Chapter II

Anna brought sherry in a beautiful old decanter, through whose faceted roses and vine leaves, the clear brown wine glinted richly ... biscuits, she produced upon an almost translucent platter adorned with the Napoleonic N ... two slim glasses, obvious offspring of the decanter, and two lace-bordered, delicate napkins, yellowed with time....

“Why--” insisted the Marchesa, between avid, bird-like sips and fierce small crunchings ... “should any woman wish to be seventy? Why--for that matter, should any woman wish to be seven? Terrible ages ... both of them! Twenty-five, now ... you’ve got the world in your fingers!”

“If what I’ve got in my fingers is the world ...” said Miss Wayne, sullen and disdainful ... “I’d give it away for a penny with a hole in it.”

She drank her sherry and set the glass back on the table. “Thank you,” she said--“no more.” She also refused a second biscuit.

The Marchesa continued her bacchanalian feastings alone.

“You’ve got magnificent health,” she suggested calmly. “I can see that for myself. You’re not bad-looking ... though by using a little female cunning you could be better. You make a decent living--don’t you?”

“What would you call a decent living?” inquired Miss Wayne coldly. “Why--ah--” The Marchesa looked vaguely about her ... at the darkly gleaming piano in the farther corner, with a faded Spanish shawl thrown across it ... at the tea-table, loaded with heavy repoussé silver and fragile Dresden cups ... at the French prints, ornately framed, adorning the walls ... at the heart-shaped and circular cushions of Normandy lace crowding the brocaded chaise longue....

“Why--ah--that depends,” said the Marchesa.

Miss Wayne laughed--a chilly and scornful sound.

“The room I live in,” she explained with elaborate courtesy, “is about one-half as large as this. It has a bed, a table, a bureau, a clothes-closet and two chairs. It looks across a grimy brownstone street.... I’m lucky it doesn’t look into an air-shaft. It’s clean and entirely respectable. And if there were a gas-jet in it instead of an electric bulb--I’d go home to-night and shut all the doors and windows and turn it on.... Does that amuse you, too?”

“Perhaps amuse is scarcely the word--it interests me immensely,” said the Marchesa, helping herself to yet another biscuit and brushing a crumb from her bosom with great care. “Why ... if you don’t mind telling me more, dear Miss Wayne--why would you turn on the gas? Isn’t that--usually--fatal?”

“I should do it--in that hope,” said Miss Wayne.

“Dear--dear!” said the Marchesa, looking thoughtfully over the rim of her glass. “I suppose--you owe somebody--money?”

“I don’t owe a cent--to a soul.”

“Well--” said the Marchesa, wiping her lips and leaning back with a sigh of repletion--“So far as I can see--there’s nothing wrong, then.”

“That isn’t the point,” said Miss Wayne doggedly.... “The point is ... there’s nothing right!”

She flung out the words like a flag of defiance. She leaned forward in her chair and locked her hands together between her knees. In spite of her blue serge frock and her small black hat, her smooth brown hair and her neat brown oxfords she was all at once a flaming figure of rebellion--clear as a scarlet maple-branch against a pale autumnal sky.

“I’m twenty-five,” she said--“and there isn’t a thing in my life that I really want. I’ve worked like a galley-slave since the time I left school ... and I’m no nearer--happiness now--than I was then. That’s too much for any one to bear--quietly. My life’s stupid--and ugly--and dull. It’ll never be anything else. It’ll only get stupider and uglier and duller--as I get older. Twenty-five is a sort of half-way place. That’s why I see it all to-day--spread out--and it’s too much. It isn’t like a birthday--it’s like a door--closing. I hate ugliness.... It isn’t what I want ... and I’m being shut in with it--gradually.... No matter how much I struggle and quarrel and dream--I’m being shut in--with the things I don’t want. Away--from the things I’d give my soul for....”

“Ha!--” said the Marchesa with unexpected sharpness--“And what are those?--if I may ask.... Diamond bracelets and chinchilla coats? Little brown dogs and expensive French cars for them to ride in?”

“Beauty!” said the girl savagely. “I want beauty in my life--and for myself. I want the right background--to be--what I could be--against it. So that when some one comes--for whom I--could care ... who could give me my world ... he’ll be able to recognize me!”

“I said it was a man!” cried the Marchesa, and chuckled deeply.

“A man I’ve never seen, then,” said Miss Wayne. “A man I have no earthly hope of seeing ... while I live as I live, and where I live....”

“Of course,” the Marchesa told her calmly, settling the black velvet band about her throat with a preening turn of the head and a fastidious thrust of the fingers. “... Of course, the man one’s never seen is the perfect lover--you know that, my dear!”

Miss Wayne said clearly with no false modesty over the words: “I know nothing at all about lovers. I never had one.”

“With your eyes?” objected the Marchesa politely. She added with critical frankness: “Your eyes are unusually good. So is your hair. There’s too much control about your mouth, however. It wants a touch of--well, say, emotional uncertainty.”

“I’ve had a good deal more need for control than--whatever it is you mean,” said Miss Wayne and smiled faintly.

“Now there!” said the Marchesa with a touch of pleasurable excitement ... “--why don’t you do that oftener? You have a really delicious smile.”

“I know it,” said Miss Wayne.

“What?--You shameless creature!”

The slim, blue-serge shoulders lifted in a shrug.

“I know more about myself than you could ever tell me. I know what possibilities I’ve got--and what I could do with them. I could be--rather nice--in soft clinging frocks--with a good deal of fur and lace. I ought never to wear a small hat, because I could be exceedingly effective in a wide one. I have good hands--if I could keep them properly ... the typewriter ruins my nails. I have good ankles ... and very pretty feet ... thin stockings and narrow shoes with buckles would make them quite lovely. I am slender--but I’m not thin.” She finished with a strange and disarming candor--“I could be almost beautiful.”

“Eh, mon Dieu--I believe you could!” said the Marchesa. “Not that I ever heard a woman discuss herself so coldly before.”

“What difference does it make?” inquired Miss Wayne with immense weariness. “The sort of thing I always have worn and always shall wear is the sort of thing I am wearing right now. It hides the person I really am as completely as fog hides the sea. But I’ll never get out of it--I’ll die in it sooner or later.... There are ships that go down in the fog, you know. And I shan’t leave a trace ... because ... no man has ever known me.”

The Marchesa stared at her curiously. She said with a dry, small cackle ... “Your parents and guardians, I take it, don’t count.”

“Both my parents died,” said Miss Wayne without apparent regret--“when I was a child. I’ve been on my own for years. There’s no one--to whom I really matter. No one who knows anything about me, beyond the fact that I am a fairly good office woman and pay my bills regularly.”

“Do you go to church?” asked the Marchesa.

“Why should I?” said Miss Wayne. “It’s no good praying for the things I want. And I’m not sufficiently thankful for the things I’ve got.”

“You--ah--might meet people.”

“I’m not quite lonely enough to go with that in view.”

“Well, dear me--” said the Marchesa rather crossly, “I don’t see what you can do about it. It must be a dreadful sort of life.... I understand you absolutely. You feel that within your nice tidy respectable working-girl shell--there’s a--siren, asleep, as it were....”

“Something like that--if you will have it!” said Miss Wayne doggedly.

“H’m’m ... and you think if you could let her out ... as one may say ... she’d find the foot of the rainbow for you ... or at least the pot of gold.”

“Yes,” said Miss Wayne--“I do.” She added, rising abruptly--“But she’ll never be let out--she’ll probably die--in her sleep. And nobody’ll know--or care. It’s very good of you to have--”

“Nonsense!” said the Marchesa, interrupting with the most engaging rudeness whatever thanks her guest was about to offer.... “As I said before--this amuses me. And I’m not so well amused as I once was.” The film on the eagle eyes grew thicker while they blinked and scowled at shadows gathering in the farther corner of the room.

“It isn’t very comfortable,” mused the Marchesa, “keeping a siren in any sort of shell ... even the shell of--supposed senility.”

Miss Wayne made a courteous sound of dissent.

“Don’t contradict me!” snapped the Marchesa. “This is a moment of rare frankness on my part. Do you suppose I don’t know I’m no longer beautiful? Do you suppose I don’t know that my voice is cracked and my face looks like the corner of an old silk shawl? Bah! I used to have a skin like a tea-rose. I used to have a voice like a wood-dove. I used to have a figure like ... well, not in the least like these languishing lead-pencils one sees at the Opera or slinking up and down Fifth Avenue nowadays! It makes me laugh!” She gave a mournful little sniff in proof thereof. “My dear, I’ve had men at my feet since”--she stopped discreetly and finished with the wisp of lawn covering a slight cough--“since about a year after my husband’s death. I understand you--absolutely. You want a beautiful setting against which to draw the eye of critical observers.”

“You’ve been very sympathetic,” said Miss Wayne. She drew on her prim brown gloves once more.

“I know how necessary background is,” said the Marchesa pensively.

“Even Cleopatra--in a room with brown wall-paper--dear me, what a ghastly thought! Must you go?--Next Saturday, then, at the same hour--good evening, Miss Wayne.”

“Good evening,” said Miss Wayne quietly and went out, closing the door behind her with taper fingers.

The Marchesa sat in the dusk for some time without stirring. Once she nodded her careful gray curls. Once she laughed to herself, like a ruminant witch in a chimney corner. Eventually she rang sharply for Anna and issued a reproof.

“I want a fire,” said the Marchesa--“and all the lamps lit. The days are getting horribly short. Anybody but a fool would have noticed it!”