Chapter I

The Marchesa was being read to, by Miss Wayne, to whom for this amiable and not always too enviable service the Marchesa made return of a certain stipend each month.

Thereby involving, since she was not one to fling good money to the winds without expecting its reappearance, buttered, so to speak, ... the Marchesa’s capricious attention.

She sat very straight in a winged chair richly covered with petit point, her delicate claw-like hands lay lightly folded on her silken lap, and her eyes ... the eyes of an old lady eagle, who has looked long and perhaps not too discreetly on the sun ... showed a slight grayish glaze. Which meant that the reading had lasted very nearly its appointed two hours and the attention of the Marchesa was teetering.

“‘Carlyle was surely no just and infallible judge,’” read Miss Wayne in the cool soft contralto which had decided her engagement.

“H’mph!” said the Marchesa.... “Who _is_? ... this side of heaven!” Miss Wayne continued without controversy. She too had an eye on the clock, and beside held no brief for the Baltimorean sage whose pronouncements she was delivering.

“‘... Macaulay was unfair, inaccurate, fanciful, lyrical--yet his essays live...!’”

“Macaulay, lyrical!... the creature’s a fool!” cried the Marchesa and swallowed a yawn which spread a thousand tiny wrinkles from her mouth to her parchment eyelids and back again. “If Macaulay was lyrical ... then Tennyson was a barrel-organ. Well--that’s not so unlikely either....” She chuckled like a parrot with a biscuit in its claw. “Where would you put Swinburne, Miss Wayne--among the saxophones?”

Miss Wayne smiled politely, which was expected of her, and murmured that she had read very little Swinburne, which the Marchesa virtuously approved.

“He’s strong meat,” said the Marchesa, wagging gray curls above a withered throat, perennially swathed in a black velvet band.... “Strong meat, Swinburne,--too strong for your type, Miss Wayne. Just as well let him be. Read--ah, Wordsworth--if you must!”

Miss Wayne continued doggedly, with a lift of dark eyebrows which dismissed Wordsworth in silence: “‘... What saved Carlyle, Macaulay and company is as plain as day. They were first-rate artists. They could make the thing charming, and that is always a million times more important than making it true.’”

“There!” cried the Marchesa and lifted a dramatic little old forefinger by way of ringing down the curtain on the afternoon’s performance. “Let us stop on that! That’s a very subtle statement, indeed. I like it. This--Mencken did you say his name was?...”

“H. L. Mencken,” murmured Miss Wayne.

“Never heard of him,” said the Marchesa, “until a nephew of mine left that book here one day.... Well--this Mencken really has an occasional idea. Make a thing charming--much more important than making it true.... His mother must have been a woman!”

“Pardon?” said Miss Wayne.

“You heard me correctly,” said the Marchesa, whose ability to startle and disturb members of her own sex was all that now remained to her of a delightful capacity for living--once, upon her own repeated inference, exercised to the full.

“Women are artists, in charm ... tyros, in truth. Dear me--that’s not bad! Récamier might have said that.”

Miss Wayne, from whom at this juncture a little tactful applause, at the very least a murmur of appreciation, might well have been expected, said nothing at all. She laid down “Prejudices--Third Series”--upon the somewhat cluttered little table which stood beside the Marchesa’s chair, picked up her gloves and her bag, brushed a bit of dust from her blue serge frock and prepared to depart.

The Marchesa watched her sharply.

“Are you tired, Miss Wayne?”

“A little,” said the girl, stiffly. “I hope my reading hasn’t shown it.”

“I had rather,” said the Marchesa, touching her fine thin nostrils airily with a wisp of yellowed valenciennes and lawn, “have you tired ... than bored.”

“Thank you,” said Miss Wayne. “In either case--I could give satisfaction.”

“Heavens!” cried the old lady on a note of keen amusement ... “the girl’s human! Who’d ’a’ thought it? Sit down, my dear--and tell me what ails you.... Have a cup of tea! Have a glass of sherry and a biscuit.... Oh, not your boot-legging stuff--my doctor prescribes it for me....”

“Thank you,” said Miss Wayne again. “I--really haven’t time. It’s very good of you....”

“Sit down!” said the Marchesa regally.

Miss Wayne sat down.

She was a slim, dark girl with rather somber eyes in a pale clear-featured face and she looked, in her straight simple blue frock not at all different from ten thousand other girls who crowd the subway of a morning, cling to its greasy leather straps of an evening. She looked--what she was--a competent business girl, neatly dressed, smoothly coiffed, closely hatted ... as neutral as a mail-order catalogue, as harmless as her own clacking typewriter--as controlled as an electric bulb ... and just about as warming.

“Well--well!” said the Marchesa and regarded her reluctant guest with interest overriding hospitality. “I’d begun to believe you were a Robot.... Isn’t that what they called ’em in that silly play a year or so ago? A machine--a piece of female mechanism. I didn’t suppose you ever got tired or took cold or flew into a temper. You’ve been coming here Saturday afternoons to read to me, over six months now.... This is the first time I’ve seen you display a touch of human frailty. Must be something very wrong, indeed.... Wouldn’t you like to tell me about it?”

For the end of a damp and grayish day, this was doing nicely. The Marchesa, who had expected nothing better than a doze in her chair before dinner and a lone hand at patience after it, sat a bit straighter and felt the air freshen.

“Come, my dear,” she coaxed, with a brightening eye and a gleam of small yellowed teeth--“Nothing a woman enjoys so much as--confession!”

“Her own--or some one’s else?” inquired Miss Wayne briefly.

“Her own--most of all,” said the Marchesa. “That’s young of you--that’s young--and gauche, Miss Wayne. However--I forgive you. I hadn’t supposed you were young--particularly. I am discovering all sorts of things ... silent upon a peak in.... I can never remember the exact location of that peak ... but we’ll let it pass. The point is--either I’ve been stupid or you’ve been very clever. Because where I was conscious of merely a well-inflected and unusually pleasant voice ... I suddenly perceive a submerged volcano!”

“Oh, please--” said Miss Wayne in some embarrassment.

“A volcano,” said the Marchesa firmly ... “and I am, in my simple way, no mean volcanologist. As one--and another--whom I have known--could have told you.” Observing that Miss Wayne slid forward a little upon her chair in preparation once more for leave-taking, the Marchesa abandoned reminiscence and added persuasively ... “Now, my dear--don’t be so ridiculously reticent ... of course, it’s a man!”

As woman to woman, she beamed and--faintly--simpered.

There were photographs, faded and some of them regrettably outspoken, all about the room in which the Marchesa sat.

“To Amalie ...” said the photographs, mostly, ... and added love--in varying degrees of duration. If certain of the pictured heroes were whiskered, some were quaintly collared and none were of a very recent vintage, the tribute of their penmanship yet remained. And the inference it wafted, of a Marchesa, young, pulchritudinous and irresistible.

“To Amalie....”

The Marchesa had been born Amelia, upon the banks of the Mississippi River at that--a fact of which the photographs naturally made no mention. She had married at the tender age of nineteen (and upon her father’s striking oil, as the then phrase went, in fortunate quantities) a comparatively impecunious Italian gentleman who had died during the honeymoon, appropriately enough, of Roman fever, before he could do more than aristocratize for life the gentle creature he left to mourn him. She had as a matter of fact mourned him adequately and with every attention to detail, a decent twelvemonth before she took up once more the quest of the pearl in the world-oyster ... and began the collection of those signed photographs which, gazing through the dusk of that stately firelit room, now waited upon Miss Wayne’s enamored admission.

Romance lived in that room--and lurked like a splinter of tarnished starlight in the Marchesa’s knowledgeable glance.

“A man--of course--” said the Marchesa with an ingratiating twinkle.... “What else could it be--at your age? Dear me--the ability to suffer once more--! What I wouldn’t give for it.”

When the girl neither answered nor questioned these pleasantly sympathetic ejaculations, the Marchesa continued in a slightly more practical vein.... “What is it? He’s too poor? There’s no romance in you children of to-day. You want your cake and a liqueur after it. Now when I was a jeune fille....”

Of course the Marchesa was congenitally a mondaine, and had never been a jeune fille at all, even in that straightforward and difficult phase between the going of the first teeth and the coming of the second ... between socks and stockings ... between bangs and brow as it were. Some intuitive understanding and resentment of this may have goaded Miss Wayne into speech.

She flung back her head and set her chin. Her dark eyes blazed and her lips trembled.

She said with a trace of huskiness in her controlled low voice: “It’s nothing to do with a man.... It’s my birthday!”

The Marchesa uttered something feeble and irrelevant about a thousand thunders. She usually swore in French because her husband had died before her acquaintance with Italian profanity was more than of the slightest.

“How old are you?” she inquired presently, regaining her poise and her curiosity.

“I am twenty-five to-day--” said Miss Wayne doggedly ... “and I wish it were either seven or seventy ... then I’d feel a little calmer. As it is--I’m rather low in my mind and I’ve been in a rotten temper since morning. Really, I think I must ask you to excuse me.... I’m not up to talking....”

For answer the Marchesa rang a little hand-bell that stood on the table at her elbow. When a middle-aged and grayly respectable woman in a black alpaca dress appeared in the doorway that led to the bedroom, the Marchesa commanded briefly--“Sherry and biscuits, Anna!”--then she turned back to the reluctant guest and bent upon her a smile which the serpent might have envied, the dove inspired.

“Now--” said the Marchesa, somewhere between a purr and a coo, settling her skirts and cuddling her beautiful withered hands closely together in her silken lap.... “Now we can talk! Go on, my dear.... You’d like to be either seven or seventy.... _Why_, in heaven’s name? This amuses me.... I haven’t been so amused in months!”