Chapter XI

When Melissa admitted to the Marchesa that she had met one or two rather nice men at the party in Kenealy’s apartment, she confined herself meticulously to the truth. And although the Marchesa’s hunger for details was insatiable, yet at dinner (even in the midst of all those uniformed and tail-coated photographs, with autographed emotion striking the eye from every side, with the very cupids on the Dresden urn on the dinner-table, gesturing rosy indiscretion) Melissa held herself down to the simplest facts and said nothing at all of her own personal reactions ... which would, beyond doubt have interested the Marchesa immensely ... but Melissa felt she needn’t quite strip her soul, to appease that aged gourmande.

“There was a man who wrote plays,” said Melissa--“Not bad-looking. A little heavy....”

“Successful?” probed the Marchesa.

“They said so,” said Melissa. “He has a place at Mamaroneck and a house on Washington Square.”

“Then he must write those silly bedroom things,” the Marchesa decided--“or perhaps what my nephew calls small-town stuff. This country has no drama, in-between.”

Melissa forbore to break a lance for American playwrights. “There was a blond artist,” she continued dispassionately ... “and toward the end of the evening a man dropped in, from another party....”

“That,” interrupted the Marchesa taking a sizable mouthful of Broccoli Hollandaise and assuming immediately afterward an expression of beatific satisfaction--“that is usually the man who sees one home.”

“He did,” said Melissa, playing with her fork.

“Do you remember his name--by any chance?”

“Why shouldn’t I?--Murdock Fleming.”

“Thousand thunders!” cried the Marchesa, with a look of the liveliest horror.... “What does one call him--in tender moments?”

“I can’t tell you--yet,” said Melissa.

“Murdock!--it sounds like a granite tombstone.”

“He was rather nice. Big and clean-looking. A polo-player, I think ... and a stock-broker.”

“You’re as good as Bradstreet, my dear,” approved the Marchesa mockingly. “Do you see him again--?”

“Mr. Fleming?”

“Obviously! since he appears to have been the one eligible of your evening.”

Melissa smoothed an already exquisite eyebrow with the tip of an indolent finger. “He asked me to dine with him--some night this week.”

“You accepted?”

“For some night, _next_.”

“Ah--you have it in you!” sighed the Marchesa blissfully. “I knew it!”

“I told him I was fearfully crowded--over the week-end.”

“Exactly the phrase! And the excuse! How do you do it?”

Melissa explained gently--“There are one or two magazines one can find that sort of thing in.... I am reading them very carefully. And Milne is rather a help ... and Lonsdale. What they call drawing-room comedy, I think.”

“Of course,” said the Marchesa delightedly--“that’s not what it’s called in the drawing-room. But you couldn’t do better, for text books. Really--it’s amazing ... you seem to have such an instinct ... were your people--ah--well-born?”

The blood swept over Melissa’s face, and her head went up. She said, returning the Marchesa’s stare with a look of furious resentment:

“Yes. Were not yours?”

At which the Marchesa laughed herself very nearly into hysterics, choked over her thimbleful of black coffee, had to be patted upon the back by the grimly immobile Anna, and continued for half an hour after to snicker feebly.

“_Dear_ Lady Disdain!” said the Marchesa. “Or should one call you Frankensteina?”

Whatever one called her, Melissa’s life was now sufficiently released from dullness, sufficiently full of suave excitement, to satisfy even her exacting temperament. Her days in the sunny bedroom, in the other room with the deep fireplace and the lamps and the _dolce-far-niente_ couch, passed in a pageant of colorful ease. Daily she settled deeper into luxury, like an orchid rooting itself in the mossy bark of a tree. Daily it became more impossible to consider that she should ever give this up--not these especial walls, but the world they stood for. Daily she laid her plans and devised her silken stratagems for keeping her place in the sun.

Murdock Fleming was, as the Marchesa had suggested, obviously the chief eligible of Kenealy’s presenting, so quite coolly and without any sort of scruple Melissa went about attaching him.

He asked her to dine, and she put him off for days--then wore her loveliest frock, smiled her most languid and caressing smile--and he asked her to dine again. At the most exclusive place in town. With an anxious head-waiter in attendance. Flowers at Melissa’s plate. A Hispano-Suiza waiting.

It was significant of Melissa’s acutely sympathetic mentality, that in no time at all, she understood what a Hispano-Suiza stood for--was able to refer to its finer points, intelligently. She, who a month or so before had made her wildest flights on the top of a bus....

“I like a woman to know a good car when she sees it,” Murdock Fleming had mentioned.

So Melissa spent hours poring over motor advertisements. She pretended to be about to buy one and had eager young salesmen instruct her, whole weary afternoons, in the essentials of a machine.

It bored her--beyond description--but the result brought her quarry to her feet.

“I like a woman to be a good sport,” said Murdock Fleming.

He soon perceived Melissa to be one of the best. His flowers crowded Melissa’s bowls and jars. He kept her telephone humming. His clean, straight-featured, sunburned face beamed in her doorway at the most unexpected hours.

“You’ve got the lad going,” said Luke Kenealy pleasantly--“in exactly no time at all from the day you met him. Quick work, Lissa! My white plume is off to you! How did you do it? He’s had the pack at his heels for years. I thought he was a fox....”

“Aren’t you being rather--vulgar?” asked Melissa and shuddered slightly.

“If I am ...” said Kenealy without apology ... “let’s stick to the subject. I ask--_how_ do you do it? _Why_ do you do it? And what will you do with it, when you’ve got it? Because,” he added, taking out his cigarette-case, selecting one and lighting it with some care--“after all--you don’t really like him--now, do you?”

“I shouldn’t say that,” said Melissa.

“If you did, I’d have hope for you,” said Kenealy.

She smiled into his scowling eyes--“Luke--don’t you like me any more?”

At which he got up--they were sitting together on the couch after some play to which he had taken her, and mended the fire noisily.

“_Like_ you?--what’s that?” he demanded, slouching with his back to the resultant blaze in the time-honored masculine attitude. “I never liked a woman in my life--always either loved or loathed ’em. You pays your money and you takes your choice.”

“Is that an offer?” inquired Melissa in a hesitant murmur.

“Would it interest you if it were?”

“I--don’t--know.”

“Then it wouldn’t! I’m not to be haggled over. I may as well tell you frankly--Fleming could buy and sell me--before breakfast.”

“That’s brutal,” said Melissa rather low.

“Not unless the inference is true.”

“That I’m gold-digging?”

“That you’re out to marry money. Don’t look so maidenly. It’s been done before, Melissa of the White Hands!”

Melissa said nothing for a comparatively long time. She sat looking into the fire and Kenealy stood looking down at her. His eyes were too keen for her to meet. Her mouth was too sweet for him to scorn.

He offered presently: “Got any confessions to make?”

“No,” said Melissa slowly. Her face grew a little hard. “Why--Luke?”

“Nothing ... just wondered.”

“You don’t really know me very well--do you?”

“I couldn’t know you better in a million years. Been hearing about you, all my life.... ‘Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?...’”

“Don’t make fun of me!”

“I’m not!... Want to hear more?

“‘I met a lady in the meads,’ ...
(Central Park, you see?)
‘Full beautiful--a faëry’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild....’”

“Please, Luke!--I can’t bear to be laughed at.”

“I’m not laughing,” he told her--and it appeared, strangely enough, that he wasn’t. Presently he added, sheering off from deep waters--“I wouldn’t mind knowing what hold the aged playmate of my late uncle has over you? That bothers me--somewhat.”

“What makes you think....”

“My head makes me think, Melissa--and my heart makes me hurt. How about _you_? Isn’t that the way your wheels go round? Well ... it’s getting late ... and I’m working to-morrow....”

Melissa asked with a long glance from under lowered lashes---“Do you really work, Luke?”

He told her quizzically. “Save the Lorelei look for young men with waxed ears, Melissa--! Yes--I really do.”

“But I thought you said--that first day....”

“Ah--the ranching stayed in your mind! Well--I may ranch in my old age--not now, thank you!”

Melissa explained, stripping the petals from a rose she held and crushing them in the palm of one hand, sniffing them delicately and crushing them again.... “I mean--you don’t really _need_ to work ... unless you like.”

“Any one needs to work,” said Kenealy. The laugh left his voice and his eyes. He added grimly: “You women make me sick!”

Melissa looked at him dumbfounded. She had no words to answer the startling bitterness of his change of mood. He said after a moment, still rather sullenly: “Work’s the only thing that keeps your soul alive ... and it’s got to be work that you choose ... not that somebody else chooses for you.”

“Did they want you to stay on the ranch?” asked Melissa softly. She thought she understood, now.

“They did. They don’t see yet why I’m not satisfied to be out in the great open spaces--with my own blooded cattle around me. They can’t understand what I want of a city--while there’s a horse to ride or a trail to follow....”

“Who are _They_, Luke?”

Kenealy answered that sympathetic murmur slowly, his eyes on Melissa’s face: “They--is my wife.”

“Oh,--I see,” said Melissa. And she spoke slowly, in her turn, stifling a curious qualm of disappointment.

“Make any difference?” he asked her.

“What difference should it make?”

“None--with Fleming coming up. That’s why I hadn’t mentioned it before. My domestic--blunders are--of no particular interest to any one else.”

“Luke--is it just that she wants to be _there_--and you want to be _here_?”

“That’s all,” said Kenealy. “And we about to die assure you--it’s enough! We’ve been married six years. The Great Mistake became apparent in six months.... She’s an Island girl, you see--she was born with a passion for the place. I wasn’t. But she’s a Catholic--and I am a strict respecter of other men’s faiths ... so....”

“You mean there’ll never be a divorce?”

“Not unless she turns Mormon--which I think most unlikely. She runs the ranch herself, you see--gives her plenty to do. I keep the Pierian spring flowing in various critical periodicals ... and there you are! I go back from time to time ... à la Ulysses ... a mere formality. We’re both relieved when it’s over. But it pacifies the neighbors.”

“I didn’t guess,” said Melissa, throwing her rose-leaves into the fire--“that you were unhappy.”

“I’m not,” said Luke Kenealy, gathering up his hat and stick and putting out a hand for good-by--“but I could be ... if I had the time.”