Chapter II: Merely Players

Philip Morley ascended the steps of Mr. Elton’s house on the afternoon of the “very informal” reception, at the psychological moment between the hours of four and six, when the first reluctant black-coated figures began to give character to the steadily flowing stream of gayly dressed women. Having succeeded in fighting his way to the door of the drawing-room, the young man paused a moment to nerve himself for the plunge into a noise and heat that seemed almost tangible. The sharp, shrill voices of women buzzed in his ears like the trills of persecuting insects, and high mirthless laughs cut his nerves like little steel blades.

“This is not civilization, it is barbarism!” Philip exclaimed to another timid male explorer into the wilderness of women. “Talk about giving the franchise to any class of human beings who take pleasure in assemblies of this sort! It’s preposterous! Women may be very charming individually, but collectively--O Lord!”

He looked helplessly into the room to try and locate his hostess, who would be sure to straighten him out into his customary ease of body and mind with a grasp of her friendly hand.

“Why are the men so thick in that corner?” he continued querulously. “Oh, I see.”

The crowd had thinned a little at the entrance to the room, and between eager faces and nodding heads, Philip Morley caught sight of a girl standing beside Mary Elton. Her beauty, her extraordinary quality, defied description or comparison. To say that she was tall, graceful, dignified,--radiant in coloring and expression,--would have been to describe half a dozen other good-looking women in the room. She positively seemed to radiate light, and to give a dazzling impression of eternal youth and of the beauty that is in living, moving things; not the cold perfection of a statue, or any work of art, but the vitality of the work of nature,--the sparkle of running water, the changing wonder of a landscape played upon by sun and cloud and breeze. Her very dress seemed part of her, and to a man’s ignorant eyes gave a bewildering impression of misty gray, toning into a delicate pink that in turn melted into the color of pale heliotropes, as it caught different rays of light. Her own soft yet vivid coloring was opalescent like her dress, for her hair was of the warm brown that grows golden in the light, her eyes were so clear that they seemed to reflect blue, green, and gray shadows, and the delicate color in her cheek came and went as she talked. Nor was her wonderful beauty that of line and color only, for intelligence, sympathy, and humor shone from her speaking face. Assuredly Mary Elton’s guest was possessed of the kind of beauty one reads of in old-fashioned romantic novels, but with an added touch of indefinable modernity and subtle mystery. In contrast, Mary Elton looked plainer than usual,--which was saying much. She was so far from good-looking that no one but herself ever commented on it. Plainness of feature was simply one of her attributes, like height in a tower or strength in a fortress, and invited no comment.

She caught sight of Philip standing by the door, and made a humorous face at him, signifying her own aversion to the hubbub around. Then she beckoned to him, pointed encouragingly at Edith Dudley, as to a goal that was worth much pushing and elbowing to attain. When he was within arm’s length, she held out her hand.

“Quick, what do you think of her? Isn’t she lovely? Isn’t she wonderful? Shouldn’t you think I was the last person in the world to get hold of such a drawing card? Aren’t we splendid foils for each other? Oughtn’t she to pay me to travel about with her? Why don’t you say what you think of her? You’re always so slow, Philip!”

“On the contrary, it’s you who are fast,” he replied laughing. “I am by no means slow to admire Miss Dudley. She is certainly stunning, but I am not sure that I want to meet any one so lovely. She can’t fail to be a disappointment with such a face as a handicap to her brain.”

“You just wait. She’s wonderful,” Mary exclaimed triumphantly. “Stop, look, and listen, as the railroad warnings say. Don’t meet her for a little while, but just stand on the outskirts, and watch her tact and grace and cleverness. Oh, she’s wonderful!” Mary repeated. Here Mary’s uncle came up to give to Philip the official greetings of a semi-host.

Mr. Elton was a fair type of the average business man. His mental horizon seemed bounded by the wool in which he dealt, but he was kindly in disposition, and truly attached to the niece who had lived with him since she was left an orphan at twelve years of age. There was no intimacy between them,--perhaps the difference in their temperaments had helped to encourage the girl’s introspection, and forced her to find her best companionship in herself,--but there was genuine affection, even although Mr. Elton might be said to have cared for his niece with all his conscience, rather than with all his heart.

“Our young friend seems to be meeting with a fair measure of success,” he stated, with the precision that characterized all his trite utterances. “It is not often that one finds so good an intelligence combined with so beautiful a face. I was really surprised at the knowledge she showed of the way in which a big business,--like that of wool, for instance,--is conducted. She seems to be well informed on many subjects, without being superficial; a rare quality nowadays.”

Mary rescued Philip from the wearisome task of feigning an interest in her uncle’s dry and woolly comments, by sending Mr. Elton off to do the polite to a lady whose deaf smile was the index to her infirmity. “There, Uncle Charles, do go and scream at poor Miss Green. She won’t hear a word you say, but she is touchingly grateful if one merely recites the alphabet to her. Why _will_ deaf people come to afternoon teas, and why does every one who isn’t deaf assume that every one else is? I never heard such a cackling. The parlor is turned into a barn-yard. Oh, how do you do, Miss Milton?”

Mary turned suddenly to greet a new arrival, who bore the hall-mark of a charitable spinster, from the neat little white path that divided an expanse of smoothly plastered hair, to the broad soles of her sensible shoes. She was the scion of a family which had many branches and was less conspicuous for its manners than its customs.

She proved her birthright by staring across her hostess at Miss Dudley for a moment before answering Mary’s greeting, and then saying abruptly, “What an extraordinary-looking young woman to be a friend of yours! Who is she? Has she relations in Boston?”

“Nothing nearer than myself. But she’s all right, Miss Milton. I shouldn’t have asked you to meet her if she hadn’t been,” Mary suavely declared, with an intentional humor that missed fire. “You’ll find she isn’t as frivolous as you think. She has an extraordinary insight, and will probably divine by intuition that you are more interested in the poor than the prosperous, and she will unquestionably give you the latest wrinkle in philanthropy. You just see. Come,” Mary continued, dragging her elderly victim after her by one end of her dateless mantilla. “Edith, I want you to meet Miss Eliza Milton. This, Miss Milton, is my friend--and cousin by courtesy--Miss Dudley. Be acquainted, as they say in the country.”

Philip saw the girl turn from the young men surrounding her, and speak to the unfashionable aristocrat in a low rich tone that fell soothingly on the ear among the sharp staccato waves of sound that filled the room. The sympathy and kindly human interest that beamed from the girl’s face could not be the result of training alone. Even her double-distilled inheritance of Southern courtesy and French grace could not explain a responsiveness that had no touch of the professional veneer that glazes eyes and lips into a perfunctory assumption of interest. Miss Milton had not been talking to the girl two minutes before the conversation had veered from the general to the particular, and Edith Dudley was giving the charitable spinster a little account of an experience she had had among the poor in a New York college settlement.

“I am very much interested in sociology,” Philip was astounded to hear the young girl glibly declare, “and I’ve been fortunate enough to have seen a little of the practical workings of various schemes for the regeneration of mankind.”

Miss Milton drew herself up with pride at representing the One Perfectly Organized Body of Workers on Earth.

“It is easy to dispose of a large subject with superficial catch-words,” she proclaimed.

“Yes, isn’t it?” Miss Dudley agreed sympathetically. “Some personal experience, some knowledge from the inside, is necessary. I have had a little,--less than I should like,--but I should be so grateful to you, Miss Milton, if you would put me in the way of taking some small part in the special form of philanthropy in which you are interested. Of course I have already read and heard a good deal about the Associated Charities here in Boston.”

“Naturally,” Miss Milton interposed.

“I am immensely impressed by its aims and accomplishments,” Miss Dudley continued. “I wonder if I couldn’t do a little visiting for you while I am in Boston.”

“We are always glad of intelligent assistance,” the Philanthropist guardedly admitted.

“I don’t know about the intelligence,” the girl said smilingly, “but I speak Italian fairly well. I believe you always need some additional visitors in the Italian quarter, don’t you? I should be so glad if you would let me practice my Italian on some transplanted organ-grinders and fruit-venders.”

Miss Milton acquiesced, with a slightly distrustful manner, in a suggestion that seemed to her as surprising as if a butterfly had suddenly offered to lead the strenuous life of a bee. Her frankly expressed astonishment was broken in upon by the introduction of a clerical young man, whose studiedly sympathetic smile seemed to preach the duty of cheerfulness to a quite professional extent, and whose air of worldly ease was the logical sequence to his ministerial waistcoat.

“Ah, this does make me feel at home!” Miss Dudley exclaimed, with a cordial grasp of the ineffective white hand extended to meet hers. “I never expected to see anything so anomalous as a clergyman of the Church of England in Mary Elton’s drawing-room. I haven’t dared to breathe my sympathy for anything so conservative as--as you, in this hot-bed, no, cold-bed of radicalism.”

“There are a few of us left, Miss Dudley, a few of us left,” he replied, with the easy reiteration of the obvious in which his calling had perfected him. He grasped an imaginary surplice with two delicate fingers. “May I hope that you will persuade Miss Elton to bring you to St. Matthew’s next Sunday, and see for yourself that Unitarians and Christian Scientists do not yet control all Boston,--not quite all of this fair city?” he eloquently preached.

“Of course I’ll come, but my cousin won’t come with me. I feel sure that she secretly goes to some hall where Emerson is the Deity worshiped, although she pretends not to go anywhere. She is much too unconventional to attend any church that preaches legitimate doctrine, but I’ll come alone.”

The little clergyman beamed unctuously, and expressed the belief that he should draw fresh inspiration from the sight of Miss Dudley in his congregation.

“I really long to confess myself a miserable sinner,” the girl went on, with the blending of seriousness and lightness that is the ambition and admiration of young society clergymen. “These sincere, self-respecting Bostonians refuse to ‘cringe to the Almighty,’ as Mary calls it. They think on the whole they’re a pretty virtuous set of people, but for my own part I never feel so good as when I say I’m bad, so I’m coming to confess with the other sinners in your congregation next Sunday.”

The young divine was reluctantly hurried by, his impressionable heart stirred by a remembered vision of a serious and spiritual face that had contradicted the lightness of the spoken words. By this time, one of the former satellites that had revolved about the new planet drifted again into the orbit of her smile. His coldly critical and clever face was stamped with the lines of fastidious modernity.

“What an anachronism is presented by the sight of a parson at Miss Elton’s reception!” he commented, smiling somewhat sneeringly at the cordial shoulders of the clergyman that were writhing, with ostentatious sympathy, over an old lady’s confessions of rheumatism. “I am sure you agree with me, Miss Dudley, that the Church in America to-day is merely a picturesque ruin,--the only ruin in this terribly new land,--that we value merely for its traditions and associations. There is no longer such a thing as living faith. Occasionally we think we have found it again, but when we turn the electric light of modern science on its poor groping shape, we discover only the ghost of something that once lived ages ago.”

Miss Dudley smiled with sad understanding. “You are right, of course. But I believe in ghosts, and that’s all right, isn’t it, as long as I don’t mistake them for their living counterparts? I know that faith is dead,--I mean the real vital faith that made martyrs of people,--but I like to play it’s alive. I really care for the forms of religion,--for its picturesqueness, its traditions; and therefore I prefer the Catholic Church to the Protestant. I like to recall my early associations with what my mother taught me, by going to church and getting into rather a slushy state of virtuous emotion, but as for a real reasoning belief”--

She gave a little shrug,--the national gesture of her mother’s race,--and suddenly her eyes were veiled by a mist of sadness. “Don’t let’s be serious at an afternoon tea!” she exclaimed. “I should like to talk to you about all kinds of things sometime, Mr. Marston. I’m sure we should agree about a great many of them. You are cynical outside, and I am cynical inside. I have to drug myself with all these ‘frivolous little anodynes that deaden suffering,’ in order not to lose my grip on life.” She signified the pleasure-seekers around her with a wave of the large bouquet of sweet peas that seemed part of her.

Philip Morley, still an eye and ear witness to Miss Dudley’s variations, gave a curious little grunt of mystification, not untinged with contempt, but he drew a little nearer to the enigma, to hear what further contradictions she would reveal.

A young Harvard student lounged up to Miss Dudley’s side, with overacted ease, and continued a conversation that had evidently been interrupted. “Then you will really dance the cotillon with me next Thursday night? You won’t forget?” he asked, impaling her eyes with a gaze of boyish admiration.

“Forget?” she laughed, clasping her hands with mock intensity. “I am not likely to forget what I enjoy more than anything in the world, dancing with a good partner,--for I know you dance well; I saw you last night.”

“What flowers do you care for? What color are you going to wear?” he asked with the blasé manner of an experienced society man.

“Oh, I care for all flowers; I shall wear all colors,” she cried lightly; but then added, “you will please me best, Mr. Warren, by not sending me any flowers at all. It is one of my very few principles, not to let college men send me flowers. There are so many things they must want to get that will last so much longer. Please don’t send me any; I really mean it. Come and take me to walk some afternoon instead. Show me Bunker Hill Monument, and teach me some local history.”

Her frank kindliness, just tinged with coquetry, was what the boy most wanted. “If you won’t let me give you flowers, you might give me one,” he said, stretching out his hand toward the variegated sweet peas that lay in the bend of her arm. She gave him a blossom, with a pretty little foreign gesture. “There. Now we won’t either of us forget our engagement for next Thursday,” she said in her softly Southern speech, and then turned with a radiant smile to bid good-by to a gray-haired lady, whose hand she held in both hers. “It has been worth my coming to Boston to hear what you have told me of my mother,” she said gently, her eyes softening with impulsive tears. “Each person who knew her contributes something to my own memory of her. It is like a mosaic,--my thought of her,--all made up of little stones of memory pieced together by different hands. _Wasn’t_ she beautiful, Mrs. Warner? Wasn’t she like a creature of another species beside the rest of the world?”

“She was, indeed, my dear, and you are like her,” the lady replied gently.

“It is so good of you to have asked me to stay with you, before seeing me,” the girl went on, “and still kinder now that you have seen me. I shall love to come when Mary is tired of me.”

“That means I must wait a long time,” Mrs. Warner said, as she pressed her hand for farewell.

“Will you please take these flowers?” the girl cried impulsively. “Sweet peas were Mamma’s favorite flowers. They will thank you better than I can,” and with the grace of perfect unconsciousness, she put the big bunch of fragrant blossoms into the old lady’s hands.

Philip Morley turned to Mary Elton, who was vigorously denouncing afternoon teas to an amused clump of her guests. “Will you introduce me to Miss Dudley?” he asked rather formally. “You know I haven’t met her yet.”

“You’re no better than an eavesdropper!” she declared. Then, “You are sure you want to meet her?” she asked earnestly, looking at him with the boyish straightforwardness that some men found disconcerting.

“Naturally. What am I here for except to meet Miss Dudley from four to six?” he expostulated. “From the droppings that have fallen off the eaves into my ears I gather that Miss Dudley is all things not only to all men, but to all women, boys, and clergymen as well. I don’t wonder she enslaves every one, with her combination of extraordinary beauty and flattering sympathy with the point of view of the person she happens to be talking to.”

“But it isn’t that she’s nothing,” Mary insisted, “she’s _everything_. She’s not a chameleon that sits on a piece of blue paper and turns to indigo,--she’s an opal: she’s blue and red and green and yellow, and good and bad and sweet and sarcastic and religious and skeptical and frivolous and serious! Come on and be introduced.”

He followed her obediently, but Mary had no time to mention his name, for Miss Dudley met his look with one of recognition. As Philip Morley came under the direct personal fire of her compelling personality, he felt the overwhelming rush of admiring excitement that one feels in seeing and hearing the swift flight of a sky-rocket in one’s immediate vicinity. The comparison flashed upon him in a moment. She was like a wonderful firework. He was constrained to admire, with quickened pulses, the upward rush, the downward flight, the shower of many-colored stars. Would he later see the stick fall to the earth?

“You are going to be Mr. Morley,--isn’t he, Mary?” the girl said, holding out a frankly cordial hand. “You see I have made Mary give me biographical sketches of all her particular friends, and her descriptions of you have been so vivid that you might just as well have your name scrawled over your face.”

“I must plead guilty of being myself,” Philip assented. “It would be quite impossible to escape detection when Mary’s vigorous language has been employed on one’s behalf. You, also, Miss Dudley, have been duly catalogued. Perhaps you do not know that you have been called an opal.”

“Opals crumble away to nothing; they are short-lived and rather sensational,” the girl answered. “Mary, there, is like a pearl,--staunch and unchangeable.”

“I’m a black pearl, then,” Mary replied grimly. “They are fortunately very rare, and so ugly that they are considered beautiful by some. I myself would as soon have a boot-button set in a ring as a black pearl. If a thing is ugly inherently, its cost cannot make it valuable to me.” A note of bitterness was stinging her voice, but she cast it out with her customary tone of light banter. “At least I am grateful for not being called a moss-agate, Edith. Isn’t it just like me to have that for my so-called ‘birthday stone’? Good-by,--there’s Miss Grantley. I’d forgotten I’d asked her. She’s anti-all-existing conditions. Anti-vivisectionist, anti-vaccinationist, anti-imperialist, anti-everything. But of course you’ll cater to all her aspirations towards reform, Edith. Miss Dudley is a born caterer,” Mary threw back at Philip, as she left them, to resume her irksome duties as hostess.

“I suppose ‘caterer,’ in Mary’s sense, and ‘opal’ mean much the same, don’t they?” asked Philip. “It is most refreshing to find anything so acquiescent as either name implies.”

“I don’t think I can be like an opal, for it is my favorite stone, and my own character is the kind I most detest,” Miss Dudley said simply. “Mary Elton is the type of person for whom I have the most genuine admiration. She is splendid. Her strength and clear-sightedness and absolute sincerity and certainty of conviction are wonderful. If I were a man,--the kind of man I’d like to be, not the kind I should be,--I should strain every nerve to win that woman, and if I failed, why, I’d at least be thankful I hadn’t succeeded in winning any one less unusual.”

Miss Dudley spoke with such simple sincerity that Philip Morley’s heart warmed to her. “Mary is indeed refreshing, and astonishingly satisfactory as a friend,” he heartily agreed. “One misses neither men nor women when one is with her. I confess I am too selfish to wish that you were a man, for if Mary married I should feel that I had lost my best friend.”

For an instant Edith Dudley looked into the young man’s eyes with a glance of eager scrutiny, but all she saw there was half-indifferent amusement.

“Perhaps I exaggerate Mary’s remarkable qualities,” she said quietly. “She is cast for so much better and bigger a part on the world’s stage than I, and acts it so much better, that I suppose I think of her with something of the same feeling with which a performer in private theatricals regards Bernhardt or Duse.”

“I should have fancied you were a better actress than Mary,” Philip commented.

“Oh, I am not speaking of consciously adopting a rôle and playing it consistently,” Miss Dudley explained. “I was merely speaking--tritely enough--of acting in the sense of living. ‘All the world’s a stage,’ you know, ‘and all the men and women merely players.’” She spoke with the slightest touch of scorn for his literalness. “At all events,” she went on, “I thank whatever gods there be that I am still capable of feeling enthusiasm for people. You are, perhaps, lazily thanking the same indefinite deities for never being carried off your feet.”

“Oh, but I am, if a strong enough person comes along,” he declared.

“Is it irrelevant to own myself the weakest of my sex?” the girl asked with a challenging smile.

“Not unless it is impertinent in me to hope I may have the opportunity of proving you otherwise. I have been listening to you talking to these people. You are not weak; you are daring, as only a person well armed can be.”

For a second she looked at him beseechingly. “I hope that you will sometime understand Mary, and will never understand me,” she said with strange seriousness.

“I already do one, and I intend to do the other,” he insisted, with his pleasant personal smile. “I am hoping to see you often while you are in Boston, Miss Dudley. I am almost like one of the family in this house, you know.”

The girl was prevented from answering by the introduction of another young collegian by her recent sophomoric conquest.

“Where do you come from, Miss Dudley?” was his correct opening, in the tone of a player of twenty questions.

“Oh, I am like George Macdonald’s baby,” she smiled, shaking off her serious mood with a dismissing nod to Philip; “I come ‘out of the Everywhere into the Here!’”

Philip turned away, his brows knitting with mystification. He was curiously interested by the dazzling inconsistencies and overwhelming beauty of the strange girl who had spoken to him of Mary Elton with an inexplicable emotion. He must see her again, and often. She was a riddle worth pondering over.

He stopped in his flight to the door to say good-by to his hostess. There was in her eyes a strange look, almost of physical suffering, that he had noticed more than once lately, and her expressive ugliness seemed more than usually pathetic under its veil of humor.

“Well, what do you think of her?” she said, with strangely vibrating intensity.

Her small eyes seemed to swim in unshed tears for a moment, and she bit her under lip viciously in self-scorn as she waited for his answer. He looked over her head, and for a moment did not reply.

Since speaking to the beautiful Miss Dudley, since her eyes had looked into his,--not boldly, not flirtatiously, but with a special intimacy and understanding,--Philip had felt almost as though he were under a hypnotic influence. Even to Mary he could not reply seriously, as to what he thought of her friend, for, if he spoke truthfully, his sentiments would sound exaggerated; so he spoke with exaggeration, and trusted that his words had the ring of truth.

“My dear Mary,” he said, laughing as he shook her hand, “she is a thousand women in one; but you are what is far more satisfactory, one woman in a thousand.”