Chapter IV: Part TWO: The Round-About (2)

In a part that he acted as well as he sang, Caruso had been permitted finally to retire, wringing wet, to his dressing room. With all the dignity of a man of genuine feeling and sensitiveness he had taken call after call on the fall of the curtain and stood bent almost double before the increasing breakers of applause. Once more he had done his best in a role which demanded everything that he had of voice and passion, comedy and tragedy. Once more, although his soul was with his comrades in battle, he had played the fool and broken his heart for the benefit of his good friends in front.

In her box on the first tier Mrs. Cooper Jekyll, in a dress imaginatively designed to display a considerable quantity of her figure, was surrounded by a party which attracted many glasses. Alice Palgrave was there, pretty and scrupulously neat, even perhaps a little prim, her pearls as big as marbles. Mrs. Alan Hosack made a most effective picture with her black hair and white skin in a geranium-colored frock--a Van Beers study to the life. Mrs. Noel d'Oyly lent an air of opulence to the box, being one of those lovely but all too ample women who, while compelling admiration, dispel intimacy. Joan, a young daffodil, sat bolt upright among them, with diamonds glistening in her hair like dew. Of the four men, Gilbert Palgrave, standing where he could be seen, might have been an illustration by Du Maurier of one of Ouida's impossible guardsmen. He made the other three, all of the extraordinary ordinary type, appear fifty per cent, more manly than they really were--the young old Hosack with his groomlike face and immaculate clothes, the burly Howard Cannon, who retained a walrus mustache in the face of persistent chaff, and Noel d'Oyly, who when seen with his Junoesque wife made the gravest naturalists laugh at the thought of the love manners of the male and female spider.

Turning her chair round, Alice touched Joan's arm. "Will you do something for me?" she asked.

Joan looked at her with a smile of disturbing frankness. "It all depends whether it will upset any of my plans," she said.

"I wouldn't have asked you if I had thought that."

Joan laughed. "You've been studying my character, Alice."

"I did that at school, my dear." Mrs. Palgrave spoke lightly, but it was plain to see that there was something on her mind. "Don't go out to supper with Howard Cannon. Come back with me. I want to talk to you. Will you?"

Joan had recently danced in Cannon's huge studio-apartment and been oppressed by its Gulliveresque atmosphere, and she had just come from the Fifth Avenue house of the Hosack family, where a characteristically dignified dinner had got on her nerves. Gilbert, she knew, was engaged to play roulette at the club, and none of her other new men friends was available for dancing. She hadn't seen anything of Martin for several days. She could easily oblige Alice under the circumstances.

So she said: "Yes, of course I will--just to prove how very little you really know about me."

"Thank you," said Alice. "I'll say that I have a headache and that you're coming home with me. Don't be talked out of it."

A puzzled expression came into Joan's eyes, and she turned her shoulder to Palgrave, who was giving her his most amorous glances. "It doesn't matter," she said, "but I notice that you are all beginning to treat me like a sort of moral weathercock. I wonder why?" She gave no more thought to the matter which just for the most fleeting moment had rather piqued her, but sat drinking in the music of Mascagni's immortal opera entirely ignoring the fact that Palgrave's face was within an inch of her shoulder and that Alan Hosack, on her other side, was whispering heavy compliments.

Alice sat back and looked anxiously from the face of the girl who had been her closest friend at school to that of the man to whom she had given all her heart. In spite of the fact that she had been married a year and had taken her place in the comparatively small set which made up New York society, Mrs. Palgrave was an optimist. As a fiction-fed girl she had expected, with a thrill of excitement, that after marriage she would find herself in a whirlpool of careless and extravagant people who made their own elastic code of morals and played ducks and drakes with the Commandments. She had accepted as a fact the novelist-playwright contention that society was synonymous with flippancy, selfishness and unchastity, and that the possession of money and leisure necessarily undermined all that was excellent in human nature. Perhaps a little to her disappointment, she had soon discovered how grotesque and ignorant this play-and-book idea was. She had returned from her honeymoon in November of the first year of the war and had been astonished to find that nearly all the well-known women whose names, in the public imagination, were associated with decadence and irresponsibility, were as a matter of fact devoted to Red Cross work and allied war charities; that the majority of the men who were popularly supposed to be killing time with ingenious wickedness worked as hard as the average downtown merchant, and that even the debutantes newly burst upon the world had, for the most part, banded themselves together as a junior war-relief society and were turning out weekly an immense number of bandages for the wounded soldiers of France and England. Young men of high and gallant spirit, who bore the old names of New York, had disappeared without a line of publicity--to be heard of later as members of the already famous Escadrille or as ambulance workers on the Western front. Beautiful girls had slipped quietly away from their usual haunts, touched by a deep and rare emotion, to work in Allied hospitals three thousand miles and more away--if not as full-blown nurses, then as scullery maids or motor drivers.

There were, of course, the Oldershaws and the Marie Littlejohns and the Christine Hurleys and the rest. Alice had met and watched them throwing themselves against any bright light like all silly moths. And there were the girls like Joan, newly released from the exotic atmosphere of those fashionable finishing schools which no sane country should permit. But even these wild and unbroken colts and fillies, she believed, had excuses. They were the natural results of a complete lack of parental discipline and school training. They ran amuck, advertised by the press and applauded by the hawks who pounced upon their wallets. They were more to be pitied than condemned, far more foolish and ridiculous than decadent. They were not unique, either, or peculiar to their own country. Every nation possessed its "smart set," its little group of men and women who were ripe for the lunatic asylum, and even the war and its iron tonic had failed to shock them into sanity. In her particularly sane way of looking at things, Alice saw all this, was proud to know that the majority of the people who formed American society were fine and sound and generous, and kept as much as possible out of the way of those others whose one object in life was to outrage the conventions. It was only when people began to tell her of seeing her husband and her friend about together night after night that she found herself wondering, with jealousy in her heart, how long her optimism would endure, because Gilbert had already shown her a foot of clay, and Joan was deliberately flying wild.

It was, at any rate, all to the good that Joan kept her promise and utterly refused to be turned by the pleadings and blandishments of Cannon and Hosack. They drove together to Palgrave's elaborate house, a faithful replica of one of the famous Paris mansions in the Avenue Wagram and sat down to a little supper in Alice's boudoir.

They made a curious picture, these two children, one just over twenty, the other under nineteen; and as they sat in that lofty room hung with French tapestries and furnished with the spindle-legged gilt chairs and tables of Louis XIV, they might have been playing, with all the gravity and imitative genius of little girls in a nursery, at being grown up.

While the servants moved discreetly about, Joan kept up a rattle of impersonalities, laughing at Cannon's amazing mustache and Gargantuan furniture, enthusing wildly over Caruso's once-in-a-century voice, throwing satire at Mrs. Cooper Jekyll's confirmed belief in her divine right to queen it, and saying things that made Alice chuckle about the d'Oylys--that apparently ill-matched pair. She drank a glass of champagne with the air of a connoisseur and finally, having displayed an excellent appetite, mounted a cigarette into a long thin mother-of-pearl holder, lighted it and sank with a sigh into the room's one comfortable chair.

"Gilbert gave me a cigarette holder like that," said Alice.

"Yes? I think this comes from him," said Joan. "A thoughtful person!"

That Joan was not quite sure from whom she received it annoyed Alice far more than if she had boasted of it as one of Gilbert's numerous gifts. She needed no screwing up now to say what she had rather timidly brought this cool young slip of a thing there to discuss.

"Will you tell me about yourself and Gilbert?" she asked quietly. There was no need for Joan to act complete composure. She felt it. "What is there to tell, my dear?"

"I hope there isn't anything--I mean anything that matters. But perhaps you don't know that people have begun to talk about you, and I think you owe it to me to be perfectly frank."

Even then it didn't occur to Joan that there was anything serious in the business. "I'll be as frank as the front page of The Times--'All the news that's fit to print,'" she said. "What do you want to know?"

Alice proved her courage. She drew up a chair, bent forward and came straight to the point. "Be honest with me, Joan, even if you have to hurt me. Gilbert is very handsome, and women throw themselves at him. I did, I suppose; but having won him and being still in my first year of marriage, I'm naturally jealous when he lets himself be drawn off by them. The women who have tried to take Gilbert away from me I didn't know, and they owed me no friendship. But you're different, and I can't believe that you--"

Joan broke in with a peal of laughter. "Can't you? Why not? I haven't got wings on my shoulders. Isn't everything fair in love and war?"

Alice drew back. She had many times been called prim and old-fashioned, especially at school, by Joan and others when men were talked about, and the glittering life that lay beyond the walls. Sophistication, to put it mildly, had been the order of the day in that temporary home of the young idea. But this calm declaration of disloyalty took her color away, and her breath. Here was honesty with a vengeance!

"Joan!" she cried. "Joan!" And she put up her hand as though to ward off an unbelievable thought.

In an instant Joan was on her feet with her arms around the shoulders of the best friend she had, whose face had gone as white as stone. "Oh, my dear," she said, "I'm sorry. Forgive me. I didn't mean that in the least, not in the very least. It was only one of my cheap flippancies, said just to amuse myself and shock you. Don't you believe me?"

Tears came to Alice. She had had at least one utterly sleepless night and several days of mental anguish. She was one of the women who love too well. She confessed to these things, brokenly, and it came as a kind of shock to Joan to find some one taking things seriously and allowing herself to suffer.

"Why, Alice," she said, "Gilbert means nothing to me. He's a dear old thing; he's awfully nice to look at; he sums things up in a way that makes me laugh; and he dances like a streak. But as to flirting with him or anything of that sort--why, my dear, he looks on me as a little boob from the country, and in my eyes he's simply a man who carries a latchkey to amusement and can give me a good time. That's true. I swear it."

It was true, and Alice realized it, with immense relief. She dried her eyes and held Joan away from her at arm's length and looked at her young, frank, intrepid face with puzzled admiration. It didn't go with her determined trifling. "I shall always believe what you tell me, Joan," she said. "You've taken a bigger load than you imagine off my heart--which is Gilbert's. And now sit down again and be comfortable and let's do what we used to do at school at night and talk about ourselves. We've both changed since those days, haven't we?"

"Have we? I don't think I have." Joan took another cigarette and went back to her chair. Her small round shoulders looked very white against the black of a velvet cushion. If there was nothing boyish or unfeminine about her, there was certainly an indefinable appearance of being untouched, unawakened. She was the same girl who had been found by Martin that afternoon clean-cut against the sky--the determined individualist.

Alice sat in front of her on a low stool with her hands clasped round a knee. "What a queer mixture you are of--of town and country, Joany. You're like a piece of honeysuckle playing at being an orchid."

"That's because I'm a kid," said Joan. "The horrible hour will come when I shall be an orchid and try and palm myself off as honeysuckle, never fear."

"Don't you think marriage has changed you a little?" asked Alice. "It usually does. It changed me from an empty-headed little fool to a woman with oh, such a tremendous desire to be worthy of it."

"Yes, but then you married for love."

"Didn't you, Joany?"

"I? Marry for love?" Joan waved her arm for joy at the idea.

Alice knew the story of the escape from old age. She also knew from the way in which Martin looked at Joan why he had given her his name and house. Here was her chance to get to the bottom of a constant puzzle. "You may not have married for love," she said, "but of course you're fond of Martin."

Joan considered the matter. It might be a good thing to go into it now that there was an unexpected lull in the wild rush that she had made to get into life. There had been something rather erratic about Martin's comings and goings during the last week. She hadn't spoken to him since the night at the Ritz.

"Yes, I am fond of him," she said. "That's the word. As fond as I might be of a very nice, sound boy whom I'd known all my life."

"Is that all?"

Joan made a series of smoke rings and watched them curl into the air. "Yes, that's all," she said.

Alice became even more interested and curious and puzzled. She held very serious views about marriage. "And are you happy with him?"

"I don't know that I can be said to be happy with him," said Joan. "I'm perfectly happy as things are."

"Tell me how they are." There was obviously something here that was far from right.

Joan was amused at her friend's gravity. She had always been a responsible little person with very definite and old-fashioned views. "Well," she said, "it's a charming little story, really. I was the maiden who had to be rescued from the ugly castle, and Martin was the knight who performed the deed. And being a knight with a tremendous sense of convention and a castle of his own full of well-trained servants, it didn't seem to him that he could give me the run of his house in the Paul and Virginia manner, which isn't being done now; and so, like a little gentleman, he married me, or as I suppose you would put it, went through the form of marriage. It's all part of the adventure that we started one afternoon on the edge of the woods. I call it the cool and common-sense romance of two very modern and civilized people."

"I don't think there's any place in romance for such things as coolness and common sense," said Alice warmly. "And as to there being two very modern and civilized people in your adventure, as you call it, that I doubt."

Joan's large brown eyes grew a little larger, and she looked at the enthusiastic girl in front of her with more interest. "Do you?" she asked. "Why?"

Alice got up. She was disturbed and worried. She had a great affection for Joan, and that boy was indeed a knight. "I saw Martin walking away from your house the night you dined with Gilbert at the Brevoort--I was told about that!--and there was something in his eyes that wasn't the least bit cool. Also I rode in the Park with him one morning a week ago, and I thought he looked ill and haggard and--if you must know--starved. No one would say that you aren't modern and civilized,--and those are tame words,--but if Martin were to come in now and make a clean breast of it, you'd be surprised to find how little he is of either of those things, if I know anything about him."

"Then, my dear," replied Joan, making a very special ring of smoke, "you know more about him than I do."

Alice began to walk about. A form of marriage--that was the phrase that stuck in her mind. And here was a girl who was without a genuine friend in all that heartless town except herself, and a fine boy who needed one, she began to see, very badly. She, at any rate, and she thanked God for it, was properly married, and she owed it to friendship to make a try to put things right with these two.

"Joan, I believe I do," she said. "I really believe I do, although I've only had one real talk with him. You're terribly and awfully young, I know. You had a bad year with your grandfather and grandmother, and the reaction has made you wild and careless. But you're not a girl who has been brought up behind a screen in a room lighted with one candle. You know what marriage means. There isn't a book you haven't read or a thing you haven't talked over. And if you imagine that Martin is content to play Paul to your imitation Virginia, you're wrong. Oh, Joan, you're dangerously wrong."

Settling into her chair and working her shoulders more comfortably into the cushion, Joan crossed one leg over the other and lighted another cigarette. "Go on," she said with a tantalizing smile. "I love to hear you talk. It's far more interesting than listening to Howard Cannon's dark prophecies about the day after to-morrow and his gloomy rumblings about the writing on the wall. You stand for the unemancipated married woman. Don't you?"

"Yes, I do," said Alice quickly, her eyes gleaming. "I consider that a girl who lets a man marry her under false pretenses is a cheat."

"A strong word, my dear!"

"But not too strong."

"Wait a minute. Suppose she doesn't love him. What then?"

"Then she oughtn't to have married him."

"Yes, but it may have suited her to marry him."

"Then she should fulfill the bargain honestly and play the game according to the rules. However modern and civilized people are, they do that."

Joan shrugged her round white shoulders and flicked her cigarette ash expertly into the china tray on the spindle-legged table at her elbow. She was quite unmoved. Alice had always taken it upon herself to lecture her about individualism--the enthusiastic little thing. "Dear old girl," she said, "don't you remember that I always make my own rules?"

"I know you do, but you can't tell me that Martin wants to go by them--or that he'll be able to remain a knight long, while you're going by one set and he's keen to go by another? Where will it end?"

"End? But why drag in the end when Martin and I are only at the beginning?"

Alice sat down again and bent forward and caught up Joan's unoccupied hand. "Listen, dear," she said with more than characteristic earnestness. "Last night I went with the Merrills to the Ziegfeld Follies, and I saw Martin there with a little white-faced girl with red lips and the golden hair that comes out of a bottle."

"Good old Martin!" said Joan. "The devil you did!"

"Doesn't that give you a jar?"

"Good heavens, no! If you'd peeked into the One-o'clock Club this morning at half past two, you would have seen me with a white-faced man with a red mustache and a kink in his hair that comes from a hot iron. Martin and I are young and giddy, and we're on the round-about, and we're hitting it up. Who cares?"

There was a little silence--and then Alice drew back, shaking her pretty neat head. "It won't do, Joany," she said, "it won't do. I've heard you say 'Who cares?' loads of times and never seen anybody take you by the shoulders and shake you into caring. That's why you go on saying it. But somebody always cares, Joany dear, and there's not one thing that any of us can say or do that doesn't react on some one else, either to hurt or bless. Martin Gray's your knight. You said so. Don't you be the one to turn his gleaming armor into common broadcloth--please, please don't."

Joan gave a little laugh and a little yawn and stretched herself like a boy and got up. "Who'd have thought it? It's half-past twelve, and we're both losing our much needed beauty sleep. I must really tear myself away." She put her arm around Alice and kissed her. "The same dear little wise, responsible Alice who would like to put the earth into woolens with a mustard plaster on its chest. But it takes all sorts to make up a world, you know, and it would be rather drab without a few butterflies. Don't throw bricks at me until I've fluttered a bit more, Ally. My colors won't last long, and I know what old age means, better than most. If I were in love as you are, my man's rules would be the ones I'd go by all the time; but I'm not in love, and I don't want to be--yet; and I'm only a kid, and I think I have the right to my fling. This marriage of mine is just a part of the adventure that Martin and I plunged into as a great joke, and he knows it and he's one of the best, and I'm grateful to him, believe me. Good night. God bless you!"

She stood for a moment on the top step to taste the air that was filled with the essence of youth. Across a sky as clear as crystal a series of young clouds were chasing each other, putting out the stars for a moment as they scurried playfully along. It was a joy to be alive and fit and careless. Summer was lying in wait for spring, and autumn would lay a withering hand upon summer, and winter with its crooked limbs and lack-luster eyes was waiting its inevitable turn.

"A short life and a merry one!" whispered Joan to the moon, throwing it a kiss.

A footman, sullen for want of sleep, opened the door of the limousine. Some one was sitting in the corner with his arms crossed over his chest.

"Marty! Is that you?"

"It's all right," said Gilbert Palgrave. "I've been playing patience for half an hour. I'm going to see you home."

V

"You are going home?"

"Yes," said Joan, "without the shadow of a doubt."

"Which means that I'd better tell the chauffeur to drive round to the One-o'clock, eh?"

"I'll drop you there if you like. I'm really truly going home."

"All right."

Joan began to sing as the car bowled up Fifth Avenue. Movement always made her sing, and the effect of things slipping behind her. But she stopped suddenly as an expression of Alice's flicked across her memory. "You'll catch Alice up, if you go straight back," she said.

"Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire! I wonder why it is the really good woman is never appreciated by a man until he's obliged to sit on the other side of the fireplace? I wish we were driving away out into the country. I have an unusual hankering to stand on the bank of a huge lake and watch the moonlight on the water."

Joan was singing again. The trees in the Park were bespattered with young leaves.

Palgrave controlled an ardent desire to touch with his lips that cool white shoulder from which the cloak had slipped. It was extraordinary how this mere girl inflamed him. Alice--Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire! She seemed oddly like some other man's wife, these days.

"Suppose I tell your man to drive out of the city beyond this rabble of bricks and mortar?"

But Joan went on singing. Spring was in her blood. How fast the car was moving, and those young clouds.

Palgrave helped her out with a hot hand.

She opened the door with her latch-key. "Thank you, Gilbert," she said. "Good night."

But Palgrave followed her in. "Don't you think I've earned the right to one cigarette?" He threw his coat into a chair in the hall and hung his hat on the longest point of an antler. It was a new thing for this much flattered man to ask for favors. This young thing's exultant youth made him feel old and rather humble.

"There are sandwiches in the dining room and various things to drink," said Joan, waving her hand toward it.

"No, no. Let's go up to the drawing-room--that is, unless you--"

But Joan was already on the stairs, with the chorus of her song. She didn't feel in the least like sleep with its escape from life. It was so good to be awake, to be vital, to be tingling with the current of electricity like a telegraph wire. She flung back the curtains, raised all the windows, opened her arms to the air, spilled her cloak on the floor, sat at the piano and ragged "The Spring Song."

"I am a kid," she said, speaking above the sound, and going on with her argument to Alice. "I am and I will be, I will be. And I'll play the fool and revel in it as long as I can--so there!"

Palgrave had picked up the cloak and was holding it unconsciously against his immaculate shirt. It was the sentimental act of a virtuoso in the art of pleasing women--who are so easily pleased. At the moment he had achieved forgetfulness of boudoir trickery and so retained almost all his usual assumption of dignity. Even Joan, with her quick eye for the ridiculous, failed to detect the bathos of his attitude, and merely thought that he was trying to be funny and not succeeding.

It so happened that over Palgrave's shoulder she could see the bold crayon drawing of Martin, brown and healthy and muscular, without an ounce of affectation, an unmistakable man with his nice irregular features and clean, merry eyes. There was strength and capability stamped all over him, and there was, as well, a pleasing sense of reliability which gained immediate confidence. With the sort of shock one gets on going into the fresh air from a steam-heated room, she realized the contrast between these two.

There is always something as unreal about handsome men as there is about Japanese gardens. Palgrave's hair was so scrupulously sleek and wiglike, his features so well-balanced and well-chosen, his wide-set eyes so large and long-lashed, and his fair, soft mustache so miraculously precise. His clothes, too, were a degree more than perfect. They were so right as to be a little freakish because they attracted as much attention as if they were badly cut. He was born for tea fights and winter resorts, to listen with a distrait half-smile to the gushing adulation of the oh-my-dear type of women.

He attracted Joan. She admired his assurance and polish and manners. With these three things even a man with a broken nose and a head bald as an egg can carry a beautiful woman to the altar. He was something new to her, too, and she found much to amuse her in his way of expressing himself. He observed, and sometimes crystallized his observations with a certain neatness. Also, and she made no bones about owning to it, his obvious attention flattered her. All the same, she was in the mood just then for Martin. He went better with the time of year, and there was something awfully companionable about his sudden laugh. She would have hailed his appearance at that moment with an outdoor cry.

It was bad luck for Palgrave, because he now knew definitely that in Joan he had found the girl who was to give him the great emotion.

She broke away from "The Spring Song" and swung into "D'ye Ken John Peel with His Coat So Gay?" It was Martin's favorite air. How often she had heard him shout it among the trees on his way to meet her out there on the edge of the woods where they had found each other. It was curious how her thoughts turned to Martin that night.

She left the piano in the middle of a bar. "One cigarette," she said, and held out a silver box.

Palgrave's hand closed tightly over her slim white arm. In his throat his heart was pumping. He spoke incoherently, like a man. "God," he said, "you--you take my breath away. You make my brain whirl. Why didn't you come out of your garden a year ago?"

He was acting, she thought, and she laughed. "My arm, I think," she said.

"No, mine. It's got to be mine. What's the good of beating about the bush?" He spoke with a queer hoarseness, and his hand shook.

She laughed again. He was trying his parlor tricks, as Hosack had called them one night at the Crystal Room, watching him greet a woman with both hands. What a joke to see what he would do if she pretended to be carried away. He might as well be made to pay for keeping her up. "Oh, Gilbert," she said, "what are you saying!" Her shyness and fright were admirable.

They added fuel to his fire. "What I've been waiting to say for years and never thought I should. I love you. You've just got me."

How often had he said those very words to other women! He did it surpassingly well. She continued to act. "Oh, Gilbert," she said in a low voice, "you mustn't. There's Alice." Two could play at his pet game.

"Yes, there is Alice. But what does that matter? I don't care, and you don't. Your motto is not to care. You're always saying so. I'm no more married to Alice than you are to Gray. They're accidents, both of them. I love you, I tell you." And he ran his hand up to her shoulder and bore down upon her. Where were his manners and polish and assurance? It was amazing to see the change in the man.

But she dodged away and took up a stand behind the piano and laughed at him. "You're an artist, Gilbert," she said. "It's all very well for you to practice on women of your own age, but I'm an unsophisticated girl. You might turn my head, you know."

Her sarcasm threw him up short. She was mocking. He was profoundly hurt. "But you've chosen me. You've picked me out. You've used me to take you to places night after night! Don't fool with me, Joan. I'm in dead earnest."

And she saw with astonishment that he was. His face was white, and he stood in a curious attitude of supplication, with his hands out. She was amazed, and for a moment thrilled. Gilbert Palgrave, the woman's man, in love with her. Think of it!

"But Gilbert," she said, "there's Alice. She's my friend." That seemed to matter more than the fact that she was his wife.

"That hasn't mattered to you all along. Why drag it in now? Night after night you've danced with me; I've been at your beck and call; you used me to rescue you from Gray that time. What are you? What are you made of? Unsophisticated! You!" He wasn't angry. He was fumbling at reasons in order to try and get at her point of view. "You know well enough that a man doesn't put himself out to that extent for nothing. What becomes of give and take? Do you conceive that you are going to sail through life taking everything and giving nothing?"

Martin had asked her this, and Alice, and now here was Gilbert Palgrave putting it to her as though it were an indictment! "But I'm a kid," she cried out. "What do you all mean? Can't I be allowed to have any fun without paying for it? I'm only just out of the shell. I've only been living for a few weeks. Can't you see that I'm a kid? I have the right to take all I can get for nothing,--the right of youth. What do you mean--all of you?"

She came out from behind the piano and stood in front of him, as erect as a silver birch, and as slim and young. There was a great indignation all about her.

His eager hands went out, and fell. He was not a brute. It would be cowardly to touch this amazing child. She was armed with fearlessness and virginity--and he had mistaken these things for callousness.

"I don't know what to say," he said. "You stagger me. How long are you going to hide behind this youthfulness? When are you going to be old enough to be honest? Men have patience only up to a point. At any rate, you didn't claim youth when Gray asked you to marry him--though you may have done so afterward. Did you?"

She kept silent. But her eyes ran over him with contempt. According to her, she had given him no right to put such questions.

He ignored it. It was undeserved. It was she who deserved contempt, not he. And he threw it back at her in a strange incoherent outburst in which, all the same, there was a vibrating note of gladness and relief. And all the while, unmoved by the passion into which he broke, she stood watching with a curious gravity his no longer immobile face. She was thinking about Martin. She was redeveloping Martin's expression when she had opened the door of her bedroom the night of her marriage and let him out. What about her creed, then? Was she hiding behind youthfulness? Were there, after all, certain things that must be paid for? Was she already old enough to be what Alice and this man called honest? Was every man made of the stuff that only gave for what he hoped to get in return?

His words trailed off. He was wasting them, he saw. She was looking through his head. But he rejoiced as to one thing like a potter who opens the door of his oven and finds his masterpiece unbroken. And silence fell upon them, interrupted only by the intermittent humming of passing cars.

Finally Palgrave took the cigarette box out of Joan's hand and put it down on a little table and stood looking more of a man than might have been expected.

"I've always hoped that one day I should meet you--just you," he said quietly; "and when I did, I knew that it would be to love. Well, I've told you. Do what you can for me until you decide that you're grown up. I'll wait."

And he turned and went away, and presently she heard a door shut and echo, and slow footsteps in the street below.

Where was Martin?

VI

She wanted Martin. Everything that had happened that night made her want Martin. He knew that she was a kid, and treated her as such. He didn't stand up and try and force her forward into being a woman--although, of all men, he had the right. He was big and generous and had given her his name and house and the run of the world, but not from his lips ever came the hard words that she had heard that night. How extraordinary that they should have come from Alice as well as from Gilbert.

She wanted Martin. Where was Martin? She felt more like a bird, at that moment, than a butterfly--like a bird that had flown too far from its nest and couldn't find its way back. She had been honest with Martin, all along. Why, the night before they had started on the street of adventure, she had told him her creed, in that dark, quiet room with the moonlight on the floor in a little pool, and had frankly cried out, "Who cares?" for the first time. And later, upstairs in her room, in his house, she had asked him to leave her; and he had gone, because he understood that she wanted to remain irresponsible for a time and must not be taken by the shoulders and shaken into caring until she had had her fling. He understood everything--especially as to what she meant by saying that she would go joy-riding, that she would make life spin whichever way she wanted it to go. It was the right of youth, and what was she but just a kid? He had never stood over her and demanded payment, and yet he had given her everything. He understood that she was new to the careless and carefree, and had never flung the word honest at her head, because, being so young, she considered that she could be let off from making payments for a time.

She wanted Martin. She wanted the comforting sight of his clean eyes and deep chest and square shoulders. She wanted to sit down knee to knee with him as they had done so often on the edge of the woods, and talk and talk. She wanted to hear his man's voice and see the laughter-lines come and go round his eyes. He was her pal and was as reliable as the calendar. He would wipe out the effect of the reproaches that she had been made to listen to by Alice and Gilbert. They might be justified; they were justified; but they showed a lack of understanding of her present mood that was to her inconceivable. She was a kid. Couldn't they see that she was a kid? Why should they both throw bricks at her as though she were a hawk and not a mere butterfly?

Where was Martin? Why hadn't she seen him for several days? Why had he stayed away from home without saying where he was and what he was doing? And what was all this about a girl with a white face and red lips? Martin must have friends, of course. She had hers--Gilbert and Hosack and the others, if they could be called friends. But why a girl with a white face and red lips and hair that came out of a bottle? That didn't sound much like Martin.

All these thoughts ran through Joan's mind as she walked about the drawing-room with its open windows, in the first hour of the morning, sending out an S. O. S. to Martin. She ought to be in bed and asleep--not thinking and going over everything as if she were a woman. She wasn't a woman yet, and could only be a kid once. It was too bad of Alice to try and force her to take things seriously so soon. Seriousness was for older people, and even then something to avoid if possible. And as for Gilbert--well, she didn't for one instant deny the fact that it was rather exciting and exhilarating for him to be in love with her, although she was awfully sorry for Alice. She had done nothing to encourage him, and it was really a matter of absolute indifference to her whether he loved her or not, so long as he was at hand to take her about. And she didn't intend to encourage him, either. Love meant ties and responsibility--Alice proved that clearly enough. There was plenty of time for love. Let her flit first. Let her remain young as long as she could, careless and care-free. The fact that she was married was just an accident, an item in her adventure. It didn't make her less young to be married, and she didn't see why it should. Martin understood, and that was why it was so far-fetched of Alice to suggest that her attitude could turn Martin's armor into broadcloth, and hint at his having ceased to be a knight because he had been seen with a girl--never mind whether her face was white and her lips red, and her hair too golden.

"I'm a kid, I tell you," she said aloud, throwing out her justification to the whole world. "I am and I will be, I will be. I'll play the fool and revel in it as long as I can--so there. Who cares?" And she laughed once more, and ran her hand over her hair as though waving all these thoughts away, and shut the windows and turned out the lights and went upstairs to her bedroom. "I'm a selfish, self-willed little devil, crazy about myself, thinking of nothing but having a good time," she added inwardly. "I know it, all of you, as well as you do, but give me time. Give me my head for a bit. When I must begin to pay, I'll pay with all I've got."

But presently, all ready for bed, she put on a dressing gown and left her room and padded along the passage in heelless slippers to Martin's room. He might have been asleep all this time. How silly not to have thought of that! She would wake him for one of their talks. It seemed an age since they had sat on the hill together among the young buds, and she had conjured up the high-reaching buildings of New York against the blue sky, like a mirage.

She had begun to think again. Alice and Gilbert between them had set her brain working--and she couldn't stop it. What if the time had come already when she must pull herself together and face facts and play what everybody called the game? Well, if it had, and she simply couldn't hide behind youthfulness any longer, as Gilbert had said, she would show that she could change her tune of "Who cares?" to "I care" with the best of them! "I'm only a little over eighteen. I don't know quite what it is, but I'm something more than pretty. I'm still not much more than a flapper--an irritating, empty-headed, fashionable-school-fed, undisciplined, sophisticated kid. I know all about that as well as they do. I'm making no pretense to be anything different. Heaven knows, I'm frank enough about it--even to myself. But it's only a phase. Why not let me get over it and live it down? If there's anything good in me, and there is, it will come out sooner or later. Why not let me go through it my own way? A few months to play the fool in--it isn't much to ask, and don't I know what it means to be old?"

She hadn't been along that passage before. It was Martin's side of the house. She hadn't given much thought to Martin's side of anything. She tried a door and opened it, fumbled for the button that would turn the light on and found it. It was a large and usefully fitted dressing room with a hanging cupboard that ran all along one wall, with several doors. Two old shiny-faced English tallboys were separated by a boot rack. Between the two windows was a shaving glass over a basin. There was a bookcase on each side of the fire-place and a table conveniently near a deep armchair with a tobacco jar, pipes and a box of cigarettes. Every available space of wall was crammed with framed photographs of college groups, some showing men with the whiskered faces and the strange garments of the early Victorian period, others of the clean-shaven men of the day, but all of them fit and eager and care-free, caught in their happiest hours. It was a man's room, arranged by one, now used by another.

Joan went through into the bedroom. The light followed her. There was no Martin. It was all strangely tidy. Its owner might have been away for weeks.

With a sense of chill and a feeling of queer loneliness, she went back to the dressing room. She wanted Martin. If Martin had been there, she would have had it all out with him, freely and frankly. Somehow she couldn't wave away the idea any longer that the time had come for her to cross another bridge. Thank God she would still be young, but the kid of her would be left on the other side. If Martin had been there, she would have told him some of the things that Alice had said about being honest and paying up, and left it to him to say whether the girlhood which she had wanted to spin out was over and must be put away among her toys.

Alice and Gilbert Palgrave,--curious that it should have been those two,--had shaken her individualism, as well as something else, vague and untranslatable, that she couldn't quite grasp, that eluded her hand. She sat down in the deep chair and with a little smile took up one of Martin's pipes and looked at it. The good tobaccoey scent of it took her back to the hill on the edge of the woods, and in her mind's eye there was a picture of two clean eyes with laughter-lines coming and going, a strong young face that had already caught the sun, square shoulders and a broad chest, and a pair of reliable hands with spatulate fingers clasped round a knee. She could hear birds calling. Spring was in the air.

Where was Martin?

VII

It was the first dress rehearsal of "The Ukelele Girl," to be produced "under the personal direction of Stanwood Mosely." The piece had been in rehearsal for eleven weeks.

The curtain had been up on the second act for an hour. Scene designers, scene painters and scene shifters were standing about with a stage director, whose raucous voice cut the fuggy atmosphere incessantly in what was intended to represent the exterior of a hotel at Monte Carlo. It more nearly resembled the materialization of a dope fiend's dream of an opium factory. What might have been a bank building in Utopia, an old Spanish galleon in drydock, or the exterior of a German beer garden according to the cover of Vogue occupied the center of the scene. The bricks were violet and old gold, sprayed with tomato juice and marked by the indeterminate silver tracks of snails. Pillars, modeled on the sugar-stick posts that advertise barber's shops, ran up and lost themselves among the flies. A number of wide stairs, all over wine stains, wandered aimlessly about, coming to a conclusion between gigantic urns filled with unnatural flowers of all the colors of a diseased rainbow. Jotted about here and there on the stage were octopus-limbed trees with magenta leaves growing in flower pots all covered with bilious blobs. Stan Mosely didn't profess to understand it, but having been assured by the designer that it was art nouveau, which also he didn't understand, he was wholly satisfied.

Not so the stage director, whose language in describing the effect it had upon him would have done credit to a gunman under the influence of cheap brandy and fright. The rehearsal, which had commenced at eight o'clock, had been hung up for a time considerable enough to allow him to give vent to his sentiments. The pause enabled Mosely, squatting frog-wise in the middle of the orchestra stalls, to surround himself with several women whose gigantic proportions were horribly exposed to the eye. The rumble of his voice and the high squeals of their laughter clashed with the sounds of the vitriolic argument on the stage, and the noises of a bored band, in which an oboe was giving a remarkable imitation of a gobbling turkey cock, and a cornet of a man blowing his nose. The leader of the band was pacing up and down the musicians' room, saying to himself: "Zis is ze last timer. Zis is ze last timer," well knowing that it wasn't. The poor devil had a wife and children to feed.

Bevies of weary and spirit-broken chorus girls in costume were sprawling on the chairs in the lower boxes, some sleeping, some too tired to sleep, and some eating ravenously from paper bags. Chorus men and costumers, wig makers and lyric writers, authors and friends of the company, sat about singly and in pairs in the orchestra seats. They were mostly bored so far beyond mere impatience by all this super-inefficiency and chaos as to have arrived at a state of intellectual coma. The various men out of whose brains had originally come the book and lyrics no longer hated each other and themselves; they lusted for the blood of the stage director or saw gorgeous mental pictures of a little fat oozy corpse surrounded by the gleeful faces of the army of people who had been impotent to protest against the lash of his whip, the impertinence of his tongue or the gross dishonesty of his methods.

One other man in addition to the raucous, self-advertising stage director, Jackrack, commonly called "Jack-in-office," showed distinct signs of life--a short, overdressed, perky person with piano fingers and baldish head much too big for his body, who flitted about among the chorus girls, followed by a pale, drab woman with pins, and touched their dresses and sniggered and made remarks with a certain touch of literary excellence in a slightly guttural voice. This was Poppy Shemalitz, the frock expert, the man milliner of the firm, who was required to make bricks out of straw, or as he frequently said to the friends of his "bosom," "make fifteen dollars look like fifty." Self-preservation and a sense of humor encouraged him through the abusive days of a dog's life.

Sitting in the last row of the orchestra, wearing the expression of interest and astonishment of a man who had fallen suddenly into another world, was Martin. He had been there since eight o'clock. For over six hours he had watched banality emerge from chaos and had listened to the blasphemy and insults of Jackrack. He would have continued to watch and listen until daylight peered upbraidingly through the chinks in the exit doors but for the sudden appearance of Susie Capper, dressed for the street.

"Hello, Tootles! But you're not through, are you?"

"Absobloominlootely," she said emphatically.

"I thought you said your best bit was in the second act?"

"'Was' is right. Come on outer here. I can't stand the place a minute longer. It'll give me apoplexy."

Martin followed her into the foyer. The tragic rage on the girl's little, pretty, usually good-natured face worried him. He knew that she had looked forward to this production to make her name on Broadway.

"My dear Tootles, what's happened?"

She turned to him and clutched his arm. Tears welled up into her eyes, and her red lips began to tremble. "What did I look like?" she demanded.

"Splendid!"

"Didn't I get every ounce of comedy out of my two scenes in Act One?"

"Every ounce."

"I know I did. Even the stage hands laughed, and if you can do that there's no argument. And didn't my number go over fine? Wasn't it the best thing in the act? I don't care what you say. I know it was. Even the orchestra wanted it over again."

"But it was," said Martin, "and I heard one of the authors say that it would be the hit of the piece."

"Oh, Martin, I've been sweating blood for this chance for five years, and I'm not going to get it. I'm not going to get it. I wish I was dead." She put her arms against the wall and her face down on her arms and burst into an agony of tears.

Martin was moved. This plucky, struggling, hardworking atom of a remorseless world deserved a little luck for a change. Hitherto it had eluded her eager hands, although she had paid for it in advance with something more than blood and energy. "Dear old Tootles," he said, "what's happened? Try and tell me what's happened? I don't understand."