Chapter ONE: I

At first he couldn’t believe it. He thought it was; he followed her for two blocks; then he decided it wasn’t, and suddenly she had stopped to look in a shop window, and he knew. He was shocked. This the pretty, endearing kid of two years ago, this haggard, hollow-cheeked woman so shabbily dressed, without gloves, with worn old boots, with that air of haste and anxiety!

“Rosaleen!” he said.

She whirled round and looked into his face with startled eyes.

“Why!” she cried. “_Mr. Landry!_”

He took her little bare hand and looked down at her, distressed beyond measure by the change in the poor little thing. But smiling, to hide his disturbance.

“Where are you off to, in such a hurry?” he asked, “I’ve been trying to catch you up for a long time.”

“I’m going home.”

“Still living up-town?”

“No; down in Washington Square.”

He couldn’t endure to let go of her hand, he couldn’t endure the thought of losing her; the tenderness and affection he had felt for her two years ago came back a hundredfold now. A tenderness that wrung his heart. To see her so shabby, so thin, so anxious, and still with her lovely, luminous grey eyes....

“Can’t I walk with you part of the way?” he asked.

“I was going in the ‘L’,” she said, doubtfully.

“But you’re not in a hurry?... Have you had lunch?”

“Oh, I couldn’t!”

“Nonsense! Come on!”

She wavered; and he instantly took advantage of her irresolution by taking her arm.

“Please!” he said. “It’s Saturday, the one day I don’t have to hurry.”

And, so afraid was he of any silence between them, that he began to talk about nothing; about how he had come up to Tiffany’s from his office, to see about a watch he was having repaired. About how fine the weather was for March, and how lively Fifth Avenue looked, and so on, until they were outside the little restaurant he had decided upon.

“I can’t, Mr. Landry! I look too--awful!”

“Rosaleen, you couldn’t look awful. And if I don’t mind, I don’t believe anyone else will complain.”

She followed him to a corner table and sat down, confused and embarrassed, opposite him. She was so conscious of her bare hands, her carelessly dressed hair. He ordered a substantial lunch, and then leaned across the table, to look at her.

“You’re much thinner,” he said. “Why? You don’t look well!”

“I’m all right,” she said. “How are you?”

“I’m not all right,” he answered. “I’ve never been all right since I was fool enough to let you go.”

“Oh, no!” she said, with a bitter little smile. “Don’t pretend you’ve been thinking of me all the time. I know better!”

“No,” he said, in his serious way. “I’m not saying I’ve thought of you all the time. What I mean is, that I realised long ago--that you were the--the right one--the only woman in the world for me....”

She smiled again, but with tears in her eyes.

“Let’s not be silly!” she said. “Let’s just be good friends.....”

“No!... Look here, Rosaleen.... I wish I could tell you how I feel.... At first, I’ll be honest--At first I was angry. I felt that you hadn’t been fair with me.... I thought I’d forget the whole thing. But I couldn’t. I wrote to you, twice. And then when you didn’t answer, I thought--it was over. It haunted me. I promise you, Rosaleen----”

She laid her hand very lightly on his arm.

“Please--let’s not bring it all up again?” she said. “It _is_ all over.... Tell me how you’ve been getting on. You look--splendid.”

And she really thought he did. He was well-dressed, he had a prosperous, an important air; he was no longer a boy, but a man, and a mighty self-confident man.

“I’m doing very well,” he said. “But I want to hear about you.”

“Oh!... I’m an artist!” she said, laughing. “A regular professional artist.”

“Are you? It doesn’t seem to agree with you.”

“It isn’t the work that disagrees with me; it’s the not getting any work. I’m poor!”

“Do you support yourself? Don’t you live with--those Humberts any longer?”

She shook her head.

“No,” she said. “You see ... I’m married.”

“_Rosaleen!_” he cried.

For a few moments he was silent, looking at her, filled with an immense regret, a remorse that stifled him.

“Who?” he asked at last.

“An artist.”

“But--doesn’t the fellow support you? Doesn’t he--work?”

“He tries. But he’s nearly blind.”

“Good God! And you support him?”

“I do the best I can. Only I’ve been sick.”

“No!” he cried. “Rosaleen, this is horrible! What can I do to help you?”

“Don’t!” she said. “You’ll make me cry.... You--you make me so--so sorry for myself....”

They couldn’t finish their lunch, either of them. Landry paid the check, and they rose. But as she was passing out in front of him, he stopped her.

“Rosaleen,” he said. “They have very good chocolates here. You used to like chocolates. Let me get you a box!”

But now she was crying, and he hastily turned with her into a quieter street.

“No cause for tears!” he said, cheerfully.

“I know it!... But I’m--I’m a fool.... I’m nervous, I guess....”

“I’ll take you home.”

“No, I’d _rather_ not, Mr. Landry!”

“Don’t you want to see me again?”

“Yes, I do. Any evening--this evening, if you like.”

He wrote down the address.

“But I don’t like to let you go like this!” he said. “I don’t think you’re fit. Let me get you a taxi?”

“No, thanks, really I’m perfectly all right!”

She smiled at him to convince him. And with a long hand clasp they separated. He stood looking after her, with a pity almost beyond his endurance. So this is what she had come to! Shabby, hungry, running about looking for work to support a blind husband. He could see before him the kid in the sailor blouse, in Miss Waters’ studio....

The girl he ought to have married. He could have spared her all this. It was _his_ fault, all of it his fault.

II

They were living in the same studio Rosaleen had once shared with Enid and Dodo. And when Landry opened the door, he was rather impressed. Perhaps he had unconsciously expected a garret and the blind man lying on a pallet. And instead saw a large and imposingly artistic room, very dark in the corners, but with a circle of light from a red-shaded lamp on a table in the centre and Rosaleen and her husband sitting beside it. The husband, too, was much better than he had expected; he was really a very gentlemanly chap, and a good talker; nothing pitiful or destitute about him. One wouldn’t have suspected him of being blind. An immense, fat fellow with a tremendous voice, and a somewhat broad sense of humour. He talked to Landry about the opera, for that was the only form of art with which the young man was acquainted. He had a very decent cigar to offer him, and he mixed an excellent cocktail.

Rosaleen, too, was different; she wore an embroidered smock of dark red silk and she had bronze slippers and stockings, and her fine brown hair was parted on one side and doubled under, to look like a short crop. Landry thought she looked quite as an artist’s wife ought to look, and charming, and adorable. She had scarcely said a word all the evening; she had sat in silence while the two men talked, but he knew very well that she wasn’t listening. She had an odd, preoccupied look in her eyes which he later came to know very well....

It was a mild and somewhat flavourless evening. When the time came for him to go, the husband invited him to come to lunch the following Saturday, and he had said that he would.

He went home in a queer mood; he was, although he didn’t know it, refusing to think at all, refusing to examine his impressions.

III

As he was walking over from the bus that next Saturday, he met her hurrying through Fourth Street, and he was really shocked at her appearance. Even an artist’s wife ought to be a little more particular. She was hatless, with felt bedroom slippers on her feet, and her arms were filled with huge bundles from which protruded the feathery tops of carrots and celery leaves. The gay April breeze was blowing her soft untidy hair across her eyes, and at first she didn’t recognise him.

“Oh, Mr. Landry!” she said. “Don’t _look_ at me!... You shouldn’t come so early...!”

There was a very great change in her; a greater one than he had realised before. She was not only thinner and paler and older looking; she was different. That critical and childish look in her eyes had gone, that air of an observer; she was no longer looking on at life, she was _in_ it, she was living.

He took one of the immense bags and followed her upstairs.

And the studio, too, was revealed to him in its reality; the artistic glamour of it was gone in the daylight. In fact, it wasn’t a studio at all; there was, crowded into one corner, a small table on which Rosaleen’s drawing materials were neatly laid out on a blotter, but the other corners contained only sordid and common adjuncts to a poverty-stricken life; a cheap little bureau covered with a paltry lace scarf, a trunk masquerading as a table, a wooden egg crate in which were dozens of tins of tomatoes, bought at a sale. The distinguished artist himself was not what he had seemed; he was still handsome, still debonair, but he was wearing a dirty collar and a soiled white apron over a wrinkled suit. He was sitting beside a little gas stove on a table, on which was superimposed a portable oven with a glass door, and he was peering in with his extinguished eyes, so absorbed in his watching that he had to make a visible effort to arouse himself and to welcome Landry.

“A la bonne heure!” he said, cordially. “I’ve made something which no man with a soul could resist. It will be ready at one sharp. A Galette, to be eaten hot, with a sauce of wine and cream. That, coffee of the best, and a marvellous little salad.... Eh?”

Landry answered without great enthusiasm; he wasn’t much interested in food. And immediately the conversation languished, the animation fled from Lawrence’s face; he became again crumpled and dejected, until Rosaleen, who had been in the back room, returned and began asking him questions about the Galette. That started him; he talked and talked, and his talk was all of food--about methods of preparation--a subject upon which Landry was profoundly ignorant. The meals in his home were plain and not greatly varied, meat, poultry and game roasted or broiled, the more respectable vegetables, an unobtrusive salad, innocent milky puddings, and those peculiar and delectable Southern hot breads. When he ate in a restaurant he ordered very much the same things, and when he was the guest of someone very rich who set rare dishes before him, he didn’t quite know what he was eating and cared still less. Such an idea as stuffing an eggplant with chopped liver seemed to him fantastic and frivolous.

The lunch was undoubtedly a good one, but it was ruined by Lawrence’s interminable culinary talk. There was no chance for a word with Rosaleen; she seemed to have no other idea in her head but to “draw out” her tiresome husband, to encourage him to bore their guest beyond toleration. Landry felt that this was hardly hospitable.

At last he rose.

“I’ll have to be going,” he said. “It’s after three, and I have an engagement.”

Lawrence shook his hand with tremendous cordiality.

“Come again!” he said. “Take pity on a man who has very little left in life. Come often!”

He turned toward Rosaleen, and Landry distinctly saw a look of understanding pass between them which he didn’t like.

“I’ll walk as far as the corner with you,” said Rosaleen. “I have an errand.”

And just as she was, she went out of the door with him. He stopped her at the head of the stairs.

“You shouldn’t go out in those slippers, Rosaleen! You’ll catch cold....”

“But that’s just where I’m going!” she answered, laughing. “To the shoemaker’s to get my shoes. They’re being mended.”

“But--” he began, and stopped.

“But haven’t you more than one pair?” he had been about to say.

He couldn’t endure to see her running about the streets like this, hatless, in bedroom slippers, a neglected, pitiful creature who had lost her womanly pride.

All the circumstances of her life puzzled and displeased him. There was something about it he couldn’t comprehend--that fat fellow with his cooking, the strained gallantry of Rosaleen’s bearing, the subtly unpleasant atmosphere which surrounded them. Even poverty couldn’t account for it, he thought.

They had reached the corner, and Rosaleen stopped.

“Mr. Landry!” she said. “Could you lend me ten dollars?”

He pulled out his bill fold, handed her a bill, politely waved aside her thanks, and fled, hurrying from the sight of her. He felt really sick, with pity, with amazement, with an unconquerable disgust.