Chapter III: Part 3

And then one returned to the sitting room and went on talking casually as if nothing had happened. It was the height of bad taste to remind a good girl today that one had kissed her yesterday or to presume upon it in any way. It was the height of bad taste also to resist when they gently pushed one away and said, "Listen, I want to tell you something. I almost forgot."

Basine knew the simple technique of these virginal intrigues. Henrietta's hands were pressing him. This was the signal to release her and pretend that nothing had happened. Ordinarily Basine would have complied. He had no interest in the girl. His original impulse to take her from Aubrey had slipped from his mind.

But he had grown sad. The mild sensual moment he would usually have experienced in the embrace had been missing. His tired nerves had not responded. Unable to exhilarate his senses he sought to make up for the failure by treating his vanity to an exhilaration. This exhilaration would come if the girl he was holding grew suddenly sad, raised wide eyes to him and in a shamed voice murmured, "I love you, George. Oh, I love you so."

He would make her do this.

"Oh, Henny. Why don't you love me? I want you so much all the time."

"Why George Basine!"

She had suspected something different about the game when it started. And this was different. Even with Aubrey it had not been as different as this. Aubrey's mother and her father had decided upon the engagement after Aubrey had been fussing her for a few weeks.

But this was different. George Basine was in love with her! She had always liked him because her father said he was a fine, promising young man and because he knew how to play, and was really like herself in many ways. She wondered what she should do. She felt worried because she was afraid she would say something that wasn't right.

She couldn't ask him to let her go because he was only holding her lightly and she could move away if she wanted to. She thought his eyes were sad and she felt suddenly sorry for him. He had stopped talking and his eyes were sad. They were looking at her and they made her feel sad, too. Things were so different when one felt sad. Everything seemed to go away then and nothing remained. Everything went away and left one a little frightened. As if the world were unreal and everybody was unreal and nothing really was.

She was frightened like that now. Or at least she thought it was fear. Then she saw it was something else. Her heart had started to pound hard and her throat fluttered inside. No one had ever looked at her like this. So seriously. As if she were somebody very serious. It made her feel strange. She grew dizzy and her arms felt weak. She whispered his name and his hands crept over her cheeks. This thrilled her as if there were electricity in his fingers. And frightened her again. But it was nice. Like being a little girl, almost a baby, and falling into an older man's arms--her father's arms. She could almost remember being a little girl and lying in her father's arms.

"Do you love me?"

She would answer this time.

"Yes," she said. "Oh George."

She hid her face against his coat. Basine was careful not to embrace her. Her "yes" had given him an inexplicable moment. He had felt himself expand under it. In her unexpected submission--he had never dreamed of such a thing ten minutes ago--she became suddenly someone who was very rare and sweet. He was still utterly oblivious of her and had it turned out to be Marion in his arms instead of Henrietta the difference would have made no change in him. The thing that was rare and sweet was the exhilaration in his senses--a purely spiritual exhilaration. He enjoyed it as one might enjoy some unforeseen and startling gift.

He grew tender. He wanted to kiss the eyes and hair of her who had given this gift to him--the thing which felt so warm in his heart and tingled so pleasantly in his thought. He must reward her somehow for having stirred in him this delicious excitement, reward her for the sweet surfeit her surrender had given his vanity. For a moment bewildered by this inner desire to express the gratitude he felt, he stood trembling.

"Oh, I love you so, my darling," he whispered. "You're so beautiful."

It was her reward for having surrendered to his unspoken demand. It was an expression of the overwhelming generosity that choked him. He found in the saying of the words a sweetness almost as keen as her surrender had afforded him. To hear himself say to someone, "I love you," was mysteriously exhilarating. The thrill that accompanied his bestowal of largesse excited him to further experiment. He was not carried away but he relished the emotions between them, the sense of having triumphed and the provoking sense of bestowing grandiose reward.

"Darling, tell me ... please tell me--will you marry me?"

"Oh George!"

"Tell me ... tell me...."

He was acting now, making his voice dramatic, pretending uncontrollable longings. She must say "Yes." He wanted her to and she must. He did not want to marry her. The thought had never occured to him. But it would be unbearable now unless she said "Yes." He must pretend and act and make the thing end by her saying "Yes."

"Oh, I can't tell you, George dear."

"You must, please...."

He had decided now finally to make her. A contest of wills. If he wanted a yes there must be a yes. Because he wanted it. His arms crushed her. He fastened against her. He felt her resisting. There was still no desire in him. His arms were still dead. But he could brook no resistance. The fact of resistance was unimportant but the idea of being resisted fired him with a passion entirely cerebral. He would warm her into saying yes, stir her senses, make her yield and her head swim until she said yes.

"I love you. Please say it. Say yes."

Yes to what? Henrietta for an instant awoke from the confusions of the past few minutes. Her morality, training, code of life and all sat up like a wary censor and surveyed the scene. The censor nodded an affirmation. It was all right. Go ahead. With this affirmation her body took fire. The weakness she had been struggling against became a beautiful enervation--a lassitude that swept her unresistingly forward.

She had never done this before. She struggled for a moment to recall the censor--the thing that had always directed her. But she seemed to have been deserted. She was alone with sensations.

Her virginal mind was unable to identify the excitement rising in her. She waited while his caresses grew bolder. Then in a panic, born of a dim realization, she flung her arms passionately around Basine and sobbed.

"Yes.... Yes.... Oh George.... I will...."

She felt at once that she had said it just in time--that it would have been sinful to continue another moment without promising she would marry him.

Basine released her slowly. The incident abruptly was over. He had in fact lost interest in it immediately before she had spoken. The thrill had come, developed and gone--a spiritual exaltation which he had enjoyed to the utmost.

But now it was over. His vanity, surfeited, had withdrawn from the situation. He was surprised to find himself looking at the girl with utter dispassion, as if nothing had happened.

Inwardly he was amused. Such things were amusing, in a way. Moments in which one saw oneself as an outrageous actor, doing something ridiculous. It was like that now. Absurd. But it had been pleasant. Curious, how pleasant. However, that was over. Henrietta would of course forget about it. And he, he was prepared to return to the library and go on popping corn as if nothing had happened, absolutely nothing.

But Henrietta leaned weakly against his arm.

"Oh George, darling. Do you really love me?"

He answered out of a social respect for consistency and nothing else. He thought the question rather tactless. Of course he didn't love her and she should have known better than to ask it. It had just been a game they had played while looking for the thingumabob.

"Yes, Henny, of course."

Her eyes were wide and her lips quivered. She was looking at him as if he were doing something remarkable and she overcome with astonishment. For an instant Basine wondered why the deuce she looked that way. Then he felt an unexpected chill that he dismissed promptly with an inwardly reassuring smile as he heard her saying.

"Oh, we'll be so happy together when we're married. Isn't it wonderful, just too wonderful for words to be married--together. Oh George! I'm so happy.... I love you so much. And father will be so...."

6

They had not expected Mr. Gilchrist to come. Mr. Gilchrist was an undersized, mild little man with greying sideburns. When he was alone he read a great deal.

He had made money in the selling of expensive furniture. He was part owner of a store in Wabash Avenue. It was generally understood that people with taste patronized the Gilchrist-Warren establishment.

He arrived at the Basines' with his wife and his son Aubrey. Keegan and Fanny had returned from a long walk. They and the judge, Henrietta, Basine and his mother and sister Doris all expressed surprise at seeing Mr. Gilchrist. There was always about Mr. Gilchrist the air of a museum piece--a quaint museum piece such as a keen but sentimental collector might delight in.

The exclamations of surprise embarrassed the little man and he stood fingering his sideburns and trying to smile in just the correct way. Mr. Gilchrist's arrival anywhere always precipitated this air of surprise. People said, "Why, Mr. Gilchrist! Awfully glad to see you! Haven't seen you for an age. Well! How are you?"

This was as if they were extremely surprised. But they weren't. They were merely annoyed, upset, vaguely hostile and condescending. And these emotions inspired by the innocent Mr. Gilchrist could be best concealed by the feigning of a correct social astonishment.

To the queries shot at him Mr. Gilchrist answered, "Very well, thank you. Thank you. Very well, thank you."

After greeting him with these exclamation points, people immediately forgot he was present. Mr. Gilchrist would sit the rest of the evening ignored by everybody and trying to the end to smile in just the correct way.

Inside Mr. Gilchrist were many little lonelinesses. His head was full of things he had read, of plots, of great characters, even of epigrams and biting iconoclasms. When people talked he did his best to be attentive. And if they talked about things that interested him--the Kings of France, the Italian wars of the fifteenth century, the topography of early London and kindred subjects--his face would tremble with enthusiasms.

He would listen, his eyes questing eagerly for epigrams, for illuminating sentences he might contribute. But his unegoistic love for the subject would make him inarticulate. His eyes that had seemed about to speak of themselves, that had seemed laden with excited informations would close and a chuckle would come from his lips. The Caesars, the Borgias, the Medicis, the Bourbons, the Valois, Savonarola, Richelieu, the various Charles, Phillips, Williams, Henrys, the plumed headliners of history around whom had centered the hurdy-gurdy intrigues, the circus romances and wars of vanished centuries--these were the hail-fellows of his imagination.

But people seldom talked of these names. People were more interested in contemporary topics. He did his best to be attentive. But his thought played truant and before he knew it he would be going over secretly certain things in his head. Villon, Marlowe, Balzac, Dumas, Gautier, Suetonius--there was a rabble of them continually arguing and declaiming in Mr. Gilchrist's head.

He liked to half close his eyes and imagine what the great names used to have for breakfast, what the great names would say if he were to enter their presence or if they were to come into this room. He liked to bring up in his mind pictures of old Paris, London, Florence, Avignon, Vienna with their lopsided roofs, winding alleys, night watchmen and king's guards. He could sit a whole evening this way thinking, "then he came to an old Inn and there were lights inside. People drinking inside, telling stories and laughing. The inn-keeper was a man named Simon. The curious stranger looked about him with an imperious eye...."

These words murmuring in his head would conjure up the picture and there would be no further need for words. He was content to sit in the old inn, noticing its quaint decorations, its quaint but romantic inmates. Adventures would follow, strange episodes, denouements, climaxes--all without words as if he were watching a cinemategraph. His attempted smile would remain--a smile that concealed the fact he was neither smiling at those around him nor aware of what they were saying. For he would only half hear the chatter of the room and now and then nod his head vaguely at some question that people were answering--as if he too were answering it.

He was almost sixty, and lonely because he knew of no one to whom he could talk. His wife in particular was a person to whom he never dreamed of talking. He had only a dim idea of what he wanted to say to someone. But all his life he had been hoping to meet this one who would be like himself. This someone would be a friend whom he could take with him into places like the old inn and the crazily twisting streets of old London or Paris.

His days and years passed however without bringing him this companion. And outwardly he remained a mild little figure with sideburns, kindly tolerant toward everyone.

When his dreams left him long enough to enable him to notice closely those about him, a feeling of sadness would come. He would feel sorry for the men and women he saw gesturing and heard talking and laughing. He thought they must be like himself--looking for something. His faded eyes would peer caressingly from behind his glasses and he would make simple little remarks in an apologetic voice. He would ask what they had been doing and when they answered in their careless, matter-of-fact ways he would nod hopefully and appear pleased.

To see Mr. Gilchrist in the midst of his family was to be convinced of the plausibility of immaculate conception. It was difficult imagining Mr. Gilchrist ever having done anything which might have resulted in fatherhood. But more than that, it was impossible even suggesting to oneself that his wife had ever received the embraces of a man, had ever so far forgotten the proprieties as to permit herself to be trapped alone with a man.

Thus the presence of Aubrey, their son, became incongruous. And Aubrey himself helped this illusion. He was a young man who looked incongruous. He seemed like a hoax or at least a caricature. He had enormous feet and ungainly legs, large hands and pipe-stem arms, hips like a woman and a face capriciously modeled out of soft putty. His ugliness by itself would have been whimsical--his protruding eyes, long pointed nose, uneven cheeks and bulbous chin hinted at something waggish.

But Aubrey had triumphed over his physical self. He had with the aid of a pair of large glasses from which dangled a black silk cord, and by holding his head thrown back as if there were a crick in his neck, acquired an air of dignity. It was his habit to glower with dignity, to stare with dignity and to preserve a dignified inanimation when he was silent. He was pigeon breasted and this helped. In fact his many slight deformities seemed all to contribute somehow toward making him a man of inspiring dignity.

People had little use for Mr. Gilchrist, his father. He was, of course, wealthy but not wealthy enough to earn the regard of the poor. They discussed him, saying, "He's not so simple as he pretends he is. Any man who's made a pile like old Gilchrist in the furniture business has a pretty smart head."

And they added that they wouldn't be surprised if something eventually were found out about old man Gilchrist. He had a past. Of this people were convinced. It was his wife's position and the fear of her personality that protected Mr. Gilchrist from the downright attacks of rumor. Any man who pretended to be as kindly as Mr. Gilchrist and who talked so tolerantly about everybody and everything was, you could bank on it, a sly rogue afraid to say what he thought because he himself was guilty of worse sins than those under discussion.

Mr. Gilchrist, by seeming above the social agitations surrounding him came to appear as one who looked down tolerantly upon inferiors--and this annoyed people. Who was Mr. Gilchrist and what had he done that he should be giving himself airs? Of course--there was Aubrey and....

Aubrey was aloof and dignified. But that was to be expected of a man who worked with his brain all the time, inventing plots and characters--his friends explained. In fact Aubrey's silences thrilled them even more than his talk. They felt, when he sat silent, that they were witnessing the birth in his head of some great idea which they would later read in a book. Aubrey was a man of superior qualities and to bask in the presence of a superior was to partake of his superiority.

Aubrey's superiority consisted, so far as Aubrey was concerned, of wearing the proper kind of eye-glasses, keeping his neck stiff, refraining from giving utterance to all the asininities which crowded his tongue and writing romances containing heroes with whom a half-million women readers had imaginary affairs every night and heroines whom another half-million men ravished in their dreams. For Aubrey was a celebrated popular fiction writer. To conceal the horrible reasons which made for the celebrity of Aubrey's fiction, the army of literary morons who succumbed to its influence grew louder and louder in their protestations that Aubrey was a great moral writer. They pointed out that here was a man whose heroines were pure, whose heroes were noble and virtuous--neglecting to add that these were the only kind of phantoms which could penetrate the guard of their own puritanism and stir the erotic impulses beneath.

Aubrey's superiority was, for the most part, a state of mind that existed among the people who knew him or had heard of him or read of him. And this attitude toward him became part of Aubrey. He adopted it as the major side of his character and lived chiefly in the opinions of others. His introspection consisted of reading press notices about himself and thinking of what other people thought of him. Thus to understand Aubrey it was necessary to go outside him and to investigate this external state of mind, the ready-made robes of purple in which his little thoughts strutted through the day.

The people in whose acclaim Aubrey robed himself were varied and many but they inhabited an identical psychological stratum. They believed firmly that all artists and writers were poor, starving, unhappy creatures.

This belief was borne out in their minds by history--such history as they permitted themselves to know. History was continually telling of geniuses who died in garrets, of great minds that could not make enough money to feed or clothe their bodies. In fact one of the shrewdest ways to tell whether a man was a genius--that is, had been a genius--was to determine whether he had been neglected during his life and died of malnutrition and disappointment.

The people who acclaimed Aubrey found a compensation in this. They liked to assure themselves that geniuses starved to death. This compensated them for the fact that they themselves were not geniuses. It made them feel that it was actually a vital misfortune to be gifted, since being gifted meant to suffer the neglect of one's fellows and the pangs of hunger.

But the knowledge that genius was neglected and hungry in no way inspired them to remedy the situation by recognizing its presence and feeding it. To the contrary they were determined to see that it remained neglected and hungry. The idea of struggling long-haired poets dressed in rags pleased them. The idea of long-haired painters living on crumbs in attics gave them peculiar satisfaction.

Geniuses were people different from themselves. They believed in different things and pretended to be excited by different emotions and lived different lives. And the people who acclaimed Aubrey were pleased to know that there was a penalty attached to being different from themselves and they were interested in seeing that this penalty was not removed. By penalizing the different ones whom they sensed as superiors, they increased the value of their own inferiorities.

Yet they acclaimed Aubrey and there was no malice in their acclaim. This was a phenomenon that had once startled Aubrey. Long ago, when he had first started to write, his family's friends had said, "Poor boy, he'll starve to death. There's no money in being an author and you lead a terrible life."

But Aubrey had gone ahead and remained an author. He had written, at the beginning, rather biting if sophomoric things, inspired by the malice he sensed toward his profession. But the inspiration had not been sufficiently strong to handicap him. When success had come and his name was emerging, the people who knew him and who had talked maliciously about his trying to be an author, were the first to acclaim him. This thing had confused Aubrey. He had felt that the public was a curious institution and he had for a few months wondered about it.

People sneered at struggling writers and referred with withering humor to art as "all bunk" and indignantly denounced its immorality. Then when one put oneself over despite their sneers they turned around and congratulated one as if one had done something of which they heartily approved. It was as if they tried to make up for their previous attitude, and for a few months Aubrey cherished a cynical image of the public. It was a great bully that spat and snarled at genius, refusing to recognize it and making it a laughing stock wherever it could. But as soon as genius came through, this same bully of a public turned around and prostrated itself and worshipped blindly at its feet.

Then Aubrey had spent the few months wondering why this was so. But he had become too busy to do much thinking. His publishers were demanding more work--so he let other matters drop. His curiosity had carried him to the brink of an idea and he had somewhat impatiently turned his back on it. He had felt that to think as he was thinking about people who were praising him and buying his books, was to play the part of an ungrateful cad.

The idea that had come dangerously close to Aubrey's consciousness was the curious notion that people resented acclaiming anybody like themselves. The lucky ones who secured their hurrah became in their eyes no longer normal humans but super-persons about whom they were prepared to believe all manner of mythical grandeurs. The more remarkable and more superior people could make out their heroes to be, the less humility they felt in worshipping them. And since their heroes were creatures in whom they recognized a glorification of their own virtues, the more self-flattering it was to increase this glorification. They were able to worship themselves with abandon in the splendors they attributed to their chosen superiors.

Thus when they started they went the limit, heaping honors and honors upon a man until he became a glittering God-like person. The country at the time of Aubrey's ascent was full of such glittering God-like creatures whose names were continually in people's mouths and in their newspapers. The instinct of inferiority demanding, as always, an outlet in the invention of gods, had found a tireless medium for this hocus-pocus in the press. Great reputations were continually springing up--the newspapers like the half-cynical, half-superstitious priests of the totem era busying themselves with creating towering effigies in clay and smearing them with vermillion paints. These gods whom people busily erected and before whom they busily prostrated themselves were, as always, the awesome deities created in their own image.

There had been a crisis in Aubrey's life when he was caught between a desire to be himself and the desire to be a great clay figure with mysterious totems splashed over it. To be himself he had only to write as he vaguely thought he wanted to write. And to be one of the great figures he had merely to write what he definitely knew would win him the respect of others.

The decision, however, had been taken out of his hands. Aubrey's talent had not been of the sort that has for its parents a hatred of society and a derision of its surfaces. He had, indeed, fancied himself for a short time as desiring to adventure among the doubts and iconoclasms which distinguished the literature he had encountered during his college days. But the fancy had proved no more than an egoistic perversion of the true impulse in him. This, it soon developed, was a desire to impress himself upon people as their superior, not their antithesis.

As a result he fell to writing books which carefully avoided the revolt which the dubious spectacle of manners and morality had stirred in him. He concentrated upon crystalizing his day dreams. He turned out tales of deftly virtuous Cinderellas who provokingly withheld their kisses for three hundred pages; of debonnaire Galahads with hearts of gold who, utilizing the current platitudes as an armor and a weapon, emerged in grandiose triumphs with the stubborn virgins thawing deliriously around their necks. Aubrey's tales were popular at once. They were the technically arranged versions of the rigmarole of secret make-believes that went on in his own as well as other people's heads. People read them and quivered with delight. They were tales which like their own daydreams served as an antidote for the puny, unimpressive realities of their lives. Also they were moral, high-minded tales and thus they served as a vindication of the codes, fears, taboos which contributed the puniness to the realities of their lives.

Aubrey's success increased rapidly as he abandoned altogether the pretence of plumbing souls and gave himself whole-heartedly to the creative pleasantries of plumbing the soap-bubble worlds in whose irridescence people found their compensations. At twenty-nine Aubrey was becoming one of the glittering God-like personages in whose worship the public finds outlet for its inferiority mania and simultaneous concealment therefrom.

He had realized this in time and without conscious effort adjusted himself toward the perfections demanded of a personage worthy of receiving the masochistic and self-ennobling salute of the mob. These perfections were simply and easily achieved. One had only to acquiesce, to accept the acclaim of outsiders as a part of one's self and to live one's inner life in a roseate contemplation of this acclaim. One had only to "remember one's public" as he put it himself, and not to disappoint them or antagonize them.

In his own family he was regarded with awe. His father always felt bewildered when he spoke to him. And even Mrs. Gilchrist revealed a slightly human nervousness in her contacts with her son.

Concerning Mrs. Gilchrist there was not much to be said, even by such incipient iconoclasts as Mrs. Basine. She was too defined an exterior. One was conscious in her presence not so much of a woman as of an invincible battle-front of ideas. Nobody had ever heard Mrs. Gilchrist give expression to anything which could remotely be identified as an idea. Nevertheless she was a battle-front.

She was a woman with an intimidating coldness of manner. This manner spoke without words of an incorruptible intolerance toward all deviations from her code. Backsliders, moral culprits, unmannerly persons and, in fact, everyone not actively under her domination were, to Mrs. Gilchrist, suspect. She managed to give the impression that people whom she did not know were creatures whose virtues as well as social prestige were matters of sinister doubt. They were outside the pale.

The secret of her domination was a psychological phenomenon that eluded her antagonists and so left them powerless to combat it. The strength Mrs. Gilchrist felt within her was the product of a complete repression. She had managed since her youth to shut herself successfully within the narrow limits of her consciousness, successfully divorcing all her thoughts, desires and actions from any dictates of an inner self. She had formed an ideal, basing it upon her social ambitions and her childish prejudices of good and bad, desirable and undesirable. And she had been able to perfect this ideal. Her mind was a tiny fortress against which her own emotions and hence the emotions of others battled in vain. It could neither think nor understand and this was its strength.

The doubts which thinking sometimes stirred in the minds of her antagonists, the knowledge of secret impulses and obscene imaginings which they were able only imperfectly to keep from themselves and which made it possible for them to appreciate dimly the sinners and iconoclasts in the world--such knowledge never intruded upon Mrs. Gilchrist.

Her indignation toward backsliders and moral culprits was not a projected censure of similar weakness in herself. There were no windows in the tiny fortress in which she lived. Protected from all human disturbances of her spirit, she spent her days closeted within her little fortress in grim contemplation of her rectitude.

Friendship was impossible to her. She was, however, a duchy, a corporation in which one could buy stock. By subscribing unquestionably to her rectitude, admitting its existence publicly and succumbing to its strength, one earned the dividends of her social approval. One became to her a very nice person in whose submission she grudgingly saw, as in an imperfect mirror, the image of her own virtues.

Curiously enough, Mrs. Gilchrist was renowned for her activity as a philanthropist and charity worker. Her social prestige, aside from her strength of character, was based upon this. She was a perennial patroness, a member of hospital boards, a chairman of bazaars, special matinees, charity balls and money-raising campaigns. All these activities were in the interest of the poor. The money raised by them went toward bringing comfort to creatures whose moral obliquity and human weaknesses Mrs. Gilchrist authentically despised. Yet she was indefatigable in her work, darting in her unvarying black dress from meeting to meeting, bristling with magnificent plans for further philanthropies.

Her husband occasionally wondered. He was unable to reconcile the coldness he knew in his wife with the character of her labors. At times he dimly felt that it was her way of saying something--perhaps a way of showing a hidden warmth toward people.

But in Mrs. Gilchrist's thought there was no such explanation.

To have admitted to herself a concern for the creatures in whose behalf she devoted her energies would have been to open a door in the tiny fortress, or at least to create a loophole out of which she might look with sympathy upon the confusions and torments of her fellows.

Her inner humanism, divorced from the narrow limits of her consciousness, was finding its outlet, as her husband suspected, in her work. But during this work never for a moment did Mrs. Gilchrist think of the creatures she was benefiting. She had rationalized her activities and made them a part of the emotionless content of her mind.

All relation between the things she did and the people she did them for was divorced in her thought. In bazaars she superintended, in balls, fetes, campaigns, auctions she energized with her presence, she saw only bazaars, balls, fetes, campaigns and auctions. She worked for their success with an invulnerable preoccupation in the details which went to make them socially proper and financially triumphant.

The altruism of her work inspired no altruism in her. She did not allow herself to sympathise with the weakness and poverties she was aiding or even to contemplate them for an instant. Yet her work accomplished, the charity a success, she experienced the stern elation of "having done good." This elation was inspired in no way by the thought of the solace she had brought to others. It was entirely egoistic--a moment in which her rectitude congratulated itself upon--its rectitude.

7

Fanny Basine smiled timidly at Aubrey. He was paying little attention to her. He was listening to Judge Smith airing his views on the annexation of the Philippines.

The judge was forcibly declaring that the thing was essential and that no gentleman with his country's future at heart could possibly believe otherwise. Aubrey, to the judge's secret discomfiture, somehow managed to convey an assent to these views, but an assent based upon superior motives. What these motives were Judge Smith was unable to fathom. Aubrey, when it came his turn to expound, further irritated the judge by revealing them. He, Aubrey, was for the annexation of the Philippines but only because he was convinced such an annexation would be of supreme benefit to the natives of the islands.

Mrs. Gilchrist nodded sternly in agreement with her son. The rest of the company listening with vacuous attentiveness waited for the debaters to continue talking for them. Basine who had been silent came to the judge's rescue. He explained that the judge and Aubrey meant practically the same thing but that they had chosen different ways to express themselves.

"Judge Smith," Basine smiled, "sees in the annexation something which will benefit his country. He knows as well as any of us that it will not benefit it financially. It will be a source of expenditure and strife. Then how will it benefit us? Because it will give us an opportunity to aid a pack of uncivilized and benighted heathen and despite them to bring peace and prosperity to their own country--not ours. Which is exactly what you mean, Aubrey."

The judge beamed approval and Aubrey contented himself with a stare of dignity. He did not relish psychological interpretations of his words. As an author, he felt annoyed. But Basine continued to talk undeterred by his stare. He disliked Aubrey. Not so much as Doris. And in a somewhat different way. Further, the presence of Henrietta was a curious inspiration. The girl's wide-eyed tenderness had irritated and frightened him after the incident in the kitchen when they had gone searching for the thingumabob. Now he had no interest in the Philippine controversy. But he had entered the discussion in order to rid himself of the uncomfortable memory the episode with Henrietta had left him. As he talked the memory played hide and seek in his words.... "She thinks I'm going to marry her ... but she's engaged to him ... she's crazy ... what the Hell did I do it for?... Damn it ... damn it...."

Instinctively he took the judge's part, as if he must establish himself firmly in the father's good graces in order to make premature amends for the jilting of his daughter. The position he had taken pleased him because it also involved an opposition to Aubrey.

Fanny continued to smile at the novelist. Keegan bored her. They had been walking together and she had lost interest in the sensual game she had been playing with him. Alone, she might have tried to repeat the experience of the morning with Keegan. But her physical curiosity partially gratified for the moment by the surreptitious excitement she had derived from him, her interest transferred itself to Aubrey.

The man amused and impressed her. Her thought separated him into two people. She resented his persistent dignity. Her perceptions, sharpened by the practical sensuality of her nature, saw through the little ruses by which Aubrey converted his slight deformities into a dignified whole. As she listened to him she said to herself, "... he thinks it's smart to wear a ribbon on his glasses ... he sticks his chest out ... he's got skinny arms ... he looks funny...."

After a half hour she lost her resentment and the thing that had inspired it came to amuse her. She could see through his funny manner so it didn't anger her. But although now she smiled with amusement at the man's impressiveness, a feeling of awe penetrated her. Aubrey was a great man. People spoke his name everywhere. He was known.

A delicious tremble passed through her. She was careful not to translate it into words. Had she inspected the tremble and its causes, it would have outraged her. She was content always to accept her emotions blindly for fear of having to forego them if she knew their causes. She kept herself intact in her own mind as a good girl not by belligerently repressing her impulses but by enjoying them secretly outside her mind.

She had thought of Aubrey as a great man and with it had come the inner impulse to be embraced passionately by him. Not because he was Aubrey, but because he was the famous Aubrey Gilchrist, whose name was known. To be embraced by a famous man would be like being embraced somehow by all the people who knew his name. She would be able to think while satisfying her desire, "Everybody knows him. They know all about him. It's almost as if they knew he was doing this ... I was doing this."

Then, too, there would be a feeling of intense secrecy about it, a sort of blasphemous secrecy. When an ordinary man kissed her, that was of course, a secret. But if a famous man should kiss her, a man like Aubrey, that would be a super-secret. A violation of something remarkable. It would be a thing concealed not merely from her family and from the vague circle of friends who might be interested, but from millions of people who knew Aubrey and who would be tremendously interested in everything he did. She would be giving herself to a public figure and yet the thing she was doing would be marvelously concealed from the public. And so she would be able to enjoy the thrill of demonstromania--of being taken by someone who was not an individual like Keegan but a man who was part of other people's minds--and at the same time she would be able to enjoy the thrill of defiant intimacy; the knowledge that the people in whose minds the name Aubrey Gilchrist was alive would be ignorant of what she was doing to the man they admired. All this would be a sharpening of pleasure by the consciousness of wholesale deceit, wholesale intimacy.

These intuitions whose articulation would have been entirely unintelligable to Fanny sent the delicious tremble through her body. Immediately the two separate Aubreys of her mind focussed into one and she lost both her amusement and her awe of him. She sat regarding him with a timid smile designed to arouse his curiosity. As yet he had ignored her, his eyes seeking out Henrietta when the annexation debate waned.

Basine had diverted the talk into literary channels by inquiring, apropos of nothing, whether anyone had read a book by a man named Meredith. He had found it in Doris' room one evening and glanced through it. Seeking now for further material with which to discomfit Aubrey he had remembered the volume. He took it for granted that since his sister Doris had been reading it, the book was a very worthwhile book--the kind he cared nothing about reading himself. This did not interfere with his utilizing an exposition of its merits as a weapon against Aubrey.

"I was quite surprised," he explained. Doris listened with a frown. She was certain her brother had not read the book and the knowledge he was lying aggravated her. She knew he lied continually but was indifferent. But to have him lie about something she admired, even in its defense, made her uncomfortable as if he were trying to establish false claims upon her regard.

"The book is altogether unlike most books," he went on, generalizing carefully. His mind, totally ignorant of the subject he was discussing, was shrewdly inventing a book diametrically opposite in style and content to the books Aubrey wrote. By praising such a book he would manage without reference to his antagonist to disparage his entire literary output.

He was not clear in his mind why Aubrey had become an antagonist. The memory reiterating itself behind his words "... she thinks I'm going to marry her ... damn it...." was mysteriously finding outlet in an indignation neither against himself nor Henrietta, but against the unsuspecting Aubrey.

Fanny listened to the new conversation, but Meredith was soon dropped. The sight of Mrs. Gilchrist grimly poised opposite her mother, became a part of the lure Aubrey exercised over her. He was the son of this hard-faced, domineering woman. To do something with him that was intimate would be a deliciously concealed violation of the mother's propriety. Fanny had always been intimidated by Mrs. Gilchrist's propriety. Embracing her son would be a sort of revenge.

Without wasting time looking for reasons, Fanny felt Aubrey as an attraction. Her attitude toward him grew more intimate. She did not try to enter the talk but adjusted herself in the chair, placing her body so that the curve of her hip and leg were effectively visible to Aubrey.

And while the others talked she assured herself of the plausibility of her ambitions. Aubrey was a great man and very famous and distinguished. But he was after all entirely human. He had written books and Fanny fell to thinking about them, about the descriptions of love-making which crowded the pages of his books. Aubrey was famous and therefore aloof. But the things that had made him famous--the love passages in his books, were not intimidating. She remembered them with gratitude. They were love descriptions and Aubrey had written them.

Love passages were in fact all that Fanny usually remembered of her reading. Plots and characters escaped her. After she had closed a book there remained in her mind merely the scenes in which men had placed their arms around women and whispered after a succession of exciting adjectives, "I love you."

This was due to the manner in which Fanny read. As a girl she had ploughed laboriously through a set of Shakespeare in quest of obscene passages. Her girl's eyes would skip with irritation the speeches that seemed to her extraneous until, caught by some "nasty" word, she would become eagerly interested and carefully digest the sentences preceding and following it. At fourteen she had discovered that the dictionary, stuck away in a dusty corner of the book case, was filled with many such words. Whenever occasion permitted she opened the big volume and poured intently over its contents, digesting with excitement the definitions of what she called to herself, the nasty words.

The result of this curious reading technique had gradually shown itself as she matured. Literature became to her a secretly immoral and indecent thing. She would blush when people mentioned _Shakespeare_ or any of the books in which she had eagerly browsed. Observing that her blushes gave people an impression of her sensitive chastity, she developed a habit of seeming offended at the mention of any volume she suspected of containing such words and passages as she was continually searching for in secret.

She would say, "Oh, I don't like that kind of a book. I don't think people should write like that--about such things. There are so many nice things to write about I don't see why people must write about the others."

Delivering herself of these sentiments on all occasions, she continued her furtive hunt for books about "such things." One red-letter evening she stumbled upon a pamphlet in her brother's room describing the horrors of venereal diseases and outlining with verbal and pictorial illustrations the ravages wrought by the disease germs. She had devoured the information greedily, her sensuality editing the well-intentioned brochure into a mass of erotic revelations.

Aubrey's books, although a bit too innocuous to exhilarate her as the pamphlet had done or even the dictionary, properly read, was able to do, contained innumerable passages she remembered. She treated his writing as she did all writing, skimming hastily over irrelevant matters such as dialogues between men, discussions of abstract problems, mother and child scenes and coming to a pause only at the portions which began with some such sentence as "He looked at her with burning eyes," or, "She felt nervous because at last she was alone with him," or, "He tried to draw her to him but she resisted, her virtue outraged by the light in his eyes."

She recalled these passages now as the literary discussion grew warmer. The knowledge that Aubrey had written them served to humanize him and remove his aloofness in her eyes. He was a famous man. On the other hand he was famous because he wrote such things as, "She yielded with a happy sigh to the manly embrace."

Aubrey felt irritated with Basine. He stood up and seemingly without intention walked to a vacant chair next to Fanny. The conversation had been taken up by Mrs. Gilchrist who was explaining the real purpose of her visit.

"We are giving a fete on Mrs. Channing's lawn," she was saying, "and I would very much like you to be one of the members of the committee on printing."

Mrs. Basine felt an elation at the words. She had read about the Channing lawn fete. An affair of social magnificence designed to raise funds for the Associated Charities. Great social names were involved. Mrs. Basine's heart trembled gratefully.

"Oh, thank you," she said, her voice taking on a formal, artificial tone. Mrs. Gilchrist nodded. The tone pleased her. She could count on the Basine woman among the select who showed their gratitude openly at the largesse of her favor. She would, in fact, deign to stay for supper as a reward.

Mrs. Basine, urging her to remain for the light Sunday evening meal, felt indignant with herself. She would have preferred to refuse the committee on printing. Even as she accepted and experienced the elation her thought bristled with revolt.

"The old fool ... the old fool," repeated itself with annoying clarity in her mind. She detested Mrs. Gilchrist. Since her husband's death Mrs. Basine had outgrown the snobbery which had inspired her during her life to pour over the society columns. But a habit had been established, the habit of a desire to become a member of the closely knit organization known as Society. And now she was apparently powerless to overcome this desire which no longer animated her but yet intruded out of the past. She looked down upon herself for the elation over becoming a member of a printing committee for a social charity fete.

"I hate it ... I just hate it," she would murmur for days at a time. But the elation would persist, a thing beyond the control of her improved outlook upon life. She was aware also of the simple process by which she transferred her self-indictment into a detestation of Mrs. Gilchrist. Mrs. Gilchrist was the one who appealed to what Mrs. Basine had grown to regard as her "smaller nature." And her anger toward the imperturbable dowager was the anger of a virtuous woman toward one whose temptations she was unable to resist.

"You've been rather silent." Aubrey smiled patronizingly at Fanny. She nodded.

"Oh, I've been so interested in what you've been saying," she answered. She noticed with a feeling of sisterly gratitude that Basine had occupied himself with Henrietta. Aubrey caught the direction of her glance and frowned. He had developed a definite dislike of Basine during the afternoon.

Keegan, listening uncomfortably to the judge who was ignoring him in his talk but whose audience Keegan felt it a social necessity to remain, tried vainly to capture Fanny's eyes. She had apparently forgotten his existence. But now as Aubrey seated himself at her side, she smiled intimately in the direction of the confused Keegan.

"Oh, Hugh," she said loud enough for him to hear.

The sound of his name from the girl gave Keegan an inexplicable sensation. He felt himself break into happy smiles and the anxiety that had been growing in his heart seemed abruptly to have vanished under her voice. He came to her side and stood looking timidly at her. The conviction came over Fanny that Keegan was in love. She felt pleased and her heart warmed toward him. But her interests remained exclusively preoccupied with the novelist.

"I was just going out to the kitchen and wondered if you wanted to help cut sandwiches," she smiled at Keegan.

"Sure," he answered.

"I'm an excellent cook myself," Aubrey unbent gravely.

Fanny stood up and started toward the hall. The two men hesitated and then followed her. Basine, frowning slightly toward the door, listened to her voice chattering to cover the embarrassed silence of the two men she had bagged.

"Don't you want to go out there and help," he turned to Henrietta.

She shook her head.

Keegan felt himself being slowly transported. His penitence had faded into less satisfactory emotions toward the middle of the day. A gloom had come over him and his heart had felt weighted. He had at first identified this state of mind as a ghastly premonition of disease as a result of last night's debauch and thought that the depression he felt was his nervous system or something warning him of this fact.

The depression lifted. He sat around the Basine home listening to the chatter of the arriving guests and feeling out of place. He felt that he was wishing for something but couldn't make out what it was. His heart hurt, his head felt heavy. There were aches in him and a feeling of listlessness. More, he couldn't sit still. The room seemed a suffocating place. He was unhappy.

Several hours later it dawned on him with a shock that he was in love with Fanny. The sudden explanation frightened him. He attempted to deny it to himself. The struggle endured a half hour. He surrendered.

When he looked at Fanny again she had undergone a complete change. There was a startling intimacy in her features. Her contours were stamped with an appeal he had never observed before in a woman. The rest of the company sat behind a thin film of politeness and formality. But Fanny sat with him outside this film. The others in the room were blurred as if half hidden. Fanny was distinct. A light seemed to beat upon her. He looked in amazement.

A few hours ago he had noticed nothing. Now he noticed everything ... her dress, her hands, her hair, her eyes, her ankles. He was frightened because it seemed as if someone had invaded the secret world in which he alone lived. He remembered frightenedly that he had lain with his head in her lap, that he had embraced her. There had been something curious about the embrace but he was unable to identify it.

"She felt sorry for me, that's all," he thought and at once all hope ebbed out of him. Yet he continued to look at her and watch her grow more familiar, so familiar that her image seemed to have come into his heart where he could feel it choking him.

A few minutes after entering the kitchen he grew hopeful. He found himself in the position of an intimate--at least by comparison. She was paying no attention to Aubrey. She laughed at his, Keegan's, clumsiness, chided him good-naturedly. She held his hand and, his heart beating wildly, directed him in slicing the bread. When he was drawing the water from the sink faucet she leaned over resting her chin on his shoulder and effected a humorous concern. He felt her body press warmly against him and almost dropped the cut-glass pitcher he was holding. He was being transported.

Out of the corner of his eye he watched the novelist. A sorry fellow with gawky feet and a clumsy-looking face. Keegan vaguely pitied him as he stood around doing his best to horn in on the intimacy between Fanny and himself. He knew how the novelist felt. It seemed to Keegan even that it was he, Keegan, feeling that way, and that the carefully concealed embarassment, the futile chagrin and lameness were his own emotions and not Aubrey Gilchrist's. In an effort to put the defeated rival at his ease, so Keegan regarded him, he tried magnanimously to include him in the little byplay between himself and Fanny.

"Here, you try your hand at this," he offered, handing Aubrey the knife. Fanny pouted.