Chapter III: Part TWO: The Round-About (1)

I

Alice Palgrave's partner had dealt, and having gone three in "no trumps" and found seven to the ace, king, queen in hearts lying before her in dummy, she wore a smile of beatific satisfaction. So also did Alice--for two reasons. The deal obviously spelled money, and Vere Millet could be trusted to get every trick out of it. There were four bridge tables fully occupied in the charming drawing-room, and as she caught the hostess' eye and smiled, she felt just a little bit like a fairy godmother in having surrounded Joan with so many of the smartest members of the younger set barely three weeks after her astonishing arrival in a city in which she had only one friend.

Alice didn't blind herself to the fact that in order to gamble, most of the girls in the room would go, without the smallest discrimination, to anybody's house; but there were others,--notably Mrs. Alan Hosack, Mrs. Cooper Jekyll and Enid Ouchterlony,--whose pride it was to draw a hard, relentless line between themselves and every one, however wealthy, who did not belong to families of the same, or almost the same, unquestionable standing as their own. Their presence in the little house in East Sixty-seventh Street gave it, they were well aware, a most enviable cachet and placed Joan safely within the inner circle of New York society--the democratic royal inclosure. It was something to have achieved so soon--little as Joan appeared, in her astonishing coolness, to appreciate it. The Ludlows, as Joan had told Alice with one of her frequent laughs, might have come over in the only staterooms on the ship which towed the heavily laden Mayflower, but that didn't alter the fact that the Hosacks, the Jekylls and the Ouchterlonys were the three most consistently exclusive and difficult families in the country, to know whom all social climbers would joyously mortgage their chances of eternity. Alice placed a feather in her cap accordingly.

Joan's table was the first to break up. She was a loser to the tune of seventy dollars, and while she wrote her check to Marie Littlejohn, a tiny blond exotic not much older than herself,--who laid down the law with the ripe authority of a Cabinet Minister and kept to a daily time-table with the unalterable effrontery of a fashionable doctor,--talked over her shoulder to Christine Hurley.

"Alice tells me that your brother has gone to France with the Canadian Flying Corps. Aren't you proud of him?"

"I suppose so, but it isn't our war, and they're awfully annoyed about it at Piping Rock. He was the crack man of the polo team, you know. I don't see that there was any need of his butting into this European fracas."

"I quite agree with you," said Miss Littlejohn, with her eyes on the clock. "I broke my engagement to Metcalfe Hussey because he insisted on going over to join the English regiment his grandfather used to belong to. I've no patience with sentimentality." She took the check and screwed it into a small gold case. "I'm dining with my bandage-rolling aunt and going on to the opera. Thank goodness, the music will drown her war talk. Good-by." She nodded here and there and left, to be driven home with her adipose chow in a Rolls-Royce.

Christine Hurley touched a photograph that stood on Joan's desk. "Who's this good-looking person?" she asked.

"My husband," said Joan.

"Oh, really! When are we to see something of him?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Joan. "He's about somewhere."

Miss Hurley laughed. "It's like that already, is it? Haven't you only just been married?"

"Yes," said Joan lightly, "but we've begun where most people leave off. It's a great saving of time and temper!"

The sophisticated Christine, no longer in the first flush of giddy youth, still unmarried after four enterprising years, was surprised into looking with very real interest at the girl who had been until that moment merely a hostess. Her extreme finish, her unself-conscious confidence and intrepidity, her unassumed lightness of temper were not often found in one so young and apparently virginal. She dismissed as unbelievable the story that this girl had been brought up in the country in an atmosphere of early Victorianism. She had obviously just come from one of those elaborate finishing schools in which the daughters of rich people are turned into hothouse plants by sycophants and parasites and sent out into the world the most perfect specimens of superautocracy, to patronize their parents, scoff at discipline, ignore duty and demand the sort of luxury that brought Rome to its fall. With admiration and amusement she watched her say good-by to one woman after another as the various tables broke up. It really gave her quite a moment to see the way in which Joan gave as careless and unawed a hand to Mrs. Alan Hosack and Mrs. Cooper Jekyll as to the Countess Palotta, who had nothing but pride to rattle in her little bag; and when finally she too drove away, it was with the uneasy sense of dissatisfaction that goes with the dramatic critic from a production in which he has honestly to confess that there is something new--and arresting.

Alice Palgrave stayed behind. She felt a natural proprietary interest in the success of the afternoon. "My dear," she said emotionally, "you're perfectly wonderful!"

"I am? Why?"

"To any other just-married girl this would have been an ordeal, a nerve-wrecking event. But you've been as cool as a fish--I've been watching you. You might have been brought up in a vice-regal lodge and hobnobbed all your life with ambassadors. How do you do it?"

Joan laughed and threw out her arms. "Oh, I don't know," she said, with her eyes dancing and her nostrils extended. "I don't stop to think how to do things. I just do them. These people are young and alive, and it's good to be among them. I work off some of my own vitality on them and get recharged at the sound of their chatter. People, people--give me people and the clash of tongues and the sense of movement. I don't much care who they are. I shall pick up all the little snobbish stuff sooner or later, of course, and talk about the right set and all that, as you do. I'm bound to. At present everything's new and exciting, and I'm whipping it up. You wait a little. I'll cut out some of the dull and pompous when I've got things going, and limit myself to red-blooded speed-breakers. Give me time, Alice."

She sat down at the piano and crashed out a fox-trot that was all over town. No one would have imagined from her freshness and vivacity that she had been dancing until daylight every night that week.

"Well," said Alice when she could be heard, "I see you making history, my dear; there's no doubt about that."

"None whatever," answered Joan. "I'm outside the walls at last, and I'll go the pace until the ambulance comes."

"With or without Martin Gray?"

"With, if he's quick enough--without, if not."

"Be careful," said Alice.

"Not I, my dear. I left care away back in the country with my little old frocks."

Alice held out her hand. "You bewilder me a little," she said. "You make me feel as if I were in a high wind. You did when we were at school, I remember. Well, don't bother to thank me for having got up this party." She added this a little dryly.

With a most winning smile Joan kissed her. "You're a good pal, Alice," she said, "and I'm very grateful."

Alice was compensated, although her shrewd knowledge of character told her how easily her friend won her points. "And I hope you're duly grateful to Martin Gray?"

"To dear old Marty? Rather! He and I are great pals."

But that was all Alice got. Her burning curiosity to know precisely how this young couple stood must go unsatisfied for the time being. She had only caught a few fleeting glimpses of the man who had given Joan the key to life, and every time had wondered, from something in his eyes, whether he found things wholly good. She was just a little suspicious of romances. Her own had worn thin so quickly. "Good-by, my dear," she said. "Don't forget you're dining with me to-morrow."

"Not likely."

"What are you doing to-night?"

"Going to bed at nine o'clock to sleep the clock round. I'm awfully tired."

She stood quite still for many minutes after Alice had gone, and shut her eyes. In a quick series of moving pictures she saw thousands of little lights and swaying people and clashing colors, and caught snatches of lilting music and laughter. She was tired, and something that seemed like a hand pressed her forehead tightly, but the near-by sound of incessant traffic sent her blood spinning, and she opened her eyes and gave a little laugh and went out.

Martin was on his way downstairs. He drew up abruptly. "Oh, hello!" he said.

"Oh, hello!" said Joan.

He was in evening clothes. His face had lost its tan and his eyes their clear country early-to-bed look. "You've had a tea-fight, I see. I peered into the drawing-room an hour ago and backed out, quick."

"Why? They were all consumed with curiosity about you. Alice has advertised our romantic story, you see." She clasped her hands together and adopted a pose in caricature of the play heroine in an ecstasy of egomania.

But Martin's laugh was short and hollow. He wasn't amused. "How did you get on?" he asked.

"Lost seventy dollars--that's all. Three-handed bridge with Grandfather and Grandmother was not a good apprenticeship. I must have a few lessons. D'you like my frock? Come up. You can't see it from there."

And he came up and looked at her as she turned this way and that. How slim she was, and alluring! The fire in him flamed up, and his eyes flickered. "Awful nice!" he said.

"You really like it?"

"Yes, really. You look beyond criticism in anything, always."

Joan stretched out her hand. "Thank you, Marty," she said. "You say and do the most charming things that have ever been said and done."

He bent over the long-fingered hand. His pride begged him not to let her see the hunger and pain that were in his eyes.

"Going out?" she asked.

Martin gave a careless glance at one of B. C. Koekkoek's inimitable Dutch interiors that hung between two pieces of Flemish tapestry. His voice showed some of his eagerness, though. "I was going to have dinner with some men at the University Club, but I can chuck that and take you to the Biltmore or somewhere else if you like."

Joan shook her head. "Not to-night, Marty. I'm going to bed early, for a change."

"Aren't you going to give me one evening, then?" His question was apparently as casual as his attitude. He stood with his hands in his pockets and his legs wide apart and his teeth showing. He might have been talking to a sister.

"Oh, lots, presently. I'm so tired to-night, old boy."

He would have given Parnassus for a different answer. "All right then," he said. "So long."

"So long, Marty! Don't be too late." She nodded and smiled and went upstairs.

And he nodded and smiled and went down--to the mental depths. "What am I to do?" he asked himself. "What am I to do?" And he put his arms into the coat that was held out and took his hat. In the street the soft April light was fading, and the scent of spring was blown to him from the Park. He turned into Fifth Avenue in company with a horde of questions that he couldn't shake off. He couldn't believe that any of all this was true. Was there no one in all this world of people who would help him and give him a few words of advice? "Oh, Father," he said from the bottom of his heart, "dear old Father, where are you?"

The telephone bell was ringing as Joan went into her room. Gilbert Palgrave spoke--lightly and fluently and with easy words of flattery.

She laughed and sat on the edge of the bed and crossed her legs and put the instrument on her knee. "You read all that in a book," she said. "I'm tired. Yesterday and the night before... No... No... All right, then. Fetch me in an hour." She put the receiver back.

"Why not?" she said to herself, ringing for her maid. "Bed's for old people. Thank God, I sha'n't be old for a century."

She presented her back to the deft-fingered girl and yawned. But the near-by clatter of traffic sounded in her ears.

II

Gilbert Palgrave turned back to his dressing table. An hour gave him ample time to get ready.

"Don't let that bath get cold," he said. "And look here. You may take those links out. I'll wear the pearls instead."

The small, eel-like Japanese murmured sibilantly and disappeared into the bathroom.

This virginal girl, who imagined herself able to play with fire without burning her fingers, was providing him with most welcome amusement. And he needed it. He had been considerably bored of late--always a dangerous mood for him to fall into. He was thirty-one. For ten years he had paid far more than there had been any necessity to keep constantly amused, constantly interested. Thanks to a shrewd ancestor who had bought large tracts of land in a part of Manhattan which had then been untouched by bricks and mortar, and to others, equally shrewd, who had held on and watched a city spreading up the Island like a mustard plant, he could afford whatever price he was asked to pay. Whole blocks were his where once the sheep had grazed.

Ingenuity to spend his income was required of Palgrave. He possessed that gift to an expert degree. But he was no easy mark, no mere degenerate who hacked off great chunks of a splendid fortune for the sake of violent exercise. He was too indolent for violence, too inherently fastidious for degeneracy. And deep down somewhere in a nature that had had no incentive to develop, there was the fag end of that family shrewdness which had made the early Palgraves envied and maligned. Tall and well built, with a handsome Anglo-Saxon type of face, small, soft, fair mustache, large, rather bovine gray eyes, and a deep cleft in his chin, he gave at first sight an impression of strength--which left him, however, when he spoke to pretty women. It was not so much the things he said,--light, jesting, personal things,--as the indications they gave of the overweening vanity of the spoiled boy and of a brain which occupied itself merely with the fluff and thistledown of life. He was, and he knew it and made no effort to disguise the fact, a typical specimen of the very small class of indolent bystanders made rich by the energy of other men who are to be found in every country. He was, in fact, the peculiar type of aristocrat only to be found in a democracy--the aristocrat not of blood and breeding or intellect, but of wealth. He was utterly without any ambition to shine either in social life or politics, or to achieve advertisement by the affectation of a half-genuine interest in any cause. On the contrary, he reveled in being idle and indifferent, and unlike the aristocrats of Europe he refused to catch that archaic habit, encouraged at Eton and Oxford, of relating everything in the universe to the standards and prejudices of a single class.

Palgrave was triumphantly one-eyed and selfish; but he waited, with a sort of satirical wistfulness, for the time when some one person should cause him to stand eager and startled in a chaos of individualism and indolence and shake him into a Great Emotion. He had looked for her at all times and places, though without any troublesome optimism or personal energy, and had almost come to believe that she was to him what the end of the rainbow is to the idealist. In marrying Alice he had followed the path of least resistance. She was young, pretty and charming, and had been very much in love with him. Also it pleased his mother, and she had been worth pleasing. He gave his wife all that she could possibly need, except very much of himself. She was a perfectly dear little soul.

Joan only kept him waiting about fifteen minutes. With perfect patience he stood in front of an Italian mirror in the drawing-room, smoking a cigarette through a long tortoise-shell holder. He regarded himself with keen and friendly interest, not in the least surprised that his wife's little friend from the country so evidently liked him. He found that he looked up to his best form, murmured a word of praise for the manner in which his evening coat was cut and smiled once or twice in order to have the satisfaction of getting a glimpse of his peculiarly good teeth. Then he laughed, called himself a conceited ass and went over to examine a rather virile sketch of a muscular, deep-chested young man in rowing costume which occupied an inconspicuous place among many well-chosen pictures. He recognized Martin, whom he had seen several times following the hounds, and tried to remember if Alice had told him whether Joan had run away with this strenuous young fellow or been run away with by him. There was much difference between the two methods.

He heard nothing, but caught the scent of Peau d'Espagne. It carried his mind back to a charming little suite in the Hotel de Crillon in Paris. He turned and found Joan standing in the doorway, watching him.

"Did you ever row?" she asked.

"No," he said, "never. Too much fag. I played squash and roulette. You look like a newly risen moon in her first quarter. Where would you like to go?"

"I don't know," said Joan. "Let's break away from the conventional places. I rather want to see queer people and taste different food. But don't let's discuss it. I leave it to you." She went downstairs. She might have been living in that house for years.

He followed, admiring the way her small, patrician head was set on her shoulders, and the rich brown note of her hair. Extraordinary little person, this! He told his chauffeur to drive to the Brevoort, and got into the car. It was possible at that hour to deal with the Avenue as a street and not as a rest-cure interrupted by short spurts.

"Would you rather the windows were up, Gehane?" he asked, looking at her through his long lashes.

"No. The air's full of new ferns. But why Gehane?"

"You remind me of her, and I'm pretty certain that you also could do your hair in the same two long braids. Given the chance, I can see you developing into some-thing like medievalism and joining the ranks of women who loved greatly."

They passed the Plaza with all its windows gleaming, like a giant's house in a fairy tale.

Joan shook her head. "No," she said. "No. I'm just the last word of this very minute. Everybody in America for a hundred and fifty years has worked to make me. I'm the reward of mighty effort. I'm the dream-child of the pioneers, as far removed from them as the chimney of the highest building from the rock on which it's rooted."

Palgrave laughed a little. "It appears that you did some thinking out there in your country cage."

"Thinking! That's all I had to do! I spent a lifetime standing on the hill with the woods behind me trying to catch the music of this street, the sound of this very car, and I thought it all out, every bit of it."

"Every bit of what?"

"Life and death and the great hereafter," she said, "principally life. That's why I'm going out to dinner with you instead of going early to bed."

The glare of a lamp silvered her profile and the young curve of her bosom. Somewhere, at some time, Palgrave had knelt humbly, with strange anguish and hunger, at the feet of a girl with just that young proud face and those unawakened eyes. The memory of it was like an echo of an echo.

"Why," said Joan, halting for a moment on her way to the steps of the old hotel, "this looks like a picture postcard of a bit of Paris."

"Yes, on the other side of the Seine, near the Odeon. Our grandfathers imagined that they were very smart when they stayed here. It's one of the few places in town that has atmosphere."

"I like it," said Joan.

The hall was alive with people, laughing and talking, and the walls with the rather bold designs of the posters. A band, which made up in vim and go what it lacked in numbers, was playing a selection from "The Chocolate Soldier." The place was full of the smell of garlic and cigarette smoke and coffee. There was a certain dramatic animation among the waiters, characteristically Latin. Few of the diners wore evening clothes. The walls were refreshingly free from the hideous gold decorations of the average hotel.

Men stared at Joan with undisguised interest and approbation. Her virginity was like the breath of spring in the room. Women looked after Palgrave in the same way. Into that semi-Bohemianism he struck a rather surprising note, like the sudden advent of caviar and champagne upon a table of beer and pickles.

They were given a table near the wall by the window, far too close to other tables for complete comfort. Waiters were required to be gymnasts to slide between them and avoid an accident. Palgrave ordered without any hesitation, like a newspaper man finding his way through a daily paper.

"How do you like it?" he said.

Joan looked about her. Mostly the tables were occupied by a man and a woman, but at a few were four and six of both in equal numbers, and here and there parties of men. At one or two, women with eccentric heads sat together in curious garments which had the appearance of being made at home on the spur of the moment. They smoked between mouthfuls and laughed without restraint. Some of the men wore longish hair and the double tie of those who wish to be mistaken for dramatists. Others affected a poetic disarrangement of collar, and fantastic beards. There were others who had wandered over the border of middle age and who were bald and strangely adipose, with mackerel eyes and unpleasant mouths. They were with young girls, gaudily but shabbily dressed, shopgirls perhaps, or artists' models or stenographers, who in dull and sordid lives grappled any chance to obtain a square meal, even if it had to be accessory to such companionship. The minority of men present was made up of honest, clean, commonplace citizens who were there for a good dinner in surroundings that offered a certain stimulus to the imagination.

"Who are they all?" asked Joan, beating time with a finger to the lilting tune which the little band had just begun, with obvious enjoyment. "Adventurers, mostly, I imagine," replied Palgrave, not unpleased to play Baedeker to a girl who was becoming more and more attractive to him. "I mean people who live by their wits--writers, illustrators, actors, newspaper men, with a smattering of Wall Street brokers seeking a little mild diversion as we are, and foreigners to whom this place has a sentimental interest because it reminds them of home. Sophisticated children, most of them, optimists with moments of hideous pessimism, enthusiasts at various stages of Parnassus, the peak of which is lighted with a huge dollar sign. A friendly, kindly lot, hard-working and temperamental, with some brilliance and a rather high level of cleverness--slaves of the magazine, probably, and therefore not able to throw stones farther into the future than the end of the month. This is not a country in which literature and art can ever grow big; the cost of living is too high. The modern Chatterton detests garrets and must drive something with an engine in it, whatever the name it goes by."

There was one electrical moment during the next hour which shook the complacency of every one in the larger room and forced the thoughts, even of those who deliberately turned their backs to the drama of Europe, out across the waters which they fondly and fatuously hoped cut off the United States from ever being singed by the blaze. The little band was playing one of those rather feeble descriptive pieces which begin with soft, peaceful music with the suggestion of the life of a farmyard, and the sound of church bells, swing into the approach of armed men with shrill bugle calls, become chaotic with the rush of fearful women and children, and the commencement of heavy artillery, and wind up with the broad triumphant strains of a national anthem. It happened, naturally enough, that the particular national anthem chosen by the energetic and patriotic man who led the band at the piano was "The Marseillaise."

The incessant chatter and laughter went on as usual. The music had no more effect upon the closely filled room than a hackneyed ragtime. Suddenly, as the first few notes of that immortal air rang out, a little old white-haired man, dining in a corner with a much-bosomed, elderly woman, sprang to his feet and in a voice vibrating with the fervor of emotion screamed "Vive la France--vive la patrie!" again and again.

Instantly, from here and there, other men, stout and middle-aged, lifted out of their chairs by this intense and beautiful burst of feeling, joined in that old heart-cry, and for two or three shattering minutes the air was rent with hoarse shouts of "Vive Joffre," "Vive la France," "Vive la patrie," to the louder and louder undercurrent of music. Indifference, complacency, neutrality, gave way. There was a general uprising and uproar; and America, as represented by that olla podrida of the professions, including the one which is the oldest in the world, paid homage and tribute and yelled sympathy to those few Frenchmen among them whose passionate love of country found almost hysterical vent at the sound of the hymn which had stirred all France to a height of bravery and sacrifice never before reached in the history of nations.

There were one or two hisses and several scoffing laughs, but these were instantly drowned by vigorous hand-clapping. The next moment the room resumed its normal appearance.

When Palgrave, who had been surprised to find himself on his feet, sat down again, he saw that Joan's lips were trembling and that there were tears in her eyes. He gave a little laugh, but before he could say any thing, her hand was on his arm. "No, don't," she said. "Let it go without a single word. It was too good for sarcasm."

"Oddly enough, I had no sarcasm ready," replied Palgrave. "When our time comes, I wonder whether we shall have an eightieth part of that enthusiasm for our little old tune. What do you think?"

"Our time? What time?"

"The time when we have to get into this melee or become the pariah dog among countries. I don't profess to any knowledge of international affairs, but any fool can see that our sham neutrality will be the most costly piece of political blundering ever perpetrated in history. Here we are in 1915. The war's nine months old. For every day we stand aside we shall eventually pay a year's bill."

"That's all too deep for me," said Joan. "And anyway, I shan't be asked to pay anything. What shall we do now?"

"What would you like to do? Go on to the Ritz and dance?" He had a sudden desire to hold this girl in his arms.

"Why not? I'm on the verge of getting fed up with this place. Let's give civilization a turn."

"I think so." He beckoned to his waiter. "The check," he said. "Sharp's the word, please."

The Crystal Room was not content with one band. Even musicians must sometimes pause for breath, and anything like a break in the jangle and noise might bring depression to the diners who had crowded in to dance. As soon, therefore, as the left band was exhausted, the one on the right sprang in with renewed and feverish energy. Whatever melody there might have been in the incessant ragtime and fox trots was lost beneath the bang and clang of drum and cymbals, to which had been added other more ingenious ear tortures in the shape of rattles and whistles. Broken-collared men and faded women struggled for elbow room like a mass of flies caught on sticky paper. There was something both heathenish and pathetic in the whole thing. The place was reekingly hot.

"Come on," said Joan, her blood stirred by the movement and sound.

Palgrave held her close and edged his way into the crowd between pointed bare elbows and tightly clasped hands.

"They call this dancing!" he said.

"What do you call it?"

"A bullfight in Hades." And he laughed and put his cheek against her hair and held her young slim body against his own. What did he care what it was or where they were? He had all the excuse that he needed to get the sense and scent of her. His utter distaste of being bruised and bumped, and of adding himself to a heterogeneous collection of people with no more individuality than sheep, who followed each other from place to place in flocks after the manner of sheep, left him. This girl was something more than a young, naive creature from the country, childishly keen to do everything and go everywhere at fever heat--something more than the very epitome of triumphant youth as clean and sweet as apple blossoms, with whom to flirt and pose as being the blase man of the world, the Mr. Know-All of civilization, a wild flower in a hot house. Attracted at once by her exquisite coloring and delicious profile, and amused by her imperative manner and intolerant point of view, he had now begun to be piqued and intrigued by her insurgent way of treating marriage and of ignoring her husband--by her assumption of sexlessness and the fact that she was unmoved by his compliments and looked at him with eyes in which there was no remote suggestion of physical interest.

And it was this attitude, new to him hitherto on his easy way, that began to challenge him, to stir in him a desire to bring her down to his own level, to make her fall in love and become what he called human. He had given her several evenings, and had put himself out to cater to her eager demand to see life and burn the night away in crowds and noise. He had treated her, this young, new thing, as he was in the habit of treating any beautiful woman with whom he was on the verge of an affair and who realized the art of give and take. But more than ever she conveyed the impression of sex detachment to which he was wholly unaccustomed. He might have been any inarticulate lad of her own age, useful as a companion, to be ordered to fetch and carry, dance or walk, go or come. At that moment there was no woman in the city for whom he would undergo the boredom and the bruising and the dementia of such a place as the one to which she had drawn him. He was not a provincial who imagined that it was the smart thing to attend this dull orgy and struggle on a polished floor packed as in a sardine tin. Years ago he had outgrown cabaret mania and recovered from the fascination of syncopation. And yet here he was, once more, against all his fastidiousness, playing the out-of-town lad to a girl who took everything and gave nothing in return. It was absurd, fantastic. He was Gilbert Palgrave, the man who picked and chose, for whose attentions many women would give their ears, who stood in satirical aloofness from the general ruck; and as he held Joan in his arms and made sporadic efforts to dance whenever there was a few inches of room in which to do so, using all his ingenuity to dodge the menace of the elbows and feet of people who pushed and forced as though they were in a subway crush, he told himself that he would make it his business from that moment onward to lay siege to Joan, apply to her all his well-proved gifts of attraction and eventually make her pay his price for services rendered.

He had just arrived at this cold-blooded determination when, to his complete astonishment and annoyance, a strong, muscular form thrust itself roughly between himself and Joan and swept her away.

III

"Marty!" cried Joan.

There was a curious glint in Martin's gray eyes, like the flash of steel in front of a window. His jaw was set, and his face strangely white.

"You said you were going to bed."

"I was going to bed, Marty dear."

"What are you doing here, then?"

"I changed my mind, old boy, and went out to dinner."

"Chucked me in favor of Palgrave."

"No, I didn't."

"What then?"

"He rang up after you'd gone; and going to bed like an old crock seemed silly and feeble, and so I dressed and went out."

"Why with that rotter Palgrave?"

"Why not? And why rotter?"

"You don't answer my question!"

"Have I got to answer your question?"

"You're my wife, although you don't seem to know it; and I object to Pargrave."

"I can't help that, Marty. I like him, you see, and humble little person as I am, I can't be expected to turn my back on every one except the men you choose for me."

"I don't choose any men for you. I want you for myself."

"Dear old Marty, but you've got me forever!"

"No, I haven't. You're less mine now than you were when I only saw you in dreams. But all the same you're my wife, and I tell you now, you sha'n't be handled by a man like Palgrave."

They were in the middle of the floor. There were people all round them, thickly. They were obliged to keep going in that lunatic movement or be run down. What a way and in what a place to bare a bleeding heart!

For the first time since he had answered to her call and found her standing clean-cut against the sky, Martin held Joan in his arms. His joy in doing so was mixed with rage and jealousy. It had been worse than a blow in the mouth suddenly to see her, of whom he had thought as fast asleep in what was only the mere husk of home, dancing with a man like Palgrave.

And her nearness maddened him. All the starved and pent-up passion that was in him flamed and blazed. It blinded him and buzzed in his ears. He held her so tight and so hungrily that she could hardly breathe. She was his, this girl. She had called him, and he had answered, and she was his wife. He had the right to her by law and nature. He adored her and had let her off and tried to be patient and win his way to her by love and gentleness. But with his lips within an inch of her sweet, impertinent face, and the scent of her hair in his brain, and the wound that she had opened again sapping his blood, he held her to his heart and charged the crowd to the beat of the music, like a man intoxicated, like a man heedless of his surroundings. He didn't give a curse who overheard what he said, or saw the look in his eyes. She had turned him down, this half-wife, on the plea of weariness; and as soon as he had left the house to go and eat his heart out in the hub of that swarming lonely city, she had darted out with this doll-man whom he wouldn't have her touch with the end of a pole. There was a limit to all things, and he had come to it.

"You're coming home," he said.

"Marty, but I can't. Gilbert Palgrave--"

"Gilbert Palgrave be damned. You're coming home, I tell you, if I have to carry you out."

She laughed. This was a new Marty, a high-handed, fiery Marty--one who must not be encouraged. "Are you often like this?" she asked.

"Be careful. I've had enough, and if you don't want me to smash this place up and cause a riot, you'll do what I tell you."

Her eyes flashed back at him, and two angry spots of color came into her cheeks. He was out of control. She realized that. She had never in her life seen any one so out of control--unaccountable as she found it. That he would smash up the place and cause a riot she knew instinctively. She put up no further opposition. If anything were to be avoided, it was a scene, and in her mind's eye she could see herself being carried out by this plunging boy, with a yard of stocking showing and the laughter of every one ringing in her ears. No, no, not that! She began to look for Palgrave, with her mind all alert and full of a mischievous desire to turn the tables on Martin. He must be shown quickly that if any one gave orders, she did.

He danced her to the edge of the floor, led her panting through the tables to the foot of the stairs and with his hand grasping her arm like a vice, guided her up to the place where ladies left their wraps.

"We're going home," he said, "to have things out. I'll wait here." Then he called a boy and told him to get his hat and coat and gave him his check.

Five minutes later, in pulsating silence, both of them angry and inarticulate, they stood in the street waiting for a taxi. The soft air touched their hot faces with a refreshing finger. Hardly any one who saw that slip of a girl and that square-shouldered boy with his unlined face would have imagined that they could be anything but brother and sister. The marriage of babies! Was there no single apostle of common sense in all the country--a country so gloriously free that it granted licenses to every foolishness without a qualm?

Palgrave was standing on the curb, scowling. His car moved up, and the porter went forward to open the door. As quick as lightning, Joan saw her chance to put Martin into his place and evade an argument. Wasn't she out of that old country cage at last? Couldn't she revel in free flight without being called to order and treated like a school-girl, at last? What fun to use Palgrave to show Martin her spirit!

She touched him on the arm and looked up at him with dancing eyes and a teasing smile. "Not this time, Marty," she said, and was across the sidewalk in a bound. "Quick," she said to Palgrave. "Quick!" And he, catching the idea with something more than amusement, sprang into the car after her, and away they went.

A duet of laughter hung briefly in the air.

With all the blood in his head, Martin, coming out of utter surprise, made a dash for the retreating car, collided with the porter and stood ruefully and self-consciously over the burly figure that had gone down with a crash upon the pavement.

It was no use. Joan had been one too many for him. What, in any case, was the good of trying to follow? She preferred Palgrave. She had no use, at that moment, for home. She was bored at the mere idea of talking things over. She was not serious. She refused to be faced up with seriousness. She was like a precocious child who snapped her fingers at authority and pursued the policy of the eel at the approach of discipline. What had she cried out that night in the dark with her chin tilted up and her arms thrown out? "I shall go joy-riding in that huge round-about. If I can get anybody to pay my score, good. If not, I'll pay it myself, whatever it costs. My motto's going to be 'A good time as long as I can get it, and who cares for the price!'"

Martin helped the porter to his feet, stanched his flow of County Kerry reproaches with a ten-dollar bill and went back into the Crystal Room. He had gone there half an hour ago with a party of young people to kill loneliness and forget a bad hour of despair. His friend, Howard Oldershaw, who had breezed him out of the reading room of the Yale Club, was one of the party. He was in the first flush of speed-breaking and knew the town and its midnight haunts. He had offered to show Martin the way to get rid of depression. Right! He should be put to the test. Two could play the "Who cares?" game; and Martin, cut to the quick, angry and resisted, would enter his name. Not again would he put himself in the way of being laughed at and ridiculed and turned down, teased and tantalized and made a fool of.

Patience and gentleness--to what end? He loved a will-o'-the-wisp; he had married a butterfly. Why continue to play the martyr and follow the fruitless path of rectitude? Hadn't she said, "I can only live once, and so I shall make life spin whichever way I want it to go?" He could only live once, and if life was not to spin with her, let it spin without her. "Who cares?" he said to himself. "Who the devil cares?" He gave up his coat and hat, and went back into that room of false joy and syncopation.

It was one o'clock when he stood in the street once more, hot and wined and careless. "Let's hit it up," he said to Oldershaw as the car moved away with the sisters and cousins of the other two men. "I haven't started yet."

The red-haired, roistering Oldershaw, newly injected with the virus of the Great White Way, clapped him on the back. "Bully for you, old son," he said. "I'm in the mood to paint the little old town. I left my car round the corner in charge of a down-at-heel night-bird. Come on. Let's go and see if he's pinched it."

It was one of those Italian semi-racing cars with a body which gave it the naked appearance of a muscular Russian dancer dressed in a skin and a pair of bangles. The night-bird, one of the large army of city gypsies who hang on to life by the skin of their teeth, was sitting on the running board with his arms folded across his shirtless chest, smoking a salvaged cigar, dreaming, probably, of hot sausages and coffee. He afforded a striking illustration of the under dog cringing contentedly at the knees of wealth.

"Good man," said Oldershaw, paying him generously. "Slip aboard, Martin, and I'll introduce you to one of the choicest dives I know."

But the introduction was not to be effected that night, at any rate. Driving the car as though it were a monoplane in a clear sky, with an open throttle that awoke the echoes, Oldershaw charged into Fifth Avenue and caught the bonnet of a taxicab that was going uptown. There was a crash, a scream, a rending of metal. And when Martin picked himself up with a bruised elbow and a curious sensation of having stopped a punching bag with his face, he saw Oldershaw bending over the crumpled body of the taxi driver and heard a girl with red lips and a small white hat calling on Heaven for retribution.

"Some men oughtn't to be trusted with machinery," said Oldershaw with his inevitable grin. "If I can yank my little pet out of this buckled-up lump of stuff, I'll drive that poor chap to the nearest hospital. Look after the angel, Martin, and give my name and address to the policeman. As this is my third attempt to kill myself this month, things ought to settle down into humdrum monotony for a bit now."

Martin went over to the girl. "I hope you're not hurt?" he asked.

"Hurt?" she cried out hysterically, feeling herself all over. "Of course I'm hurt. I'm crippled for life. My backbone's broken; I shall have water on both knees, a glass eye and a mouth full of store teeth. But you don't care, you Hun. You like it."

And on she went, at the top of her voice, in an endless flow of farce and tragedy, crying and laughing, examining herself with eager hands, disbelieving more and more in the fact that she was still in the only world that mattered to her.

Having succeeded in backing his dented car out of the debris, Oldershaw leaped out. His face had been cut by the glass of the broken windshield. Blood was trickling down his fat, good-natured face. His hat was smashed and looked like that of the tramp cyclist of the vaudeville stage. "All my fault, old man," he said in his best irrepressible manner, as a policeman bore down upon him. "Help me to hike our prostrate friend into my car, and I'll whip him off to a hospital. He's only had the stuffing knocked out of him. It's no worse than that.... That's fine. Big chap, isn't he--weighs a ton. I'll get off right away, and my friend there will give you all you want to know. So long." And off he went, one of his front wheels wabbling foolishly.

The policeman was not Irish or German-American. He was therefore neither loud nor browbeating. He was dry, quiet and accurate, and it seemed to Martin that either he didn't enjoy being dressed in a little brief authority or was a misanthrope, eager to return to his noiseless and solitary tramp under the April stars. Martin gave him Oldershaw's full name and address and his own; and the girl, still shrill and shattered, gave hers, after protesting that all automobiles ought to be put in a gigantic pile and scrapped, that all harum-scarum young men should be clapped in bed at ten o'clock and that all policemen should be locked up in their stations to play dominoes. "If it'll do you any good to know it," she said finally, "it's Susie Capper, commonly called 'Tootles.' And I tell you what it is. If you come snooping round my place to get me before the beak, I'll scream and kick, so help me Bob, I will." There was an English cockney twang in her voice.

The policeman left her in the middle of a paean, with the wounded taxi and Martin, and the light of a lamp-post throwing up the unnatural red of her lips on a pretty little white face. He had probably gone to call up the taxicab company.

Then she turned to Martin. "The decent thing for you to do, Mr. Nut, is to see me home," she said. "I'm blowed if I'm going to face any more attempts at murder alone. My word, what a life!"

"Come along, then," said Martin, and he put his hand under her elbow. That amazing avenue, which had the appearance of a great, deep cut down the middle of an uneven mountain, was almost deserted. From the long line of street lamps intermittent patches of light were reflected as though in glass. The night and the absence of thickly crawling motors and swarming crowds gave it dignity. A strange, incongruous Oriental note was struck by the deep red of velvet hangings thrown up by the lights in a furniture dealer's shop on the second floor of a white building.

"Look for a row of women's ugly wooden heads painted by some one suffering from delirium tremens," said Miss Susie Capper as they turned down West Forty-sixth Street. "It's a dressmaker's, although you might think it was an asylum for dope fiends. I've got a bedroom, sitter and bath on the top floor. The house is a rabbit warren of bedrooms, sitters and baths, and in every one of them there's some poor devil trying to squeeze a little kindness out of fate. That wretched taxi driver! He may have a wife waiting for him. Do you think that red-haired feller's got to the hospital yet? He had a nice cut on his own silly face--and serve him right! I hope it'll teach him that he hasn't bought the blooming world--but of course it won't. He's the sort that never gets taught anything, worse luck! Nobody spanked him when he was young and soft. Come on up, and you shall taste my scrambled eggs. I'll show you what a forgiving little soul I am."

She laughed, ran her eyes quickly over Martin, and opened the door with a latchkey. Half a dozen small letter boxes were fastened to the wall, with cards in their slots.

"Who the devil cares?" said Martin to himself, and he followed the girl up the narrow, ill-lighted staircase covered with shabby carpet. Two or three inches of white stockings gleamed above the drab uppers of her high-heeled boots. Outside the open door of a room on the first floor there was a line of milk bottles, and Martin sighted a man in shirt sleeves, cooking sausages on a small gas jet in a cubby-hole. He looked up, and a cheery smile broke out on his clean-shaven face. There was brown grease paint on his collar. "Hello, Tootles," he called out.

"Hello, Laddy," she said. "How'd it go to-night?"

"Fine. Best second night in the history of the theater. Come in and have a bite."

"Can't. Got company."

And up they went, the aroma following.

A young woman in a sky-blue peignoir scuttled across the next landing, carrying a bottle of beer in each hand. There was a smell of onions and hot cheese. "What ho, Tootles," she said.

"What ho, Irene. Is it true they've put your notice up?"

"Yep, the dirty dogs! Twelve weeks' rehearsals and eight nights' playing! Me for the novelties at Gimbel's, if this goes on."

A phonograph in another room ground out an air from "Boheme."

They mounted again. "Here's me," said Miss Capper, waving her hand to a man in a dirty dressing gown who was standing on the threshold of the front apartment, probably to achieve air. The room behind him was foggy with tobacco smoke which rose from four men playing cards. He himself was conspicuously drunk and would have spoken if he had been able. As it was, he nodded owlishly and waggled his fingers.

The girl threw open her door and turned up the light. "England, Home and Beauty," she said. "Excuse me while I dress the ship."

Seizing a pair of corsets that sprawled loosely on the center table, she rammed them under a not very pristine cushion on the sofa.

Martin burst out laughing. The Crystal Room wine was still in his head. "Very nippy!" he said.

"Have to be nippy in this life, believe me. Give me a minute to powder my nose and murmur a prayer of thanksgivin', and then I'll set the festive board and show you how we used to scramble eggs in Shaftesbury Avenue."

"Right," said Martin, getting out of his overcoat. How about it? Was this one way of making the little old earth spin?

Susie Capper went into a bedroom even smaller than the sitting room, turned up the light over her dressing table and took off her little white hat. From where Martin stood, he could see in the looking-glass the girl's golden bobbed hair, pretty oval face with too red lips and round white neck. There, it was obvious, stood a little person feminine from the curls around her ears to the hole in one of her stockings, and as highly and gladly sexed as a purring cat.

"Buck up, Tootles," cried Martin. "Where do you keep the frying pan?"

She turned and gave him another searching look, this time of marked approval. "My word, what a kid you look in the light!" she said. "No one would take you for a blooming road-hog. Well, who knows? You and I may have been brought together like this to work out one of Fate's little games. This may be the beginning of a side-street romance, eh?"

And she chuckled at the word and turned her nose into a small snow-capped hill.

IV

Pagliacci was to be followed as usual by "Cavalleria." It was the swan song of the opera season.