Chapter III: Part 3

Jenny, standing before a full-length, three-sided mirror, did an uncharacteristic thing. She removed from the front of her peignoir of coffee-colored lace, a small cascade of ruffles, which left her chest bare, daubed powder on to the V, and then stood off to survey. Her bathroom, an enormous one guiltless of tile, cleverly disguised in rugs, taffetas, a sunken bathtub with growing plants on its coping, and porcelain water-birds on little stands against a background of glazed Chinese wall-paper, reflected her figure over and over again. There was no angle from which she could not contemplate herself. Profile. Semi-profile. Full front. Back. She bent into them all, surveying. She was the angular type of woman that wears high neck-ruffs well. She owned dog-collars of jewels; principally pearls with vertical bars of sapphires, emeralds, diamonds, or jade. She need not have feared for her neck and shoulders. It was just that, somehow, the close collar, the narrow cuff, the high ruff of fur at the hands and wrists and neck, gave Jenny what air of distinction she could claim. Tall, narrow, her high coiffure boldly revealing her ears and planes of cheek, there was something studiedly, if remotely, Bernhardtian about Jenny. At least she grasped at the wisp of resemblance and pandered to it for all it was worth.

Yet, standing before the mirror, holding the cascade of coffee-colored lace alternately against her chest and then removing it, she finally decided to leave it off, feeling strangely not herself as she did so.

As a matter of fact, she was not herself. So strangely not herself that once she crossed her arms over her flat chest and hugged her shoulders in an exultant little fashion.

The no-longer-to-be-evaded truth of it was that Jenny, whose impeccable wifehood, extending over a period of twenty-three years, had been an easy virtue, was excited away and beyond her usual and curiously volatile air of composure, by the fact that a young Argentine, named Ramond Lopez, was coming in for a five-o’clock cocktail with her in the conservatory.

It had been arranged in the hurried breaking up of a party at the Ambassadeur the previous afternoon. Abbey Chadwick had asked twenty to tea and dancing, including young Lopez, who was said to be a paid dancer at Florentine’s, a gigolo of exalted type who mingled socially by virtue of his connections, but who, nevertheless, was paid by the management. He had sat next to Jennifer at the Ambassadeur and had coaxed her to attempt a tango which she had never before ventured on a public floor. He and a Spanish girl professionally known as Cleo, had danced two Brazilian ballroom numbers at one of Jennifer’s dinner dances a few weeks previous, and been paid handsomely for it.

The son of a partially defunct coffee king, whose fortune had been spent in defending his daughter Bianca from the charge of having shot and instantly killed her young _roué_ of a millionaire husband as he was leaving his racing-stable, Ramond’s anomalous position kept him hovering precariously between two worlds. He had been a mere lad in school, in Switzerland, at the time of the notorious case of Bianca Lopez Dakin, but the swift tides of family fortune, the death of his father, a little later the death of Bianca, and the paltriness of his inheritance, had swept him from Rio Janeiro. He was any young man with a dancing-figure and a personable air.

It was said of him, as it was said of his kind, that women contributed chiefly toward his support. Possibly. It is certain, however, that Jenny, whose social world was a happy hunting-ground for the hired or more subtly rewarded gigolo, had never bartered in the strange coin of that realm except in the out-and-out terms of signing checks to paid entertainers for services rendered and received. The case of Ramond had been different from the case of Nemo, the case of Tom and Dick and Harry, only to the extent that he had occasionally been present in social capacity at functions where she and Jennifer dined or danced.

It had all come about so suddenly that it seemed to Jenny her confused senses must be playing her a prank. As tidy about her emotions as she was about the objects on her dressing-table, and more and more given of late years to going about to all occasions and functions without Rarick, the man beside her at dinner or in an opera box or with whom she danced, catalogued readily according to these tidy emotions.

Whatever Rarick might hold against her, Jenny was given to reminding herself, infidelity by word or action, as wife, or mother to his children, could never be one of his indictments.

The former, on those not infrequent occasions when she brought this subject to the fore, Rarick let rest uncontroversial; but the latter, which was scarcely true to Rarick, was more than he could hear without rebuttal. The very fact that Jenny’s children adored her, caused him to contend bitterly that she misused her power by smothering them beneath bracelets and shields.

Be that as it may, here was Jenny now, standing before her mirror, hugging her shoulders and shaken to the very foundation of that temperamental frigidity which had always stood her in such good stead. Ramond Lopez, cross between a gigolo, and somebody or other’s tame robin, and who taught the tango for fifteen dollars a lesson at Palm Beach during the season, had suddenly walked devastatingly into her consciousness. She could trace its inchoate beginnings back to the night of Jennifer’s dinner dance, when he and the Spanish girl, the fellow Nemo and a beautifully sinuous little Russian, had alternated in exhibition dances. Later Ramond had asked her to sit out a tango with him in Rarick’s conservatory, of all places! A brackish retreat, this erstwhile breakfast-room, of hot-smelling soils and difficult pottings in Osmunda leaves and sphagnum moss, and which was devoted almost exclusively to orchid plants imported from Brazil and Japan. In the various processes of their hybridization, they were seldom, as Jenny and Jennifer were constantly complaining, sufficiently presentable to save them florist’s expenditures.

Jenny was not the one to invite the highly special attentions of slim young men with Latin eyes. She danced with them, dined, and cocktailed, even flirted in that rather excited brittle manner of hers; but, outside of that, her slate was clean. The security of that state of her mind was unconsciously apparent in the thrust of her clean scimitar-thin features.

A young wag of a society writer for a caustic weekly had described Jenny’s face as two profiles pasted together. It was enormously apt. Lopez, at Jennifer’s dance, had sat among the unflowering hybrids of Rarick’s odontiodes, cypripediums, and other curious orchids of purely botanical interest, and with his immediate eyes covering her face like a mask of sweet ether, had solemnly refuted this delicious indictment, paying her, instead, breathy compliments that somehow failed to arouse her usual sure-fire ability to laugh a bad boy cruelly into his place.

At Ramond’s lispings, something starved in Jenny had lifted its desolate head. Excepting for the months of courtship, when an eager, rather timidly idealistic young clerk had wooed the intelligent-looking Jenny Avery on the “chigger”-infested banks of the Meramac, there had been precious few words, except in platitude, addressed warmly and closely into Jenny’s eyes.

Almost immediately after her marriage, the alienating affair of the twenty-five hundred had mattered terribly in their relationship.

Bitter with having given, bitter with having allowed himself to accept, once Rarick had seen her reaction set in, the honey dried out of the brief flower of marriage.

No, it had been many a day since close, fervent things had been said to Jenny. Ramond had made her suddenly and hurtingly aware of it. Something in her had thawed and was aching. Ramond, half her age, had interpreted her with a melancholy kind of wisdom.

“Why do you try to deceive me, as you do the others, with your icy manner?” he said to her, with the slight accent that lifted his lips in a flare off his square white teeth.

“My dear boy,” she said, starting to be brittle and annihilating in the cocksure way she had, “you are now in the act of telling me how misunderstood I am.”

To her surprise, he was neither annihilated nor subdued. He caught both her slim cool wings of hands, half-buried under wrist-ruffs, in the grip of his own.

“You must not talk like that to me. You do not mean what you say. You are the most interesting woman that I know. One cannot bear to be in the company of the insipid young girls, once he has known you. Do not pretend, Mrs. Rarick, that you need to be told that you are fascinating. Sometimes I think you are as Dante would have been if he had been beautiful and a woman. Sometimes I think you are most like Bernhardt. Then I think you are like the best of both of them.”

“Why, you foolish boy!” she said, the words, from lack of conviction, slow and stiff on her lips. American men simply did not look at one like that. They had not the eyes....

“I want to see more of you, Mrs. Rarick. I want to know you. Am I impertinent----”

He was.

“--or just one more admirer. After all, I cannot be what you call in America, such a ‘total loss,’ Mrs. Rarick, or I would not have the good sense to recognize so quickly a brilliant and worth-while woman when I see one. It is easy to dance with your beautiful girls over here--but they are not so nimble with their brains as with their feet and tongues. Am I impertinent?”

He was. Yet how amusing of him! Here was no mere patent-leather-haired gigolo, with a gift for wearing evening clothes and making middle-aged women horrible. Impudent of him to have insinuated his fingers up under the fur cuff of her long, tight sleeve--in flames--she did not withdraw them----

* * * * *

There was a letter between Jenny’s bodice and her flesh, as she maneuvered before the mirror. It was a line from Ramond, confirming what had been the hurried arrangement for this afternoon’s cocktail.

Lest you forget what is unforgettably important to me. This afternoon
at five, where the orchids dare not bloom for fear of comparison.

RAMON.

The “d” off the “Ramon” had somehow excited her more than the note itself. She was aware, as she sat up that morning in bed and put the square white envelope back on her breakfast tray, that her legs, which were stretched between the sheets, were trembling and would have doubled under her had she attempted to stand. The place at her side, with the covers folded back by Rarick, as he had risen from his night there, was still dented with his body. Through the years, there had been no gesture from either of them to alter these arrangements in any of their town or country homes, with the exception of the camp in the Adirondacks, where the women’s quarters of _de luxe_ simplicity were in one twenty-four-room log building, and the men’s in another of equal size.

A wave of self-pity, not unmixed with anger, drenched Jenny as she sat and dipped strawberries-in-November, into a small brown bowl of sour cream. What a starveling she must be, if just the ordinary homage and admiration from a boy such as Ramon could bring about all this turmoil within her.

Why, in the last few years she and Rarick had left off even pecking each other good-night. She had been aware of it, and, in the spirit of letting the old cat die, had managed to seem asleep first, if they retired together, which was rare.

It was well over twenty years since the days when he had placed kisses against her lips when he came home evenings, or stretched himself out after dinner on a couch, holding her hand while she sat beside him and read aloud. Twenty years, or was it ever? There were limits to the memory of the flesh. The feeling of the print of caresses had long since died from Jenny’s. Not that Jenny was a type to whom the end of every road was the arms of the man she loves. Her temperamental frigidity saw to that. And yet, suddenly sitting there in bed, the sense of desiring a great deal and being not desired, stabbed through her consciousness.

Life was passing her by. And for what? For nothing more than a dumb-animal response to the instinct to abide by her sense of wifely duty. For what? For Rarick, to whom even her fidelity might be a matter of indifference? For her children? Bless them, they were no worse and possibly not much better than the average. Life was going to be bountiful to them. Jennifer would marry brilliantly. Avery, you somehow felt about him, even then, in his adolescence, was sure in some way to be as distinguished as he was rich. She would be crowded out of their lives. And then what? A specter of an old age with Rarick, whose eccentricities and cloistered habits were sure to grow upon him, stalked down a corridor of her imagination--then what?----Thank God, thank God, it was still left in her to feel that cut of thrill at the left-off “d.”

Ramon was coming.

She handed the small cascade of ruffles to the maid in the Breton cap and hurried out as if she dared not glance back at this symbol of the soiled inner workings of the mind of Jenny Avery Rarick, mother of two grown children.

Ramon was in the conservatory, poking about among goldfish which darted about a beautiful wall-fountain of Pulhamite stone that Rarick had brought over, with its lichen still clinging to it, from a rock-garden he had admired in Taormina.

He kissed her hand, lifting back some lace first, and then regarded her in long silence, a slight film of moisture across his eyes making them deeper.

The quick picture of half a dozen men she knew, including Rarick, flashed across her mind’s eye. How clumsily they would have paid this same simple tribute. Mark House, an American who had been fabulously rich all his life and lived much abroad, always employed this continental greeting. But how clumsily, creaking where his shirt bent, and leaving the disagreeable feeling of smear across the knuckles. A Count Luckow, whom Jenny suspected of casting amorous eyes at Jennifer, who had only ridicule for him, had this habit gracefully. Rarick, somehow, would not visualize.

She could imagine that, to a young man like Ramon, whose masculinity was not mere maleness, there must be something chapped and a little funny about the unkissed hands of American women.

Twenty and more years of the perfunctory pats of greeting and adieu from Rarick had been Jenny’s sole share in a world which she was suddenly aware must be filled with the grand passions between women and men. Not that anything she had not received from Rarick mattered, but the slow anger of resentment flared just the same.

Women who had been less meticulous than she about their marriage-vows were loved women. There were women of Jenny’s acquaintance, of great wealth and social security, who had not been meticulous, whose wifehood was far from irreproachable, but who somehow had the gift of demanding full measure of homage from their husbands.

Precious little Jenny had demanded or received. A stab of self-pity, the immemorial self-pity of a woman feeling denied, cut Jenny. Rarick as a husband and lover! It was inconceivable that he could be missing in his turn any of those things he denied her. The lover had died back there in the beginning; and for the twenty and more subsequent years she had been living with a husband. What would even this Latin-eyed youngster, who was paying her pretty, slightly old-fashioned compliments, and letting his eye linger far too long on the spot where the insert of ruffles had been removed, think of her sterile kind of life if he knew? Really, his eyes, black-velvet ones of deepest nap, were naughty, roving as they did, from hers down to the tip of the V-neck which she had calculated before her mirror. A wave of self-disgust made her redden. With a prim reaction, over which she had no control, she suddenly felt stripped, and withdrew her hand, to clap it against her chest.

He regarded her with gentle reproach.

“Why are you like that?”

“Like what?”

“Shy, like a--like one of those beautiful wild pumas that used to live on the edge of one of my father’s estates in the interior of Peru.”

Puma! She did not know whether to laugh down what she regarded as his absurdity or incinerate him with the rebuff of which she was so capable.

“You don’t understand the strange wild beauty of these graceful creatures. You must not think the comparison odious, Mrs. Rarick.”

What were you to do with a boy like that, whose sweetness was indomitable?

They sat on the coping of the fountain, against a back-rest formed by a Malaga-grape vine the thickness of an arm. Delicate Asia Minor aconite crawled along the coping; and even though not one of Rarick’s hundreds of species of orchids was at the moment in bloom, an overheated air of exotic humidity prevailed.

“You’re a silly boy for making me indulge your whim for a cocktail in this ridiculous conservatory of my husband’s, where nothing ever really blooms, but unpronounceable, unwearable species and expensive botanical things are always about to happen and somehow don’t. Except by the time orchids are ridiculously cheap at every corner florist’s.”

The impersonal portion went sailing over his head.

“I know it is only a little glass house, but it cannot ever seem quite that to me, since it is where you first let me dare know you a little better.”

“I’m afraid, dear boy, there is nothing to know. If I am still water, I am not only the kind that doesn’t run deep, but perhaps the kind that doesn’t run at all.”

“You do not expect me to believe that.”

No, she did not, but she said it again.

“You are a liberal education to me.”

“How liberal?”

“I am tired of all your pretty girls here in this country who have no faces in particular. You have a face.”

“My dear boy, are you given to profound observations like that?”

“You must not make me ridiculous. I mean you have a face that hangs like a cameo in the memory.”

She looked at him, and, through the glazed fabric of a skin that did not easily take the flush, blushed with the surprised sweetness of a girl.

“You naughty Latin boy. I am old enough to be your mother.”

“I am glad, though, that you are not. Fancy the tragedy of having to be no more than son to Dusé or Cleopatra or Bernhardt.”

“My boy doesn’t feel that way,” she said, clambering back to what safety-ledge she could.

“Don’t say that.”

“What?”

“It hurts me.”

“What?”

“‘My boy’--in that tone. I am jealous, Mrs. Rarick--not of him--but of all the life that has claim on you----”

She had the impulse to rise and rebuke him, and, instead, permitted his hand to wander again toward the thick fur ruffs at her wrists. Then a butler served cocktails, and they were silent and at nice distance while he puttered; but the eyes of young Lopez, above the three cocktails he tossed off, were over her face with the sweetishness of an anæsthetic mask.

“I’m going to send you along home now,” she said, and rose. There were no lights, and a thick hush of November snow was falling against the glass walls, closing them in.

“I don’t want to go home, Jenny.”

Jenny. The plushy way he had of saying that. The impertinence of his saying that. The dearness....

“I don’t want to go home, Jenny, without something to tide me over until next time.” That plushiness in his speech was not from the effect of the three cocktails, but from an excited lisp, adorable to her, that seemed to crowd his speech.

“Impertinent,” she said, frightened, in an exultant way beyond anything that had ever happened to her, and putting out a stiff arm to ward him off.

He used the arm as a lever to draw her toward him. To the silence of the big white flakes that were pasting themselves against their glass inclosure, he dipped the back of her neck against his arm and sank his lips down on to hers.

Racing home from a charity bazaar, where she had raffled off character dolls with conspicuous success, to change her clothes for a tea dance at the St. Regence, a surprise awaited Jenny.

Avery was home.

An envelope addressed in his large free hand was handed her by the maid in the Breton cap.

DEAR MOTH:

Hullo! Surprise, eh what? I’ll wait in my bedroom until you pop in on
me.

AV.

Avery home!

The first thought that flashed through Jenny’s mind, as she stood with the note dangling among her purse and gloves, flooded her with such self-disgust that, on the very heels of it, she went hurrying to Avery’s room, as if in expiation, the enormous sable coat that wrapped her from eyes to knees still dangling back off her slight shoulders.

If only she had gone straight from the bazaar to the St. Regence, without having bothered to come home and change into a taupe Lanvin gown with a high neck-ruche of chinchilla that Ramon liked. It made Ramon nervous to wait. Actually gave him indigestion, which asserted itself in little splotches of pink across his forehead. High-strung....

A lump of mortification was in Jenny’s very soul as she sped to her son. Was Avery ill? Crazy thought, but this was the first time she had seen Avery in the two months since--Ramon. Would he--could he--sense anything different? No. No. No. She need not reproach herself where her children were concerned. She had been plugging harder than ever for Avery’s speed-boat. Would--Avery--being home--make a difference to Ramon? He had never seen her with her boy. With Jennifer, now, it was different. With that not-to-be-resisted lisp of his when he attempted to employ the idioms of American slang, he called them the “Flip sisters.” But Avery--Avery, though only sixteen, had a grave, rather precious quality. His blond straight youth, while boasting a maturity of appearance that matched some of the young fellows who trailed around Jennifer, was shot through with the most knowing perceptions. Would Avery, with those curiously delicate perceptions, sense that in the two months since she had seen him, strange, turbulent, and high emotions had been sluicing through the slim being of his mother?

How annoyed Rarick would be if something only casual were bringing Avery home in the midst of his semester. He had come down so flat-footedly against it. Surely Avery could not be ill....

He was standing in a striped-flannel dressing-gown, tamping tobacco into his short-stemmed pipe, when his mother entered. The contents of a large pigskin bag, good accouterments, littered the room. A portable phonograph was open on the table, with a disk on, and a needle in position.

“Good for you, Mother! I was afraid it might not be you. Peacock tells me father often gets home nowadays around four.”

“Avery, you’re not ill?”

“Nothing so pleasantly explanatory of my sudden return to the magnificent fold of the family,” he said, giving his parent a lift off the floor as he kissed her.

“Avery, you’re not in trouble of any sort?”

“Not the kind you think.”

“What other kinds are there?”

“Deep psychological fee-fie-fo-fum ones.”

“Avery, don’t tell me you’ve started to be foolish about a girl--or anything like that,” she cried, flashing a glance, even in the suspense of her sudden suspicion, to her wrist watch.

“No, I’m off women,” he said, with elaborate grandeur and innocence of them, that made her take his long, pale cheeks between her hands and kiss him.

“Darling, tell me what has brought you home in this sudden fashion. You know how set your father is against it, since all those supper dances we used to drag you in for. Tell me, son, I’ve only a moment between appointments.”

“Mother, be a brick and cancel. How can I talk to you if you’ve only a moment? I must see you before father comes in. Please manage.”

She stood fluttering between her indecisions. After all, the important thing was that Avery was well. Some schoolboy predicament no doubt, that seemed enormous enough to the schoolboy living it. Ramon hated to wait. Waiting acted as an actual physical depressant upon him, from which he was slow to recover. Jenny had learned that. Their most violent quarrel had resulted from her arrival twenty minutes late at a small tea-room in West Seventy-sixth Street which they were beginning to frequent for its obscurity. Women who took tango lessons of Ramon learned quickly, too, that to keep him waiting was to receive only desultory and sullen attention, instead of the subtle thrills they came for and paid for.

Jenny’s virtue as wife and mother had been founded on no principle of life or religion. That she happened to possess it up to now had apparently been a matter of no counter-forces sufficiently strong to imperil it. Raging to see Ramon, who in five minutes would be beginning his wait for her, Jenny regarded this slender choirboy-faced son of hers, while turmoils battered her. He was not an easy son. Never had been. There had been long and frequent sieges of difficult child-illnesses and curious phases of mental reserve. His schooling had not been an easy matter to settle, what with his father’s desires, the boy’s, and her own. She had won her points, where Avery was concerned, too slowly to have them appear won.

The years at Newberry, and now his freshman year at Eastern, had drawn Avery out of his reticent, inhibited, boyhood precisely as she had predicted they would. Avery was pretty much of a regular fellow now. He had “made” the right fraternity. The son of a former Vice-president of the United States had sponsored him for K. A. K.; and the Avery who used to hide from his riding-master and feel squeamish in a rowboat now rode his own polo mount and did not remonstrate at Jenny’s high desire for him to own a speed-boat. As a child he had feared water.

Yes, Avery was pretty much of a fellow now. In fact, she was fond of admitting, a little slyly and with innuendo that was without foundation, that he was too much of a fellow.

“Boys will be boys” flowed in relief off the lips of Jenny, who had spent her quota of time doubting if her boy would. Ah yes, boys nowadays knew how to handle their love-affairs, various tooth-cutting amours and indiscretions, as skilfully as they knew how to handle their cars. That was to presuppose that Avery had always handled his, just that casually.

Avery, always more or less at shy odds with life, with his father, and even with Jenny herself, had not been the gay and uncomplex youngster that Jennifer had been. Even now he was sometimes dark and turgid water to her. Had she failed him as confidante on those occasions when he had seemed to want to grope his way into her understanding of this or that plight of his? Chiefly psychological ones that she had found it hard to comprehend. She had read books on adolescence. In a vague way, they accounted.

Once, on one of his Easter vacations from Newberry, Avery, to whom his mother was by far the happiest aspect of his holidays, had tried to read her excerpts from a very private journal which he had kept for three years, and which locked with a key he kept on a chain with his fraternity symbol.

She had felt deeply the spirit which prompted the confidence, but was conscious of having failed miserably to understand what to her had seemed the rather embarrassing vaporings of a young mind floundering to climb out of some sophomoric morass. It was a phase of adolescence, she concluded, as she dismissed the sense of failure that had followed these private disclosures of some of the mental travail of her son. No one could quite be expected to be able to comprehend the tortuous and tortured workings of the adolescing mind. From the books she had read, it would be rather abnormal to find Avery normal at this stage. All would work itself out. As a matter of fact, of course, a boy’s father was the proper confidant at such times.... But secretly, Jenny gloried in her strategic position in the minds and hearts of both her children. It was a sort of trump card up her sleeve; it was the writing on the wall of who was who.

Was she about to fail again of her coveted place in the eyes of her son? If Avery were impelled to once more put before her the difficult and even embarrassing torments of his expanding and maturing mind, would it not be better, after all, to evade the issue, than to fail in it?

Let Avery have it out with his father! Let them become acquainted and find a common language. It was not even fair to continue to stand as buffer between them. Great responsibilities, that had to do with his father, were ultimately to descend upon this young boy. Better to try to have him cross the stormy Niagara gorge that divided the two of them.

But, in her heart, Jenny knew that the source of all this hurried disposition of her immediate predicament was the fact that Ramon was waiting. He must be chewing at his lip now, and sliding in and out of the waistcoat pocket that lay against the slim torso of his dancer’s body, a platinum-and-diamond watch, the thickness and diameter of a silver dollar, Jenny’s first gift to him.

“Mother, I know I’m putting the cart before the horse, to try and make you understand the result first, and then give you the reasons that led up to the decision, but the fact is, I’m done with college.”

Then it _was_ something schoolboyish! Let him have it out with his father. Eastern was the ideal college for a son of the rich. Important connections. Socially right. Proper setting. Rich men with sons about to inherit vast responsibilities, chose Eastern for their boys. Ramon was waiting ten minutes by now. High time Avery and his father were making each other’s acquaintance.

“You talk as if such decisions were a matter of course, Avery. I’m surprised.”

“I knew you would be, Mother. That’s why I want like the dickens to talk to you before the explaining to father begins. Or maybe you’ll talk to him, Mother?”

“I cannot always be taking sides with you against your father, Avery. After all, he is your father and my husband, and must be respected.”

That, ever since the advent of Ramon, was part of her new psychology of atonement to her husband. She had applied it directly to Rarick the few weeks just passed, causing him no surprise in particular, because he was no longer sensitive to her doings. Her son, however, looked up at her in almost startled surprise.

“Out of whose book of life have you torn a new page, Mother? Not your own?”

Now he was going to be abstract! That was the difficulty about being able to understand Avery. It made her proud of what she was pleased to call his depth; but, just the same, he was at the stage where he was forever vaporing about life. As such. It was a thoroughly concrete affair to Jenny, life was. Witness the precise situation of Ramon waiting for her. It was hard to treat life as a generality. You talked about your own life, of the life of some one in whom you were passionately interested. Just life as a subject was sermon matter, or something you did not discuss except under precious circumstances.

“You’ve only three more years at Eastern, Avery. There is something about the idea of a college degree! It’s an asset in after-life. Avery T. Rarick. Century Club, Racquet Club, Eastern Club. It’s fine to hear one man say of another, ‘We finished at Eastern together. We made the polo teams together at Eastern!’” (Ramon was capable of going off, after waiting a half-hour.)

“Mother, I want a couple of years to myself.”

“Yourself?”

“Yes. Alone. Mother, I want terribly some time to myself. In Europe. On my own. I imagine Paris is as good a place as any for a place to get one’s bearings. Or, better still, some off-the-beat places like Sicily or Greece. I’m fed up. College is all right for a certain sort of fellow; I’m wasting my time at it.”

“That’s ungrateful, Avery. I’ve almost won your father over about your boat.”

“Mother, I need to tell you a few things about myself. I’d have told you long ago, you’re so sweet. But you dodged; and I do hate like the dickens to say them....”

Then it was to be in the key of the writings in that locked journal of his. Darling, silly adolescent! Ramon was waiting.

“Avery, I cannot stand the strain of the rôle of go-between for you and your father any longer. Isn’t it manlier for you to face him yourself? This is too serious for me. You yourself must ask him for what you want----”

“Why, mother, do you know I’ve never really wanted anything before? It is you who have always wanted for me. That’s what makes it impossible for me to really get at father. He thinks I’m the fellow who has wanted all the things I’ve never really wanted.”

So! It had come home to her. So much sooner than she could have dreamed. It was for this she had practically alienated her husband, worn down her vitality, sacrificed her peace of mind. From the very infancy of her children, Jenny had been fighting for what she wanted for them; and here was her son interpreting it for her in a way that robbed her of any of the fruits of sacrifice.

“Avery Rarick,” she said, with everything reproachful in her voice that she could muster, “I cannot believe my ears.”

“Mother dear, you mustn’t take it that way! Let me explain.”

Ramon was waiting.

“Listen, dear, I must----”

“Mother, I haven’t hopped on to this decision today or yesterday. I’m everybody’s total-loss at college, dear.”

“That’s a pretty disheartening thing to have to hear, after the long wrangle I had with your father, who wanted a state university. Really, Avery----”

“I’d be no go at any college, Mother. It’s hard as the devil to try to explain--even to you.”

“Yes, Avery,” she said, mashing out a cigarette off which she had taken two puffs, and trying to bite down an impatience that was almost a frenzy within her; “I should think it might be.” Ramon was waiting.

“Mother, what do you think?”

“I can’t. I don’t,” she said, and pressed her eyeballs.

“Mother, for the last six months I’ve been carrying only one course at college. You might as well know and have it over with.”

“You’ve made excellent connections. Donnie Chattenfield told Jennifer that Hal is inviting you to Whitecastle for the Christmas holidays.”

“Mother, doesn’t that surprise you?”

“Why should it? The Chattenfields weren’t always as socially secure as they are now. I----”

“I mean, doesn’t it surprise you that I’ve only carried one course, and that a dead-cat one in current events?”

“Of course it does----”

“It doesn’t really, old darling, because you’ve never thought about it one way or another. But anyway--even my address at college has been a fake one, Mother. I’ve faked.”

“Avery!”

“I haven’t lived on the campus for six months. The college canning-factory began to tin my brains, so I moved out of it. I’ve rooms up on the hill with an artist and his wife.”

“Why, Avery Rarick, how could you!”

“It’s the only thing I could do, Mother. I’m not cut out for the college-factory. Matter of fact, if I am cut out for much of anything, I haven’t found out yet what it is. That’s what I want to talk about. You’ve been such a brick getting Father to put up with me, that it’s kind of rotten to bring this home to you after the way you maneuvered for Eastern. But it would have been the same at Penn, or whatever state university it was Father preferred. It isn’t that I haven’t been working. I have--after a fashion--worked, if you’d call it that!”

“Oh, Avery, don’t meander. Talk to the point.”

“Right, Mother. I mean, I’ve been scribbling. Writing a little. Verse and stuff. Pretty rotten. Wouldn’t like to see it, would you? Might give you a better idea of why I think a couple of years on my own--knocking about Europe--alone--alone--would put me straight--with things. Mother, you’re not listening!”

She lifted her tormented eyes to him, which for the moment she had closed against the milling of her inner frenzy, and made the pretense of having heard.

“That is all stuff and nonsense, Avery. You are to bide your time at college, and next summer take that trip to Norway and Sweden with the Stanley-Blake twins.”

“I don’t give a damn for those saps, Mother.”

“‘Those saps,’ as you are pleased to call them, will some day be two of the most powerful men in America.”

“I tell you I need to be alone, Mother. To find myself.”

“Oh--Avery----”

“I know! I sound like a letter to a newspaper. Well, I’m capable of writing one like this. ‘Editor, _Daily Bunk_. Dear Sir: What should a young man of seventeen years of age do who simply cannot get interested in life as he sees it about him. I cannot find myself. Everything becomes disgustingly monotonous. Not interesting enough to call for any real effort. I’m a perfect failure to date, and unless I pull out, may remain so for the rest of my days on this supposedly glorious earth. Everything about me is as interesting as a morgue, where I am concerned. What’s wrong with this picture?’

“Letter from Editor to Morbid Young Man: ‘Your symptoms, young man, include indifference to whatever you do and the belief that a congenial task would reveal your hitherto unappreciated values. As you see the world, it is sadly out of joint, and you wonder why others are so indifferent to the pearl of great price hidden in your personality. Young man, behind your inability to connect with life, lurks an egregious self-centeredness and an exaggerated idea of your own consequence.’”

“Avery, I can’t bear it. You’re too funny to be borne. Stop it, idiot! How can one take you seriously?”

“But I am serious, Mother. I’m clowning Hamlet for you.”

How slenderly handsome he was, his father’s son around the eyes and brow, but son of his mother in the lean, lithe figure. As he sat there on the edge of the table, dangling one long cleverly-clad leg, and showing, as if to excellent stage-direction, his clean blade of profile, he was like one of those well-made youths in English society-comedies.

“Avery, I simply must go. My advice to you is to pack yourself back to college without even letting your father know about this--brainstorm.”

“Mother, I’m in hell!”

“Then you _are_ in some trouble, son,” she cried out, a sudden terror dilating her eyes.

“I know, Mother, I know, it all sounds like tommyrot,” he cried, and struck his breast with a gesture that immediately became sophomoric to her, once he followed it up with words. “But can’t you understand? The hell is here inside me. I must get away. Alone. To think--it out----It’s too cluttered up here. I can’t stand the clutter. I’m sick of being me. And doing the things a fellow has to do if he is me. Give me a year or two on my own, Mother. Get Father to. I want to think. I want to think my way out....”

“Of what?”

“How do I know? How can I try to tell it, when you sit there thinking of other things. When you won’t understand.”

How dear he was! How inexpressibly dear. Hurtingly young. Silly, sensitive, sophomoric dreamer. She had never seen him like this. At least not exactly like this. She wanted to take him in her arms.... Ramon was waiting.

“Mother dear, be a brick. Put it up to Father before I have to face the music. Make him see that I need a couple of years away--to myself----”

“I simply must go, son.”

“He’ll never understand, Mother. Coming from me, the suggestion will only antagonize him. I can’t be myself with Father--any more than I sometimes think he can be with me.”

“Hush, Avery.”

There was one principle of hers which Jenny had never even bent, much less broken. She could not bring herself to discuss her husband’s shortcomings with his children.

“I must go!” she cried, wildly. “If you insist upon coming home from college with such ideas, son, it is manlier that you should face your father yourself. Tell him just what you have told me.”

“I can’t! I can’t! You know that.”

“Then begin to learn now. I cannot always be buffer between you. Tell him what you’ve told me.”

“Not in a thousand years. He’ll want facts. I haven’t any.”

“Here he comes. Tell him now.”

“Mother, for God’s sake! You wouldn’t do that----”

For the first time in her life, Jenny would. She was off and gone, down the corridor, frantic with haste, just as Rarick, attracted by his son’s voice, paused at his door to peer in.

For several years now, Rarick had been cultivating this habit of extricating himself from his office at four o’clock in the afternoon. It was not easy, except that he had found that the closing of his multifarious day, whether at four or six or eight, was sure to leave an overflow of affairs to which he could not get around.

The year that Rarick instructed his chauffeur to enter his office at precisely the stroke of four, and, regardless of who or what might be present, hand him his hat, the force began to refer to him as “the old man.”

As a matter of fact, it was Rarick’s conclusion that these few precious hours of late afternoon which included the sedative one of twilight, if properly induced, could be made to stack upon the credit side of health and vitality.

His golf consisted of those hours spent in the forest-like silences of his library, where he read little, if at all, but where glyphs and triptychs; helmet and sword of Doge’s guard; “Virgin and Child”; Auvergne art of the fifteenth century; pillars of stone decorated in Roman cups; red velvets inlaid with heraldic leopards, played effect after effect into his solitude.

He could sit in the dim splendor of this hall, and out would creep the mood to empty his pocket of its strange fires of stones of the earth and place them in smoldering rows along a strip of black velvet which he kept concealed behind the cushion of a divan. Out of his organ, “Father’s Folly,” there came pouring to his pressing of a button the storied action of “Tosca” or “La Bohème,” told in the illuminated stained glass above the triple grin of keyboards. Musical cataracts that leaped in glory over the din of a day that had been lived to the tune of dishpans, hair-nets, lingerie ribbon, and forty thousand small dolls made out of imitation peach-skin from the Vermont factory. Countless and ever-fascinating devices lurked within the Gothic maw of this pretentious instrument. Symphony orchestras, Japanese bells, xylophones, bird-notes, and cymbals. Violin solos, sextettes, octettes, “Chimes of Normandy,” Bach, Verdi, Guilmant, Handel, Saint-Saëns, Bonne, Mendelssohn, and a reproduction of the Vatican choir, with the lifted faces of the singing boys rising chastely above their surplices and glowing softly into stained-glass flesh.

To Rarick, who scarcely knew his son, there was something of Avery in these pale soprano boys, a look of spiritual contact, until he invariably jerked himself away from a comparison that, no sooner made, seemed ridiculous.

Avery, indeed! Speed-boats. Plus-fours. Oriental-pearl studs at seventeen. A growing suspicion that all was not open and above board about his college had been Rarick’s. Something not quite _bona-fide_ about what Avery had to say about his life there----

The suspicion moved up a notch at the sight of his boy, standing in the French-flannel dressing-gown, with the contents of his open bag scattered about the room, and the plane surface of his lean, pale face plastered with a look of panic that was positively grotesque as his father leaned in at the door. The flash of Jenny’s sable coat, as she sped down the hall, had not been lost upon him, and now there came to him rather belatedly the consciousness that he had been hearing the dim patter of her and Avery’s voices all the way along the corridor.

The thrill that he invariably experienced over this narrow young person he called son, shot through him before his first resentment had time to leap out.

Good youngster! A bit too thin. Needed filling out. A bothered look to him. What made him gape like a fish that had just been landed, hook and all? The scent and the echo of Jenny still lay on the air. Conniving again, filling Rarick with a roiling sense of outsider in his own home. Heads together, the two of them had been shutting him out. Some scrape had brought him home, no doubt.

“Well, Father, here I am.”

The little man stood in the doorway, shoulder-high to his seventeen-year-old son, head up, hand thrust into the groove between his coat buttons. After all, your prisoner was innocent until you proved him guilty. Illness, or whim, or unavoidable difficulty might have brought Avery home. Surely he would not dare to be showing himself in the midst of a school-week, for some of the nonsense frivolities Rarick had come down hard against, such as Jenny’s plans for the social divertissement of the youngest set.

“This is a surprise, boy. At least to me,” he could not help supplementing.

Hang it! Why had he added that? It threw the boy still further off his ease.

“I guess it is sort of a surprise to me, too Father. Hadn’t particularly planned on coming, until I found myself driving down. One of those decisions a fellow kind of makes for a long time without knowing he’s doing it. All of a sudden it’s made! If you see what I mean.”

“I see,” said his father, in the polite tones of not seeing at all.

“Will you sit down, Father?”

The boy did have oyster-shells under his eyes. Ill-health? Dissipations? Well? What?

They seated themselves, facing each other, on two straight chairs. It occurred to Avery miserably, as he swept one of them clear of a litter of his belongings, that he and his father were forever facing each other on straight chairs.

With his tongue as thick as a rusk in his mouth, the determination to unbend came flooding over him. A fellow had a right to some kind of a decent break with his father. Old gentleman wasn’t God. Regular enough fellow, no doubt, if you once broke through the crust. Crusty with crust, though, no doubt of that. Low-down of mother, to leave him flat--but here goes.

“You see, Father, here’s the situation,” began the son of Rarick.

They were going to get on! Sometimes a man and his boy just naturally came to a place where they began to get on. Avery was old enough now to understand....

“I’m mighty anxious to hear it, son.”

Now that was a handsome enough beginning of the old gentleman! Many a fellow and his ‘gov’, after starting it off on the wrong foot, had hit a pace. Not a bit improbable but what the old gentleman might be the one to understand more quickly than anyone else, that a fellow needs to somehow--get his balance. God, though, could anyone understand, except the fellow himself who was living through this particular hell?

“The situation is this, Father.”

“Yes, son.” Patience. Patience. Shouldn’t expect a lad to come directly to the point like a business man. What the dickens was the trouble with him? Bothered looking boy, no doubt of that. Well, it was a good time to get at him. This fine, straight fellow on the chair before him was his son. The pleasurable years were about to begin. The time had come to draw this boy into his life. This boy was no stranger. This boy was his!

“Yes, son?”

“The situation is this, Father.” What in the name of Heaven was the situation? Sitting there, facing his father, frantic for point of contact, now-or-never blazing in his bright blue eyes, words seemed to log-jam back in Avery’s throat.

You didn’t sit opposite one of the titan business men of the country--of the world, for that matter--and tell him that your soul was hurting you. You didn’t sit opposite the director of a string of banks, a merchandise king of two continents, the biggest individual dispenser of pins, Eskimo pies, and ink-erasers in the world, and tell him of the strange torments, the nervous panic, the despairs, the ecstasies, the strange stirrings of the desire to love and be loved, or the yearnings for some power to express the wonder and the pain of those first faint stirrings. You didn’t sit opposite a small, literal man called your father, whose ideals were as well hung as his paintings, and tell him that the world was a manhole into which you felt yourself falling. It was one thing to pour forth these torments and ecstasies and lonelinesses into your journal, which locked, or into the trunk of verses that were your own disembodied nerves, jangling away for dear life. It was another to sit facing this small remote man, your father. “The situation is this, Father.” What in God’s name was the situation? One did not dare to say to one’s father, “Life is too much for me, Dad.” One did not quite dare bring to the point of discussion the curiously recurrent thoughts of the lips of women that were flashing through his torment ... the desire to create ... the desire to live beautifully ... the need to be alone to work it all out. The confusion ... somewhere there was a father to understand ... not this father. And yet--strange little man--he liked his organ with the horrible stained-glass operas. The fires in the stones of the earth had witchery for him. The salty wisdom and humor of the old fossil he kept up in the yellow suite tickled and delighted him. What the devil was the truth of this man, his father? What the devil was the truth of himself, Avery, sitting there in torment, idiotically repeating over and over again, “This is the situation, Father.”

“Go ahead, son.”

“As I had been saying to mother, just before you came in, or rather, it’s been running through my mind....”

He and his mother had had their heads together as usual. She had been first in his confidence. This was the method cooked-up between them, of approach to the ogre. Damit! Jenny was a good mother, a more successful parent than he was, no getting around that; but a man was entitled to the first-hand confidence of his boy!

Was the old gentleman stiffening already?

Damit! damit! this boy was his. The only thing on earth he could look to train into being closely and intimately his. There were a hundred things he needed to begin to get said to this boy, if ever they were to begin to prepare for the intricate problems that lay ahead for both of them. A good way to begin was to give in. Why not on the speed-boat! That was what he was most probably wanting. Damned dangerous playthings of the rich. Speed-devices for going nowhere. Things. More things to alienate him from the power to be tranquil. The way to get at these youngsters, though--Jenny had the right idea--was to give them things. Things. The way to get at Avery was the way of indulgence. Youth wants indulgence.

“Well, I suppose if there is something you want, son, you’re beginning to be of an age now where you’ve got to depend on your own good judgments.”

“That’s mighty fine of you to say, Father.”

“I sometimes have my own ideas about these things, Avery. Some day, when you don’t have to get back to college, we’ll take time off and----”

“But, Father----”

“--talk some of these things out. We haven’t ever had much to say to each other about you and your relationship to this big world you are preparing to grapple with. It’s a bigger and more complex world than falls to the lot of most youths. I’d like to talk to you along those lines----”

“But, Father, that’s not what I want to ta----”