Chapter XIV

Still Horatia stayed with her sister. It was not what she had planned to do after Maud’s return, but there seemed no easy way of immediate escape and she shrank from the thought of taking another flat. Harvey and Maud were cordially insistent in urging her to stay with them. They told her that they needed her--that the children had become so used to her that they would be miserable without her. And Jim seemed inclined to think it better for her there during the heat of the summer. In the autumn, after they were married, they would have a place of their own. Until then--Maud’s house offered all the comforts which would make the summer easy.

Work slackened a little. The office force took their vacations in due order but Horatia kept postponing hers, hating to leave Jim for even two weeks. And yet there was the faintest little cloud between her and Jim. Since the Sunday which he had spent with Mrs. Hubbell she had not felt quite so free with him as she had before--not quite so intimate. She did not want to discuss Rose Hubbell with him but she wanted to talk things out with him which concerned Rose. She felt the first peace of her engagement marred and was resolute in her determination to mar it no further. He had never referred to that Sunday and she was shocked to find that her mind reverted to it fairly often. She found that she wanted to know every incident of every hour and that she was jealous of every minute that he had spent with Rose--that she wanted to share every mood and every hour with him. It made her slightly inquisitive as to what he did with his time. Jim never resented--never seemed to notice her questionings, but Horatia noticed herself sometimes--with a fierce sense of shame--prying into his movements.

“It is disgusting,” she told herself, “but of course it isn’t as though I was just plain jealous. It’s really because I don’t think Rose Hubbell is good for him. Even Kathleen Boyce insisted on telling me that.”

She herself saw nothing much of Rose. Once they met by accident downtown and Horatia had to lunch with her and twice she declined invitations which included her and Jim. But Rose had little opportunity to get near Horatia when Horatia was intrenched behind the life at Maud’s. When Horatia had free time, Maud had a way of absorbing it and Maud sometimes had a good deal to offer in the way of entertainment. She had somehow managed the acquaintanceship of Marjorie Clapp, who seemed pleasantly interested in Maud’s entire household now that Horatia was living there. The Clapps week-ended at the cottage to which Horatia had gone once with Anthony, and Horatia spent a happy Saturday and Sunday there with Mrs. Clapp. Anthony was not in evidence. His sister told Horatia that he had decided to go in with his father and that his father had sent him West for six weeks to get acquainted with the branches of the business.

It was as if a background were being given Horatia against which she must paint her life with Jim. The more she saw of these orderly people, the more impossible it seemed not to conform in part to their standards. One’s mind, of course, would remain more free than Maud’s and run deeper in its current than did Marjorie Clapp’s. But there were surely unescapable necessities in any plan of life which she might arrange. Three meals a day and a servant and a certain amount of intercourse with pleasant people. She knew that there were people who did without the servant and took the three meals “out of the house,” but she could never vision herself living as those people lived--without dignity and eternally in disorder. “More of Aunt Caroline is coming out in me every day,” she complained to Jim. “As I plan for the fall my mind almost begins to run to West Park and a house with a stone dog.”

Maud had a deft way of talking trousseau too. Whether she was trying to show Horatia certain impossibilities in life with Langley or whether her sister’s availability for marriage brought out all the woman in her, Horatia could not decide. But Maud had a way of showing her trousseau linen and discussing ways of furnishing, and though Horatia laughed her to scorn and said she would buy a dozen pequot sheets, half a dozen pillow cases and two table cloths and let it go at that, none the less the shimmer of damask and the alluring silks of window draperies insinuated themselves into her consciousness and made her yearn just a little sometimes for a little more ability to expand her own plans.

Not when she was with Jim. Then everything faded except the vast depths of life with him. She told Mrs. Clapp something about Jim--subtly enough as far as words go, if her eyes and the cadences of her voice had not been absolutely revealing. They talked about love.

“There’s love--and love--and love,” said Marjorie, “and each of us loves his or her own kind of love. I’ve known people who found greatest delight in giving up things for the people they care about. I’ve known others whose joy was in possession of the person loved--and there are people who love by sharing and having children and people who think that they are enough to one another in themselves and that children would be an interference and a hindrance. Some people want one thing and some another and some people want enduring things and some want the fun of transitory things. I’ve never been one of the people who like roses just because they are perishable. I’m all for things that last, myself. But I’m willing to admit the other kind of people.

“Peter and I,” went on Marjorie, “just looked at each other and saw babies--as the old women say--in each other’s eyes. I don’t mean that we married to have babies, you know. Not as crude as that. But that was the end of our love. We wanted to see each other in little new bodies and we wanted to make a home for the babies and to give them everything good and lovely. Because we loved each other. If we hadn’t happened to meet each other we might have gone on forever without finding the right thing. I think there is a right thing, you know, a thing for everyone. Some people are born to be perpetually esthetic and some to keep the great tide of emotion flowing strong through the world--and some are meant to see babies and some to be good mental companions. The point is to find out what you are suited for and to carry out your own job with the right person. I was lucky.”

“Yes. And I’m going to be.”

“It would be an outrage if you weren’t,” said the older woman admiringly.

She asked Jim out for the Sunday afternoon while Horatia was there, and he came, but curiously, the visit seemed to bring out a vein of cynicism in him that Horatia thought was permanently overlaid. He was brilliant in his talk and gayer than Horatia had ever seen him in anyone’s company, but in spite of his gayety she felt in him criticism of everything he saw about him. He rallied Marjorie on having spread the “flesh-pots of Egypt” before him, but he said it with a kind of laughing scorn that angered Horatia though it made no apparent impression on Marjorie. And Horatia found herself a little hurt and chilled that he did not seem to appreciate the things which had been charming her so much.

“Poor Jim,” said Marjorie astutely, to her husband, after their guests had left and they sat together on the dusky terrace, “so terribly in love with that girl and so awfully afraid that he won’t be able to give her what she wants.”

“Are you playing a game for Anthony?” asked her husband.

“No--I’m not playing for Anthony. I’m playing for that girl. I’m not sure where she belongs. And it’s tremendously important to get in the right niche these days. Maybe it is Jim--but it would be tragic if it weren’t. And Anthony cares such a lot. He has never cared before and this is all in the right way. It’s so hard to see----”

Meanwhile Horatia was probing Jim.

“They live--beautifully--and it all makes a wonderful harmony.”

“So did nuns in cloisters.”

“But they aren’t cloistered.”

“In a way. They are removed from all earthly trials and they go on the assumption that a thousand perfect individuals will be able to leaven the world. They won’t. Nor ten thousand. The only thing that will leaven the world is the effort of millions of imperfect people.”

“That’s true,” said Horatia, gravely.

He turned to her swiftly.

“Of course it’s true, but it’s not my criticism of them. My criticism of them is bred in jealousy. Because they have all the things actual and spiritual that lend to beauty. I want them for you and because I can’t give them to you, I swagger around on my little dust heap and belittle their mountain.”