia’s impression of him was far from being one of social brilliance, but rather of an almost wilful negligence. She quite grew used to seeing him, a tall, distinguished figure, sitting at ease in a far corner, and giving to the scene a pleasant though not remarkably respectful attention.

On such an afternoon in January, the usual routine had been preserved. The last of the callers, carrying off Mrs. Marshall-Smith with her, had taken an urbane, fair-spoken departure. Sylvia turned back from the door of the salon, feeling a fine glow of conscious amenity, and found that Austin Page’s mood differed notably from her own. He had lingered for a tete-a-tete, as was so frequently his habit, and now stood before the fire, his face all one sparkle of fun. “Don’t they do it with true American fervor!” he remarked. “It would take a microscope to tell the difference between them and a well-rehearsed society scene on the stage of the Francais! That’s their model, of course. It is positively touching to see old Colonel Patterson subduing his twang and shutting the lid down on his box of comic stories. I should think Mrs. Patterson might allow him at least that one about the cowboy and the tenderfoot who wanted to take a bath!”

The impression made on Sylvia had not in the least corresponded to this one; but with a cat-like twist of her flexible mind, she fell on her feet, took up his lead, and deftly produced the only suitable material she had at command. “They _seem_ to talk well, about such interesting things, and yet I can never remember anything they say. It’s odd,” she sat down near the fireplace with a great air of pondering the strange phenomenon.

“No, it isn’t odd,” he explained, dropping into the chair opposite her and stretching out his long legs to the blaze. “It’s only people who do something, who have anything to say. These folks don’t do anything except get up and sit down the right way, and run their voices up and down the scale so that their great-aunts would faint away to hear them! They haven’t any energy left over. If some one would only write out suitable parts for them to memorize, the performance would be perfect!” He threw back his head and laughed aloud, the sound ringing through the room. Sylvia had seldom seen him so light-heartedly amused. He explained: “I haven’t seen this sort of solemn, genteel posturing for several years now, and I find it too delicious! To see the sweet, invincible American naivete welling up in their intense satisfaction in being so sophisticated,–oh, the harmless dears!” He cried out upon them gaily, with the indulgence of an adult who looks on at children’s play.

Sylvia was a trifle breathless, seeing him disappear so rapidly down this unexpected path, but she was for the moment spared the effort to overtake him by the arrival of Tojiko with a tray of fresh mail. “Oh, letters from home!” Sylvia rejoiced, taking a bulky one and a thin one from the pile. “The fat one is from Father,” she said, holding it up. “He is like me, terribly given to loquaciousness. We always write each other reams when we’re apart. The little flat one is from Judith. She never can think of anything to say except that she is still alive and hopes I am, and that her esteem for me is undiminished. Dear Spartan Judy!”

“Do you know,” said the man opposite her, “if I hadn’t met you, I should have been tempted to believe that the institution of the family had disappeared. I never saw anything like you Marshalls! You positively seem to have a real regard for each other in spite of what Bernard Shaw says about the relations of blood-kin. You even, incredible as it seems, appear to feel a mutual respect!”

“That’s a very pretty compliment indeed,” said Sylvia, smiling at him flashingly, “and I’m going to reward you by reading some of Judith’s letter aloud. Letters do paint personalities so, don’t they?”

He settled himself to listen.

“Oh, it won’t take long!” she reassured him laughingly. She read:

“‘DEAR SYLVIE: Your last letter about the palaces at Versailles was very interesting. Mother looked you up on the plan of the grounds in Father’s old Baedeker. I’m glad to know you like Paris so much. Our chief operating surgeon says he thinks the opportunities at the School of Medicine in Paris are fully as good as in Vienna, and chances for individual diagnoses greater. Have you visited that yet?'” Over the letter Sylvia raised a humorous eyebrow at Page, who smiled, appreciative of the point.

She went on: “‘Lawrence is making me a visit of a few days. Isn’t he a queer boy! I got Dr. Wilkinson to agree, as a great favor, to let Lawrence see a very interesting operation. Right in the middle of it, Lawrence fainted dead away and had to be carried out. But when he came to, he said he wouldn’t have missed it for anything, and before he could really sit up he was beginning a poem about the “cruel mercy of the shining knives.”‘” Sylvia shook her head. “Isn’t that Lawrence! Isn’t that Judith!”

Page agreed thoughtfully, their eyes meeting in a trustful intimacy. They themselves might have been bound together by a family tie, so wholly natural seemed their sociable sitting together over the fire. Sylvia thought with an instant’s surprise, “Isn’t it odd how close he has come to seem–as though I’d always, always known him; as though I could speak to him of anything–nobody else ever seemed that way to me, nobody!”

She read on from the letter: “‘All of us at St. Mary’s are feeling very sore about lawyers. Old Mr. Winthrop had left the hospital fifteen thousand dollars in his will, and we’d been counting on that to make some changes in the operating-room and the men’s accident ward that are awfully needed. And now comes along a miserable lawyer who finds something the matter with the will, and everything goes to that worthless Charlie Winthrop, who’ll probably blow it all in on one grand poker-playing spree. It makes me tired! We can’t begin to keep up with the latest X-ray developments without the new apparatus, and only the other day we lost a case, a man hurt in a railroad wreck, that I know we could have pulled through if we’d been better equipped! Well, hard luck! But I try to remember Mother’s old uncle’s motto, “Whatever else you do, _don’t_ make a fuss!” Father has been off for a few days, speaking before Alumni reunions. He looks very well. Mother has got her new fruit cellar fixed up, and it certainly is great. She’s going to keep the carrots and parsnips there too. I’ve just heard that I’m going to graduate first in my class–thought you might like to know. Have a good time, Sylvia. And don’t let your imagination get away with you.

“‘Your loving sister,

“‘JUDITH,'”

“Of all the perfect characterizations!” murmured Page, as Sylvia finished. “I can actually see her and hear her!”

“Oh, there’s nobody like Judith!” agreed Sylvia, falling into a reverie, her eyes on the fire.

The peaceful silence which ensued spoke vividly of the intimacy between them.

After a time Sylvia glanced up, and finding her companion’s eyes abstractedly fixed on the floor, she continued to look into his face, noting its fine, somewhat gaunt modeling, the level line of his brown eyebrows, the humor and kindness of his mouth. The winter twilight cast its first faint web of blue shadow into the room. The fire burned with a steady blaze.

As minute after minute of this hushed, wordless calm continued, Sylvia was aware that something new was happening to her, that something in her stirred which had never before made its presence known. She felt very queer, a little startled, very much bewildered. What was that half-thought fluttering a dusky wing in the back of her mind? It came out into the twilight and she saw it for what it was. She had been wondering what she would feel if that silent figure opposite her should rise and take her in his arms. As she looked at that tender, humorous mouth, she had been wondering what she would feel to press her lips upon it?

She was twenty-three years old, but so occupied with mental effort and physical activity had been her life, that not till now had she known one of those half-daring, half-frightened excursions of the fancy which fill the hours of any full-blooded idle girl of eighteen. It was a woman grown with a girl’s freshness of impression, who knew that ravished, scared, exquisite moment of the first dim awakening of the senses. But because it was a woman grown with a woman’s capacity for emotion, the moment had a solemnity, a significance, which no girl could have felt. This was no wandering, flitting, winged excursion. It was a grave step upon a path from which there was no turning back. Sylvia had passed a milestone. But she did not know this. She sat very still in her chair as the twilight deepened, only knowing that she could not take her eyes from those tender, humorous lips. That was the moment when if the man had spoken, if he had but looked at her …

But he was following out some thought of his own, and now rose, went to Mrs. Marshall-Smith’s fine, small desk, snapped on an electric light, and began to write.

When he finished, he handed a bit of paper to Sylvia. “Do you suppose your sister would be willing to let me make up for the objectionable Charlie Winthrop’s deficiences?” he asked with a deprecatory air as though he feared a refusal.

Sylvia looked at the piece of paper. It was a check for fifteen thousand dollars. She held there in her hand seven years of her father’s life, as much money as they all had lived on from the years she was sixteen until now. And this man had but to dip pen into ink to produce it. There was something stupefying about the thought to her. She no longer saw the humor and tenderness of his mouth. She looked up at him and thought, “What an immensely rich man he is!” She said to him wonderingly, “You can’t imagine how strange it is–like magic–not to be believed–to have money like that!”

His face clouded. He looked down uncertainly at his feet and away at the lighted electric bulb. “I thought it might please your sister,” he said and turned away.

Sylvia was aghast to think that she had perhaps wounded him. He seemed to fear that he had flaunted his fortune in her face. He looked acutely uncomfortable. She found that, as she had thought, she could say anything, anything to him, and say it easily. She went to him quickly and laid her hand on his arm. “It’s splendid,” she said, looking deeply and frankly into his eyes. “Judith will be too rejoiced! It _is_ like magic. And nobody but you could have done it so that the money seems the least part of the deed!”

He looked down at her, touched, moved, his eyes very tender, but sad as though with a divination of the barrier his fortune eternally raised between them.

The door opened suddenly and Mrs. Marshall-Smith came in quickly, not looking at them at all. From the pale agitation of her face they recoiled, startled and alarmed. She sat down abruptly as though her knees had given way under her. Her gloved hands were perceptibly trembling in her lap. She looked straight at Sylvia, and for an instant did not speak. If she had rushed in screaming wildly, her aspect to Sylvia’s eyes would scarcely have been more eloquent of portentous news to come. It was a fitting introduction to what she now said to them in an unsteady voice: “I’ve just heard–a despatch from Jamiaca–something terrible has happened. The news came to the American Express office when I was there. It is awful. Molly Sommerville driving her car alone–an appalling accident to the steering-gear, they think. Molly found dead under the car.”

CHAPTER XXXVI

THE ROAD IS NOT SO CLEAR

It shocked Sylvia that Molly’s death should make so little difference. After one sober evening with the stunning words fresh before their eyes, the three friends quickly returned to their ordinary routine of life. It was not that they did not care, she reflected–she _did_ care. She had cried and cried at the thought of that quivering, vital spirit broken by the inert crushing mass of steel–she could not bring herself to think of the soft body, mangled, bloody. Austin cared too: she was sure of it; but when they had expressed their pity, what more could they do? The cabled statement was so bald, they hardly could believe it–they failed altogether to realize what it meant–they had no details on which to base any commentary. She who had lived so intensely, was dead. They were sorry for her. That was all.

As an apology for their seeming callousness they reiterated Aunt Victoria’s dictum: “We can know nothing about it until Felix comes. Let us hold our minds in suspense until we know what to think.” That Morrison would be in Paris soon, none of them doubted. Indeed, they united in insisting on the number of natural–oh, perfectly natural–reasons for his coming. He had always spent a part of every winter there, had in fact a tiny apartment on the Rue St. Honore which dated from his bachelor life; and now he had a double reason for coming, since much of Molly’s fortune chanced to be in French bonds. Her father had been (among other things) American agent for the Comptoir National des Escomptes, and he had taken advantage of his unusual opportunities for acquiring solid French and remunerative Algerian securities. Page had said at once that Morrison would need to go through a good many formalities, under the French laws. So pending fuller information, they did not discuss the tragedy. Their lives ran on, and Molly, dead, was in their minds almost as little as Molly, living but absent, had been.

It was only two months before Felix Morrison arrived in Paris. They had expected him. They had spoken of the chance of his arrival on this or that day. Sylvia had rehearsed all the possible forms of self-possession for their first meeting; but on the rainy February afternoon when she came in from representing Aunt Victoria at a reception and saw him sitting by the fire, her heart sank down and stopped for an instant, and when it went on beating she could hear no sound but the drumming of her pulse. The back of his chair was towards her. All she could see as she stood for a moment in the doorway was his head, the thick, graying dark hair, and one long-fingered, sensitive, beautiful hand lying on the arm of the chair. At the sight, she felt in her own palm the soft firmness of those fingers as palpably as ever she had in reality.

The instant’s pause before Aunt Victoria saw her standing there, gave her back her self-control. When Mrs. Marshall-Smith turned and gravely held out her hand, Sylvia came forward with a sober self-possession. The man turned too, sprang up with an exclamation apparently of surprise, “Miss Marshall, you _here_!” and extended his hand. Sylvia, searching his face earnestly, found it so worn, saw in it such dark traces of suffering and sorrow, that the quick tears of sympathy stood in her eyes.

Her dread of the meeting, a morbid dread that had in it an acknowledged element of horror, vanished. Before that moment she had seen only Molly’s face as it had looked the day of their desperate talk, white and despairing, and resolutely bent over the steering-wheel. She had not been able to imagine Felix’ face at all, had instinctively put it out of her mind; but as she looked into it now, her fear of it disappeared. It was the fine, sensitive face of a fine, sensitive man who has known a great shock. What had she feared she would see there? He was still holding her hand, very much affected at seeing her, evidently still in a super-sensitive condition when everything affected him strongly. “She loved you–she admired you so!” he said, his wonderful voice wavering and uncertain. Sylvia’s tears fell openly at this. She sat down on a low stool near her aunt’s knees. “I can’t believe it–I haven’t been able to believe it!” she told him; “Molly was–she was more alive than anybody I ever saw!”

“If you had seen her that morning,” he told them both,–“like a flame of vitality–almost frightening–so vivid. She waved good-bye, and then that was not enough; she got out of the car and ran back up the hotel-step to say good-bye for just those few moments–and was off–such youth! such youth in all her–“

Sylvia cried out, “Oh, no! no! it’s too dreadful!” She felt the horror sweep down on her again; but now it did not bear Felix’ face among its baneful images. He stood there, shocked, stricken, but utterly bewildered, utterly ignorant–for the moment in her relief she had called his ignorance utter innocence …

They did not see him again for many days, and when he came, very briefly, speaking of business technicalities which absorbed him, he was noticeably absent and careworn. He looked much older. The gray in his thick hair had increased. He looked very beautiful and austere to Sylvia. They exchanged no more than the salutations of arrival and farewell.

Then one day, as she and Aunt Victoria and Austin Page strolled down the long gallery of the Louvre, they came upon him, looking at the Ribera Entombment. He joined them, walking with them through the Salon Carre and out to the Winged Victory, calling Sylvia’s attention to the Botticelli frescoes beyond on the landing. “It’s the first time I’ve been here,” he told them, his only allusion to what lay back of him. “It is like coming back to true friends. Blessed be all true friends.” He shook hands with them, and went away down the great stairway, a splendid figure of dignity and grace.

After this he came once and again to the apartment of the Rue de Presbourg, generally it would appear to use the piano. He had none in his own tiny _pied-a-terre_ and he missed it. Sylvia immensely liked his continuing to cling for a time to the simple arrangements of his frugal bachelor days. He could now of course have bought a thousand pianos. They understood how he would miss his music, and stole in quietly when, upon opening the door, Tojiko told them that Mr. Morrison had come in, and they heard from the salon his delicately firm touch on the keys. Sometimes they listened from their rooms, sometimes the two women took possession of the little octagonal room off the salon, all white paneling and gilt chairs, and listened there; sometimes, as the weeks went on and an especially early spring began to envelop Paris in a haze of sunshine and budding leaves, they stepped out to listen on the wrought-iron balcony which looked down the long, shining vista of the tree-framed avenue. For the most part he played Bach, grave, courageous, formal, great-hearted music.

Sometimes he went away with no more than a nod and a smile to them, but more and more, when he had finished, he came out where they were, and stood or sat to exchange brief impressions on the enchanting season, or on some social or aesthetic treat which “_ces dames_” had been enjoying. Austin Page was frequently with them, as in the earlier part of the winter, and it was finally he himself who one day took the step of asking Morrison if he would not go with them to the Louvre. “No one could appreciate more than Miss Marshall what has always been such a delight to us all.”

They went, and not only once. That was the beginning of another phase; a period when, as he began to take up life again, he turned to his old friends to help him do it. He saw almost no one else, certainly no one else there, for he was sure to disappear upon the arrival of a caller, or the announcement of an expedition in which other people were included. But he returned again and again to the Louvre with them, his theory of galleries necessitating frequent visits. Nothing could be more idiotic, he held, than to try to see on one occasion all, or even half, or even a tenth part, of a great collection of works of art. “It is exactly as reasonable,” he contended, “as to read through on the same day every poem in a great anthology. Who could have anything but nausea for poetry after such a gorge? And they _must_ hate pictures or else be literally blind to them, the people who look at five hundred in a morning! If I had looked at every picture in the Long Gallery in one walk through it, I should thrust my cane through the Titian Francis-First itself when I came to the Salon Carre.”

So he took them to see only a few, five or six, carefully selected things–there was one wonderful day when he showed them nothing but the Da Vinci Saint Anne, and the Venus of Melos, comparing the dissimilar beauty of those two divine faces so vitally, that Sylvia for days afterwards, when she closed her eyes and saw them, felt that she looked on two living women. She told them this and, “Which one do you see most?” he asked her. “Oh, the Saint Anne,” she told him.

He seemed dissatisfied. But she did not venture to ask him why. They lived in an atmosphere where omissions were vital.

Sylvia often wondered in those days if there ever had been a situation so precariously balanced which continued to hang poised and stable, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day. There were moments when her head was swimming with moral dizziness. She wondered if such moments ever came to the two quiet, self-controlled men who came and went, with cordial, easy friendliness, in and out of the appartement on the Rue de Presbourg. They gave no sign of it, they gave no sign of anything beyond the most achieved appearance of a natural desire to be obliging and indulgent to the niece of an old friend. This appearance was kept up with such unflagging perseverance that it almost seemed consciously concerted between them. They so