Chapter III: Part 3

He wound his arms around his knees. That was it. That was what you had to do to come to terms with this fantastic divan. Stick your knees up, almost to your chin, and then not to be altogether too orang-utan-like, wind your arms. The only alternative would be to sit on your feet, as his hostess was doing.

“There wouldn’t have been any need for you to come to my office,” he said. “Not to talk about Petra. She is the last person in the world, to my mind, to need psychiatric treatment.” He might as well get this part over quickly, Lewis felt.

Clare was surprised by the dry conviction with which Lewis spoke, but she was not warned. She swayed toward him, from her heels, and put her hand on his arm. The gesture was as unselfconscious, and un-sex-conscious, as if she were a child of ten. Lewis was aware of her unconsciousness all the time that her fingers stayed there, pressing into his coat sleeve, and her soft warm breath was almost on his cheek. He wondered whether she pawed Dick like this, with casual unselfconsciousness,—and whether Dick found it engagingly innocent. Dick was just the sort of romantic youth—Lewis hadn’t needed Cynthia to explain Dick to him—to confuse sexual paucity with purity.

“Oh, but you don’t understand what we meant then, Richard and I,” she protested. “Psychiatry—anyway as you practise it, Doctor Pryne—is not for diseased minds merely. Petra is terribly sane. Saner than I am, I’m certain of that. It is something less tangible I am asking your help with. I want you to make it possible for my stepdaughter to be true to herself and to be happy.—That wasn’t Petra’s true self you saw this afternoon. I know, Doctor, that it is your faith, as much as it is mine, that most people want to find themselves and be true to themselves, to their best selves, I mean, if only they can be shown how. If you _hadn’t_ that faith in human nature, then you couldn’t do for people what you do. You see I know something about your work. Mrs. Dickerman is one of my intimate friends. Cornelia James too. I’ve known Cornie ever since we were at Miss Foster’s School together. So I know, for I have seen, how you took at least one woman and made her into a charming, agreeable person when she was over thirty. Why, Cornie was the most morbid, oversensitive and unhappy soul until you began treating her!—And even if I hadn’t seen these miracles, I’d still know from reading your books what you can do for people in the way of orientating them with their own highest potentialities. And all I am asking, Doctor Pryne, is that you should do that for my Petra. You do believe, don’t you, that it isn’t natural to her—can’t be natural to any one—to be so secretive and indifferent as she seems? Not at nineteen, anyway! And with Lowell Farwell for a father—and I so devoted to her!”—Clare’s fingers had relaxed their steady pressure but she was slow to remove them from Lewis’s coat sleeve.

Lewis might have laughed. He frowned to save himself from doing so; for it would not have been a pleasant laugh and the frown was, at least, silent. Clare was not the first blasphemous wealthy woman who had tried, casually and even patronizingly, to buy his services as a cure of souls for themselves or members of their family. But in this instance it was Petra’s reserve—that clean, sword-edged reserve—he was being asked to violate. Yes, this woman was looking forward to his pulling Petra all apart, like the works of a clock, and laying the pieces on the table, for them to mull over together.

He could hear Mrs. Lowell Farwell expatiating on it to her next dinner partner. Yet, no. She would hardly do that. It would be worth saving until the conversation was general. “Oh, yes. Doctor Pryne is psychoanalyzing my stepdaughter. He is frightfully interested in her case. It is too wonderful what he has done for her already. She’s a different person. Oh, but you must know who he is! Doctor Lewis Pryne! He wrote ‘Learning to be Adult.’”

Oh, yes! Mrs. Farwell would exploit it for all it was worth at dinners, luncheons, teas and in the arms of dancing partners for weeks to come, while all the time the inflections in her voice demanded, “What do you think of me, what do you think of me, what do you think of _me now_?”

Only, of course she would not—because she could not. Fortunately she had come to the wrong counter. Lewis had nothing to sell her—but, on second thoughts, something, possibly, that he would give her for nothing; for it had suddenly occurred to him that if he failed her entirely to-night, she might try elsewhere. There _were_ psychoanalysts quite the sort she imagined him to be, of course. Would Petra, with Mrs. Farwell setting her heart on it, have the hardihood to stand out against going through the fashionable paces of being psychoanalyzed? He must do what he could to avoid such a possible calamity.

“This question of finding one’s self,” he murmured,—“it’s living one’s life, isn’t it, that accomplishes that, in the end? Petra is too young to have found herself in that sense, of course. But she is old enough, on the other hand, to want to. That may be the conflict, the cause of all her ‘indifference’ to you and her life here. She said something to me this afternoon about wanting to go to business school and be independent. Wouldn’t her father send her? That would be cheaper, anyway, and infinitely more sensible than having her psychoanalyzed. She could get quite away from Green Doors. Live in the Girls’ Studio Club—or perhaps even set up an apartment with some girl friend....” He was, of course, thinking of Teresa.

It had the effect, anyway, of removing Mrs. Farwell’s hand from his arm. She was back in her corner, looking at him with surprise and even doubt.

“Petra didn’t tell you that she wanted to get away from Green Doors and all I am doing for her here? Did she? Petra didn’t actually say—this afternoon, the minute you were alone with her—that she was unhappy? Did she? I simply don’t understand, Doctor Pryne!”

“But why are you surprised?” Lewis evaded. “I gathered from young Wilder when he came to my office on Thursday that that was how things were with Petra. You felt she was abnormally indifferent to you, he said, and to all the nice things you were trying to do for her and to give her. But, do you know, now I’ve seen Petra, that indifference seems perfectly healthy to me? She is, after all, not a child. She’s a woman. _Let_ her learn a profession and be independent! Why not?”

Mrs. Farwell was growing wider and wider eyed. Then suddenly Lewis knew what he should have guessed: Clare had never really believed that Petra was antagonistic to her. She had thought her indifference and reticence merely temperamental idiosyncrasies. In fact, she had in all sincerity thought Petra what she had made Cynthia think her, a girl deficient in sensibility. So she was only tampering with Petra’s temperament, or rather, asking Lewis to tamper with it, for the sake of drawing him—Doctor Lewis Pryne—into the Farwells’ “interesting” circle. Modern morbid psychology was much in the air these days. Being psychoanalyzed by “well-known” doctors had become a fashionable pastime. Having one’s stepdaughter, to whom one was in every way so marvelously generous, psychoanalyzed, and then oneself discussing the case in the wings, as it were, with the famous psychiatrist _ad infinitum_, would be a new way to play the game.

A strained laugh from Clare interrupted Lewis’ bitter train of thought. “I am afraid Petra has been deceiving you, rather,” she exclaimed. “What I _can’t_ understand is how she managed it, and in so short a time, with you, who are so—so wise. She must have deliberately set out to engage your sympathies the minute I left her alone with you. But why? And as for a girl like Petra living at the Studio Club—after Green Doors—can you imagine it, really? Don’t tell me _she_ suggested that!”

“Perhaps not,” Lewis answered. “As a matter of fact, she would be more restricted in her freedom there than here, I suppose. But with a friend, then—in an apartment—”

Again the laugh. “You don’t know Petra, Doctor Pryne! She hasn’t an intimate friend to her name. I invite girls here, of course, all the time. They come, enjoy themselves with each other and the boys, and invite Petra to their homes in return. But as for friends, she simply doesn’t make them. She hasn’t the gift of friendship. It’s one of my worries about her,—one of the things I thought your analysis of her might cure!”

“But there’s Teresa. That’s one friend, at least, Teresa—” Too late Lewis knew himself a traitor to Petra’s confidences, and broke off, embarrassed and sorry. But to his great relief, Clare seemed not to have even heard. She was repeating, but almost as if for her own ears, and very softly, “I don’t understand. Petra took you to the guest house to show you the river view. That is all the time you two were together. And in that short while Petra conveyed to you that she was unhappy here and wanted to get away. Why, it’s unbelievable! How could even Petra be quite so—so outrageous as that!”

“But mightn’t Petra think it a little outrageous of us, of you and me, to be discussing her here now, as we are doing?” Lewis inquired reasonably. “Why shouldn’t _she_ be wounded—and angry? I don’t see any difference, really....”

Shock dried the tears, just gathered, from the widened eyes which were turned on him. If Clare had taken anything for granted, as certain to result from to-day’s anticipated contact with this supposedly brilliant psychiatrist, it was that he would be deeply impressed by her beautiful disinterested kindness toward this girl who had no natural claim on her whatever. But from the very first minute, so Clare began to think now, Doctor Pryne had missed everything of what should have been obvious to him. He had no subtlety then! But if this were true, why was everybody so mad about him and how could he be a successful doctor of souls! That was what Lowell called him, and he was even talking of putting him into his next novel,—disguised, of course. And then the miracles he worked! You simply had to have penetration of some sort, understanding of some sort, to do for personalities what he had done for Julia Dickerman, Cornie and all the rest! But even without any extraordinary amount of penetration you would expect him to see that it was both disloyal and cheap for Petra to have confided in him as she must have done this afternoon, the very minute they were alone together.

Suddenly Clare gave up the idea of being hurt by Petra’s astounding disloyalty. She would be too generous, too big to think of herself in the situation at all. But she understood now that she would have to _say_ to this man whatever it was she wanted him to know. No use trusting to his discerning anything! That was what Petra had done, apparently. Said things. Simply because Petra had said things, Doctor Pryne had believed them—and that in spite of all that he should have seen and all that Clare had meant him to see for himself! Well, she—Clare—would have to descend to Petra’s crude methods. She would explain herself to this exasperating person in words and expound her relations with Petra. But she would leave the malice to Petra. The very contrast between her generosity and Petra’s smallness ought to speak for itself. He simply could not be so obtuse as to miss that much—or could he?

She refrained from touching him, although her impulse had again been to put her fingers on his arm. Instinctively she had a minute ago come to feel that physical contact made this particular man uncomfortable. But the urgency of Clare’s fingers’ pressure was transferred to her voice when she said:

“I am afraid that you have begun by misunderstanding almost everything, Doctor Pryne. But it doesn’t matter. I mean, it doesn’t matter that you consider Petra justified in her attitude toward me and what I am trying to do for her, as you seem to. What does matter—all that I care about at all—is Petra’s good. It is for her own sake I want her to become adjusted and happy, an integrated personality. It is not for my sake. Not even for her father’s. And if you are right and I ought to give her up, let her go away,—why, then I hope I am unselfish enough to let her try it. But why business school—of all things, for a daughter of Lowell Farwell’s? It will be interesting to know.”

But she gave Lewis no chance to answer that. She hurried on:

“First you must tell me everything she said to you. I don’t mean what she may have said about Green Doors, her home here, or me. No, I am afraid hearing that would hurt too much. But what she wanted different. Let us just concentrate on the positive side of things and let the negative go.... You see, even if you won’t take her as a patient, in the way I hoped you would take her, I still need your advice, your wisdom, Doctor. For in those brief moments you were alone with my stepdaughter, you seem to have come nearer to understanding her than I have in the years of our close association. You made her articulate for once. That in itself is something. Petra, articulate!”

She paused there, but only to draw Lewis’ glance to her face. “You see, my husband can’t help me with Petra.” Her eyes probed in the shallows of Lewis’ cold, sleepy gaze. “He is out of it, even if she is his own daughter. There is almost nothing of sympathy between them. That is what I have been working for, ever since my marriage, to help them to a more happy relationship. I have dreamed that Lowell might come to love the daughter of his youth as he loves our little Sophia. He adores the baby. But that, I am afraid, is merely because she is mine, and her very existence makes _me_ more his. That is the way it is in happy marriages, of course. Father-love is all bound up in the father’s love for the mother. But Lowell, you see, loved Petra’s mother (if you can call it love)—well, differently—and that is why Petra herself—I have figured it out—means so little to him....”

Again Clare kept her fingers from Lewis’ coat sleeve but she actually clutched her hands on her lap to accomplish it. And she swayed toward him, her eyes insisting on holding his cold gaze. Her whole vivid, quicksilver face was alive with her intention to make Lewis her ally, to win from him something at last, of what she had intended to win when she invited him back to-night.

“Do you mind my telling you intimate things like this?” she asked naively. “I had meant to tell them and had everything—all the information you could need—organized, you see. Even now, when you say that Petra doesn’t need psychoanalyzing, I still rather want to tell you. Before you are sure you are right about the wisdom of Petra’s leaving her father and me, giving up her life here with all its advantages, you ought to know a little more about the child herself, don’t you think? I see now—you have let me see—that my Petra herself, as a person, interests you, quite aside from your psychiatry. And I am grasping at that interest as at a straw, Doctor. I am so alone in my concern for this child and in my dreams for her! I’m not mistaken? You _are_ interested, aren’t you?” This time at last the lady required an answer—waited for it.

“Yes, I am very much interested,” Lewis admitted, after a mere instant’s hesitation. But all the same he looked toward the door. If only Petra herself would appear there! Come in, in her frosty gown! Interrupt this really silly performance. He did not need any one to explain Petra to him. It was her presence he wanted. One meeting of their eyes had told him more than all the volumes Mrs. Lowell Farwell could say with that overtone in her voice which insisted on bending his understanding to her own interpretations of Petra—or more subtly yet, what she meant him to think were her interpretations. Really he could not doubt that Clare must know, as simply as he knew, that Petra did not need either of them; the integration of her young self was a perfected accomplishment and all the more perfected for having the seal of her reticence upon it.

Suddenly now Lewis knew why the blue gentians, there in the Cambridge apartment where first he saw Petra, had stayed so sharply etched on his memory. Petra herself was like a blue gentian,—a secret, brave flower springing from an arid soil. Lewis remembered “The Wind Boy,” a story he had bought lately for his nephews and read through before giving them. The little girl in that story was named Gentian, and her brother explained it: “Father always said that one small gentian had all the sky folded around in its soft fringes. Gentian magic. Cold and frost don’t scare it, for it has the whole sky held close to give it company and heart....” Well, that was true of Petra, just as it was true of the little girl in the fairy tale. But what made it true, how Petra had appropriated the blue sky and held its secrets as her own, where she had lain hold of it,—that Lewis could not guess.

Clare at this moment was vastly encouraged by the light which played—palpably—over the doctor’s lips and almost rose in his cold sleepy eyes This was approaching the way she had imagined things would go between them when they really got to talking intimately, and he began to see her in the way she intended he should see her. Before she was through with telling him about Petra to-night—the excuse for the tête-à-tête—this light of appreciation and admiration for herself would have become established unequivocally in the cold sleepy eyes. She had not a moment’s doubt of it. Nothing in past experience had instilled trepidation or the imagination of the possibility of failure into this sex-unconscious flirt whose line (she acknowledged it to herself and was quite simply proud of it) was spiritual _rapport_ with interesting male personalities in the higher areas of contact. If passion developed in the course of these spiritual contacts, it was merely a sign, on a slightly lower plane, that all had gone well in the upper airs. It was a sign, in fact, that Clare’s vanity, though not her senses, ultimately demanded.

Her eyes fell from Lewis’ cold eyes to his mouth. She thought cleverly (she was far from stupid): “It’s a face of frozen passion. Not cold. It is all there. But frozen by asceticism.”

She was suddenly, hardly understanding why herself, extraordinarily excited.

_Chapter Eight_

Lewis continued to see a blue gentian etched on air, all the while Clare told him about Petra. But he heard her, well enough, in spite of the vision he was contemplating, and outwardly he was attentive.

“Lowell was frightfully young when he married Petra’s mother. And the attraction between them—it’s almost inevitable in early marriages like that, I suppose—was merely physical. So, when he waked up to that, it wasn’t nearly enough, not for a person like Lowell Farwell, anyway. But the only reason one need even remember that early tragedy is the way it still affects Petra. Her father got the idea, almost from the day she was born, that she was her mother over again. She was physically like her, in the first place. They say that Ann was a great beauty. Lowell says she was even more beautiful than Petra. But it wasn’t the physical resemblance that repelled Lowell most and still hurts. It was her mind and temperament. He got the idea that Petra had a commonplace mind, ordinary. Like her mother. And now, nineteen years after, she is still for him an echo—a reverberation—of an old disappointment. It seems cruel, I know. But he can’t help himself, and one can understand, don’t you think?

“I understand, anyway. And it is appalling to think that if Petra’s mother hadn’t happened to die, Lowell might still be bound to her. She was puritanical or fundamentalist or something. Whatever the particular cult was, it was stupid and narrow and forbade divorce. She thought herself religious! Imagine calling such cruelty religion! But Providence had mercy, if she didn’t. She didn’t believe in birth control any more than she did in divorce, and she died when the second child was born, when Petra was only one year old. That, if anything, gives you the picture of how impossible Petra’s mother made things for her young, penniless, genius-husband—having another child right away. But the new baby was premature and fortunately lived only a little while.

“Lowell was through with marriage, he thought then, for all time. His religious wife had seared his faith in the sweetness of it as a human relation. But though seared, his faith was not actually destroyed. It has never been destroyed. Lowell Farwell has been bigger than the things life has done to him. Six or seven years later he saw Elsa Larsen in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ at Munich. Elsa Larsen’s acting was beautiful enough to break your heart. When she stuck to Shakespeare, anyway. She was really a great actress, even if this country never woke up to her. Did you ever see her? I saw her first in Munich, when I was a young girl. I spent the year I was twelve abroad with my mother. We went to the National Theater dozens of times to see Elsa Larsen in her Shakespeare roles. I never dreamed then that I should marry her husband one day! I may even have seen him, without knowing or remembering, in the theater. They were married inside of a week after they met. It was a perfectly wild marriage, of course. The result of utter loneliness on his part, mad infatuation on hers.

“Larsen killed herself. Yes, I know it isn’t known. And it _is_ shocking. But she did it. She ran the car into those park gates on purpose. She meant to kill Lowell at the same time. He was begging her to get a divorce from him or let him get it, and she simply lost her head and drove straight into the gates. She saw that they were closed in plenty of time to have swerved. Lowell is certain of it.

“But what I want you to see and think about, Doctor, is Petra, of course. They put her in boarding school and she stayed there vacations and all, the few years till the so-called accident. But when poor Marian made Lowell think he had compromised her—yes, every one except Lowell himself, it seems, pretty well understood that little drama Marian staged at the Tillotsons’ house party—well, when Marian became Petra’s second stepmother, there wasn’t enough money to keep the child on at boarding school. Larsen spent all she earned and left nothing. They lived huddled up in that dreary little apartment in Cambridge with only one servant to do the work. How Marian hated it! She never lifted her hand for Petra or gave her a thought, except to resent her being there at all, one could see. But the thing Marian has really to blame herself for, to my mind, is the way she left the child to the sole companionship of whatever general-housework girl happened to be in possession of the place at the time. I myself was so appalled at seeing what Petra’s life was like when I met them, that even if I hadn’t fallen head over heels in love with Lowell I should have married him, almost, to rescue his daughter. All that was maternal in me was roused and fighting. That day I met you there—remember?—my heart was broken for Petra....

“So now you can see why I can’t blame Petra for any seeming disloyalty she may have displayed this afternoon in the talk you had with her. She has never known what it was to be loved before. How should she be counted on to return it, or even to be loyal to it? It is asking too much—even after three years, I think. But you see why I am grateful for your interest in her, and why I am ready, almost without questioning it, to act on any advice you care to give—now that you know the child’s miserable history.”

As she had been talking, Clare’s eyes had now and then been starry with tears, and on the final words one or two actually fell. She wiped them away, quite simply, with a handkerchief. She had no need to consider her make-up, as she never wore any.

Lewis withdrew his thought from a blue gentian, etched on air. He untied himself somehow and struggled up from his low place at Clare’s side. He asked if he might smoke. Clare had not remembered to offer him a cigarette because she herself did not smoke any more than she used make-up; but at once she was all charming apologies for her neglect and motioned him toward the supply near at hand. But Lewis, apologetic himself, preferred his own variety. He got out his case, lit a Lucky, took a deep inhalation,—and laughed.

Clare did not understand the laugh, considering all she had been saying to him—and her tears. But she waited. She had done what she could to make herself clear to him and it was his turn now. He must have some reaction other than that ambiguous laugh to all that she had said—and _looked_—during the past minutes.

He was pacing back and forth before the long divan, his hands deep in the already sagging pockets of his tweed jacket. They did not dress for dinner at the Allens, and Lewis was in Meadowbrook without his dress clothes. But when after a few seconds of this rather surprising behavior, the man whirled and stood before her, looking down at her, his face, at last, was beginning to mirror something—she was almost certain—of what she was. Clare thought she saw her generosity reflected in Doctor Pryne’s face as in a mirror. And on account of that true reflection of herself, she forgave him all the bewilderment and uncertainty he had for just a little while caused her. It was rather wonderful having his cold, sleepy eyes no longer cold and sleepy but aware of her. She had known all along of course that Doctor Lewis Pryne was a person of rare power and magnetism, but until this instant she had missed the biting tang of actually feeling it. To her own surprise her heart beat fast. Madly!

“Are you serious?” he was asking. “Do you really want advice from me? For I know what I would do in your place and I would do it like a shot. Shall I say?”

She looked back up at him. Was this hypnotism? She felt excitedly supine—submissive—open to this man’s will....

Her eyes, grave—and she herself knew how lovely!—promised him she was ready to do whatever he said.

“Very well.”—But how dry his voice sounded! And already he had stopped looking at her!—“First of all, I should cut off that absurd allowance. Two thousand a year, Petra said it was, and just for clothes! And then I should encourage her to take the job waiting for her in my office. It’s a good job. It can begin on Monday morning at nine o’clock. And I wouldn’t fuss any more about trying to create sympathy between father and daughter. It is too late. The time is past. Petra has had, I suppose, a pretty bad deal from the beginning, but from now on she ought to be her own environment maker. You can’t possibly go on doing it for her. Have you ever heard the phrase: ‘Environment is hidden identity’? I believe that that is perfectly true of any personality, given half a chance. It’s time Petra had her chance. Marriage and a home where she herself is the protecting force—that’s the ultimate answer. But as a stop-gap right now, a job. That’s what I think.”

Clare had sent for Petra and they were waiting. Lewis wandered over to the massive, built-in library table. It was shaped like a scimitar. The last words in biography, essays, poetry and fiction of two continents seemed to be here under his hand, most of the volumes still in their bizarre paper jackets. In the midst of the bright jumble stood two large heavy silver frames holding photographs. One was Clare, the other Petra. Petra was in evening dress and her posture and expression must have been dictated by the photographer. The eyes in particular were self-conscious and static in their inexpressive trance. The mouth alone was sentient, not even the stare of the photographer and the camera together having succeeded in betraying it into insincerity. Clare’s photographed face, on the other hand, was vibrant, with just the hint of a candid smile dawning in eyes and lips. She was not in evening dress but had been taken in a simple blouse with a soft turnover collar. Of the two photographs, hers was much the more interesting and alluring. And so Lowell Farwell must think every time he noticed the two faces in juxtaposition here on his table.

“Just one of Clare’s little touches,” Lewis told himself, wincing. But now he was to get Petra away, out of it. That was exhilarating. He took Petra’s photograph into his hands. He was studying it, and Clare from her corner of the divan was watching him curiously, when Petra finally came in. Clare beckoned Petra to the deserted place beside her while Lewis replaced the photograph to the exact spot on the desk from which he had taken it, and sat down on the arm of a chair facing the divan and the two living, breathing women contrasted there. He lighted a fresh cigarette but did not offer Petra one, remembering her afternoon’s embarrassment.

He began at once. “You know what you said this afternoon, Petra, about wanting to learn stenography and becoming ultimately somebody’s private secretary? Well, I have a job for you that will begin paying right away, and you can practise shorthand and typewriting in your spare moments. It’s in my office, assistant to my secretary. Miss Frazier is overworked. Has been for some time. It has been getting more and more on my conscience lately.” This was perfectly true. “But with another girl in the reception office to receive the patients, answer the telephone, and take the preliminary records, I’ll not worry. You can begin Monday morning.”

Lewis’ voice showed nothing of the elation he was feeling. His tone, in fact, was dry and his look constrained. But Petra, as well as he, had herself well in hand, it seemed. Reticence had leapt to her eyes with almost his first words—a sword on guard.

“Darling! What _is_ the matter?” Clare demanded, but without much genuine surprise. She had never expected that Petra would be delighted by Doctor Pryne’s offer of this job. She knew her stepdaughter’s love of freedom and luxury too well, she thought. And when Petra learned that her allowance was to be cut as well as her days filled with work, Clare imagined she would not even consider Doctor Pryne’s astonishing proposition. Why, this very month Petra had borrowed ahead on her allowance, to pay for the frock she had worn this afternoon. She was always borrowing ahead. She spent more on her clothes than Clare spent on her own. Petra considered that her contribution to the world’s work was making and keeping herself beautiful, and if she had deceived Doctor Pryne this afternoon into thinking her serious-minded and idealistic, he was now to be undeceived, Clare told herself almost gleefully. Watching it happen was like watching a play, immensely entertaining. But while Clare watched, she spoke.

“There’s nothing to be frightened of,” she told Petra. “Don’t look like that. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, darling. It is only a suggestion Doctor Pryne is making. Have a cigarette?” She picked one out of a box on a table at her hand, put it into Petra’s fingers, and finding an automatic lighter, held it for Petra.

Even in his bewilderment at the way Petra had received his offer, Lewis could appreciate what Clare was doing in insisting on that cigarette. Petra was a foil for herself. Physically and temperamentally, all Clare’s effects were heightened by her contrast with her stepdaughter. And Clare, the artist tireless in procuring her own effects, took advantage of even so trivial a difference as smoking and not smoking. She had not remembered to offer Lewis a cigarette, but she was practically forcing Petra to smoke. And Petra’s docile compliance was only one of the ways in which she was of use to her stepmother and earned that fantastic two thousand dollars....

But Petra’s fingers holding the cigarette were shaking. The trembling began at her elbow, resting on her knee, but it was most visible in the fingers. She said, in a voice that gave the lie to her shaking fingers, “It is very nice of you to offer me a job, Doctor Pryne. How much is the salary?”

Clare had made a mistake in insisting on the cigarette! She should have presented Petra with a spear, not an English Oval, as an emblem of the girl’s unyielding hardihood. The cigarette, moved to exquisite vibrations in her trembling fingers, merely robbed Petra’s overt hardness of its authenticity. Oh, yes, Clare would do better to play up the Diana in the girl, not a sophistication which did not exist.

“Eighteen dollars a week,” he said. “That is a small living wage, I know, but I am afraid it is all the job is really worth. And prices are down. Food, rooms, clothes, everything. They have tumbled. You ought to be able to manage on eighteen a week and get quite a lot of fun out of it, Petra.”

In saying this so lightly he remembered, of course, the millions of unemployed throughout the country, and his heart smote him at his careless words. But he did not waver in his purpose. Petra’s need of employment was different from theirs, it is true, but no less real. Her situation, as much as theirs, was desperate.... But what was she saying!

“I don’t have to worry about living on your eighteen a week, Doctor Pryne. I never could, you know. Just my dresses cost much more than that. Besides, Clare doesn’t charge me board!”

“Petra darling! There is nothing in this offer to make you angry! Doctor Pryne got the idea from you yourself, this afternoon, that you wanted to leave Green Doors and be independent. That is why he thought of this job. He thought you were unhappy because you weren’t independent and living a life of your own. Whatever did you say to make him think that?”

Petra hesitated. Any one looking at her that moment could actually see her deciding among a choice of answers to her stepmother. Lewis did look at her and see. But Clare could not wait for the fabrication, whatever it was to be. She went on: “But Doctor Pryne has convinced me of one thing, Petra. He has made me ashamed, not for you, for myself. Your two thousand dollars’ allowance is absurd. With people hungry right in Boston. When you spend it only for clothes! It ought to be one thousand, darling. And the other thousand you can give, yourself, any way you like to do it, to charity.”

Petra’s cigarette was burning itself away in an ashtray between herself and Clare. Its smoke ascended in thick violet ribbons. Lewis felt that she was thinking with lightning speed,—but unguessable thoughts. Clare was as much in the dark as himself as to Petra’s thoughts, he supposed; but he suspected that, unlike himself, she did not know her own ignorance. Against those ribbons of violet smoke Petra looked like a sibyl—enigmatical—young—divinely young.

“Do you mean that you are cutting my allowance in half? Now, like this,—without warning?” She spoke as if Lewis were not there, as if she and Clare were alone. Her voice was more astonished than it was angry.

“No. I wouldn’t do that, Petra. You know I wouldn’t. You can still have the second thousand for charity, to give any way you like. I will do the same myself. I had been thinking of it for myself as a matter of fact—even before my talk with Doctor Pryne about you to-night. I meant to go over my dress bills and, beginning next month, budget myself to half as much as I am accustomed to spend. Merely giving money outright, the way I have been doing, isn’t enough. It is actual sacrifice that counts.”

“But I don’t want either to give or to sacrifice,” Petra protested. “If the two thousand is mine, I shall spend it just as I have been spending it the last three years. Is it mine, or isn’t it mine, Clare? That is what I asked you.”

Clare’s glance just flickered in Lewis’ direction. But she did not want him to read the gratification in it and she put her hand to her cheek quickly, shading her eyes. She said, “Darling, unless you will look up some charity, get interested in it, and give the second thousand there, it can’t be yours any more. Not now—when I have been seeing things through Doctor Pryne’s clear vision. But surely—”

Lewis wanted to stop the woman, wanted to undo all that he himself had so crudely brought about. But he might as well have tried to push back an oncoming steam roller as turn Clare from her honorable participation in this dramatic scene that he himself, no other, had staged. He felt this and held his peace, knowing all the while that he had blundered irreparably and made things worse for Petra than they already had been, in some mysterious way that he was not yet in a position to understand.

Petra had interrupted Clare. Her anger had now risen to the level of her astonishment. “It’s absolutely unfair,” she cried, her young face and her young voice ablaze with wrath. “It is a _salary_ you are cutting, Clare Otis-Farwell! Not a mere allowance. Does Doctor Pryne know that? And you do it casually, like this, at his mere suggestion. I earn every penny of it.”

“What in heaven’s name do you mean?” For that instant Clare forgot Lewis as audience. Her expression was simply dumbfounded, with for once nothing subtle about it. “_You_ earn two thousand dollars a year! Why, you don’t even make your own bed!”

“But I do earn it, all the same. Every dollar of it. By being around all the while as evidence of your generosity and goodness! Everybody praises you for it! And you hope it will make my father keep on adoring you as he has never kept on adoring his other wives. I am a perpetual reminder to him of how you differ from all the others. _You_ are _maternal_! Haven’t I let you play your part? Haven’t I played mine? What have I done to spoil the picture? Surely you’ve thought it worth a miserable two thousand!”

Clare was on her feet, every tinge of color whipped by Petra’s cruel, wild words from her unrouged face.

“Petra! Hush! Are you crazy?”

Petra, too, was up. And then Lewis noticed that he himself was standing! There was nothing he could say or do, however. He felt as if his own poisonous thoughts about Clare Farwell had been, through some fault of his own, broadcast through Petra’s sibyllic lips. All the blame for the whiplash words, for the cruel scorn of them and their hatred, was his. Not Petra’s. It was he, Lewis, who had thought them and now they were brashly vocal.

But now suddenly again Petra’s voice was her own, and the words were her own, no sibyl’s. “Oh, Clare!” she was faltering. “I am sorry. I am terribly sorry. I was crazy, yes.—” And then, looking at Lewis, in a different and utterly cold tone, she asked surprisingly, “How much does eighteen a week make it a year, Doctor Pryne? Eighteen times fifty-two, do you know?”

He told her, not showing his consternation. She said, “Well, that almost makes up the two thousand, then; if I live here at Green Doors and Clare pays me one thousand for part time. Am I to go on living here, Clare? Or isn’t that possible—after what I just said?”

Clare, who was not tall, looked tall at the moment. Consciousness of a chance to show magnanimity swayed her bodily as well as mentally, like a refreshing wind, where only a minute ago she had been stifling. “Of course you may go on living here. This is your home. Of course you haven’t meant a word you said. You were a little hysterical. It was Doctor Pryne’s idea, about your living in Boston,—not mine. He even suggested Teresa Kerr as a roommate! Imagine! But as long as you can tolerate me, Petra, no matter whether you can ever learn to trust me and love me or not, I want you _at home_. Call it half-time salary if you like. I shall certainly give you the one thousand.”

But at mention of Teresa’s name, Petra’s anger was back, lashing this time toward Lewis. But only for a flash. It was over, as lightning is over; and it had struck through her glance. She answered Clare, turning her back on Lewis, “That _is_ wonderful of you. I don’t see how you can be so forgiving. I don’t deserve it. But I want to tell you, Clare, that ever since I have been with you here at Green Doors, I have never once spoken a disloyal word about you—until this afternoon, to Doctor Pryne. And I never will again—not as long as I live here, and ever after, I hope. Can you ever trust me again? Do you believe me, Clare?”

Lewis turned away. He walked toward one of the French windows opening onto the terrace. But Petra’s voice followed him, made him turn again. She was asking in a polite voice, “Is your offer still open, Doctor Pryne? Shall I come to work on Monday?”

He came back; looked at her for a confused, almost blank moment; then said shortly, “Of course. If you really want to.”

“Do you think I can learn? Will I really be any use to you? It isn’t just your conscience giving me that other thousand, since it’s through you I’ve lost it?”

“I am sure you will earn every cent of it. Miss Frazier needs an assistant badly. I told you that.”

“Shall I take this job, Clare? Do you advise it? Do you believe what Doctor Pryne says? For I won’t take his charity. Will I be worth eighteen a week to him?”

Lewis himself knew that Petra meant would having a job in Boston hurt the effect Clare desired to obtain of her relation to her stepdaughter. And did the part-time job she would now be holding at Green Doors—that is, evenings and holidays—make the one thousand dollars a guaranteed matter? But what was in Clare’s mind when she answered, Lewis was beyond guessing.

“I should try it, anyway, Petra. Of all people, you can trust Doctor Pryne’s sincerity. Working for him will be an interesting experience, at the very least, and at the most you will be having some responsible part in the world’s work and the joy that that inevitably brings. I think it is very wonderful of Doctor Pryne to take such an interest—and help us all. He is very generous—and understanding.”

“And shall I go back to the hall now? They will be wondering where I am, I think.”

“Yes. You must go right back, of course. Darling, your frock is charming! You do look too lovely to-night. Tell Dick about your job. He will be particularly interested.”

As Petra started to leave, Lewis reached for her hand. She gave it to him as if in contract. But such a contract! “I shall be on time Monday. Thanks again,” she said.

Their eyes were almost on a level, when they stood together like this, Lewis was so little taller. And Petra’s reticence, a two-edged sword—and for him now—was not merely on guard. It cut down between them, severing all understanding.

_Chapter Nine_

“I thought we were all right. There aren’t any loose ends that I know of....”

Lewis had come to his office half an hour ahead of his usual time on Monday morning in order to prepare his secretary for Petra’s appearance there, which would be due, if she kept her word, a few minutes later.

“Certainly there are no loose ends. But that is just the trouble. You are so conscientious that you won’t let the sun go down—no, you won’t let it rise, and that is the point—on loose ends. You sit up nights over the work. I simply had to get you an assistant and this seemed the opportunity. By the way, and it’s very much by the way, did you do what I said and forget the manuscript over the week-end, or did you keep it right by you?”

Miss Frazier did not bother to answer. It was a foolish question. How could she have done what he wanted! His book was going to press in another month. At least, she and the publishers intended that it should. Naturally, she had worked on it over Saturday and Sunday, and she would continue to do that, if only Doctor Pryne kept his end up, until the thing was in print. But now she would not waste time in defending her industry, with this new girl due any minute.

“Who is she?” Miss Frazier asked. “Where did you find her?”

“It’s Petra Farwell. She needed a job so badly that I offered her this one without considering very much her qualifications.” He had to admit it. “She has no training but I believe she can typewrite a little. She has done some copying for her father. But whether she can spell or knows how to make out a check, or anything of the sort, I don’t know. I thought we’d put her in the reception office with the telephone and the patients. She has a nice clear voice and nice manners. That will relieve you of the part you like least. Isn’t it so?”

Petra Farwell! That was the girl, the daughter of the novelist Lowell Farwell, about whom they had been speaking here in the office only a few days ago. A young architect, a Mr. Richard Wilder, had made an appointment for the sole purpose of asking Doctor Pryne to psychoanalyze the novelist’s daughter, and he had taken fifteen minutes or more of Doctor Pryne’s time doing it. It was with some satisfaction Miss Frazier had already made a memorandum of the bill she was to send for that interview and obtained the doctor’s approval of it,—twenty-five dollars. Doctor Pryne had turned down the case, naturally, since he was not a psychoanalyst, and really, anyway, had time for only serious work; but Miss Frazier remembered that he had accepted an invitation to tea at the Farwell home in the country. And this was the result!

Miss Farwell had not sounded a very attractive person. And why should she, the daughter of Lowell Farwell and the stepdaughter of a very rich woman, need a job so badly that Doctor Pryne had engaged her without consulting his secretary, or assuring himself of her qualifications?

But Miss Frazier pulled herself up at this point in her reflections. She had no business letting herself remember anything that had been said about Miss Farwell in a professional fifteen minutes here in the doctor’s sanctum. Her standard for herself was to approximate her employer’s professional attitude as closely as possible—one part of the mind for confidences given professionally, and the other, quite separated and even uncolored by that special knowledge, for the social contact. So at this moment she did not show by so much as a lifted eyebrow that she had any intimate knowledge whatever of Miss Farwell’s character.

“And I’ve promised her,” the doctor was saying, “that between times, when there’s nothing in particular to do for you, she can study shorthand and practice typing. Please order the best textbooks for that, will you, Miss Frazier, this morning,—and a machine. Rent or buy the machine, whichever is more economical. And she will have to have a table for it in the reception office. You can get that while you are out at lunch.—After she gets going, she might take on some of the book. As I said, she has done copying for her father.”

The expression with which his secretary received this last remark, however, showed Lewis his stupid mistake. “I’m just talking through my hat,” he said quickly. “That is a hopeless idea, of course. But can you tell me how it is that you appear to be the only known human living who can make out my stuff, Miss Frazier?”

The girl averted her face. Her clear-cut, almost cameo profile kept its accustomed impersonal secretarial look, but her cheek was hot. Lewis saw the unaccustomed color and was annoyed with himself for his second stupidity in the minute.

She said, “It’s a sixth sense I have about your writing, I guess. It almost seems so, anyway. I am not so extraordinarily good about all illegible handwriting. But even the first day, yours was pretty clear to me. It surprises me myself.”

“Well, that is the best of luck for me,” Lewis murmured, and was grateful to hear a door opening and a step out in the reception office. “That must be Petra,” he exclaimed, and went out quickly.

He brought her in. But Miss Frazier, at the moment of Petra’s entrance, was blind to Petra’s bodily reality. It was rather the reflection of her on the doctor’s face that Miss Frazier saw and read as easily as she was accustomed to read his illegible script. “It has happened at last,” the thought sliced through her brain, clean, knifelike. And then, flowing through and over the wound, came the tides of her will, cooling the painful gash. “Nobody must guess that it matters.... It doesn’t matter.... It can’t matter....”

It was will, too, that jerked her attention from the doctor’s mirroring face, after that first second, to the girl herself. There she stood in a cool white frock with a violet-colored felt hat slouched Greta Garbo fashion over bright curls. She looked frightened. Why should she be frightened?

“Miss Frazier will initiate you,” the doctor’s voice was blurred and as far away as his face, washed over by the tides of Miss Frazier’s brave will. “You must ask her anything you need to know as it comes up, Petra. That is the simplest way, I suppose, to learn the ropes. And now I had better have a look at the mail.”—It was there, already sorted for him into piles on his desk, with Miss Frazier’s accustomed clarifying notes attached.

Miss Frazier took Petra, first, to the dressing room which now they must share. “This door goes into my private office,” she explained, “and this into the reception room, which will be in your charge. I’ll clear all my personal things out of the desk at once.”

When she had taken off her hat and powdered her face, Petra followed the secretary to the desk which was to be, miraculously, her very own, and they stood looking down on it together—both of them inarticulate and at a loss. “Perhaps the best way will be for you merely to stick around and notice how I answer the telephone to-day,” Miss Frazier decided, after a minute of cogitation. “One of your jobs, when you have caught on, will be to take down the names and addresses of the new patients, and file them here in this card drawer. Do you see? Whether the doctor accepts them as patients or not, we want the names and addresses, and the date that they telephoned or came. That is the only recording you will do out here. The rest I attend to, and it all goes into the files in the inner office. The most difficult thing to learn will be which calls to pass on to the doctor, though. I don’t myself quite see how he thinks you are going to begin learning that....”