Chapter IX

“If you look at me like that,” said Anthony, “I will kiss you and ask you to marry me. I don’t know which I’ll do first, but I’ve put both things off long enough.”

This on the springiest of spring days with Horatia clambering back into the car which Anthony had stopped by the roadside until she found some cowslips; she was smiling her perfect happiness at Anthony. Her smile disappeared.

“Don’t do that----”

“Which?”

“Either. I should have told you long ago, Anthony. But it assumed that you cared if I told you this--and I couldn’t assume such awful conceit. You don’t. It’s just the day and the fun we’ve been having.”

“But you were going to tell me----”

“That I love Jim Langley and I’m going to marry him.” She held her head high and her blush was triumphant.

“When?” asked Anthony.

“I don’t know--not for a year, perhaps, but sooner or later I’m--we’re--going to.”

Anthony twisted the wheel idly without starting his motor.

“Well--there’s nothing I can do about it except to wish you joy. Langley’s all right--and if you are sure you love him, it’s all right. But don’t let the work deceive you. That’ll stop after you are married and the glamour----”

“No, indeed, I shall work right along--right along--that’s our whole idea.”

Anthony did not look impressed. He started the car and drove on silently. Then----

“Look here, Horatia, I know you’ll damn me for a reactionary, but I want to say a few things. I ought to go away and leave you alone but I don’t want to. I can’t exactly admit Langley as a rival on the strength of what you say. You see what I want to give you is something very different. I want you to marry me and to--to organize our lives, but I want to assume the rough steady work and I want you to be relieved of strain.” She flushed and he went quickly on. “I’ve seen a lot of this radical married stuff, your own name business, this both earning business, and I’ve never seen it lead anywhere yet. And--wait. I’ve seen a lot of the other kind--the awfully domestic, submerged woman. I never in my life wanted to marry until I saw you. It always looked like a trap. But with you marriage would be a wonderful game--a limitless voyage, an endless happiness. I don’t want you to work or wear yourself out as the women on newspapers do wear out. I want you to be strong and fine and happy. I want to see the world with you--and to plan a big useful life with you--to do big things largely. I can’t say it, Horatia, because I’m an ass. But I love you and I want to fight for you.”

There were tears in Horatia’s eyes.

“I wish I did love you, Anthony,” she cried. “I like you awfully. But, Anthony, Jim is written all over my heart. I tremble when he’s near me.”

“That’s not necessarily a sign of love.”

“It’s Jim, Anthony.”

Anthony may have been thinking of what Maud had said. He turned to her pleadingly.

“Anyway let me make a fight, won’t you?”

“It’s no good.”

“But I can’t lose you like this--without a struggle.”

She said nothing more. They drove back to the city and he dropped Horatia at her office. She mounted the steps feeling very much troubled, and a little outraged. Anthony was sweet, but the intrusion of such feeling on the one between her and Jim shamed her.

Jim welcomed her not at all. It was a bad and busy afternoon and Horatia had really been playing truant. He came up to her in a hurry.

“You’ll have to hurry your column for the fourth page, Miss Grant. It was late yesterday and we had to hold everything up for it. Please hurry.”

Horatia guessed that for that moment she was not his lover but his reporter. She flushed. And then, loyally, she gloried in his attitude. She wanted to be more than a woman to Jim. She wanted to be a part of his work.

“I’ve good news for you,” he said later. “I’ve a typist coming up to see me in a few minutes. I have decided that you need a typist if we are to ever have clean copy.”

They laughed.

The typist came in and Langley looked her over. She was a washed-out girl with a freckled face and stringy hair. She had come in answer to Langley’s advertisement and with a memory of having seen her somewhere before, he took her into his office to question her. Finally he asked her:

“Haven’t I seen you in somebody’s office around here?”

“Yes,” said Miss Christie, “I used to work for Mr. John Hubbell.”

Langley winced. That was it. His momentary impulse to dismiss the girl she guessed from his manner.

“I left town right after that,” she went on, “and I have only just come back. Mrs. Hubbell sent me away for a while and then I found work in Chicago. But it’s hot and lonely there and I thought that the trouble would be all over and the reporters would leave me alone, so I came back.”

“How long had you been with Mr. Hubbell?”

“Six years, sir--since I left business college. There never was anyone who treated me so well.”

Perhaps out of loyalty to any of Jack’s friends or even employees, he engaged her. For he did engage her and took her out to Horatia. “We will share Miss Christie, Miss Grant,” he said. “Try to get your typing done while I am out of the office.”

So Miss Christie was installed. She was not a gossip, so Horatia never heard about her position in Jack Hubbell’s office or connected the drab little figure with the grace and beauty of Mrs. Hubbell. And no one thought to give Mrs. Hubbell information that might have been interesting about Miss Christie being in Langley’s office. Miss Christie took an instant liking to Horatia. Horatia treated her well and treated her intelligently, admiring her clerical skill from the depths of her own lack of it. Miss Christie was drawn into the atmosphere of the office and in her quiet little way she came to love it.

There was another confidence which was not made. Horatia did not tell Jim that Anthony had asked her to marry him. She wanted to and she didn’t want to. There seemed almost immodesty in telling Jim that another man loved her. And then it didn’t seem fair to Anthony. She had refused him but there was no need to make the refusal embarrassing by telling even Jim.

Anthony told no one. He evidently did not consider himself out of the game. But he dropped his emotional attitude as abruptly as he had picked it up. It worried Horatia nevertheless that he turned up at many places where she went, though usually it was fun to see him and to joke with him and ride home with him or to have him appear for supper on Sunday evenings, with a supply of food under his arm. He arranged to have Horatia meet his sister too, and Maud was all a-flutter when she heard that Horatia had been asked to dinner at the Clapps’.

“Will you borrow my gold net?” she begged.

“Why no,” said Horatia. “That blue dress is good enough.”

Maud had to content herself with the fact of the invitation and Horatia was more than contented with the event itself. She enjoyed the simple dinner in the lovely big house and the visit to the nursery where every device for good health and happiness had been joined together and she enjoyed the conversation of the Clapp family. At Maud’s one always had a sense of striving or of smug content in attainment, but these people were not like that at all. They were living as it seemed best and wise and happy to live--luxuriously but unpretentiously. So Anthony would live, surrounded by his nurseries and his children and his servants and his pleasant diversions. They talked of Italy and of a proposed trip to China. It made her feel ignorant and little. But she looked neither ignorant nor little, with her face glowing with interest and the table candles bringing out the color in her blue gown and the dusky shadows of her hair. She looked charming and she was charming and the Clapps admitted it cordially to Anthony.

“That’s all right,” said Anthony. “Of course you’d like her. The question is how did we strike her?”

Mr. Clapp was talking to Horatia during this colloquy. Anthony’s sister talked to her later.

“You must see a great deal of the world from your office, Miss Grant.”

“A great deal.”

“It’s a very fascinating sight, of course. Romantic, full of excitement.”

“Why does everyone think I’m romantic on first sight?” wondered Horatia aloud.

“You are romantic. It’s romantic in itself that a beautiful young girl goes out to work in a newspaper office. I know that lots of them do but they haven’t yet dried up the romance. Because beauty and charm in a woman were designed for such other purposes.”

Horatia frowned. “You don’t really think that?”

“I think so. Beauty and charm mean love and love means life. That’s why it excites us to see beauty.”

“So many people say I’m good-looking now. Do you know I was a frightful little girl?”

“That’s natural enough. But it’s not your face or features. It’s what lights you up from within.”

She took Horatia’s hands in both of hers as she said good night.

“Be good to Anthony,” she said, “and don’t let your fires be dimmed, will you?”

“I’ve met a splendid woman,” said Horatia to Jim, next day. “Do you know Mrs. Clapp?”

“She is splendid,” agreed Langley. “Yes. I was brought up with her. We went to school together. So Anthony wants you to know her. You’d better. She is a real person.”

“Jim,” Horatia went on, “why don’t you keep up with people like that instead of this Hubbell crowd? Don’t you like nice people better than anything? Not that Mrs. Hubbell isn’t nice. But after all she hasn’t much to contribute, now has she?”

“She can dance,” he answered lightly.

“What’s dancing?”

“It’s quite a lot of fun.”

“But I don’t see why you should need that sort of fun. I’m sure that these other people have fun too and they don’t take it in dancing and going around to public places. Not that I haven’t enjoyed myself a lot. You mustn’t think I’m ungracious enough not to admit that it was all fun for me--this going around with the Hubbell crowd. But after we’re married--don’t you think we might do the other crowd a bit? It sets you up.”

Jim reflected. He seemed to be thinking over his answer very carefully. Then he spoke.

“You want to realize, Horatia, that these people are interested in you and not in me. They like you and undoubtedly would be glad to have you in their circle--and in their family. They don’t want me. They don’t trust me and they don’t like me and that’s all there is to that. And if you marry me, I’m afraid they’ll drop you. As my wife you won’t be as--desirable.”

Horatia had flushed.

“Don’t, Jim,----” she begged, “don’t talk like that. Why, you’re so infinitely their superior--they aren’t in your mental class.”

“They’ve played a better game,” said Jim. “Horatia, dear, don’t you want to call it off between us? You can go to the end of the world without me. But with me you’d just be burdened. You’d be doomed to the society of queer people. And me. And you’d tire of the queer people first and then of me.”

“I don’t see why it must mean queer people,” objected Horatia. “Why must it? Not that I don’t like queer people, but I like the others too. And you most of all. And I won’t give you up.”

“But swear not to marry me to reform me----”

“I swear.”

That argument was over and yet they had reached no outcome and they both knew it. Horatia said fiercely to herself that there was no use in being trivial and that it certainly didn’t matter. But she felt that she had stumbled upon a strange quality in her lover--a resistance--a kind of weakness too. And with the assurance of all lovers she told herself that it must not happen again.

It had not been a good time for the conversation either. They were bound for a dinner at Rose Hubbell’s, and Horatia felt that she had been stupid and that all evening he would be feeling her criticism of the people she was with. In the shadow of the cab she leaned against him.

“I’m an easily influenced fool, Jim. I’m just plain stupid. And the only thing that matters is you. Repeat that, please.”

Which he did, very satisfactorily.

The big rooms at Rose Hubbell’s were decorated with jonquils. It was fortunate that Mrs. Hubbell, not being poor, never had to stint her setting. Her company, tonight, included two regular army officers, both very distinguished looking, the illustrator, Starling, who had recently come into such repute, Austin Benedict, a dilettante of everything, the cynical Mrs. Boyce, and two of the dancers from the Russian troupe at the theatre, who were really young women savoring much more of New York than Russia. They were a gay company. Horatia forgot her criticisms. Mrs. Hubbell’s deft servant called them to a perfectly appointed supper. The atmosphere was artificial; the company was artificial; the gaiety was artificial, and Horatia knew it but she could not help admiring the perfection of the artifice. The wonder came over her again at the baffling quality in Jim which could say that the hunt for pleasure was becoming a dangerous chase for the world and at the same time suffer himself to be part of such a company. She did not realize that his inconsistency was a common enough one among men--and that his need for company, for society of any kind had been very great. A mind more skilled in psychology would have grasped the fact of the pride that kept him from the society of the people he had formerly known and the other pride which had kept him in this company after his calamitous public connection with it. And they sat around the table with its sparkling little service and the talk grew gayer and gayer. Settings, thought Horatia, are queer. Perhaps this in its way is as desirable as great open rooms and nurseries. If one had to choose. But she did not choose between settings. It was a glorious thought--her choice--her choice was between men.

Austin Benedict paid Horatia laughing exaggerated attentions. She must do nothing for herself.

“You working women are getting too independent,” he said. “It makes us afraid. I heard someone say the other day in a certain distinguished company that you should not be a working woman.”

They all insisted on the rest of it, Mrs. Hubbell in the lead.

“Why, as a matter of fact, it wasn’t a man, as you all are thinking. It was Mrs. John Clapp--a discerning lady. She said ‘that to think of you waiting for street cars in the rain made her shudder’--not that she dislikes either street cars or rain but because she feels that you should be protected from both.”

Clouds on Langley’s face, the faintest amusement on Mrs. Hubbell’s and the frankest embarrassment on Horatia’s.

“He delights in baiting me,” she said laughingly and tried to turn the conversation. But she was helpless.

“Marjorie Clapp,” contributed Mrs. Hubbell, “is trying to make the old-fashioned woman fashionable. She knows that it’s the only chance the poor thing has to get back into favor. Make it fashionable to churn the butter and make the candles and that sort of thing will go. And Marjorie knows where she would shine! At a butter-churn!”

“Just where you wouldn’t, Rose,” said Kathleen Boyce, satirically, “the butter wouldn’t--what is it--wouldn’t butter--for you, ever.”

“Oh, I admit that. I admit a great deal of capability in Marjorie.”

“But what’s the use of churning butter,” Kathleen went on, “when you can buy it in beautiful molds and what’s the use of devoting all your time to a house and family when there are maids and nursemaids?”

“I don’t think it’s any good with maids and nursemaids having too much command,” said Horatia. She had forgotten that the conversation hinged on her. “They are all right for hotels. But a house has to express a woman--just as my aunt’s house in West Park with its Nottingham lace curtains and bronze alligators and coldly clean floors expresses her and just as Mrs. Clapp’s big, easy house expresses her.”

“I wonder what yours would be like. Tell us what you think.”

Mrs. Hubbell’s question was light and Horatia should have parried it. But one of her moods of seriousness had come on her and she wanted to bring them all into it for a minute. She wanted to tell them before Langley what their home would be like. It was one of the revelations that an older person would have refused to make for fear of mockery but Horatia’s youth drove her on.

“My house? My house won’t be perfect because of lots of lacks. But I can tell you what I’d like to have. A house, quite large and spacious with just as little furniture in it as was necessary. Open spaces and deep halls and built-in settees with bright cushions where you could lie when you came home tired and where children could play and forget their toys. Room for everyone so no one would irritate anyone else. Fireplaces so that people could dream before them. A few guest-rooms for friends who wanted to come when they were tired or when they especially wanted to see me,--guest-rooms with the morning sun so that any tired person would wake up cheerful. Not too much service and not too many meals together. Breakfast, maybe, together, and then everyone would be free for the day. Trees about the house--big trees which would seem part of it. I would like a hospitable house and a free house. You see I was brought up in one in which crumbs on the floor were a mortal sin. It’s an atmosphere instead of a particular place that I want. I just get it vaguely--a long dark oak hall--with the light through windows at the back----” She broke off with an appealing half-laugh and half-sigh and the most involuntary look at Langley--“But I shall have to get the atmosphere in a six-room apartment probably. And I’m sure I can. And I want to.”

Then somehow she knew she had hurt Jim again and she stopped abruptly. Her description had been far too serious for the company and they were embarrassedly sober. But Mrs. Hubbell did not let go, quite yet.

“It was a beautiful description, dear,” she said, “wasn’t it, Jim?”

Jim gave her a quick side look and Mrs. Hubbell stopped. She could afford to, for Horatia wondered about that look. She felt she had made rather a fool of herself and had a sudden memory that Jim and the blonde lady were very old friends.

“I,” said Benedict, “want what I have achieved. A few rooms for which I pay rent and not taxes. A man whose services I can share with my neighbor, thereby reducing his wages. A shaving brush, the morning _Times_, a telephone and a light beside my bed. Keep your ambitions down, my friends, and you’ll be happy.”

“What I want,” the Russian dancer broke in, “is a suite at the Plaza. Perfectly good enough for me. And a bank account to keep the hotel clerk off my neck.”

“And since wishes aren’t horses, let’s change the subject before our discontents run away with us,” said Jim quietly.

They rolled up the rugs in the living-room and Kathleen Boyce played jazz music and the Russian dancers gave themselves over to the army officers, who danced beautifully. Horatia preferred to watch them, she told Jim, and he watched with her until Mrs. Hubbell, gay and informal as hostess, came up to claim him. Then Mrs. Boyce, resigning her place to the Victrola, joined Horatia.

They watched Mrs. Hubbell’s grace in silence, paying little attention to the others.

“They dance perfectly.”

“Perfectly,” agreed Mrs. Boyce. “Rose taught Jim to dance. Taught him other things too. He is her prize possession, you know.”

Horatia longed to cry out to this faintly smiling woman at her side, “He is my possession,” but she did not dare for fear of what it might lead to. And Mrs. Boyce went on:

“Of course Jim’s a romanticist. He’d stand by any woman whose name was connected with his and whom he dreamed that he might have hurt. But I’ve sometimes wondered if she hasn’t hoodwinked him a little about that whole affair. It may have been a pity that Jack Hubbell decided that he wouldn’t take it through the courts.”

Horatia said nothing.

“You are probably damning me for not minding my own business. Of course you are. But, my dear child, you’re no match for Rose. If you want Jim Langley, get him out of this crowd. It’s not much good. And it’s certainly not good for him. Rose Hubbell may not make men respect her but she doesn’t care.”

“Please,” begged Horatia and Kathleen waved Benedict to come and dance with her. Horatia expected that Jim would stop and join her but he kept on dancing. The illustrator was informally reading a magazine. She sat alone, with an odd sensation of being a wall-flower at a children’s party.

“Perhaps,” she thought, “my face is drawing down at the corners and soon my lip will quiver. I must look natural. There’s nothing to be silly about.” But for all that the forlorn little feeling persisted cruelly.

Then, just as she thought she could sit there no longer, and was trying to decide whether to break in on the illustrator’s reading or to go out into the other room, the music stopped and with the easiest grace in the world Langley and Rose both came towards her. Not in the least apologetic. Smiling at her gaily. No more hurt expression on Langley but a look of sheer enjoyment which made him look young and debonair.

“You have a gift, Rose. I was always awkward on that turn. I never understood it before. But when you get it, like most other things, it’s easy.”

“Horatia thinks we are silly, Jim.”

“Horatia is right. We are silly.”

He took Horatia out on the floor and they danced well, silently, but without abandon.

“I love you,” whispered Langley.

Horatia’s voice was low as she answered:

“Ah, but I love you--utterly--completely.”

Perhaps then Langley longed for the chance to take off ten years of his age as men do long once in a lifetime when a great opportunity comes too late. How was he to explain--or fully understand himself--that only in the strength of very young emotions is everything else automatically shut out except the emotions themselves and that later the beauty is in relating love to a life already known?