Chapter C: G. Poore

_Lines_

The cold pale patina of sky,
The brown upon the woodland leaf
With all frail lovely things that die
Blend in the autumn’s grief.

For in each withered autumn flower
Is wonder where the dead may go,
And we slight children of an hour
May live and never know.

JOHN R. CHAMBERLAIN.

_The Great Pan Jandrum_

A beautiful tolerance of the various actions of all other people is perhaps the most comprehensive statement of the virtue we admired in him so zealously. An ingenuously boastful boy of twelve would find in him a ready admirer of his most cherished deeds, and he appeared to really appreciate the condescension of the youth of eighteen who saw fit to confide in him, and to take their opinionated selves with decent ceremony where others among their elders would have been merely annoyed or else distressingly amused. People you had always regarded as obviously undesirable, you found him praising--not in the manner of one who champions the weaker side on principle, but because he actually found strange things to like about them. But he was not one of the quiet, gentle, charitable type whose humanity seems the result almost of a want of character, and as such a questionable asset: he relished things with the eager tastes of a performer rather than an onlooker, being blessed also with a watchful and sometimes bursting sense of humor which was as his religion, making him deal with events in the guise of a priestly buffoon and people with a surgery as incisive as it was good-natured.

He was a connoisseur of people--a connoisseur of the happier type who does not simply make a few things his own and damn the unfortunate rest, but who finds that all food for the soul is good food, after all. Thus he used to pick up all sorts of people and become tremendously fond of them overnight. Any genuine person--whether a self-centered young man or a despicable old one, or his gardener’s wife--was of the greatest importance in his eyes. A trace of sentiment or pomposity in one of the subjects of his observations was to him an intellectual emetic as regards that person, but practically all other forms of human failing delighted him quite as much, if not more than the most inspiring strength. You felt that he, for one, had attained to a perfect freedom from himself, so that he could sit back, unlike the rest of us, and be entertained by the diverse abnormalities of his companions: that he found his own passions wholly in the understanding perusal of those of other people.

An Irish servant once said of him: “Sure, now, he does like to see the young people have a good time!” and it expressed brilliantly his attitude. For to his mind, apparently all people were young people whom he was watching at their diversions. In fact, if it had not been for his hilarious sharing of our pleasures, he would have been to us rather like a god: for he seemed older than we, as though he had known of old the great lives upon Olympus and were down here to gratify some fatherly instinct of sympathy for us. And when he sometimes left us, one sensed the withdrawal of considerably more than a presence. We were accustomed to him as one of the most active figures on the scene, but still, when he went away, it was as if a harmonious background had also been removed. In appearance he was fat. His head was large and his face grave, in repose, like that of a serious child.

There were stories, I was once shocked on finding out, about the Great Pan Jandrum’s youth--stories of a vagueness that implied things about him quite incongruous to the people who knew him now. Did he then have a common youth, with all its attendant distortions?--it seemed impossible. Evidently it had not been a romantic theatrical youth either, in spite of its present shaded character. One lady simply said he had been “nasty” and let it go at that. He seems to have been a commonplace person then--aggressively commonplace, with all the nauseating poses of his age strong in him, like diseases. Alcohol had played a part, it seems; and he was not one of those who were made genial or attractive by its use. One could have the heresy to make a decent guess, after all this, as to one origin of his widespread tolerance.

But the placidity of his middle years had been of an amplitude to swallow and almost entirely submerge these indefinite and hushed enormities. So if any dignity in him had given it a chance, the community, which was not large, would have looked upon him as a benevolent influence. At a feast, without his contagious humor, he would still have been a sort of golden aura to the occasion; to meet him was to come away eased of the life-long burden of yourself, having heard him laugh; and he had a gift for rendering people unable to look seriously in the face of a calamity. You were always trying, in spite of yourself, to worship him, he was so grand, and so you would have, except that he was too dynamic for a pedestal.

It almost made him, as a person, not ring true. His rôle was too exact. Occasionally one would find one’s-self looking intently at his serious, childish face--and wondering if there were not something behind it besides a fund of geniality. He was too much of a cheerful background; too understanding of the weaknesses of his neighbors; and in his humor far too thorough not to be sometimes suspected to unreality. But it was a passing doubt at best, and quite conceivably the product of our imaginations as we looked backward from a later date. At any rate, he was enjoyed and respected as a very rare personage indeed: a friend of everyone alike, though no one in particular. You might have described him to a perfect stranger as “a very amusing person”, but if he was mentioned you really did not feel that way yourself. You did not think of him as a person at all, in fact, but as the thing he was, or stood for, as though he were the representative of something.

But it seems that fate had written that the Pan Jandrum--the wise and genial Pan Jandrum--the Great Pan Jandrum himself, was riding, all this time, for a fall.

Fortunately, I was away when it happened, as I should not like to have seen it. For it is certain I should have shared the curiously intense feeling of revulsion--or rather simply depression that settled upon the community afterward. Several things contributed to the effect of the event, chief of which was, of course, its publicity. Had he not chosen the particular evening he did to cast aside every vestige of self-control, no one might have known. But Mrs. Joe-Billy happened, on that winter night, to be giving a dinner at her big house up on the hill to which the Great Pan Jandrum had been invited, and from which he stayed, for a time, conspicuously and unaccountably absent.

Whether he was accidentally started by some inadvertent friend, or whether he deliberately wished to enjoy himself, I do not know. Perhaps he was just tired of his heroic rôle: that is, of our ridiculous yet touching attitude toward him.

Those who saw him during the earlier part of the evening, at the club, never could be made to see the tragic side of the whole affair. Upon them he apparently made an ineffaceable impression and from what we others heard, it must have been a performance in the genuine grand manner. It was, in a way, the glorious apex of his unreal career among us. People who did not see him there were always very pitiless about the way he acted, pity not being reserved, I suppose, for the unpardonable failure of something as great as the Pan Jandrum. But I have seen no one who did see him there who could tell of any part of it without putting it on a lofty epic scale--even the saturnine barber whose pride in his control of the imagination was like a perpetual flower in his buttonhole. The quantity he had to drink was grown, by the time it reached my ears, to an heroic figure. The picture was of him seated in his shirt sleeves alone at a small table, immersed in bottles. The smoke-filled grill room was thronged with young men and dignitaries tip-toe on tables and chairs and chairs on tables in order to hear him and see his stupendous gestures. Nobody could ever remember anything, he said, but it was so impressive as to need but a day for it to acquire a legendary character. I know for a fact that one of the twelve old women of the village who lived a whole block away sent to find the cause of the noise, and that old Mr. Galhoolie roared with the best until it was too much for him and he was sick--in the English sense--all down his patriarchal white beard. I have found myself wishing I had been there, as I wish I had been at Camelot or at one of the receptions given the Greek of many devices on his wanderings.

But I do not wish I had been up on the hill that night, though that was the dramatic part of the show. It came after he was known to have escaped from the club alone, after a lengthy disappearance. Up there, they had naturally supposed that he failed to fill his place on account of some trivial domestic tragedy, or the advent of friends; or that something had at last got into his solid old liver which during so many years of good living had been besieged in vain. But when they heard he was coming up there in all his magnificence they were horrified. A morbid curiosity chained them there, but they awaited him in silent, breathless apprehension, imagining him drawing slowly toward them like an evil fate over the snowy intervening mile of road. Their reticence was curious, and explained only by the unbelievableness of the Great Pan Jandrum’s being uncontrolled--hilarious, crude, outlandish--they didn’t know what. And they appreciated the occasion at once. It was no ordinary man about to be foolish, disheartening as that would be under the circumstances, but they realized that it would touch each one of us inasmuch as we had put a certain rare type of faith in what he was.

If only it had been hilarity, or crudity, or wildness that greeted them! Their wait had been long enough and tense, with them talking in low voices--asking each other hesitating little questions about what they thought might happen. Suddenly some one started back with a gasp, and they all turned to find his serious child’s face outside the window, intently peering at them.

There is no need to describe his actions subsequent to his entering the house. He was not outlandish. He was merely quiet in voice and manner with an appalling drunkard’s dignity, and he was fully dressed. The cheer had all gone out of him. He talked for an hour without pause, first to one, then to another, entirely about himself and with horrible seriousness. Sententiousness and pomposity from the Great Pan Jandrum! His tone was threatening; almost challenging all the while, and there was that in his face which prevented any thought of stopping him. Intimate, personal, half-finished thoughts issued from him like loathsome abortions. He took the beautiful Mrs. Galhoolie’s hand in his and told her he reverenced and respected her so much that he could not ever love her as the others did. Everyone was left knowing in excessively sentimental terms just what he thought of them. Everything he uttered was an indecent exposure; every sentence tore away another portion of the disguise--as it looked--that he had been so long building. He was operating on himself in their presence, exposing the nauseating entrails of his mind--so comfortable from the outside--and forcing upon them the knowledge that he was as sordid and commonplace as they in their very worst moments. When they brought him home and left him they could hear him sobbing--great, deep-voiced, mountainous sobs that shook his bed.

But for me, the story of the evening gave the key to the man and made him interesting. You may admire a point of view and you may even bask in it, but you cannot make it your friend. It sounded precisely as though a pent-up flood of gnawing sentiment and egoism had been let loose in him. He must have had incurably Byronic tendencies which had at some time or other offended his critical sense, and you saw him now as a man despairingly and acutely aware of his vulgar heritage of ego who had with his almost passionate interest in the fortunes of other people built up the most powerful defense against himself that he could think of. And there always was, too, I reflected, something of the fanatic about his rôle of humorist.

I should have been disturbed on our first meeting soon after the performance, had it not come as a surprise. I was in Paris, and as I was leaving my hotel one night for some kind of a festivity he popped out of the darkness and shook me by the hand. We parted hastily, I having time for little greeting. “Have a good time, now!” he said as I left, and that old characteristic phrase of his rang in my ears as I walked off down the street. He had said it with his usual cheerful, interested smile and I looked in vain for a found-out expression I had expected to notice in his face. I wondered if he realized what his one false step had meant to our imaginations. For, as I afterwards observed, it was not a question of his brazening it out: he evidently had consigned it to the limbo of to-be-expected mistakes with a shrug of the shoulders and took it for granted that we had done the same. But, however this may be, I saw that he had already begun to build another structure of worship in my esteem at any rate. Already my newly discovered man was disappearing, engulfed as in a very splendid costume which he had removed for a minute. And when next I saw him at home I had again the ancient feeling of being bathed in a warm electric light--that unaccountably had sparks, as well.

W. T. BISSELL.

_Maurice Hewlett_

In 1893 Mr. Edmund Gosse, with a fine perception of literary tendencies, wrote: “It is my conviction that the limits of realism have been reached; that no great writer who has not already adopted the experimental system will do so; and that we ought now to be on the lookout to welcome (and, of course, to persecute) a school of novelists with a totally new aim, part of whose formula must unquestionably be a concession to the human instinct for mystery and beauty.” The next year, with “Ebb Tide”, “The Prisoner of Zenda”, and “Under the Red Robe”, the signs were unmistakable, and what the critics have pleased to call the Romantic Revival had begun. It was on the crest of this wave of romanticism that Maurice Hewlett first appeared, and when that wave had spent itself fifteen years later his best work was done. He was at once a child of this movement, exhibiting in varied form its most familiar phases, and a strange free spirit, deriving from no literary movement, a romanticist by nature, not the exigencies of his art. And so, if we feel the influence of the period in “The Forest Lovers”, “The New Canterbury Tales”, “The Fool Errant”, and the rest, it is in “The Queen’s Quair” and in “Richard Yea-and-Nay” that we come upon the very essence of Hewlett’s art, an art which was quite distinctively his own. These two novels he wrote to please himself. They have been called his finest work.

As Lionel Johnson said of Scott, so he might have said of Maurice Hewlett: “In him the antiquarian spirit awoke a passion, instead of a science.” Hewlett was mystically touched by the beauty of the Middle Ages and by the beauty of the Renaissance. He was a mediaevalist, a quattrocentist par excellence, but above all this, or perhaps, better, as a physical embodiment of all this, he loved Italy with a passionate, sensitive love. It was this love for Italy which so subtly affected his character and gave to his novels their color and their warmth, although strange enough very little of his life was spent in Italy and little of his best work deals with its history or its people. It was of England that he wrote in “The Queen’s Quair”, of England and the Crusades in “Richard Yea-and-Nay”. So, if we grant to his affection for Italy and her art the warmth and color of his novels, we must look for their life, their vitality, to this same England and his understanding love of her past, his oneness in spirit with even the simplest of those characters which moved across the broad canvas of her history.

It is not for me to say that either the color and warmth of Italy’s art or the life and vitality of England’s past were exclusively the foundation stones of Hewlett’s art. His novels are, all of them, rich with intermingled threads like tapestry--not the heavy brocaded tapestry of the poet Spenser, but a tapestry brilliant, yet often misty and confused, that was quite his own. His backgrounds he built of hundreds of figures, quickly and sharply etched in a manner remarkably reminiscent of Sir Thomas Malory and Froissart. Against this background which he had created with so lavish a care he laid his greater figures--and I think of Richard and John Lackland and the old King, Henry the Second, from “Richard Yea-and-Nay”--figures which he had limned with broad, bold strokes and touched with a quiet wit. The effect is not only that of tapestry but of old stained glass. We marvel how the simple, splendid figures stand out and are yet a part of a delicately wrought background.

But in the movement of these greater figures before so complex a background lay the weakness of Hewlett’s art. He knew the pageantry and color of the lives he wrote about, but it was not given him to read deeply beneath the gaily painted surface they presented. The movement of his characters through the unfolding scenes of his romances is not puppetry. Hewlett’s touch was too fresh, too original for that. It is only that we see in part, whereas if he had had the power the whole would be revealed to us. In his greatest novel, and in that novel almost alone, the veil is lifted for a few moments. In those moments I think he knew Richard.

Perhaps, though, more than all else, the factor that can undermine the permanence of Hewlett’s work is his style. His writing is twisted, tortured, and--in the reading--perplexing. His prose is almost never rhythmical; it is often awkward and harsh. The books he wrote to please himself, his best work, he filled with archaic turns of speech until their very pages seem to bear the marks of age. They are, as some one has said, “the inventions of a connoisseur in the queer and remote, a sort of transformation of Henry James’s involutions into terms of olden days”.

To cavil at this is difficult, as it is difficult to cavil at the design and composition of the romances themselves, they are so characteristic of their author. He turned his hand to modern England in the novels of the English countryside, “Rest Harrow”, “Halfway House”, and the others. He came back to the manner of his earlier period in “Brazenhead the Great” and worked for a time in the field of Norse legend. But he will be remembered longest by those two strange, tangled, brilliant romances, “Richard Yea-and-Nay” and “The Queen’s Quair”, the best expression his art ever found. Maurice Hewlett was a colorist, a romancer, a passionate lover of ancient ways. We should give thanks for the mystery of the Bowing Rood in the church of the nuns at Fontevrault; for the beauty of Richard, his face covered with his shield, standing at dawn upon the hills before Jerusalem.

RICHARD L. PURDY.

_The Egolatress_

Infinitely more lovely in the winter darkness than in the revealing light of day, Summit Avenue stretched beneath the moon. The clashing architectures of the huge houses were mercifully blurred into harmony by the night, and the long piles of snow drew the picture into a loose, graceful unity. Beneath the glowing strands of the boulevard lights flowed a double current of automobiles, in smooth streams that wound out to the suburbs and downtown to the bays of commerce and amusement.

Before the doors of the Territorial Club the streams turned in a sweeping curve, and occasionally cars left the current to turn in, pause a moment before the pseudo-Gothic entrance, and then join the parked flank in the driveway.

A long blue roadster, once sleek and new, now battered, and dusty still from months of confinement, slid to a stop, like a stick caught on the bank of a stream. The young driver busied himself with the intricate process of locking his car. It was dear to him. His companion climbed out, shivering.

“Great Scott! You have cold nights up there,” he said. “At home there’s no snow on the ground at all.”

The owner of the car laughed. “You’ll get used to it, in two weeks. Throw that rug over the radiator, will you?” He finished locking the car, got out, and, as an extra precaution, lifted the hood and disconnected the spark-plugs.

“Can’t be too careful of the old boiler,” he said apologetically. “If it was stolen I wouldn’t get another one out of dad for a century.”

In the lobby he nodded to the young negro who came to take their coats, with the familiarity of a member, and turned to his companion, who was glancing curiously at the chattering groups of men and girls in evening dress who were in the lobby.

“From the crowd, Tommy, I gather we’ve looked in on some one’s party. Wait, and I’ll see who’s giving it.”

In a tall, loosely hung way, Tommy was rather handsome; distinguished, certainly. He had deep grey eyes, and a way of taking all things with a slow, questioning smile, that either charmed or exasperated. He was very dark; a Southerner; twenty-two perhaps.

The other, short, and sandy-haired, and blue-eyed, carrying himself with that preoccupied air of conscious importance which is so often the aspect of short people, was in excellent contrast. By their oppositeness they set one another off; rather to Tommy’s advantage.

“Grant’s party, for Millicent,” his host said, returning. “Mrs. Grant’s an old social-enemy and friend of mother’s; we’re invited to stay.”

He led the way down a short hall to the right, past parted velvet curtains, toward the source of the music. Before the formidable Mrs. Grant, a matron of the over-stuffed type, he performed the amenities.

“Mrs. Grant, this is Tommy Squire, my roommate at school. Tommy’s from Richmond.”

Mrs. Grant was very happy to meet a friend of Carl Twist’s. Tommy accepted the three longest fingers of the drooping hand which she extended to him with the manner of an operatic duchess, and managed to convey his gratitude for the honor. As a further concession Mrs. Grant propounded the unique theory that winters in the North were apt to be _much_ colder than those in Virginia--“Don’t _you_ find it so, Mr. Squire?” When the two had unanimously ratified her sagacious observation, the audience was over.

The club’s lounge and dining-room had been thrown into one; the tables, later to be drawn out for supper, were massed in a corner, and elaborate decorations festooned the walls. Under the rose and grey of the low-beamed ceiling the whirl and color and indiscriminate noise of unleashed exuberance of the first of the holiday dances throbbed and spun to the music. There were men and girls from the universities, from prep. schools and finishing schools, and a seasoning of those who had graduated or dropped out. Most of them had returned within the week, and each time that the music stopped there were numerous impromptu, frenzied reunions, as friends parted for an age of three and a half months simulated paroxysms of joy at seeing one another, with shrieks and calls and kisses and much waggling hand-shaking--as the sex or the innate histrionics of the participants impelled them.

In the interval of music Tommy was introduced to the privates of the stag-line, remembering mismated fragments of names, and receiving the bone-crushing grip which is every youth’s obsession, until his own shoulders sagged, and his throat became dry with repeating “How do you do.”

“I’d better introduce you to some girls, now,” Carl decided mercifully.

A couple brushed past, engrossed in the intricacies of a new dance. The girl caught Tommy’s interest.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

Carl laughed softly. “So soon?” he said. “That’s Millicent Grant, for whom the party’s being given. She goes to Dobbs; as a relaxation, I guess. Her real business is the Male; making men fall for her, dangle a while, and then dropping them. Thinks she’s wasted on the small field this town offers. Look out for her. She’s shallow as the deuce, but hard to get away from.”

“No danger,” said Tommy. “I didn’t appear so interested as to get all this biography, I hope!”

“You’ll hear it soon enough. She enjoys being the talk of the town; local Barbara Neave, as it were. Come and meet her.”

Followed by Tommy, Carl threaded his way through the dancers, stepped with nonchalant expertness on the toes of a stag about to precede him, and cut in.

“Hello, Millicent! Come and be introduced to Tommy Squire, coming Big Man at school, who does me the honor of being my roommate for the exclusive right of wearing my ties.”

Tommy smiled formally at his friend’s brilliance, made an inward notation that he liked her eyes when she smiled, and acknowledged the presentation.

When Carl had removed himself, they danced.

Then followed the conventional small-talk of two members of the warring sexes when both are engaged in “making an impression”. They both followed youth’s greatest diversion, staying in school the while dodging its exactions and embracing its pleasures, and acquiring not education, but the equally essential atmosphere. It developed that he was a junior, she in the final year of finishing school; that he played football, but had failed to win a letter (though he confessed with pardonable pride having played eight minutes in a Big Game when the first-string tackle had been carried off the field); that she _adored_ football; that she likewise _adored_ a number of things; dogs (but not the messy kind); fraternity pins, and Eastern men (this was a pardonable error; she made flattering concessions to the Southern variety, when Tommy found the opportunity to tell her where he came from); that she _adored_--a great many more things.

In short, they simply chattered, as a man and a girl have always done, on first meeting. Later stages of acquaintanceship bring long silences, either from undisguised boredom or an adolescent spiritual understanding. Now, silence was a gaping hole in the garment of etiquette, to be patched with endless talk.

They were soon cut in on.

Carl returned from the arduous task of dancing with his own sister (a task only to her brother; she, too, held court), and found Tommy marooned in the stag line. He introduced him to other girls, in whom Tommy found varying charm. Carl’s sister, a mature child of seventeen, wanted to know, “_Honestly_ now,” whether Carl drank at school.

Tommy lied like a good roommate. He reflected philosophically on the oddness of sisters who went out constantly with men who drank, and yet expected total abstinence from their brothers. It was a reversal of the older custom of brothers who demanded impeccable behavior of their sisters; and yet--

Millicent passed. He cut-in. When they had danced half a dozen steps he lost her to another stag.

She was annoyed, and the pressure of her hand as they parted was a little more than casual artifice. Millicent had early finished her appraisal of the men at the party. She knew that she was destined to meet most of them night after night for the next two weeks, and she planned eventualities. She planned to have half a dozen affairs; the holiday-loves, more evanescent even than summer-loves, that dwindled, after the two weeks, from special-delivery letters into abrupt silence. There would be one or two proposals, perhaps, in the last days--there had been three, at the end of the summer at Minnetonka. She catalogued the men, slowly: Eddie Pearson, nice enough--too nice, insipid; Orme Waldon, whom no amount of snubbing would rebuff; Stewart Holmes, whose egotism was such that he believed all girls secretly longed for his attentions; and so on. These were the last three of the summer’s garnerings. She wanted some one _new_. Tommy Squire. He seemed worth thinking about. Rather wise--he’d need angling to draw in. Idly she planned manoeuvres.

Tommy cut-in again. She used the old effective artifice of asking him to keep her tiny handkerchief and vanity-case in his pocket. When she caught his eye, he was to understand that they were needed. Tommy smiled to himself. He understood.

But Millicent did not need to use her vanity-case very often. Tommy kept on cutting-in. However, his manner was not gratifying. He was pleasant, impersonal, quizzical. He told her that she was rather the most attractive girl there--and added, thoughtfully, that there were lots more beautiful girls, in Richmond.

“You’re absolutely _rude_, Mr. Squire!” Millicent wanted to be placated.

He drew her out, and with skillful questions, sped with occasional compliments, he exposed her vanity. When she realized that, she retaliated--they understood one another, distantly still, and far beneath the surface of conversation.

As he continued to cut in--alternating, rather from politeness, with Carl’s sister Joan--the stags, in a tacit agreement, let him have her more and more to himself. Joan did not like that. It was ahead of her plans.

At supper Millicent saw to it that they were paired together. Looking distastefully at the noisy tables, where already the customary table-jokes were under way--spoons being laid in rows so that a tap on one sent another into a glass of water, and misappropriation of the salt and pepper (Bardy Cless and Evelyn Preston leading on the humorists), she feared that she might lose him there to Joan Twist.

“Let’s go outside and have our supper in a car,” she suggested. “There’s no room here.”

Tommy, politely overlooking the numerous empty places, was entirely willing. He got cake and sandwiches, and two plates with cups of coffee and chicken patties, and together they sped across the street to a parked limousine that stood almost in the shadow of the cathedral.

He told her, in the course of the next few minutes, that she was _quite_ as lovely as any girl in Richmond. The darkness, and Millicent’s bare shoulder close against him, were effective.

And he was pleasantly surprised when he found that she had no desire to be kissed.

“Why, I’ve only known you for two hours,” she said, dropping lightly out of the car. “And besides, mother will be mad _again_ when she finds that I’m not having supper at my own party. Last year Dick Cole and I drove down to the chicken shack, and mother almost passed away when we came back, eating drumsticks!”

They both forgot the débris of their supper, but later, after the party was over, a very angry matron discovered it when she sat in a plate of chicken, on entering her car to go home.

Long past midnight Millicent sat before her dressing table, thinking. She took off the silver band around her hair, and with a brush began to restore the fluffiness which the mode demands. A wisp which grew an infinitesimal fraction of an inch longer, in front, than the rest she critically snipped off with finger-nail scissors. She let her hands rest on the table, and regarded her reflection. She was supremely satisfied with what she saw; she always was. Her self-admiration transcended egotism. It was impersonal. She was complacently certain that she was the most beautiful girl in the city. The assurance of a very few girls--and a very great number of men--was superfluous. Wilde has said that love of oneself is a life-long romance: Millicent’s was a passion! In the perfection of her features, a subtle coldness of manner, a faint expression as of calculating, which her character had betrayed into her eyes, was the nearest thing to a fault which she could see. Such an expression must inevitably creep into the expression of a girl who is the object of so much masculine attention that she may--and perforce must--choose, and weigh, and reject, so slighting the least attractive candidates. It was these who were most aware of the expression--they remembered it vividly, in soothing their disappointments.

Millicent picked up a lip-stick, and toyed with it. She glanced up at the top of her mirror. There she kept a curious record. Drawn on the level of the glass with the lip-stick, were three small hearts. A photograph almost hid them. They were initialed--E.P., O.W., S.H. She picked up her handkerchief, and rubbed out the last one. She was tired of Stewart--he would be dropped; in the cool, summary manner which was the essence of Millicent. Eddie, and Orme Waldon would remain. Eddie was always beneficial--he played up so well when she wanted compliments. Orme had a car which she could command, with him or without him; and that was very useful.

When she had erased the last heart she drew a new one, larger and apart; the photograph would completely hide it. She initialed it T.S., and then she sat regarding it--he had been so pointedly disinterested! Ah, but he would learn servility; others had, before him.

* * * * *

After a few days, the members of the general “crowd” had come to see that through accident or design Tommy and Millicent were usually together, when both were at any given place at the same time. There were comments; some caustic, some foolish, some wise: Carl, for instance, was irritatingly derisive. “I told you she’d take you in!” he told Tommy; and when Tommy serenely denied any unusual interest, he agreed, with the reservation--“That’s all right, for _now_, you sweet idiot, but you don’t appreciate what Millicent can do, in ten days. Just wait!”

On Sunday afternoons a heterogeneous crowd was wont to drift over to the Grants’, to piece together the gossip of the week. At supper-time they regularly went through the ritual of expressing formal astonishment at the lateness of the hour, and then reluctantly accepting the expected invitation to stay and partake of a buffet-supper.

When Carl and Tommy arrived they found the usual assembly. For half the afternoon Millicent ignored Tommy, simulating a deep interest in Eddie Pearson’s stuttered and imperfect rendition of all the jokes in the past week’s Orpheum bill. Eddie was one of those people who insist upon showing you how excellently they can imitate the comedian....

Tommy, on the couch, was amiably quarreling with Barbara Peart over the literary merits of modern literature. Barbara held serious and decided views; Tommy didn’t care a damn either way; the subject bored him so that it was an effort to be polite. Millicent finally extricated herself from Eddie’s imperfectly remembered humor with scant courtesy, and sat down beside Tommy. There was satisfaction in taking him away from Barbara, anyway. Thereafter she directed the conversation--to herself, inevitably.

Tommy and Carl stayed on after the rest of the crowd had left. Millicent arranged that. Carl at first refused to accept her hints that he too might leave; but after they had sat in silence for ten minutes, Millicent sulking, Tommy looking into the fire and thinking about the hunting near Richmond, and Carl professing fascination in the automobile pages of the Sunday paper, he relented, and rose to go. Tommy, with elaborately concealed relief, rose to accompany him. Then Millicent took command of the situation, and said, with superb carelessness:

“Well, drive back here and take Tommy home about eleven, because I really must go to bed early to-night if I’m to go on that snow-shoe trip to-morrow.”

So Tommy stayed. The conversation was not animated. Millicent made poor progress. Presently, when the conversation reached Millicent in its usual course, she asked him whether he liked bobbed-hair. He did, on certain girls. She obviously expected to be told that she was one; if not the chief one. He told her so.

The next step would be for him to stretch his arm along the back of the couch, above her shoulders, and comment upon its fluffiness. Tommy took his cue admirably. He stirred her hair with his fingers, and he did not withdraw his arm. Millicent had drawn imperceptibly closer. The fire in the grate had burned down to a drowsy glow, leaving the room in the semi-darkness of late winter twilight. Now her head swayed toward him. The moment was propitious. Tommy knew it. He had been cast as leading man in just such a scene before. He knew that the next move was his....

And rather unexpectedly he made it. Very deliberately he got up, walked over to the table, took up a cigarette and lit it. Neither of them spoke. The silence was unnatural. A tension filled the air. There was nothing to say.

The sound of a horn on the driveway saved the situation.

“That must be Carl,” Tommy said quickly. “Sounds as if he might be in a hurry. Don’t get up; I’ll just grab my things in the hall. Good-night, Millicent--awfully good time.”

He went out, a little breathlessly, before she could speak or get up.

Millicent was furious; furious at Tommy, who had snubbed her with such ironic insolence; furious at herself, who had engineered her own humiliation. The climax of her planning had come to ignominious failure. Consuming anger filled her. For a moment she wondered whether his manner would betray anything of the breach to the rest of the crowd, on the snowshoe trip, the next day. Paul Lyle, in making up the party, had paired them as a matter of course. Millicent knew what the crowd was saying: and she would not be made ridiculous in their eyes, now. Before Tommy went back to school he must propose, and the crowd must know that he had.

She repeated that, mentally. The words were like italics on a page.

* * * * *

There was no perceptible difference in their attitude the next morning. The snowshoe trip to Paul Lyle’s cabin on the St. Croix River had been abandoned, because a vagary of the thermometer had brought balmy winds and a thaw, overnight.

Tommy was relieved. The trip had been planned in his honor, and he had had to feign a deep interest in Northern sports; actually he had had a distinct premonition that he was due to make a general ass of himself on snowshoes.

It was decided that they should drive up to the cabin for dinner, instead. They found the cabin mired in slush, and with a leaking roof, but a crackling fire in the stone hearth, and the uncertain melodies from a small phonograph which some one unearthed, put them all in high spirits. When they had tired of dancing over the uneven floors they constituted themselves into an exploring party, and wandered down to the river and out on the soft ice.

Presently, Providence took a hand.

Millicent, who had run ahead of the rest, shrieked suddenly, balanced wildly for an instant, and fell into an air-hole in the ice.

It took but a very few moments to lift her out, and take her up to the cabin, but in that period she had been seriously chilled from exposure in the icy water. The men had done all that they could. Mary Skinner, small and frail, took command. Millicent was put to bed, before the hearth, bordering on the line of unconsciousness. A doctor was on the way. They could only wait.

Tommy was dazed. Millicent had suddenly became a great deal to him. The play of excited emotion, suddenly released, will do that. He sat on the steps, unmindful of his own damp clothes. Millicent’s light sweater was in his hands. Why, he wondered inconsistently, out of all this crowd of girls did it have to be Millicent who should be endangered?

“Tommy’s taking it pretty hard, I guess,” some one said. “He thinks an awful lot of Millicent.”

And for the first time, he did.

* * * * *

When the doctor had come, and given Millicent a hypodermic, they wrapped her carefully in rugs, and drove slowly back to town.

She would have to stay in bed for a week or so, that was all, the doctor said.

Tommy’s first floral offering came the next morning, and in the course of the following days he sent almost everything in the florist’s stock, from corsage bouquets to funeral lilies. He came himself, and stayed interminably, until Mr. Grant, ordinarily a mild-mannered and ponderously humored man, observed with unwonted choler that “If that young man comes any earlier, I shall have to give him my place at the breakfast table!” His wife, who looked upon Tommy with that eye of wisdom which mothers with marriageable daughters possess, was more kindly disposed. Tommy, in the parlance of her sphere, was an excellent “catch”. He might see Millicent as often as he liked.

Millicent prolonged her stay in bed. She was aware that she made rather a charming invalid, and throned in her bed she received a gratifying court.

The wise commenters became positive.

“Millicent’s really in love, this time,” they said, “and their engagement will be announced before Tommy goes back to school.”

Tommy, the drawling and indifferent, had given way to Tommy, the intense and devoted. Millicent was aware of her victory.

The hearts with E.P. and O.W. had gone. Tommy’s, hidden by the photograph, reigned alone. Perhaps, she thought idly, after they were married she would have it cut into the glass. It was a pretty fancy. She toyed with the idea, toyed with it as she did with everything in her life; a languid, fickle amusement.

The day before Tommy and Carl were to go back to school Millicent got up. She was paler, and more ethereally beautiful, she decided, with characteristic candor. The sweet peas which he had sent that morning looked rather well on her.

She wondered, as she pinned them on, whether he would propose to-day or wait until the last.

He was nervous; a little haggard, too, she noticed, when he came, and she knew that he would propose to-day. Her triumph was at hand, but suddenly she knew that she wanted more time to think. She must make him wait until to-morrow.

They were on the couch again. He kissed her, and in the moment that their lips touched it came to her that Tommy was realty infatuated--but in another moment the old doubt had returned, and when he said:

“Millicent, dear, I’ve only known you--” she stopped him, with a breathless flutter, and said, “To-morrow, Tommy, to-morrow afternoon; I _can’t_ tell you to-day!”... And she ran out of the room.

Millicent did not appear at supper. She was locked in her room, her head buried in her arms on the dressing-table, thinking; half crying. It was the only crisis which had ever come into her life. Always before she had left this to the man; her own way had continued serenely untroubled. Once, in a fit of fancy, she reached up as if to erase the heart, but she did not complete the gesture.

The next morning dragged slowly by.

After lunch Millicent went to her desk, and in a fit of caprice wrote a letter. She read it, and started to tear it up. Then she changed her mind, and left it, sealed, on her desk. It was a quarter past two. Tommy ought to arrive very soon.

She walked over to the pier-glass in the hall. Dispassionately she admired her beauty. She thought that she had never seen anyone so lovely. Others might be merely beautiful, hers was distinctive. Beauty was a power in itself; and when coupled with intellect--the power it might wield was infinite. Great beauties had made history--many of them had had humbler beginnings, by far, than she. She felt in that moment that she too might have been destined to rule.... French novels had taught her these things--and had failed to instil a sense of personal absurdity.

Egotism was her greatest fault; she looked upon it as her highest virtue.

Her thought came back to Tommy. No man had ever been so much in love with her as he was. And he represented so many desirable things. He was appealingly good looking. He was wealthy in his own right, Carl had told her. Life with him would be tranquil and luxurious.... It might grow dull.

* * * * *

She heard him on the walk. She stood there, frozen, as he came up the steps. He rang the bell, and in that instant decision came. The maid was coming through to open the door. Millicent snatched the sealed letter from her desk, and handed it to her.

“Give this to Mr. Squire,” she said, and while the maid gazed stupidly at her, she laughed, half hysterically, and ran up the stairs.

In her room she heard Tommy come in, heard the murmur of the maid’s voice, and then, after a pause longer than she had ever endured, she heard the door close upon him. She waited until she could not hear his footsteps longer--then she walked over to the mirror, and rubbed out the heart.