Chapter II: Part 2

Lewis was silent. He was not looking at Petra, but he knew instinctively when she lost her strange, inexplicable fear, and relaxed. A baby, with a pretty young nurse in its wake, was running down the lawn, toward the tea table. Petra had been the first to notice the invasion and welcomed the diversion it brought. Then Clare, following Petra’s eyes, saw the baby.

“Little Sophia!” she cried, quickly on her feet, while anecdotes of Felix Fairfax hung broken off in mid-air. She ran forward a few steps and knelt on the grass, her arms spread wide to receive her little daughter. In that gracious moment Clare was like nothing in the world but a dancing Greek figure on some lovely old vase—all quicksilver, grace and charm. Dick’s face glowed appreciatively. Even Lewis, for that minute, was aware of Clare’s loveliness.

The baby, however, made a swooping detour to avoid the wide-flung, slender arms of the kneeling mother and plunged straight for Petra, her big half-sister. Petra held her off, at arm’s length. “You’ve been in the brook. You’re dirty. You’re muddy. Don’t touch my dress. No!”

The rebuffed cherub commenced to wail but Petra did not relent and draw her into her arms. “No! No!” She repeated it. “Mustn’t spoil Petra’s beautiful, clean dress. No. _I’m not going to pick you up._”

Then Clare swept down upon them and snatched the baby up. Two muddy palms immediately made their mark on the shoulders of her white frock. But she lifted the delicious little hands and kissed them, one after the other, gravely—delicately. Her eyes, over the baby’s golden head, looked at Petra now with healthy, open accusation, and she held the delicious little body more and more tightly to her, while small wet shoes muddied her skirt.

Clare, looking away from Petra at last, met Doctor Pryne’s puzzled eyes. “I’m going to take little Sophia up to the nursery, if you’ll excuse me for only a few minutes,” she said. “Anyway, I wanted you to see our guest house—the view at its back. You get the river there. Petra will show you. And this is a good time—before Lowell comes along.—Richard, you may come up with us and see what a nice supper a nice cook has sent up to a nice nursery for an adorable baby! Only first we’ll help a nice nurse to wash these precious, dirty paws.... No, Richard, I want to carry her myself. Truly. You don’t mind, Doctor? I always run up to the nursery at little Sophia’s supper time, even in the middle of quite formal parties. But it only takes a few minutes.”

Her eyes, on Lewis’, were replete with meaning. “Now is your time,” they said. “Do make a beginning at helping me understand this strange girl. You can’t deny she is lacking in normal responses. Help me!”

“Good-by, sister,” Petra murmured, and went near enough to lay her cheek for just a breath against her little sister’s hair. “I couldn’t let you spoil my pretty dress, honey. But I do love you!”

At this belated gesture, Clare’s beseeching look at Lewis transformed itself to one of ironic amusement.

“If you are really interested in the view, Doctor Pryne, it’s across the road. We can go through the kitchen garden. That is shorter than going back through the house.”

The kitchen garden, through which Petra led him, was a jungle of drooping, white-starred blackberry canes. They came out of it through a little wicket gate and crossed the intimate, idle road to the guest house opposite.

“Clare won’t let them cut the grass here,” Petra explained. “Any objection to wading?” Lewis had none and followed the girl around the side of the little house and came to an uncovered piazza at the back. Ignoring the several chairs arranged with an eye to the view there, they sat down side by side on the edge of the piazza boards. From under their feet wide sweeps of June fields surged away in many-colored rippling waves. White and yellow daisies, red and white clovers, golden buttercups, orange devil’s-paintbrush, and sparkling sun-soaked grass dazzled Lewis’ eyes against the view of river and blue hills beyond.

“Paradise will be a June field like this,” he thought, “with the saints reunioning while the angels dance.” He was thinking of Fra Angelico’s “Last Judgment,” the detail of the left corner.—“Petra and I seem to have arrived somewhat ahead of time, though,—and, God knows, without our crowns! This girl! She is a breaker of promises, a vain poser, a liar, a traitor to friendship, and a repulser of innocent babyhood. Clare made her do her paces. Just didn’t she, though!”

But his next thought was more like shock than thought. “Why need her hands be as lovely as her face? Or _is_ this Paradise!” They were clasped about her knees, strong, sun-tanned hands, with long, squarish-tipped fingers. Angelic hands!

Lewis remarked, “It’s nice here.”

Petra agreed, “Yes, isn’t it!”

Lewis lighted a cigarette and Petra pulled a grass blade to make a bracelet, bending forward from lithe hips.

“You thought I was horrid to my baby sister, didn’t you, Doctor Pryne?” she asked bluntly. “I wasn’t, not really. But I couldn’t let her spoil my dress, could I? This is the first time I’ve worn it. It would have to be dry-cleaned if I had picked her up. And things are never so nice again after they are dry-cleaned. Besides, I can’t afford it.”

The dress she had so ruthlessly protected against a bewitching baby was smooth silk, the color of heavy cream. Its only decoration was a flight of embroidered gold and brown bees. They flew up one full sleeve from wristband to shoulder, across the back of the neck and down the other body-side of the frock to the lower edge of the hem. It was—taken by itself—a lovely frock, and if it had not been so utterly Petra’s own, belonged so completely to her shapely young body and coloring, even Lewis—no connoisseur in women’s clothes—would have noticed its lovely detail before this.

Petra dropped her grass bracelet—half made—into the grass and picked up the hem of her skirt, folding it back. “Look,” she said, “how beautifully finished it is.”

The flight of bees had been carried on, in all its careful perfection, to the upper edge of the hem on its inner side, where it would never show. It was as if the embroiderer had loved her work too well to realize when she had done enough.

“Clare’s dress was nothing at all,” Petra was saying. “It didn’t matter what little Sophia did to it. Besides, if Clare ruined a dozen dresses, it wouldn’t matter. She could buy dozens more.... So it wasn’t fair, was it?”

“No. It was hardly fair,” Lewis agreed absently.

Petra jumped up. The bee-embroidered hem of her skirt brushed through the flowers in the deep grass. She came closer to Lewis, stood there before him in the long grass.

“Could you spare me a cigarette?” she asked.

She had not smoked at the tea table and Lewis had taken it for granted she was that rare thing, a modern girl who did not smoke. Apologetically, he offered her his opened cigarette case and struck a match for her on the piazza boards. (The grateful patient should have given Lewis a lighter along with the case!) But he might as well have kissed her as have held the light for her,—with his face like that. Even before the girl saw Lewis’ face, she felt what was there for her to see. Her eyelids swept up, to verify her suddenly alert instinct, and for just that instant blue reticence, under Lewis’ own startled eyes, leapt into blue flame.... Petra drew a little away, trying to smile and utterly failing. Lewis lighted a fresh cigarette for himself.

Petra puffed at hers for a minute only and then it went the way the bracelet had gone, only she bent to press out the spark—firmly, securely—into damp grass roots. Returning to her place, she clasped her hands around her knees again and explained.

“Really I don’t know how to smoke, not gracefully. You shouldn’t have watched me! You made me feel hypocritical, watching me like that. But I do smoke, sometimes. Almost every night. One or two cigarettes after dinner with Father. So I wasn’t pretending, you see....”

She went on, after a minute, “You asked me about Teresa, remember? I’ll tell you now. I couldn’t say a word with Clare listening. But Clare lied about her. She knows perfectly well that Teresa wasn’t our maid—not in the sense that that Fairfax person was Clare’s butler, I mean. Teresa was nothing in the world but our guardian angel,—father’s, Marian’s, and mine. And she is my best friend.”

Lewis said coolly, “Yes, of course! I knew that. I saw that it was so, that afternoon in Cambridge. And when Mrs. Farwell said that Teresa was gone out of your life like a lost safety pin I knew it couldn’t be true. But _why_ did she say it? And why did you let her say it?”

“Oh, Clare wasn’t lying when she said that. She thought, I mean, that it was true enough. It was in saying Teresa was our maid, putting her with Felix Fairfax,—that was the lie. But so far as Clare knows, Teresa is gone—just as absolutely as any disappearing safety pin. I wish I were as elusive,—that Clare had mislaid me too. But she has a use for me. She thinks she has, anyway, and she actually pays me a wage of two thousand dollars a year to live here at Green Doors and be a model stepdaughter.”—Petra flashed a defiant look at Lewis and added, “I’m different from Clare’s other servants, you see. I don’t adore her!”

The girl’s hands, Lewis noticed, were no longer clasping her knees. They were gripping them. But he gave no sign that he was conscious of her anger and her rebellion.

“Will you just listen to that bird,” he said. “Bobolinks are usually cheerful, of course. But this fellow is carrying it beyond reason, it seems to me! He might have a peephole into heaven,—the way he sounds.” For a bobolink, apparently beside himself with rapture, was circling and swooping, swooping and circling, singing his jetty little throat to bursting. His nest must be hidden somewhere in the grass not a dozen yards from where they sat on the piazza’s edge.

Petra tilted her head to see the speck of song against the sunlight. She stayed silent until the rapture ended and the heaven-glimpser sank home. She even waited a minute or two beyond that sudden silence before she said, but calmly now, her twined fingers relaxing their grip, “My friend, Teresa, is like that bobolink’s song. At least, she’s as happy as that. Jolly as that. I’ll tell you about her, Doctor Pryne. I am glad that you think of us together. I adore her, of course. She was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and she lived there till she was fifteen. Her father and mother kept a day school for boys. But Teresa had four sisters and they all went to the boys’ school. There were three brothers. Eight children in Teresa’s family, you see....”

_Chapter Five_

Lewis listened, without looking at Petra. As she told him about Teresa, they were both watching for another flight of the bobolink, their eyes focused on the delicately waving tide of grass above the hidden nest. Hearing Petra’s voice, this way, without looking at her, Lewis learned as much about her as she was telling him about Teresa; for her voice had none of the reticence of her gentian eyes nor the stubborn power of her rounded chin. It was a gentle voice, clipped and ingenuous. Above all ingenuous. What her face had lost with childhood her voice had strangely taken on. It had a listening, attentive quality. Lewis, in the practice of his profession, had gradually acquired a habit of separating voices from their possessors. He had discovered that while the face and the very pose and carriage of a person may deceive, the human voice simply cannot. It is the materialization of personality into sound waves.

“... Eight children. Teresa’s mother had taught the fifth grade in a public school in Cambridge. Teresa’s father was Scotch. They met when Mr. Kerr was over here working for a doctor’s degree at Harvard. He came from Edinburgh. They fell so much in love that they couldn’t wait for the degree but got married and went to Edinburgh and started the day school. But it didn’t pay except just in the beginning. By the time all eight children were there in the Kerr family, they began to be really poor. The Kerr children themselves were half the school, you see. Teresa was the oldest. When Teresa was fifteen, they gave up the school in Edinburgh and returned to Cambridge. Teresa’s father got all the tutoring he could do. He was a magnificent teacher. They lived in a five-room apartment on Lawrence Street, all crowded in, but soon they moved to Boston and had a bigger place, in the top floor of a tenement on Bates Street.

“Teresa’s mother and father taught the children as they had done in Scotland. Only her mother did most of it, of course, because her father was away tutoring all day. But the Kerrs had their own ideas about education and didn’t want the children to go to public school. They wanted them to learn Greek and Latin, you see, almost in their cradles. But Teresa did go to High School. She was fifteen when they came to America and her father let her go into the Senior Class in the High School just so she could get a diploma that June. After school she helped with the housework and helped with the children’s lessons too.

“That January two of Teresa’s sisters died, the two who came next her in age. They had T B anyway, the doctor said, but they actually died of pneumonia. Very suddenly. They had been Teresa’s playmates. The rest of the children were more like her babies, she took so much care of them. But Teresa stayed out of school only one week when they died. She needed her diploma, you see, because she was going to go on through college and become a teacher.

“... Well, but when spring came ... something terrible happened.... It is too terrible to tell. But if Teresa bore it, I guess you can bear hearing it, Doctor Pryne. Shall I tell you?”

“Yes,” Lewis urged. “I want to hear,” but added with quick compunction, “if it doesn’t hurt you too much, Petra,”—and was utterly astonished by the devastating look Petra gave him. But her scorn was for herself.

“Hurt me too much!” she exclaimed. “I only wish it could hurt me! Really hurt me! It is too terrible that one person had to bear it all alone. And Teresa, of all people! When she is so happy, so jolly—and loves God more than all the rest of the people I know put together love Him! It was to her it happened. _All I’m doing is tell it!_

“The twenty-third of April, the Principal of the High School sent for Teresa to come to his office before she went home. He told her that she was to graduate with very highest honors and that he had got a Radcliffe scholarship for her. It was Teresa’s birthday. She was sixteen. Teresa could hardly wait to get home to tell her mother all the Principal had said. It would be Teresa giving a birthday present to her mother, you see. Mothers should have presents even more than the children they have borne should have them, Teresa thinks. For the mothers remember the birthdays and the children can’t.... She ran as fast as she could, the minute she got out of the subway. She didn’t care if people stared at a grown-up girl racing through the streets. She wanted so to get there with the wonderful news. There was a crowd of people at the end of her street held back by ropes. The air was full of smoke....”

Again the bobolink soared, cascading rapture. Petra stopped telling about Teresa’s sixteenth birthday and listened and watched with Lewis. But this time she did not wait for the music to sink and fall away home; after a breath or two she went on, her voice of necessity raised a little, indenting itself through the bobolink’s Gloria.

“The whole building where the Kerr family lived was burned down to the pavement. Somebody told Teresa that everybody had escaped except a woman who lived in the top-story corner tenement and her six children. They had all been burned alive. They came to the windows too late for the fire ladders to reach them. They must have been asleep when the fire started and waked too late. The alarm was sounded a little after eight. Yes ... Teresa had left her mother and all the children sleeping deeply. She and her father had got breakfast together and gone out with infinite care not to wake them,—she to school, he to his work in Cambridge. The baby had had croup during the night, you see, and the whole family had been disturbed by it. Even the younger children. Teresa’s mother had made a tent with sheets over the crib, and boiled a kettle in it, and toward dawn it was over and the baby was sleeping. The police had learned there were six children in the family and that was why they said six were burned. But Teresa, you see, had gotten up early. She and her father. They had been at infinite pains—I told you that—not to wake the others. _Infinite pains._ The baby was sleeping naturally, breathing softly when they stole out.

“It was a policeman who told Teresa about how the mother and ‘six’ children had come to the window. He had seen them himself.... But a priest shoved him one side. That was Father Donovan. He was their parish priest. The Kerrs were Catholic. Teresa is a Catholic. Teresa couldn’t pray. But Father Donovan’s praying was really hers. He said, ‘_My_ mother, _my_ brothers and sisters, _my_ baby brother. May perpetual light shine upon them.’ ... They gave Teresa brandy. In the rectory. They put it in hot tea. The housekeeper rubbed her feet and hands, while Father Donovan called up all the places her father might be. Father Donovan had thought the police had made certain when they said that all _six_ Kerr children had come to the window, and until Teresa got there, you see, he had no way of tracing her father. But now Teresa gave the names and addresses. Finally somebody said yes—Mr. Kerr was there. Father Donovan said, ‘Then keep him and don’t let him know anything until I come. I must tell him. Nobody else.’ But the people didn’t wait,—or something happened. I don’t know what. I can’t ask Teresa. Perhaps she doesn’t know. Whether he died of the shock or whether he killed himself—thinking all were burned.... All that Teresa said was ‘Father Donovan was in time to give him absolution.’

“Father Donovan boarded Teresa with his housekeeper’s sister. And she went on and got her diploma and graduated from High School with very highest honors in June. Nobody came to her graduation for by then Father Donovan was dying of cancer. He had not told Teresa until he had to. When he found he couldn’t go to the graduation, you see, he told her. She took her diploma right to him. She ran to the rectory the minute she was out. He blessed her and was as delighted and proud as her mother would have been, Teresa says, and her father, and her brothers and sisters. He told her that his death would not be even an interruption to his prayers for her goodness and happiness, and he asked her to pray for him always, all her life. He died early the next morning....

“The week after Father Donovan died Marian found Teresa through an employment agency, and she went to Cape Cod for the summer with us. That was the summer Marian began to be ill. Teresa and I did the work and took care of her, and swam all the rest of the time. I taught Teresa to swim and she was simply mad about it. Marian had melancholia and Father was terribly unhappy that summer. And I was selfish and cross, having to wash so many dishes.... _But Teresa was happy!_... Yes, it is true. She was the one who was happy.... But gradually, I grew terribly happy too, because of her. She didn’t tell us anything about her family or what had happened to them, only that they were dead. Whenever I asked her about her brothers and sisters who had died, she put me off. And Marian never asked her anything, I think. She had merely hired somebody who was to be one of the family and work for less money because of that privilege. But above all, Marian had chosen Teresa from all the other applicants for the job at the agency because she seemed the most _cheerful_.

“In September, when we went back to Cambridge, Teresa wanted to use her scholarship and enter Radcliffe. But Marian needed her so much and had come to depend on her for everything so much—but most of all it was her cheerfulness she needed—that Teresa gave up college for that year and stayed on with us. But she told Father and me, then, when she decided to stay on with us, about the fire, and about the two sisters who had died of pneumonia, and about how her mother and father had wanted her to go to college. Father said that she must go, of course, but that she was surely young enough to wait a year. He was appalled about the fire and said she must never tell Marian. It would be too harrowing. And he was very sorry I had heard it....

“The summer after that we couldn’t afford the cottage on the Cape and we stayed on in Cambridge. That was bad for Marian. All the time that she was in the apartment she spent in her bedroom on her chaise-longue. But it was frightfully hot and she would get wildly nervous and go out then to luncheons and tea dances and places—looking very gay and well. But it was only a false, nervous strength, the doctor said....

“Then that fall you came, Doctor Pryne. Teresa and I were so relieved! But you didn’t have a chance. Marian went away, and there was the divorce. But she went away without saying anything to Teresa and me. We came back from a day in the country in time to get dinner that afternoon, and she was gone. That evening Father explained it all to us—in words of one syllable, you know,—what had happened.

“Teresa took it so hard that I don’t remember how _I_ felt about it. I didn’t feel anything, I think. I was so surprised to hear Teresa _crying_ that that was all I thought about, really. It was as if the world was shaking under us—under Father and me—with Teresa, of all people, crying. But Father was angry with Teresa. She said, you see, that he must bring Marian back. He said he would not think of doing any such thing—that she had a right to her freedom, if she wanted it. Teresa started crying when Father said to us, ‘I can honestly say I am happy in Marian’s happiness and I think she has done exactly right. It’s sheer stupidity for people who are not happy together to go on pretending they are. It is happiness that matters. There’s at least one person the happier in the world to-night, and any one who really and genuinely cares for her must be glad for her,—even if it means separation from her, of a sort, and for a time. And after the divorce goes through, you know, there’s no reason in the world why we shouldn’t all be as good friends as ever.’

“But Teresa cried just exactly as if somebody was dead. And this time Father Donovan was dead too and could not pray her prayers for her, while she cried. That is what I thought, I remember, though I didn’t understand why she was crying like that. I was terribly frightened by her crying like that—and Father’s walking the floor so white and angry with her.

“Clare came in about then. I think Father called her up and asked her to come, to help him with Teresa. She made Teresa drink some water. And then, when Teresa was quiet, she said, ‘You are a self-righteous, ignorant girl. Mr. Farwell has the patience of a saint but this is more than he can bear.—He is going to give you a month’s wages and you must go away. You are only making things that are hard for him already much harder.’

“I went with Teresa while she packed her suit cases. Clare called up Morris Place House and told them to get a room ready for Teresa. She is a trustee there. She ordered the taxi too, and told us when it came. She took everything in charge, as if she were in Marian’s place already. But Teresa told the taxi-driver to go somewhere else, not Morris Place House. She wasn’t crying any more but she looked ghastly. She wouldn’t let me go away with her but she promised never to forsake me. And she never has. She is my guardian angel.... But Clare doesn’t know any more about Teresa now—how she is, where she is—than she told you she did. And she’s not going to know. That is _something_ I can do for Teresa.... But you asked about her, Doctor Pryne. You remembered her. And now I have told you about her.... I really wanted to....”

The bobolink’s Gloria had reached its climax minutes ago and ceased. Petra’s voice—when she had come to telling how Clare had discharged Teresa and sent her away, “as if she were in Marian’s place already”—had taken on the reticence of her eyes. It was not her personality any more—that voice—not as it had been. But the girl’s eyes, now that both she and the bobolink were silent, and Lewis looked at her, were thick with tears.

“But what did Teresa do? Was it too late to get into Radcliffe that fall? I suppose so. That was late autumn—nearly three years ago. What did Teresa do? Where did she go?”

Lewis had to know. Teresa had become increasingly real and important to him with every word that Petra had said of her. Petra must go on, must tell it all, even if she did cry, doing it.

But there were no tears in her voice. “Yes, it was too late for Radcliffe. Father had again, you see, persuaded her to wait another year. But I went to see her the next morning and she had a plan. She had decided to get some kind of job—any kind—until she could begin earning her way through Radcliffe in the shortest time possible. In the end she meant to be a private secretary and I would go and live with her. Then I would begin going to Business School. We would both be independent and I needn’t live with Clare and Father. After Teresa had gone away in the taxi, they told me, you see, that they were going to be married as soon as the divorces went through,—so it was a very relieving idea, to live with Teresa and earn my own living. Teresa started in to make it come true right away. And it was coming true. She was all ready to graduate when—”

Petra broke off there, jumping up as if a bell had rung for her, and her first duty in life was to answer it. But it was only Dick Wilder, whistling to them from the road.

“Teresa was all ready to graduate and what happened? It doesn’t matter about Dick. Go on.” Lewis was impatient at the interruption.

“But they want us. Clare has sent him for us. She thinks I have kept you too long,” Petra whispered, and promised, quickly, under her breath, “I will tell you what happened the minute we are alone again. I want to tell you. I want your advice, Doctor Pryne. Things have happened.—But not now. Teresa is a secret here at Green Doors. From Dick Wilder too. From everybody.”

Dick had come around the side of the house. “Why didn’t you sing out?” he inquired, astonished at finding them there. “I thought you must have passed up our famous view and gone somewhere else, you two! Lowell has turned up at last. But whatever—”

Dick was silenced by a fresh astonishment. This was stranger than their hiding and not answering,—Petra crying. Of all things! And even Lewis was not quite himself. Well, Dick knew nothing to do about it other than to recommence talking faster than ever—which he did—and somehow hurry them back to the elm and Clare’s management. He began explaining, very swiftly and at some length, as they went, how little Sophia had refused to let anybody but her mother feed her her supper, and that that was why they—he and Clare—had been gone such an unconscionably long while themselves, and how, taking everything together, he was afraid that Petra’s father was feeling that they hadn’t any of them much realized that he had broken off his work half an hour ahead of the usual time to join them at tea, since nobody was anywhere near the tea table when he came up from his studio.

Petra may have heard something of Dick’s nervous chatter. Lewis heard nothing. Left to himself, he would never have been so docile under Dick’s high-handedness, of course. But Petra had shown such a passionate will to obedience from the instant of the summoning whistle that there was nothing else for Lewis but to seem docile too.

And here they were back on the lawn again, going down toward the group of chairs under the elm. Lowell Farwell had risen and was standing, waiting for them. He was more imposing even than the published portraits. His leonine mane of frosty curls, his elegant but wide shoulders, his height—and as they reached the shade and were near enough—his luminous black eyes under striking black brows, were the concrete and visible aspects of a personality to conjure with.

_Chapter Six_

Lewis had dined with his sister and her family and now he and she were promenading her piazza. Cynthia was like her name, fragrantly feminine, blond and delightful, a cool petaled flower of New England. They caught glimpses of Harry, her banker husband, as they passed and repassed the living-room windows. He was lying back in what might very well be the world’s most comfortable chair, reading the financial pages of the _Transcript_, smoking his Corona, and supposedly enjoying the jazz music which came blaring to him from a Boston hotel through his radio; he had only to raise a hand—no need even to lift his head—to turn the knob which would produce a decent quiet.

“I always promise myself when I’m here that I will come oftener,” Lewis was saying. “Then I get so devilish busy I don’t manage it. But now, Cynthia, it may be different. You may be seeing too much of me.”

“That’s nice. I should love to see too much of you. But _why now_? Oh! Green Doors, of course! And I’ve been trying to get you to go over there with me for a year or more! You see why, now, don’t you! It’s fascinating, isn’t it! I feel, sometimes, when I’m there, that the very air is charged with a sort of electricity, if you know what I mean, which you don’t, since it doesn’t express what I mean. But it’s all high spots, somehow. We must seem commonplace to them, Harry and I. But Clare is sweet to us, all the same. Even Lowell Farwell doesn’t seem bored. He and Harry discuss international affairs, Russia and that sort of thing. And Clare herself is so human. Isn’t she beautiful—in an unusual way!”

“But why wouldn’t Mrs. Farwell be human?” Lewis laughed. “Do you imply that she is above or below the norm? As to being beautiful—Petra is _really_ beautiful.”

“Petra—really beautiful? Yes, I suppose she is. But her features are too classical to be interesting, don’t you think? And she’s so impassive. She’s too big too. She’ll be positively statuesque some day. That type always develop into Junos. Clare is frightfully sweet to her. Frightfully patient. And what a background she’s providing her with! All it needs is just a little playing up to! If she only knew how!”

“What do you mean, background?” Lewis asked curiously. And he wondered, what had Petra ever done to Cynthia to bring out such malice. Malice was no more natural to Cynthia than to himself.

“What do you think I mean?” she exclaimed, a little impatiently. “The people she is meeting, of course. Yourself to-day, for instance. How many times have you gone anywhere socially during the last year, Lewis? Yet you went to the Farwells’. And you say you want to go again, often. But it’s not only celebrities. Socially, too, Clare is giving Petra everything. This dinner dance tonight. Dick says there isn’t a man invited who isn’t the last word in eligibility. Why, Clare is providing Petra opportunities any ordinary girl would give her eyes for. And it’s probably wasted. Men want more than mere passive beauty these days. Temperament, vivacity are what count. Clare doesn’t realize it, of course, but the very contrast between herself and Petra puts them off Petra in spite of Clare’s disadvantage in being married and thirty. It couldn’t help to. Wait till little Sophia grows up, though. Then Clare will have her innings as a mother. The little thing sparkles already! Personality is a queer thing, isn’t it?”

“I’ve sometimes almost thought so,” Lewis agreed dryly. Then he asked, “Can you tell me, Cynthia, why Dick, who is adult, after a fashion—anyway, he isn’t a mere callow college boy—and seems practically to live at Green Doors, hasn’t fallen in love with Petra? And she with him? It’s a miracle.”

Lewis meant his question earnestly. For hours now, in his heart, he had been religiously grateful for the miracle mentioned.

“Are you serious?” Cynthia asked. “Couldn’t you see for yourself—this afternoon? Let’s sit down. No—I don’t want a chair. You take it. I’ll perch here on the rail. Yes, do smoke. What an absolutely precious cigarette case you’ve got there! My dear, let me take it! How delicious! Just feeling it in your hand is thrilling! A present?”

Lewis nodded, but absently. Cynthia, as Dick had done, refrained from commenting on the probable value of the gift. If Lewis realized the value, he would only be made uncomfortable by it.

“You want to know why Dick doesn’t fall in love with Petra Farwell? It’s too obvious. How could a person like Dick look twice at that gauche girl, with Clare all the while in the same picture? Besides, Dick, more than most moderns, is a romantic. It sticks out all over him. He’s an incorrigible idealist. But I’m not worried for Dick. He won’t get his heart broken. Clare is too big to let that happen. It’s really the most civilizing thing that could happen to him to be in love with a woman like Clare at precisely this stage in his development. Think of the color, the sheer beauty, the _depth_ that knowing Clare so well—even thinking he is breaking his heart over her—is giving to Dick’s life! As for falling in love with a girl like Petra—why, he isn’t aware of her, except, perhaps, as one of Clare’s problems. Dick hasn’t said anything to us—Harry and me—of Petra’s being a problem at Green Doors. Clare herself is too selfless and big in every way ever to let on, of course. But anybody can see! Clare’s being so extraordinarily sweet and patient only makes it stand out all the more, how much a problem Petra is. Couldn’t you see it yourself, this afternoon, Lewis? Where’s your psychology?”

“Where is your own, Cynthia, my dear?” Lewis’ voice was oddly constrained, Cynthia thought, wondering at it. “Why don’t you look at Petra for yourself? It’s obvious you never have. You’ve supinely accepted Clare’s version of her, without using your own intelligence.”

“Clare’s version of Petra! But haven’t I just been saying that Clare is absolutely loyal to Petra? She defends her, every time. She even goes so far as to call her sullen silences ‘reticence.’ And her vanity—Petra’s obsessed over clothes, thinks of nothing else—Clare merely treats that as touchingly young and naïve. Or else she pretends that it’s evidence of artistic appreciation and taste. But if that’s what it is, why doesn’t it show itself in other directions, now and then? I’ve never seen it. Why, the other day I mentioned something in her father’s last novel, and Petra had to admit she hadn’t even read it! Imagine! No, whatever Clare pretends to herself and the rest of us about it, Petra is just plain dull.... One is sorry for Clare, of course....”

Lewis was keeping only a tenuous hold on his good temper. “How can you be so dull yourself?” he asked. “She—Petra—is as far from dull as any human being I’ve ever had the honor to know. I suppose you’ve seen her nowhere but against the general unreality of Green Doors. That’s the ‘background’ your Clare has given the child.... Petra’s truth, against her background’s untruth, has bewildered you. It hasn’t me....” He lighted a fresh cigarette.

Cynthia flapped her arms and burst into as good an imitation of a rooster crowing as is possible to the human species. It was an accomplishment retained from childhood. In those early days it had been, usually, the closing note in some argument between brother and sister, where Cynthia had been proven the winner; and now, if ever, she knew herself right.

“You lose! I win!” she laughed, dropping her wings. “What good does it do you to be a psychiatrist? And a famous one? Petra and truth! That girl would as soon tell an out-and-out lie as wink. Clare never knows where she is with her when it’s a question of fact.”

“Oh, so Clare _has_ admitted that much—not excused it?”

“Not a bit of it. You haven’t caught _me_, darling, in a fib. Clare couldn’t excuse it or cover it up. It’s too obvious. Petra is always avoiding the truth.”

“Yes. I got a hint of that myself this afternoon. Couldn’t help it.”

But now that so suddenly and even surprisingly Lewis had acknowledged her victorious in the scrimmage, Cynthia felt a little remorseful. Not on Lewis’ account—he could afford his losses—on Petra’s.

“I needn’t have been so malicious!” she owned. “Come to think of it, I suppose Petra Farwell’s never had one atom of religious training. What is there to make her feel an obligation to be truthful—or even grateful, for the matter of that? She’s never had a chance to see life lived beautifully—till now.”

“But who of us has had religious training?” Lewis asked, surprised. “You haven’t. I certainly haven’t. Your own children haven’t. What’s that got to do with your judgments on Petra, then?”

“Oh, don’t be so logical, darling. I was only making excuses for her, I suppose. But we are different, you must admit. Lying doesn’t come natural to us, does it! And we are sincere....”

“Doesn’t it? Are we? Well—possibly. But then we are at peace with our environment. Not in danger from it. Our best policy is sincerity, telling the truth. If we were living in a jungle, my dear, an unfriendly and mysterious jungle, where we couldn’t tell the trees from the shadows, you know, we’d fall back on protective coloring and other hypocrisies, lies, wouldn’t we? That’s where Petra’s living. In a jungle. Where she can’t tell the shadows from the trees, if you want to know....”

“You’re being fantastic on purpose. Or else you’re overworking and not responsible!” Cynthia accused and then, suddenly, stopped breathing. How had they ever got to talking like this, so earnestly, about Petra Farwell? Lewis, anyway, who never talked personalities! What had happened to him? Why was he looking so strained and different? Was Lewis really interested in Petra Farwell for herself—in some particular way?

For years Cynthia had wanted Lewis to marry. Her husband agreed with her that, unmarried, the world was losing much that her famous brother could give it. He was terribly sweet with children. Her own four adored him. And some of his best and most famous work had been done with children. Besides, he was—although Cynthia herself, being only his sister, could not quite see why—extraordinarily magnetic to women. They pursued him shamelessly. Avoiding that pursuit, both in his work and socially, had developed into something approximating an art in his contacts, Cynthia imagined. So he had a world to choose from. If only he had met Clare before Lowell Farwell met her! Cynthia had sighed this sigh to herself before to-night. Clare would have been perfect. But there were others. There must be. Lewis needn’t fall back on a Petra—a sullen, stodgy young beauty, who wasn’t even enough of a personality herself to appreciate personality in another, in Clare. If Lewis should be hypnotized by mere beauty and youth, and do anything so stupid,—how simply ironic that would be!

Catching back her breath, Cynthia descended precipitately from her perch on the piazza rail. She wanted to be nearer Lewis. Physical nearness might help their sympathetic nearness, which had been—she knew now—scattered to the four winds when she flapped rooster wings and crowed a minute ago. Besides, she had an inspiration. She drew a chair close to his. The arms of the two chairs touched.

“Lewis!” she said. “Do you remember that strange book, ‘Phantastes,’ by George MacDonald? We read it together the summer after Father died. No, it was the summer before. Aunt Cynthia read it to us. Those weeks we stayed with her. That was the summer _before_ Father died, wasn’t it? Anyway, we were really too young for that book. But we got something out of it. I remember parts quite vividly, every now and then.... Particularly that gruesome bit about the Maid of the Alder. Remember that? How she was so perfectly beautiful to look at? Anodos thought so, anyway. And he went with her that long walk through the forest and spent the night with her in her cave? He thought she was the Lady of the Marble—or was it Alabaster?—whom he had sung to life and who had fled from him. He had never clearly seen her face but she was his ideal woman, the woman his soul was seeking. Now he thought he was to possess her at last.... But when morning came and he woke, his companion of the night had waked ahead of him and was at the door of the cave, standing there, looking out. Her back was turned to him.... Remember?... She had had her desire of Anodos and she simply didn’t care now if he discovered that she was not his ideal woman? She was perfectly careless that he should see how she was hollow! Do you remember her standing there, in the cave door, looking out into the forest—her hollow, rotten back, like the stump of a decayed tree? Like a coffin stood upon end? Wasn’t it gruesome just!”

Cynthia was genuinely shuddering by this time. Lewis laughed. “I should say I do remember. That morning-after scene darkened my boyhood,” he chuckled. “I’ve read ‘Phantastes’ through several times since that summer. I keep it by me. I can’t imagine—can you?—why Aunt Cynthia chose that particular book for youngsters like us? I suppose because of its fairy element—the enchanted forest, and all. To my mind, it’s one of the world’s deepest, wisest, but almost too obscurely mystical books. Do _you_ remember, Cynthia, how one begins to feel the horror threatening Anodos’ soul’s life, early, in the very beginning of this Maid of the Alder business, when he starts off with her on the walk to the cave? Your first twinges of horror and dread for Anodos set in when she takes such precautions to keep her face always squarely toward him, walking backwards to accomplish it, when necessary! Then, when they at last reach the cave, she makes him go in _ahead_ of her. Inside, she always keeps her back to the wall. How horrible it is when the lamp shines through her! Anodos should have guessed then that she was hollow!... It is a nightmare....”

“But Lewis! I meant—I’m afraid I meant—that Petra Farwell, young girl though she is, has several times made me remember the Maid of the Alder. I haven’t just made it up now. Truly. I thought of it the last time I was at Green Doors. We were there for dinner....”

“Petra—the Maid of the Alder! You’re a little mad! But it’s rather a curious coincidence that I myself have been brooding on ‘Phantastes’ very lately, this afternoon, in fact, at Green Doors and apropos of Petra too. Fact! Do you remember Anodos’ song to his ideal woman—the genuine one, not the imitation—through her shrouding marble? It says how the world’s sculptors in their search for her have succeeded in embodying in their creations no more than their ideas of what she may be. They’ve never taken hold of her living self. I even remember some lines. Bless me if I don’t!

“Round their visions, form enduring,
Marble vestments thou hast thrown;
But thyself, in silence winding,
Thou has kept eternally;
Thee they found not, many finding—
I have found thee: wake for me.”

Lewis murmuring poetry in the dusk! And with the little curly smile that with him, paradoxically, meant utterest sincerity in what he was saying, even solemnity! Cynthia’s heart beat slowly and with a kind of awe at the simplicity of the way in which Lewis’ curly smile and his poetry had shut her up, permanently, on the subject of Petra. The whole situation—trivial and really nothing at all to Cynthia until only a minute ago—had between a breath and a breath been lifted to the dignity of a position on the knees of the gods, where she must perforce leave it to its own developments in that realm of pure fatality. And she thought they had been talking lightly!

But now her brother was asking—casual again, thank goodness—“Have the kids gone up to bed yet? I’m terribly afraid I promised ’em a yarn after they were packed away and that model starched nurse you indict on ’em was well out of the picture. They’ll be looking for me.”

_Chapter Seven_

Lewis was pledged to return to Green Doors at ten o’clock that evening. Cynthia and Harry, Clare was aware, had made plans which would keep their cherished guest occupied for all of Sunday, and he could not come then. This was the only time left. She had made the rendezvous under cover of walking up to the house with Lewis when he was leaving Green Doors this afternoon. He was to let himself in by the wicket gate and she would meet him on the terrace, for Petra was not to know that he had come back. Dick had explained her scheme to him, had he not?

Yes, Dick had explained, and while at the time of the explanation Lewis had had no intention of collaborating with Mrs. Farwell in any schemes whatever, now he agreed to return for a “talk.” Anything that touched Petra’s existence would have drawn him irresistibly back.

The great hall was wide open onto the terrace tonight, as it had been this afternoon. It made an excellent ballroom. It was a small party and every one was inside, dancing. At least, as Lewis came up onto it, the terrace seemed deserted.

His eyes found Petra first of all. She was dancing with a tall, dark youth, over a restricted area in the center of the floor. Lewis saw that the other girls were like flowers in the black-coated arms of their partners—scarlet flowers, blue, yellow, exotically scented. Or was the perfume from the flowers on the terrace? In any case, it harmonized with the exotic music. But the girls themselves seemed too fragile for the voluptuous implications of the perfume and the music. They were flowers drifting on the dark current of sensuousness with petals not yet sodden.

Lewis was amused at himself over his fancifulness but it continued to spin itself along. If the girls there were flowers, the boys were leaves. And the leaves, no more than the flowers, belonged to the dark current under the music; they were merely eddying over its surface, vacant and bemused. It was strangely unreal, unconvincing—both the would-be savage music and the would-be voluptuous dancing.

But Petra was different. His eyes came back to her. She was not bemused and she was too alive to drift. So her dancing was out of key and came near to awkwardness. Given solid earth, she could run fleetly, beautifully, Lewis was certain,—a Diana, spirit and body one. But she was too alive and too vital to find herself in this syncopated dalliance with a shadow world of sensuousness. Passion, for her to recognize it, must be bright, whole, burning with sun. Lewis was not amused now at his thought. He knew what he knew about Petra, and his heart offered up a gratitude that was religious in the knowing.

Clare stole up and stood beside him. She had been watching for his arrival, sitting with Dick in the shadow of a tall flower-grown urn. She had sent the young man back to the party peremptorily and with some excitement the instant the older and more eminent visitor appeared.

“Aren’t they precious!” she exclaimed, her fingers just touching Lewis’ arm. “All of them! But my Petra in particular? In that frosty gown!—Come to the library. We can’t talk against this racket. Lowell’s in town speaking to a meeting of the Boston Authors’ Club, otherwise he would be hiding in the library himself. He detests jazz. Except when your brother-in-law plays it. Harry’s jazz is superb. He makes it art!”

The library was a surprisingly small room but its walls rose through two stories with books all the way up to the high ceiling. A mild, yellow and diffused light, radiating from unseen sources, would make reading here—even at the top of the book ladder—as easy for the eyes as if it were broad day.

Clare settled herself in a corner of the very low, built-in modern divan which extended down one entire length of the room, and Lewis, obedient to her gesture, sat down, experimentally, beside her. He had had little practice with modernistic furniture such as this, which, he was learning now, demanded a new technique in posture, unless one were built on angular lines and accustomed to lolling. It would quite suit Farwell, for instance, whose divan it was. But Lewis, who was stocky rather than angular, found himself having to bend in all the wrong places to adapt himself to it. Mrs. Farwell, however, was perfectly at home. She had drawn her feet up under her, Japanese fashion, and sat now perched on her heels, wand-straight, small and exquisite. But then, she was as supple-bodied as a child and as poised as a dancer in every attitude that she assumed.

“I am really delighted,” she was saying, “that you have come, like this. If I had gone into town some day, instead, and seen you in your office, everything would have been so different. I should have had to _tell_ you about things. We may have saved weeks, don’t you think so, Doctor Pryne, in getting you here where you can see it all for yourself and needn’t draw it out bit by bit with questions?”

Clare’s evening gown was flame-colored taffeta, her jewels pearls, her feet—out of sight but remembered—were sandal-shod with gold heels, curved like dagger blades. It was an elegance in striking contrast to the simplicity and seeming carelessness of her afternoon’s appearance. But Lewis felt no contrast. It was all of the same piece: all part of the game. And when he looked away from her, which he did rather quickly in very shame for the ungenerosity of every thought he seemed able to think concerning Petra’s stepmother, it was only to find her voice increasing his prejudice. No matter what ideas her words in themselves conveyed, certain inflections in the tones seemed to be asking over and over, “What do you think of me, what do you think of me, _what do you think of me_?” It was the eager and unappeasable cry of an insatiate vanity. Lewis hated himself for hearing it so plainly; but his nerves were taut. When had Doctor Pryne allowed himself the excuse of nerves before! Yet to be so near Petra and shut away in here with Mrs. Farwell!