Chapter V: Part 5

This process was so salutary that later when Tom and Lois were at the Hall to dinner it hardly seemed possible to Sylvia that she had had any queer feelings at all about the matter and teased and joked with the doctor in precisely her old merry, audacious way, exactly as she had been accustomed to doing since she was a naughty little schoolgirl at St. Anne's. When they were walking home together in the starlight Lois turned to her husband with a curious question.

"Tom, don't you ever wish you had waited for Sylvia? She is so lovely and full of life. She is much more your kind than I am."

Tom Daly shook his head, and added with all honesty that there never had been but one girl he had wanted to marry and he had been lucky enough to get her. And Lois, suddenly lifting her face to his, gave him one of her rare love looks; a look which he would have crossed the very fires of Hell to gain.

As they entered the house she turned to him again.

"Tom, I am cold and indifferent and I don't always care about the things you care so much for but I do care--about you. I wish you would try to remember that, even when I hurt you. Do you mind kissing me?"

Tom Daly had not "minded." But it was not until they were upstairs in their own room that the whole of Lois' slow speech evolved. She turned from the mirror before which she had been letting down her long, ash blond hair.

"Tom," she said.

"Yes, Lois."

"Do you know I have been having a feeling for a long time that you and Sylvia were beginning to care for each other? It began that night she was here and played to you all the evening while I wrote out checks. I went out to cover the flowers and I saw you on her steps, with her hands in yours looking so exactly like lovers something just froze in me. I hate jealous women and I wouldn't say it or hardly think it, but that is why I have been holding you so far off. If you could love Sylvia, I didn't want to keep you. I wouldn't fight for anything--even love. But to-night I saw it had all been just my imagination. I have hurt myself and you just for nothing. I might have known Sylvia wasn't that kind. Oh, Tom!"

But even as he drew Lois into his arms Tom Daly knew that it is sometimes a woman's business to fight for love. Humbly he admitted that it had been Sylvia and not himself nor Lois who had saved the day. As honest a man as ever lived was Tom Daly, but neither then nor at any other time did he tell his wife how narrowly her fears had escaped realization. Nor did Sylvia Arden ever guess how slight an impetus would have set herself and the fine man she knew as neighbor and brother drifting into perilous seas, instead of being as they now were, anchored safely in the haven of old friendship. That was Tom Daly's secret, and he was used to keeping secrets, even his own.

*CHAPTER XIV*

*"AND HAVING EYES"*

After the night when Phil Lorrimer played with opportunity a minute, then set it aside as not for his taking, things began to be different. Human relations have a way of shifting into new combinations of form and color like a kaleidoscope just when you think they have become as fixed as the stars in their courses.

That night brought a reaction with Phil. He was actuated by a fierce and relentless energy which only work could appease. Hence he came less often to Miss Josephine Murray's pleasant apartment, but kept burrowing deeper and deeper like a mole into the professional soil, working like a demon by day, and studying, reading, experimenting doggedly by night, trying his best to fill his mind so full that the thought of Sylvia could not find a cranny in which to creep and grow. But the less vacuum he left in his mind the bigger seemed the emptiness of his heart, or rather its fullness, for was it not full to overflowing with love for Sylvia? Like a mole, too, in his blindness, it did not occur to Phil that his stubborn silence might be hurting Sylvia. Still less in his humble unselfconsciousness did it occur to him that he might also be hurting Barbara Day. He had supposed always she understood. His love for Sylvia seemed as obvious and inevitable as rain and sun. It was incredible that any one should be unaware of it. So he would perhaps have reasoned, if it had seemed necessary to reason at all on the subject, which it did not.

And while Phil burrowed and blundered Barbara grew up. Her cheeks shed their soft childlike curves. Her eyes lost their dewy morning-glory look. They seemed not to wonder any more, but to know. The city had set its seal upon her, fed her youth to its strange gods. But the city was not all to blame. What had happened to Barb might have happened anywhere. The little drama in which she was playing out her part might have been staged in any other place quite as well. Nor was it at all an original drama. Its plot is curiously old though it has infinite variations.

It came to Barb that winter that, after all, happiness wasn't the essential thing she had believed. One could, it seemed, go on eating and sleeping and walking and talking and typing and even laughing, just the same, even if one did feel a little like an empty goblet, turned bowl down, with all its sparkling contents spilled out. It was queer, but it was so.

Yet way down in the bottom of Barb's heart there still nestled a little winged creature called Hope, just as there had been in the bottom of Pandora's box. Maybe things were not as strange as they seemed. Maybe it was just that people were very busy about Christmas time. Possibly after New Year's it would be different again.

But before New Year's Barb discovered that things would never be different, and the way she found out was very simple.

On the second evening of her visit to Jeanette, Sylvia had run away from the stately "Duplex on the Drive" to take supper with Barb, and Miss Murray, for purposes of her own, had asked Doctor Lorrimer to join them also. He had been a little late in arriving and as the others had already gone into the dining-room Barb opened the door for him. He greeted her with the old friendly terrible grip which crushed Barb's ring into her finger and set the blood singing through her. He started to make a remark about the weather but his opinion of that commodity was never completed for suddenly from the room beyond Sylvia's laughter rippled out.

Did you ever happen to be engaged in decorous conversation with a man and suddenly see a change sweep over his face, and an arrested, listening, illuminated look take possession of it, just because somewhere in the distance he had heard a step, a voice, a laugh, belonging to somebody who was not yourself? That was what Barbara Day saw, and the little winged creature used her wings then and there and never came back. Barb heard the clock tick out as before, "Suppose a chap wants to marry a girl," but she knew now, once and for all, that the clock had never been talking about Barbie Day. It had always meant Sylvia Arden from the beginning.

But Barb's fathers had been fighting men and she herself was game to her little brown fingertips.

"Hurry!" she said gayly, just a shade _too_ gayly, perhaps, only Phil did not notice. "Sylvia's here and soup's served." And as she pushed aside the curtains into the dining-room she announced with a gallant flourish, "Doctor Lorrimer, ladies."

But while Phil and Sylvia shook hands she did not look at them, busying herself instead with rearranging the scarlet carnations which stood in the center of the table, complaining to her aunt as she did so that the flowers looked "stiff" and "old-maidish" and needed a "touch."

It was Barb who was the blithest of them all that night at the little supper party, bestowing to it the "touch" just as she had to the carnations. Sylvia and Phil were both slightly self-conscious and not very conversational. Miss Josephine Murray was somewhat silent too, watching the young people with eyes that saw all there was to see and understanding things at which she had been able only to guess hitherto.

That night after Sylvia and Phil had gone, Barb slipped quickly away to bed, a little afraid of what her aunt's keen gaze might have discovered, and longing, in any case, to be alone with the dark and the Thing she had been dodging all the evening, the Thing which sooner or later had to be faced and grappled with.

Later Miss Murray found her wide awake and stooped to kiss her with unwonted tenderness.

"Good night, Barbie. Anything I can do to--put you to sleep?"

Barb shook her head with a tired little smile. Then suddenly she sat up.

"If you don't mind, I think I'd like you to put your arms around me and hold me tight for a minute. Mother used to hold me that way when I felt--achey."

Miss Josephine's arms went around the girl, holding her very "tight" indeed for a few moments of silence.

"Do you feel very achey, Barbie?" she asked presently.

"Oh, no," lied Barb. "I just wanted to be petted a little weeny mite, that was all. I'm all right. Thank you, Aunt Jo. Don't bother. Do go to bed. I know you are tired."

That was the nearest the two ever came to speaking of the Thing but neither fell asleep until dawn, and when Barb awoke from her brief, heavy slumber she was entirely grown up.

Out in the crisp chill of the December night, after leaving Miss Murray and Barb, Phil and Sylvia had found their tongues. All the hurt and estrangement of the past months seemed magically to have shed itself, leaving only the old happy intimacy with perhaps a touch of something new and even more exhilarating about it.

As they walked along the river front they talked of many things, of Phil's work, of Jack's unprecedented diligence, of Gus Nichols' success on the road, of Felicia's designs, and Lois Daly's novel, of "Hester house" and Phil's mother, of Barb's services to the Cause, and Suzanne's mysterious journeyings; of everything indeed, it seemed, except the subject which was nearest the surface, their own selves.

When they reached the Lathams' apartment they were still as far from having said the really important things that trembled on their lips as they had been at the beginning. Sylvia knew perfectly well what she wanted to say but being a woman could not say it. Phil also knew perfectly well what he wanted to say but being a man set his lips and did not say it. It was only as Sylvia paused in the doorway and held out her hand to Phil that the thing came near to getting said in spite of them both.

"Sylvia!" Phil's voice had a quick little catch in it very unlike his usual rather deliberate speech. "If I don't see much of you while you are here you will understand, won't you? It won't be because I don't want to but because I--don't dare." And his frank blue eyes implored her to understand and forgive.

"Are you sure--there is anything--to be afraid of?" Sylvia's words had jerked a little, too, and as she drew her hand away to press the bell her eyes expressed more even than her tongue had said.

"Sylvia!" Phil took a swift step nearer but before he could say any more a solemn liveried person had appeared in the doorway and stood at blinking attention while Sylvia shot one dazzling glance at the young doctor and vanished into the dim spaces of the hall, whence it seemed to Phil, though he could not be sure, she kissed her hand to him behind the liveried person's back, before she was lost in the elevator. Phil stared after her a moment in dazed silence then went out into the night.

The next day, when he came in from the clinic, he found a little note from Sylvia inviting him to take tea with her the following afternoon. "Of course it is all nonsense about your not seeing much of me while I am here," the note had added. "Phil, can't you understand there isn't anything to be afraid of?" The last was underscored. And then the writer subscribed herself conventionally his as ever.

Phil read the note hungrily several times and puzzled more than a little over its contents, which he perceived were open to more than one interpretation, especially the underscored portion. And then he had sat down and written an answer which he dispatched by special messenger. The answer expressed thanks and polite regret that the writer had a previous engagement.

Sylvia had run away into her own room to read the note and grew first a little rosy, then a little white as she read. Then she tore the missive into bits, and going to the window, deliberately let the fragments flutter away in the December blast outside.

"I might as well have proposed and done with it," she thought hotly. "Phil Lorrimer needn't worry. I won't endanger his precious peace of mind again while I'm here. Previous engagement, indeed! He's afraid of my money and he makes me tired."

As a matter of fact she did Phil injustice in one particular at least. The previous engagement had been perfectly authentic. The Washington Square Players were giving that afternoon a first performance of a play which had been translated from the Russian by a friend of Phil's and he had promised to be present and had long ago invited Barb to go with him. And Barb being fully determined that Phil should never guess how things were had kept her engagement and succeeded in behaving so comradely and sisterly, which was precisely the way she had been behaving all along only more so, that her escort was allowed to continue in his state of innocence and ignorance as to things better left unknown, which was quite according to code.

But it was one of those odd coincidences that sometimes occur that Sylvia and Jeanette should have been whirling swiftly toward the park on their way home from the matinee just at the moment when Phil and Barb were transferring to the Subway at the Circle. Very much absorbed the latter appeared to be in each other's society, so much so that neither saw the limousine pass them, but Sylvia had not been so blind, and Jeanette also had taken in the scene.

"Wasn't that your little friend with Phil Lorrimer?" the latter had asked. "Somebody was telling me he goes everywhere with her. I shouldn't wonder if they were engaged, should you? They certainly looked devoted enough." So Jeanette had rattled on and never noticed that Sylvia had not answered.

That night Sylvia had gone to a big ball and worn a wonderful, sophisticated Paquin gown of sea green satin and pearls. She looked very young and lovely. The men flocked around her and she managed them all like a seasoned coquette and had three proposals during the course of the evening. Of course it was perfectly well known that she was an heiress as well as a beauty, so the proposers was not so romantically rash as might have been thought.

And from that time on Sylvia "went the pace" as madly as Jeanette herself, without pause or rest. After that one supper party Barb was never able to capture her friend again, her engagements piled up so fast and high. It looked as if Suzanne's prophecy about the "labyrinth" were being fulfilled. As for Phil, never once was he able to see her again. She was always out when he called or telephoned and always had previous engagements when he tried to get her for the theater or a concert. She was as invisible, so far as he was concerned, as if some fairy's wand had drawn a magic circle about her, a fact which made him burrow deeper than ever in his work and made him look a little older and grimmer than his twenty-five years warranted.

*CHAPTER XV*

*THE CITY AND SYLVIA*

Sylvia had supposed herself sufficiently grown up and wise and modern when she came to the city but she had not been there a week before she knew that she had been a veritable innocent, an infant in swaddling clothes, so to speak. Here was life, of a sort, with a vengeance.

In Jeanette's circle, Sylvia saw Mammon worship executed on so prodigious a scale and with such sacrificial ardor it fairly took her breath away. Everything was of the superlative degree. Sheer wealth, sheer elaboration, sheer success, sheer bigness, sheer speed, were all that counted it seemed. And in the melee the old-fashioned virtues, spiritual values, ideals, were somehow either dimmed beyond recognition or totally extinguished. Love showed itself chiefly in the guise of passion, often frankly illicit, and in lust frequently but thinly veiled. The motley throng of young-old men and old-young men who paid court to herself were obviously actuated by one of two motives or a combination of the two, the impulse of passion, or the impulse of avarice. Both points of view Sylvia loathed and thought degrading to herself as well as the men who held them. Nearly all of the group of more or less importunate suitors who thronged about her she frankly despised. The men she might have liked and respected did not come near her, much less enter the lists. No doubt they classed her with the other women with whom she appeared, women butterfly clad, butterfly souled, obviously unfit for the serious purposes of life. Sylvia did not wonder that the real men kept away. They showed their realness by so doing she thought.

Once, at a dinner, fate and her hostess allotted a different kind of companion, a grim looking person with very broad shoulders and very clear blue eyes, who let her severely alone during three courses and then when she was getting desperately bored by the over-assiduous attentions of the receding-chinned, narrow-browed scion of wealth who sat at her other elbow had suddenly turned to explode a question in her direction.

"What the devil do you see in all this?"

Sylvia had retorted that she didn't know what she saw but was trying to find out.

"When the pumpkin coach arrives I shall skip back home and think it over," she had added whimsically with a Sylvia smile.

Her neighbor had grunted a little at that and eyed her sharply from under his heavy brows.

"I thought as much," he said. "You don't belong."

"Don't I?" Sylvia had inquired dubiously. "Isn't my gown all right?" She was wearing a New York creation this time, of white tulle and gold tissue, a frock which Jeanette had pronounced a "dream," so her anxiety was not very deep-seated. "Or is it my hair? Ears are out just now, aren't they. They told me they were."

"Oh, you are protectively colored all right. It isn't that. Superficially you might be any one of this sea of ninnies that surround us. But, my dear young lady, your eyes betray you. You have a brain."

"Dear me!" sighed Sylvia, looking around her apprehensively. "Is it so bad as that? I hope nobody else suspects."

"No danger. They aren't looking for brains. Bodies content 'em. I hope you don't think this Punch and Judy show is the real New York? You are a stranger, I take it?"

"A pilgrim and a stranger. Where is the real New York?"

"Downtown, a good deal of it. Some of it is in the universities, especially in the night classes. Some of it is in the laboratories where they are fighting disease and achieving chemical miracles. Some of it is in the little back bedrooms where the chap from the up-state village has come down to peddle his dreams in the market place. The real New York--the real America--is made up of just two things--the dream and the deed. Those that make dreams their masters fail and go to pieces and that is a tragedy. Those that build without the vision will see the work of their hands filter to dust. And that's a worse tragedy. But those who can dream and transmute the dream to human gain, in tangible form--they are the real thing. These people here haven't the decency to dream nor the energy to do. They are the scum on the surface. They are punk--most of 'em. Rotten."

Sylvia had looked around her a little startled. The scene had looked brilliant and appealing to her a moment ago. Somehow now she saw it through this brutal stranger's eyes a "Punch and Judy show.". She shivered slightly. Suddenly she felt a bit like a little girl at a party, grown homesick, all at once, ready to be taken home quick. For she could not help believing her neighbor was right. Underneath the glamour and the beauty and the poise and the breeding around her there was a good deal that was more or less "rotten." She had seen it in men's eyes and heard it in their voices, yes, in the women's, too. She was filled with a great disgust and with some shame as well. For in her zest for experience had she not let her own shield get a little dented and tarnished? She turned back to her companion, her new knowledge in her eyes.

"Why did you tell me?" she reproached.

"Why, indeed? You knew it without my telling you. See here, girl, I'm going to Alaska myself to-morrow. I can't stand much of this sort of thing. I'd like to think you were going to pull out, too, before the taint gets you. I said your eyes betrayed you. They did. But it isn't only that you have brains. The brains are there but there is something else too. You have faith. You've lived in a decent sort of world where people are straight and kind and honest and simple. Better go back to it while there is still time."

Sylvia drew a long breath.

"Thank you," she said. "I believe I will."

Later Jeanette asked her what she had found to say to Archibald Grant.

"He's the Arctic Explorer Grant, you know. Quite the biggest toad in the puddle there, to-night."

"Was he?" Sylvia had looked thoughtful. "I didn't know who he was but we had rather an interesting talk. Jeanette, I've got to go home."

"Go home! Why, Sylvia, you haven't been here two weeks yet!"

"I know. But I'm incurably a home person. I've had a wonderful time but I want to see Arden Hall and Felicia and--"

"Jack?" teased Jack's sister languidly.

Sylvia flushed a little. At the moment it did seem as if she would be very glad, indeed, to see Jack. Jack was so clean and young and joyous and wholesome. He seemed to her to belong to a different world from that which his sister inhabited. But, after all, at Jeanette's insistence, Sylvia agreed to stay another week.

Jeanette herself was almost feverish in her gayety these days. It seemed, indeed, as if she could not stop if she tried, as if "all the devils of Hell were loose and after her" as Jack had said. She was a puzzle to Sylvia. That she was not happy was apparent, but she was always gay, talkative, full of quick laughter and brilliant plans for new pleasures, something fresh every hour. There were always many men in her wake. Usually they were men of brains, men "who did things," as the phrase goes, musicians, writers, artists and the like. Jeanette did not affect fools, as she had said curtly to Sylvia once. She had brains herself and used them. She was rather famous and rather feared for her somewhat satirical wit. Her husband was a quiet, scholarly aristocrat, who spent most of his time reading memoirs of somebody or other, or bringing out elegant "privately printed" monographs. In Jeanette's scheme of things he seemed scarcely to count at all, beyond the essential facts of having provided her with an extravagant income and an assured place in New York society. To do her justice, however, Jeanette was by no means dependent upon her husband for these things. She made her own circle wherever she went. She did not need either the Latham money or name to assure her leadership. She was a born queen. These factors were merely contributing circumstances.

Among Jeanette's varied and numerous retinue was one young man whom Sylvia found less easy than the others to place. This was an artist, Charlton Haynes by name, a newcomer in the city who had been for some time engaged in "doing" Jeanette's portrait. Wherever Jeanette was, the young portrait painter appeared to be also by some magic process. The two had little to say to each other in public but Sylvia had noticed more than once how the painter's rather gloomy face lit up when Jeanette approached, giving an effect much like a sudden sunshine after a passing cloud. More than once, too, Sylvia had seen a flash of some quick, wordless communication pass between them. They spent long hours together mornings in the great ball-room where he worked in the north light. When Sylvia was with them, as she sometimes was, the artist was rather silent and absorbed in his work and Sylvia thought if he were always so quiet he must be rather dull company.

One morning she suffered an abrupt enlightenment as to the relations between her hostess and the artist. Jeanette had been detained and had asked Sylvia to go to the ballroom and explain to Mr. Haynes that she would be with him as soon as possible. As Sylvia opened the door he had turned with outstretched arms and an impulsive "Sweetheart, you are dreadfully late." And then his hands had fallen and a shamed, hang-dog, caught-in-the-act expression banished the eager look of expectant joy on his face as he met Sylvia's eyes and saw her quick flush.

He shrugged and tried to make the best of the situation by a hasty "Beg pardon, Miss Sylvia. I didn't see it was you."

"So I judged," said Sylvia and delivered her message gravely and departed. She wondered if this was what Jack had guessed and if that was why he had wanted her to go to Jeanette. Had he thought she could save her? Poor Jeanette! Could any one save her but herself?

Two hours later Jeanette came to Sylvia, writing letters in her own room at the little teakwood desk.

"Sylvia."

"Yes?" Sylvia had turned, wondering what Jeanette would say, wondering almost more what she herself was going to say.

"Charlton says he gave himself away awhile ago, did he?"

"Rather."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean you to know for fear it might bother you. Otherwise, of course, I don't mind your knowing. We have been in love for some time. There doesn't seem to be anything to do about it at present."

Jeanette's tone was impersonal. She might as easily have been discussing the relation between the moon and the tides as the relation between herself and Charlton Haynes. The facts existed. That was all apparently. At least all Jeanette cared to admit.

"Couldn't he go away?" asked Sylvia, equally matter of fact.

"He could, but it would make talk if he went before the portrait was done. Besides, I don't want him to go. He offered to. It is I who am keeping him. I hope you are not too much shocked, Sylvia."

"I'm not shocked at all, but I am sorry. Does Jack know?"

"Jack!" For the first time, Jeanette showed a quaver of emotion in her voice. "Jack! Good gracious, no! Why should he? I wouldn't have Jack know for anything. What made you ask that?"

"Jack tried to warn me something about you before I came. He seemed to think you needed me."

And suddenly Jeanette's calm broke. She flung herself face down among the silken cushions of the couch. Sylvia came and knelt beside her putting both arms around her. In a moment Jeanette sat up, flushed but tearless. Sylvia slipped back upon the floor, her hands clasped around her knees, her eyes pitiful.

"I do need you. I need somebody. Sylvia, listen to me. It is a dreadful thing for a girl to marry if she isn't in love. Fate is sure to strike back at her sooner or later. That is what happened to me. I married Francis because I thought he could give me the things I wanted--the things I thought I wanted. And he has, but it isn't what I really wanted at all. I am just beginning to understand what I do want--what life might mean, if one deserved to have it mean anything. I hate this house and the servants and the hideous kind of existence we live--the kind I elected to live. It wasn't Francis' choice. It was mine. But I hate it all now. I'd like to leave it this minute. But I can't. I'm bound, hand and foot, by conventions and fears and selfishness. I couldn't live now without luxury, I've had it so long. I couldn't stand poverty or shame or sacrifice or honesty of any kind. I'm a sham. I love Charlton. But I shan't try to get a divorce and I shan't run off with him because I'm not big enough. I'm just big enough to squirm and suffer and hate myself for being such a pitiful little coward. I'm not even big enough to send him away. I'm not worth his wrecking his life and ideals for, but I don't tell him that. I tell him I love him and that is enough to keep him here like a lap dog. Pah! He isn't very big either or he would make me go with him or leave me outright."

"But, Jeanette, it is all such a tangle. If you really care, why don't you go to Francis and tell him the truth? Surely nothing can be so bad as going on like this."

"You don't know what you are talking about, Sylvia. I'd die before I would go to Francis and I'd die if he found out, but I'm going on risking everything until something happens. I don't know what."

And in the face of such reasoning or non-reasoning, Sylvia had no answer to make. She was beginning to hate the city heartily. It seemed to be weaving nothing but misery for everybody. Was there any happiness in it? Surely she herself had found none. She desired more than anything else in the world to run away from it all, to get back to Felicia and, yes, to Jack. They two seemed the only refuge in a heaving sea of trouble.

*CHAPTER XVI*

*AS MIGHT HAVE BEEN EXPECTED*

It seemed as if Sylvia's cup of disenchantment were destined to brim over before the city was done with her. She tried to view Jeanette's affair with the portrait painter with an open mind and tolerant attitude. She saw that there was no real evil in it as yet--probably never would be for Jeanette was likely to "play safe" having much at stake. But somehow it all disheartened the younger girl. She thought she could have forgiven both the transgressors more easily if they had dared a little more, or cared a little more for each other and less for themselves. If they had eloped she would have been shocked and troubled but she would have understood their conduct. It was the amazing bad taste and effrontery of carrying on so half-hearted a liaison in Francis Latham's own house and under his very eyes which was to Sylvia the least excusable phase of the matter. Deceit of any sort was obnoxious to her straightforward soul. She herself could never have kept on living a daily lie such as Jeanette was living. Something would have snapped. And somehow Sylvia found herself seeing things all around her blacker, no doubt, than they were, because of her too much recently acquired knowledge, and often she remembered the explorer's terse verdict that these people were "punk." It was all very disillusioning and made one sick at heart.

But Sylvia had other cause to feel that happiness was eluding her these days in early January. The wound to her pride that Phil Lorrimer had dealt, though seared over, was by no means healed. She tried to be perfectly fair and sane, to admit that if Jeanette's supposition were correct, Barb would doubtless make Phil a better wife than she herself would have done, to acknowledge that it was entirely natural and appropriate that Phil and Barb should have learned to care for each other during the intimate months past when she herself had deliberately neglected Phil. Even so, Phil need not have looked at her as he had that night on Jeanette's doorstep. He needn't have let her all but propose to him. That was the deepest rankling thorn of all. She had almost offered herself to him on Jeanette's threshold. If he had really cared as his eyes had said wouldn't he have understood what she was trying to tell him that the money was nothing at all, that it didn't matter in the least, that there was, indeed, nothing to be afraid of, as she had twice taken the pains to reassure him?

If he had really cared would he not have found means to see her during her weeks with Jeanette in spite of her mantle of invisibility? It was all too evident that he didn't care, that it was Barb who could give him what he wanted, or rather let him give everything as his pride demanded. Sylvia knew perfectly well that she had wanted Phil Lorrimer to ask her to marry him, knew too, that she had meant to say yes if he did ask her, but she also knew that though her pride was offended, her heart was far from being broken. Indeed, love in its entirety, in its heights and depths, its glory and its mortal agony, its madness and its abiding joy, she had scarcely as yet conceived.

She was still questing experience, tasting life, and even the bitter flavor of this last new-gained knowledge was interesting because bitterness was new to Sylvia Arden. Youth drinks its gall and wormwood with almost as supreme satisfaction as it does its nectar and ambrosia.

Not that Sylvia understood all this or consciously analyzed her mental processes. She did nothing of the sort. She only knew she had been hurt, and found it a rather fascinating game to hide the hurt from herself and the rest of the world.

Perhaps her zest for the hiding game made her play a little more recklessly with the men who dogged her footsteps than was entirely wise or kind. Certainly it made her eyes a little starrier, her cheeks a little deeper carmine, her laugh a little more tantalizing. Men saw and smiled and said the little Maryland "Deb" was a queen, a beauty, and a wit as well as an heiress, an unbelievably lucky combination.

"Knows how to hold her own too," they agreed. "She'll lead you on to the limit and then when you think you have her--she isn't there. Got the elusive game to perfection, wherever she learned it."

But the last night of her stay in the city Sylvia came near playing her game an inch too far. There had been a theater party and supper afterward at the Astor and when at last they started for home she chanced to get separated from Jeanette who, supposing her guest was with her husband, had gone on in another car.

"Why!" exclaimed Sylvia, from the curbing. "I do believe they have all deserted me. There goes Jeanette, and Francis went with the Homers."

"Well, here am I!" challenged Porter Robinson, at her elbow. Porter Robinson was the most daring and insistent of all the swarmers about the most popular new rose. "Whither thou goest I will go! Here, Cabby," and his uplifted finger summoned a taxicab in which he and Sylvia were in a moment ensconced.

It was a wonderful night. Brilliant stars studded the heavens and the trees in the park were laden with a fleecy burden of new-fallen snow. The little girl still in Sylvia who loved snow storms and had too little of them in Maryland cried out in ecstasy at the sight.

"Oh-h! Couldn't we drive in there a little and see it? It's so lovely after the lights and the crowd--like a different world!"

Naturally Porter Robinson had no objections to driving at midnight in a closed cab through the park with the prettiest, liveliest, most piquant girl he had met in many a season.

But a half hour later Sylvia flashed into the library at the Lathams with wrath and shame in her heart and ran square into Jack standing with his back to the fireplace.

"Ugh! I hate men," she greeted him stormily.

"You do! What's up? Where is Jeanette? You look like a Valkyr or an avenging fury."

"I don't know where Jeanette is. Porter Robinson brought me home."

"Oh," comprehended Jack. "So that is the rumpus. Didn't Porter behave like a perfect gentleman?"

"He did not." Sylvia threw off her cloak with a wrathful gesture, leaving her slim, rounded young loveliness, clad in the white tulle and gold "dream," suddenly revealed to Jack's eyes. "He tried to kiss me, if you must know."

"And what did you expect at this time of night when you had shed your lawful chaperones?" inquired Jack blandly. "Especially after you had been flirting like the mischief with him all the evening!"

Sylvia slipped into a chair and stared up at Jack. "How did you know?" she asked with astonished meekness.

Jack laughed.

"Didn't. I just guessed. So you did flirt with him like the mischief?"

"I--shouldn't wonder," admitted Sylvia with a grimace. "He's a beast, but then maybe I was a little to blame. I suppose I shouldn't have asked him to take me riding in the park at this time of night."

"Possibly not," agreed Jack.

"You wouldn't have taken advantage of a situation like that, Jack. You know you wouldn't."

"H-m-m?" interrogated Jack dubiously. "That so? If you looked one half as pretty in the cab as you do this minute, I'm morally or immorally certain I should not only have tried to kiss you but have succeeded."

"Jack!"

"Like this!" And suddenly, to Sylvia's utter surprise, he had stooped and kissed her full on one crimson, excited cheek. "Game's up, sweetheart. My turn. You've had your fling, and I guess from all Jeanette writes it has been a pretty lively one. Honest Injun, Sylvia, aren't you sick of it all, ready to try it out on a different line with me? No, don't speak just yet. I'm not quite through. I promised I would get busy and show you I could hold down a man's job if necessary. Well, I've done it. I'm not boasting, but you can ask Dad if I haven't made good and kept my promise to the letter. That is all on that subject. Secondly, I don't pretend to be a saint, but thanks to you and the Christmas Family setting me straight some years ago I'm a fairly decent specimen as men go. I believe I'd show up moderately well by comparison with the Porter Robinsons and the rest. That is all of that. Thirdly, I love you. There isn't any other girl, never has been, and, so far as I can see, never will be. Now--did you mind very much having me kiss you?"

Sylvia's eyes were demurely downcast, her cheeks flushed, but a quiver of a smile appeared around the corners of her mouth.

"Not much. I rather think I--I liked it--a little," she admitted.

That was enough for Jack, and five minutes later when Jeanette came in she found him on the arm of Sylvia's chair, her tulle and gold rather crushed and mussed but with her eyes looking very starry.

He sprang up with alacrity as his sister entered and went to give her a brotherly kiss.

"'Lo, Jeannie. Sylvia and I have just got engaged. Hope you don't mind?"

Jeanette shot a straight, questioning, dubious look at Sylvia then remarked she was delighted, of course, and if they would excuse her she would go to bed as she was very tired. Sylvia had vaguely realized at the moment that Jeanette was white, but it was not until the next day that she understood. Charlton Haynes had left suddenly for California on the midnight train and he and Jeanette had apparently parted for all time. Of what lay behind Sylvia could not even surmise and Jeanette kept her own counsel. At any rate, Sylvia was able to perceive that under the circumstances the other woman had little enthusiasm left over for the love affairs of even her sole and beloved brother.

And that next afternoon Sylvia and Jack went South together, and the Minotaur did not get Sylvia after all. But whether she had not stepped blithely into a deeper labyrinth than the one she had evaded was another question.

*CHAPTER XVII*

*BARB DIAGNOSES*

The evening that culminated in Sylvia's engagement to Jack, Phil had spent with Barbara. Barb had discovered that it was neither impossible nor very difficult to slip back into the beaten way of friendship with the young doctor, especially as he himself had never left that safe and sane path and had no faintest conception of the mad little, sad little detour the girl had accomplished beneath his very eyes. Barb was a very wise and brave little lady and having realized that she had been reaching for the moon withdrew her hand and made the most she could out of every day sunbeams. Phil never guessed that his occasional visits to Miss Murray's apartment were rather bittersweet occasions to Barb, nor did he notice that she was quieter, graver, not quite so responsive as he had hitherto found her. As a matter of fact, Phil wasn't seeing much of anything these days except his own stolidly endured misery. It had been bad enough to know Sylvia was in Greendale where he couldn't see her at all, but to know she was within easy reach and yet farther from him to all intents and purposes than if an ocean or a desert separated them was incomparably worse.

He hated Jeanette Latham's kind of life, hated to have Sylvia's fresh radiance tarnished by its contact, hated to think of her, night after night, in the society, even in the arms of the Porter Robinsons of Jeanette's circle, jealous of it all because it kept Sylvia from him, hurt that she would give up none of her gayeties for his sake, blindly conscious that he had offended her, though only half guessing how and to what extent.

One night he had been at the opera, way up in the upper tiers, as was his custom, and between the acts he had wandered about in the galleries and seen Sylvia in a box below, surrounded by a swarm of devoted male attendants, and he had watched her with mingled gloom and avidity. She was so lovely in her chiffons and furs and her exquisite youthfulness and grace, her face uplifted, her hair shining in the light like burnished copper, her lips parted with laughter. She seemed so eminently a part of the picture to fit into the brilliant scene as a diamond sparkles appropriately in its hoop of gold that Phil's heart sank heavier than ever. Well, it only proved he had been right. What had he to offer Sylvia in exchange for all this? She belonged to it and it to her, as a bird belongs to the air.

Perhaps it was the intensity of his gaze that had made Sylvia look up. At any rate she raised her eyes and met his, staring hungrily down at her. The exciting, haunting music of Tristan and Isolde had stirred strange deeps in Sylvia, begotten an elan of flesh and soul which flared like a pure flame in her eyes at the moment. The man at her side, Porter Robinson, as it happened, saw the look and followed her gaze with curiosity to see what had lit the flame. But in all that sea of faces he had no means of distinguishing the one which stood out for the girl as if it had been the one face in the world. In a second she had turned away and lowered her eyes.

"What was it?" asked her companion. "Did you see a vision?"

"Maybe," said Sylvia. "Hush! The music is beginning."

All the rest of the evening she half hoped Phil would seek her out in the box but he had not come. And the next night had been the one when she had discovered Porter Robinson was a beast and an hour later had found herself rather unexpectedly engaged to Jack Amidon.

As for Phil, his will tugged at its moorings that night. He, too, had been moved by the music, and even more by the challenge of Sylvia's eyes. He had telephoned her the next day to try to make an engagement with her for the evening but Sylvia was submerged with engagements, had a tea, a dinner, a theater party, and so forth, already on hand, and her voice over the telephone was as cool and remote as a mountain stream. She even forgot to tell him she was leaving the city the next day. Sylvia's pride in its way matched Phil's own.

And so instead of spending the evening with Sylvia, Phil had dropped in to see Barbara, which is where this chapter really began.

He was certainly anything but good company that night. He sat somberly looking into the fire, answering Barb's casual chatter with brief absent-minded monosyllables. Barb, watching out of the corner of her eye, and with the sure intuition that love teaches, guessed the source of his gloom. She forgot all about her own hurt in sorrow for his and longed with all the mother in her to comfort him. Suddenly the silence which had fallen became intolerable, the weight of the unspoken thing too heavy to be endured another minute. So out of a clear sky Barb dropped a bomb.

"Phil, why don't you ask Sylvia to marry you?"

Phil jumped and stared and frowned.

"Reason's sufficiently obvious I should say. The gown and the furs and the pearls she had on last night probably cost more than my year's income."

"What of it? Gowns and furs and pearls aren't important. There are things that Sylvia cares much more about."

"What?"

"You," was on the tip of Barb's tongue, but she did not say it. After all, that was for Sylvia to say. She had no means of knowing how Sylvia felt except that vivid memory of the way the other girl's eyes had looked that night on Lover's Leap.

"Happiness, for one thing," she substituted. "Phil Lorrimer, don't you know Sylvia Arden well enough to know the things that money buys are not the real things--the things she cares for. She is willing to play with them while she is waiting. Who wouldn't? I would myself, if I had the chance. But Sylvia never mixes things up. She knows what counts and what doesn't count as well as anybody I know. If you think her having money and your not having it makes the slightest difference to her, you're even stupider than I gave you credit for." Barb had warmed to her subject and did not care if the lash of her tongue did sting a little. She rather thought Phil Lorrimer needed a sting or two. She had forgotten for the moment she had ever been in love with this young man herself. She remembered only she was a woman speaking for her sex in plain round terms.

"You mean Sylvia wants me to ask her to marry her?"

Barb made an impatient gesture.

"I don't know anything about that. That is between you two. What I do know, and what I am trying to tell you, is that the modern woman despises a man just as much for not wanting to ask her to marry him because she has money as she does for wanting to ask her to marry him because she has it. That kind of idea is ancient and exploded and idiotic and disgusting."

Phil threw out his hand in half humorous, half serious protest.

"My word! What an avalanche! So you think it is thoroughly contemptible in me to care whether the woman I marry has a million dollars or not when I haven't a red cent?"

"I do," asserted Barb stoutly. "The money isn't any of your affair, any more than the kind of knife you use on the operating table is hers, or the color of your hair or eyes, for that matter. It just hasn't anything to do with it."

"What is my affair? What is the male end of the bargain, according to the latest approved feministic standards?"

"It's the male end of the bargain, if you choose to put it that way, to give a woman love and respect and comradeship, a clean, strong, healthy body and mind and soul, to be the kind of man she would like the father of her children to be. I believe that is about all. Read Beatrice Forbes-Robinson Hale's chapter on the 'New Man' and you'll understand why Sylvia's money has nothing to do with the case and why your pride is stupid and conceited and old-fashioned, a relic of the time when man expected to be the sole provider and expected his wife to be the chief parasite of the family, when he gloried in his high and mighty superiority and expected her to be meekly grateful and appreciative of said superiority. Now, do you understand?"

"A little," said Phil Lorrimer slowly. "Thank you, Barb. Maybe I have been an idiot, as you say. It takes you to clear away the rubbish in a fellow's mind. Jack tried to tell me the same thing and, well, I guess Sylvia tried, too, only she didn't put it as violently visibly as you have, and I threw the words back in her face like the donkey I am. Barb, do you believe there is any chance she'll forgive me?" he begged anxiously.

"I don't know how much she has to forgive," retorted Barb shortly. "But you had better be about it before her forgiveness is all she has left to give. You can't expect a girl like Sylvia to sit down and wait for a man to get his eyes open like a Maltese kitten. I suppose you know Jack is hot on the trail, and no doubt there are plenty of others here in New York."

"Lord! Don't I know it?" Phil got to his feet. "You needn't rub it in, Barb. I'm scared enough on that score already and jealous as the old one. I'd have liked to drop asphyxiating gas on the moon-faced calf I saw with her last night at the opera, looking as if he owned her. Gee! I've got to get out and let the air circulate through my brains a little. I feel as if I had a hot box up there." He gave his tawny head a thump. "Honest, Barb, I'm much obliged to you for your efficiently brutal treatment. You are some doctor, all right."

And in his genuine gratitude Phil started to seize both Barb's small hands in his, but she backed away, fearful perhaps lest he see more than she wanted, now that his eyes were unsealed in other respects. In a moment he was gone and Barb walked deliberately over to the mirror and surveyed her flushed face and big, excited eyes.

"They say a critic is a man who can't write. I begin to think a reformer--at least, a woman reformer--is a woman who can't have what she wants. Maybe I can get the sacred fire after all. Wonder if Aunt Jo got it--my way."

Barb laughed a little tremulously and then picked up a volume of Ellen Key and sat down to read as hard as she could.

Her brain was very clear that night it seemed. She felt as if she could have written a book about woman herself.

*CHAPTER XVIII*

*THE CAUSE AND THE CAREER*