Chapter II: Part 2

Arthur Wyant's shabby sitting-room was full of February sunshine, illustrated magazines, newspapers and cigar ashes. There were some books on shelves, shabby also: Wyant had apparently once cared for them, and his talk was still coloured by traces of early cultivation, especially when visitors like Nona or Stan Heuston were with him. But the range of his allusions suggested that he must have stopped reading years ago. Even novels were too great a strain on his attention. As far back as Nona could remember he had fared only on the popular magazines, picture-papers and the weekly purveyors of social scandal. He took an intense interest in the private affairs of the world he had ceased to frequent, though he always ridiculed this interest in talking to Nona or Heuston.

While he sat there, deep in his armchair, with bent shoulders, sunk head and clumsy bandaged foot, Nona saw him, as she always did, as taller, slimmer, more handsomely upstanding than any man she had ever known. He stooped now, even when he was on his feet; he was prematurely aged; and the fact perhaps helped to connect him with vanished institutions to which only his first youth could have belonged.

To Nona, at any rate, he would always be the Arthur Wyant of the race-meeting group in the yellowing photograph on his mantelpiece: clad in the gray frock-coat and topper of the early 'eighties, and tallest in a tall line of the similarly garbed, behind ladies with puffed sleeves and little hats tilting forward on elaborate hair. How peaceful, smiling and unhurried they all seemed! Nona never looked at them without a pang of regret that she had not been born in those spacious days of dogcarts, victorias, leisurely tennis and afternoon calls...

Wyant's face, even more than his figure, related him to that past: the small shapely head, the crisp hair grown thin on a narrow slanting forehead, the eyes in which a twinkle still lingered, eyes probably blue when the hair was brown, but now faded with the rest, and the slight fair moustache above an uncertain ironic mouth.

A romantic figure; or rather the faded photograph of one. Yes; perhaps Arthur Wyant had always been faded--like a charming reflection in a sallow mirror. And all that length of limb and beauty of port had been meant for some other man, a man to whom the things had really happened which Wyant had only dreamed.

His visitor, though of the same stock, could never have inspired such conjectures. Stanley Heuston was much younger--in the middle thirties--and most things about him were middling: height, complexion, features. But he had a strong forehead, his mouth was curved for power and mockery, and only his small quick eyes betrayed the uncertainty and lassitude inherited from a Wyant mother.

Wyant, at Nona's approach, held out a dry feverish hand. "Well, this is luck! Stan was just getting ready to fly at your mother's approach, and you turn up instead!"

Heuston got to his feet, and greeted Nona somewhat ceremoniously. "Perhaps I'd better fly all the same," he said in a singularly agreeable voice. His eyes were intent on the girl's.

She made a slight gesture, not so much to detain or dismiss as to signify her complete indifference. "Isn't mother coming presently?" she said, addressing the question to Wyant.

"No; I'm moved on till tomorrow. There must have been some big upheaval to make her change her plans at the last minute. Sit down and tell us all about it."

"I don't know of any upheaval. There's only the dinner-dance for Amalasuntha this evening."

"Oh, but that sort of thing is in your mother's stride. You underrate her capacity. Stan has been giving me a hint of something a good deal more volcanic."

Nona felt an inward tremor; was she going to hear Lita's name? She turned her glance on Heuston with a certain hostility.

"Oh, Stan's hints--."

"You see what Nona thinks of my views on cities and men," Heuston shrugged. He had remained on his feet, as though about to take leave; but once again the girl felt his eager eyes beseeching her.

"Are you waiting to walk home with me? You needn't. I'm going to stay for hours," she said, smiling across him at Wyant as she settled down into one of the chintz armchairs.

"Aren't you a little hard on him?" Wyant suggested, when the door had closed on their visitor. "It's not exactly a crime to want to walk home with you."

Nona made an impatient gesture. "Stan bores me."

"Ah, well, I suppose he's not enough of a novelty. Or not up-to-date enough; _your_ dates. Some of his ideas seem to me pretty subversive; but I suppose in your set and Lita's a young man who doesn't jazz all day and drink all night--or vice versa--is a back number."

The girl did not take this up, and after a moment Wyant continued, in his half-mocking half-querulous voice: "Or is it that he isn't 'psychic' enough? That's the latest, isn't it? When you're not high-kicking you're all high-thinking; and that reminds me of Stan's news--"

"Yes?" Nona brought it out between parched lips. Her gaze turned from Wyant to the coals smouldering in the grate. She did not want to face any one just then.

"Well, it seems there's going to be a gigantic muck-raking--one of the worst we've had yet. Into this Mahatma business; you know, the nigger chap your mother's always talking about. There's a hint of it in the last number of the 'Looker-on'; here ... where is it? Never mind, though. What it says isn't a patch on the real facts, Stan tells me. It seems the goings-on in that School of Oriental Thought--what does he call the place: Dawnside?--have reached such a point that the Grant Lindons, whose girl has been making a 'retreat' there, or whatever they call it, are out to have a thorough probing. They say the police don't want to move because so many people we know are mixed up in it; but Lindon's back is up, and he swears he won't rest till he gets the case before the Grand Jury..."

As Wyant talked, the weight lifted from Nona's breast. Much she cared for the Mahatma, or for the Grant Lindons! Stuffy old-fashioned people--she didn't wonder Bee Lindon had broken away from such parents--though she was a silly fool, no doubt. Besides, the Mahatma certainly had reduced Mrs. Manford's hips--and made her less nervous too: for Mrs. Manford sometimes was nervous, in spite of her breathless pursuit of repose. Not, of course, in the same querulous uncontrolled way as poor Arthur Wyant, who had never been taught poise, or mental uplift, or being in tune with the Infinite; but rather as one agitated by the incessant effort to be calm. And in that respect the Mahatma's rhythmic exercises had without doubt been helpful. No; Nona didn't care a fig for scandals about the School of Oriental Thought. And the relief of finding that the subject she had dreaded to hear broached had probably never even come to Wyant's ears, gave her a reaction of light-heartedness.

There were moments when Nona felt oppressed by responsibilities and anxieties not of her age, apprehensions that she could not shake off and yet had not enough experience of life to know how to meet. One or two of her girl friends--in the brief intervals between whirls and thrills--had confessed to the same vague disquietude. It was as if, in the beaming determination of the middle-aged, one and all of them, to ignore sorrow and evil, "think them away" as superannuated bogies, survivals of some obsolete European superstition unworthy of enlightened Americans, to whom plumbing and dentistry had given higher standards, and bi-focal glasses a clearer view of the universe--as if the demons the elder generation ignored, baulked of their natural prey, had cast their hungry shadow over the young. After all, somebody in every family had to remember now and then that such things as wickedness, suffering and death had not yet been banished from the earth; and with all those bright-complexioned white-haired mothers mailed in massage and optimism, and behaving as if they had never heard of anything but the Good and the Beautiful, perhaps their children had to serve as vicarious sacrifices. There were hours when Nona Manford, bewildered little Iphigenia, uneasily argued in this way: others when youth and inexperience reasserted themselves, and the load slipped from her, and she wondered why she didn't always believe, like her elders, that one had only to be brisk, benevolent and fond to prevail against the powers of darkness.

She felt this relief now; but a vague restlessness remained with her, and to ease it, and prove to herself that she was not nervous, she mentioned to Wyant that she had just been lunching with Jim and Lita.

Wyant brightened, as he always did at his son's name. "Poor old Jim! He dropped in yesterday, and I thought he looked overworked! I sometimes wonder if that father of yours hasn't put more hustle into him than a Wyant can assimilate." Wyant spoke good-humouredly; his first bitterness against the man who had supplanted him (a sentiment regarded by Pauline as barbarous and mediæval) had gradually been swallowed up in gratitude for Dexter Manford's kindness to Jim. The oddly-assorted trio, Wyant, Pauline and her new husband, had been drawn into a kind of inarticulate understanding by their mutual tenderness for the progeny of the two marriages, and Manford loved Jim almost as much as Wyant loved Nona.

"Oh, well," the girl said, "Jim always does everything with all his might. And now that he's doing it for Lita and the baby, he's got to keep on, whether he wants to or not."

"I suppose so. But why do you say 'whether'?" Wyant questioned with one of his disconcerting flashes. "Doesn't he want to?"

Nona was vexed at her slip. "Of course. I only meant that he used to be rather changeable in his tastes, and that getting married has given him an object."

"How very old-fashioned! You _are_ old-fashioned, you know, my child; in spite of the jazz. I suppose that's what I've done for _you_, in exchange for Manford's modernizing Jim. Not much of an exchange, I'm afraid. But how long do you suppose Lita will care about being an object to Jim?"

"Why shouldn't she care? She'd go on caring about the baby, even if ... not that I mean..."

"Oh, I know. That's a great baby. Queer, you know--I can see he's going to have the Wyant nose and forehead. It's about all we've left to give. But look here--haven't you really heard anything more about the Mahatma? I thought that Lindon girl was a pal of yours. Now listen--"

When Nona Manford emerged into the street she was not surprised to meet Stanley Heuston strolling toward her across Stuyvesant Square. Neither surprised, nor altogether sorry; do what she would, she could never quite repress the sense of ease and well-being that his nearness gave. And yet half the time they were together she always spent in being angry with him and wishing him away. If only the relation between them had been as simple as that between herself and Jim! And it might have been--ought to have been--seeing that Heuston was Jim's cousin, and nearly twice her age; yes, and had been married before she left the schoolroom. Really, her exasperation was justified. Yet no one understood her as well as Stanley; not even Jim, who was so much dearer and more lovable. Life was a confusing business to Nona Manford.

"How absurd! I asked you not to wait. I suppose you think I'm not old enough to be out alone after dark."

"That hadn't occurred to me; and I'm not waiting to walk home with you," Heuston rejoined with some asperity. "But I do want to say two words," he added, his voice breaking into persuasion.

Nona stopped, her heels firmly set on the pavement. "The same old two?"

"No. Besides, there are three of those. You never _could_ count." He hesitated: "This time it's only about Arthur--"

"Why; what's the matter?" The sense of apprehension woke in her again. What if Wyant really had begun to suspect that there was something, an imponderable something, wrong between Jim and Lita, and had been too shrewd to let Nona detect his suspicion?

"Haven't you noticed? He looks like the devil. He's been drinking again. Eleanor spoke to me--"

"Oh, dear." There it was--all the responsibilities and worries always closed in on Nona! But this one, after all, was relatively bearable.

"What can I do, Stan? I can't imagine why you come to _me_!"

He smiled a little, in his queer derisive way. "Doesn't everybody? The fact is--I didn't want to bother Jim."

She was silent. She understood; but she resented his knowing that she understood.

"Jim has got to be bothered. He's got to look after his father."

"Yes; but I-- Oh, look here, Nona; won't you see?"

"See what?"

"Why--that if Jim is worried about his father now--Jim's a queer chap; he's tried his hand at fifty things, and never stuck to one; and if he gets a shock now, on top of everything else--"

Nona felt her lips grow hard: all her pride and tenderness for her brother stiffened into ice about her heart.

"I don't know what you mean. Jim's grown up--he's got to face things."

"Yes; I know. I've been told the same thing about myself. But there are things one doesn't ever have a chance to face in this slippery sliding modern world, because they don't come out into the open. They just lurk and peep and mouth. My case exactly. What on earth is there about Aggie that a fellow can _face_?"

Nona stopped short with a jerk. "We don't happen to be talking about you and Aggie," she said.

"Oh, well; I was merely using myself as an example. But there are plenty of others to choose from."

Her voice broke into anger. "I don't imagine you're comparing your married life to Jim's?"

"Lord, no. God forbid!" He burst into a dry laugh. "When I think of Aggie's life and Lita's--!"

"Never mind about Lita's life. What do you know about it, anyhow? Oh, Stan, why are we quarrelling again?" She felt the tears in her throat. "What you wanted was only to tell me about poor Arthur. And I'd guessed that myself--I know something ought to be done. But _what_? How on earth can I tell? I'm always being asked by everybody what ought to be done ... and sometimes I feel too young to be always the one to judge, to decide..."

Heuston stood watching her in silence. Suddenly he took her hand and drew it through his arm. She did not resist, and thus linked they walked on slowly and without further speech through the cold deserted streets. As they approached more populous regions she freed her arm from his, and signalled to a taxi.

"May I come?"

"No. I'm going to meet Lita at the Cubist Cabaret. I promised to be there by four."

"Oh, all right." He looked at her irresolutely as the taxi drew up. "I wish to God I could always be on hand to help you when you're bothered!"

She shook her head.

"Never?"

"Not while Aggie--"

"That means never."

"Then never." She held out her hand, but he had turned and was already striding off in the opposite direction. She threw the address to the chauffeur and got in.

"Yes; I suppose it _is_ never," she said to herself. After all, instead of helping her with the Wyant problem, Stan had only brought her another: his own--and hers. As long as Aggie Heuston, a sort of lay nun, absorbed in High Church practices and the exercise of a bleak but efficient philanthropy, continued to set her face against divorce, Nona would not admit that Heuston had any right to force it upon her. "It's her way of loving him," the girl said to herself for the hundredth time. "She wants to keep him for herself too--though she doesn't know it; but she does above all want to save him. And she thinks that's the way to do it. I rather admire her for thinking that there is a way to save people..." She pushed that problem once more into the back of her mind, and turned her thoughts toward the other and far more pressing one: that of poor Arthur Wyant's growing infirmity. Stanley was probably right in not wanting to speak to Jim about it at that particular moment--though how did Stanley know about Jim's troubles, and what did he know?--and she herself, after all, was perhaps the only person to deal with Arthur Wyant. Another interval of anxious consideration made her decide that the best way would be to seek her father's advice. After an hour's dancing she would feel better, more alive and competent, and there would still be time to dash down to Manford's office, the only place--as she knew by experience--where Manford was ever likely to have time for her.

V

THE door of his private office clicked on a withdrawing client, and Dexter Manford, giving his vigorous shoulders a shake, rose from his desk and stood irresolute.

"I must get out to Cedarledge for some golf on Saturday," he thought. He lived among people who regarded golf as a universal panacea, and in a world which believed in panaceas.

As he stood there, his glance lit on the looking-glass above the mantel and he mustered his image impatiently. Queer thing, for a man of his age to gape at himself in a looking-glass like a dago dancing-master! He saw a swarthy straight-nosed face, dark crinkling hair with a dash of gray on the temples, dark eyes under brows that were beginning to beetle across a deep vertical cleft. Complexion turning from ruddy to sallow; eyes heavy--would he put his tongue out next? The matter with him was...

He dropped back into his desk-chair and unhooked the telephone receiver.

"Mrs. James Wyant? Yes... Oh--_out_? You're sure? And you don't know when she'll be back? Who? Yes; Mr. Manford. I had a message for Mrs. Wyant. No matter."

He hung up and leaned back, stretching his legs under the table and staring moodily at the heap of letters and legal papers in the morocco-lined baskets set out before him.

"I look ten years older than my age," he thought. Yet that last new type-writer, Miss Vollard, or whatever her name was, really behaved as if ... was always looking at him when she thought he wasn't looking... "Oh, what rot!" he exclaimed.

His day had been as all his days were now: a starting in with a great sense of pressure, importance and authority--and a drop at the close into staleness and futility.

The evening before, he had stopped to see his doctor and been told that he was over-working, and needed a nerve-tonic and a change of scene. "Cruise to the West Indies, or something of the sort. Couldn't you get away for three or four weeks? No? Well, more golf then, anyhow."

Getting away from things; the perpetual evasion, moral, mental, physical, which he heard preached, and saw practised, everywhere about him, except where money-making was concerned! He, Dexter Manford, who had been brought up on a Minnesota farm, paid his own way through the State College at Delos, and his subsequent course in the Harvard Law School; and who, ever since, had been working at the top of his pitch with no more sense of strain, no more desire for evasion (shirking, he called it) than a healthy able-bodied man of fifty had a right to feel! If his task had been mere money-getting he might have known--and acknowledged--weariness. But he gloried in his profession, in its labours and difficulties as well as its rewards, it satisfied him intellectually and gave him that calm sense of mastery--mastery over himself and others--known only to those who are doing what they were born to do.

Of course, at every stage of his career--and never more than now, on its slippery pinnacle--he had suffered the thousand irritations inseparable from a hard-working life: the trifles which waste one's time, the fools who consume one's patience, the tricky failure of the best-laid plans, the endless labour of rolling human stupidity up the steep hill of understanding. But until lately these things had been a stimulus: it had amused him to shake off trifles, baffle bores, circumvent failure, and exercise his mental muscles in persuading stupid people to do intelligent things. There was pioneer blood in him: he was used to starting out every morning to hack his way through a fresh growth of prejudices and obstacles; and though he liked his big retaining fees he liked arguing a case even better.

Professionally, he was used to intellectual loneliness, and no longer minded it. Outside of his profession he had a brain above the average, but a general education hardly up to it; and the discrepancy between what he would have been capable of enjoying had his mind been prepared for it, and what it could actually take in, made him modest and almost shy in what he considered cultivated society. He had long believed his wife to be cultivated because she had fits of book-buying and there was an expensively bound library in the New York house. In his raw youth, in the old Delos days, he had got together a little library of his own in which Robert Ingersoll's lectures represented science, the sermons of the Reverend Frank Gunsaulus of Chicago, theology, John Burroughs, natural history, and Jared Sparks and Bancroft almost the whole of history. He had gradually discovered the inadequacy of these guides, but without ever having done much to replace them. Now and then, when he was not too tired, and had the rare chance of a quiet evening, he picked up a book from Pauline's table; but the works she acquired were so heterogeneous, and of such unequal value, that he rarely found one worth reading. Mrs. Tallentyre's "Voltaire" had been a revelation: he discovered, to his surprise, that he had never really known who Voltaire was, or what sort of a world he had lived in, and why his name had survived it. After that, Manford decided to start in on a course of European history, and got as far as taking the first volume of Macaulay up to bed. But he was tired at night, and found Macaulay's periods too long (though their eloquence appealed to his forensic instinct): and there had never been time for that course of history.

In his early wedded days, before he knew much of his wife's world, he had dreamed of quiet evenings at home, when Pauline would read instructive books aloud while he sat by the fire and turned over his briefs in some quiet inner chamber of his mind. But Pauline had never known any one who wanted to be read aloud to except children getting over infantile complaints. She regarded the desire almost as a symptom of illness, and decided that Dexter needed "rousing," and that she must do more to amuse him. As soon as she was able after Nona's birth she girt herself up for this new duty; and from that day Manford's life, out of office hours, had been one of almost incessant social activity. At first the endless going out had bewildered, then for a while amused and flattered him, then gradually grown to be a soothing routine, a sort of mild drug-taking after the high pressure of professional hours; but of late it had become simply a bore, a duty to be persisted in because--as he had at last discovered--Pauline could not live without it. After twenty years of marriage he was only just beginning to exercise his intellectual acumen on his wife.

The thought of Pauline made him glance at his clock: she would be coming in a moment. He unhooked the receiver again, and named, impatiently, the same number as before. "Out, you say? Still?" (The same stupid voice making the same stupid answer!) "Oh, no; no matter. I say _it's no matter_," he almost shouted, replacing the receiver. Of all idiotic servants--!

Miss Vollard, the susceptible type-writer, shot a shingled head around the door, said "_All_ right" with an envious sigh to some one outside, and effaced herself before the brisk entrance of her employer's wife. Manford got to his feet.

"Well, my dear--" He pushed an armchair near the fire, solicitous, still a little awed by her presence--the beautiful Mrs. Wyant who had deigned to marry him. Pauline, throwing back her furs, cast a quick house-keeping glance about her. The scent she used always reminded him of a superior disinfectant; and in another moment, he knew, she would find some pretext for assuring herself, by the application of a gloved finger-tip, that there was no dust on desk or mantelpiece. She had very nearly obliged him, when he moved into his new office, to have concave surbases, as in a hospital ward or a hygienic nursery. She had adopted with enthusiasm the idea of the concave tiling fitted to every cove and angle, so that there were no corners anywhere to catch the dust. People's lives ought to be like that: with no corners in them. She wanted to de-microbe life.

But, in the case of his own office, Manford had resisted; and now, he understood, the fad had gone to the scrap-heap--with how many others!

"Not too near the fire." Pauline pushed her armchair back and glanced up to see if the ceiling ventilators were working. "You _do_ renew the air at regular intervals? I'm sure everything depends on that; that and thought-direction. What the Mahatma calls mental deep-breathing." She smiled persuasively. "You look tired, Dexter ... tired and drawn."

"Oh, rot!--A cigarette?"

She shook her small resolute head. "You forget that he's cured me of that too--the Mahatma. Dexter," she exclaimed suddenly, "I'm sure it's this silly business of the Grant Lindons' that's worrying you. I want to talk to you about it--to clear it up with you. It's out of the question that you should be mixed up in it."

Manford had gone back to his desk-chair. Habit made him feel more at home there, in fuller possession of himself; Pauline, in the seat facing him, the light full on her, seemed no more than a client to be advised, or an opponent to be talked over. He knew she felt the difference too. So far he had managed to preserve his professional privacy and his professional authority. What he did "at the office" was clouded over, for his family, by the vague word "business," which meant that a man didn't want to be bothered. Pauline had never really distinguished between practising the law and manufacturing motors; nor had Manford encouraged her to. But today he suspected that she meant her interference to go to the extreme limit which her well-known "tact" would permit.

"You must not be mixed up in this investigation. Why not hand it over to somebody else? Alfred Cosby, or that new Jew who's so clever? The Lindons would accept any one you recommended; unless, of course," she continued, "you could persuade them to drop it, which would be so much better. I'm sure you could, Dexter; you always know what to say--and your opinion carries such weight. Besides, what is it they complain of? Some nonsense of Bee's, I've no doubt--she took a rest-cure at the School. If they'd brought the girl up properly there'd have been no trouble. Look at Nona!"

"Oh--Nona!" Manford gave a laugh of pride. Nona was the one warm rich spot in his life: the corner on which the sun always shone. Fancy comparing that degenerate fool of a Bee Lindon to his Nona, and imagining that "bringing-up" made the difference! Still, he had to admit that Pauline--always admirable--had been especially so as a mother. Yet she too was bitten with this theosophical virus!

He lounged back, hands in pockets, one leg swinging, instinctively seeking an easier attitude as his moral ease diminished.

"My dear, it's always been understood, hasn't it, that what goes on in this office is between me and my clients, and not--"

"Oh, nonsense, Dexter!" She seldom took that tone: he saw that she was losing her self-control. "Look here: I make it a rule never to interfere; you've just said so. Well--if I interfere now, it's because I've a right to--because it's a duty! The Lindons are my son's cousins: Fanny Lindon was a Wyant. Isn't that reason enough?"

"It was one of the Lindons' reasons. They appealed to me on that very ground."

Pauline gave an irritated laugh. "How like Fanny! Always pushing in and claiming things. I wonder such an argument took you in. Do consider, Dexter! I won't for a minute admit that there can be anything wrong about the Mahatma; but supposing there were..." She drew herself up, her lips tightening. "I hope I know how to respect professional secrecy, and I don't ask you to repeat their nasty insinuations; in fact, as you know, I always take particular pains to avoid hearing anything painful or offensive. But, supposing there were any ground for what they say; do they realize how the publicity is going to affect Bee's reputation? And how shall you feel if you set the police at work and find them publishing the name of a girl who is Jim's cousin, and a friend of your own daughter's?"

Manford moved restlessly in his chair, and in so doing caught his reflexion in the mirror, and saw that his jaw had lost its stern professional cast. He made an attempt to recover it, but unsuccessfully.

"But all this is too absurd," Pauline continued on a smoother note. "The Mahatma and his friends have nothing to fear. Whose judgment would you sooner trust: mine, or poor Fanny's? What really bothers me is your allowing the Lindons to drag you into an affair which is going to discredit them, and not the Mahatma." She smiled her bright frosty smile. "You know how proud I am of your professional prestige: I should hate to have you associated with a failure." She paused, and he saw that she meant to rest on that.

"This is a pretty bad business. The Lindons have got their proofs all right," he said.

Pauline reddened, and her face lost its look of undaunted serenity. "How can you believe such rubbish, Dexter? If you're going to take Fanny Lindon's word against mine--"

"It's not a question of your word or hers. Lindon is fully documented: he didn't come to me till he was. I'm sorry, Pauline; but you've been deceived. This man has got to be shown up, and the Lindons have had the pluck to do what everybody else has shirked."

Pauline's angry colour had faded. She got up and stood before her husband, distressed and uncertain; then, with a visible effort at self-command, she seated herself again, and locked her hands about her gold-mounted bag.

"Then you'd rather the scandal, if there is one, should be paraded before the world? Who will gain by that except the newspaper reporters, and the people who want to drag down society? And how shall you feel if Nona is called as a witness--or Lita?"

"Oh, nonsense--" He stopped abruptly, and got up too. The discussion was lasting longer than he had intended, and he could not find the word to end it. His mind felt suddenly empty--empty of arguments and formulas. "I don't know why you persist in bringing in Nona--or Lita--"

"I don't; it's you. You will, that is, if you take this case. Bee and Nona have been intimate since they were babies, and Bee is always at Lita's. Don't you suppose the Mahatma's lawyers will make use of that if you _oblige_ him to fight? You may say you're prepared for it; and I admire your courage--but I can't share it. The idea that our children may be involved simply sickens me."

"Neither Nona nor Lita has ever had anything to do with this charlatan and his humbug, as far as I know," said Manford irritably.

"Nona has attended his eurythmic classes at our house, and gone to his lectures with me: at one time they interested her intensely." Pauline paused. "About Lita I don't know: I know so little about Lita's life before her marriage."

"It was presumably that of any of Nona's other girl friends."

"Presumably. Kitty Landish might enlighten us. But of course, if it _was_--" he noted her faintly sceptical emphasis--"I don't admit that that would preclude Lita's having known the Mahatma, or believed in him. And you must remember, Dexter, that I should be the most deeply involved of all! I mean to take a rest-cure at Dawnside in March." She gave the little playful laugh with which she had been used, in old times, to ridicule the naughtiness of her children.

Manford drummed on his blotting-pad. "Look here, suppose we drop this for the present--"

She glanced at her wrist-watch. "If you can spare the time--"

"Spare the time?"

She answered softly: "I'm not going away till you've promised."

Manford could remember the day when that tone--so feminine under its firmness--would have had the power to shake him. Pauline, in her wifely dealings, so seldom invoked the prerogative of her grace, her competence, her persuasiveness, that when she did he had once found it hard to resist. But that day was past. Under his admiration for her brains, and his esteem for her character, he had felt, of late, a stealing boredom. She was too clever, too efficient, too uniformly sagacious and serene. Perhaps his own growing sense of power--professional and social--had secretly undermined his awe of hers, made him feel himself first her equal, then ever so little her superior. He began to detect something obtuse in that unfaltering competence. And as his professional authority grew he had become more jealous of interference with it. His wife ought at least to have understood that! If her famous tact were going to fail her, what would be left, he asked himself?

"Look here, Pauline, you know all this is useless. In professional matters no one else can judge for me. I'm busy this afternoon; I'm sure you are too--"

She settled more deeply into her armchair. "Never too busy for you, Dexter."

"Thank you, dear. But the time I ask you to give me is outside of business hours," he rejoined with a slight smile.

"Then I'm dismissed?" She smiled back. "I understand; you needn't ring!" She rose with recovered serenity and laid a light hand on his shoulder. "Sorry to have bothered you; I don't often, do I? All I ask is that you should think over--"

He lifted the hand to his lips. "Of course, of course." Now that she was going he could say it.

"I'm forgiven?"

He smiled: "You're forgiven;" and from the threshold she called, almost gaily: "Don't forget tonight--Amalasuntha!"

His brow clouded as he returned to his chair; and oddly enough--he was aware of the oddness--it was clouded not by the tiresome scene he had been through, but by his wife's reminder. "Damn that dinner," he swore to himself.

He turned to the telephone, unhooked it for the third time, and called for the same number.

That evening, as he slipped the key into his front-door, Dexter Manford felt the oppression of all that lay behind it. He never entered his house without a slight consciousness of the importance of the act--never completely took for granted the resounding vestibule, the big hall with its marble staircase ascending to all the light and warmth and luxury which skill could devise, money buy, and Pauline's ingenuity combine in a harmonious whole. He had not yet forgotten the day when, after one of his first legal successes, he had installed a bathroom in his mother's house at Delos, and all the neighbours had driven in from miles around to see it.

But luxury, and above all comfort, had never weighed on him; he was too busy to think much about them, and sure enough of himself and his powers to accept them as his right. It was not the splendour of his house that oppressed him but the sense of the corporative bonds it imposed. It seemed part of an elaborate social and domestic structure, put together with the baffling ingenuity of certain bird's-nests of which he had seen the pictures. His own career, Pauline's multiple activities, the problem of poor Arthur Wyant, Nona, Jim, Lita Wyant, the Mahatma, the tiresome Grant Lindons, the perennial and inevitable Amalasuntha, for whom the house was being illuminated tonight--all were strands woven into the very pile of the carpet he trod on his way up the stairs. As he passed the dining-room he saw, through half-open doors, the glitter of glass and silver, a shirt-sleeved man placing bowls of roses down the long table, and Maisie Bruss, wan but undaunted, dealing out dinner cards to Powder, the English butler.

VI

PAULINE MANFORD sent a satisfied glance down the table.

It was on such occasions that she visibly reaped her reward. No one else in New York had so accomplished a cook, such smoothly running service, a dinner-table so softly yet brightly lit, or such skill in grouping about it persons not only eminent in wealth or fashion, but likely to find pleasure in each other's society.

The intimate reunion, of the not-more-than-the-Muses kind, was not Pauline's affair. She was aware of this, and seldom made the attempt--though, when she did, she was never able to discover why it was not a success. But in the organizing and administering of a big dinner she was conscious of mastery. Not the stupid big dinner of old days, when the "crowned heads" used to be treated like a caste apart, and everlastingly invited to meet each other through a whole monotonous season: Pauline was too modern for that. She excelled in a judicious blending of Wall Street and Bohemia, and her particular art lay in her selection of the latter element. Of course there were Bohemians and Bohemians; as she had once remarked to Nona, people weren't always amusing just because they were clever, or dull just because they were rich--though at the last clause Nona had screwed up her nose incredulously... Well, even Nona would be satisfied tonight, Pauline thought. It wasn't everybody who would have been bold enough to ask a social reformer like Parker Greg with the very people least disposed to encourage social reform, nor a young composer like Torfried Lobb (a disciple of "The Six") with all those stolid opera-goers, nor that disturbing Tommy Ardwin, the Cubist decorator, with the owners of the most expensive "period houses" in Fifth Avenue.

Pauline was not a bit afraid of such combinations. She knew in advance that at one of her dinners everything would "go"--it always did. And her success amused and exhilarated her so much that, even tonight, though she had come down oppressed with problems, they slipped from her before she even had time to remind herself that they were nonexistent. She had only to look at the faces gathered about that subdued radiance of old silver and scattered flowers to be sure of it. There, at the other end of the table, was her husband's dark head, comely and resolute in its vigorous middle-age; on his right the Marchesa di San Fedele, the famous San Fedele pearls illuminating her inconspicuous black; on his left the handsome Mrs. Herman Toy, magnanimously placed there by Pauline because she knew that Manford was said to be "taken" by her, and she wanted him to be in good-humour that evening. To measure her own competence she had only to take in this group, already settling down to an evening's enjoyment, and then let her glance travel on to the others, the young and handsome women, the well-dressed confident-looking men. Nona, grave yet eager, was talking to Manford's legal rival, the brilliant Alfred Cosby, who was known to have said she was the cleverest girl in New York. Lita, cool and aloof, drooped her head slightly to listen to Torfried Lobb, the composer; Jim gazed across the table at Lita as if his adoration made every intervening obstacle transparent; Aggie Heuston, whose coldness certainly made her look distinguished, though people complained that she was dull, dispensed occasional monosyllables to the ponderous Herman Toy; and Stanley Heuston, leaning back with that faint dry smile which Pauline found irritating because it was so inscrutable, kept his eyes discreetly but steadily on Nona. Dear good Stan, always like a brother to Nona! People who knew him well said he wasn't as sardonic as he looked.

It was a world after Pauline's heart--a world such as she believed its Maker meant it to be. She turned to the Bishop on her right, wondering if he shared her satisfaction, and encountered a glance of understanding.

"So refreshing to be among old friends... This is one of the few houses left... Always such a pleasure to meet the dear Marchesa; I hope she has better reports of her son? Wretched business, I'm afraid. My dear Mrs. Manford, I wonder if you know how blessed you are in your children? That wise little Nona, who is going to make some man so happy one of these days--not Cosby, no? Too much difference in age? And your steady Jim and his idol ... yes, I know it doesn't become my cloth to speak indulgently of idolatry. But happy marriages are so rare nowadays: where else could one find such examples as there are about this table? Your Jim and his Lita, and my good friend Heuston with that saint of a wife--" The Bishop paused, as if, even on so privileged an occasion, he was put to it to prolong the list. "Well, you've given them the example..." He stopped again, probably remembering that his hostess's matrimonial bliss was built on the ruins of her first husband's. But in divorcing she had invoked a cause which even the Church recognizes; and the Bishop proceeded serenely: "_Her children shall rise up and call her blessed_--yes, dear friend, you must let me say it."

The words were balm to Pauline. Every syllable carried conviction: all was right with her world and the Bishop's! Why did she ever need any other spiritual guidance than that of her own creed? She felt a twinge of regret at having so involved herself with the Mahatma. Yet what did Episcopal Bishops know of "holy ecstasy"? And could any number of Church services have reduced her hips? After all, there was room for all the creeds in her easy rosy world. And the thought led her straight to her other preoccupation: the reception for the Cardinal. She resolved to secure the Bishop's approval at once. After that, of course the Chief Rabbi would have to come. And what a lesson in tolerance and good-will to the discordant world she was trying to reform!

Nona, half-way down the table, viewed its guests from another angle. She had come back depressed rather than fortified from her flying visit to her father. There were days when Manford liked to be "surprised" at the office; when he and his daughter had their little jokes together over these clandestine visits. But this one had not come off in that spirit. She had found Manford tired and slightly irritable; Nona, before he had time to tell her of her mother's visit, caught a lingering whiff of Pauline's cool hygienic scent, and wondered nervously what could have happened to make Mrs. Manford break through her tightly packed engagements, and dash down to her husband's office. It was of course to that emergency that she had sacrificed poor Exhibit A--little guessing his relief at the postponement. But what could have obliged her to see Manford so suddenly, when they were to meet at dinner that evening?

The girl had asked no questions: she knew that Manford, true to his profession, preferred putting them. And her chief object, of course, had been to get him to help her about Arthur Wyant. That, she perceived, at first added to his irritation: was he Wyant's keeper, he wanted to know? But he broke off before the next question: "Why the devil can't his own son look after him?" She had seen that question on his very lips; but they shut down on it, and he rose from his chair with a shrug. "Poor devil--if you think I can be of any use? All right, then--I'll drop in on him tomorrow." He and Wyant, ever since the divorce, had met whenever Jim's fate was to be discussed; Wyant felt a sort of humiliated gratitude for Manford's generosity to his son. "Not the money, you know, Nona--damn the money! But taking such an interest in him; helping him to find himself: appreciating him, hang it! He understands Jim a hundred times better than your mother ever did..." On this basis the two men came together now and then in a spirit of tolerant understanding...

Nona recalled her father's face as it had been when she left him: worried, fagged, yet with that twinkle of gaiety his eyes always had when he looked at her. Now, smoothed out, smiling, slightly replete, it was hard as stone. "Like his own death-mask," the girl thought; "as if he'd done with everything, once for all.--And the way those two women bore him! Mummy put Gladys Toy next to him as a reward--for what?" She smiled at her mother's simplicity in imagining that he was having what Pauline called a "harmless flirtation" with Mrs. Herman Toy. That lady's obvious charms were no more to him, Nona suspected, than those of the florid Bathsheba in the tapestry behind his chair. But Pauline had evidently had some special reason--over and above her usual diffused benevolence--for wanting to put Manford in a good humour. "The Mahatma, probably." Nona knew how her mother hated a fuss: how vulgar and unchristian she always thought it. And it would certainly be inconvenient to give up the rest-cure at Dawnside she had planned for March, when Manford was to go off tarpon-fishing.

Nona's glance, in the intervals of talk with her neighbours, travelled farther, lit on Jim's good-humoured wistful face--Jim was always wistful at his mother's banquets--and flitted on to Aggie Heuston's precise little mask, where everything was narrow and perpendicular, like the head of a saint squeezed into a cathedral niche. But the girl's eyes did not linger, for as they rested on Aggie they abruptly met the latter's gaze. Aggie had been furtively scrutinizing her, and the discovery gave Nona a faint shock. In another instant Mrs. Heuston turned to Parker Greg, the interesting young social reformer whom Pauline had thoughtfully placed next to her, with the optimistic idea that all persons interested in improving the world must therefore be in the fullest sympathy. Nona, knowing Parker Greg's views, smiled at that too. Aggie, she was sure, would feel much safer with her other neighbour, Mr. Herman Toy, who thought, on all subjects, just what all his fellow capitalists did.

Nona caught Stan Heuston's smile, and knew he had read her thought; but from him too she turned. The last thing she wanted was that he should guess her real opinion of his wife. Something deep down and dogged in Nona always, when it came to the touch, made her avert her feet from the line of least resistance.

Manford lent an absent ear first to one neighbour, then the other. Mrs. Toy was saying, in her flat uncadenced voice, like tepid water running into a bath: "I don't see how people can live without lifts in their houses, do you? But perhaps it's because I've never had to. Father's house had the first electric lift at Climax. Once, in England, we went to stay with the Duke of Humber, at Humber Castle--one of those huge parties, royalties and everything--golf and polo all day, and a ball every night; and, will you believe it, _we had to walk up and down stairs_! I don't know what English people are made of. I suppose they've never been used to what we call comfort. The second day I told Herman I couldn't stand those awful slippery stairs after two rounds of golf, and dancing till four in the morning. It was simply destroying my heart--the doctor has warned me so often! I wanted to leave right away--but Herman said it would offend the Duke. The Duke's such a sweet old man. But, any way, I made Herman promise me a sapphire and emerald _plaque_ from Cartier's before I'd agree to stick it out..."

The Marchesa's little ferret face with sharp impassioned eyes darted conversationally forward. "The Duke of Humber? I know him so well. Dear old man! Ah, you also stayed at Humber? So often he invites me. We are related ... yes, through his first wife, whose mother was a Venturini of the Calabrian branch: Donna Ottaviana. Yes. Another sister, Donna Rosmunda, the beauty of the family, married the Duke of Lepanto ... a mediatized prince..."

She stopped, and Manford read in her eyes the hasty inward interrogation: "Will they think that expression queer? I'm not sure myself just what 'mediatized' means. And these Americans! They stick at nothing, but they're shocked at everything." Aloud she continued: "A mediatized prince--but a man of the _very highest_ character."

"Oh--" murmured Mrs. Toy, puzzled but obviously relieved.

Manford's attention, tugging at its moorings, had broken loose again and was off and away.

The how-many-eth dinner did that make this winter? And no end in sight! How could Pauline stand it? Why did she want to stand it? All those rest-cures, massages, rhythmic exercises, devised to restore the health of people who would have been as sound as bells if only they had led normal lives! Like that fool of a woman spreading her blond splendours so uselessly at his side, who couldn't walk upstairs because she had danced all night! Pauline was just like that--never walked upstairs, and then had to do gymnastics, and have osteopathy, and call in Hindu sages, to prevent her muscles from getting atrophied... He had a vision of his mother, out on the Minnesota farm, before they moved into Delos--saw her sowing, digging potatoes, feeding chickens; saw her kneading, baking, cooking, washing, mending, catching and harnessing the half-broken colt to drive twelve miles in the snow for the doctor, one day when all the men were away, and his little sister had been so badly scalded... And there the old lady sat at Delos, in her nice little brick house, in her hale and hearty old age, built to outlive them all.--Wasn't that perhaps the kind of life Manford himself had been meant for? Farming on a big scale, with all the modern appliances his forbears had lacked, outdoing everybody in the county, marketing his goods at the big centres, and cutting a swathe in state politics like his elder brother? Using his brains, muscles, the whole of him, body and soul, to do real things, bring about real results in the world, instead of all this artificial activity, this spinning around faster and faster in the void, and having to be continually rested and doctored to make up for exertions that led to nothing, nothing, nothing...

"Of course we all know _you_ could tell us if you would. Everybody knows the Lindons have gone to you for advice." Mrs. Toy's large shallow eyes floated the question toward him on a sea-blue wave of curiosity. "Not a word of truth? Oh, of course you have to say that! But everybody has been expecting there'd be trouble soon..."

And, in a whisper, from the Marchesa's side: "Teasing you about that mysterious Mahatma? Foolish woman! As long as dear Pauline believes in him, I'm satisfied. That was what I was saying to Pauline before dinner: 'Whatever you and Dexter approve of, I approve of.' That's the reason why I'm so anxious to have my poor boy come to New York ... my Michelangelo! If only you could see him I know you'd grow as fond of him as you are of our dear Jim: perhaps even take him into your office... Ah, that, dear Dexter, has always been my dream!"

... What sort of a life, after all, if not this one? For of course that dream of a Western farm was all rubbish. What he really wanted was a life in which professional interests as far-reaching and absorbing as his own were somehow impossibly combined with great stretches of country quiet, books, horses and children--ah, children! Boys of his own--teaching them all sorts of country things; taking them for long trudges, telling them about trees and plants and birds--watching the squirrels, feeding the robins and thrushes in winter; and coming home in the dusk to firelight, lamplight, a tea-table groaning with jolly things, all the boys and girls (girls too, more little Nonas) grouped around, hungry and tingling from their long tramp--and a woman lifting a calm face from her book: a woman who looked so absurdly young to be their mother; so--