Chapter VII

In her own room again, Lilah went to the telephone and called Flagg at his apartment. A man’s voice answered that Major Flagg was not well.

“I know,” Lilah said impatiently. “I am Mrs. Peabody. I must speak to him.”

“I am Major Flagg’s physician,” was the reply, in a tone Lilah thought a shade too dry. “He cannot speak to any one.” He went on to explain that Major Flagg was not seriously ill, but that he must, for a fortnight, be absolutely quiet.

“I saw him less than an hour ago,” Lilah insisted. “He seemed quite all right.”

The physician, with some acerbity, added that Major Flagg had had another attack on his way home. He was in bed and must stay there, undisturbed....

“Thank you,” Lilah said.

She turned away from the instrument with a frightened gesture. She couldn’t see him! That meant she must meet disaster alone; she had, irrevocably, committed herself to Grace Fuller. No matter what happened to Flagg, whether he lived or died, she had lost Robert....

She began, unsteadily, to dress for dinner. The Sinclairs, the lissome May and her husband, were coming, and, as a balance to their unimportant millions, Lilah had invited the American violinist and his curtly intelligent bride, a woman who might amuse the Sinclairs because she belonged to one of the richest families in the country. In the Sinclairs, two fortunes had come together, and the only enthusiasm they had in common was money. Their interest was not vulgar, it was, rather, fraternal. They enjoyed communion with the rare, kindred blessed.

Lilah thought: “I’ve got to pretend. But none of this is mine--”

In her chemise, with her hair tumbled on her shoulders, she realized that she had not called her maid. When she did, it was with a certain humility that she said: “I am very late.”

The maid said: “Yes, m’am,” and went into the bathroom to start the tub. She was a pretty mulatto, a soft, slight creature with the gait of an enchantress. Lilah had never liked her because she had the air of knowing everything, and the suave, the velvet quality of her St. Kitt’s English gave her a certain distinction.

Lilah wondered: “Could she have heard that row with Grace?”

She studied the girl’s back, her unhurried, expert gestures, and when she straightened suddenly, and turned, Lilah was embarrassed.

“The bath’s ready, m’am.”

A shower of violet crystals sparkled in the tub, and as Lilah stirred them, testing the scented water with the tips of her fingers, she had a sharp memory of tin tubs and basins in Swiss _pensions_.... And, willfully, she recalled the lovers of Lorelay.... She glanced down at herself, silver-white, with little bubbles, like quicksilver, climbing over her skin, bursting on the surface of the water. How lovely her thighs were, indented, slim, young.... And her knees, her feet.... She could go to Lorelay with Flagg and send for that famous, that notorious, tin tub without shame. She was like Manet’s Olympe, not classical but adorable. Flagg would understand if she mentioned Lorelay and Olympe. Robert would not; or, if he did, he would be shocked....

“Seven o’clock, m’am.”

“Coming!”

In a robe of dark blue silk, thrown over a shift of cream chiffon, she faced her mirror, while the mulatto girl dressed her hair. Her panic had been replaced by exuberance. She felt certain that she could handle Grace. Flagg would say, do, nothing. She was safe for a fortnight, with both love and beauty....

“Draw it back, away from my ears. Not fluffy! Here, give me the comb! I’ve told you so many times.”

“Sorry, m’am.”

That pretty, petulant face, honey-colored, was reflected in the triple mirror in an unguarded moment and Lilah caught a flash of dislike and contempt from eyes that were usually turned aside.

“Have you a sweetheart?” Lilah asked, twisting her hair into the Second Empire contour she affected.

“Yes, m’am.”

“Does he love you?”

The mulatto shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. Men are funny. He’s a pretty man, but he gambles. He spends all my money. He’s a sailor.”

“Get me the black dress. I’ll want the white cameo ear-rings. No! Not there! In the leather box. Stupid! Stupid! I’m late.”

On her way downstairs, where the financial rating of the violinist’s wife was just dawning on the Sinclairs, Lilah stopped to speak to Grace Fuller.

“Grace?”

“Yes.” Grace Fuller was having her own dinner, in the fashion of nursery governesses, on a card-table before the fire.

“You’ve had dinner?”

“I’m having it--just.”

Lilah came into the room. She was very lovely. She wore no jewelry, save the heavy white cameos, set in gold, that dangled from her ears. She gave no hint of her actual years; Grace Fuller thought, in a moment of judgment, that she was like the city, a creation of that energy which is all nerves. There was something ageless in the slim, provocative, sexless body, thrust a little forward, the carriage of her head, with its dense weight of hair coiled under, her lips, painted like an Oriental’s, not scarlet, but magenta. She said lightly: “Am I all right? Will I do?”

“Beautifully,” Grace said, flushing.

Lilah bent down, and Grace became conscious of the odor of sandalwood. “Dear old Grace; I’m absolutely in your hands.”

“If you mean that I am not to say anything to Robert,” Grace replied, “I won’t. Things like this are too personal, too terrible, for an outsider--”

“I will know what to say when I see Robert,” Lilah interrupted. Her manner became, abruptly, sharp and decisive. “Or whether to say anything at all.” She added, almost carelessly: “My feeling may have been pity.”

Grace said nothing. The flush had mounted until her face burned, as if the shame of Lilah’s confession were hers. For the first time she had had a glimpse of Lilah’s weakness--she saw her exposed to defeat; the revelation was, somehow, humiliating. Grace Fuller turned her eyes away.

“I think you can trust me,” she said. And, instantly, she hated herself for not having struck. Now it was too late.

Lilah went downstairs.

Her guests were already launched. Fred Sinclair was staring at the violinist’s wife with the satisfaction of an entomologist who has happened upon a singularly rare insect. Mrs. Sinclair was testing her charm upon an unyielding surface; the violinist was more a priest than an artist. Lilah found him parrying Mrs. Sinclair’s sentimental thrusts with his own peculiar irony. He despised any one who wasted his time. Lilah trembled for the success of her dinner. She said deftly that in Robert’s absence she depended perhaps too much on her friends; she suggested loneliness and a peculiar sensitiveness to “atmospheres.” The violinist promptly pocketed his ill-temper and his bride surrendered to Mr. Sinclair’s butterfly-on-a-pin manner. On the way in to dinner, she graciously stated the size of her fortune, Mr. Sinclair’s collection thereby gaining a precious specimen.

Lilah had counted on Flagg as a sixth at the table. In her failure to warn the servants, a place had been set and she had to explain. Immediately, the silver and glass were removed, the chair taken away, but Flagg’s name had interested the violinist.

“I’m sorry. I’ve always wanted to know him. What a thundering crime--a man like that, gassed! There could be no survival of the fittest in such warfare.”

He spoke with bitterness of the destruction of the world’s best brains and of the inevitable hiatus--there would be a wide break in both science and art. As it was, the few who were left carried a double burden; their responsibility to the past and to the generation that had had no expression save in death. Flagg was one of the men the world could not spare. The indignity of his suffering now--

The violinist broke off: “I know it isn’t considered polite to talk about the war. In Europe, people aren’t so squeamish. It happened. It may happen again.”

Mrs. Sinclair thought not.

Lilah smiled at the violence of his retort; he had served on the Russian front, had seen the Kolchak debacle, and, before that, had flown over Triest and Pola, Villach and Wien, with d’Annunzio. Mrs. Sinclair listened to his tirade with a pained expression, as if he were being intentionally disagreeable. Why on earth talk about war when you could talk about the theaters, reducing and prohibition--there were enough interesting things....

Lilah pictured Mrs. Sinclair in her Long Island house, a Tudor mansion set down in a vast wilderness of new rose-gardens upon a featureless plain, not unadorned but unhallowed. Her security, established when she was a child, had been deepened by the possession of this enormous stone house, a fortress against chance or change; in rooms as cold, as cheerless, as echoing as a series of railway terminals, she seemed removed from those things which happen to all of us; the walls were too thick and too new to admit defeat. Lilah wondered what Mrs. Sinclair would do if the armies the violinist invoked should trample the Sinclair flower-beds and pepper the Tudor walls with machine-gun bullets.... Send for the Swiss butler, probably, and die, game and unconvinced, sipping a dry Martini.... Lilah could not decide which counted for more--the indifference of the Sinclairs or the awareness of the violinist; they believed that the future was negligible, the present amusing, which sufficed; he believed that the world could be saved only by incredible effort, a supreme, unending, unified intention....

He complained that there was no flame in humanity--too much water had been thrown on it, perhaps. Life was drab unless kept at an artificial, stimulated pitch; pleasure, purchased, had taken the place of faith....

Mrs. Sinclair, bending her willowy body from the waist, whispered to Lilah: “My dear--what’s this I hear about you and Putnam Flagg? It wouldn’t do for you--it wouldn’t do at all! He’s penniless. Now, don’t look innocent. A dozen people have seen you together, lunching at _tea rooms_ and meeting in _art galleries_ ... it’s awfully touching, but no one believes these naïve--”

“May,” her husband said.

“Oh, yes.” She turned again to the violinist. “Faith. You were saying--?”

* * * * *

In the morning Flagg telephoned. “Did you think that I would pay any attention to a doctor’s orders? I want to see you.”

His voice unnerved Lilah. Every time it was like the first time--a breathless recognition, a summons, alarming and unavoidable, to a self beyond self. “He was very severe--” Suddenly her voice broke. Through a flood of frightened tears, she stammered: “Oh, my darling! My darling!”

Flagg said gravely: “Lilah--if I could comfort you.... Will you get your hat and come over here? It’s quite respectable. There’s a nurse, who will, if I ask her, leave us alone. Or, if you prefer, she will stay in the room.”

“I can’t. It isn’t possible! I might be seen.”

“And what if you are? Before long every one who knows you will know that you love me. Things like this can’t be gone at politely. When you break up a marriage, it’s war. It’s got to be war. And neither of us can afford to be afraid, now, or later. You understand, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then come!”

“But--”

He was silent, and Lilah knew that the issue was important. If she refused, she would in all probability never see Flagg again.

“You’re better?”

“Yes.... Take a taxi. You know the number. These are bachelor quarters, but I’ve prepared the elevator man--he’ll bring you up.... I’ll be a lot better when I see you.”

Lilah thought: “Don’t be squeamish. All the women you know do this sort of thing.”

Aloud, she said: “I’ll come at once.”

She dressed with a romantic attention to detail. She chose a small black hat with an air of intrigue and sophistication; a veil that seemed to shut her beauty away so that her eyes were remote, enticing beneath the rakish brim of the tricorn.

A streak of conventionality, a dislike of criticism, warred with her eagerness to see Flagg. She sent her motor away and walked westward to the Avenue, then uptown. Lilah wanted to have her own way but to be considered above reproach. The possibility of scandal frightened her; she thought: “I’m not a coward! Only, to be torn to bits and thrown to the yellow journals to make a middle-class holiday! A Sunday supplement martyr! It’s so stupid.... So ugly.... Robert and Junius, all of us--” With a shock of relief, she thought: “I’m glad I haven’t a child.”

Still, she might have. Even now, she might have! Robert’s child. Even now, as she went to Flagg. But that would be a loathsome trick of destiny; it couldn’t be! Couldn’t.... She didn’t deserve punishment; not such a punishment! God thought of people--there must be some sort of divine justice. Now that she had love--But suppose, as Flagg had said, that there were a God beyond God, and no one watching, no one caring....

She found herself standing before a shop window, and was conscious of the blurred reflection of herself, the fashionable outline of a woman of the world. There was security, insurance against a detestable, a repugnant reality, in the fact of her worldliness. Like Mrs. Sinclair, she was a product of civilization, a vital, representative image of society, removed, by her unquestioned right to her position, from the blind attacks of destiny. She was powerful because she was instructed. She was indomitable because she was intelligent. If there was a God beyond a God she could reach Him. She would not take punishment--need not--

She shook herself, tried to stare at the things in the window--a Florentine chair, more graceful than most of them; a Persian bowl; a Flemish chest; a Luini; a strip of ecclesiastical velvet; a pair of Waterford glass chandeliers....

Her thoughts flew back to the house she had just left. She had wanted glass chandeliers for her bedroom--one on either side of the narrow mantel, to balance the _trumeau_. These were delightful--a shower of crystals, delicate as cobwebs after a rain. They were, probably, expensive....

Lilah hesitated. Her room was lifeless, almost gloomy; it needed such a sparkle as these little chandeliers would give.... She saw herself, moving about in a bland, crystal light....

She went into the shop, conscious, as always, nowadays, of her ability to reach out and take what she wanted. The chandeliers were displayed by a collector who flattered her by making no comments. That they were genuine, and rare, was beyond question.

“I’ll take them.”

“Very well.”

“Mrs. Robert Peabody.”

“I know. We had the pleasure of importing some Venetian glass--”

Lilah interrupted: “Be sure to send a man to hang the chandeliers.”

“Certainly. To-morrow.”

She went out again, somehow relieved, as if she had come unscathed through a hurricane. Buying things always gave her a sense of security. Silly of her, to have been afraid of something that could never happen to her ... never....

* * * * *

Flagg lived in the West Fifties, not far from the noisy “L” track where trains passed like steel comets, clattering, insistent.... An old man in an alpaca jacket admitted her to a narrow hallway and to a slow, dingy elevator operated by a cable. His face was scarlet; there seemed to have been an explosion of veins beneath the surface of the skin.... Without glancing at Lilah, he let the cable slip through his hands, as if, in his dejection and ennui, there could be no end to this ascent. Lilah thought: “How easy, after all.” He let her out and indicated a door “to the left. Push the button.”

Lilah saw the name “Flagg.” There was a rustle behind the door and it opened sharply. A woman in starched linen said: “Mrs. Peabody? Major Flagg is waiting. This way, please.”

Lilah had expected him to be in bed. But he rose from an arm-chair and smiled down at her.

“You’re better?”

“Yes.... Now! You were a long time getting here.”

“I walked.”

“Miss Peterson--Mrs. Peabody.”

The starched woman, who was, to Lilah, as featureless as an egg, bowed, murmured something and went out, closing the door.

“Don’t be afraid,” Flagg said. “I won’t keel over again. I’ll give you tea presently. But now I want to talk to you. You lovely thing! She can’t hear--there’s a corridor, and then my bedroom, where she’s sitting. Shall I send her away?”

“No. No.” Lilah shook her head. “It’s bad enough--my being here.”

He leaned forward and caught her hands, smiling. He drew off her gloves, turned her palms over and kissed them. His gestures were slow but there was nothing of Robert’s hesitancy about him; his eyes flew over her. She felt again that penetrating delight in him, and because he did not expect pity, her pity made her tremble; there was a maternal, a brooding pain in her heart. Without speaking, she went back to her eager search for the things she loved, enumerated them--the line of his cheek, the peculiar, sharp modelling of his lips, his lids, a way his hair had of growing, like a sort of fur, short, thick, lusterless--she wanted to stroke it, but she didn’t. Somehow, he was still a stranger whose presence excited and embarrassed her. She wondered if any one had ever known him; whether she would ever know him. Robert was like a plant that recoils at the touch of a prying finger. But Flagg was like an animal; he had the grace, the aloofness of an animal, the eyes of an animal. She was almost afraid to touch him. His absorption flattered her, as if a creature of the woods had strayed close to rub against her and purr--a big cat. Without stirring, she let him kiss her fingers, one after the other. And she felt again that sense of a moment prolonged, suspended, until she lost reality.

Her glance went beyond him to the room. She had never thought of him as living anywhere.... A shabby, slovenly room. Rows of white shelves were weighted with books. There were no photographs. Only a small bronze of a woman and a jar filled with pipes....

“This isn’t my place,” he said, glancing up quickly. “It belongs to a man I knew in France, who’s broke. He loves books, and I’ve had a feast....”

His eyes deepened and there came into them that look of a satyr, mischievous and sensual. She wanted to kiss him, but she held herself away. Something told her that there would be no going back after to-day; he would not grant her a reprieve.

“I’m sorry,” he began, “for what I said yesterday. In time, you’ll love love--not the idea, but the thing itself. That’s what I’m waiting for. When it comes to you, so that you understand it--its beauty and its penalty--you will lose yourself. And then you will be exquisite.”

“I love you,” she insisted, “now.”

He shook his head.

He relinquished her hands and, crossing the room, filled and lighted a pipe. Then he asked abruptly: “What are you going to tell your husband?”

“I don’t know.” Catching her breath, she evaded him: “Must I tell him anything?”

He did not answer. His expression was mocking. And angrily Lilah cried: “It isn’t easy! For you, yes! But for me--to break with a man who loves me and who doesn’t suspect--”

“Oh. He loves you. I didn’t know that. I had hoped that he didn’t. Are you sure he does?”

“Of course! It will kill him. He trusts me.”

“You haven’t betrayed him!” Flagg said sharply.

“What do you mean?”

“Love is never a betrayal. It’s the truth! I am convinced that it is a sin to deny love, under any circumstances, for any reason--to live with one man and love another is unmoral, ugly, inexcusable. To live with one woman and love another is to betray them both. I am not arguing on the side of promiscuousness. I despise filth. But there is, after all, a definite standard. A responsibility--to the emotion itself. There’s your obligation! Only, the world won’t recognize it.... You’ve got to be sure--dead certain--that what you feel justifies what you do.”

“You’re putting it up to me, then?”

He came over and kneeled beside her. He was asking something. His body pressed against her knees. His hands were supplicating. For the first time he was humble, but more than ever insistent; life itself, demanding that she say yes or no, that she take or leave, give or refuse. In spite of herself, she touched his hair, and with a terrifying sense of being lost, slipped forward into his arms.

“I’ll tell him, simply, that I love you.”

“When?”

She struggled back, away from him again. But Flagg remained on his knees, no longer a suppliant; stubbornly, he repeated: “When?”

“When he comes back--next week.”

She added, with a flash of disdain: “You might at least be sorry for him!” She put out her hand quickly and caught his. “I didn’t mean that! I hurt everybody. Don’t let me hurt you!”

Flagg laughed. “I don’t let myself be hurt.”

What he thought was: “If she cares for me, I can hurt her--that’s my weapon, and she knows it.” He got up and went to the window, stood there, smoking, his back turned. He waited with admirable restraint for Lilah to speak again. Behind him, she was absolutely silent. The sun had gone. The room was fading into the gray shadows of late afternoon, retreating, dimming, like a blurred photograph. Flagg kept his eyes on the street; his senses were aware of her; he had no comfort in her presence, but he wanted her there. Suddenly, she was close to him, soft, propitiating. She put her arms around him, pressed her face against his back and they stood, in silence, for a long time. Flagg no longer saw the city; that slate-gray twilight seemed to envelope them both, to isolate them. And he had a deep pity for himself and for her. What should be so simple, so natural, so uncomplicated, would be raveled and frayed and tarnished.... Between this moment and anything like the realization of happiness, there would be a struggle of egos--rebellion, shocked pride, jealousy, in conflict. Before he could show himself to her and lose himself in her loveliness, both of them would suffer. And for what? Because life was so confounded complicated--no passion could be single, perfect, but must be linked up to other passions, an endless tangle of little, petty feelings--like lichens on a tree. The growth was hindered, the sap cut off so that the blossoms withered and the whole plant, tree and parasite, came down into the dust, choked to death....

“Are you sure we’re right?” Lilah asked. “I’ve got to be sure! Isn’t it selfish to be happy?”

Flagg answered that to be unhappy was the worst sort of selfishness. For centuries the world had been in the grip of a superstitious fear of acknowledged happiness, as if being contented with one’s lot were an indication of alliance with the devil. If you sang, in old Salem, you were hanged for a witch. “But to-day, if you sing, you are selfish! And it amounts to the same thing--the world has its fingers crossed....”

Flagg asked, without turning: “Have you ever loved your husband, Lilah?”

Lilah pressed against him. “Don’t ask me, now, to say.... A moment.... Perhaps, yes. But not like this! I am perfectly willing to divorce him.”

Flagg wanted to know what reasons she would give. She said impatiently: “Why--I _want_ a divorce! Isn’t that enough? Such things are arranged. Nowadays, you don’t have to give reasons, do you?”

Flagg answered that he would prefer that she allow Robert to bring suit; the defection, such as it was, was hers; she had tired of her bargain; she had broken her word; she had found compensation. If any one was to blame, she was.... Lilah interrupted: “You’re mad! It would ruin me! It is accepted, usual, for men to take the public blame for these things--every one understands. It isn’t serious. Don’t you know--you silly--idealist--that in New York a man can arrange an adulterous affair by simply hiring a woman, a room and a witness? I know decent men, respectable men, who have done it, not once, but several times. Like vaccination, it doesn’t always take. My darling, you don’t want me talked about.... And it would be so funny.... Robert, in silk pajamas, entertaining a chorus girl.”

“You and I, in love--and your husband, caught with a hired adulteress in a rotten hotel, for your sake! What cheap irony! Such things are damned ugly. You and I will take our medicine, Lilah. Or we’ll renounce, now, what might be so fine. If you’re afraid, say so.”

After a moment, Lilah said, “I’m not afraid.”

She drew away. A knock at the door was followed, discreetly, by a professional inquiry: “You are feeling better, Major Flagg?” And that starched, rustling presence entered, carrying a glass. With a gesture of rebellion, funny because it was unconscious, Flagg took the mixture and drank it.

“You’re talking too much,” the nurse said. With another crackle of starched skirts, she moved from lamp to lamp and the room came into sharp outline. The slovenly carpet and worn chairs, a frayed scarf on the table....

“I’ll go,” Lilah said quickly.

“Hang the doctor!” Flagg exploded. “I beg your pardon, Miss Peterson--but doctors don’t always understand.”

She took the empty glass from him, shrugging her shoulders. And the door closed upon her with a disapproving bang.

“I must go,” Lilah said again. “I must. If anything should happen to you--”

Flagg made her sit down. He made her remove the concealing veil and the little black hat. He began to take the pins out of her hair, but, laughing, she stopped him. She could not, now, imagine that he had ever been ill; a mood of playfulness had followed his rebellion; he was curiously like a young animal again, lost in his delight in her. He was lovable, willful; she stayed because he wanted it. It was hard to refuse him anything. And she couldn’t see that her being there hurt him--he had forgotten his enemy in his discovery of Lilah. Sitting on the floor with his arm thrown across her knees, he talked about himself. Himself, as a little boy. As an almost grown boy. As a young man. It was as if he wanted her to share everything, all in a moment; as if he could make her see the whole pattern of his life, so that he would never be alone again. Lilah could feel herself change, relent, bend down to him with a lovely tenderness. It was what she had always wanted to be, the way she had wanted to feel, only that no one had let her be herself. People had allowed her to be hard and bright and dominating! Now she was the woman she might have been. The simplest things he said touched her. She had no desire to ridicule, to hurt him. She wanted him to want her, to need her, to get closer and closer to her heart.

“I wish I had seen you when you were a little boy,” she said.

“I was a sort of flat face and terribly earnest. From the beginning, before I could reason, I wanted to know about God. I couldn’t believe. And the harder they tried to make me believe, the more stubborn I was. God was unimaginable. They sent me to Sunday school, where I sat with my underlip sticking out, denying God with my muscular system--braced against acceptance. I remember that this refusal made me, in my own eyes, an outcast. I thought of myself as the loneliest and wickedest child on the crust of the globe. But I believed only what I could see, touch or smell.” He shook his head. “And I never got a whiff of God! I remember that one day a sort of evangelist came to the Sunday school. He asked all the little boys and girls who believed in God to stand up. I sat where I was, burning with shame. He leveled at me a shouting and frothing, invective, hate and threats of damnation--eternal. And how I loathed God! When he got through he asked all the little boys and girls who didn’t believe in God to stand up, and I stood up, alone....

“Aren’t kids everlastingly funny? I hadn’t an ounce of prevarication in me; I told the truth, always, until I was a grown man, when I learned that there are times when the truth hurts. Then I drew in my claws. I make velvet paws nowadays. But that doesn’t affect my honesty--I am deadly honest with myself.”

Lilah wondered whether he could feel her shivering with delight in being near him, whether he saw how her eyes looked at him. She could never go back to Robert. She could never again pretend. It was going to be hard. It was going to hurt her to strip herself naked of pretense and fight for this new, this strange and wonderful raiment.

“Did you ever change,” she asked unsteadily, “about God?”

He was launched again. He told her about his student days in Germany--how he had gone back, patiently, to the sources. His days of pessimism. His romantic year. A period of mysticism. A frightened, at first tentative groping through the mazes of science. Then, something like a personal conviction, emerging.... He began to shake off support and to stand alone, almost against his will, for to stand alone was a responsibility. It forever removed him from the sensuous, happy, careless self he had wanted to be and demanded that he face facts, cold, brutal, unadorned and make of them what he could. God came to him out of these facts--not the God he had refused to believe in--a vastly different--

He made her see, somehow, why he was not afraid of pain or death, and why he was reconciled. He hadn’t much longer--but why should he have longer? Only to love her. To make her happy, if that was what she wanted.

“I didn’t know you could care like this. But since you do--”

She still trembled; he could not help but see what she was feeling. The thing that hurt her now was that he would have to know how little and selfish she had been. The self she had to offer him was inadequate. Her magic was tawdry, like cheap spangles on a dancer’s skirt. Her beauty was painted on. The reality, the real Lilah had nothing to give him. And some day, when he had stopped loving her technique, he would look for her art, and find nothing, only fear and an ugly desire to keep him, at all costs. She saw herself, in a sort of contorted and nightmarish vision, pleading with him; she saw his indifference--no, his recognition--crushing her down. It wasn’t Robert and Junius, scandal, that she was afraid of; it was not having Flagg. That was the most terrible thing--to be alone again, inventing enthusiasms, because the reason for being was not there.

This was what Robert had meant.

“You’re not listening,” Flagg said.

“I am. I am.”

“I changed,” he went on, from what beginning Lilah could not guess, “as every one changed. And like every one else, I saw freedom as the most desirable end, gaining it all important. Only that I differed from most in that I didn’t want freedom for personal reasons. I’ve always been singularly free of the crooked, inherited notions that hold men back. But a freedom that releases the mental power of humanity--I can’t make you understand; I’ve only the vaguest notion myself! But I see that if we don’t adapt ourselves, we’ll disappear from the earth. We don’t need web feet or fluffy little wings or snouts, yet we do need an entirely new sort of mind. And the old way of thinking has got to be pitched out, forgotten.”

He clasped her hands, tight, between both of his. “But we can’t pitch it out all at once! The social wheel is still revolving, although the engine has been smashed--it is carried forward by its own momentum, down-hill--a few hundred years of coasting! The survivors will look back at us as we look back at the Neanderthal ape--that’s how fast we’re going.... In the meantime, here we are, you and I, trying to conform to the decencies.”

“Are we?” Lilah asked. In spite of herself, she laughed. “I don’t think it’s decent, exactly, to cheat Robert. If we’re being honest....”

He interrupted: “Lilah, have you stopped to think about me?”

“Why, yes.”

“Aren’t you thinking about yourself?”

She shook her head.

He insisted: “Do you know what I want? What I dream of? Hours of sunshine. Hours of perfectly imbecile happiness, lying on a green hill with my head in your lap, watching the clouds go over. Must we wait? It isn’t so far to Spring. Can’t we go somewhere--I know a town in Connecticut, off the tourist track, where we’d be let alone. In April, the frogs sing at dusk, and the air is moist, cool, full of little gnats that dance as the sun goes down. I used to go there, years ago, to watch things grow. A marvelous season, Lilah. There’s a stir, actual, in the soil, and those prying, green fingers come through.... Suppose you and I were there to watch it together? I stayed at a farmhouse. We could go there. The apple orchard--if it hasn’t changed, and God forbid!--is deep with grass. And our room would be under the eaves....”

“You mustn’t talk like this!”

“Why not?”

“You mustn’t.”

“Does it hurt you? Tell me!”

“Yes.”

“Then I know I’m right. You’ve got to come to me as soon as you’ve told your husband. It isn’t fair to take from him what you don’t deserve--that house, and these clothes and all your ease and luxury! It doesn’t belong to you! After to-day, I’ll hate every hour you spend there. I want you to give back everything he’s given you. I’m not jealous, only I believe in value received.”

Lilah felt like a runner. Breathlessly, she dodged this obstacle. “You wouldn’t expect Robert to bargain?”

“I’m not thinking of Robert. I’m thinking of you. What I want you to be. If you love me, you’ll come to me, free, not all tangled up in another man’s possessions.”

She pushed him away.

“I’ve got to go.”

“Not yet. It’s only six o’clock.”

“But it’s dark. What will that nurse think?”

“I’m all right. I only want you.”

“I know. But some day you may have too much of me.”

“Stay.”

She got up and he stood close, pleading. Lilah was afraid, with that same delicious fear. Now, she wanted to hide her trembling from him, to ward off what must happen if he guessed the extent, the danger, of her surrender. She began to fasten her veil, her arms, in tight, black sleeves, upraised; Putnam Flagg watched her, and, characteristically, avoided, at that moment, any caress. When she glanced up, he said: “Very charming. What a minx you are! An artist. I admire you inordinately, if for nothing more than your gift of putting me off!”

Suddenly she clung to him. “Tell me the truth. Are you going to get well?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it terrible--the pain?”

“Bad enough. As if a hand squeezed, here, harder and harder. I could die, if I’d let myself. Only I won’t.”

“What does the doctor say?”

“Nothing. He’s used to bad hearts.”

“I hate doctors. They’re beasts! I hate suffering. I hate bodies.” She beat with her palms against his breast. “It’s terrible. Terrible! That you should suffer so! And we stand here, talking about houses and clothes and my owing something to Robert. When I only owe myself to you, now and forever.”

They kissed. They trembled against each other. And Lilah had never known such giving. He said: “The world’s full of ugliness. It needn’t be, perhaps. But it is. We’ll have to face this pain of mine along with the rest.... Now I’ll let you go.”

She went out into the street again. No one she knew was, at the moment, passing. She turned East, facing a cold wind. Her figure passed in and out of the squares and rounds of light cast by shop windows and street lamps, hurrying, bent a little forward. Her thoughts were hurrying, hurrying, ahead of her, toward the Spring, a dusk when frogs would sing and gnats dance, and she would lie against Flagg, holding the pain away with her two arms, her lips, her love....