Chapter I: HAVE seen her--and I don’t wonder! (2)

“Flirt!” exclaimed the count. “Does a goddess flirt? That’s what she is. Think of it--in this new shiny country, in this city with telephones and policemen, in this sad street with the houses all built the same.” He sat upright and shook his cigarette at me. “She belongs where it is all sunshine and joy, and they dance and laugh and there is no business and nobody has a conscience.”

“Do you mean Ancient Greece or Modern Naples?”

The count made a vague sweeping gesture that left a little trail of smoke in the air.

“_N’importe!_ But not here. She is a pagan, a natural being, a nymph, a dryad. I don’t know what in your language--but oh, something beautiful that isn’t bothered with a soul.”

I started, Masters and the count, raw America and sophisticated Italy, converging toward the same point.

Before I could answer her voice sounded startlingly loud through the register. For the first moment I didn’t recognize the strain, then I knew it--“_Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore_”--I have lived for art, I have lived for love. We looked at each other in surprised question as the impassioned song poured from the grating. It was as if she had heard us and this was her answer.

My knowledge of nymphs and dryads is small, but I feel confident if one of them had ever sung a modern Italian aria through a modern American register she could not have rendered it with less heart and soul than Miss Harris did.

Yesterday morning Betty telephoned me to come and lunch with her. Betty’s summons are not casual outbreaks of hospitality. There is always an underlying purpose in them, what a man I know who writes plays would call “a basic idea”. She is one of the few people who never troubles about meaningless formalities or superfluous small talk. It’s her way, and then she hasn’t time. That’s not just a phrase but a fact. Every hour of her day has its work, good work, well done. Only the poor know Betty’s private charities, only her friends the number of her businesslike benefactions.

Walking briskly down the avenue I wondered what was her basic idea this time. Sometimes it’s clothes: “There are some dresses on the bed. Look them over and take what you like. The gray’s rather good, but I think the pink would be more becoming. I can have it done over for you by my woman.” Sometimes it’s a reinvestment of part of my little capital suggested by Harry, a high interest and very safe. Once it was an attempt to marry me off. That was last autumn when I had just got back from Europe, to a man with mines from Idaho. When I grew tearful and reluctant she gave it up and shifted him--for he was too valuable to lose--to a poor relation of Harry’s.

We were at lunch when the basic idea began to rise to the surface, Betty at the head of the table, very tight and upright in purple cloth and chiffon, and little Constance, her eldest born, opposite me. Little Constance is an adorable child with a face like a flower and the manner of a timid mouse. She loves clothes and when I come leans against me looking me over and gently fingering my jewelry. She won’t speak until she has examined it to her satisfaction. At the table her steadfast gaze was diverted from me to a dish of glazed cherries just in front of her.

The entrée was being passed when Betty, helping herself, said:

“Harry’s just met a man from Georgia who is in cotton--not done up in it, his business.” She looked into the dish then accusingly up at the butler: “I said fried, not boiled, and I didn’t want cream sauce.”

The butler muttered explanations.

“Tell her it mustn’t happen again, no more cream sauce for lunch.” She helped herself, murmuring, “Really the most fattening thing one can eat.”

“Why do you eat it?” said little Constance, withdrawing her eyes from the cherries.

“Because I like to. Keep quiet, Constance. Mr. Albertson, that’s his name, is well-off, perfectly presentable and a widower.”

So it was matrimonial again.

“That’s very nice,” I replied meekly.

“We’ll have him to dinner some night next week and you to meet him.”

“Why do you ask me? He’d surely rather have some one younger and prettier.”

“It doesn’t matter what he’d rather have. I’ll telephone you when the day’s fixed.”

“Betty,” I murmured, looking at her pleadingly.

“Evie,” she returned firmly, “don’t be silly. The present situation’s got to come to an end some time.”

“It’ll never end.”

“Rubbish. There’s no sense in you scraping along this way in two rooms--”

“Remember the kitchenette.”

“In two rooms,” she went on, ignoring the kitchenette. “Of course I don’t want you to live in Georgia, but--”

Little Constance showed a dismayed face.

“Is Evie going to live in Georgia?”

Betty turned a stern glance on her.

“Constance, you’ll lunch up-stairs if you keep on interrupting.”

Constance was unaffected by the threat.

“When is she going?” she asked.

“Never,” I answered.

“I’m glad,” said little Constance, and seeing her mother’s glance averted, stole a cherry from the dish and hid it in her lap.

“From what Harry says, and he’s heard all about Mr. Albertson, he seems a perfectly fitting person, forty-five, of very good family and connections, and with an income of thirty thousand a year.”

“He’ll probably not like me,” I said hopefully.

“Oh, he will,” answered Betty with grim meaning, “I’ll see to that.”

I could hear her retailing my perfections to Mr. Albertson and my heart sank. Masterful, managing people crush me. If the man from Georgia liked me, as the man from Idaho did, I foresaw a struggle and I seem to have exhausted all my combative force in the year before my husband died. I looked at little Constance and caught her in the act of popping the cherry into her mouth. It was large and she had to force it into her cheek and keep it there like a squirrel with a nut. An expression of alarm was in her face, there was evidently less room for it than she had expected.

Betty went ruthlessly on.

“Your present way of living is absurd--you, made for marriage.”

I saw little Constance’s eyes grow round with curiosity, but she did not dare to speak.

“Made for companionship. If you were a suffragette or a writer, or trimmed hats or ran a tea-room, it would be different, but you’re a thoroughly domestic woman and ought to have a home.”

Little Constance bit the cherry with a sharp crunching sound. Betty looked at her.

“Constance, are you eating your lunch?”

Little Constance lifted her bib, held it to her mouth, and nodded over it.

The danger was averted. Betty turned to me.

“Marriage is the only life for a normal woman. Judkins, I’ll have some more of those sweetbreads.”

She helped herself, and under the rattle of the spoon and fork, little Constance crunched again, very carefully.

“And what is the good of living in the past. That’s over, thank heaven.”

“I’m not living in the past any more. Betty, I’m--I’m--raising my head.”

Betty looked sharply up from the sweetbreads, and I flinched under her glance. She cast an eye on Judkins, who was receding into the pantry, waited till he was gone, then said, in an eager hushed voice:

“Evie, don’t tell me there’s some one?”

Never have I been more discomfited by the directness of my Betty. I felt myself growing red to my new rat and was painfully aware that little Constance, now crunching rapidly, had fixed upon me the deadly stare of an interested child.

“Of course there isn’t. What nonsense. But time has passed and one doesn’t stay broken-hearted forever. I’m not _old_ exactly, and I’m--that is--it’s just as I said, I’m beginning to come alive again.”

“Oh!” Betty breathed out and leaned against her chair-back, with a slight creaking of tight drawn fabrics. But she kept her eye on me, in a sidelong glance, that contained an element of inspecting inquiry. Little Constance swallowed the cherry at a gulp and the question it had bottled up burst out:

“Evie, are you going to get married?”

“No,” I almost shouted.

Little Constance said no more, but her gaze remained glued to my face in an absorption so intense that she leaned forward, pressing her chest against the edge of the table. Betty played with her knife and fork with an air of deep thought. Judkins reentered to my relief.

He was passing the next dish when little Constance broke the silence.

“Evie, why did you get all red just now?”

“Constance,” said her mother, “if you’re a good girl and stop talking you can have a cherry when lunch is over.”

“Thanks, mama,” said little Constance, in her most mouse-like manner.

After lunch we drove about in the auto and shopped, and as the afternoon began to darken Betty haled me to a reception.

“Madge Knowlton’s daughter’s coming out,” she said. “And as you used to know her before you went to Europe, it’s your duty to come.”

“Why is it my duty? I was never an intimate of hers.”

I’m shy about going to parties now; I feel like Rip Van Winkle when he comes back.

“To swell the crowd. It’s a social service you owe to a fellow woman in distress.”

We entered the house through a canvassed tunnel and inserted ourselves into a room packed with women and reverberating with a clamor of voices. We had a word and a hurried handclasp with Madge Knowlton and her daughter, and then were caught in a surging mass of humanity and carried into a room beyond. The jam was even closer here. I dodged a long hatpin, and was borne back against a mantelpiece banked with flowers whose delicate dying breath mingled with the scents of food and French perfumery. When the mass broke apart I had momentary glimpses of a glittering table with a woman at either end who was pouring liquid into cups.

At intervals the crowd, governed by some unknown law, was seized by migratory impulses. Segments of it separated from the rest, and drove toward the door. Here they met other entering segments with a resultant congestion. When thus solidified the only humans who seemed to have the key of breaking us loose were waiters. They found their way along the line of least resistance, making tortuous passages like the cracks in an ice pack.

From them we snatched food. I had a glass of punch, a cup of coffee, a chocolate cake, two marrons and a plate of lobster Neuberg, in the order named. I haven’t the slightest idea why I ate them--suggestion I suppose. All the other women were similarly endangering their lives, and the one possible explanation is that we communicated to one another the same suicidal impulse. It was like the early Christians going to the lions, the bold ones swept the weaker along by the contagion of example.

I met several old acquaintances who cried as if in rapturous delight.

“Why, Evelyn Drake, is this really you?”

“Evie--I can’t believe my eyes! I thought you had gone to Europe and died there.”

“How delightful to see you again. Living out of town, I suppose. We must arrange a meeting when I get time.”

And so forth and so on.

It made me feel like a resurrected ghost who had come to revisit the glimpses of the moon. My old place was not vacant, it was filled up and the grass was growing over it. I was glad when one of those blind stampeding impulses seized the crowd and carried me near enough to Betty to cry, as I was borne along, “I’m going home and I’d rather walk,” and was swept like a chip on a stream to the door.

It was raining, a thin icy drizzle. Beyond the thronging line of limousines, the streets were dark with patches of gilding where the lamplight struck along the wet asphalt. They looked like streets in dreams, mysteriously black gullies down which hurried mysteriously black figures. I walked toward Lexington Avenue, drooping and depressed, in accord with the chill night and the small sad noises of the rain. I was in that mood when you walk slowly, knowing your best dress is getting damp and feeling the moisture through your best shoes and neither matters. Nothing matters.

Once I used to enjoy teas, found entertainment in those brief shouted conversations, those perilous feasts. Perhaps I was sad because I was so out of it all. And what was I in--what took its place? I was going back to emptiness and silence. To greet me would be a voiceless darkness, my evening companion a book.

I got on a car full of damp passengers. As if beaten down by the relentless glare of the electric lights, all the faces drooped forward, hollows under the eyes, lines round the mouths. They sat in listless poses, exhaling the smell of wet woolen and rubber and I sat among them, also exhaling damp smells--also with hollows under my eyes and lines round my mouth. That, too, didn’t matter. What difference if I was hollowed and lined when there was no one to care?

My room was unlighted and cold. I lighted the gas and stood with uplifted hand surveying it. It was like a hollow shell, an empty echoing shell, that waited for a living presence to brighten it. Just then it seemed to me as if I never could do this--its loneliness would be as poignant and pervasive when I was there, would steal upon me from the corners, surround and overwhelm me like a rising sea. My little possessions, my treasures, that were wont to welcome me, had lost their friendly air. I suddenly saw them as they really were, inanimate things grasped and held close because associated with the memory of a home. In the stillness the rain drummed on the tin roof and the line in a forgotten poem rose to my mind, “In the dead unhappy night and when the rain is on the roof.”

I snatched a match and hurried to the fire. Thrusting the flame between the bars of the grate, I said to myself:

“I must get some kind of a pet--a dog or a Persian cat. I’ve not enough money to adopt a child.”

The fire sputtered and I crouched before it. I didn’t want any supper, I didn’t want to move. I think a long time passed, several hours, during which I heard the clock ticking on the mantel over my head, and the rain drumming on the roof. Now and then the rumbling passage of a car swept across the distance.

I have often sat this way and my thoughts have always gone back to the past like homing pigeons to the place where they once had a nest. To-night they went forward. My married life seemed a great way off, and the Evelyn Drake in it looked on by the Evelyn Drake by the fire, a stranger long left behind. The memories of it had lost their sting, even the pang of disillusion was only a remembrance. With my eyes on the leaping flames I looked over the years that stretched away in front, diminishing to a point like a railway track. My grandmother had lived to eighty-two and I was supposed to be like her. Would I, at eighty-two, be still a pair of ears for young men’s love stories and young women’s dreams of conquest?

Oh, those years, that file of marching years, coming so slowly and so inevitably, and empty, all empty!

The rain drummed on the roof, the clock ticked and the smell of my best skirt singeing, came delicately to my nostrils. Even _that_ didn’t matter. From thirty-three to eighty-two--forty-nine years of it. I looked down at my feet, side by side, smoking on the fender. Wasn’t it Oliver Wendell Holmes, when asked to define happiness, answered, “four feet on the fender”?

There was a knock on the door, probably the count to continue the recital of his love’s young dream. My “Come in” was not warm.

The door opened and Roger entered in a long wet raincoat.

I jumped up crying “Roger,” and ran to him with my hand out.

He took it and held it, and for a moment we stood looking at each other quite still and not speaking. I was too glad to say anything, too glad to think. It was an astonishing gladness, a sort of reaction I suppose. It welled through me like a warm current, must have shone in my face, and spoken from my eyes. I’ve not often in my life been completely outside myself, broken free of my consciousness and soared, but I was then just for one minute, while I looked into Roger’s face, and felt his hand round mine.

“You’re glad to see me, Evie,” he said and his voice sounded as if he had a cold.

That broke the spell. I came back to my eighteen-foot parlor, but it was so different, cozy and pretty and intimate, full of the things I care for and that are friends to me. The rain on the roof had lost its forlornness, or perhaps, by its forlornness accentuated the comfort and cheer of my little room.

We sat by the fire. Roger’s feet were wet and he put them upon the fender.

“Now, if you’d been plodding about in the rain with me you’d put yours up, too. Hullo, what have I said? Your face is as red as a peony.”

“It’s the fire. I’ve been sitting over it for a long time,” I stammered.

Just then the register became vocal, with the habanera from _Carmen_.

Roger got up and shut it.

“Don’t you want to hear her sing?” I asked.

“No, I want to hear you talk,” said he.

VII

MISS HARRIS is going to appear in a concert. She came glowing and beaming into my room to tell me. Vignorol, her teacher, had arranged it--with a violinist and a baritone--in Brooklyn.

“Why not New York?” I asked.

“Not _yet_,” said Miss Harris, moving about the room with a jubilant dancing step, “but after this is over--wait and see!”

Great things are expected to come of it. The public’s attention is to be caught, then another concert, maybe an engagement in one of the American opera companies--just for experience. It is to be the opening of a career which will carry her to the Metropolitan Opera House. The baritone is another of Vignorol’s pupils, Berwick, a New Englander--nothing much, just to fill up. The violinist is a Mrs. Stregazzi, who also fills up, and little Miss Gorringe accompanies. I was shown a pencil draft of the program with Liza Bonaventura written large at the top--“Yes, it’s to be Bonaventura; I had a superstition about it,” and the dress is to be white, or, with a sudden bright air:

“I might borrow your green satin--but of course I couldn’t. You’re too small.”

Since then the house has resounded with practising from the top floor. Heavy steps and light feminine rustlings have gone up and down the stairs. Once the strains of a violin came with a thin whine through the register as if some melancholy animal was imprisoned behind the grill. In the dusk of the lower hall I bumped into a young man with tousled hair and frogs on his coat, whom I have since met as Mr. Berwick.

The star is in a state of joyful excitement which has communicated itself to the rest of us. When in the evening she goes over her repertoire, the Westerners and Miss Bliss sit on the bottom steps of their stairs, Mr. Hamilton and the count on the banisters of theirs and I on the top step of mine. A Niagara of sound pours over us, billowing and rushing down through the well, buffeted between the close confining walls. When each piece is ended Miss Harris comes out on her landing, leans over the railing and calls down:

“How was that?”

Then our six faces are upturned and we express our approbation, according to our six different natures.

Our mutual hopes for her success have drawn us together and we have suddenly become very friendly. Mr. Hazard drops in upon me in a paint-stiffened linen blouse and Mr. Weatherby has confided to me the money to pay for his laundry. Mr. Hamilton has smoked a large black cigar in my dining-room, and Miss Bliss has come shivering with hunched shoulders and clasped red arms to “borrow a warm” (her own expression) at my fire.

In my excursions to the top floor I have met Mrs. Stregazzi and Miss Gorringe. Mrs. Stregazzi is a large blond lady with an ample figure and a confidential habit. On our first meeting she called me “dearie” and told me all about her divorce from Mr. Stregazzi, who, I gathered, was her inferior, both in station and the domestic virtues. In his profession--the stage--he was something called “a headliner”, and appeared to be involved mysteriously with trained animals. Since his divorce he has married another “headliner”. It’s like that story of the Frenchman in Philadelphia: “He _is_ a Biddle, she _was_ a Biddle, they are _both_ Biddles.” I must ask Lizzie Harris what it is. Miss Gorringe is a thin sallow girl with an intelligent face, and Mr. Berwick a bulky silent New Englander, in the early twenties, who bears a strong resemblance to the bust of Beethoven over Schirmer’s music store.

They are strange people, artless as children, and completely absorbed in themselves and their work. They appear to have no points of contact with any other world, and the real part of their world is the professional part. They don’t say much about their homes or their lives away from it.

A few days ago they took tea with me, and as they talked I had a series of glimpses, like quickly shifted magic lantern slides, of their life on trains, in hotels, behind the scenes and on the stage. It seemed to me a sort of nightmare of hurry and scramble, snatched meals, lost trunks, cold dressing-rooms. Maybe the excitement makes up for the rest. It must be exciting--at least that’s the impression I got as I sat behind the teacups listening.

Lizzie Harris seemed to find it enthralling, everything they said interested her. Mrs. Stregazzi told some anecdotes that I didn’t like--I don’t want to be a prig, but they really were _too_ sordid and scandalous--and our prima donna hung on the words of that fat made-up woman as if she spoke with the tongues of men and of angels. The more I know of her the less able I am to get at the core of her being, to place her definitely in my gallery of “women I have known.” I had finally decided that in spite of her tempests, her egotism and her weather-cock moods, there was something rare and noble in her, and here she was drinking in cheap gossip about a set of people she didn’t know, and who seem to be a mixture of artist, mountebank and badly brought-up child.

As I sat pouring the tea I felt again that curious aloofness in her. But before it was more a withdrawal of her spirit into herself, a retreating into an inner citadel and closing all the doors. This time it was the spirit reaching toward others and shutting me out, like a child who forgets its playmate when a circus passes by. She listened hungrily, now and then commenting or questioning with a longing, almost a homesick note. When they rose to go, with a scraping of chair-legs and a concerted clamor of farewells, she was reluctant to lose them, followed them to the hall and leaned over the banister watching their departing heads.

She made me feel an outsider, almost an intruder. I was willing to efface myself for the moment and stood by the table waiting for her to come back and reestablish me in her regard. She said nothing, however, but brushed by the door and went up-stairs. In a few minutes Musetta’s song filled the house. The next morning she came in while I was at breakfast and asked me to lend my green satin dress to Miss Gorringe, and when I agreed kissed me with glowing affection.

That all happened early in the week. Yesterday afternoon I was witness to a scene, the effect of which is with me still, at midnight, scratching this down in my rose-wreathed back room. It was a hateful scene, a horrible scene--but let me describe it:

Calls of my name descending from the top floor in Miss Harris’ voice, took me out to my door.

“I am going over some of my things,” the voice cried. “Come up and listen.” Then, as I ascended, “It’s the scene between Brunhilda and Siegmund in _Die Walkuere_, the _piéce de résistance_ of the evening.”

I didn’t find Miss Gorringe as I expected, but Mr. Masters, sitting on the piano stool and looking glum. He rose, nodded to me, and sinking back on the stool, laid his hands on the keys and broke into a desultory playing. With all my ignorance I have heard enough to know that he played uncommonly well.

The future Signorita Bonaventura was looking her best, a slight color in her cheeks, confidence shining in her eyes.

“We’ve been trying it over. Did you hear?”

The weather had been warm, the register closed, so I had only heard faintly.

“Well, it’s going to be something great,” said the prima donna.

“Is it?” said Mr. Masters with his back to us.

The sneering quality was strong in his tone and I began to wish I hadn’t come.

“Go across the room, Mrs. Drake,” he said curtly. “Sit where you can see her.”

I obeyed, sitting in the corner by the window. She faced me and Mr. Masters was in profile.

My friends tell me I am completely devoid of the musical sense. It must be true, for I can not sit through _Meistersinger_, and there are long reaches of _Tristan and Isolde_ that get on my nerves like a toothache. But I _have_ some kind of appreciation, do derive an intense pleasure from certain scenes in certain operas. It was one of these scenes they were now giving, that one in the second act of _Die Walkuere_ when Brunhilda appears before Siegmund.

It has always seemed to me that the drama rose above the music, overpowered it. I supposed this to be the fancy of my own ignorance and never had the courage to say it. But the other day I read somewhere the opinion of Dujardin, the French critic, and he expressed just what I mean--“It is not the music, no, it is not the music, that counts in the scene, but the words. The music is beautiful--of course it is, it couldn’t be otherwise--but Wagner was aware of the beauty of the poetry and allowed it to transpire.”

That is exactly what I should have said if I had dared.

Masters struck the opening notes and she began to sing.

“Siegmund sieh’ auf mich! Ich bin’s der bald du folgst--
Siegmund, look on me. I come to call thee hence.”

What a greeting!

A stir of irritation passed through me. She looked at Masters with a friendly air and sang the lines with an absence of understanding and emotion that would have robbed them of all meaning if anything could. I wanted to shake her.

Then I forgot--Masters began.

If I was surprised at his playing his singing amazed me. He had almost no voice, but he had all the rest--the wonderful thing, imagination, the response to beauty, power of representing a state of mind. I don’t explain well, I am out of my province, perhaps it’s better if I simply say he became Siegmund.

As he played he turned and looked at her. His whole face had changed, transformed by the shadow of tragedy. To him Lizzie was no longer Lizzie, she was the helmed and armored daughter of Wotan delivering his death summons. I can pay no higher tribute to him than to say I forgot him, the burlap walls, the thin tones of the piano and saw a vision of despairing demigods.

“Wer bist du, sag’
Die so schön und ernst mir erscheint?”

Then Lizzie:--

“Nur Todgeweihten
Taugt mein Anblick:
Wer mich erschaut,
Der scheidet vom Lebenslicht.”

My vision was dispelled. No one could have kept it listening to her and watching her. As they went on what he created she destroyed; it was the most one-sided, maddening performance. I found myself eager to have her stop that I might hear him. Before they had reached the end I knew that Mr. Masters was an artist and she was not. That is all there was to it.

She turned to me, proudly smiling, with a questioning “Well”.

Mr. Masters, his head drooped, heaved a sigh.

I could not be untruthful. I had been too deeply moved.

“Your voice is very fine,” I said in the flattest of voices and looked at her beseechingly.

She met my eyes steadily and her smile died away.

“Only a voice,” she said.

“Miss Harris,” I cried imploringly. “You are young, you have beauty--” She cut short my bromides with an angry exclamation.

“And no more temperament than a tomato can,” Mr. Masters finished for me.

He ran his fingers over the keyboard in a glittering flow of notes.

“You’re a liar,” she cried, turning furiously on him.

Now, for the first time, I saw her really angry, not childishly petulant as in her orange-throwing mood, but shaken to her depth with rage. She was rather terrible, glaring at Masters with a grim face.

“Am I?” he said, coolly striking a chord. “We’ll see Tuesday night in Brooklyn.”

I had expected him to answer her in kind, but he only seemed weary and dispirited. Her chest rose with a deep breath and I saw to my alarm that she had grown paler.

“You didn’t always think that,” she said in a muffled voice.

“No,” he answered quietly, “I believed in you at first.”

He spread his hands in a long clutching movement and struck another chord. It fell deep into the momentary silence as if his powerful fingers were driving it down like a clencher on his words.

“And you don’t any more?”

“No, I’ve about done believing,” he responded.

She ran at him and seized him by the shoulder. He jerked it roughly out of her grasp and twirling round on the stool faced her, exasperated, defiant, a man at the end of his patience. But his eyes said more, full of a steely dislike. She met them and panted:

“You can’t, you don’t. Even you couldn’t be so mean--” then she stopped, it seemed to me as if for the first time conscious of the hostility of his gaze. There was the pause of the realizing moment and when she burst out her voice was strangled with passion:

“Go--get out--go away from me. I’m sick of it all. I’ll stand no more--go--go.”

She ran to the door and threw it open. I got up to make my escape. Neither of them appeared to remember I was there.

“All right,” he said, calmly rising. “That suits me perfectly.”

He picked up his hat and coat and moved to the door. I tried to get there before him, dodging about behind their backs for an exit, then, like a frightened chicken, made a nervous dive and got between them. Her hand on my arm flung me back as if I had been a chair in the way. I had a glimpse of her full face, white and with burning eyes. She frightened me.

Mr. Masters walked into the hall and there came to a standstill. After looking at the back and front of his hat he settled it comfortably on his head and moved toward the stairs.

Suddenly she rushed after him and caught him by the arm.

“No--no--” she cried. “Don’t go.”

I couldn’t see her face, but his was in plain view and it looked exceedingly bored.

“What is it now?” he said.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I’m so discouraged--you take the heart out of me. I don’t know what I’m saying and I’ve tried so hard--oh, Jack--”

Her voice broke, her head sank. Mr. Master’s expression of boredom deepened into one of endurance.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked with weary patience.

“Come back. Don’t be angry. Forget what I said.”

She began to cry, shielding her face with one hand, the other still holding him by the sleeve.

He sighed, and glancing up, saw me. I expected him to drive me forth with one fierce look. Instead he made a slight grimace and reentered the room, she holding to his sleeve. He dropped heavily on the piano stool and she on the chair opposite, her hands in her lap, two lines of tears on her cheeks. Neither said a word.

The way was clear and I flew out with the wild rush of a bird escaping from a snare. As I ran down the stairs the silence of that room, four walls enclosing a tumult of warring passions, followed me.

It’s midnight and I haven’t got over the ugliness of it. What am I to think? The thing many people would think, I won’t believe, I can’t believe. No one who knew her could. That the unfortunate creature loves him is past a doubt--but how can she? How can she humiliate herself so? Where is the pride that the rest of us have for a shield and buckler. Where is the self-respect? To cry--to let him see her cry, and then--that’s the _comble_, as the Paris art students say--to call him back!

I feel sick, for I love her. If she hasn’t got a soul or temperament or any of the rest of it that they do so much talking about, she’s got something tucked away somewhere that’s good, that’s true. It looks at you out of her eyes, it speaks to you in her voice--and then Masters comes along and it’s gone.

I stopped here, and biting the end of my pen, looked gloomily at the wall and met the cold stare of my ancestors. I wonder what the men would have said if they had been there this afternoon. I’m not sure--men are men and Lizzie is beautiful. But about you ladies, I can make a guess. You would purse your mouths a little tighter and say, “Evelyn, you’re keeping queer company. Whatever you may think in your heart, drop her. That’s the wise course.” All but the French Huguenot lady, she’s got an understanding eye. She feels something that the others never felt, probably saw a little deeper into life and it softened the central spot.

No, my dears, you’re all wrong. You’re judging by appearances and fixed standards, which is something your descendant refuses to do. Go to sleep and try and wake up more humble and humane. Good night.

VIII

BETTY had the dinner for Mr. Albertson last night and of course I went, for Betty is like royalty, she doesn’t invite, she commands. In a brief telephone message she instructed me to wear my blue crêpe and I wore it. Before dinner, in her room, she eyed me critically and put a blue aigrette in my hair.

Mr. Albertson was a gallant Southerner with courtly manners and a large bald spot. We got on very nicely, though he did not exhibit that appreciation of my charms that marked the Idaho man from the moment of our meeting. If, however, he should develop it I have resolved to crush it by strategy. I don’t know just how yet--the only thing I can think of at present is to ask him to call and pretend I’m drunk like David Garrick. I’ll get a better idea if the necessity arises. I haven’t the courage to defy Betty twice.

Betty sent me home in the limousine, without the footman and the chow dog. It was a cold still night, the kind when the sky is a deep Prussian blue and all the lights have a fixed steady shine. As the car wheeled into Fifth Avenue and I sat looking out of the window, revolving schemes for the disenchanting of Mr. Albertson, I saw Roger walking by. Before I thought I had beckoned to him and struck on the front window for the chauffeur to stop. The car glided to the curb and Roger’s long black figure came running across the street.

“You!” he cried, “like a fairy princess with a feather in your hair. What ball are you coming from, Cinderella?”

As soon as he spoke I grew shy. Do the women who have ready tongues and the courage of their moods, realize the value of their gifts?

“I--I--it’s not a ball, it’s Betty Ferguson’s and she’s sending me home.”

“All right.” He said something to the chauffeur, stepped in and the car started. “What a piece of luck. I was coming from a deadly dinner and going to a deadly club. What inspired you to hail me?”

Nothing did, or something did that I couldn’t explain. I felt round for an answer and produced the first that came.

“I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“Go ahead.” He pulled the rug over me. “It’s a nipping cold night abroad. Let’s hear what it was you wanted to talk about.”

For a moment I thought of telling him of Lizzie Harris and Mr. Masters, then I knew that wouldn’t do. Lizzie’s secrets were my secrets. I had to tell him something and in my embarrassment I told him the first thing that came into my head.

“Betty asked me to dinner to meet a man from Georgia.”

As soon as I had said it I had a sick feeling that he might be wondering why I should stop him on Fifth Avenue at eleven o’clock of a winter’s night, to impart this piece of intelligence.

He received it with the dignity of a valuable communication.

“Did she? And what was he like?”

“Very charming. His name’s Albertson and he has cotton mills down there.”

“Must be a man of means.”

“I believe he is.”

It was very nice of Roger to take it so simply and naturally, but you can always rely on his manners. My embarrassment passed away. The auto sped out into the concentrated sparklings of Plaza Square, then swerved to the left, sweeping round the statue of Sherman led to victory by a long-limbed and resolute angel.

“We’re going the wrong way. What’s Nelson doing?” I raised a hand to rap on the window.

“I told him to take us through the park. Put your hand in your muff. Why did Betty ask you to meet Mr. What’s-his-name from Georgia?”

I know every tone of Roger’s voice, and the one he used to ask that question was chilly. Betty’s plans involved no secrecy, so I said, laughing:

“I think she’s trying to make a match.”

“Oh,” said Roger.

I had thought he would laugh with me, but in that brief monosyllable there was no amusement. It came with a falling note, and it seemed to be a sort of extinguisher on the conversation, a full stop at the end of it, for we both fell silent.

The auto swept up the drive, gray and smooth between gray trees. I could see a reach of deep blue sky with the stars looking big and close, as if they had come down a few billion miles and were looking us over with an impartial curiosity. Across the park the fronts of apartment-houses showed in gleaming tiers, far up into the night, their lights yellower than the stars. It was lovely to glide on, swiftly and smoothly, with the frost gripping the world in an icy clasp while we were warm and snug and so friendly that we could be silent.

“Isn’t this beautiful, Roger?” I said, looking out of the window. “Look on the other side of the park, hundreds of lights in hundreds of homes.”

Roger gave a sound that if I were a writer of realistic tendencies, I should call a grunt.

We met a hansom with the glass down, and on an ascending curve another auto swooping by with two great glaring lamps. I felt quite oddly happy; the menacing figure of Mr. Albertson became no more than a bogy. After all even Betty couldn’t drag me struggling to the altar.

“Why is Betty so anxious to marry you off?” came suddenly from the corner beside me.

Mr. Albertson assumed his original shape as a marriageable male with a bald spot and a cotton mill, and Betty slipped back into position. I wasn’t sure she couldn’t drag any one to the altar if she made up her mind to it. My voice showed the oppression of this thought.

“She thinks all women should be married.”

“You have been married.”

Something was the matter with Roger to say that.

“Well, she thinks I’m poor and lonely.”

“Are you?”

I began to have an uncomfortable, complicated feeling. Fear was in it, also exhilaration. It made me sit up stiffly, suddenly conscious of a sensation of trembling somewhere inside.

“I am poor,” I said, “that is, poor compared to people like Betty.”

“And lonely, too?”

The disturbance grew. It made me draw away from Roger, pressed close into my corner, as if no scrap or edge of my clothing must touch him. I was afraid that my voice would show it and determined that it mustn’t.

“I’m lonely sometimes. That rainy night when you came in unexpectedly I was.”

My voice _wasn’t_ all right. I cleared my throat and pretended to look at the stars.

Roger said nothing, but the secret subways of emotion that connect the spirits of those who are in close communion, told me he, too, was moved. The air in the closed scented car did not seem enough for natural breathing. It was like a pressure, something that put your heart-beats out of tune, and made your lips open with a noiseless gasp. I stood it as long as I could and then words burst out of me. They came anyway, ridiculous words when I write them down:

“But I’ll never marry any of them. No matter what they are, or what Betty wants, or how many of them she has up to dinner.”

The pressure was lifted and I sank back trembling. It was as if I had been under water and come up again into the air. The spiritual telegraph told me that Roger felt as I did, and that suddenly he or I or both of us, had broken down a barrier. It was swept away and we were close together--closer than the night when we had held hands and forgotten where we were, closer than we’d ever been in all the years we’d known each other. It was not necessary to say anything. In our several corners we sat silent, understanding for the first time, I and the man I loved.

The sharp landscape slid by us, naked trees, spotted lines of light, stretches of lawn grizzled with frost, woodland depths with the shine of ice about the tree roots, and then the flash of glassy ponds.

We sat as still as if we were dead, as if our souls had come out of our bodies and were whispering. It was a wonderful moment of time, one of the unforgetable moments that dot the long material years. All that’s gone before and all that’s going to come dies away and there’s only the present--the beautiful exquisite present. We only have a few like that in our lives.

It lasted till the auto drew up at my door. We said good night and parted.

Up in my room I sat a long time by the fire thinking of the hundreds of women like myself, the disillusioned ones, in the dark dens of tenements and in the splendid homes near by. I tried to send them messages through the night, telling them we could rise out of the depths. I saw life as it really is, hills and valleys, patches of blackness and then light, but always with an unresting force flowing beneath, the immortal thing that urges and upholds and makes it all possible. I remembered words I used to work on bits of perforated board when I was a little girl, “God is Love.” I never understood what it meant, even when I stopped working it on perforated board and grew to the reasoning stage. To-night I knew--got at last what a happy child might understand--love in the heart was God with us, come back to us again.

IX

YESTERDAY was the concert day and I couldn’t go--a bad cold. The house lamented from all its floors, for it was going en masse, even the trained nurse with a usurped right to the sun-dial.

The only way I could add to the festivity of the occasion was to distribute my possessions among that section of the audience drawn from Mrs. Bushey’s light housekeeping apartments. It began with the Signorita Bonaventura, who wore my mother’s diamond pendant, then went down the line:-- Miss Gorringe my green satin (she said it would be horribly unbecoming, but the audience wouldn’t notice her), Miss Bliss my black lynx furs, Mrs. Phillips, the nurse, my evening cloak, Mr. Hazard my opera glasses, Mr. Weatherby my umbrella--his had a broken rib and it looked like snow. We were afraid the count couldn’t find anything suitable to his age and sex, but he emptied my bottle of Coty’s Jacqueminot on his handkerchief and left, scented like a florist’s. Mrs. Bushey came last and gleaned the field, a gold bracelet, a marabou stole and a lace handkerchief she swore she wouldn’t use.

Much noise accompanied the passage of the day and some threatening mishaps. At eleven we heard Berwick was hoarse, but at one (by telephone through my room) that raw eggs and massage were restoring him. At midday Miss Gorringe sent a frantic message that the sash of the green satin wasn’t in the box. Gloom settled at two with a bulletin that Mrs. Stregazzi’s second child had croup. It was better at five. Mr. Hazard’s dress suit smelled so of moth balls that the prima donna said it would taint the air, and Emma, the maid, hung it out on the sacred sun-dial. There was a battle over this. For fifteen minutes it raged up two flights of stairs, then Mr. Hazard conquered and the sun-dial was draped in black broadcloth.

At intervals Lizzie came down to see me and use the telephone. She was in her most aloof mood, forbidding, self-absorbed. On one of her appearances she found a group of us congregated about my steam kettle. Our chatter died away before her rapt and unresponsive eye. Even I, who was used to it, felt myself fading like a photographic proof in a too brilliant sun. As for the others they looked small and frightened, like mice in the presence of a well-fed lioness, who, though she might not want to eat them, was still a lioness. They breathed deep and unlimbered when the door shut on her.

In the late afternoon Roger came to see me. He brought a bunch of violets and a breath of winter into my bright little room. The threatening snow had begun to fall, lodging delicately on eaves and ledges, a scurry of tiny particles against the light of street-lamps. We stood in the window and watched it, trimming the house-fronts with white, carpeting the steps, spreading a blanket ever so softly and deftly over the tin roof. How different to the rain, the insistent ruthless rain. The night when the rain fell came back to me. How different that was from to-night!

There was a hubbub of voices from the hall and then a knock. They were coming to see me before they left. They entered, streaming in, grubs turned to butterflies. The house was going cheaply in cars over the bridge; only the prima donna and Miss Gorringe were to travel aristocratically in a cab.

Strong scents from the count’s Jacqueminot mingled with the faint odor of moth balls that Mr. Hazard’s dress suit still harbored. Miss Gorringe had rouged a little and the green satin was quite becoming. Miss Bliss had rouged a good deal and had had her hair marcelled. In the doorway the trained nurse hung back, sniffing contemptuously at Mr. Hazard’s back. Mrs. Bushey, Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Weatherby grouped themselves by the fireplace.

“Where’s the prima donna?” I asked.

“Coming,” cried a voice from the stairs, and the air was filled with silken rustlings.

It was like an entrance on the stage, up the passage and between the watching people, and I don’t think any actress could have done it with more aplomb. In her evening dress she was truly superb--a goddess of a woman with her black hair in lusterless coils and her neck and shoulders as white as curds. Upon that satiny bosom my mother’s pendant rose and fell to even breathings. Whatever anybody else may have felt, the star of the occasion was calm and confident.

Her appearance had so much of the theatrical that it must have made us suddenly see her as the professional, the legitimate object of glances and comments. Nothing else could explain why I--a person of restrained enthusiasms--should have broken into bald compliments. She took them with no more self-consciousness than a performing animal takes the gallery’s applause, smiled slightly, then looked at Roger, the stranger. I did so, too, childishly anxious to see if he admired my protégée. He evidently did, for he was staring with the rest of them, intent, astonished.

Her glance appeared to gather up his tribute as her hands might have gathered flowers thrown to her. He was one of the watching thousands that it was her business to enthrall, his face one of the countless faces that were to gaze up at her from tier upon tier of seats.

When the door shut on the last of them, laughter and good nights diminishing down the stairs, he turned to me with an air that was at once bewildered and accusing.

“Why in heaven’s name didn’t you tell me she was so good-looking?”

“I did and you wouldn’t believe me,” I answered gaily, for I was greatly pleased. It was a little triumph over Roger with his hypercritical taste and his rare approvals.

The next morning I waited anxiously for news. I thought Lizzie would be down early, but the others came before her, dropping in as the morning wore away. With each entrance I grew more uneasy.

Mr. Hazard was first, in a gray sweater.

“Well, she looked great. I wish I could have painted her that way. But--” he tilted his head, his expression grown dubious. “You know, Mrs. Drake, I don’t know one tune from another--but--”

“But what?” I said sharply.

“Well, it seemed to me Berwick got away with it.”

“Do you mean the audience liked him better?”

He nodded, a grave agreeing eye on me.

“He got them when he sang that thing about _The Three Grenadiers_. It made your heart swell up.”

He leaned nearer, lowering his voice. “And he got them in that German duet, too.”

He drew back and nodded again darkly, as if wishing me to catch a meaning too direful for words.

An hour later Miss Bliss blew in in a blue flannel jacket and the remnants of her marcelle wave. By contrast with her flushed and blooming appearance of the evening before, she looked pinched and pallid. She cowered over the fire, stretching her little chapped hands to the blaze and presenting a narrow humped back to my gaze.

“She didn’t seem to catch on some way or other. I don’t know why but--”

She stopped and leaned forward for the poker.

“But what?”

“Well--” She poked the fire, the edge of the flannel jacket hitched up by the movement, showing a section of corset laced with the golden string that confines candy boxes. “She doesn’t give you any thrill. I’ve heard people without half so much voice who could make the tears come into your eyes. I tell you what, Mrs. Drake,” she turned round with the poker uplifted in emphasis, “_I_ wouldn’t spend _my_ good money to hear a woman sing that way. If I shell out one-fifty I want to get a thrill.”

She was still there when the count came in. He sat between us gently rocking and eying her with a pensive stare. She pulled down her jacket and patted solicitously at the remains of her marcelle.

“She looked,” said the count, pausing in his rocking, “she looked like a queen.”

“Good gracious,” I cried crossly, “_do_ drop her looks. I saw her.”

The count, unmoved by my irritation, answered mildly:

“One can’t drop them so easily.”

“But her singing, her performance?”

“Her performance,” murmured the young man, and appeared to look through Miss Bliss at a distant prospect. “It was good, but--”

I had to restrain myself from screaming, “But what?”