Chapter VI

When Lilah returned to the Thirty-eighth Street house, late that night, it was her inclination to avoid any encounter with Robert. She hoped that he had fallen asleep. Dismissing the servant, Lilah entered the electric elevator, another of De Blauvelt’s innovations, and got out on the second floor. The door was noisy and as she turned toward her room she saw a light flash on in Robert’s room across the hall. He called: “Lilah?”

“Yes,” she said, and paused, holding her breath. She ought to go in. But she could not. She felt that her excitement had written itself on her face and she hated to invent reasons for that animation. She wanted most of all to be alone and to see herself, clearly, before she went further. Robert might surprise her into saying something before she was ready.

“I’m tired,” she called out. “Good night!”

She locked herself into her room, suddenly determined to have her way. She must deal with this new feeling before anything happened to diminish it, to mar its shining beauty. Robert expected to be kissed; it was a part of the utterly stupid and peremptory rite of marriage, devoid of spontaneous affection or of that emotion which is led up to, prepared, by word and touch. Why did he insist, when he knew that it was a conventional gesture and could lead to nothing, create nothing, change nothing? She heard his hand sliding over the panels of the door, and again he called: “Lilah?”

She saw herself reflected in all the mirrors in an attitude of disgust and rebellion and she was struck by her loneliness. No one could help her. This was a primitive feeling, so powerful that it was all she could do not to hurl her dismissal at the closed door. What, in a man she loved, would have been lovable, in Robert was revolting.

“Go away,” she said in a low voice.

At once he was silent, as if she had struck him dead. She listened for the sound of his retreating footsteps, but she could hear nothing. He must have gone swiftly, silently; or else was still standing there, his hand suspended, his gesture arrested by something final in her voice.

She spoke again: “I’m very tired.”

There was no answer. And slowly she undressed, trembling as if there had been an actual disaster.

She slipped into bed and switched off the light. The silence of the room was permeated by a low and continuous sound, a distant mingling of voices, victorious, hopeless, a vast, removed dissonance.... The city.

She got up again and kneeled by an open window. There, the sound took form, was less terrifying. The street, beneath a moon at the full, was empty, like a street in a nightmare. Office buildings were like pyramids in a forest of pyramids, inscrutable, lifeless. And one tower, higher than the rest, was pierced by a loggia, rimmed with moonlight, romantic.

She tried to piece together the fragmentary happenings of that evening. The idea came to her that perhaps she had over-estimated Flagg’s interest; her own had been immediate, sharp, an emotion more penetrating than anything she had experienced. The meeting had upset her whole philosophy of conduct; she had thought herself safe within the defined circle of her material desires; her inner self, what idealists were pleased to call her soul, she had believed secure against temptation; beauty, in things, was to have been enough. And now she saw, dimly, that she had stepped outside the circle into a strange territory where beauty, to be beauty at all, must be of the spirit.

She recalled their silence in the motor, the brief contact of shoulders, an ostentatious indifference when, seated at the Rendezvous, their interest had either to disguise itself or be subjected to remark. Flagg had not danced, but Lilah did, because it was expected of her. The writer from San Diego claimed Flagg. She was witty and tangibly human, a woman, Lilah decided, in daylight. Broad of feature, with a tanned skin and careless braids of thick brown hair, she had an enviable indifference to what men thought of her which assured her their instant, delighted attention. Whenever Flagg laughed Lilah’s heart contracted with something like hate. She had thought herself incapable of jealousy. What she felt was worse than jealousy; it was a primitive, an atrocious suffering. She had gone on dancing, smiling, but her eyes had sought Flagg again and again, had sought, across the crowded room blue with smoke and dust, confirmation of something she had only glimpsed and might have imagined--his head, the short, smooth hair, his features, his expression of humorous, sensitive understanding. He leaned a little sideways, to catch the ironic comments of the sun-burned lady from San Diego, but his eyes never failed to meet Lilah’s, to let her in a little way and then, abruptly, to shut her out....

Once, she had found herself alone at the table with him.

“You have shown yourself to me,” he said abruptly in a lowered voice, staring away from her at the crowd. “Perhaps because of something in me or because of something that has happened to make you careless. No. Don’t interrupt. You are right. We are not alike but we are different enough to be dangerous to each other. I am going to be frank with you. Nothing could have flattered me more than your being aware of me, for now I know that something I thought had died in me is still alive. But I can’t be what you might want me to be. I can’t play any game but my own. You see, I have chosen to stay alive at the expense of my old enthusiasms--and failings. I have only a margin of life. Like that chap of Conrad’s, I have an enemy in my breast. I must be watchful and I must feel nothing. And here you are, commanding me to feel. I haven’t any existence of my own. I am dedicated to my unstable heart, fending off reality to spare myself a damnable pain that makes me red in the face, sick, unconscious.... I haven’t any life of my own. I am as dead as dust. I am a man who buys life, day by day, simply by sparing his heart.... Love is selfish.... If I love you, it will be selfishly. I warn you. I have no desire to play the game of hide-and-seek, to dodge jealous husbands. I haven’t anything to offer you--either money or feeling or security.”

Lilah had said quickly: “Thank you! You are very explicit.”

A momentary fear passed to leave her trembling. She realized that while he was speaking she had lost all sense of the crowding dancers, the barbaric throb of the music, their publicity. She put up her hand to hide what she knew must be an expression of utter rage.

“Even to-day,” she began, in an unsteady voice, “when anything is permitted--you dare--I don’t understand--”

Suddenly he turned and looked at her. “Even to-day preliminary skirmishes are ridiculous. I beg your pardon. I took it for granted that you were experienced enough to hear the truth.”

They were interrupted by Chivers Chew who bore Lilah away without the formality of an apology to Flagg; he rose and let Lilah go with the conventional reluctance. In Chew’s arms, held too close, Lilah suffered panic. She had no idea what Flagg had meant; whether he had laughed at her or whether, without question, he wanted her. Whatever he had intended, one thing was certain, the feeling she had wanted to avoid was being thrust upon her. The immediate future held a great selfishness or a great daring. This feeling was bound to assert itself or destroy her. She could not be certain that it was, in the romantic sense, love.

She could not, even now, be certain; kneeling in the open window with her blank gaze on the city, she wondered....

They had not spoken again. She might not see him, ever. But that was impossible! She had left the party, at one o’clock, to come home alone. Her coming had been in the nature of a flight, an escape from an intangible danger, a fatal, desirable, disastrous happiness....

She rose, with a sudden impulse to go back.... They would be at May Sinclair’s apartment, talking, drinking, until dawn....

She switched on the electric light again. Her cloak lay across a chair. She threw it over her shoulders, thrust her bare feet into the slippers that lay where she had kicked them off and opened the door.

Robert was standing outside, his face curiously puckered. “Where on earth are you going?” he demanded.

Lilah said furiously: “Why on earth are you listening at my door?”

“I wasn’t listening.”

He lifted his arms. “I forgot. You spoke to me.... I was waiting.... Well, by God, I was a fool!”

Lilah closed the door. Her teeth were chattering. She flung the wrap aside. “Go away. Go away,” she said. “Go away.”

* * * * *

It seemed of sudden, vital importance that she should be happy. Since there was no certain immortality, temporal happiness was necessary at any cost. She had been cheated because she did not love; but Robert had loved her, still loved her. He had failed because he had not fulfilled the promise of that moment in the fog. He was like all prosaic lovers; he had thought of nothing better to say than: “Poor Lilah! Poor little girl.” She had always despised pity. She denied all the feminine attributes other women used as defensive weapons. She preferred admiration to sympathy; and in this she was unusual; most women like to cry against a masculine shoulder. Lilah wanted the fullness of success, recognition of her strength.

She went to the telephone and in a cautious voice gave Mrs. Sinclair’s number.

“Lilah!” The high, clear tones came into the receiver against a confused background of music and voices. “I thought you found us dull!”

“May I come back?”

“Now?” Then, with a burst of amused laughter: “Of course! Come.”

Lilah called a taxi and dressed hurriedly. From her window she saw the car slip down the hill from Madison Avenue and the driver, jumping out, glanced up.... He mustn’t ring! Mustn’t!

She flew downstairs. Robert’s door was closed. If he heard, he made no attempt, this time, to stop her. The house was dimly lighted, muffled, close; there was an unreality about the formal arrangement of chairs, the stiff, precise folds of curtains and draperies, as if no one had ever lived in these rooms or passed up and down the stairs.... The thought crossed Lilah’s mind that she had, after all, failed to create a livable home. Her heart hadn’t been in it....

She made violent signals to the chauffeur of the taxi: “_Don’t ring!_ Here I am! Take me to four-seventy Park.”

The man gave her a curious look as he shut the door. Then she realized that it was three o’clock.

* * * * *

Mrs. Sinclair’s party was still in progress. The formal luxury of the room had been put askew. Wilder was at the piano. Carey sat cross-legged on a table, singing Hawaiian ditties in a soft, saccharine voice. With shut eyes and upcurling lips, he was like an elderly Buddha in a dinner-jacket.

Lilah saw immediately that Flagg was there and her heart leaped, but she said, smiling at him: “I’m not a bit of a coward. I came back to apologize.”

They sat down together, unexpectedly embarrassed. It was not possible to fence effectively before a roomful of people. But Lilah felt that she had committed herself. She studied his face, his well-modeled hands. He was harder, more mature than Robert; the nature of his aloofness was not clear to her. Either he was cruel, or he was removed, by the nature of his experience, from ordinary behavior. He said nothing but sat with his eyes on the fire which had burned low in a shallow hearth of yellow and black marble. May Sinclair was flirting, in her intense, experimental fashion, with Chivers Chew. The shipbuilding Englishman and his wife had disappeared. Nearby, stretched at full length with her head in Heywood’s lap, the writer from San Diego was explaining the hows and the whys of the short-story game:

“It’s perfectly easy. Any boob can do it. All you have to know is human nature and God knows human nature doesn’t cringe from publicity, these days! All of us skin our souls in public. I’m successful because I skin mine a little closer. I give the public naked hearts, as you hand around olives at a picnic--on a pickle fork! People are sick and tired of flappers. They want ‘strong stuff,’ be it pseudo or not; heroic love and sacrifice. Divorce has lost its novelty. I’ve been writing the most exalted morality-tales.... You’ll see--in another year skirts will go down and manners will go up. It isn’t going to be fashionable to lie with your head on a strange gentleman’s bony knee--”

“Then why do you do it?” Heywood demanded, not stirring.

“Because it’s quite roguish in San Diego.”

“San Diego--where on earth is San Diego?”

Lilah turned to Flagg. He smiled. “What a lot of rubbish! Why do people generalize about taste and morals? To-day, when propriety is a vice in New York, a cigarette is immoral in San Diego. And if skirts go down in New York, they’ll go up in San Diego, because San Diego is always two years behind--and what does that prove?”

He leaned forward, lowered his voice: “Is it decided, then? Are we to go on?”

Lilah said simply: “Yes.”

She rose, tossing her cigarette away. She was languid again; her eyes drooped. She brushed against him, but he sat, immovable, his expression guarded.

* * * * *

“May,” she said, “I don’t like your party. I’m going home.”

“Have a drink,” was the succinct reply.

Lilah’s hostess did not trouble to rise. And Chivers Chew, peering over the back of the sofa with a blurred expression said: “Don’t be a grouch, Lilah! We’re all danced out. Listen to Carey. He’s on the fiftieth verse of the Hawaiian poem in praise of the first Missionary Carey, who had fifteen wives and sixty-two sons. Tune in--there’s a good girl.”

Flagg followed Lilah into the corridor. His offer to accompany her was, in its tempered formality, old-fashioned. She could not understand just wherein he differed from the men she knew; he was more bold, more direct than they, but he seemed devoid of the fashionable carelessness which made them, very often, insulting. The women were responsible for most of it--they let themselves be slapped on the back and addressed as “old girl.”

As they stepped into the elevator they heard Montague Wilder entering upon the D-flat waltz, in thirds.

“The stale hour,” Flagg remarked, as they waited on the curb for a night-prowler. With his cane he signalled a skulking vehicle that turned out of a side-street. A sharp, cool wind whipped Lilah’s cloak; the sky was already pale with dawn. But the streets were deserted; in pools of light cast by the tall, globed arcs, an occasional figure was visible, unreal, moving upon strange errands; cars passed, rarely, with a smooth purring of tires, bearing shadowy, drooping women, and men in the attitude of relaxed satiety.

Flagg did not speak, and Lilah became conscious of his unswerving regard.

“I don’t understand what’s happened,” she said unsteadily. “I am not willing--I want happiness. But I can’t hurt, too much, some one who has been kind to me. I’m selfish. You’ll see. I want--things. But this is new. I don’t know. I’m frightened.”

“Don’t be,” he said.

He continued to stare at her. He seemed to be dreaming, sunk in a reverie. Lilah’s fear deepened. If he had touched her, or had spoken, she would have thrust him aside with all of her accustomed scorn and impatience. But there was something in his silence that was devotional, innocent, almost immaterial. She recognized that he was above self, absorbed in her.... With a shiver, she recalled Robert, at her door....

The taxi swerved and stopped before the Thirty-eighth Street house.

Lilah gave her hand into Flagg’s clasp and as they looked again at each other her lips trembled. She heard herself asking him to come, as soon as possible; then, conscious of a too apparent eagerness, she added: “Thursday. I’m fearfully busy.”

“To-morrow.”

“No. No. I can’t. Give me a day or two. Thursday, at four.”

* * * * *

At breakfast, Lilah said sweetly: “Was I cross last night? I’m sorry.”

Robert lowered the newspaper. His answer surprised her, but she did not alter her smile that had in it a touch of malice. “Cross? No. Why?”

“I thought perhaps--”

“I’m going to the Point,” he interrupted. “My grandfather isn’t well.”

“Oh, Robert--”

“It’s not serious,” he said. And added, with no apparent irony: “I’ll come back!”

Lilah lowered her eyes to hide her expression. This little circumstance, unlooked for, outside her volition or her intention, was a part of her unfailing luck. In every circumstance, she was triumphant.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she began.

“He has a cold. Damned nuisance! Old men shouldn’t have colds. He might die. I’m fond of him. And besides, he holds the business together. An enormous amount of correspondence goes to the Point. In the end, he makes all the important decisions, defines policies--his preferences are respected. If he should die, I would have to take his place. But there are other reasons why I don’t want him to die.”

“Shall I go?” Lilah asked. “I will. But wouldn’t Grace be more useful?”

“He doesn’t need a nurse. He’s lonely. If you will come with me, and wear your prettiest dresses and perhaps play poker with him--he will get well. Old people sometimes die because they are ignored. They live alone until they lose the sense of their own reality; they sort of--vanish.”

Lilah said briefly: “Let me see his letter.”

Junius Peabody’s fine, careful writing with the curious, looped s’s covered half a sheet of stationery. He said simply that he would be glad of company since he was confined to his bed and feverish. “They won’t let me up, confound them!”

“He’s not very ill,” Lilah remarked. “You go, and if I’m really needed, wire me.” She added: “You’ll be happy, because you love the country. And I have a great deal to do. Oh, unimportant things! But if I’m to go away in June, I won’t have more than just enough time to get ready.”

When Robert said: “Very well,” she had the feeling that she was safe. The immediate future held, not the necessity for speaking a dangerous truth, but an adventure, delectable, mysterious, exciting.

Suddenly gracious, she gave her hand to Robert. “I’ll miss you, cross old Bobsie,” she said sweetly.

* * * * *

The next two weeks were as exciting as she could have wished.

She heard from Robert that his grandfather was better but that the spaniel had canker of the ear. “It’s terrible. She moans like a human being and shakes her head and tries to get her hind foot into her ear. The vet came--that old fellow from Biddeford--and operated. Last night I sat up until four o’clock putting ice on her nose and pouring stuff into her ear. She wouldn’t sleep and kept looking at me. I’ve been away too long. Edwin shut her head in a door because she wanted to get into the warm kitchen and lie under the stove. My God, why can’t people understand that animals are human? I’ll never like Edwin again. It makes me sick to look at him. If I had a son, I’d act this way, only worse. The silver bitch is the only son I’ve ever had.... I’ve been thinking over you and me. I have failed with you and I don’t know why. No one could love you more than I do. But I suffer in my love, and that isn’t right--love ought not to betray, but it seems to. Will you help me? Perhaps you know what I mean. If we had a son, there would be no complications. Last night when I sat there giving that pup pieces of ice that melted as if I’d put them on a red-hot stove, I saw a good many things clearly. The ice ran over my hand and up my arm and ruined my shirt, and at the risk of your hating me I’ll tell you that I cried like a baby and my tears ruined my tie. When I got through I looked like the sole survivor of the Flood. (You write Biblical words with capitals, don’t you?) And, as I was saying, certain things were sort of washed clean or clear, or both. If I could only put my thoughts down on paper so that you would understand! I know that if I could explain myself to you, you’d come, quick! Love shouldn’t be a sacrifice; it should be a service. That goes down easily on paper, but it took hours to bubble up out of my unconscious. And another thing, it doesn’t pay to go running around looking for new material to work with. What you have at hand is usually workable, if you are patient enough. Success is, after all, making what you have into a decent sort of achievement. The people who fail are the ones who kick about never having had a chance. We all have a chance. I could be specific, only I won’t. I am offering myself to you as a lump of clay for your fashioning. You might make something of me--the life-size statue of a happy man. Isn’t it worth trying?”

Lilah did not know what to answer; she postponed answering, and, after a while, forgot. The issue was not pressing. To placate Robert, she sent a wire: “Love to you both. Lilah.”

These two weeks were exclusively her own. She did not want to serve love or to use the material at hand. She hated smug, decent, stereotyped domesticity. Other women could spend year after year with the details of a home and children; it was unthinkable that she should surrender to monotony. She must live to the full; she was willing, she assured herself, to take both the reward and the punishment. The penalty, however, was too remote to be considered.

Putnam Flagg had been a professor before he became a major. He preferred the first title to the second, since he declared that he was not, by nature, a soldier. He disapproved of the advantage offered by rank and insignia to men who might be disposed to bully their inferiors, but he approved of awards that carried with them nothing but recognition of work well done. As a teacher and a scientist, he had known abstract adventure; no war could equal the hazards of research. Yet his ability had forced him into the most terrible branch of warfare and, as an expert in the use of poison-gas, he had had a dose of his own medicine. This struck him as an altogether exquisite justice; he had been an unwilling but an intelligent servant of his country--once convinced of his duty he had used all of his knowledge, and had, temporarily, laid aside his scruples. He despised war, but he also despised despotism. He was one of the few thinkers whose faith had not been shaken by the tragedy; rather, he emerged from it with an even deeper belief in man’s progress. Flagg was convinced that society had gone too far to turn back; surrender, discouragement, meant annihilation; the battle must be fought to the end.

He did not shrink from facts; he believed that the esthetic imagination would be supplanted by the scientific imagination. There was no limit to the audacity of man; no limit to what he might dare, what he might do....

Flagg was to go back to his university in the Autumn. Lilah got a very definite picture of a small city, a group of Gothic buildings unhallowed by age, the plain, a wide river, brown polished, slow and resistless.... Flagg would have a house “on the campus” and a small laboratory of his own. Three times a week, in a Gothic room, before an un-Gothic audience of farmers’ sons and business men in embryo, he would lecture. His “subject” he told her, was zoölogy. Lilah shuddered. She could not understand Mendelian heredity, but she had understood what Junius Peabody said about the adult being in some manner contained within the germ. She could not see what was gained, exactly, by knowing.... In the end, you always stumbled upon God, and the inscrutable beginnings.

“We must make certain,” Flagg said, “that there is not a God beyond God. Perhaps our conception is childish.”

Lilah put her hand over his mouth. “Let’s not talk about it. I’m more interested in your college, your guinea pigs and rabbits and test tubes.”

His smile was mocking. “Guinea pigs and God,” he remarked. Suddenly he caught her hands. “I think I love you because you are beautiful. There’s nothing else to love! Yet I love you! Do you care? Or are you playing with me?”

Lilah had not, so far, committed herself. They were spending an hour before her fire, sharing the French sofa that had been too small for Robert. Flagg’s touch frightened her.

She had been so happy. A week had passed like a day; it had contained the essence of experience. If she let herself love, she must face exile in a western university town--but that was impossible; Flagg would not be spared because he happened to be an unusual and valuable man. She would have to wait, and divorce Robert. She saw a year, two years, of postponement, poverty again, criticism, ugliness, the battle to justify passion. If she did not love, there was Robert, and this, and this--A house! Or Flagg might die....

Her hands trembled in his, but she was obstinately silent. Outside, a heavy rain fell, obliterating, for the moment, the rumble of traffic in Madison Avenue. A servant, or Grace Fuller, might come in and find her hands in this man’s hands, her face, with a look of lost desire, turned up to his.... If she kissed him, she knew, she would be powerless to turn back to the facile little enthusiasms of her life. If she didn’t kiss him, she would be safe, forever, in her rooms frescoed by Shawhan and decorated by De Blauvelt, in her chosen interests, in the perfunctory embraces of her marriage.

On the other hand, there was happiness. Happiness, at that moment, seemed terrible, a dark undertaking, something forbidden and murderous. It involved Robert. The intensity of that moment in the fog, when she had promised Robert love, was nothing more than a betrayal. She must not promise again, and fail.

Somehow this feeling was different. She was swayed by more than her own part in the drama; for once she turned out from herself toward another human being. Pity had no part in her love for Flagg; his affliction was not evident; she had learned to accept his guarded manner as part of his personality. His appearance--that length and leanness and the pagan outlines of his face--stirred her. His eyes were brown, without sparkle, lifted, under heavy lids, like the eyes of a cat. “You belong in mythology,” she said. He was not ready to her hand; she felt always that he might turn suddenly, with a feline indifference, and walk away from her. He seemed always to be amused by her artificialities, yet delighted, as if he had come upon an unusually winning little mouse.

She wanted to hate him, because it would be more comfortable to hate than to love him. Without quite knowing what she did, but staring straight into his eyes with a look full of questioning, she leaned forward until their lips met.

He whispered: “Lilah!” and caught her close to him. When she heard his heart beating, she realized what she had done. She could not draw away.... This was the reality of giving. She must keep it.... How beautiful! How final! She could not turn back, undo what she had done, or cease to feel what she was feeling.... Helpless, she leaned against him, hardly conscious of his lips on her forehead, her hair. He kept on whispering: “Lilah! Lilah!” She had not expected him to be so gentle. When finally she opened her eyes and pushed him away, she saw that he was suffering. His face was flushed, transformed, made ugly and pathetic by pain. The feeling of death was there, tangible, sickening.... His eyes were wide open, and in them an expression of surprise deepened into horror.

Lilah cried: “Your heart!”

He nodded and, loosening the grasp of her hands, tried to stand up.

“Don’t! Stay where you are. I’ll get help....”

He said in a surprisingly loud voice: “No! I’ll be all right. Wait....”

His struggle was short and sharp. He seemed to be trying, over and over again, to start the interrupted action of his heart. With every failure, fear and amazement made more horrible the expression of his wide-open eyes. Lilah watched. Once she cried out: “You mustn’t! For my sake!” Flagg tried to smile, to reassure her. He seemed to be listening. And the blood left his face, drained out, like a tide. His flesh was blue-white, livid. The physical agony seemed to waste him. Soon, Lilah thought, he would fall out of her arms. But he held himself upright with an effort, meeting the enemy again and again, and it was as if he held himself precariously on the rim of space.

Suddenly, for no appreciable reason, it was over. He slipped sideways, back upon the sofa, and his eyes closed. “I’m all right.... Only sorry.... Perhaps you know, now, how I love you....”

A servant was coming into the room. With a wrenching effort, Lilah steadied her voice and said: “What time is it?”

“Six o’clock, madam.”

“Is Miss Fuller in the library?”

“Yes, madam.”

“Ask her to come here.”

Grace Fuller came at once. Between them, they made Flagg comfortable; he lay with his arm under his head, apparently asleep. With deft, impersonal touches, Grace Fuller ascertained his pulse, wiped off his forehead, which was drenched with sweat, gave him water. She said nothing. Lilah did not meet her eyes. Her own feelings were confused; now that Flagg was safe, she could sense to the full her triumph; but how fragile a thing happiness had become--it depended on this man’s living! And it was doubtful whether he could resist the fatal pressure of the inevitable emotion. He lay exhausted, pallid, one hand hanging limply with fingers that brushed the floor.

Lilah turned her face away, afraid that Grace Fuller might see her expression, the mingling of pity and glory, of fear and expectancy.

“Is he all right? Will he die?”

“No,” Grace Fuller said.

At that, Flagg opened his eyes. “Die? Of course not! This happens very often. I shall be all right in half a second. I’m sorry and ashamed. Your kindness....”

He sat up.

Lilah’s gesture toward him was immediate; before she tempered its meaning, Grace Fuller had seen. But the nurse remained with her cool fingers on Flagg’s wrist. Only her lips twisted as if, before that revelation, she wanted to laugh. She helped Flagg to his feet.

“Good of you,” he said.

He bowed, apologized again and with a glance at Lilah, unreadable, went out and quickly downstairs.

“That’s war,” Grace Fuller remarked dryly. “Thousands like him, trying to....”

Lilah brushed her aside. “I’m going with him! He’s ill.... Let me go, I tell you....”

Grace Fuller caught Lilah’s arm, held her. “Lilah, don’t be a fool.”

Lilah cried wildly: “Let me go! I must.... He’s ill.... Oh, damn you!”

In a white fury she struck, clawed, but Grace Fuller pinioned her arms, shook her, twisted her back, away from the door.

“I love him! I love him! I’m not ashamed. Tell Robert! Tell every one! I want it over.”

“You’re hysterical,” Grace Fuller said.

Lilah ceased struggling. For an appalling moment she thought her own heart had stopped. She sagged against Grace Fuller’s shoulder; while a dark tide of feeling rose, submerged her, receded again.

“I love him,” she repeated in a dull voice. “That’s all. What can I say, or do?”

She straightened and pushed Grace Fuller away. “Now, you two can dance on my grave.”