Chapter XXXI: A New Hilltop 224 (3)

“No, that has nothing to do with it. Hal loves me. You can’t understand what that means to me ... because ... you don’t know how my people regard me. The only thing I ever wanted is love. Not the kind that papa gives me. That’s too general. He loves everything and everybody--including my mother, when she treats him like a dog. But I don’t want to think about them, now. It hurts ... to think about my father. I can stand it, because I’m not very lovable. He couldn’t be unkind if he tried. He would go on loving his children, if we did the worst thing in the world. I used to wish Lary would love me ... he’s so much like papa in some ways. But you couldn’t tell anybody that what you wanted was love. They’d think you were stalling--that you were after something else, and used that for a blind. Why, even Bob didn’t really know me--and he was the best friend I ever had. I used to steal matches for him, when he was learning to smoke, and I’ve taken many a lickin’ to keep him out of trouble. I got mean and hateful after he was drowned. Talk about an all-wise Providence! I couldn’t have any respect for a God that would kill Bob and leave me alive.”

“But Dr. Schubert--”

“Yes, he and Syd....” Her lips tightened. “They wouldn’t approve of Hal either. He has a reputation for being ... well, rather loose in his ideas. He isn’t a bit worse than the other boys in college. But he happens not to be the psalm-singing kind. I hate the tight ideas I was brought up on. But that isn’t what makes me love Hal. Lady Judith, if you had been told all your life that you were ugly and cross and good-for-nothing ... and somebody came along who thought you were sweet and clever and beautiful--” She laughed shortly. “Yes, all of that! I know I’m built according to the architecture of an ironing board; but Hal says my form is perfect. He twists my hair around his fingers by the hour, and he just loves to stroke my cheeks, because my skin is soft--like Lary’s, and papa’s. Don’t you see? Being loved like that--”

“Yes, Eileen, I see. How soon are you going to be married?”

“Not for years and years. I persuaded Hal, last night, to go to Pratt Institute, instead of that third rate college where he was going to take finance. I want him to do that--so that Lary’ll respect him. He doesn’t intend to settle down in this dried-up village. He hates it as much as I do.” She fell silent a moment. “There’s only one drawback to living away from Springdale.”

“Leaving your father?”

“No, he wouldn’t mind that, and neither would I--after I had a family of my own. But if one of my children should get sick--very sick--and I couldn’t reach Syd--I’d be frantic! Syd’s the only doctor who knows what’s the matter with a baby.”

“You love children, Eileen?”

“I adore them.” She hugged her breast ecstatically. “I hope I’ll have six. Hal loves them, too. That’s only one of the tastes we have in common. He wants a home ... he’d even be willing to let Lary build it, and select the furniture. And that’s a lot ... the way my brother treats him. I hope you’ll try to see his fine side, to like him ... for my sake. You know what it’s going to mean to me.”

XI Vicarious Living

I

Hal Marksley called regularly in his car to take the two girls to school. Theo, in the rôle of chaperone, was novel, to say the least. Occasionally he and Eileen went for long rides in the country when classes were over. Once they were delayed by the amusing annoyance of three punctures, and it was dinner time when they neared home. Hal took the precaution to leave the roadster on Grant Drive, traversing the three short blocks to Elm Street on foot. On other occasions, when there was no danger of encountering the men-folk of the family, Mrs. Trench would invite him in for lemonade and cake, after which she would command Eileen to play her latest violin piece--usually a bravura of technique, quite as incomprehensible to Mrs. Trench’s accustomed ears as to Hal’s--during which the youth would drum the window sill with impatient fingers.

It was understood between the young people that Mrs. Ascott alone was in the secret, and that the engagement ring had been placed with some of her valuables in Dr. Schubert’s vault, against the time when it would be safe to display it. There was one drop of bitter in Eileen’s great happiness. Her father. Even since her talk with Judith, she had been conscious of something essentially dishonourable in her conduct. She was beginning to look at her father with awakened eyes. He had always been a person of little consequence in his home. Lavinia was the dynamo that drove the plant. David was a belt or a fly-wheel, a driving rod or some such nonessential--easily replaced if he should break or rust. But David Trench would never rust. His wife kept him going at such a rate that a high polish was his only alternative. Rust gathers on unused metal. Eileen wondered what her father was like--inside. What her mother was like, for that matter. David talked little and Lavinia talked all the time, and the revelation of silence was, if anything, more informing than that of incessant chatter.

Mrs. Ascott might win Lary over to a reluctant acceptance of the engagement; but that would have small bearing on the problem of her father. It was the way with pliant natures. You can bend them without in the least influencing their ultimate resistance. Lavinia might be shattered by a well directed blow, whereas David would yield courteous response. There might be a dent in his feelings, but his convictions would remain as they were.

II

One Friday afternoon, as April lingered tiptoe on the threshold of May, Dr. Schubert sent for Lary to assist him with a peculiarly difficult experiment, one calling for strong nerves and a quick perception. When it was finished, Lary and Judith walked home together, crossing the campus to avoid the thoroughfare that connected the old residence quarter with the fashionable section that had rooted itself in the once fertile farms of Springdale’s newer society.

“Would you mind going a little out of your way?” the man asked, consulting his watch. “It’s early, and I have a troublesome problem. You know women--I don’t.”

“An estimate of a possible Mrs. Trench? Take my advice, Lary. Have her sized up for you by a man--never by another woman. Women can’t be just to each other when they meet on ... mating ground. Besides, no woman ever tells a man quite what she thinks of another woman. The other woman’s secret is, in part, her own. She must guard it--as you guarded the silly secrets of your college fraternity. If you ever saw the inside of one of us, you’d know how little there is to conceal. But the mystery ... that’s the important thing. Still, I’ll do my best. I’m old enough to be your mother, and ought to trust my judgment.”

“There is no potential Mrs. Trench in this problem. The thing that’s worrying me is the inglenook in a house I’m building in Roosevelt Place. The woman--who has exceptionally definite ideas of architecture--has changed her mind three times. Now she’s as dissatisfied with her own planning as she is with mine. We’re at our wits’ end, and I must find--”

“Look, Lary, those birds! They’re fighting!”

The woman seized his arm and whirled him about. They were nearing the end of the campus walk, where the maples cast slow-dancing shadows on the hard gravel. Larimore Trench almost lost his footing, as the pebbles scurried across the grass. He looked at his companion in astonishment. She was not one to go off her head at trifles, yet her tone revealed genuine alarm. In the grass, not ten feet away, two chesty robins were battling like miniature game cocks, their cries denoting a grotesque kind of rage.

“La femme in the case is over there on that syringa,” Lary told her, “estimating the prospects for the posterity she expects to mother. I have never been satisfied with the age I have to live in. But I’m glad I wasn’t born a troglodyte, in a world crying for population.”

As he spoke, his back to the street, Hal and Eileen whisked by in their car and disappeared around the corner. The two watched the birds a moment. Then they resumed their walk. The easy confidence that had grown, quite unnoticed, between them was interrupted. Strive as they would they could find no common ground. Judith was vexed with Eileen. Why should she come along, with her crashing discord, at just that moment? And again, why did it matter whether she and Larimore Trench had a pleasant walk or a sullen one? They had long since discussed every problem under the sun--and had found all of them hopelessly old. As they turned from Grant Drive and were entering Roosevelt Place, she paused to lay an arresting hand on his arm.

“Lary, there are three houses here under construction. The one near the middle of the block is yours. You haven’t even a bowing acquaintance with the other two.”

The man--not the architect--flushed with pleasure. He had never talked shop to Mrs. Ascott, and her recognition of one of his ideas, simply rendered in rough concrete and blue-green tile, pleased him. She would help him to compromise with Mrs. Morton about that inglenook. But the inglenook was only a subterfuge. He wanted to talk to her about his sister. She alone could make Eileen see that her admirer was uncouth, a good-looking animal devoid of a single quality to survive the honeymoon.

III

As they picked their way cautiously between paint cans and piles of building refuse, Lary discovered that the workmen had erected a barricade between the front hall and the living-room, and the angle of the stairway shut the chimney corner from view. On the second floor there was another obstacle. The floors had been newly waxed, and a stern “Verboten” flaunted its impotent arrogance in their path. They continued their climb to the third floor, where children, servants, billiards, and winter garments would be harboured. Judith paused in the door to the nursery, crossed the room and sank, exhausted, in the wide window seat. Lary found place beside her, as he told her of the clever girl who had done the Peter Pan frieze above the yellow painted wall.

“Are you fond of children, Lary?” She was thinking of Eileen.

“No, I detest them.”

“You-- But how can you say such a thing? Your understanding with Theodora is perfect. You kindle, you glow, when you are telling her stories from the classics.”

“That’s because she isn’t a child. I believe she never was. But my affection for her didn’t begin when she was.... The first few months, I believe I hated her. I may tell you about it some time. When I lose patience with my mother--and other women--I think about that hideous afternoon, twelve years ago last December. I don’t believe any child--or anything else that men and women are at such a bother to create and leave behind them--is worth all that suffering.”

Mrs. Ascott withdrew, ever so little. She did not like Larimore Trench when his tone revealed that peculiar timbre, that quality of boyish cynicism. He had seen so much of books, so little of life. And then it came to her that he viewed everything in the sordid world--the world outside his imagination--through the distorting lenses of his mother’s personality, her limitations and her prejudices. In his most violent opposition he was, nevertheless, directed by her. He would go to the south pole ... because she stood obstinately at the north. It was she who shaped his course, determined his stand. Her insistence on the fundamental importance of material progress drove him early to the post of disinterested onlooker. That he did his work, and did it well, was a reflex of his inner nature, the nature that came to him when David’s fineness and Lavinia’s dynamic ardour were fused, in a moment of unthinking contact. And it was the penalty of such fusing, that neither of his parents comprehended the nature they had given him.

IV

The silence towered, opaque and forbidding, between them. But they had come with a purpose, groping their way to the same objective, neither one guessing what was in the other’s mind. By a devious path, that was nevertheless essentially feminine, Judith approached:

“Lary, do you want to tell me about your brother? It would have made such a difference in Eileen’s life--if he had lived.”

“You would have enjoyed Bob--a tremendous fellow, every phase of him. He played half-back on the college team when he was sixteen. And at that, he took the state cup in the half mile dash. He had medals for hammer throwing and pole vault. There is a whole case of his cups and ribbons in the college library. He’s the only one of us who inherited my mother’s energy. Oh, Sylvia, of course. She can rattle around and make a great showing--and she does actually accomplish things when she has a definite purpose ... something she wants to do. The rest of us are a listless pack. We’d rather climb a tree and watch the parade go by. But Bob was in everything, for the sheer fun of living. It looks to me like a stupid blunder ... to cut off such virility before it had perpetuated itself.”

“Eileen told me she had lost her respect for God, since her brother was drowned. She was so naïve and in such deadly earnest.”

“Eileen was a born doubter. I was sixteen when I revolted against the idea of a Deity with the duties of an ordinary stockroom clerk--and it was one of Eileen’s searching questions that set me thinking. Not bad for six years old. Mamma holds to the old orthodox belief as one of the hallmarks of respectability. In her day, and town, the iconoclasts were pool-room keepers and saloon bums. The catechism was drilled into us as soon as we could talk. My mother would have been a great ritualist, if she had had the luck to be born an Anglican. There isn’t much in her church to hang your hat on.”

“But your father, Lary--religion means something to him.”

“Yes ... it’s about all he has. Eileen breaks his heart with her irreverent flings. I spare him. Not because I am more considerate than she. More selfish, perhaps. I can’t take the consequences of inflicting pain. You’ll call it crass spiritual weakness--a flaw in the casting. I’ve tried to overcome it. I couldn’t have endured....” His voice wavered, “Last night I heard my father praying for Eileen. It was ghastly. I wanted to tell her how she is torturing him. But it would only provoke a fresh outburst of scoffing.”

“Lary, will you give Eileen into my hands--stop worrying about her--you and your father? Will you persuade him that I have been sent ‘from on high’ to guide her through this wilderness? I may fail; but I have her confidence.”

“Papa was afraid, because you were rich, that you would share her mother’s view. Oh, not that Eileen took refuge in your sympathy. She’s too proud, too good a sport, for that. She only told him that money, _per se_, was no obstacle--_vide_ Mrs. Ascott. Before she was through with it, she told him that if he kept on, she would go to the devil with Hal Marksley. It was after that that he carried his trouble to the God who is said to answer prayers.”

“As a substitute for the Deity.... But at least, Lary, I know the premises. And at the worst, it is only the working out of her own nature. No one can live Eileen’s life for her, not even her father. But there’s the tower clock, striking six. You will be late for dinner--and we haven’t looked at that inglenook.”

XII The Poem Judith Read

I

From her vine-screened retreat in the summer house, Judith Ascott looked out on the fairest May Day she had ever known. It was the morning after ... and the promise she had made to Lary hung sinister and foreboding over her spirit. Everything around her was vibrant with coming summer. At home the buds would be opening timorously, while here the perennial climbers were in full leaf. An aureate splendour, seductive as Danae’s rain, rippled through the open structure of the pergola, transmuting the pebble walk to a pavement of costly gems; but within the widening of the arbour--that David had converted into an outdoor living-room--the frightened shadows sought refuge from the shafts that would presently destroy them. To the cool umbrageous corner nearest the house, where the light was faint, the woman had taken her world-weary body, yearning for the relaxation her bed had denied her.

It was all so insistent, this new life that had come to her, its music keyed to a pitch she had never realized, a tempo beyond the reach of her experience. The Trenches. Were there other families in the universe like this one? Before her coming to Springdale she had viewed the world through a thick forest of people, most of them intolerably tiresome. In the main they were contented ... such contentment as is to be derived from a favourable turn in the market or the balm of Bermuda to beguile a winter’s day. Happy lives, she had read, make uninteresting biographies. Her life had been far from happy, and her biography would be utterly stupid. Mrs. Trench was--she realized with a stab of astonishment--a desperately unhappy woman, and her life story was made up of a propitious marriage and six abnormally interesting children. And then ... Theo appeared at the other side of the garden wall, discerned the white-clad figure among the verdant shadows of the summer house, and scaled the low barrier with the nimbleness of a squirrel. In the folds of her skirt she held something, and a furtive air pervaded her small person.

II

“Dear Lady Judith, may I have the honour of a morning call?”

“Do come, you little ray of sunshine. Your Lady Judith’s sky is overcast, and she is in sore need of cheer.”

“Don’t you go bothering Mrs. Ascott this morning,” Theo’s mother cried sharply from the pantry window. “You ought to know enough not to wear out your welcome.”

“No danger,” Judith assured her. She did not perceive the look of sharp displeasure on the older woman’s face, but the voice affected her disagreeably, and she turned for relief to the anomalous reproduction of Lavinia, who was already nestling confidently at her side, on the oaken settle. The child spread upon her knee two sheets of paper, on which many lines had been written. A casual glance betrayed the agony of composition. Words had been discarded by the device of an impatient pen stroke. Others had been consigned to oblivion by means of carefully drawn lines. Phrases had been transposed and rhyming terminals changed.

“It’s a poem. I thought it would help to cheer you up. Mamma wouldn’t like it, and neither would Mrs. Stevens--because it doesn’t hop along on nice little iambic feet. It has to say ‘te-tum, te-tum, te-tum,’ or they think it isn’t poetry. Eileen writes some that are wilder than this one; but she never lets mamma see them. She wrote one on Love, last Sunday morning, when she ought to have been listening to the sermon, and ... what do you think! Left it in the hymn book! And Kitten Henderson found it, and sent it to Dan Vincel as her own composition.”

Mrs. Ascott took the copy, scanning the first page with crescent interest. She had not thought of Eileen as a poet. Yet such intense musical feeling.... The musician is seldom a poet of marked quality or distinction. The godlike gifts of rhythm, cadence, imagery, these may not flow with equal volume in double channels. Yet the verses, however crude, would shed another light on a nature too complex for ready analysis. There was no title, no clue to the impulse that promoted the writing. There was no need of such. A girl in Eileen’s rhapsodic mental state would not go far in search of inspiration.

“Birth, Hope, Ambition, Love,
These four the minor half of life compose:
The sylvan stream to broadening river flows,
And, golden-fair, replete with promise, glows
The radiant Sun above.

“The major half of life?
Love scars the soul, as ’twere a searing brand:
Ambition turns to ashes in our hand,
Nor, ’til the glass has spilled its latest sand,
Comes rest from urge and strife.

“O Birth! thou wanton wight
That dost with smiles enmask thy mocking eyes!
How dost thou cheat the unborn soul that flies
Full-eager from its formless Paradise
To realms of Death and Night!”

Theo sat breathless, a flush of expectation staining her dark skin, as the first page was laid aside and the second came to view. Before the remaining stanzas were finished, her heart was beating visibly through the thin morning dress, as her lips fashioned soundlessly the lines she had memorized at the second reading:

“O Love! more wanton e’en
Than Birth or Hope or bold Ambition, thine
To lift the quivering soul to heights divine,
To mad the brain with Amor’s poisoned wine,
To spread thy wonder-sheen

“O’er eyes that erst could see!
Thy promises, how fair, how full of bliss!
Are mortals born for rapture such as this?
Helas! the web was cunning-wove, I wis,
That e’en entangled me!”

“Theodora, are you _sure_ that Eileen wrote these verses?”

“Eileen? Goodness, no! She scrawls all over the paper. You never saw her write a neat little hand like that.”

“Then who did write it?”

“Why ... Lary, of course. I thought you knew he was the poet--the _real_ poet of the family. He wrote it last night. I saw his light burning at four o’clock this morning. I couldn’t sleep, either. Mine was ear-ache. His was another kind. He says you always have to agonize when you write anything worth while. And I think this poem is ... worth while ... don’t you?”

The solid ground of assurance was, somehow, slipping from beneath her feet. Lady Judith was not pleased. Her usually pale cheeks burned red, and there was an unfamiliar look in her eyes.

“Eileen told you to bring this to me?”

“Humph! You don’t think I’d show her Lary’s poem? He lets me see lots of things he writes, that mamma and the rest of them don’t know anything about--till they’re published. And if the stupid editors send them back--I never do tell. I wouldn’t ... for the world.”

“He gave you this to read?”

“N-n-not exactly. He left the desk unlocked. Didn’t put the top quite all the way down, and one corner of the paper was sticking out. I had to see what it was, so that if it was something the others oughtn’t to see, I could put it under the blotter, out of sight.”

An expression of Dutton’s flashed through Mrs. Ascott’s mind: “Theo’s the spit of her mother. She’ll do the dirtiest tricks, and explain ’em on high moral grounds.” She caught and held the dark, troubled eyes.

“Theodora, do you know that you have done something almost unpardonable?”

“But, Lady Judith, when anybody feels the way Lary does, and you love him as much as I do--don’t you see, the sooner there’s an understanding, the better? It was that way with the Lady Judith in the story. And if it hadn’t been for the meddlesome fairy, that found the drawing of the two hearts, interlocked, the Prince wouldn’t have known, till it was too late.”

“Theo,” the woman interrupted sharply, “take these two sheets of paper back to your brother’s room, and lay them exactly as you found them, so that he won’t know they have been moved or seen.”

Fear puckered the thin little face, fear and chagrin. With sparrow-like motion she turned and darted in the direction of the wicket gate. Midway she stopped, arrested by the timbre of Mrs. Ascott’s voice--a sternness she had not deemed possible.

“Come back, Theodora, if you want me ever to care for you again.”

A moment the lithe body wavered, the mind irresolute. Then she set her head impishly on one side, looked at the angry, frightened woman with a scold-me-if-you-can expression, and slowly retraced her steps, dragging her toes in the gravel and swaying her straight hips from side to side. It was pure bravado. At the entrance to the summer house, her spirit broke. In another instant she was in Mrs. Ascott’s lap and great sobs were shaking her agitated bosom.

“There, precious, I didn’t mean to hurt you. But, can’t you realize, dearie? You must be made to realize, no matter how it hurts.”

“No, you are the one who must be made to realize. I knew it, all along.”

“Knew what, Theo?”

“That Lary’s crazy about you. He never cared for anybody--not even puppy-dog love, when he was a boy. He was glad when Sylvia married, so he wouldn’t have to take her girl friends home--when they hung around so late that they were afraid to go home by themselves. I’ve been waiting to tell you about him for ever so long. You couldn’t know how good he is--how good--and wonderful.” The smothered voice was full of adoration. “He has the dearest ways, when you are all alone with him. And he never misses the point of a joke. Mamma can say witty things; but she almost never sees the other fellow’s joke. And his hands are so gentle--not strong and rough, like Bob’s. If you only knew.... But Lary wouldn’t ever tell you the nice side of him.”

Hungry arms pressed her close.

“Ah!” the advocate stopped her pleading, to sigh with infinite relief. “You won’t be angry with me. But, Lady Judith, I had to do it ... if you hadn’t ever forgiven me. Lary is teaching me to stand things like a stoic. And when so much depends on it--” The eyes flamed with an idea. “You know, like walking along in the dark, and all at once somebody strikes a match to light a cigar, and you see that there is a hole in the road that you would have fallen into. If no one had struck a match, how would you know the hole was there?”

“And you can keep this secret--never let your brother suspect?”

“He’s the last person in the world that I’d tell. He’d be more angry than you were. And there’s another reason. I’m not quite sure that Lary knows what’s the matter with him. Of course he says--in the last stanza of the poem. He’s written love poetry before, when it was only a woman he imagined, and so he might not think it was serious. Mrs. Ferguson said that if her husband had suspected that he was falling in love with her, he would have taken the first train out of town. Afterward ... he was glad he didn’t know.”

“Theodora! Are you sixty years old, and have you settled the marriage problems of a dozen unpromising daughters and granddaughters? Where did you get such ideas?”

“I heard mamma and Mrs. Ferguson talking about it, before Sylvia was married. I never forget anything I hear; but it’s an awful long time before I get light on some things. When I read Lary’s poem, this morning--and came to that last line--and remembered how pale you looked when you came out in the yard before breakfast--why, all at once the ideas came tumbling together, and I knew that Lary mustn’t know he was in love till he was so far in, he wouldn’t want to ever get out.”

It was adorable, the way she took Mrs. Ascott’s attitude and response for granted. No woman, not even the enshrined Lady Judith, would fail to be honoured by Lary’s love.

III

“Theo-_do_-ra!” Drusilla’s broad cadence issued from the pantry window. Drusilla was the coffee-coloured maid of all work, who was serving temporarily as mouthpiece for Mrs. Trench. “Come home this minute, honey. You got to do an errand befoh lunch.”

Theodora reflected that there was time for twenty such errands. And her perplexity grew when, after a few minutes, she saw Eileen pass through the wicket gate to take Mrs. Ascott an embroidery pattern from an old number of the Self Culture magazine. She remembered distinctly that Mrs. Ascott had said she did not care particularly about it. That was a week ago. Why had mamma dragged it out now, and sent it over by Eileen?

With all her wizard penetration, the child had never glimpsed the deep windings of her mother’s mind. Mrs. Ascott could not be counted on to take a lively interest in two of the Trench children, and for the present Eileen was the focal point of her mother’s concern. More and more the conviction grew that this woman from the great outside world had been sent by Divine Providence to aid in bringing to swift climax what otherwise might have been a long drawn out affair.

Long engagements were dangerous. Sylvia had been engaged to Tom Henderson for two years. If she, Lavinia Larimore, had listened to Calvin, when he begged her to run away and be married, the night he proposed to her.... It was when she reached this stage in her silent soliloquy that she determined to have Drusilla call Theodora home, and send Eileen to Vine Cottage in her stead.

XIII Eyes Turned Homeward

I

It is improbable that Bromfield’s weekly paper would have yielded its meagre space for the chronicling of Eileen Trench’s engagement, had that important fact been divulged at home. There were other, more momentous things going on. The entire front page of each issue was plastered with the Stone sensation, which grew by melodramatic leaps to something like an international affair. Fournier Stone had been captured in Montreal, had broken from his captor and leaped into the river. At first it was thought that he had been drowned; but he was an agile swimmer, and it was reported that a man answering his description had been seen near Longueuil, an hour or two after his escape.

From Mrs. Stone’s darkened bedroom came bulletins of one collapse after another. The news that her darling had perished in the treacherous waters beneath the Victoria bridge affected her so profoundly that the physician resorted to nitroglycerine injections to restore her. Lavinia read the accounts with emotions that surged from exultation to a species of envy. The part she had been called upon to play was such a drab one, that Lettie Stone’s colourful rôle stung her. To ease her mind, she fell back on one passage of Scripture after another. She might have known all along that the marriage would end in something like this. It was right that it should end this way ... right that an immoral, unprincipled woman should suffer. And Calvin? No doubt he was suffering, too. But what was the good of going over that ground--ground that she had long since stripped bare of every sprig of comfort or misery?

At last came the startling denouement. Mrs. Calvin Stone was dead. There had been a simple private funeral--attended by everybody in Bromfield. That night Fournier had slipped stealthily into town, and out to the cemetery, where he had ended his life on his mother’s grave. The account of the double tragedy was not news to Lavinia. Ellen Larimore had sent a telegram ... just why, it was difficult to explain. The message came Sunday morning, while David and the girls were at church and Lary was at the office getting out some rush specifications. It conveyed only the bare information that Fournier Stone had shot himself, the night after his mother’s funeral.

“Dead ... Calvin free!” the woman muttered, staring in a daze at the words. And, after a moment of strangling emotion: “But what difference does it make--now? I can’t be there to see it. I wouldn’t go, _if_ I _could_.”

At this juncture Lavinia’s thoughts took an unexpected turn. She was always thinking things she had no intention of harbouring within her consciousness--as if she had a whole cellar full of ideas she did not know she possessed. The one that came up to her now nauseated her. To see Calvin weeping over the body of his dead wife! Oh, the insolent superiority of the dead! You have no words with which to confront them. All their failings, all their sins are lifted above your most virtuous attack. It would be like this if David should die, and she could no longer upbraid him. No, it was better for people to go on living. You could at least speak your mind, without galling self-reproach.

II

Lavinia was determined to put Calvin Stone definitely and permanently from her thought. He had been amply punished for his monstrous treatment of her. The incident was closed, and at last she could have peace. And then something came to divert all her thinking into a channel that must have been present in the dark valley of her being all the while--unrecognized, because the need for it had been so hazily remote. A story--one of Larimore’s foolish stories. She seldom listened to them; but this one she could not escape. Eileen had gone home with Hal Marksley and had met his sister. It was Wednesday, and the outcome of the Stone imbroglio was still locked in her heart, the telegram having been burned in the kitchen range, Sunday morning, while Drusilla was on the second floor, doing up the bedrooms.

After dinner the Trench family had gravitated, one by one, to Mrs. Ascott’s summer house. David was there, laughing boyishly at something Eileen was telling. What were they talking about? Lavinia’s sharp ears caught a sentence now and then. It was not her wont to be out of things, the things that concerned her family. Her tenant seldom invited her--specifically. But then she never invited Mrs. Ascott, either. Going to the pantry, she filled a plate with raisin muffins, from the afternoon’s baking. Eileen would approach that shrine, armed with a sensational story; but her mother carried breakfast rolls.

III

When Nanny had taken the plate into the house, Judith made room for Mrs. Trench on the settle at her side. David leaned against the solid beam that he had set, seven years ago, to support the arch of the doorway. His blue eyes were full of unwonted content. Theodora was perched on the afternoon tea table, folded now to look like a packing case, steadying herself by a brown hand on her father’s arm. Eileen was on the other bench with Lary. She resumed the narrative that had been interrupted by her mother’s arrival:

“Yes, he’s the most unspeakable beast I ever saw. Oh, by-the-way, mamma, I was telling them about meeting Mr. and Mrs. Nims, this afternoon. Kitten and Hal and I had to go over to the house to get some rugs and things for the play, in the college chapel, and Adelaide opened the door for us.”

“You don’t mean-- How did she treat you?”

“Oh, all right. She didn’t know me from anybody else.... But she’s coming to help coach us, the night of dress rehearsal. Mrs. Henderson said, in her talk, that most of the charm in that Sargent portrait was the technique--brush work and colour arrangement. But Adelaide Nims doesn’t need Johnny Sargent or any other artist to tell her how to colour up. She had on an embroidered Chinese robe--the kind the Mandarin women wear in the house--pinkish tan, with a wide band of blue around the sleeves and neck--the kind of blue that fairly made her hair flame. I wanted to eat her, she was so beautiful. And just then I got a glimpse of her husband, through the window. He was sprawled all over a lawn bench that was built to hold three decent-sized people, and his stomach came out like the side of the rain barrel. I was trying to get a good look at his face, when he began to yawn--you know, the kind of a yawn that ate up all the rest of his features. I wanted to giggle ... or scream! And when he finally came into the house, and Kitten and I met him, I couldn’t think of a thing but that awful cavern inside his mouth. Gee! I’d hate to have to live with a man who looks like a hogshead, split down the middle, and an Edam cheese for a head--and no neck at all.”

“I didn’t suppose the nobility looked like that,” Mrs. Trench snapped.

“Humph! He’s only a younger son--and nine brothers and nephews between him and a handle to his name. Adelaide must have been in an awful tight pinch to have married him, money or no money.”

“He may not have been so stout when he courted her,” David ventured. “When your mother married me, no one would have thought of calling me her ‘better three-quarters’--and look at us now.”

“_Other_ three-quarters,” Lavinia corrected. “I never could see the justice in calling a man his wife’s ‘better’ half.”

“There’s historical warrant for your objection, mamma,” Lary said, hoping to avert the revelation his mother was all too prone to make--her callous contempt for David in particular and men as a class.

“You don’t mean the tiresome old story of Adam and the rib,” Eileen demurred.

“Nothing like that. I found the story in some elective Greek we were reading, my third year in college. And as you describe this Mr. Nims, he seems to fit the original model. Seven of us were selected to translate the Symposium of Plato, and I had the story Aristophanes was said to have told at that memorable banquet. It was in response to the toast, ‘The Origin of Love.’ As the gods planned the world, there was no such thing as love. But they had created a race of terribly efficient mortals--hermaphroditic beings, man and woman in one body, their faces looking in opposite directions. They had four legs and a double pair of arms, and when they wanted to go somewhere in a hurry, they rolled over and over, like an exaggerated cart wheel, touching all their hands and feet to the ground in succession. They could see what was going on behind them, and could throw missiles in two directions at the same time.

“As long as they didn’t realize their advantage, it was all right. But one day a leader was born among them. I suspect it was the female half of him who discovered that they were superior to the gods. If they went about it right, they could capture Olympus, and send the gods to earth to toil and offer sacrifices. The one thing the gods cared about was having their vanity fed, by the smoke from countless altars. It was for this service that man was created, in the beginning. So, when it was reported on Mount Olympus that mortals aspired to be gods, Zeus conceived a way to avert the disaster, and at the same time have twice as many creatures on earth to offer sacrifices.

“He made a great feast, and invited all the insolent race of man. And when he had them at his mercy, so that they couldn’t escape, he had them brought to him, one at a time, and cleft them in two, vertically, so that they could look only in one direction, and run on only two feet--”

“O-wee-woo!” Theodora squirmed. “Didn’t they bleed ... terribly?”

“Hush, Theo, it’s only a story,” Mrs. Trench exclaimed, irritably.

“And that’s how a man and his other half came to be separated,” David said, drawing Theodora to him and stroking her pain-puckered brow.

“Yes, the gods thought they had destroyed man, when they cleft him in two,” Lary went on, his brown eyes shining. “But in that act of ruthlessness they sowed the seeds of their own destruction. When they hurled the mutilated creatures out of Paradise, most of the halves became separated. Then began the endless search for their other halves. The men realized that they couldn’t live up to their full capacity, with the feminine side of themselves gone. And when they did find each other, they experienced a rapture that surpassed the highest emotional possibility of the immortals. That thrill was love. The gods heard about it, and condescended to mate with mortals, in the hope of experiencing the thrill. But it was useless. They had not been separated from their other halves.”

“But how did they sow the seeds of their own destruction?” Judith asked.

“It’s the old story of the apple in the Garden of Eden. The thing they couldn’t get became the ultimate desideratum. They devoted all their energy to the quest of love. They deserted all their old godlike pursuits--and in the end, the Greek deities crumbled and were destroyed by the more vigorous gods of the barbarians.”

Theodora pondered the tale. She could not be satisfied by the application to Mr. and Mrs. Nims. The tub-like man, who was far more tublike in her imagination than Eileen’s exaggerated description should have warranted, was undoubtedly the man who was married to Hal’s sister. But Mrs. Nims was thin. And he was her second husband. Manifestly something was wrong.

“But Lary, suppose when those men tried to find their other halves, they couldn’t.... Their right halves had died, or had got tired of waiting and had gone off with some one else....”

“There wouldn’t be any thrill of love, and the man couldn’t do his best, because he lacked the right person to urge him on,” David told her.

“Humph!” this from Eileen, “I guess the woman would be in as bad a fix as the man. Poor Adelaide Nims has had two tries at her other half, and missed it both times. She’s terribly unhappy, for all that she puts up such a good front. Lady Judith, don’t you think she ought to keep on trying till she does find the right one? Or is there a right one for all of us?”

“Yes ... unless we rush off into an alliance that prevents us from recognizing our true mate,” Mrs. Ascott said pointedly.

The girl flushed. The shaft had gone home. She shifted her gaze from the clear gray eyes ... and surprised an inexplicable expression on her mother’s face.

IV

Lavinia had listened, without interest, to the story. But the application--she had been brought up on stories with a Moral at the end. “Unless we rush off into an alliance....” Her face grew hard, a yellow pallor spreading from neck to brow. That was what she had done. That was what Calvin had done. It was his fault, not hers, that she had erred. She ignored the years of waiting, before Calvin had known Lettie. And those two had been mismated, had lived apart most of the time, the first few years of their married life, had quarreled violently when they were together. There must have been a right partner for Calvin. She choked with emotion as she realized--she had never been sure of it, in all those years--that Lettie was not the right one. She would like to see Calvin Stone again, now that it was all over. But what was the use? There was David, forty-eight, and ridiculously healthy. That night she lay awake, into the gray of dawn, thinking, thinking....