THE WORKS OF JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER

THE LAY ANTHONY

MOUNTAIN BLOOD

THE THREE BLACK PENNYS

GOLD AND IRON

JAVA HEAD

THE HAPPY END

LINDA CONDON

LINDA CONDON

BY

JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER

_To_ CARL VAN VECHTEN

_This, Linda Condon's Gravest Bow. _

LINDA CONDON

I

A black bang was, but not ultimately, the most notable feature ofher uncommon personality--straight and severe and dense across herclear pale brow and eyes. Her eyes were the last thing to rememberand wonder about; in shade blue, they had a velvet richness, apoignant intensity of lovely color, that surprised the heart. Asidefrom that she was slim, perhaps ten years old, and graver than gay. 

Her mother was gay for them both, and, therefore, for the entirefamily. No father was in evidence; he was dead and never spoken of, and Linda was the only child. Linda's dresses, those significanttrivialities, plainly showed two tendencies--the gaiety of hermother and her own always formal gravity. If Linda appeared at dinner, in the massive Renaissance materialism of the hotel dining-room, witha preposterous magenta hair-ribbon on her shapely head, her motherhad succeeded in expressing her sense of the appropriately decorative;while if Linda wore an unornamented but equally "unsuitable" frock ofdark velvet, she, in her turn, had been vindicated. 

Again, but far more rarely, the child's selection was evident on thewoman. As a rule Mrs. Condon garbed her flamboyant body in large andexpensive patterns or extremely tailored suits; and of the two, theevening satins and powdered arms barely retaining an admissibleline, and the suits, the latter were the most, well--spectacular. 

She was not dark in color but brightly golden; a gold, it must besaid in all honesty, her own, a metallic gold crisply and solidlymarcelled; with hazel-brown eyes, and a mouth which, set against herdaughter's deep-blue gaze, was her particular attraction. It wasrouged to a nicety, the under lip a little full and never quiteagainst the upper. If Linda's effect was cool and remote, Mrs. Condon, thanks to her mouth, was reassuringly imminent. She was, too, friendly; she talked to women--in her not overfrequentopportunities--in a rapid warm inaccurate confession of almosteverything they desired to hear. The women, of course, werecontinually hampered by the unfortunate fact that the questionsnearest their hearts, or curiosity, were entirely inadmissible. 

Viewed objectively, they all, with the exception of Linda, seemedalike; but that might have been due to their common impressivesetting. The Boscombe, in its way, was as lavish as Mrs. Condon'sdresses. The main place of congregation, for instance, was a greatspace of white marble columns, Turkey-red carpet and growing palms. It was lighted at night indirectly by alabaster bowls hanging ongilded chains--a soft bright flood of radiance falling on the seatedor slowly promenading women with bare shoulders. 

Usually they were going with a restrained sharp eagerness toward thedining-room or leaving it in a more languid flushed repletion. Therewere, among them, men; but somehow the men never seemed to be of theleast account. It was a women's paradise. The glow from above alwaysemphasized the gowns, the gowns like orchids and tea-roses and theleaves of magnolias. It sparkled in the red and green and crystaljewels like exotic dew scattered over the exotic human flowers. Veryoccasionally there was a complacent or irritable masculine utterance, and then it was immediately lost in the dominant feminine sibilance. 

Other children than Linda sped in the manner of brilliant fretfultops literally on the elaborate outskirts of the throng; but theywere as different from her as she was from the elders. Indeed Lindaresembled the latter, rather than her proper age, remarkably. Shehad an air of responsibility, sometimes expressed in a troubledfrown, and again by the way she hurried sedately through driftingfigures toward a definite purpose and end. 

Usually it was in the service of one of her mother's smallinnumerable requests or necessities; if the latter were sitting witha gentleman on the open hotel promenade that overlooked the sea andneeded a heavier wrap, Linda returned immediately with a furredcloak on her arm; if the elder, going out after dinner, had broughtdown the wrong gloves, Linda knew the exact wanted pair in the longperfumed box; while countless trifles were needed from theconvenient drug-store. 

The latter was a place of white mosaic floor and glittering glass, with a marble counter heaped with vivid fruit and silver-coveredbowls of sirups and creams with chopped nuts. Linda often found timeto stop here for a delectable glass of assorted sweet compounds. Shewas on terms of intimacy with the colored man in a crisp linen coatwho presided over the refreshments, and he invariably gave her anextra spoonful of the marron paste she preferred. When at lunch, itmight be, she cared for very little, her mother would complainabsently:

"You must stop eating those sickening mixtures. They'd ruin anyskin. " At this she invariably found the diminutive mirror in the bagon her lap and glanced at her own slightly improved color. Theburden of the feminine conversations in which Mrs. Condon wasprivileged to join, Linda discovered, was directed toward theseoverwhelming considerations of appearance. And their importance, communicated to her, resulted in a struggle between the desire topreserve her skin from ruin and the seductions of marron paste andmaple chocolates. 

Now, with an uncomfortable sense of impending disaster, she wouldhastily consume one or the other; again, supported by a beginningself-imposed inflexibility, she would turn steadily away fromtemptation. In the end the latter triumphed; and her normalappetite, always moderate, was unimpaired. 

This spirit of resolution, it sometimes happened, was a cause ofhumorous dismay to her mother. "I declare, Linda, " she would observewith an air of helplessness, "you make me feel like the giddy oneand as if you were mama. It's the way you look, so disapproving. Ihave to remind myself you're only--just how old are you? I keepforgetting. " Linda would inform her exactly and the other sigh:

"The years slip around disgustingly. It seems only yesterday I wasat my first party. " Usually, in spite of Linda's eagerness to hearof that time when her mother was a girl, the elder would stopabruptly. On rare occasions solitary facts emerged from the recalledexistence of a small town in the country. There were such details asbuggy-riding and prayer-meetings and excursions to a Boiling Springswhere the dancing-floor, open among the trees, was splendid. Atthese memories Mrs. Condon had been known to cry. 

But she would recover shortly. Her emotions were like that--easilyroused, highly colored and soon forgotten. She forgot, Lindarealized leniently, a great deal. It wasn't safe to rely on herpromises. However, if she neglected a particular desire of Linda's, she continually brought back unexpected gifts of candy, boxes ofsilk stockings, or lovely half-wilted flowers. 

The flowers, they discovered, although they stayed fresh for a longwhile pinned to Linda's slim waist, died almost at once if worn byher mother. "It's my warm nature, I am certain, " the latterproclaimed to her daughter; "while you are a little refrigerator. Imust say it's wonderful how you keep your clothes the same. Neat asa pin. " Somehow, with this commendation, she managed to include aslight uncomplimentary impatience. Linda didn't specially want toresemble a pin, a disagreeable object with a sharp point. Sheconsidered this in the long periods when, partly by preference, shewas alone. 

Seated, perhaps, in the elaborate marble and deep red of theBoscombe's reception-rooms, isolated in the brilliant expensivethrong, she would speculate over what passed in the light of her ownspecial problems. But nothing, really, came out to her satisfaction. There was, notably, no one she might ask. Her mother, approachedseriously, declared that Linda gave her the creeps; while othersmade it plain that it was their duty to repress the forwardnessinevitable from the scandalous neglect of her upbringing. 

They, the women of the Boscombe, glancing at their finger-nailsstained and buffed to a shining pale vermilion, lightly rubbingtheir rings on the dry palm of a hand, wondered pessimisticallywithin Linda's hearing what could come out of such an association. That term, she vaguely gathered, referred to her mother. The latterevidently interested them tremendously; because, she explained, theyhad no affairs of their own to attend to. This was perfectly clearto Linda until Mrs. Condon further characterized them as "busy. "

The women, stopped by conventions from really satisfactoryinvestigation at the source, drew her on occasion into a laboriouslylight inquisition. How long would Linda and her mama stay at theBoscombe? Had they closed their apartment? Where was it? Hadn't Mrs. Condon mentioned Cleveland? Wasn't Linda lonely with her mama out somuch--they even said late--in rolling chairs? Had she ever seen Mr. Jasper before his arrival last week?

No, of course she hadn't. 

Here they exchanged skeptical glances beneath relentlessly pulledeyebrows. He was really very nice, Mr. Jasper. Linda in a matter-of-factvoice replied that he had given her a twenty-dollar gold piece. Mr. Jasper was very generous. But perhaps he had rewarded her for beinga good little girl and not--not bothering or hanging about. "Whyshould he?" was Linda's just perceptibly impatient response. Thenthey told her to be quiet because they wanted to listen to the music. 

This consisted in studying, through suspended glasses in chasedplatinum, a discreet programme. At the end of a selection theyeither applauded condescendingly or told each other that they hadn'tcared for that last--really too peculiar. Whichever happened, theleader of the small orchestra, an extravagant Italian with a supplewaist, turned and bowed repeatedly with a grimacing smile. Themusic, usually Viennese, was muted and emotional; its strainsblended perfectly with the floating scents of the women and thefaintly perceptible pungent odors of dinner. Every little while aspecially insinuating melody became, apparently, tangled in thewomen's breathing, and their breasts, cunningly traced and caressedin tulle, would be disturbed. 

Mrs. Condon applauded more vigorously than was sanctioned by theothers' necessity for elegance; the frank clapping of her pink palmsnever failed to betray a battery of affected and significantsurprise in eyes like--polished cold agates. Linda, seated besideher parent, could be seen to lay a hand, narrow and blanched andmarked by an emerald, on the elder's knee. Her pale fine lips movedrapidly with the shadow of trouble beneath the intense black bang. 

"I wish you wouldn't do it so loudly, mother, " was what shewhispered. 

II

The jealously guarded truth was that, by her daughter at least, Mrs. Condon was adored. Linda observed that she was not like an ordinarymother, but more nearly resembled a youthful companion. Mrs. Condon'sgaiety was as genuine as her fair hair. Not kept for formal occasion, it got out of bed with her, remained through the considerabledifficulties of dressing with no maid but Linda, and if the otherwere not asleep called a cheerful or funny good night. 

Their rooms were separated by a bath, but Linda was scarcely ever inher own--her mother's lovely things, acting like a magnet, constantly drew her to their arrangement in the drawers. When thelaundry came up, crisp and fragile webs heaped on the bed, Lindalaid it away in a sort of ritual. Even with these publicly invisiblegarments a difference of choice existed between the two: Mrs. Condon's preference was for insertions, and Linda's for shadowembroidery and fine shell edges. Mrs. Condon, shaking into positiona foam of ribbon and lace, would say with her gurgle of amusement, "I want to be ready when I fall down; if I followed your advicethey'd take me for a nun. "

This brought out Linda's low clear laugh, the expression of herextreme happiness. It sounded, for an instant, like a chime of smallsilver bells; then died away, leaving the faintest perceptible flushon her healthy pallor. At other times her mother's humor made hervaguely uncomfortable, usually after wine or other drinks that leftthe elder's breath thick and oppressive. Linda failed completely tograsp the allusions of this wit but a sharp uneasiness alwaysresponded like the lingering stale memory of a bad dream. 

Once, at the Boscombe, her mother had been too silly for words: shehad giggled and embraced her sweet little girl, torn an expensiveveil to shreds and dropped a French model hat into the tub. After adistressing sickness she had gone to sleep fully dressed, and Linda, unable to move or wake her, had sat long beyond dinner into thenight, fearful of the entrance of the chambermaid. 

The next day Mrs. Condon had been humble with remorse. Men, shesaid, were too beastly for description. This was not an unusualopinion. Linda observed that she was always condemning men ingeneral and dressing for them in particular. She offered Lindaendless advice in an abstracted manner:

"They're all liars, Lin, and stingy about everything but theirpleasure. Women are different but men are all alike. You get sick todeath of them! Never bother them when they are smoking a cigar;cigarettes don't matter. Leave the cigarette-smokers alone, anyhow;they're not as dependable as the others. A man with a good cigar--youmust know the good from the bad--is usually discreet. I ought tobring you up different, but, Lord, life's too short. Besides, youwill learn more useful things right with mama, whose eyes are open, than anywhere else. 

"Powder my back, darling; I can't reach. If I'm a little late to-nightgo to sleep like a duck. You think Mr. Jasper's nice, don't you?So does mother. But you mustn't let him give you any more money. It'll make him conceited. "

Linda wondered what she meant by the last phrase. How could it makeMr. Jasper conceited to give her a gold piece? However, she decidedthat she had better not ask. 

It was like that with a great many of her mother's mysteriousremarks--Linda had an instinctive feeling of drawing away. The otherkissed her warmly and left a print of vivid red on her cheek. 

She examined the mark in the mirror when her mother had gone; itwas, she decided, the kiss made visible. Then she laid away thethings scattered about the room by Mrs. Condon's hasty dressing. Herown belongings were always in precise order. 

A sudden hesitation seized her at the thought of going down to thecrowd at the music. The women made her uncomfortable. It wasn't whatthey said, but the way they said it; and the endless questionswearied her. She was, as well, continually bothered by her inabilityto impress upon them how splendid her mother was. Some of them shewas certain did not appreciate her. Mrs. Condon at once admitted andwas entertained by this, but it disturbed Linda. However, sheunderstood the reason--when any nice men came along they alwaysliked her mother best. This made the women mad. 

The world, she gathered, was a place where women played a game ofmen with each other. It was very difficult, she couldn't comprehendthe rules or reason; and Linda was afraid that she would beunsuccessful and never have the perfect time her mother wanted forher. In the first place, she was too thin, and then she knew thatshe could never talk like her dearest. Perhaps when she had had somewine it would be different. 

She decided, after all, to go down to the assemblage; and, by one ofthe white marble pillars, Mrs. Randall captured her. "Why, here'sLinda-all-alone, " Mrs. Randall said. "Mama out again?" Linda repliedstoutly, "She has a dreadful lot of invitations. "

Mrs. Randall, who wore much brighter clothes than her mother, wascalled by the latter an old buzzard. She was very old, Linda couldsee, with perfectly useless staring patches of paint on her wrinkledcheeks, and eyes that look as though they might come right out ofher head. Her frizzled hair supported a dead false twist with aglittering diamond pin, and her soft cold hands were loaded withjewels. She frightened Linda, really, although she could not saywhy. Mrs. Randall was a great deal like the witch in a fairy-story, but that wasn't it. Linda hadn't the belief in witches necessary fordread. It might be her scratching voice; or the way she turned herhead, without any chin at all, like a turtle; or her dresses, whichled you to expect a person very different from an old buzzard. 

"Of course she does, " said Mrs. Randall, "any number of invitations, and why shouldn't she? Your mother is very pleasant, to be sure. "She nodded wisely to the woman beside her, Miss Skillern. 

Miss Skillern was short and broad and, in the evening, always worecurled ostrich plumes on tightly filled gray puffs. She remindedLinda of a wadded chair. Mrs. Randall, after the other's slightstiff assent, continued:

"Your mama would never be lonely, not she. All I wonder is shedoesn't get married again--with that blondine of hers. Wouldn't yourather have one papa than, in a way of speaking, a different one atevery hotel?"

Linda, completely at a loss for answer, studied Mrs. Randall withher direct deep blue gaze. Miss Skillern again inclined her plumes. With the rest of her immobile she was surprisingly like one of thosefat china figures with a nodding head. Linda was assaulted by thefamiliar bewildered feeling of not understanding what was said and, at the same time, passionately resenting it from an inner sensitiverecognition of something wrong. 

"How could I have that?" she finally asked. 

"How?" repeated Miss Skillern, breathing loudly. 

"Yes, how?" Mrs. Randall echoed. "You can ask your mama. You reallycan. And you may say that, as a matter of fact, the question camefrom us, " she included her companion. 

"From you, " Miss Skillern exactly corrected her. 

"Indeed, " the other cried heatedly, "from me! I think not. Didn'tyou ask? Answer me that, if you please. I heard you with my own earssay, 'How?' While now, before my face, you try to deny it. " It wasplain to Linda that Miss Skillern was totally unmoved by the charge. She moved her lorgnette up, gazing stolidly at the musicalprogramme. "From you, " she said again, after a little. Mrs. Randallsuddenly regained her equilibrium. 

"If the ladies of this hotel are afraid to face that creature I--I--amnot. I'll tell her in a minute what a respectable person thinks ofher goings-on. More than that, I shall complain to Mr. Rennert. 'Mr. Rennert, ' I'll say, 'either she leaves or me. Choose as you will. Thereputation of your hotel--'" she spluttered and paused. 

"Proof, " Miss Skillern pronounced judicially; "proof. We know, butthat's not proof. "

"He has a wife, " Mrs. Randall replied in a shrill whisper; "a wifewho is an invalid. Mrs. Zoock, she who had St. Vitus' dance and leftyesterday, heard it direct. George A. Jasper, woolen mills inFrankford, Pennsylvania. Mr. Rennert would thank me for thatinformation. "

They had forgotten Linda. She stood rigid and cold--they wereblaming her mother for going out in a rolling chair with Mr. Jasperbecause he was married. But her mother didn't know that; probablyMr. Jasper had not given it a thought. She was at the point ofmaking this clear, when it seemed to her that it might be better tosay that her mother knew everything there was about Mr. Jasper'swife; she could even add that they were all friends. 

Linda would have to tell her mother the second she came in, andthen, of course, she'd stop going with Mr. Jasper. Men, she thoughtin the elder's phrase, were too beastly for words. 

"After all, " Mrs. Randall was addressing her again, "you needn't sayanything at all to your mama. It might make her so cross that she'dspank you. "

"Mother never spanks me, " Linda replied with dignity. 

"If you were my little girl, " said Miss Skillern, with rolling lips, "I'd put you over my knee with your skirts up and paddle you. "

Never, Linda thought, had she heard anything worse; she wasprofoundly shocked. The vision of Miss Skillern performing such anoperation as she had described cut its horror on her mind. There wasa sinking at her heart and a misty threat of tears. 

To avert this she walked slowly away. It was hardly past nine o'clock;her mother wouldn't be back for a long while, and she was toorestless and unhappy to sit quietly above. Instead, she continueddown to the floor where there were various games in the corridorleading to the billiard-room. The hall was dull, no one was clickingthe balls about the green tables, and a solitary sick-looking man, with inky shadows under fixed eyes, was smoking a cigarette in achair across from the cigar-stand. 

He looked over a thick magazine in a chocolate cover, his gazearrested by her irresolute passage. "Hello, Bellina, " he said. 

She stopped. "Linda, " she corrected him, "Linda Condon. " Obeying asudden impulse, she dropped, with a sigh, into a place beside him. 

"You're bored, " he went on, the magazine put away. "So am I, but myterm is short. "

She wondered, principally, what he was doing, among so many women, at the Boscombe. He was different from Mr. Jasper, or the other menwith fat stomachs, the old men with dragging feet. It embarrassedher to meet his gaze, it was so--so investigating. She guessed hewas by the sea because he felt as badly as he looked. He askedsurprisingly:

"Why are you here?"

"On the account of my mother, " she explained. "But it doesn't mattermuch where I am. Places are all alike, " she continued conversationally. "We're mostly at hotels--Florida in winter and Lake George in summer. This is kind of between. "

"Oh!" he said; and she was sure, from that short single exclamation, he understood everything. 

"Like all true beauty, " he added, "it's plain that you are durable. "

"I don't like the seashore, " she went on easily; "I'd rather be in agarden with piles of flowers and a big hedge. "

"Have you ever lived in a garden-close?"

"No, " she admitted; "it's just an idea. I told mother but shelaughed at me and said a roof-garden was her choice. "

"Some day you'll have the place you describe, " he assured her. "Itis written all over you. I would like to see you, Bellina, in aspace of emerald sod and geraniums. " She decided to accept withoutfurther protest his name for her. "You are right, too, about thehedge--the highest and thickest in creation. I should recommend apseudo-classic house, Georgian, rather small, a white façade againstthe grass. A Jacobean dining-room, dark certainly, the Frenchwindows open on dipping candle flames. You'd wear white, with yourhair low and the midnight bang as it is now. "

"That would be awfully nice, " Linda replied vaguely. She sighed. 

"But a very light drawing-room!" he cried. "White panels and archesand Canton-blue rugs--the brothers Adam. A fluted mantel, McIntires, and a brass hod. Curiously enough, I always see you in the evening... At the piano. I'm not so bored, now. " Little flames of redburned in either thin cheek. "What nonsense!" Suddenly he was tired. "This is a practical and earnest world, " his voice grew thin andhurt her. "Yet beauty is relentless. You'll have your garden, but Ishouldn't be surprised at difficulties first. "

"It won't be so hard to get, " she declared confidently. "I mean tochoose the right man. Mother says that's the answer. Women, shesays, won't use their senses. "

"Ah. "

Linda began to think this was a most unpleasant monosyllable. 

"So that's the lay! Has she succeeded?"

"She has a splendid time. She's out tonight with Mr. Jasper in arolling chair, and he has loads and loads of money. It makes all theother women cross. "

"Here you are, then, till she gets back?"

"There's no one else. "

"But, as a parent, infinitely preferable to the righteous, " hemurmured. "And you--"

"I think mother's perfect, " she answered simply. 

He shook his head. "You won't succeed at it, though. Your mother, for example, isn't dark. "

"The loveliest gold hair, " she said ecstatically. "She's much muchprettier than I'll ever be. "

"Prettier, yes. The trouble is, you are lovely, magical. You willstay for a lifetime in the memory. The merest touch of you will bemore potent than any duty or fidelity. A man's only salvation willbe his blindness. "

Although she didn't understand a word of this, Linda liked to hearhim; he was talking as though she were grown up, and in response tothe flattery she was magnetic and eager. 

"One time, " he said, "very long ago, beauty was worshiped. Men, yousee, know better now. They want their dollar's worth. The world wasabsolutely different then--there were deep adventurous forests withholy chapels in the green combe for an orison, and hermits rising toParadise on the _Te Deum Laudamus_ of the angels and archangels. There were black castles and, in the broad meadows, silk tents withivory pegs and poles of gold. 

"The enchantments were as thick as shadows under the trees: perhapsthe loveliest of women riding a snow-white mule, with a saddle clothof red samite, or, wrapped in her shining hair, on a leopard withyellow eyes, lured you to a pavilion, scattered with rushes andflowers and magical herbs, and a shameful end. Or a silver doe wouldweep, begging you to pierce her with your sword, and, when you did, there knelt the daughter of the King of Wales. 

"But I started to tell you about the worship of beauty. Platostarted it although Cardinal Pietro Bembo was responsible for thecreed. He lived in Italy, in an age like a lily. It developed mostlyat Florence in the Platonic Academy of Cosomo and Pico dellaMirandola. Love was the supreme force, and its greatest expression adesire beyond the body. "

He gazed at Linda with a quizzical light in his eyes deep in shadow. 

"Love, " he said again, and then paused. "One set of words will do aswell as another. You will understand, or not, with something fardifferent from intellectual comprehension. The endless service ofbeauty. Of course, a woman--but never the animal; the spirit always. Born in the spirit, served in the spirit, ending in the spirit. Adirect contradiction, you see, to nature and common sense, frugalityand the sacred symbol of the dollar. 

"It wouldn't please your Mr. Jasper, with his heaps and heaps ofmoney. Mr. Jasper would consider himself sold. But Novalis, not sovery long ago, understood.... A dead girl more real than all earth. You mustn't suppose it to be mere mysticism. "

Linda said, "Very well, I won't. "

He nodded. "No one could call Michelangelo hysterical. Sometime inthe history of man, of a salt solution, this divinity has touchedthem. Touched them hopefully, and perhaps gone--banished by theother destination. Or I can comprehend nature killing it relentlessly, since it didn't lead to propagation. Then, too, as much as was usefulwas turned into a dogma for politics and priests. 

"You saw in the rushlight a woman against the arras; there was ahumming of viola d'amore from the musicians' balcony; she smiled atyou, lingering, and then vanished with a whisper of brocade de Lyonson a sanded floor. Nothing else but a soft white glove, eternallyfragrant, in your habergeon, an eternally fragrant memory; the dimvision in stone street and coppice; a word, a message, it might be, sent across the world of steel at death. And then, in the lastflicker of vision, the arras and the clear insistent strings, thewhispering brocade de Lyons on the landing. 

"The philosophy of it, " he said in a different tone, "is exact, evena scientific truth. But men have been more concerned with turninglead into gold; naturally the spirit has been neglected. The scienceof love has been incredibly soiled:

"The old gesture toward the stars, the bridge of perfection, theescape from the fatality of flesh. Yet it was a service of the bodymade incredibly lovely in actuality and still never to be grasped. Never to be won. It ought to be clear to you that realized it woulddiminish into quite a different thing--

"'_La figlia della sua mente, l'amorosa idea. _'"

His voice grew so faint that Linda could scarcely distinguisharticulate sounds. All that he said, without meaning for her, stirred her heart. She was used to elder enigmas of speech; hernormal response was instinctively emotional, and nothing detractedfrom the gravity of her attention. 

"Not in pious men, " he continued, more uncertain; "nor in seminariesof virtue. They have their reward. But in men whose bitterness oflonging grew out of hideous fault. The distinction of beauty--not apayment for prayers or chastity. The distinction of love ... Abovechests of linen and a banker's talent and patents of nobility.... Divine need. Idiotic. But what else, what better, offers?"

He was, she saw, terribly sick. His hands were clenched and hisentire being strained and rigid, as though he were trying to dosomething tremendously difficult. At last, with infinite pain, hesucceeded. 

"I must get away, " he articulated. 

Linda was surprised at the effort necessary for this slightaccomplishment when he had said the most bewildering things withcomplete ease. Well, the elevators were right in front of him. Herose slowly, and, with Linda standing at his side, dug a sharp handinto her shoulder. It hurt, but instinctively she bore it and, moving forward, partly supported him. She pressed the bell thatsignaled for the elevator and it almost immediately sank into view. "Hurry, " he said harshly to the colored operator in a green uniform;and quite suddenly, leaving a sense of profound mystery, he disappeared. 

III

Linda decided that he had told her a rather stupid fairy story. Shewas too old for such ridiculous things as ladies in their shininghair on a leopard. She remembered clearly seeing one of the latterat a zoological garden. It had yellow eyes, but no one would care toride on it. Her mother, she was certain, knew more about love thanany man. His words faded quickly from her memory, but a confusedrich sense stirred her heart, a feeling such as she experiencedafter an unusually happy day: white gloves and music and Mr. Jasperdispleased. 

A clock chimed ten, and she proceeded to her mother's room, whereshe must wait up with her information about Mr. Jasper's wife. Shewas furious at him for a carelessness that had brought her mothersuch unfavorable criticism. Everything had been put away beforegoing down, and there was nothing for her to do. The time draggedtediously. The hands of the traveling-clock in purple leather on thedressing-table moved deliberately around to eleven. A ringing of icein one of the metal pitchers carried by the bell boys sounded fromthe corridor. There was the faint wail of a baby. 

Suddenly and acutely Linda was lonely--a new kind of loneliness thathad nothing to do with the fact that she was by herself. It was astrange cold unhappiness, pressing over her like a cloud and, at thesame time, it was nothing at all. That is, there was no reason forit. The room was brightly lighted and, anyhow, she wasn't afraid of"things. " She thought that at any minute she must cry like thatbaby. After a little she felt better; rather the unhappiness changedto wanting. What she wanted was a puzzle; but nothing else wouldsatisfy her. It might be a necklace of little pearls, but it wasn't. It might be--. Now it was twelve o'clock. Dear, dear, why didn't shecome back!

Music, awfully faint, and a whisper, like a dress, across the floor. Her emotion changed again, to an extraordinary delight, a glow likethat which filled her at the expression of her adoration for hermother, but infinitely greater. She was seated, and she lifted herhead with her eyes closed and hands clasped. The clock pointed toone and her parent came into the room. 

"Linda, " she exclaimed crossly, "whatever are you doing up? A badlittle girl. I told you to be asleep hours before this. "

"There is something you had to know right away, " Linda informed hersolemnly. "I only just heard it from Mrs. Randall and MissSkillern. " Her mother's flushed face hardened. "Mr. Jasper ismarried, " Linda said. 

Mrs. Condon dropped with an angry flounce into a chair. Her broadscarf of sealskin slipped from one shoulder. Her hat was crooked andher hair disarranged. "So that's it, " she said bitterly; "and theywent to you. The dam' old foxes. They went to you, nothing more thana child. "

Linda put in, "They didn't mean to; it just sort of came out. I knewyou'd stop as soon as you heard. Wasn't it horrid of him?"

"And this, " Mrs. Condon declared, "is what I get for being, yes--proper. 

"I said to-night, 'George, ' I said, 'go right back home. It's theonly thing. They have a right to you. ' I told him that only to-night. And, 'No, I must consider my little Linda. ' If I had held up myfinger, " she held up a finger to show the smallness of the actnecessary, "where would we have all been?

"But this is what I get. You might think the world would notice awoman's best efforts. No, they all try to crowd her and see herslip. If they don't watch out I'll skid, all right, and with someone they least expect. I have opportunities. "

Linda realized with a sense of confusion that her mother had knownof Mr. Jasper's marriage all the while. But she had nobly tried tosave him from something; just what Linda couldn't make out. Theother's breath was heavy with drinking. 

"You go to bed, Lin, " she continued; "and thank you for taking careof mama. I hope to goodness you'll learn from all this--pick outwhat you want and make for it. Don't bother with the antique frumps, the disappointed old tabbies. Have your fun. There's nothing else. If you like a man, be on the level with him--give and take. Men arenot saints and we're better for it; we don't live in a heaven. You've got a sweet little figure. Always remember mama telling youthat the most expensive corsets are the cheapest in the end. "

Linda undressed slowly and methodically, her mother's words ringingin her head. Always remember--but of course she would have thenicest things possible.... A keepsake and faint music. She thought, privately, that she was too thin; she'd rather be her mother, withshoulders like bunches of smooth pink roses. In bed, just as she wasfalling asleep, a sound disturbed her from the corridor above--theslow tramping of heavy feet, like a number of men carefully bearingan awkward object. She listened with suspended breath while theypassed. The footfalls seemed to pound on her heart. Slowly, slowlythey went, unnatural and measured. They were gone now, but she stillheard them. The crashing of her mother into bed followed with a deepsigh. The long fall of a wave on the shore was audible. Two thingscontended in her stilled brain--the mysterious feeling of desire andher mother's advice. They were separate and fought, yet they werestrangely incomprehensibly joined. 

IV

In the morning Mrs. Condon, with a very late breakfast-tray in bed, had regained her usual cheerful manner. "The truth is, " she toldLinda, "I'm glad that Jasper man has gone. He had no idea ofdiscretion; tired of them anyhow. " Linda radiated happiness. Thiswas the mother she loved above all others. Her mind turned a littleto the man who had talked to her the night before. She wondered ifhe were better. His thin blanched face, his eyes gleaming uncomfortablyin smudges, recurred to her. Perhaps he'd be down by the cigar-standagain. She went, presently, to see, but the row of chairs was empty. 

However, the neglected thick brown-covered magazine was still on theledge by which he had been sitting. There was a name on it, and while, ordinarily, she couldn't read handwriting, this was so clear andregular, but minutely small, that she was able to spell it out--HowardWelles. 

It disappointed her not to find him; at lunch she observed nearlyevery one present, but still he was lost. He wasn't listening to themusic after dinner, nor below. A deep sense of disappointment grewwithin her. Linda wanted to see him, hear him talk; at times a sharphurt in the shoulder he had grasped brought him back vividly. Thenext day it was the same, and finally, diffidently, she approachedthe hotel desk. A clerk she knew, Mr. Fiske, was rapidly sortingmail, and she waited politely until he had finished. 

"Well?" he asked. 

"I found this down-stairs, " she said, giving him the magazine. "Perhaps he'll want it. " Mr. Fiske looked at the written name, andthen glanced sharply at her. "No, " he told her brusquely, "he won'twant it. " He turned away with the magazine and left Linda standingirresolutely. She wanted to ask if Mr. Welles were still at theBoscombe; if the latter didn't want the magazine she'd love to haveit, Linda couldn't tell why. But the clerk went into the treasurer'soffice and she was forced to move away. 

Later, lingering inexplicably about the spot where she had heard somany bewildering words, a very different man spoke to her. He, Lindaobserved, was smoking a cigar, a good one, she was certain. He wassmallish and had a short bristling mustache and head partly bald. His shoes were very shiny and altogether he had a look of prosperity. "Hello, cutie!" he cried, capturing her arm. She responded listlessly. The other produced a crisp dollar bill. "Do you see the chocolatesin that case?" he said, indicating the cigar-stand. "Well, get thebest. If they cost more, let me know. Our financial rating is numberone. " Linda answered that she didn't think she cared for any. "Allright, " the man agreed; "sink the note in the First National LadiesBank, if you know where that is. "

He engineered her unwillingly onto a knee. "How's papa?" hedemanded. "I suppose he will be here Saturday to take his familythrough the stores?"

She replied with dignity, "There is only my mother and me. "

At this information he exclaimed "Ah!" and touched his mustache witha diminutive gold-backed brush from a leather case. "That's morethan I have, " he confided to her; "there is only myself. Isn't thatsad? You must be sorry for the lonely old boy. "

She wasn't. Probably he, too, had a wife somewhere; men werebeastly. "I guess your mother wants a little company at timesherself?"

Linda, straining away from him, replied, "Oh, dear, no; there arejust packs of gentlemen whenever she likes. But she is tired of themall. " She escaped and he settled his waistcoat. 

"You mustn't run away, " he admonished her; "nice children don't. Your mother didn't bring you up like that, I'm sure. She wouldn'tlike it. "

Linda hesitated, plainly conveying the fact that, if she were towait, he would have to say something really important. 

"Just you two, " he deliberated; "Miss and Mrs. Jones. "

"Not at all, " Linda asserted shortly; "our name is Condon. "

"I wonder if you'd tell her this, " he went on: "a gentleman's hereby himself named Bardwell, who has seen her and admires her a wholelot. Tell her he's no young sprig but he likes a good time all thebetter. Dependable, too. Remember that, cutie. And he wouldn'tpresume if he had a short pocket. He knows class when he sees it. "

"It won't do any good, " Linda assured him in her gravest manner. "She said only this morning she was sick of them. "

"That was before dinner, " he replied cheerfully. "Things lookdifferent later in the day. You do what I tell you. "

All this Linda dutifully repeated. Her mother was at the dressing-table, rubbing cream into her cheeks, and she paused, surveying herreflection in the mirror. "He was smoking a big cigar, " Linda added. The other laughed. "What a sharp little thing you are!" sheexclaimed. "A body ought to be careful what they tell you. " Shewiped off the cream and rubbed a soft pinkish powder into her skin. 

"He saw me, did he?" she apparently addressed the glass. "Admired mea whole lot. Was he nice, Linda?" she turned. "Were his clothesright? You must point him out to me to-night. But do it carefully, darling. No one should notice. Your mother isn't on the shelf yet;she can hold her own, even in the Boscombe, against the wholebarnyard. "

Linda, at the entrance to the dining-room, whispered, "There he is. "But immediately Mr. Bardwell was smiling and speaking to them. 

"I had a delightful conversation with your little girl to-day, " hetold Mrs. Condon; "such a pretty child and well brought up. "

"And good, too, " her mother replied; "not a minute's trouble. Thecommon sense of the grown; you'd never believe it. "

"Why shouldn't I?" he protested gallantly. "Every reason to. " Mrs. Condon blushed becomingly. 

"She had to make up for a lot, " she sighed. 

An hour or more after dinner Mrs. Randall stopped Linda in the hallbeyond the music. "Mama out?" she inquired brightly. "I thought Mr. Jasper left this morning?"

Linda told her that Mr. Jasper had gone; she added nothing else. 

"I must look at the register, " Mrs. Randall continued; "I reallymust. "

Obeying an uncontrollable impulse Linda half cried, "I'd like to seeyou riding on a leopard!" A flood of misery enveloped her, and shehurried up to the silence of her mother's deserted room. 

V

It was on her fourteenth birthday that Linda noticed a decidedchange in her mother; a change, unfortunately, that most of allaffected the celebrated good humors. In the first place Mrs. Condonspent an increasingly large part of the day before the mirror of herdressing-table, but without any proportionate pleasure; or, if therewas a proportion kept, it exhibited the negative result of a growingannoyance. "God knows why they all show at once, " she exclaimeddiscontentedly, seated--as customary--before the eminently truthfulreflection of a newly discovered set of lines. "I'm not old enoughto begin to look like a hag. "

"Oh, mother, " Linda protested, shocked, "you mustn't say such horridthings about yourself. Why, you're perfectly lovely, and you don'tseem a speck older than you did years ago. "

The other, biting her full underlip at the unwelcome fact in turnbiting a full lower lip back at her, made no reply. Linda lingeredfor a moment at her mother's ruffled pink shoulders; then, with asigh, she turned to the reception-room of their small suite at theHotel Gontram. It was a somber chamber furnished in red plush, witha complication of shades and gray-white net curtains at long windowsand a deep green carpet. There was a fireplace, with a grate, supported by varnished oak pillars and elaborate mantel and glass, aglittering reddish center-table with a great many small odd shelvesbelow, a desk with sheaves of hotel writing paper and the telephone. 

The Gontram was entirely different from the hotels at the lakes orseashore or in the South. It was a solid part of a short block westof Fifth Avenue in the middle of the city. Sherry's filled a cornerwith its massive stone bulk and glimpses of dining-rooms withglittering chandeliers and solemn gaiety, then impressive clubs andwide entrances under heavy glass and metal, tall porters in splendidlivery, succeeded each other to the Hotel Gontram and the dullthunder of the elevated trains beyond. 

The revolving door, through which Linda sedately permitted herselfto be moved, opened into a high space of numerous columns andbenches, writing-desks and palms. At the back was the white roomwhere, usually alone, she had breakfast, while the dining-room, discreetly lighted, was at the left. It was more interesting herethan, for example, at the Boscombe; people were always coming in orgoing, and there were quantities of men. She watched them arrivingwith shoals of leather bags in the brisk care of the bellboys, disappear into the elevator, and, if it was evening, come down indinner coats with vivid silk scarfs folded over their white shirts. 

The women were perpetually in street clothes or muffled in satinwraps; Linda only regarded them when they were exceptional. Usuallyshe was intent on the men. It often happened that they returned herfrank gaze with a smile, or stopped to converse with her. Sometimesit was an actor with a face dryly pink like a woman's from make-up;they were familiar and pinched her cheeks, calling her endearingnames in conscious echoing voices as if they were quite hollowwithin. Then there were simply business men, who never appeared totake off their derby hats, and spoke to her of their little girls athome. She was entirely at ease with the latter--so many of hermother's friends were similar--and critically valued the details oftheir dress, the cigar-cases with or without gold corners, thewatch-chains with jeweled insignia, the cuff-links and embroideredhandkerchiefs. 

If her mother approached while Linda was so engaged the elder wouldlinger with a faint smile, at which, now, the girl was conscious ofa growing impatience. She'd rise with dignity and, if possible, escape with her parent from florid courtesies. This sense ofannoyance oppressed her, too, in the dining-room, where her mother, a cocktail in her hand, would engage in long cheerful discussionswith the captains or waiters. Other women, Linda observed, spokewith complete indifference and their attention on the _carte dejour_. Of course it was much more friendly to be interested inthe servants' affairs--they told her mother about their wives andthe number of their children, the difficulties of bringing both endstogether, and served her with the promptest care; but instinctivelyLinda avoided any but the most formal contact. 

She had to insist, as well, on paying the tips; for Mrs. Condon, hersympathies engaged, was quite apt to leave on the table a five-dollarbill or an indiscriminate heap of silver. "You are a regular littleJew, " she would reply lightly to Linda's protests. This, the latterthought, was unfair; for the only Jew she knew, Mr. Moses Feldt, anacquaintance of their present period in New York, was quite the mostgenerous person she knew. "Certainly you don't take after your mama. "

After she said this she always paused with tight lips. It wascharged with the assumption that, while Linda didn't resemble her, she did very much a mysterious and unfavorably regarded personage. Her father, probably. More and more Linda wondered about him. He wasdead, she knew, but that, she began to see, was no reason for thepositive prohibition to mention him at all. Perhaps he had donesomething dreadful, with money, and had disgraced them all. Yet shewas convinced that this was not so. 

She had heard a great many uncomplimentary words applied tohusbands, most of which she had been unable to comprehend; and shespeculated blankly on them in her mother's connection. On the wholethe women agreed that they were remarkably stupid and transparent, they protested that they understood and guided every move husbandsmade; and this surely gave her father no opportunity for independentcrime. She was held from questioning not so much by her mother'scommand--at times she calmly and successfully ignored that--as fromits unfortunate effect on the elder. 

Mrs. Condon would burn with a generalized anger that sank to adespondency fortified by the brandy flask. Straining embraces andtears, painful to support, would follow, or more unbearablesilliness. The old difficulties with giggling or sympatheticchambermaid;--Linda couldn't decide which was worse--then confrontedher with the necessity for rigid lies, misery, and the procuring ofsums of money from the bag in the top drawer. Altogether, andspecially with the fresh difficulties of her mother's unaccountableirritation and apprehensions, things were frightfully complicated. 

It was late afternoon in November, and the electric lights were on;however, they were lighted when they rose, whenever they were in therooms, for it was always gloomy if not positively dark; the bedroomlooked into a deep exterior well and the windows of the otherchamber opened on an uncompromising blank wall. Yet Linda, nowwidely learned in such settings, rather liked her present situation. They had occupied the same suite before, for one thing; and goingback into it had given her a sense of familiarity in so much thatalways shifted. 

Linda, personally, had changed very little; she was taller than fouryears before, but not a great deal; she was, perhaps, more graceful--hermovements had become less sudden--more assured, the rapidly maturingqualities of her mind made visible; and she had gained a surprisingrepose. 

Now, for example, she sat in a huge chair cushioned with blackleather and thought, with a frowning brow, of her mother. It wasclear that the latter was obviously worried about--to put itfrankly--her face. Her figure, she repeatedly asserted, could bereasoned with; she had always been reconciled to a certain jollystoutness, but her face, the lines that appeared about her eyesovernight, fairly drove her to hot indiscreet tears. She had been tosee about it, Linda knew; and returned from numerous beauty-parlorsmarvelously rejuvenated--for the evening. 

She had been painted, enameled, vibrated, massaged; she had hadelectric treatment, rays and tissue builders; and once she had beenbaked. To-day the toilet table would be loaded with milkweed, cerates and vanishing cream; tomorrow they would all be swept away, given to delighted chambermaids, while Mrs. Condon declared that, when all was said, cold water and a rough towel was nature's way. 

This afternoon, apparently everything, including hope, had failed. She was as cross as cross. From the manner in which she spoke itmight have been Linda's fault. The worst of it was that even thelatter saw that nothing could be done. Her mother was growing--well, a little tired in appearance. Swift tears gathered in Linda's eyes. She hadn't been quite truthful in that reassuring speech of hers. She set herself to the examination of various older women with whomshe had more or less lately come in contact. How had they regardedand met the loss of whatever good looks they had possessed?

It was terribly mixed up, but, as she thought about it, it seemed toher that the world of women was divided into two entirely differentgroups, the ones men liked, and who had such splendid parties; andthe ones who sat together and gossiped in sharp lowered voices. Shehoped passionately that her mother would not become one of thelatter for a long long while. But eventually it seemed that therewas no escape from the circle of brilliantly dressed creatures withruined faces who congregated in the hotels and whispered and noddedin company until they went severally to bed. 

The great difference between one and the other, of course, was thefavor of men. Their world revolved about that overwhelming fact. Hermother had informed her of this on a hundred occasions and incountless ways; but more by her actions, her present wretchedness, than by speech. It was perfectly clear to Linda that nothing elsemattered. She was even beginning, in a vague way, to think of it inconnection with herself; but still most of her preoccupation was inher mother. She decided gravely that a great deal, yet, could bedone. For instance, lunch to-day:

Her mother had given her a birthday celebration at Henri's, thefamous confectioner but a door or two from their hotel, and at theend, when a plate of the most amazing and delightful little cakeshad been set on the table, the elder had eaten more than half. Afterwards she had sworn ruefully at her lack of character, beggingLinda--in a momentary return of former happy companionship--never tolet her make such a silly pig of herself again. Then she got sotired, Linda continued her mental deliberations; if she could onlyrest, go away from cities and resorts for a number of months, thelines in turn would soon vanish. 

The elder moved impatiently, with a fretful exclamation, in theinner room; from outside came the subdued dull ceaseless clamor ofNew York. Formerly it had frightened Linda; but her dread had becomea wordless excitement at the thought of so much just beyond thewindows; her hands grew cold and her heart suddenly pounded, destroying the vicarious image of her mother. 

VI

"I wish now I'd been different, " Mrs. Condon said, standing in thedoor. Her dress was not yet on, but her underthings were fully aselaborate and shimmering as any gown could hope to be. "And aboveeverything else, I am sorry for the kind of mother you've had. " Thiswas so unexpected, the other's voice was so unhappy, that Linda wasstartled. She hurried across the room and laid a slim palm on hermother's full bare arm. "Don't say that, " Linda begged, distressed;"you've been the best in the world. "

"You know nothing about it, " the elder returned, momentarily seated, her hands clasped on her full silken lap. "But perhaps it's not toolate. You ought to go to a good school, where you'd learneverything, but principally what a bad thoughtless mama you have. "

"I shouldn't stay a second in a place where they said that, " Lindadeclared. A new apprehension touched her. "You're not reallythinking of sending me away!" she cried. "Why, you simply could notget along. You know you couldn't! The maids never do up your dressesright; and you'd be so lonely in the mornings you would nearly die. "

"That's true, " Mrs. Condon admitted wearily. "I would expire; but Iwas thinking of you--you're only beginning life; and the startyou'll get with me is all wrong. Or, anyway, most people think so. "

"They are only jealous. "

"Will you go into the closet, darling, and pour out a teeny littlesip from my flask; mama feels a thousand years old this evening. "

Returning with the silver cup of the flask half full of pale pungentbrandy Linda could scarcely keep the tears from spilling over hercheeks. She had never before felt so sad. Her mother hastily drank, the stinging odor was transferred to her lips; and there was apalpable recovery of her customary spirit. 

"I don't know what gets over me, " she asserted. "I'm certain, fromwhat I've heard of them, that you wouldn't be a bit better off inone of those fashionable schools for girls. Woman, young and older, were never meant to be a lot together in one place. It's unnatural. They don't like each other, ever, and it's all hypocritical andnasty. You will get more from life, yes, and me. I'm honest, toohonest for my own good, if the truth was known. "

She rose and unconsciously strayed to the mirror over the mantelwhere she examined her countenance in absorbed detail. 

"My skin is getting soft like putty, " she remarked aloud to herself. "The thing is, I've had my time and don't want to pay for it. Blondes go quicker than dark women; you ought to last a long while, Linda. " Mrs. Condon had turned, and her tone was again almostcomplaining, almost ill-natured. Linda considered this informationwith a troubled face. It was quite clear that it made her mothercross. "I've seen men stop and look at you right now, too, and younothing more than a slip fourteen years old. Of course, when I wasfifteen I had a proposal; but I was very forward; and somehow you'redifferent--so dam' serious. "

She couldn't help it, Linda thought, if she was serious; she reallyhad a great deal to think about, their income among other things. Ifshe didn't watch it, pay the bills every three months when itarrived, her mother would never have a dollar in the gold mesh bag. Then, lately, the dresses the elder threatened to buy were oftenimpossible; Linda learned this from the comments she heard after thewearing of evening affairs sent home against her earnest protests. They were, other women more discreetly gowned had agreed, ridiculous. 

Linda calmly realized that in this her judgment was superior to hermother's. In other ways, too, she felt she was really the elder; andher dismay at the possibility of going away to school had beenmostly made up of the realization of how much her mother's well-beingwas dependent on her. 

Mrs. Condon, finishing her dressing in the bedroom, at times calledout various injunctions, general or immediate. "Tell them to have ataxi at the door for seven sharp. Have you talked to that littlegirl in the black velvet?" Linda hadn't and made a mental note toavoid her more pointedly in the future. "Get out mother's carriageboots from the hall closet; no, the others--you know I don't wearthe black with coral stockings. They come off and the fur sticks tomy legs. It will be very gay to-night; I hope to heaven Ross doesn'ttake too much again. " Linda well remembered that the last time Rosshad taken too much her mother's Directoire wrap had been completelytorn in half. "There, it is all nonsense about my fading; I look aswell as I ever did. "

Mrs. Condon stood before her daughter like a large flame-pink tulleflower. Her bright gold hair was constrained by black gauze knottedbehind, her bare shoulders were like powdered rosy marble and thefloating skirts gathered in a hand showed marvelously small satin-tiedcarriage boots. Indeed Linda's exclamation of delight was entirelyfrank. She had never seen her mother more radiant. The cunninglyapplied rouge, the enhanced brilliancy of her long-lashed eyes, hadperfectly the illusion of unspent beauty. 

"Do stay down-stairs after dinner and play, " the elder begged. "Andif you want to go to the theatre, ask Mr. Bendix, at the desk, tosend you with that chauffeur we have had so much. I positivelyforbid your leaving the hotel else. It's a comfort after all, thatyou are serious. Kiss mama--"

However, she descended with her mother in the elevator; there was amore public caress; and the captain in the Chinese dining-room placedLinda at a small table against the wall. There she had clams--sheadored iced clams--creamed shrimps and oysters with potatoes_bordure_, alligator-pear salad and a beautiful charlotte creamwith black walnuts. After this she sedately instructed the captainwhat to sign on the back of the dinner check--Linda Condon, roomfive hundred and seven--placed thirty-five cents beside the finger-bowlfor the waiter, and made her way out to the news stand and thetalkative girl who had it in charge. Exhausting the possibilities ofgossip, and deciding not to go out to the theatre--in spite of thenews girl's exciting description of a play called "The New Sin"--shewas walking irresolutely through the high gilded and marbleassemblage space when, unfortunately, she was captured by Mr. MosesFeldt. 

VII

He led her to a high-backed lounge against the wall, where, seatedon its extreme edge, he gazed silently at her with an expression ofsentimental concern. Mr. Moses Feldt was a short round man, bald butfor a fluffy rim of pale hair, and with the palest imaginable eyesin a countenance perpetually flushed by the physical necessity ofaccommodating his rotundity to awkward edges and conditions. Asusual he was dressed with the nicest care--a band of white linenlaid in the opening of his waistcoat, his scarf ornamented by apear-shaped pearl on a diamond finished stem; his cloth-toppedvarnished black shoes glistened, while his short fat fingers claspeda prodigious unlighted cigar. At last, in a tone exactly suited tohis gaze, he exclaimed:

"So that naughty mama has gone out again and deserted Moses and herlittle Linda!" In what way her mother had deserted Mr. Feldt shefailed to understand. Of course he wanted to marry them--thecomprehensive phrase was his own--but that didn't include him inwhatever they did. Principally it made a joke for their privateentertainment. Mrs. Condon would mimic his eager manner, "Stella, let me take you both home where you'll have the best in the land, "And, "Ladies like you ought to have a loving protection. " Lindawould laugh in her cool bell-like manner, and her mother add asatirical comment on the chance any Moses Feldt had of marrying her. 

Linda at once found him ridiculous and a being who forced aslighting warmth of liking. His appearance was preposterous, theready emotion often too foolish for words; but underneath there wasa--a goodness, a mysterious quality that stirred her heart torecognition. Certain rare things in life and experience affected herlike that memory of an old happiness. She could never say what theymight be, they came at the oddest times and by the most extraordinarymeans; but at their occurrence she would thrill for a moment as ifin response to a sound of music. 

It was, for example, absurd that Mr. Moses Feldt, who was a Jew, should make her feel like that, but he did. And all the while thatshe was disagreeable to him, or mocking him behind his back, she wasas uncomfortable and "horrid" as possible. While this fact, ofcourse, only served to make her horrider still. At present sheadopted the manner of a patience that nothing could quite exhaust;she was polite and formal, relentlessly correct in position. 

Mr. Moses Feldt, the cigar in his grasp, pressed a hand to theprobable region of his heart. "You don't know how I think of you, "he protested, tears in his eyes; "just the idea of you exposed toanything at all in hotels keeps me awake nights. Now it's a drunk, or a fresh feller on the elevator, or--"

"It's nice of you, " Linda said, "but you needn't worry. No one woulddare to bother us. No one ever has. "

"You wouldn't know it if they did, " he replied despondently, "atyour age. And then your mother is so trustful and pleasant. Takethose parties where she is so much--roof frolics and cocoanut grovesand submarine cafés; they don't come to any good. Rowdy. " Lindastudied him coldly; if he criticized them further she would leave. He mopped a shining brow with a large colorful silk handkerchief. "It throws me into a sweat, " he admitted. 

"Really, Mr. Feldt, you mustn't bother, " she told him in one of herfew impulses of friendliness. "You see, we are very experienced. " Henodded without visible happiness at this truth. "I'm a jackass!" hecried. "Judith tells me that all the time. If you could only see mydaughters, " he continued with a new vigor; "such lovely girls asthey are. One dark like you and the other fair as a daisy. Judithand Pansy. And my home that darling mama made before she died. " Thehandkerchief was again in evidence. 

"Women and girls are funny. I can't get you there and not fornothing will Judith make a step. It may be pride but it seems to mesuch nonsense. I guess I'm old-fashioned and love's old-fashioned. Homes have gone out of style with the rest. It's all theserestaurants and roofs now, yes, and studios. I tell the girls tostay away from them and from artists and so on. I don't encouragethem at the apartment--a big lump of a feller with platinumbracelets on his wrists. What kind of a man would that be! I'd liketo know who'd buy goods from him. 

"Sometimes, I'm sorry I got a lot of money, but it made mama happy. When she laid there at the last sick and couldn't live, I said, 'Oh, if you only won't leave me I'll give you gold to eat. '" He was somoved, his face so red, that Linda grew acutely embarrassed. Peoplewere looking at them. She rose stiffly but, in spite of her effortto escape him, he caught both her hands in his:

"You say I'm an old idiot like Judith, " he begged. This Lindadeclined to do. And, "Ask your mother if you won't come to dinnerwith the girls and me, cozy and at home--just once. "

"I'm afraid it will do no good, " she admitted; "but I'll try. " Sherealized that he was about to kiss her and moved quickly back. "I amalmost afraid of you, " he told her; "you're so distant and elegant. Judith and Pansy would get on with you first rate. I'll telephonetomorrow, in the afternoon. If the last flowers I sent you came Inever heard of it. "

She thanked him appropriately for the roses and stood, erect andimpersonal, as a man in the hotel livery helped him into a coat. Mr. Moses Feldt waved the still unlighted cigar at her and disappearedthrough the rotating door to the street. 

She gave a half-affected sigh of relief. Couldn't he see that hermother would never marry him. At the same time the strange thrilltouched her; the sense of his absurdity vanished and she no longerremembered him perched like a painted rubber ball on the edge of thelounge. 

In the somber red plush and varnished wood of the reception-room oftheir suite he seemed again charming. Perhaps it was because he, too, adored her mother. That wasn't the reason. The familiar rarejoy lingered. It seemed now as though she were to capture andunderstand it ... There was the vibration of music; and then, asalways, she felt at once sad and brave. But, in spite of her oldeffort to the contrary, the feeling died away. Some day it would beclear to her; in the meanwhile Mr. Moses Feldt became once more onlyridiculous. 

VIII

In the morning she was dressed and had returned from breakfastbefore her mother stirred. The latter moved sharply, brought an armup over her head, and swore. It was a long while before she got upor spoke again, and Linda never remembered her in a worse temper. When, finally, she came into the room where the breakfast-tray waslaid, Linda was inexpressibly shocked--all that her mother haddreaded about her appearance had come disastrously true. Her facewas hung with shadows like smudges of dirt and her eyes were nettedwith lines. 

Examining the dishes with distaste she told Linda that positivelyshe could slap her for letting them bring up orange-juice. "Howoften must I explain to you that it freezes my fingers. " Lindareplied that she had repeated this in the breakfast-room and perhapsthey had the wrong order. Neither her mother nor she said anythingmore until Mrs. Condon had finished her coffee and started a secondcigarette. Then Linda related something of Mr. Moses Feldt's call onthe evening before. "He cried right into his handkerchief, " shesaid, "until I thought I should sink. "

Mrs. Condon eyed her daughter speculatively. "Now if you were onlyfour years older, " she declared, "it would be a good thing. He wassimply born to be a husband. " Horror filled Linda at the other'simplication. "Yes, " the elder insisted; "you couldn't do better;except, perhaps, for those girls of his. But then you'd have notrouble making them miserable. It's time to talk to you seriouslyabout marriage. " The smoke from the cigarette eddied in a gray veilacross her unrefreshed face. 

"You're old for your age, Linda; your life has made you that; and, like I said last night, it is rather better than not. Well, for youmarriage, and soon as possible, is the proper thing. Mind, I havenever said a word against it; only what suits one doesn't suitanother. Where it wouldn't be anything more than an old ladies' hometo me you need it early and plenty. You are too intense. Thatdoesn't go in the world. Men don't like it. They want their pleasureand comfort without strings tied to them; the intensity has to betheirs. 

"What you must get through your head is that love--whatever it is--andmarriage are two different things, and if you are going to besuccessful they must be kept separate. You can't do anything with aman if you love him; but then you can't do anything with him if hedoesn't love you. That's the whole thing in a breath. I am notcrying down love, either; only I don't want you to think it is thebread and butter while it's nothing more than those little sweetcakes at Henri's. 

"Now any girl who marries a poor man or for love--they are the samething--is a fool and deserves what she gets. No one thanks her forit, him least of all; because if she does love him it is only tomake them miserable. She's always at him--where did he go and whydid he stay so long, and no matter what he says she knows it's alie. More times than not she's right, too. I can't tell you toooften--men don't want to be loved, they like to be flattered andflattered and then flattered again. You'd never believe how childishthey are. 

"Make them think they're it and don't give too much--that's thesecret. Above all else don't be easy on them. Don't say 'all right, darling, next spring will do as well for a new suit. ' Get it thenand let him worry about paying for it, if worry he must. If theydon't give it to you some one smarter will wear it. But I started totalk about getting married. 

"Choose a Moses Feldt, who will always be grateful to you, and keephim at it. They are so easy to land it's a kind of shame, too. PerhapsI am telling you this too soon, but I don't want any mistakes. Well, pick out your Moses--and mama will help you there--and suddenly, atthe right time, show him that you can be affectionate; surprise himwith it and you so staid and particular generally. Don't overdo it, promise more than you ever give--

"In the closet, dearie, just a little. That's a good girl. Mama's sodry. " She rose, the silver cup of the flask in her hand, and movedinevitably to the mirror. "My hair's a sight, " she remarked; "allstrings. I believe I'll get a permanent wave. They say it lasts forsix months or more, till the ends grow out. Makes a lot of it, too, and holds the front together. If you've ever had dye in your hair, Ihear, it will break off like grass. "

Linda pondered over what she had been told of love and marriage; onthe whole the exposition had been unsatisfactory. The latter she wasable to grasp, but her mother had admitted an inability exactly tofix love. One fact, apparently, was clear--it was a nuisance and ahindrance to happiness, or rather to success. Love upset things. Still she had the strongest objection possible to living foreverwith a man like Mr. Moses Feldt. At once all that she had hoped forfrom life grew flat and uninteresting. She had no doubt of hermother's correctness and wisdom; the world was like that; she mustmake the best of it. 

There was some telephoning, inquiries, and she heard the elder makean appointment with a hair-dresser for three that afternoon. Shewondered what it would be like to have your hair permanently wavedand hoped that she would see it done. This, too, she realized, was apart of the necessity of always considering men--they liked yourhair to be wavy. Hers was as straight and stupid as possible. She, in turn, examined herself in a mirror: the black bang fell exactlyto her eyebrows, her face had no color other than the carnation ofher lips and her deep blue eyes. She moved away and criticallystudied her figure; inches and inches too thin, she decided. Undoubtedly her mother was right, and she must marry at the firstopportunity--if she could find a man, a rich man, who was willing. 

Her thoughts returned vaguely to the mystery, the nuisance, of love. Surely she had heard something before, immensely important, aboutit, and totally different from all her mother had said. Her mind wasfilled with the fantastic image of a forest, of dangers, and a fatchina figure with curled plumes, a nodding head, that brushed herwith fear and disgust. A shuddering panic took possession of her, flashes burned before her eyes, and she ran gasping to the perfumedsoft reassurances of her mother. 

IX

In a recurrence of her surprising concern of the day before Mrs. Condon declined to leave her dearest Linda alone; and, their armscaught together in a surging affection, they walked down FifthAvenue toward the hairdresser's. There was a diffused gray sparkleof sunlight--it was early for the throngs--through which they passedrapidly to the accompaniment of a rapid eager chatter. Linda wore adeep smooth camel's hair cape, over which her intense black hairpoured like ink, and her face was shaded by a dipping green velvethat. Her mother, in one of the tightly cut suits she affected, hadnever been more like a perfect companion. 

They saw, in the window of a store for men, a set of violent purplewool underwear, and barely escaped hysterics at the thought of Mr. Moses Feldt in such a garb. They giggled idiotically at thespectacle of a countryman fearfully making the sharp descent fromthe top of a lurching omnibus. And then, when they had reached theplace of Mrs. Condon's appointment, stopped at the show ofelaborately waved hair on wax heads and chose which, probably, wouldresemble the elder and which, in a very short while now, Linda. 

There was an impressive interior, furnished in gray panels andsilvery wood; and the young woman at the desk was more surprisinglywaved than anything they had yet seen. M. Joseph would be readyalmost immediately; and in the meanwhile Mrs. Condon could lay asideher things in preparation for the hair to be washed. She did thiswhile Linda followed every movement with the deepest interest. 

At the back of the long room was a succession of small alcoves, eachwith an important-looking chair and mirror and shelves, a whitebasin, water-taps and rubber tubes. Settled, in comfort, Mrs. Condon's hair was spread out in a bright metal tray fastened to theback of the chair, and the attendant, a moist tired girl in acareless waist, sprayed the short thick gold-colored strands. 

"My, " she observed, "what some wouldn't give for your shade! Neverbeen touched, I can see, either. A lady comes in with real Titian, but yours is more select. It positively is Lillian Russell. " Whileshe talked her hands sped with incredible rapidity and skill. "Thegentlemen don't notice it; of course not; oh, no! There was a girlhere, a true blonde, but she didn't stay long--her own car, yes, indeed. Married her right out of the establishment. There wasn't anynonsense to her. 

"So this is your little girl! I'd never have believed it. Not thatshe hasn't a great deal of style, a great deal--almost, you mightsay, like an Egyptian. In the movies last night; her all over. It'sa type that will need studying. Bertha Kalich. But for me--"

Already, Linda saw, this part of the operation was done. The girlwheeled into position a case that had a fan and ring of blueflickering flames, and a cupped tube through which hot air waspoured over her mother's head. M. Joseph strutted in, a smallcarefully dressed man with a diminutive pointed gray beard andformal curled mustache. He spoke with what Linda supposed was aFrench accent, and his manners, at least to them, were beautiful. But because the girl had not put out the blue flames quickly enoughhe turned to her with a voice of quivering rage. 

It was so unexpected, in the middle of his bowing and smoothassurances, that Linda was startled, and had to think about him allover. The result of this was a surprising dislike; she hated, even, to see him touch her mother, as he unnecessarily did in directingthem into the enclosure for the permanent wave. 

The place itself filled her with the faint horror of instruments andthe unknown. Above the chair where Mrs. Condon now sat there was acircle in the ceiling like the base of a chandelier and hanging downfrom it on twisted green wires were a great number of the strangestthings imaginable: they were as thick as her wrist, but round, longer and hollow, white china inside and covered with brownwrapping. The wires of each, she discovered, led over a little wheeland down again to a swinging clock-like weight. In addition to thisthere were strange depressing handles on the wall by a dial with ajiggling needle and clearly marked numbers. 

The skill of the girl who had washed her mother's hair, however, wasslight compared with M. Joseph's dexterity. The comb flashed in hiswhite narrow hands; in no time at all every knot was urged out intoa shining smoothness. "Just the front?" he inquired. Not waiting forMrs. Condon's reply, he detached a strand from the mass over herbrow, impaled it on a hairpin, while he picked up what might havebeen a thick steel knitting-needle with one end fastened in themiddle of a silver quarter. The latter, it developed, had a hole init, through which he drew the strand of hair, and then wrapped itwith an angry tightness about the long projection. 

At this exact moment a new girl, but tired and moist, appeared, tooka hank of white threads from a dressing-table, and tied thatseparate lock firmly. This, Linda counted, was repeated fifteentimes; and when it was accomplished she was unable to repress anervous laughter. Really, her mother looked too queer for words: thelong rigid projections stood out all over her head like--like a hugepincushion; no, it was a porcupine. Mrs. Condon smiled in uncertainrecognition of her daughter's mirth. 

Then Linda's attention followed M. Joseph to a table against apartition, where he secured a white cotton strip from a film of themsoaking in a shallow tray, took up some white powder on the blade ofa dessert knife and transferred it to the strip. This he wrapped andwrapped about the hair fastened on a spindle, tied it in turn, anddragged down one of the brown objects on wires, which, to Linda'sgreat astonishment, fitted precisely over the cotton-bound hair. Again, fifteen times, M. Joseph did this, fastening each connectionwith the turn of a screw. When so much was accomplished her mother'shair, it seemed, had grown fast to the ceiling in a tangle of greenends. It was the most terrifying spectacle Linda had ever witnessed. Obscure thoughts of torture, of criminals executed by electricity, froze her in a set apprehension. 

The hair-dresser stepped over to the dials on the wall, and, with asharp comprehensive glance at his apparatus, moved a handle as faras it would go. Nothing immediately happened, and Linda gave arelaxing sigh of relief. M. Joseph, however, became full of apainful attention. 

X

He brought into view an unsuspected tube, with a cone of paper atits end, and bent over her mother, directing a stream of cold airagainst her head. "How do you feel?" he asked, with, Linda noticed, a startling loss of his first accent. Mrs. Condon so far felt wellenough. Then, before Linda's startled gaze, every single one of thefifteen imprisoning tubes began to steam with an extraordinaryvigor; not only did they steam, like teapots, but drops of waterformed and slowly slid over her mother's face. If the processappeared weird at the beginning, now it was utterly fantastic. 

The little white vapor spurts played about Mrs. Condon's drippingcountenance; they increased rather than diminished; actually itresembled a wrecked locomotive she had once seen. "How are you?" M. Joseph demanded nervously. "Is it hot anywhere?" With a suddengesture she replied in a shaking voice, "Here. "

Instantly he was holding the paper cone with its cold air againsther scalp, and the heat was subdued. He glanced nervously at hiswatch, and Mrs. Condon managed to ask, "How long?"

"Twenty minutes. "

Dangerous as the whole proceeding seemed nothing really happened, and Linda's fears gradually faded into a mere curiosity andinterest. A curtain hung across the door to the rest of theestablishment, but it had been brushed partly aside; and she couldsee, in the compartment they had vacated, another man bending withwaving irons over the liberated mass of a woman's hair. He was verymuch like M. Joseph, but he was younger and had only a dark scrap ofmustache. As he caught up the hair with a quick double twist heleaned very close to the woman's face, whispering with an expressionthat never changed, an expression like that of the wax heads in theshow-case. He bent so low that Linda was certain their cheeks hadtouched. She pondered at length over this, gazing now at the manbeyond and now at M. Joseph flitting with the cold-air tube abouther mother; wondering if, when she grew older, she would like ahair-dresser's cheek against hers. Linda decided not. The ideadidn't shock her, the woman in the other space plainly liked it;still she decided she wouldn't. A different kind of man, she toldherself, would be nicer. 

Her thoughts were interrupted by a sharp, unpleasant odor--the odorof scorched hair; and she was absolutely rigid with horror at anagonized cry from her mother. 

"It's burning me terribly, " the latter cried. "Oh, I can't stand it. Stop! Stop!"

M. Joseph, as white as plaster, rushed to the wall and reversed thehandle, and Mrs. Condon started from the chair, her face nowstreaming with actual tears; but before she could escape the manthrew himself on her shoulders. 

"You mustn't move, " he whispered desperately, "you'll tear your hairout. I tell you no harm's been done. Everything is all right. Please, please don't cry like that. It will ruin my business. There areothers in the establishment. Stop!" he shook her viciously. 

Linda had risen, terrorized; and Mrs. Condon, with waving pluckinghands, was sobbing an appeal to be released. "My head, my head, " sherepeated. "I assure you"--the man motioned to a pallid girl to holdher in the chair. With a towel to protect his hand he undid a screw, lifted off the cap and untwisted the cotton from a bound lock ofhair; releasing it, in turn, from the spindle it fell forward in acomplete corkscrew over Mrs. Condon's face. 

"Do you see!" he demanded. "Perfect. I give you my word they'll allbe like that. The cursed heat ran up on me, " he added in a swiftaside to his assistant. "Has Mrs. Bellows gone? Who's still in theplace? Here, loose that binding ... Thank God, that one is allright, too. "

Together they unfastened most of the connections, and a growingfringe of long remarkable curls marked Mrs. Condon's pain-drawn anddabbled face. Linda sobbed uncontrollably; but perhaps, after all, nothing frightful had happened. Her poor mother! Then fear againtightened about her heart at the perturbed expression that overtookthe hair-dresser. He was trying in vain to remove one of the caps. She caught enigmatic words--"the borax, crystallized ... Solid. Itwould take a plumber ... Have to go. "

The connection was immovable. Even in her suffering Mrs. Condonimplored M. Joseph to save her hair. Nothing, however, could bedone; he admitted it with pale lips. The thing might be chiseledoff; in the end he tried to force a release and the strand, with arenewal of Mrs. Condon's agony--now, in the interest of herappearance, heroically withstood--snapped short in the container. 

Rapidly recovering her vigor, she launched on a tirade against M. Joseph and his permanent waving establishment--Linda had neverbefore heard her mother talk in such a loud brutal manner, nor usesuch heated unpleasant words, and the girl was flooded with awretched shame. Still another lock, it was revealed, had beenruined, and crumbled to mere dust in its owner's fingers. 

"The law will provide for you, " she promised. 

"Your hair was dyed, " the proprietor returned vindictively. "Thegirl who washed it will testify. Every one is warned against thepermanent if their hair has been colored. So it was at your ownrisk. "

"My head's never been touched with dye, " Mrs. Condon shrillyanswered. "You lying little ape. And well does that young woman knowit. She complimented me herself on a true blonde. " The girl had, too, right before Linda. 

"You ought to be thrashed out of the city. "

"Your money will be given back to you, " M. Joseph told her. 

Outside they found a taxi, and sped back to their hotel. Above, Mrs. Condon removed her hat; and, before the uncompromising mirror, studied her wrecked hair--a frizzled vacancy was directly over herleft brow--and haggard face. When she finally turned to Linda, hermanner, her words, were solemn. 

"I'm middle-aged, " she said. 

A dreary silence enveloped them sitting in the dark reception-roomwhile Mrs. Condon restlessly shredded unlighted cigarettes on thefloor. She had made no effort to repair the damages to her appearance, and when the telephone bell sharply sounded, she reached out in aslovenly negligence of manner. Linda could hear a blurred articulationand her mother answering listlessly. The latter at last said: "Verywell, at seven then; you'll stop for us. " She hung up the receiver, stared blankly at Linda, and then went off into a harsh mirth. "Oh, my God!" she cried; "the old ladies' home!"

XI

With her mother away on a wedding-trip with Mr. Moses Feldt, Lindawas suddenly projected into the companionship of his two daughters. One, as he had said, was light, but a different fairness from Mrs. Condon's--richly thick, like honey; while Judith, the elder, whomust have been twenty, was dark in skin, in everything but her eyes, which were a contrasting ashen-violet. She spoke at once of Linda'sflawless whiteness:

"A magnolia, " she said, in a deliberate dark voice; "you are quite agorgeous child. Do you mind my saying that your clothes are ratherquaint? They aren't inevitable, and yours ought to be that. "

They were at lunch in the Feldt dining-room, an interior of heavyornately carved black wood, panels of Chinese embroidery in imperialyellow, and a neutral mauve carpet. The effect, with glitteringiridescent pyramids of glass, massive frosted repoussé silver, burnished gold-plate and a wide table decoration of orchids andfern, was tropical and intense. It was evident to Linda that theFeldts were very rich indeed. 

The entire apartment resembled the dining-room, while the buildingitself filled a whole city block, with a garden and fountains likean elaborate public square. Linda, however, wasn't particularlyimpressed by such show; she saw that Judith and Pansy had expectedthat of her; but she was determined not to exhibit a surprise thatwould imply any changes in her mother's and her condition. Inaddition, Linda calmly took such surroundings for granted. Herprimary conception of possible existence was elegance; its necessityhad so entered into her being that it had departed from herconsciousness. 

"I must take you to Lorice, " Judith continued; "she will know betterthan any one else what you ought to have. You seem terribly pure--atfirst. But you're not a snowdrop; oh, no--something very rare in aconservatory. Much better style than your mother. "

"I hope you won't mind Judith, " Pansy put in; "she's always likethat. " A silence followed in which they industriously dipped theleaves of mammoth artichokes into a buttery sauce. Linda, ascustomary, said very little, she listened with patient care to theothers and endeavored to arrive at conclusions. She liked Pansy, whowas as warm and simple as her father. Judith was harder to understand. She was absorbed in color and music, and declared that ugliness gaveher a headache at once. Altogether, Linda decided, she was rathersilly, especially about men; and at times her emotions would risebeyond control until she wept in a thin hysterical gasping. 

The room where, mostly, they sat was small, but with a high ceiling, and hung in black, with pagoda-like vermilion chairs. The light, inthe evening, was subdued; and Pansy and Judith, in extremelyclinging vivid dresses, the former's hair piled high in an ambermass and Judith's drawn severely across her ears, were lovely. Lindathought of the tropical butterflies of the river Amazon, of orchidslike those always on the dining-room table. A miniature grand pianostood against the drapery, and Judith often played. Linda learned torecognize some of the composers. Pansy liked best the modernwaltzes; Judith insisted that Richard Strauss was incomparable; butLinda developed an overwhelming preference for Gluck. The older girlinsisted that this was an affectation; for a while she tried toconfuse Linda's knowledge; but finally, playing the airs of "Orpheusand Eurydice, " she admitted that the latter was sincere. 

"They sound so cool, " Linda said in a clear and decided manner. 

There was a man with them, and he shook his head in a mock sadness. "So young and yet so formal. If, with the rest, you had Judith'stemperament, you would be the most irresistible creature alive. Forsee, my dear child, as it is you stir neither tenderness nor desire;you are remote and perfect, and faintly wistful. I can't imaginebeing human or even comfortable with you about. Then, too, you havetoo much wisdom. "

"She is frightful, " Pansy agreed; "she's never upset nor her hair asight; and, above all else, Linda won't tell you a thing. "

"Some day, " Judith informed them from the rippling whisper of thepiano, "she will be magnificently loved. "

"Certainly, " the man continued; "but what will Linda, Linda Condon, give in return?"

"It's a mistake to give much, " Linda said evenly. 

"No, no, no!" Judith cried. "Give everything; spend every feeling, every nerve. "

"You are remarkable, of course; almost no women have the courage oftheir emotions. " His name was Reynold Chase, a long thin grave youngman in a dinner coat, who wrote brilliant and successful comedies. "Yet Linda isn't parsimonious. " He turned to her. "Just what areyou? What do you think of love?"

"I haven't thought about it much, " she replied slowly. "I'm not surethat I know what it means. At least it hasn't anything to do withmarriage--"

"Ah!" he interrupted her. 

Her usually orderly mind grew confused; it eddied as though with thesound of the piano. "It is not marriage, " she vaguely repeated hermother's instruction. Reynold Chase supported her. 

"That destroys it, " he asserted. "This love is as different aspossible from the ignominious impulse eternally tying the young intoknots. It's anti-social. "

"How stupid you are, Reynold, " Pansy protested. "If you want to usethose complicated words take Judith into the drawing-room. I'm sureLinda is dizzy, too. "

The latter's mental confusion lingered; she had a strong sense ofhaving heard Reynold Chase say these strange things long before. Judith left the piano, sat beside him, and he lightly kissed her. Anew dislike of Judith Feldt deepened in Linda's being. She had noreason for it, but suddenly she felt absolutely opposed to her. Themanner in which Judith rested against the man by her was verydistasteful. It offended Linda inexplicably; she wanted to draw intoan infinity of distance from all contact with men and life. 

She didn't even want to make one of those marriages that had nothingto do with love, but was only a sensible arrangement for thesecuring of gowns and velvet hangings and the luxury of enclosedautomobiles. Suddenly she felt lonely, and hoped that her motherwould come back soon. 

XII

But when her mother, now Mrs. Moses Feldt, did return, Linda wasconscious of a keen disappointment. Somehow she never actually cameback. It wasn't only that, after so many years together, she occupieda room with another than Linda, but her manner was changed; it hadlost all freedom of heart and speech. The new Mrs. Feldt was heavilypolite to her husband's daughters; Linda saw that she liked Pansy, but Judith made her uncomfortable. She expressed this in an isolatedreturn of the old confidences:

"That girl, " she said sharply, "likes petting. She can talk allnight about her soul and beauty, and play the piano till her fingersdrop off, but I--I--know. You can't fool me where they are concerned. I can recognize an unhealthy sign. I never believed in going to allthose concerts and kidding yourself into a fever. I may have shownmyself a time, but you mark my word--I was honest compared to JudithFeldt. Don't you be impressed with all her art talk and the booksshe reads. I was looking into one yesterday, and it made me blush;you can believe it or not, it takes some book for that!"

At the same time she treated Judith with a studious sweetness. Mr. Moses Feldt--Linda always thought of him as that--was a miracle ofkindly cheerfulness. He made his wife and her daughter, and his owngirls, an unbroken succession of elaborate and costly presents. "What's it for if not to spend on those you love?" he would remark, bringing a small jeweler's box wrapped in creamy-pink paper from hispocket. "You can't take it with you. I wasn't born with it--mama andI were as poor as any--you'll forgive me, Stella, I know, forspeaking of her. I got enough heart to love you both. 'Oh, mama!' Isaid, and she dying, 'if you only won't go, I'll give you gold toeat. '"

Curiously, as Linda grew older, the consciousness of her stepfatheras an absurd fat little man dwindled; she lost all sense of hisactual person; and, as the influence of her mother slipped from herlife, the mental conception of Mr. Moses Feldt deepened. She thoughtabout him a great deal and very seriously; the things he said, thewarm impact of his being, vibrated in her memory. He had the effecton her of the music of Christopher Gluck--the effect of a pure finechord. 

Pansy she now thought of with a faint contempt: she was rapidlygrowing thick-waisted and heavy, and she was engaged to a dull youngman not rich enough to be interesting. They sat about in frankembraces and indulged in a sentimental speech that united Judith andLinda in common oppression. 

There were, not infrequently, gatherings of the Feldts at dinner, anoisy good-tempered uproar of a great many voices speaking at once;extraordinary quantities of superlative jewels and dresses ofsuperfine textures; but the latter, Linda thought, were too vivid inpattern or color for the short full maternal figures they oftenadorned. But no one, it seemed, considered himself ageing or even, in spite of the most positive indications, aged. The wives withfaded but fashionable hair and animated eyes in spent faces talkedwith vigorous raillery about the "boys, " who, it might have happened, had gone in a small masculine company to a fervid musical show theevening before. While they, in their turn, thick like their brotheror cousin Moses, with time-wasted hair and countenances marked withthe shrewdness in the service of which the greater part of theirlives had vanished, had their little jokes about the "girls" and theyounger and handsomer beaux who threatened their happiness. 

At times the topic of business crept into the lighter discussion, and, in an instant, the gaiety evaporated and left expressionlessmen and quick sharp sentences steely with decision, or indirect andimperturbably blank. A memorandum book and a gold pencil wouldappear for an enigmatic note, after which the cheerfulness slowlyrevived. 

The daughters resembled Judith or the slower placidity of Pansy;while there was still another sort, more vigorous in being, whoconsciously discussed riding academies, the bridle-paths of CentralPark, and the international tennis. Their dress held a greaterrestraint than the elders; though Linda recognized that it was noless lavish; and their feminine trifles, the morocco beauty-casesand powder-boxes, the shoulder-pins, their slipper and garterbuckles were extravagant in exquisite metals and workings. 

They arrived in limousines with dove-colored upholstery and crystalvases of maidenhair fern and moss-roses; and often, in such a car, Linda went to the theatre with Judith or Pansy and some cousins. Usually it was a matinee, where their seats were the best procurable, directly at the stage; and they sat in a sleek expensive row eatingblack chocolates from painted boxes ruffled in rose silk. Theaudience, composed mostly of their own world, followed the exoticfortunes of the plays with a complete discrimination in everypossible emotional display and crisis. 

Lithe actresses in a revealing severity of attire, like spoiled nunswith carmine lips, suffering in ingenuous problems of the passions, agonized in shuddering tones; or else they went to concerts to hearyoung violinists, slender, with intense faces and dramatic hair, play concertos that irritated Linda with little shivers of delight. 

Sometimes they had lunch in a restaurant of Circassian walnut andvelvet carpets, with cocktails, and eggs elaborate with truffles andFrench pastry. Then, afterward, they would stop at a confectioner's, or at a cafe where there was dancing, for tea. They all danced in aperfection of slow graceful abandon, with youths who, it seemed toLinda, did nothing else. 

She accepted her part in this existence as inevitable, yet she waspersistently aware of a feeling of strangeness, of essentialdifference from it. She was unable to lose a sense of looking on, asif morning, noon and night she were at another long play. Lindaregarded it--as she did so much else--with neither enthusiasm normarked annoyance. Probably it would continue without change throughher entire life. All that was necessary, and easily obtained, was asufficient amount of money. 

Her manner, Pansy specially complained, was not intimate andinviting; in her room Linda usually closed the door; the frankcommunity of the sisters was distasteful to her. She demanded anextraordinary amount of personal privacy. Linda never consultedJudith's opinion about her clothes, nor exchanged the moresignificant aspects of feeling. Alone in a bed-chamber furnished insilvery Hungarian ash, her bed a pale quilted luxury with Madeiralinen crusted in monograms, without head or foot boards, and adressing-table noticeably bare, she would deliberately anddelicately prepare for the night. 

While Judith's morning bath steamed with the softness and odor oflavender crystals, Linda slipped into water almost cold. This, withher clear muslins and heavy black silk stockings, her narrowunornamented slippers, represented the perfection of niceness. 

There were others than Pansy, however, who commented on what theycalled her superiority--the young men who appeared in the evening. Anumber of them, cousins of the Feldt dinner parties or more casual, tried to engage her sympathies in their persons and prospects. Itwas a society of early maturity. But, without apparent effort, shediscouraged them, principally by her serene lack of interest. It wasa fundamental part of her understanding of things that younger menwere unprofitable; she liked far better the contemporaries of MosesFeldt. 

Reynold Chase had ceased his visits, but his place had been taken byanother and still another emotionally gifted man. The present onewas dark and imperturbable: they knew little of him beyond the factsthat he had been a long while in the Orient, that his manner andFrench were unsurpassed, and that practically every considerablecreative talent in New York was entertained in his rooms. 

Judith had been to one of his parties; and, the following morning inbed, she told Pansy and Linda the most remarkable things. 

"It would never do for Pansy, " she concluded; "but I must get Markueto ask you sometime, Linda. How old are you now? Well, that'spractically sixteen, and you are very grown up. You would be quitesensational, in one of your plain white frocks, in his apartment. You'd have to promise not to tell your mother, though. She thinksI'm leading you astray now--the old dear. Does she think I am blind?I met a man last week, a friend of father's, who used to know her. Of course he wouldn't say anything, men are such idiots aboutthat--like ostriches with their pasts buried and all the featherssticking out--but there was a champagne expression in his smile. "

Linda wondered, later, if she'd care to go to a party of Markue's. There was a great deal of drinking at such affairs; and though sherather liked cordials, crême de thé and Grand Marnier, even strongerthings flavored with limes and an occasional frigid cocktail, shedisliked--from a slight experience--men affected by drink. Judithhad called her a constitutional prude; this, she understood, was aterm of reproach; and she wondered if, applied to her, it were just. 

Usually it meant a religious person or one fussy about the edge ofher skirt; neither of which she ever considered. She didn't like tosit in a corner and be hugged--even that she could now assert with adegree of knowledge--but it wasn't because she was shocked. Nothing, she told herself gravely, shocked her; only certain acts and momentsannoyed her excessively. It was as if her mind were a crisp dresswith ribbons which she hated to have mussed or disarranged. 

Linda didn't take the trouble to explain this. Now that her motherhad withdrawn from her into a perpetual and uncomfortable politenessshe confided in no one. She would have been at a loss to put hercomplicated sensations and thoughts into words. Mr. Moses Feldt, theonly one to whom she could possibly talk intimately, would be upsetby her feelings. He would give her a hug and the next day bring up anew present from his pocket. 

Her clothes, with the entire support of Lorice, were all delicate infabric, mostly white with black sashes, and plainly ruffled. Shedetested the gray crepe de Chine from which Judith's undergarmentswere made and the colored embroidery of Pansy's; while she ignoredscented toilet-waters and extracts. Markue, in finally asking her toa party at his rooms, said that there she would resemble an Athenianmarble, of the un-painted epoch, in the ballet of Scheherazade. 

XIII

"There's nothing special to say about Markue's parties, " Judith, dressing, told Linda. "You will simply have to take what comes yourway. There is always some one serious at them, if you insist, asusual, on dignity. " She stood slim and seductive, like a perversepierrot, before the oppressive depths of a black mirror. Linda hadfinished her preparations for the evening. There was no departurefrom her customary blanched exactness. She studied her reflectionacross Judith's shoulder; her intense blue eyes, under the levelblot of her bang, were grave on the delicate pallor of her face. 

In the taxi, slipping rapidly down-town, Linda was conscious of aslight unusual disturbance of her indifference. This had nothing todo with whether or not she'd be a success; her own social demandswere so small that any considerable recognition of her wasunimportant. Her present feeling came from the fact that to-night, practically, she was making her first grown-up appearance in theworld, the world from which she must select the materials of herhappiness and success. To-night she would have an opportunity to putinto being all that--no matter how firmly held--until now had beenbut convictions. 

Her interest was not in whom or what she might meet, but in herself. Judith, smoking a cigarette in a mist of silver fox, was plainlyexcited. "I like Markue awfully, " she admitted. 

"Does he care for you?" Linda asked. 

"That, " said Judith, "I can't make out--if he likes me or if it'sjust anonymous woman. I wish it were the first, Linda. " Her voicewas shadowed; suddenly, in spite of her youth and exhilaration, sheseemed haggard and spent. Linda recognized this in a cold scrutiny. Privately she decided that the other was a fool--she didn't watchher complexion at all. 

The motor turned west in the low Forties and stopped before a highnarrow stone façade with a massive griffon-guarded door. Judith ledthe way directly into the elevator and designated Markue's floor. Itwas at the top of the building, where he met them with hisimpenetrable courtesy and took them into a bare room evidentlyplanned for a studio. There were an empty easel, the high blankdusty expanse of the skylight, and chairs with the somber hats andcoats of men and women's wraps like the glistening shed skins ofbrilliant snakes. 

They turned through the hall to an interior more remarkable thananything Linda could have imagined; it seemed to her very high, without windows and peaked like a tent. Draperies of intricateEastern color hung in long folds. There were no chairs, but lowbroad divans about the walls, a thick carpet with inlaid stands inthe center laden with boxes of cigarettes, sugared exotic sweets andsmoking incense. It was so dim and full of thick scent, the shuteffect was so complete, that for a moment Linda felt painfullyoppressed; it seemed impossible to breathe in the wavering bluishatmosphere. 

Markue, who had appeared sufficiently familiar outside, now had astrange portentous air; the gleams of his quick black eyes, the duskytone of his cheeks, his impassive grace, startled her. New York wasutterly removed: the taxi that had brought Judith and her, theswirling traffic of Columbus Circle and smooth undulations of FifthAvenue, were lost with a different life. She saw, however, the opendoor to another room full of clear light, and her self-possessionrapidly returned. Judith--as she had threatened--at once desertedher; and Linda found an inconspicuous corner of a divan. 

There were, perhaps, twenty people in the two rooms, and each oneengaged her attention. A coffee-colored woman was sitting beyondher, clad in loose red draperies to which were sewed shiningpatterns of what she thought was gold. Markue was introducingJudith, and the seated figure smiled pleasantly with a flash ofbeautiful teeth and the supple gesture of a raised brown palm. That, Linda decided, was the way she shook hands. Two dark-skinned men, one in conventional evening dress, were with her; they had smallfine features and hair like carved ebony. 

Linda had never before been at an affair with what she was forced tocall colored people; instinctively she was antagonistic andsuperior. She turned to a solemn masculine presence with a ruffledshirt and high black stock; he was talking in a resonant voice andwith dramatic gestures to a woman with a white face and low-drawnhair. Linda was fascinated by the latter, dressed in a soft clingingdull garnet. It wasn't her clothes, although they were remarkable, that held her attention, but the woman's mouth. Apparently, it hadno corners. Like a little band of crimson rubber, or a ring of vividflame, it shifted and changed in the oddest shapes. It was anunhappy mouth, and made her think of pain; but perhaps not so muchthat as hunger ... Not for food, Linda was certain. What did shewant?

There was a light appealing laugh from another seated on the floorin a floating black dinner dress with lovely ankles in delicateSpanish lace stockings; her head was thrown back for the whisper ofa heavy man with ashen hair, a heavenly scarf and half-emptiedglass. 

Her bare shoulders, Linda saw, were as white as her own, as whitebut more sloping. The other's hair, though, was the loveliest redpossible. The entire woman, relaxed and laughing in the perfumeryand swimming shadows, was irresistible. A man with a huge nose andblank eyes, his hands disfigured with extraordinary rings, momentarilyengaged her. Then, at the moment when she saw an inviting andcorrectly conventional youth, he crossed and sat at her side. 

"Quite a show, " he said in the manner she had expected and approved. The glow of his cigarette wavered over firmly cut lips. "We've justcome to New York, " he continued. "I don't know any one here butMarkue, do you?" Linda explained her own limitations. "The Victory'sfine and familiar. "

She followed his gaze to where a winged statue with flying draperywas set on a stand. She had seen it before, but without interest. Now it held her attention. It wasn't a large cast, not over threefeet high, but suddenly Linda thought that it was the biggest thingin the room; it seemed to expand as she watched it. 

Beside the Victory, in a glass case with an enclosed concealedlight, was a statue, greenish gray, a few inches tall, with asneering placidity of expression as notable as the sweep of theother white fragment. "That's Chinese, " her companion decided; "itlooks as old as lust. " There was the stir of new arrivals--atowering heavy man with a slight woman in emerald satin. "There'sPleydon, the sculptor, " the youth told her animatedly. "I've seenhim at the exhibitions. It must be Susanna Noda, the Russian singer, with him. He's a tremendous swell. "

XIV

Linda watched Pleydon as he met Markue in the middle of the room. Hewas dressed carelessly, improperly for the evening; but she forgavethat as the result of indifference. The informal flannels and softcollar, too, suited the largeness of his being and gestures. Therewas a murmur of meeting, Susanna Noda smiled appealingly; and then, as Pleydon found a place on a divan, she at once contentedly sat onhis lap. Watching her, Linda thought of a brilliant parrot; but thatwas only the effect of her color; for her face, with a tilted noseand wide golden eyes, generous warm lips, was charming. She lighteda cigarette, turned her graceful back on the room and company, andchatted in French to the composed sculptor. 

Linda divined that he was the most impressive figure she hadencountered; the quality of his indifference was beautiful and couldonly have come in the security of being a "tremendous swell. " Thatphrase described all for which she had cared most. It includedeverything that her mother had indicated as desirable and a lot thatshe, Linda, had added. Money, certainly, was an absolute necessity;but there were other things now that vaguely she desired. She triedto decide what they were. 

Only the old inner confusion resulted, the emotion that might havebeen born in music; however, it was sharper than usual, and bred anew dissatisfaction with the easier accomplishments. Really it wasvery disturbing, for the pressure of her entire experience, all shehad been told, could be exactly weighed and held. The term luxury, too, was revealing; it covered everything--except her presentunformed longing. 

There were still newcomers, and Linda was aware of a sudden constraint. A woman volubly French had appeared with a long pinkish-white dog ina blanket, and the three Arabians--she had learned that much--hadrisen with a concerted expression of surprise and displeasure. Theiranxiety, though, was no more dramatic than that of the dog's proprietor. The gesture of her hands and lifted eyebrows were keenly expressive ofher impatience with any one who couldn't accept, with her, her dog. 

"Markue ought to have it out, " some one murmured. "Dogs, to highcaste Mohammedans, are unclean animals. " Another added, "Worse thanthat, if it should touch them, they would have to make thepilgrimage to Mecca. "

Without any knowledge of the situation of Mecca, Linda yet realizedthat it must be a very long journey to result from the mere touch ofa dog. She didn't wonder at the restrained excitement of the"colored" people. The situation was reduced to a sub-acid argumentbetween the Frenchwoman and the Begum; Madame couldn't exist withouther "_p'tit_. " The Oriental lady could not breathe a common airwith the beast. The former managed a qualified triumph--the"_p'tit_" was caged with a chair in a corner, and the episode, for the moment, dropped. 

Soon, however, Linda saw that the dog had wriggled out of captivity. It made a cautious progress to where the candy stood on a low standand ran an appreciative tongue over the exposed sweet surfaces. Rapidly a sugared fig was snapped up. Linda held her breath; no onehad noticed the animal yet--perhaps it would reach one of theobjectors and she would have the thrill of witnessing the departurefor Mecca. 

But, as always, nothing so romantic occurred; the dog wasdiscovered, and the Mohammedans, with a hurried politeness, madetheir salaams. Instead, a man with a quizzical scrutiny throughglasses that made him resemble an owl, stopped before her. 

"'Here we go 'round the mulberry-bush, '" he chanted. "Hello, KateGreenaway. Have you had a drink?"

"Yes, thank you, " she replied sedately. 

"Certified milk?"

"It was something with gin, " she particularized, "and too sweet. " Hetook the place beside her and solemnly recited a great many nurseryrhymes. On the whole she liked him, deciding that he was verywicked. Soon he was holding her hand in both of his. "I know you'renot real, " he proceeded. "Verlaine wrote you--_'Les Ingenus':_

 "'From which the sudden gleam of whiteness shed Met in our eyes a frolic welcoming. '

"What if I'd kiss you?"

"Nothing, " she returned coldly. 

"You're remarkable!" he exclaimed with enthusiasm. "If you are notalready one of the celebrated beauties you're about to be. As coolas a fish! Look--Pleydon is going to rise and spill little Russia. Have you heard her sing Scriabine?" Linda ignored him in a sharpreturn of her interest in the big carelessly-dressed man. He putSusanna Noda aside and moved to the dim middle of the room. Hisfeatures, Linda saw, were rugged and pronounced; he was very strong. 

For a moment he stood gazing at the Winged Victory, his browgathered into a frown, while he made a caressing gesture with hiswhole hand. Then he swung about and, from the heavy shadows of hisface, he looked down at her. He was still for a disconcerting lengthof time, but through which Linda steadily met his interrogation. Then he bent over and seriously removed the man beside her. 

"Adieu, Louis, " he said. 

The weight of Pleydon's body depressed the entire divan. "Anordinary man, " he told her, "would ask how the devil you got here. Then he would take you to your home with some carefully chosen wordsfor whatever parents you had. But I can see that all this isneedless. You are an extremely immaculate person. 

"That isn't necessarily admirable, " he added. 

"I don't believe I am admirable at all, " Linda replied. 

"How old are you?" he demanded abruptly. 

She told him. 

"Age doesn't exist for some women, they are eternal, " he continued. "You see, I call you a woman, but you are not, and neither are you achild. You are Art--Art the deathless, " his gaze strayed back to theVictory. 

As she, too, looked at it, it seemed to Linda that the cast filledall the room with a swirl of great white wings and heroic robes. Inan instant the incense and the dark colors, the uncertain pallidfaces and bare shoulders, were swept away into a space through whichshe was dizzily borne. The illusion was so overpowering thatinvoluntarily she caught at the heavy arm by her. 

XV

"Why did you do that?" he asked quickly, with a frowning regard. Linda replied easily and directly. "It seemed as if it were carryingme with it, " she specified; "on and on and on, without everstopping. I felt as if I were up among the stars. " She paused, leaning forward, and gazed at the statue. Even now she was certainthat she saw a slight flutter of its draperies. "It is beautiful, isn't it? I think it's the first thing I ever noticed like that. Youknow what I mean--the first thing that hadn't a real use. "

"But it has, " he returned. "Do you think it is nothing to be sweptinto heaven? I suppose by 'real' you mean oatmeal and scented soap. Women usually do. But no one, it appears, has any conception of thepractical side of great art. You might try to remember that it issimply permanence given to beauty. It's like an amber in whichbeautiful and fragile things are kept forever in a lovely glow. Thatis all, and it is enough. 

"When I said that you were Art I didn't mean that you were skilfullypainted and dressed, but that there was a quality in you whichrecalled all the charming women who had ever lived to draw men outof the mud--something, probably, of which you are entirelyunconscious, and certainly beyond your control. You have it in aremarkable degree. It doesn't belong to husbands but to those whocreate 'Homer's children. '

"That's a dark saying of Plato's, and it means that the_Alcestis_ is greater than any momentary offspring of theflesh. "

Linda admitted seriously, "Of course, I don't understand, yet itseems quite familiar--"

"Don't, for Heaven's sake, repeat the old cant about reincarnation;"he interrupted, "and sitting together, smeared with antimony, on aroof of Babylon. "

She hadn't intended to, she assured him. "Tell me about yourself, "he directed. It was as natural to talk with him as it was, withothers, to keep still. Her frank speech flowed on and on, supportedby the realization of his attention. 

"There really isn't much, besides hotels, all different; but you'dbe surprised how alike they were, too. I mean the things to eat, andthe people. I never realized how tired I was of them until mothermarried Mr. Moses Feldt. The children were simply dreadful, thechildren and the women; the men weren't much better. " She said thisin a tone of surprise, and he nodded. "I can see now--I am supposedto be too old for my age, and it was the hotels. You learn a greatdeal. "

"Do you like Mr. Moses Feldt?"

"Enormously; he is terribly sweet. I intend to marry a man just likehim. Or, at least, he was the second kind I decided on: the firstonly had money, then I chose one with money who was kind, but now Idon't know. It's very funny: kindness makes me impatient. I'mperfectly sure I'll never care for babies, they are so mussy. Idon't read, and I can't stand being--well, loved. 

"Mother went to a great many parties; every one liked her and sheliked every one back; so it was easy for her. I used to long for thetime when I'd wear a lovely cloak and go out in a little shut motorwith a man with pearls; but now that's gone. They want to kiss youso much. I wish that satisfied me. Why doesn't it? Is there anythingthe matter with me, do you think? I've been told that I haven't anyheart. "

As he laughed at her she noticed how absurdly small a cigaretteseemed in his broad powerful hand. "What has happened to you isthis, " he explained: "a combination of special circumstances hashelped you in every way to be what, individually, you were. As arule, children are brought up in a house of lies, like taking a finenaked body and binding it into hideous rigid clothes. You escapedthe damnation of cheap ready-cut morals and education. Your motherought to have a superb monument--the perfect parent. Of course youhaven't a 'heart. ' From the standpoint of nature and society you'reas depraved as possible. You are worse than any one else here--thanall of them rolled together. "

Curiously, she thought, this didn't disturb her, which proved atonce that he was right. Linda regarded herself with interest as asupremely reprehensible person, perhaps a vampire. The latter, though, was a rather stout woman who, dressed in frightful lingerie, occupied couches with her arms caught about the neck of a manbending over her. Every detail of this was distasteful. 

What was she?

Her attention wandered to the squat Chinese god in the glass case. It was clear that he hadn't stirred for ages. A difficult thoughtpartly formed in her mind--the Chinese was the god of this room, ofMarkue's party, of the women seated in the dim light on the floorand the divans; the low gurgle of their laughter, the duskywhiteness of their shoulders in the upcoiling incense, the smotheredgleams of their hair, with the whispering men, were the world of thegrayish-green image. 

She explained this haltingly to Pleydon, who listened with aflattering interest. "I expect you're laughing at me inside, " sheended impotently. "And the other, the Greek Victory, " he added, "isthe goddess of the other world, of the spirit. It's quaint a heathenwoman should be that. "

Linda discovered that she liked Pleydon enormously. She continueddaringly that he might be the sort of man she wanted to marry. Buthe wouldn't be easy to manage; probably he could not be managed atall. Her mother had always insisted upon the presence of thatpossibility in any candidate for matrimony. And, until now, Linda'sphilosophy had been in accord with her. But suddenly she entertainedthe idea of losing herself completely in--in love. 

A struggle was set up within her: on one hand was everything thatshe had been, all her experience, all advice, and her innatedetachment; on the other an obscure delicious thrill. Perhaps thiswas what she now wanted. Linda wondered if she could try it--just alittle, let herself go experimentally. She glanced swiftly atPleydon, and his bulk, his heavy features, the sullen mouth, appalled her. 

Men usually filled her with an unaccountable shrinking into herremotest self. Pleydon was different; her liking for him haddestroyed a large part of her reserve; but a surety of instinct toldher that she couldn't experiment there. It was characteristic that alesser challenge left her cold. She had better marry as she hadplanned. 

Susanna Noda came up petulantly and sank in a brilliant gracefulswirl at his feet. Her golden eyes, half shut, studied Lindaintently. 

XVI

"I am fatigued, " she complained; "you know how weary I get when youignore me. " He gazed down at her untouched. "I have left Lao-tze forGreece, " he replied. She found this stupid and said so. "Has he beenno more amusing than this?" she asked Linda. "But then, you are achild, it all intrigues you. You listen with the flattery of yourblue eyes and mouth, both open. "

"Don't be rude, Susanna, " Pleydon commanded. "You are so femininethat you are foolish. I'm not the stupid one--look again at our'child. ' Tell me what you see. "

"I see Siberia, " she said finally. "I see the snow that seems sopure while it is as blank and cold as death. You are right, Dodge. Iwas the dull one. This girl will be immensely loved; perhaps by you. A calamity, I promise you. Men are pigs, " she turned again to Linda;"no--imbeciles, for only idiots destroy the beauty that is given tothem. They take your reputation with a smile, they take your heartwith iron fingers; your beauty they waste like a drunken Russianwith gold. "

"Susanna, like all spendthrifts, is amazed by poverty. "

Even in the gloom Linda could see the pallor spreading over theother's face; she was glad that Susanna Noda spoke in Russian. However, with a violent effort, she subdued her bitterness. "Go intoyour Siberia!" she cried. "I always thought you were capable of thelast folly of marriage. If you do it will spoil everything. You arenot great, you know, not really great, not in the first rank. You'veonly the slightest chance of that, too much money. You were never inthe gutter as I was--"

"Chateaubriand, " he interrupted, "Dante, Velasquez. "

"No, not spiritually!" she cried again. "What do you know of theinferno! Married, you will get fat. " Pleydon turned lightly toLinda:

"As a supreme favor do not, when I ask you, marry me. "

This, for Linda, was horribly embarrassing. However, she gravelypromised. The Russian lighted a cigarette; almost she was sereneagain. Linda said, "Fatness is awful, isn't it?"

Pleydon replied, "Death should be the penalty. If women aren'tlovely--" he waved away every other consideration. 

"And if men have fingers like carrots--" Susanna mimicked him. Judith, flushed, her hair loosened, approached. "Linda, " shedemanded, "do you remember when we ordered the taxi? Was it two orthree?" Markue, at her shoulder, begged her not to consider home. 

"I'm going almost immediately, " Pleydon said, "and taking yourLinda. " His height and determined manner scattered all objections. 

Linda, at the entrance to the apartment, found to her greatsurprise--in place of the motor she had expected--a small gracefulsingle-horse victoria, the driver buttoned into a sealskin rug. Deepin furs, beside Pleydon, she was remarkably comfortable, and she wassoothed by the rhythmic beat of the hoofs, the even progress throughthe crystal night of Fifth Avenue. 

Her companion flooded his being with the frozen air. They had, itseemed, lost all desire to talk. The memory of Markue's partylingered like the last vanishing odor of his incense; there was aconfused vision of the murmurous room against the lighted exteriorwhere the drinks sparkled on a table. Linda made up her mind thatshe would not go to another. Then she wondered if she'd see Pleydonagain. The Russian singer had been too silly for words. 

It suddenly occurred to her that the man now with her had takenSusanna Noda, and that he had left her planted. He had preferreddriving her, Linda Condon, home. He wasn't very enthusiastic aboutit, though; his face was gloomy. 

"The truth is, " he remarked at last, "that Susanna is right--I amnot in the first rank. But that was all nonsense about the necessityof the gutter--sentimental lies. "

Linda was not interested in this, but it left her free to exploreher own emotions. The night had been eventful because it had shakenall the foundation of what she intended. That single momentarydelicious thrill had been enough to threaten the entire rest. At thesame time her native contempt of the other women, of Judith with hertumbled hair, persisted. Was there no other way to capture suchhappiness? Was it all hopelessly messy with drinks and unpleasantfamiliarity?

What did Pleydon mean by spirit? Surely there must be more kinds oflove than one--he had intimated that. She gathered that "Homer'schildren, " those airs of Gluck that she liked so well, were works ofart, sculpture, such as he did. Yet she had never thought of them asimportant, important as oatmeal or delicate soap. She made up hermind to ask him about it, when she saw that they had reached theEighties; she was almost home. 

"I am going away to-morrow, " he told her, "for the winter, to SouthAmerica. When I come back we'll see each other. If you should changeaddress send me a line to the Harvard Club. " The carriage hadstopped before the great arched entrance to the apartment-house, towering in its entire block. He got out and lifted her to thepavement as if she had been no more than a flower in his hands. Thenhe walked with her into the darkness of the garden. 

The fountains were cased in boards; the hedged borders, the bushes andgrass, were dead. High above them on the dark wall a window was bright. Linda's heart began to pound loudly, she was trembling ... From thecold. There was a faint sound in the air--the elevated trains, orstirring wings? It was nothing, then, to be lifted into heaven. Therewas the door to the hall and elevator. She turned, to thank DodgePleydon for all his goodness to her, when he lifted her--was ittoward heaven?--and kissed her mouth. 

She was still in his arms, with her eyes closed. "Linda Condon?" hesaid, in a tone of inquiry. 

At the same breath in which she realized a kiss was of no importancea sharp icy pain cut at her heart. It hurt her so that she gasped. Then, and this was strange, she realized that--as a kiss--it hadn'tannoyed her. Suddenly she felt that it wasn't just that, butsomething far more, a part of all her inner longing. He had put herdown and was looking away, a face in shadow with an ugly protrudinglip. 

She saw him that way in her dreams--in the court under the massivesomber walls, with a troubled frown over his eyes. It seemed to herthat, reaching up, she smoothed it away as they stood together in adarkness with the fountains, the hedges, dead, the world with nevera sound sleeping in the prison of winter. 

XVII

Linda thought about Dodge Pleydon on a warm evening of the followingMay. At four o'clock, in a hotel, Pansy had been married; and theentire Feldt connection had risen to a greater height of clamorouscheer than ever before. Extravagant unseasonable dishes, wines andbanked flowers were lavishly mingled with sentimental speeches, healths and tears. Linda had been acutely restless, impatient of allthe loud good humor and stupid compliments. The sense of herisolation from their life was unbearably keen. She would have a verydifferent wedding with a man in no particular like Pansy's. 

After dinner--an occasion, with Pansy absent, where Mr. MosesFeldt's tears persisted in flowing--she had strayed into the formalchamber across from the dining-room and leaned out of a window, gazing into the darkening court. Directly below was where Pleydonhad kissed her. She often re-examined her feelings about that; butonly to find that they had dissolved into an indefinite sense of theinevitable. Not alone had it failed to shock her--she hadn't evenbeen surprised. Linda thought still further about kissing, with thediscovery that if, while it was happening, she was conscious of thekiss, it was a failure; successful, it carried her as far aspossible from the actuality. 

Pleydon, of course, had not written to her; he had intimated nothingto the contrary, only asking her to let him know, at the HarvardClub, if she changed address. That wasn't necessary, and now, probably, he was back from South America. Where, except by accident, might she see him? Markue, with his parties, had dropped fromJudith's world, his place taken by a serious older dealer in Dutchmasters with an impressive gallery just off Fifth Avenue. 

That she would see him Linda was convinced; this feeling absorbedany desire; it was no good wanting it or not wanting it;consequently she was undisturbed. She considered him gravely and indetail. Had there been any more Susanna Nodas in his stay south? Shehad heard somewhere that the women of Argentine were irresistible. Her life had taught her nothing if not the fact that a number ofwomen figured in every man's history. It was deplorable but couldn'tbe avoided; and whether or not it continued after marriage dependedon the cunning of any wife. 

Now, however, Linda felt weary already at the prospect of a marriedlife that rested on the constant play of her ingenuity. A great manythings that, but a little before, she had willingly accepted, seemedto her probably not less necessary but distinctly tiresome. Lindabegan to think that she couldn't really bother; the results weren'tsufficiently important. 

Dodge Pleydon. 

She slept in a composed order until the sun was well up. It waswarmer than yesterday; and, going to an afternoon concert withJudith, she decided to walk. Linda strolled, in a short severejacket and skirt, a black straw hat turned back with a cockade and acrisp flushed mass of sweet peas at her waist. The occasion, as itsometimes happened, found her in no mood for music. The warmth ofthe sunlight, the open city windows and beginning sounds of summer, had enveloped her in a mood in which the jangling sentimentality ofa street organ was more potent than the legato of banked violins. 

She was relieved when the concert was over, but lingered at her seatuntil the crowd had surged by; it made Linda furious to be shoved orindiscriminately touched. Judith had gone ahead, when Linda wasconscious of the scrutiny of a pale well-dressed woman of middleage. It became evident that the other was debating whether or not tospeak; clearly such an action was distasteful to her; and Linda hadturned away before a restrained voice addressed her:

"You will have to forgive me if I ask your name ... Because of acertain resemblance. Seeing you I--I couldn't let you go. "

"Linda Condon, " she replied. 

The elder, Linda saw, grew even paler. She put out a gloved hand. "Then I was right, " she said in a slightly unsteady voice. "Butperhaps, when I explain, you will think it even stranger, inexcusable. My dear child, I am your father's sister. "

Linda was invaded by a surprise equally made up of interest andresentment. The first was her own and the second largely borrowedfrom her mother. Besides, why had her father's family never made theslightest effort to see her. This evidently had simultaneouslyoccurred to the other. 

"Of course, " she added, quite properly, "we can't undertake familyquestions here. I shouldn't blame you a bit, either, if you wentdirectly away. I had to speak, to risk that, because you were sounmistakably a Lowrie. It is not a common appearance. We--I--" shefloundered for a painful moment; then she gathered herself with aconsiderable dignity. "Seeing you has affected me tremendously, changed everything. I have nothing to say in our defense, you mustunderstand that. I am certain, too, that my sister will feel thesame--we live together in Philadelphia. I hope you will give me youraddress and let us write to you. Elouise will join with meabsolutely. "

Linda told her evenly where she lived, and then allowed Miss Lowrieto precede her toward the entrance. She said nothing of this toJudith, nor, momentarily, to her mother. She wanted to consider itundisturbed by a flood of talk and blame. It was evident to her thatthe Lowries had behaved very badly, but just how she couldn't makeout. She recalled her father's sister--her aunt--minutely, forced tothe realization that she was a person of entire superiority. Here, she suddenly saw, had been the cause of all their difficulties--theLowries hadn't approved of the marriage, they had objected to hermother. 

Five years ago she would have been incensed at this; but now, essentially, she was without personal indignation. She wanted, forherself, to discover as much as possible about her father and hisfamily. A need independent of maternal influences stirred her. Lindawas reassured by the fact that her father had been gently born;while she realized that she had always taken this for granted. Hermother must know nothing about the meeting with Miss Lowrie untilthe latter had written. 

That was Friday and the letter came the following Tuesday. Linda, alone at the breakfast-table, instantly aware of the source of thesquare envelope addressed in a delicate regular writing, opened itand read in an unusual mental disturbance:

"My dear Linda, I hope you will not consider it peculiar for me to call you this, for nothing else seems possible. Meeting you in that abrupt mannerupset me, as you must have noticed. Of course I knew of you, andeven now I can not go into our long unhappy affair, but until I sawyou, and so remarkably like the Lowries, I did not realize howwicked Elouise and I had been. But I am obliged to add only whereyou were concerned. We have no desire to be ambiguous in that. 

However, I am writing to say that we should love to have you visitus here. It is possible under the circumstances that your motherwill not wish you to come. Yet I know the Lowries, a veryindependent and decided family, and although it is my last intentionto be the cause of difficulty with your mother, still I hope it maybe arranged. 

In closing I must add how happy I was at the evidence of your blood. But that, I now see, was a certainty. You will have to forgive usfor a large measure of blindness. Affectionately, AMELIA VIGNÉ LOWRIE. "

Almost instantaneously Linda was aware that she would visit theLowries. She liked the letter extremely, as well as all that sheremembered of its sender. At the same time she prepared for a scenewith her mother, different from those of the past--with the recourseto the brandy flask--but no less unpleasant. They had very little tosay to each other now; and, when she went into her mother's roomwith an evident definite purpose, the latter showed a constrainedsurprise, a palpable annoyance that her daughter had found her atthe daily renovation of her worn face. 

XVIII

Linda said directly, "I met Miss Lowrie, father's sister, at aconcert last week, and this morning I had a letter asking me to staywith them in Philadelphia. "

Mrs. Feldt's face suddenly had no need for the color she held poisedon a cloth. Her voice, sharp at the beginning, rose to a shrillunrestrained wrath. 

"I wonder at the brass of her speaking to you at all let alonewriting here. Just you give me the letter and I'll shut her up. Theidea! I hope you were cool to her, the way they treated us. Staywith them--I guess not!"

"But I thought of going, " Linda replied. "It's only natural. Afterall, you must see that he was my father. "

"A pretty father he was, too good for the girl he married. It's myfault I didn't tell you long ago, but I just couldn't abide themention of him. He deserted me, no, us, cold, without a word--walkedout of the door one noon, taking his hat as quiet as natural, andnever came back. I never saw him again nor heard except throughlawyers. That was the kind of heart he had, and his sisters areworse. I hadn't a decent speech of any kind out of them. TheLowries, " she managed to inject a surprising amount of contempt intoher pronouncement of that name. "What it was all about you nor anysensible person would never believe:

"The house smelled a little of boiled cabbage. That's why he leftme, and you expected in a matter of a few months. He said in hisdam' frigid way that it had become quite impossible and took downhis hat. "

"There must have been more, " Linda protested, suppressing a maddesire to laugh. 

"Not an inch, " her mother asserted. "Nothing, after a little, suitedhim. He'd sit up like a poker, just as I've seen you, with his lipstight together in the Lowrie manner. It didn't please him no matterwhat you'd do. He wouldn't blow out at you like a Christian and Inever knew where I was at. I'd come down in a matinée, the prettiestI could buy, and then see he didn't like it. He would expect you tobe dressed in the morning like it was afternoon and you going out. And as for loosening your corsets for a little comfort about thehouse, you might as well have slapped him direct. 

"That wasn't the worst, though; but his going away without as muchas a flicker of his hand; and with me like I was. Nobody on earthbut would blame him for that. I only got what was allowed me afterwe had changed back to my old name, me and you. He never asked onesingle question about you nor tried to see or serve you a scrap. Forall he knew, at a place called Santa Margharita in Italy, you mighthave been born dead. "

She was unable, Linda recognized, to defend him in any way; he hadacted frightfully. She acknowledged this logically with her power ofreason, but somehow it didn't touch her as it had her mother, andas, evidently, the latter expected. She was absorbed in the visionof her father sitting, in the Lowrie manner, rigid as a poker; shesaw him quietly take up his hat and go away forever. Lindaunderstood his process completely; she was capable of doingprecisely the same thing. Whatever was the matter with her--in theheartlessness so often laid to her account--had been equally true ofher father. 

"You ought to know what to say to them, " Mrs. Moses Feldt cried, "orI'll do it for you! If only I had seen her she would have heard athing or two not easy forgotten. "

Linda's determination to go to Philadelphia had not been shaken, andshe made a vain effort to explain her attitude. "Of course, it washorrid for you, " she said. "I can understand how you'd never neverforgive him. But I am different, and, I expect, not at all nice. It's very possible, since he was my father, that we are alike. Iwish you had told me this before--it explains so much and would havemade things easier for me. I am afraid I must see them. "

She was aware of the bitterness and enmity that stiffened her motherinto an unaccustomed adequate scorn:

"I might have expected nothing better of you, and me watching itcoming all these years. You can go or stay. I had my life in spiteof the both of you, as gay as I pleased and a good husband just thesame. I don't care if I never see you again, and if it wasn't forthe fuss it would make I'd take care I didn't. You'll have yourfather's money now I'm married; I wonder you stay around here at allwith your airs of being better than the rest. God's truth is youain't near as good, even if I did bring you into the world. "

"I am willing to agree with you, " Linda answered. "No one could besweeter than the Feldts. I sha'n't do nearly as well. But that isn'tit, really. People don't choose themselves; I'm certain fatherdidn't at that lonely Italian place. If you weren't happy laced inthe morning it wasn't your fault. You see, I am trying to excusemyself, and that isn't any good, either. "

"Unnatural, " Mrs. Moses Feldt pronounced. And Linda, weary anddepressed, allowed her the last word. 

XIX

Nothing further during the subsequent brief exchange of notesbetween Miss Lowrie and Linda was said of the latter's intention tovisit her father's family. Mrs. Feldt, however, whose attitudetoward Linda had been negatively polite, now displayed an animositycarefully hidden from her husband but evident to the two girls. Theelder never neglected an opportunity to emphasize Linda's selfishnessor make her personality seem ridiculous. But this Linda ignored fromher wide sense of the inconsequence of most things. 

Yet she was relieved when, finally, she had actually left New York. She looked forward with an unusual hopeful curiosity to the Lowries. To her surprise their house--miles, it appeared, from the center ofthe city--was directly on a paved street with electric cars, unpretentious stores and very humble dwellings nearby. Back from thethoroughfare, however, there were spacious green lawns. The streetitself, she saw at once, was old--a highway of gray stone with lowaged stone façades, steep eaves and blackened chimney-pots reaching, dusty with years, into the farther hilly country. 

A gable of the Lowrie house, with a dignified white door, a fanlightof faintly iridescent glass and polished brasses, faced the bricksidewalk, while to the left there was a high board fence and anentrance with a small grille open on a somber reach of garden. Amaid in a stiff white cap answered the fall of the knocker; she tookLinda's bag; and, in a hall that impressed her by its bareness, Linda was greeted by the Miss Lowrie she had seen. 

Her aunt was composed, but there was a perceptible flush on hercheeks, and she said in a rapid voice, after a conventional welcome, "You must meet Elouise at once, before you go up to your room. "

Elouise Lowrie was older than Amelia, but she, too, was slender anderect, with black hair startling in its density on her wastedcountenance. Linda noticed a fine ruby on a crooked finger andbeautiful rose point lace. "It was good of you, " the elderproceeded, "to come and see two old women. I don't know whether wehave more to say or to keep still about. But I, for one, am going toavoid explanations. You are here, a fool could see that you wereBartram's girl, and that is enough for a Lowrie. "

The room was nearly as bare as the hall: in place of the deep carpetsof the Feldts' the floor, of dark uneven oak boards, was merely waxedand covered by a rough-looking oval rug. The walls were paneledin white, with white ruffled curtains at small windows; and thefurniture, the dull mahogany ranged against the immaculate paint, therocking-chairs of high slatted walnut and rush bottoms, the slenderformality of tables with fluted legs, was dignified but austere. There were some portraits in heavy old gilt--men with florid facesand tied hair, and the delicate replicas of high-breasted women inbrocades. 

There was, plainly, an air of the exceptional in Amelia Lowrie'sconduction of Linda to her room. She waited at the door while theother moved forward to the center of a chamber empty of all theluxury Linda had grown to demand. There was a bed with tall gracefulposts supporting a canopy like a frosting of sugar, a solemn set ofdrawers with a diminutive framed mirror in which she could barelysee her shoulders, a small unenclosed brass clock with long exposedweights, and two uninviting painted wooden chairs. This was not, although very nearly, all. Linda's attention was attracted by aframed and long-faded photograph of a young man, bareheaded, with aloosely knotted scarf, a striped blazer and white flannels. His facewas thin and sensitive, his lips level, and his eyes gazed with asteady questioning at the observer. 

"That was Bartram, " Amelia Lowrie told her; "your father. This washis room. "

She went down almost immediately and left Linda, in a maze of dimemotions, seated on one of the uncomfortable painted chairs. Herfather! This was his room; nothing, she realized, had been disturbed. The mirror had held the vaguely unsteady reflection of his face; hehad slept under the arched canopy of the bed. She rose and went toa window from which he, too, had looked. 

Below her was the garden shut in on its front by the high fence. There was a magnolia-tree, now covered with thick smooth whiteflowers, and, at the back, low-massed rhododendron with fragilelavender blossoms on a dark glossy foliage. But the space was mainlygreen and shadowed in tone; while beyond were other gardens, otheremerald lawns and magnolia-trees, an ordered succession oftranquillity with separate brick or stone or white dwellings in thelengthening afternoon shadows of vivid maples. 

It was as different as possible from all that Linda had known, fromthe elaborate hotels and gigantic apartment houses, the tropicalinteriors, of her New York life. She unpacked her bag, putting hergold toilet things on the chest of drawers, precisely arranging in ashallow closet what clothes she had brought, and then, changing, went down to the Lowries. 

They surveyed her with eminent approval at a dinner-table lightedonly with candles, beside long windows open on a dusk with a glimmerof fireflies. Suddenly Linda felt amazingly at ease; it seemed toher that she had sat here before, with the night flowing gently inover the candle-flames. The conversation, she discovered, neverstrayed far from the concerns and importance of the Lowrie blood. "My grandmother, Natalie Vigné, " Elouise informed her, "came withher father to Philadelphia from France, in eighteen hundred and one, at the invitation of Stephen Girard, who was French as well. Shemarried Hallet Lowrie whose mother was a Bartram. 

"That, my dear, explains our black hair and good figgers. Therenever was a lumpy Lowrie. Well, Hallet built this house, or ratherenlarged it, for his wife; and it has never been out of the family. Our nephew, Arnaud Hallet--Arnaud was old Vigné's name--owns it now. Isaac Hallet, you may recall, was suspected of being a Tory; at anyrate his brother's descendants, Fanny Rodwell is the only one left, won't speak. "

The placid conversation ran on unchanged throughout dinner and theevening. Linda was relieved by the absence of any questioning;indeed nothing contemporary, she realized, was held to be significant. "I thought Arnaud would be in to-night, " Elouise Lowrie said; "heknew Linda was expected. " No one, however, appeared; and Linda wentup early to her room. There, too, were only candles, a pale waveringillumination in which the past, her father, were extraordinarilynearby. A sense of pride was communicated to her by so much thattime had been unable to shake. The bed was steeped in the magic ofserene traditions. 

XX

Arnaud Hallet appeared for dinner the evening after Linda's arrival;a quiet man with his youth lost, slightly stooped shoulders, crumpled shoes and a green cloth bag. But he had a memorable voiceand an easy distinction of manner; in addition to these shediscovered, at the table, a lighter amusing sense of the absurd. Shewatched him--as he poured the sherry from a decanter with a silverlabel hung on a chain--with a feeling of mild approbation. On thewhole he was nice but uninteresting. What a different man fromPleydon!

The days passed in a pleasant deliberation, with Arnaud Halletconstantly about the house or garden, while Linda's thoughtscontinually returned to the sculptor. He was clearer than theactuality of her mother and the Feldts or the recreated image of herfather. At times she was thrilled by the familiar obscure sense ofmusic, of longing slowly translated into happiness. Then more actualproblems would envelop her in doubt. Mostly she was confused--in hercool material necessity for understanding--by the temper of herfeeling for Dodge Pleydon. Linda wondered if this were love. Perhaps, when she saw him again, she'd be able to decide. Then she rememberedpromising to let him know if she changed her address. It was possiblethat already he had called at the Feldts', or written, and that hermother had refused to inform him where she had gone. 

Linda had been at the Lowries' two weeks now, but they were acutelydistressed when she suggested that her visit was unreasonablyprolonged. "My dear, " they protested together, "we hoped you'd staythe summer. Bartram's girl! Unless, of course, it is dull with us. Something brighter must be arranged. No doubt we have only thoughtof our own pleasure in having you. "

Linda replied honestly that she enjoyed being with them extremely. Her mother's dislike, the heavy luxury of the Feldt apartment, heldlittle attraction for her. Then, too, losing the sense of thebareness of the house Hallet Lowrie had built for his French wife, she began to find it surprisingly appealing. 

Her mind returned to her promise to Pleydon. She told herself thatprobably he had forgotten her existence, but she had a strongunreasoning conviction that this was not so. It seemed the mostnatural thing in the world to write him and, almost before she wasaware of the intention, she had put "Dear Mr. Pleydon" at the headof a sheet of note-paper. 

I promised to let you know in the spring when you came back fromSouth America where I was. I did not think I would have to do it, but here I am in Philadelphia with my father's sisters. I do notknow just how long for, but a month, anyhow. It is very quiet, butcharming. I have the room that was my father's when he was young, and look out of the window like he must have. If you should come toPhiladelphia my aunts ask me to say that they would be glad to haveyou for dinner. This is how you get here.... 

Very sincerely, LINDA CONDON. 

She walked to a street crossing, where she dropped the envelope intoa letter-box on a lamppost, and returned to find Arnaud Halletwaiting for her. He said:

"Everyone agrees I'm serious, but actually you are worse than theAssembly. " They went through the dining-room to the garden, and saton the stone step of a deep window. It was quite late, perhapseleven o'clock, and the fireflies, slowly rising into the night, hadvanished. Linda was cool and remote and grave, silently repeatingand weighing the phrases of her letter to Pleydon. 

She realized that Arnaud Hallet was coming to like her a very greatdeal; but she gave this only the slightest attention. She liked him, really, and that dismissed him from serious consideration. Anyhow, in spite of the perfection of his manner, Arnaud's careless dressdispleased her: his shoes and the shoulders of his coat wereperpetually dusty, and his hair, growing scant, was always ruffled. Linda understood that he was highly intellectual, and frequentlycontributed historical and genealogical papers to societies andbulletins, but compared with Dodge Pleydon's brilliant personalityand reputation, Pleydon surrounded by the Susanna Nodas of life, Arnaud was as dingy as his shoes. 

She wondered idly when the latter would actually try to love her. Hewas holding her hand and it might well be to-night. Linda decidedthat he would do it delicately; and when, almost immediately, hekissed her, she was undisturbed. No, surprisingly, it had been quitepleasant. He hadn't mussed her ribbons, nor her spirit, a particle. In addition he did not at once become impossible and urgentlysentimental; there was even a shade of amusement on his heavy face. 

"You appear to take a lot for granted, " he complained. 

"I'd been wondering when it would happen, " she admitted coolly. 

"It always does, then?"

"Usually I stop it, " she continued. "I don't believe I'll ever likebeing kissed. Can you tell me why? No one ever has; they all thinkthey can bring me around to it. "

"And to them, " he added. 

"But they end by being furious at me. I've been sworn at and calleddreadful names. Sometimes they're only silly. One cried; I hatedthat the most. "

"Do you mean that you were sorry for him?"

"Oh, dear, no. Why should I be? He looked so odious all smeared withtears. "

Arnaud Hallet returned promptly: "Linda, you're a little beast. " Tocounteract his rude speech he kissed her again. "This, " he said withless security, "threatens to become a habit. I thought, at forty-five, that I was safely by the island of sirens, but I'll be on the rocksbefore I know it. "

She laughed with the cool remoteness of running water. 

"I wonder you haven't been murdered, " he proceeded, "in a moonlessgarden by an elderly lawyer. Do you ever think of the lyric daywhen, preceded by a flock of bridesmaids and other flowery pagantruck, you'll meet justice?"

"Marriage?" she asked. "But of course. I have everything perfectlyplanned--"

"Then, my dear Linda, describe him. "

"Very straight, " she said, "with beautiful polished shoes andbrushed hair. "

"You ought to have no trouble finding that. Any number of my friendshave one--to open the door and take your things. I might arrange avery satisfactory introduction for everybody concerned--a steady manwell on his way to preside over the pantry and table. "

"You're not as funny as usual, " Linda decided critically. "That, too, disturbs me, " he replied. "It looks even more unpromising forthe near future. "

XXI

In her room Linda thought, momentarily, of Arnaud Hallet; whatevermight have been serious in her attitude toward him dissolved by thelightness of his speech. Dodge Pleydon appealed irresistibly to herdeepest feelings. Now her mental confusion was at least clear inthat she knew what troubled her. It was not new, it extended even totimes before Pleydon had entered her life--the difficultiespresented by the term "love. "

In her mind it was divided into two or three widely differentaspects, phases which she was unable to reconcile. Her mother, inthe beginning, had informed her that love was a nuisance. To behappy, a man must love you without any corresponding return; thiswas necessary to his complete management, the securing of thegreatest possible amount of new clothes. It was as far as loveshould be allowed to enter marriage. But that reality, with acomplete expression in shopping, was distant from the immaterial anddelicate emotions that in her responded to Pleydon. 

Linda had been familiar with the materials, the processes, of what, she had been assured, was veritable love since early childhood. Hermother's dressing, the irritable hours of fittings and at hermirror, the paint she put on her cheeks, the crimping of her hairwere for the favor of men. These struggles had absorbed the elder, all the women Linda had encountered, to the exclusion of everythingelse. This, it seemed, must, from its overwhelming predominance, bethe greatest thing in life. 

There was nothing mysterious about it. You did certain thingsintelligently, if you had the figure to do them with, for apractical end. The latter, carefully controlled, like an essence ofwhich a drop was delightful and more positively stifling, was asreal as the methods of approach. Oatmeal or scented soap! The force ofexample and association combined to bathe such developments in thesanest light possible, and Linda had every intention of the successfulgrasping of an easy and necessary luxury. She had, until--vaguely--now, been entirely willing to accept the unescapable conditions of loveused as a means or the element of pleasure at parties. Now, however, the unexpected element of Dodge Pleydon disturbed her philosophy. 

Suddenly all the lacing and painting and crimping, the pretense andlies and carefully planned accidental effects, filled her withrevolt. The insinuations of women, the bareness of theirrevelations, her mother returning unsteady and mussed from a dinner, were unutterably disgusting. Even to think of them hurt herfundamentally: so much of what she was, of what she had determined, had been destroyed by an emotion apparently as slight as echoedmusic. 

Here was the real mystery and for which nothing in her experiencehad prepared her. She began to see why it was called a nuisance--ifthis were love--and wondered if she had better not suppress it atonce. It wouldn't be suppressed. Her thoughts continually came backto Pleydon, and the warmth, the disturbing thrill, always resulted. It led her away from herself, from Linda Condon; a sufficientlystrange accomplishment. A concern for Dodge Pleydon, little schemesfor his happiness and well-being, put aside her clothes andcomplexion and her future. 

Until the present her acts had been the result of deliberation. Shehad been impressed by the necessity for planning with care; but, inthe cool gloom of the covered bed, a sharp joy held her at thepossibility of flinging caution away. Yet she couldn't quite, nomatter how much she desired it, lose herself. Linda was glad thatPleydon was rich; and there were, she remembered, moments forsurrender. 

As usual these problems, multiplying toward night, were fewer in thebright flood of morning. She laughed at the memory of ArnaudHallet's humor; and then, it was late afternoon, the maid told herthat Pleydon was in the drawing room. Her appearance satisfactoryshe was able to see him at once. To her great pleasure neitherPleydon nor his clothes had changed. He was dressed in light-grayflannels; a big easy man with a crushing palm, large features and anexpression of intolerance. 

"Linda, " he said, "what a splendid place to find you. So much betterthan Markue's. " He was, she realized, very glad to see her, anddropped at once, as if they had been uninterruptedly together, intointimate talk. "My work has been going badly, " he proceeded; "orrather not at all. I made a rather decent fountain at Newport;but--remember what Susanna said?--it's not in the first rank. A happybalance and strong enough conception; yet it is like a Cellini ewerdone in granite. The truth is, too much interests me; an artistought to be the victim of a monomania. I'm a normal animal. " Hestudied her contentedly:

"How lovely you are. I came over--in an automobile at last--becauseI was certain you couldn't exist as I remembered you. But you couldand do. Lovely Linda! And what a gem of a letter. It might have beencopied from 'The Perfect Correspondent for Young Females. ' You'renot going to lose me again. When I was a little boy I had a passionfor sherbets. "

She smiled at him with half-closed eyes and the conviction that, with Pleydon, she could easily be different. He leaned forward andhis voice startled her with the impression that he had read hermind:

"If you could care for any one a lifetime would be short to get you. Look, you have never been out of my thoughts--or within my reach. Itseems a myth that I kissed you; impossible ... Linda. "

"But you did, " she told him, gaining happiness from the mereassurance. They were alone in the drawing-room, and he rose, sweeping her up into his arms. Yet the expected joy evaded herdesire and the sudden determination to lose utterly her reserve. Itwas evident that he as well was conscious of this, for he releasedher and stood frowning, his protruding lower lip uglier than ever. 

"A lifetime would be nothing, " he said again; "or it might beeverything wasted. Which are you--all soul and spirit, or none?"

"I don't know, " she replied, in her bitter disappointment, her heartpinched by the sharpest pain she remembered. There was the stir ofskirts at the door; Linda turned with a sense of relief to AmeliaLowrie. However, dinner progressed very well indeed. "Then youraunt, " Elouise said to Pleydon, "was Carrie Dodge. I recall herperfectly. " That established, the Lowrie women talked with agracious freedom, exploring the furthermost infiltrations of bloodand marriages. 

Linda was again serene. She watched Pleydon with an extraordinaryformless conviction--each of them was a part of the other's life;while in some way marriage and love were now hopelessly confused. Itwas beyond effort or planning. That was all she could grasp, but shewas contented. Sometimes when he talked he made the familiardescriptive gesture with his hand, as if he were shaping the form ofhis speech: a sculptor's gesture, Linda realized. 

Later they wandered into the garden, a dark enclosure with the longivy-covered façade of the house broken by the lighted spaces ofwindows. Beyond the fence at regular intervals an electric carpassed with an increasing and diminishing clangor. The white petalsof the magnolia-tree had fallen and been wheeled away; the blossomsof the rhododendron were dead on their stems. It was, Linda felt, avery old garden that had known many momentary emotions and lives. 

Dodge Pleydon, standing before her, put his hands on her shoulders. "Would I have any success?" he asked. "Do you think you'd care forme?"

She smiled confidently up at his intent face. "Oh, yes. " Yet shehoped that he would not kiss her--just then. The delicacy of herlonging and need were far removed from material expressions. This, of course, meant marriage; but marriage was money, comfort, the coldthing her mother had impressed on her. Love, her love, was a mistakehere. But in a little it would all come straight and she wouldunderstand. She no longer had confidence in her mother's wisdom. 

In spite of her shrinking, of a half articulate appeal, he crushedher against his face. Whatever that had filled her with hope, shethought, was being torn from her. A sickening aversion over whichshe had no control made her stark in his arms. The memories of thepainted coarse satiety of women and the sly hard men for which theyschemed, the loose discussions of calculated advances and sordidsurrenders, flooded her with a loathing for what she passionatelyneeded to be beautiful. 

Yet deep within her, surprising in its vitality, a fragile ardorpersisted. If she could explain, not only might he understand, butbe able to make her own longing clear and secure. But all shemanaged to say was, "If you kiss me again I think it will kill me. "Even that failed to stop him. "You were never alive, " he asserted. "I'll put some feeling into you. It has been done before withmarble. "

Linda, unresponsive, suffered inordinately. 

Again on her feet she saw that Pleydon was angry, his face grim. Heseemed changed, threatening and unfamiliar; it was exactly as if, inplace of Dodge Pleydon, a secretive impersonal ugliness stooddisclosed before her. He said harshly:

"When will you marry me?"

It was what, above all else, she had wanted; and Linda realized thatto marry him was still the crown of whatever happiness she couldimagine. But her horror of the past recreated by his beating down ofher gossamer-like aspiration, the vision of him flushed andruthless, an image of indiscriminate nameless man, made itimpossible for her to reply. An abandon of shrinking fear numbed herheart and lips. 

"You won't get rid of me as you do the others about you, " hecontinued. "This time you made a mistake. I haven't any pride thatyou can insult; but I have all that you--with your character--require. I have more money even than you can want. " She cried despairingly:

"It isn't that now! I had forgotten everything to do with money anddepended on you to take me away from it always. "

"When will you marry me?"

In a flash of blinding perception, leaving her as dazed as though ithad been a physical actuality, she realized that marrying him hadbecome an impossibility. At the barest thought of it the dread againclosed about her like ice. She tried, with all the force of oldvaluations, with even an effort to summon back the vanquishedthrill, to give herself to him. But a quality overpowering andinstinctive, the response of her incalculable injury, made anycontact with him hateful. It was utterly beyond her power toexplain. A greater mystery still partly unfolded--whatever she hadhoped from Pleydon belonged to the special emotion that hadpossessed her since earliest childhood. 

In the immediate tragedy of her helplessness, with Dodge Pleydonimpatient for an assurance, she paused involuntarily to wonder aboutthat hidden imperative sense. There was a broken mental fantasyof--of a leopard bearing a woman in shining hair. This was succeededby a bright thrust of happiness and, all about her, a surging like theimagined beat of the wings of the Victory in Markue's room. AlmostPleydon had explained everything, almost he was everything; and thenthe other, putting him aside, had swept her back into the misery ofdoubt and loneliness. 

"I can't marry you, " she said in a flat and dragged voice. Hedemanded abruptly:

"Why not?"

"I don't know. " She recognized his utter right to the temper thatmastered him. For a moment Linda thought Pleydon would shake her. "You feel that way now, " he declared; "and perhaps next month; butyou will change; in the end I'll have you. "

"No, " she told him, with a certainty from a source outside herconsciousness. "It has been spoiled. "

He replied, "Time will discover which of us is right. I'm almostwilling to stay away till you send for me. But that would only makeyou more stubborn. What a strong little devil you are, Linda. I haveno doubt I'd do better to marry a human being. Then I think we bothforget how young you are--you can't pretend to be definite yet. "

He captured her hands; too exhausted for any resentment or feelingshe made no effort to evade him. "I'll never say good-bye to you. "

His voice had the absolute quality of her own conviction. To heramazement her cheeks were suddenly wet with tears. "I want to gonow, " she said unsteadily; "and--and thank you. "

His old easy formality returned as he made his departure. In replyto Pleydon's demand she told him listlessly that she would be herefor, perhaps, a week longer. Then he'd see her, he continued, in NewYork, at the Feldts'. 

In her room all emotion faded. Pleydon had said that she was stillyoung; but she was sure she could never, in experience or feeling, be older. She became sorry for herself; or rather for the illusions, the Linda, of a few hours ago. She examined her features in thelimited uncertain mirror--strong sensations, she knew, were a chargeon the appearance--but she was unable to find any difference in herregular pallor. Then, mechanically conducting her carefulpreparations for the night, her propitiation of the only omnipotenceshe knew, she put out the candles of her May. 

XXII

What welcome Linda met in New York came from Mr. Moses Feldt, whoembraced her warmly enough, but with an air slightly ill at ease. Hebegged her to kiss her mama, who was sometimes hurt by Linda'scoldness. She made no reply, and found the same influence andevidence of the power of suggestion in Judith. "We thought maybe youwouldn't care to come back here, " the latter said pointedly, overher shoulder, while she was directing the packing of a trunk. TheFeldts were preparing for their summer stay at the sea. 

Her mother's room resembled one of the sales of obvious andexpensive attire conducted in the lower salons of pleasure hotels. There were airy piles of chiffon and satin, inappropriate hats andthe inevitable confections of silk and lace. "It's not necessary toask if you were right at home with your father's family, " Mrs. Condon observed with an assumed casual inattention. "I can see yousitting with those old women as dry and false as any. No one savedme in the clacking, I'm sure. "

"We didn't speak of you, " Linda replied. She studied, unsparing, theloose flesh of the elder's ravaged countenance. Her mother, sherecognized, hated her, both because she was like Bartram Lowrie andstill young, with everything unspent that the other valued and hadlost. In support of herself Mrs. Feldt asserted again that she had"lived, " with stacks of friends and flowers, lavish parties anddevoted attendance. 

"You may be smarter than I was, " she went on, "but what good it doesyou who can say? And if you expect to get something for nothingyou're fooled before you start. " She shook out the airy breadths ofa vivid echo of past daring. "From the way you act a person mightthink you were pretty, but you are too thin and pulled out. I'veheard your looks called peculiar, and that was, in a manner ofspeaking, polite. You're not even stylish any more--the line is fullagain and not suitable for bony shoulders and no bust. " She stillcherished a complacency in her amplitude. 

Linda turned away unmoved. Of all the world, she thought, only DodgePleydon had the power actually to hurt her. She knew that she wouldsee him soon again and that again he would ask her to marry him. Sheconsidered, momentarily, the possibility of saying yes; and instantlythe dread born with him in the Lowrie garden swept over her. Lindatold herself that he was the only man for whom she could ever deeplycare; that--for every conceivable reason--such a marriage was perfect. But the shrinking from its implications grew too painful for support. 

Her mother's bitterness increased hourly; she no longer hid herfeelings from her husband and Judith; and dinner, accompanied by herelaborate sarcasm, was a difficult period in which, plainly, Mr. Moses Feldt suffered most and Linda was the least concerned. Thiscondition, she admitted silently, couldn't go on indefinitely; itwas too vulgar if for no other reason. And she determined to ask theLowries for another and more extended invitation. 

Pleydon came, as she had expected, and they sat in the smallreception-room with the high ceiling and dark velvet hangings, the piano at which, long ago it now seemed, Judith had played theairs of Gluck for her. He said little, but remained for a longwhile spread over the divan and watching her--in a formalchair--discontentedly. He rose suddenly and stood above her, adomineering bulk obliterating nearly everything else. In responseto his demand she said, pale and composed, that she was not"reasonable"; she omitted the "yet" included in his question. Pleydon frowned. However, then, he insisted no further. 

When he had gone Linda was as spent as though there had been a freshbrutal scene; and the following day she was enveloped in anunrelieved depression. Her mother mocked her silence as anotherevidence of ridiculous pretentiousness. Mr. Moses Feldt regarded herwith a furtive concerned kindliness; while Judith followed her withcountless small irritating complaints. It was the last day at theapartment before their departure for the summer. Linda wasinsuperably tired. She had gone to her room almost directly afterdinner, and when a maid came to her door with a card, she exclaimed, before looking at it, that she was not in. It was, however, ArnaudHallet; and, with a surprise tempered by a faint interest, she toldthe servant that she would see him. 

There was, Linda observed at once, absolutely no difference inArnaud's clothing, no effort to make himself presentable for NewYork or her. In a way, it amused her--it was so characteristic ofhis forgetfulness, and it made him seem doubly familiar. He waved ahand toward the luxury of the interior. "This, " he declared, "isdownright impressive, and lifted, I'm sure, out of a novel ofOuida's. 

"You will remember, " he continued, "complaining about my sense ofhumor one evening; and that, at the time, I warned you it might growworse. It has. I am afraid, where you are concerned, that it hasabsolutely vanished. My dear, you'll recognize this as a proposal. Ithought my mind was made up, after forty, not to marry; and Ispecially tried not to bring you into it. You were too young, Ifelt. I doubted if I could make you happy, and did everythingpossible, exhausted all the arguments, but it was no good. 

"Linda, dear, I adore you. "

She was glad, without the slightest answering emotion, that Arnaud, well--liked her. At the same time all her wisdom declared that shecouldn't marry him; and, with the unsparing frankness of youth andher individual detachment, she told him exactly why. 

"I need a great deal of money, " she proceeded, "because I amfrightfully extravagant. All I have is expensive; I hate cheapthings--even what satisfies most rich girls. Why, just my satinslippers cost hundreds of dollars and I'll pay unlimited amounts fora little fulling of lace or some rare flowers. You'd call it wicked, but I can't help it--it's me. 

"I've always intended to marry a man with a hundred thousand dollarsa year. Of course, that's a lot--do you hate me for telling you?--butI wouldn't think of any one with less than fifty--"

Arnaud Hallet interrupted quietly, "I have that. "

Linda gazed incredulously at his neglected shoes, the wrinkles ofhis inconsiderable coat and unstudied scarf. She saw that, actually, he had spoken apologetically of his possessions; and a stingingshame spread through her at the possibility that she had seemedcommon to an infinitely finer delicacy than hers. 

XIII

Most of these circumstances Linda Hallet quietly recalled sittingwith her husband in the house that had been occupied by theLowries'. A letter from Pleydon had taken her into a past sevenyears gone by; while ordinarily her memory was indistinct;ordinarily she was fully occupied by the difficulties, or rathercompromises, of the present. But, in the tranquil open glow of aFranklin stove and the withdrawn intentness of Arnaud reading, hermind had returned to the distressed period of her wedding. 

Elouise Lowrie--Amelia was dead--sunk in a stupor of extreme oldage, her bloodless hands folded in an irreproachable black surahsilk lap, sat beyond the stove; and Lowrie, Linda's elder child, five and a half, together with his sister Vigné, had been longasleep above. Linda was privately relieved by this: her childrenpresented enormous obligations. The boy, already at a model school, appalled her inadequate preparations by his flashes of perceptiveintelligence; while she was frankly abashed at the delicate rosyperfection of her daughter. 

The present letter was the third she had received from DodgePleydon, whom she had not seen since her marriage. At first he hadbeen enraged at the wrong, he had every reason to feel, she had donehim. Then his anger had dissolved into a meager correspondence ofoutward and obvious facts. There was so much that she had been unableto explain. He had always been impatient, even contemptuous, of theemotion that made her surrender to him unthinkable--Linda realizednow that it had been the strongest impulse of her life--and, ofcourse, she had never accounted for the practically unbalancedenmity of her mother. 

The latter had deepened to an incredible degree, so much so that Mr. Moses Feldt, though he had never taken an actual part in it--suchbitterness was entirely outside his generous sentimentality--hadbecome acutely uncomfortable in his own home, imploring Linda, withready tears, to be kinder to her mama. Judith, too, had growncutting, jealous of Linda's serenity of youth, as her appearanceshowed the effect of her wasting emotions. Things quiteextraordinary had happened: once Linda's skin had been almostseriously affected by an irritation that immediately followed thetrace of her powder-puff; and at several times she had had clumsilycomposed anonymous notes of a most distressing nature. 

She had wondered, calmly enough, which of the two bitter women wereresponsible, and decided that it was her mother. At this thesituation at the Feldts', increasingly strained, had become animpossibility. Arnaud Hallet, after his first visit, had soonreturned. There was no more mention of his money; but every time hesaw her he asked her again, in his special manner--a formalityflavored by a slight diffident humor--to marry him. Arnaud'sproposals had alternated with Pleydon's utterly different demand. 

Linda remembered agonized evenings when, in a return of his brutalmanner of the unforgettable night in the Lowrie garden, he tried toforce a recognition of his passion. It had left her cold, exhausted, the victim of a mingled disappointment at her failure to respondwith a hatred of all essential existence. At last, on a particularlytrying occasion, she had desperately agreed to marry him. 

The aversion of her mother, becoming really dangerous, had finallyappalled her; and a headache weighed on her with a leaden pain. Dodge, too, had been unusually considerate; he talked about thefuture--tied up, he asserted, in her--of his work; and suddenly, atthe signal of her rare tears, Linda agreed to a wedding. 

In the middle of the night she had wakened oppressed by a dreadresulting in an uncontrollable chill. She thought first that hermother was bending a malignant face over her; and then realized thather feeling was caused by her promise to Dodge Pleydon. It had grownworse instead of vanishing, waves of nameless shrinking swept overher; and in the morning, further harrowed by the actualities ofbeing, she had sent a telegram to Arnaud Hallet--to Arnaud'skindness and affection, his detachment not unlike her own. 

They were married immediately; and through the ceremony and thesucceeding days she had been almost entirely absorbed in a sensationof escape. At the death of Amelia Lowrie, soon after, Arnaud hadsuggested a temporary period in the house she remembered withpleasure; and, making small alterations with the months and years, they had tacitly agreed to remain. 

Linda often wondered, walking about the lower floor, why it seemedso familiar to her: she would stand in the dining-room, with itsceiling of darkened beams, and gaze absent-minded through the longwindows at the close-cut walled greenery without. The formaldrawing-room, at the right of the street entrance, equally held her--acool interior with slatted wooden blinds, a white mantelpiece withdelicately reeded supports and a bas-relief of Minerva on thecenter panel, a polished brass scuttle for cannel-coal and chairswith wide severely fretted backs upholstered in old pale damask. 

The house seemed familiar, but she could never grow accustomed tothe undeniable facts of her husband, the children and her completelychanged atmosphere. She admitted to herself that her principalfeeling in connection with Lowrie and Vigné was embarrassment. Hereshe always condemned herself as an indifferent, perhaps unnatural, mother. She couldn't help it. In the same sense she must be anunsatisfactory wife. Linda was unable to shake off the convictionthat it was like a play in which she had no more than a spectator'spart. 

This was her old disability, the result of her habit of sitting, asa child, apart from the concerns and stir of living. She made everypossible effort to overcome it, to surrender to her new conditions;but, if nothing else, an instinctive shyness prevented. It went backfurther, even, she thought, than her own experience, and sherecalled all she had heard and reconstructed of her father--a manshut in on himself who had, one day, without a word walked out ofthe door and left his wife, never to return. These realizations, however, did little to clarify her vision; she was continuallytrying to adjust her being to circumstances that persistentlyremained a little distant and blurred. 

In appearance, anyhow, Linda told herself with a measure ofreassurance, she was practically unchanged. She still, with thesupport of Arnaud, disregarding current fashion, wore her hair in astraight bang across her brow and blue gaze. She was as slender asformerly, but more gracefully round, in spite of the faintcharacteristic stiffness that was the result of her mentalhesitation. Her clothes, too, had hardly varied--she wore, wheneverpossible, white lawns ruffled about the throat and hem, with broadsoft black sashes, while her more formal dresses were sheaths ofdull unornamented satin extravagant in the perfection of theirsimplicity. 

XXIV

Arnaud Hallet stirred, sharply closing his book. He had changed--exceptfor a palpable settling down of grayness--as little as Linda. For awhile she had tried to bring about an improvement in his appearance, and he had met her expressed wish whenever he remembered it; but thiswas not often. In the morning a servant polished his shoes, brushedand ironed his suits; yet by evening, somehow, he managed to look asthough he hadn't been attended to for days. She would have liked himto change for dinner; other men of his connection did, it was a partof his inheritance. Arnaud, however, in his slight scoffingdisparagement, declined individually to annoy himself. He was, shelearned, enormously absorbed in his historical studies and papers. 

"Did you enjoy it?" she asked politely of his reading. "Extremely, "he replied. "The American Impressions of Tyrone Power, the Englishactor, through eighteen thirty-three and four. His account of aEuropean packet with its handbells and Saratoga water and breakfastof spitch-cock is inimitable. I'd like to have sat at Cato's then, with a julep or hail-storm, and watched the trotting races. "

Elouise Lowrie rose unsteadily, confused with dozing; but almostimmediately she gathered herself into a relentless propriety and aformal goodnight. 

"What has been running through that mysterious mind of yours?"

"I had a letter from Dodge, " she told him simply; "and I wasthinking a little about the past. " He exhibited the nice unstrainedinterest of his admirable personality. "Is he still in France?" hequeried. "Pleydon should be a strong man; I am sure we are bothconscious of a little disappointment in him. " She said: "I'll readyou his letter, it's on the table. 

"'You will see, my dear Linda, that I have not moved from the Rue dePenthièvre, although I have given up the place at Etretat, and I amnot going to renew the lease here. Rodin insists, and I coming toagree with him, that I ought to be in America. But the seriousattitude here toward art, how impossible that word has been made, ischarming. And you will be glad to know that I have had some successin the French good opinion. A marble, Cotton Mather, that I cut fromthe stone, has been bought for the Luxembourg. 

"'I can hear you both exclaim at the subject, but it is veryrepresentative of me now. I am tired of mythological naiads in aconstant state of pursuit. Get Hallet to tell you something aboutMather. What a somber flame! I have a part Puritan ancestry, as anyLowrie will inform you. Well, I shall be back in a few months, veryserious, and a politician--a sculptor has to be that if he means toland any public monuments in America. 

"'I hope to see you. '"

The letter ended abruptly, with the signature, "Pleydon. "

"Are you happy, Linda?" Arnaud Hallet asked unexpectedly after ashort silence. So abruptly interrogated she was unable to respond. "What I mean is, " he explained, "do you think you would have beenhappier married to him? I knew, certainly, that it was the closestpossible thing between us. " Now, however, she was able to satisfyhim:

"I couldn't marry Dodge. "

"Is it possible to tell me why?"

"He hurt me very much once. I tried to marry him, I tried to forgetit, but it was useless. I was dreadfully unhappy, in a great manyways--"

"So you sent for me, " he put in as she paused reflectively. "Ididn't hurt you, at any rate. " It seemed to her that his tone wasshadowed. "You have never hurt me, Arnaud, " she assured him, conscious of the inadequacy of her words. "You were everything Iwanted. "

"Except for my hats, " he said in a brief flash of his saving humor. "It would be better for me, perhaps, if I could hurt you. Thatability comes dangerously close to a constant of love. You mustn'tthink I am complaining. I haven't the slightest reason in the faceof your devastating honesty. I didn't distress you and I had thenecessary minimum--the fifty thousand. " His manner was so even, sodevoid of sting, that she could smile at the expression of hermaterial ambitions. "I realize exactly your feeling for myself, butwhat puzzles me is your attitude toward the children. "

"I don't understand it either, " she admitted, "except that I amquite afraid of them. They are so different from all my ownchildhood; often they are too much for me. Then I dread the timewhen they will discover how stupid and uneducated I am at bottom. I'm sure you already ask questions before them to amuse yourself atmy doubt. What shall I do, Arnaud, when they are really at schooland bring home their books?"

"Retreat behind your dignity as a parent, " he advised. "They arecertain to display their knowledge and ask you to bound things orname the capital of Louisiana. " She cried, "Oh, but I know that, it's New Orleans!" She saw at once, from his entertained expression, that she was wrong again, and became conscious of a faint flush ofannoyance. "It will be even worse, " she continued, "when Vigné looksto me for advice; I mean when she is older and has lovers. "

"She won't seriously; they never do. She'll tell you when it's allover. Lowrie will depend more on you. I may have my fun about thecapital of Louisiana, Linda, but I have the greatest confidence inyour wisdom. God knows what an unhappy experience your childhoodwas, but it has given you a superb worldly balance. "

"I suppose you're saying that I am cold, " she told him. "It must betrue, because it is repeated by every one. Yet, at times, I used to bevery different--you'd never imagine what a romantic thrill or strangeideas were inside of me. Like a memory of a deep woods, and--and theloveliest adventure. Often I would hear music as clearly as possible, and it made me want I don't know what terrifically. "

"An early experience, " he replied. Suddenly she saw that he wastired, his face was lined and dejected. "You read too much, " Lindadeclared. He said: "But only out of the printed book. " She wonderedvainly what he meant. As he stood before the glimmering coals, inthe room saturated in repose, she wished that she might give himmore; she wanted to spend herself in a riot of feeling on Arnaud andtheir children. What a detestable character she had! Her desire, herefforts, were wasted. 

He went about putting up the windows and closing the outsideshutters, a confirmed habit. Linda rose with her invariable sense ofseparation, the feeling that, bound on a journey with a hiddendestination, she was only temporarily in a place of littleimportance. It was like being always in her hat and jacket. Arnaudshook down the grate; then he gazed over the room; it was all, shewas sure, as it had been a century ago, as it should be--all exceptherself. 

XXV

Yet her marriage had realized in almost every particular what shehad--so much younger--planned. The early suggestion, becomingthrough constant reiteration a part of her knowledge, had beenfollowed and accomplished; and, as well, her later needs wereserved. Linda told herself that, in a world where a very great dealwas muddled, she had been unusually fortunate. And this made herangry at her pervading lack of interest in whatever she hadobtained. 

Other women, she observed, obviously less fortunate than she, werevolubly and warmly absorbed in any number of engagements andpleasures; she continually heard them, Arnaud's connections--thewhole superior society, eternally and vigorously discussing servantsand bridge, family and cotillions, indiscretions and charities. These seemed enough for them; their lives were filled, satisfied, extraordinarily busy. Linda, for the most part, had but little todo. Her servants, managed with remote exactness, gave no trouble;she had an excellent woman for the children; her dress presented nonew points of anxiety nor departure ... She was, in short, Arnaudadmitted, perfectly efficient. She disposed of such detailsmechanically, almost impatiently, and was contemptuous, no envious, of the women whose demands they contented. 

At the dinners, the balls, to which Arnaud's sense of obligationboth to family and her took them against his inclination, it was thesame--everyone, it appeared to Linda, was flushed with an intentnessshe could not share. Men, she found, some of them extremelypleasant, still made adroit and reassuring efforts for her favor;the air here, she discovered, was even freer than the bravado of herearlier surroundings. This love-making didn't disturb her--it was, ultimately, the men who were fretted--indeed, she had rather hopedthat it would bring her the relief she lacked. 

But again the observations and speculation of her mature childhood, what she had heard revealed in the most skillful femininedissections, had cleared her understanding to a point that made theadvances of hopeful men quite entertainingly obvious. Their methodwas appallingly similar and monotonous. She liked, rather than not, the younger ones, whose confidence that their passion was somethingnew on earth at times refreshed her; but the navigated materialismof greater experience finally became distasteful. She discussed thissharply with Arnaud:

"You simply can't help believing that most women are completeidiots. "

"You haven't said much more for men. "

"The whole thing is too silly! Why is it, Arnaud? It ought to beimpressive and sweep you off your feet, up--"

"Instead of merely behind some rented palms, " he added. "But I mustsay, Linda, that you are not a very highly qualified judge ofsentiment. " He pronounced this equably, but she was conscious of thepresence of an injury in his voice. She was a little weary at beingeternally condemned for what she couldn't help. Any failure was asmuch Arnaud Hallet's as hers; he had had his opportunity, all thatfor which he had implored her. Her thoughts returned to DodgePleydon. April was well advanced, and he had written that he'd beback and see them in the spring. Linda listened to her heart but itwas unhastened by a beat. She would be very glad to have him athand, in her life again, of course. 

Then the direction of her mind veered--what did he still think ofher? Probably he had altogether recovered from his love for her. Ithad been a warm day, and Arnaud had opened a window; but now she wasaware of a cold air on her shoulder and she asked him abruptly tolower the sash. Linda remembered, with a lingering sense of triumph, the Susanna Noda whom Dodge had left at a party for her. There hadbeen a great many Susannas in his life; the reason for this was theabsence of any overwhelming single influence. It might be that now--hehad written of the change in the subjects of his work--such a guidehad come into his existence. She hoped she had. Yet, in view of theannounced silliness of women, she didn't want him to be cheaplydeluded. 

He was an extremely human man. 

But she, Linda, it seemed, was an inhuman woman. The days ran intoweeks that added another month to spring; a June advanced sultrywith heat; and, suddenly as usual, a maid at the door of her roomannounced Pleydon. It was five o'clock in the afternoon, she had todress, and she sent him a message that he mustn't expect her in ahurry. She paused in her deliberate preparations for a longthoughtful gaze into a mirror; there was not yet a shadow on herface, the trace of a line at her eyes. The sharp smooth turning andabsolute whiteness of her bare shoulders were flawless. 

At first it appeared to Linda that he, too, had not changed. Theywere in the library opening into the dining-room, a space shutagainst the sun by the Venetian blinds, and faintly scented by abowl of early tea roses. He appeared the same--large and informallyclad in gray flannels, with aggressive features and sensitive stronghands. He was quiet but plainly happy to be with her again and satleaning forward on his knees, watching her intently as she chose aseat. 

Then it slowly dawned on her that he had changed, yes--tragically. Pleydon, in every way, was years older. His voice, less arbitrary, had new depths of questioning, his mouth was more repressed, hisface notably sparer of flesh. He was immediately aware of the resultof her scrutiny. "I have been working like a fool, " he explained. "Abreath of sickness, too, four years ago in Soochow. One of thedamnable Asiatic fevers that a European is supposed to be immunefrom. You are a miracle, Linda. How long has it been--nearly eightyears; you have two children and Arnaud Hallet and yet you are thegirl I met at Markue's. I wanted to see you different, just alittle, a trace of something that should have happened to you. Ithasn't. You're the most remarkable mother alive. "

"If I am, " she returned, "it is not as a success, or at least forme. Lowrie and Vigné are healthy, and happy enough; but I can't losemyself in them, Dodge; I can't lose myself at all. "

He was quiet at this, the smoke of his cigarette climbing bluely ina space with the aqueous stillness of a lake's depths. "The same, "he went on after a long pause; "nothing has touched you. I ought tobe relieved but, do you know, it frightens me. You are relentless. You have no right, at the same time, to be beautiful. I have seen agreat many celebrated women at their best moments, but you arelovelier than any. It isn't a simple affair of proportion andfeatures--I wish I could hold it in a phrase, the turn of a chisel. I can't. It's deathless romance in a bang cut blackly acrossheavenly blue. " He was silent again, and Linda glad that he stillfound her attractive. She discovered that the misery his presenceonce caused her had entirely vanished, its place taken by an eagerinterest in his affairs, a lightness of spirit at the realizationthat, while his love for her might have grown calm, no other womanpossessed it. 

At the dinner-table she listened--cool and fresh, Arnaud complained, in spite of the heat--to the talk of the two men. By her sideElouise Lowrie occasionally repeated, in a voice like the faintjangle of an old thin piano, the facts of a family connection or acommendation of the Dodges. Arnaud really knew a surprising lot, andhis conversation with Pleydon was strung with terms completelyunintelligible to her. It developed, finally, into an argument overthe treatment of the acanthus motive in rococo ornament. France wassummoned against Spain; the architectural degrading of Italydeplored.... It amazed her that any one could remember so much. 

Linda without a conscious reason suddenly stopped the investigationof her feeling for Pleydon. Even in the privacy of her thoughts anadded obscurity kept her from the customary clear reasoning. Afterdinner, out in the close gloom of the garden, she watched theflicker of the cigarettes. There was thunder, so distant and vaguethat for a long while Linda thought she was deceived. She had a keenrushing sensation of the strangeness of her situation here--LindaHallet. The night was like a dream from which she would stir, sigh, to find herself back again in the past waiting for the return of hermother from one of her late parties. 

But it was Arnaud who moved and, accompanying Elouise Lowrie, wentinto the house for his interminable reading. Pleydon's voice beganin a low remembering tone:

"What a fantastic place the Feldt apartment was, with that smotheredroom where you said you would marry me. You must have got hold ofHallet in the devil of a hurry. I've often tried to understand whathappened; why, all the time, you were upset--why, why, why?"

"In a way it was because a ridiculous hairdresser burned out some ofmy mother's front wave, " she explained. 

"Of course, " he replied derisively, "nothing could be plainer. "

She agreed calmly. "It was very plain. If you want me to try to tellyou don't interrupt. It isn't a happy memory, and I am only doing itbecause I was so rotten to you. 

"Yes, I can see now that it was the hairdresser and a hundred otherthings exactly the same. My mother, all the women we knew, didnothing but lace and paint and frizzle for men. I used to think itwas a game they played and wonder where the fun was. There were evenhints about that and later they particularized and it made me assick as possible. The men, too, were odious; mostly fat and bald;and after a while, when they pinched or kissed me, I wanted to die. 

"That was all I knew about love, I had never heard of any other--menaway from their families for what they called a good time and womenplotting and planning to give it to them or not give it to them. Then mother, after her looks were spoiled, married Mr. Moses Feldt, and I met Judith, who only existed for men and men's rooms and toldme worse things, I'm sure, than mother ever dreamed; and, on top ofthat, I met you and you kissed me. 

"But it was different from any other; it didn't shock me, and itbrought back a thrill I have always had. I wanted, then, to loveyou, and have you ask me to marry you, more than anything else inthe world. I was sure, if you would only be patient, that I couldchange what had hurt me into a beautiful feeling. I couldn't tellyou because I didn't understand myself. " She stopped, and Pleydonrepeated, bitterly and slow:

"Fat old bald men; and I was one with them destroying your exquisitehope. " She heard the creak of the basket chair as he leaned forward, his face masked in darkness. "Perhaps you think I haven't paid. 

"You will never know what love is unless I can manage somehow tomake you understand how much I love you. Hallet will have to endureyour hearing it. This doesn't belong to him; it has not touched theearth. Every one, more or less, talks about love; but not one in athousand, not one in a million, has such an experience. If they didit would tear the world into shreds. It would tear them as it hasme. I realize the other, the common thing--who experimented more!This has nothing to do with it. A boy lost in the idealism of hisfirst worship has a faint reflection. Listen:

"I can always, with a wish, see you standing before me. Youyourself--the folds of your sash, the sharp narrow print of yourslippers on the pavement or the matting or the rug, the rufflesabout your hands. I have the feeling of you near me with yourbreathing disturbing the delicacy of your breast. There is the odorand shimmer of your hair ... Your lips move ... But without a sound. 

"This vision is more real than reality, than an opera-house full ofpeople or the Place Vendôme; and it, you, is all I care for, all Ithink about, all I want. I find quiet places and stay there forhours, with you; or, if that isn't possible, I turn into a blindman, a dead man warm again at the bare thought of your face. Listen:

"I've been in shining heaven with you. I have been melted to nothingand made over again, in you, good. We have been walking together ina new world with rapture instead of air to breathe. A slow walkthrough dark trees--God knows why--like pines. And every time Ithink of you it is exactly as though I could never die, as thoughyou had burned all the corruption out of me and I was made of silverfire. And listen:

"Nothing else is of any importance, now or afterward, you are nowand the hereafter. I see people and people and hear words and words, and I forget them the moment they have gone, the second they arestill. But I haven't lost an inflection of your voice. When I workin clay or stone I model and cut you into every surface and fold. Isee you looking back at me out of marble and bronze. And here, inthis garden, you tried to give me more--"

The infinitely removed thunder was like the continued echo of hisvoice. There was a stirring of the leaves above her head; and thelight that had shone against the house in Elouise Lowrie's windowwas suddenly extinguished. All that she felt was weariness and aconfused dejection, the weight of an insuperable disappointment. Shecould say nothing. Words, even Pleydon's, seemed to her vain. Thesolid fact of Arnaud, of what Dodge, more than seven years before, had robbed her, put everything else aside, crushed it. 

She realized that she would never get from life what supremelyrepaid the suffering of other women, made up for them the failure ofpractically every vision. She was sorry for herself, yes, and forDodge Pleydon. Yet he had his figures in metal and stone; his senseof the importance of his work had increased enormously; and, well, there were Lowrie and Vigné; it would be difficult, every oneagreed, to find better or handsomer children. But they seemed nomore than shadows or colored mist. This terrified her--what ahopelessly deficient woman she must be! But even in the profundityof her depression the old vibration of nameless joy reached herheart. 

In the morning there was a telegram from Judith Feldt, saying thather mother was dangerously sick, and she had lunch on the train forNew York. The apartment seemed stuffy; there was a trace ofdinginess, neglect, about the black velvet rugs and hangings. Hermother, she found, had pneumonia; there was practically no chance ofher recovering. Linda sat for a short while by the elder's bed, intent upon a totally strange woman, darkly flushed and ravished inan agonizing difficulty of breathing. Linda had a remembered visionof her gold-haired and gay in floating chiffons, and suddenly lifeseemed shockingly brief. A serious-visaged clergyman entered theroom as she left and she heard the rich soothing murmur of aconfident phrase. 

The Stella Condon who had become Mrs. Moses Feldt had had littletime for the support of the church; although Linda recalled that shehad uniformly spoken well of its offices. To condemn Christianity, she had asserted, was to invite bad luck. She treated this inexactly the way she regarded walking under ladders or spilling saltor putting on a stocking wrong. Linda, however, had disregardedthese possibilities of disaster and, with them, religion. 

A great many people, she noticed, talked at length about it; womenin their best wraps and with expensive little prayer books left thehotels for various Sunday morning services, and ministers came inlater for tea. All this, she understood, was in preparation forheaven, where everybody, who was not in hell, was to be forever thesame and yet radiantly different. It seemed very vague and far awayto Linda, and, since there was such a number of immediate problemsfor her to consider, she had easily ignored the future. When now, with her mother dying, it was thrust most uncomfortably before her. 

She half remembered sentences, admonitions, of the godly--a womanhad once told her that dancing and low gowns were hateful in thesight of God, some one else that playing-cards were an instrument ofthe devil. Pleasure, she had gathered, was considered wrong, and sheinstinctively put these opinions, together with a great deal else, aside as envious. 

That expressed her whole experience. She had never keenly associatedthe thought of death with herself before, and she was unutterablyrevolted by the impending destruction of her fine body, the delicatecare of which formed her main preoccupation in life. Age wassupremely distasteful, but this other ... She shuddered. 

Linda wanted desperately to preserve the whiteness of her skin, theflexible black distinction of her hair, yes--her beauty. Here, again, with other women the vicarious immortality of children wouldbe sufficient. But not for her. She was in the room that had beenhers before marriage, with her infinite preparations for the nightat an end; and, her hair loose across the blanched severity of herattire, her delicately full arms bare, she clasped her cold hands instabbing apprehension. 

She would do anything, anything, to escape that repulsive fatalityto her lavished care. It was only to be accomplished by being good;and goodness was in the charge of the minister. She saw clearly andat once her difficulty--how could she go to a solemn man in aclerical vest and admit that she was solely concerned by theimpending loss of her beauty. The promised splendor of heaven, initself, failed to move her--it threatened to be monotonous; and shewas honest in her recognition that charity, the ugliness of poverty, repelled her. Linda was certain that she could never change in theseparticulars; she could only pretend. 

A surprising multiplication of such pretense occurred to her inpeople regarded as impressively religious. She had seen men likethat--she vaguely thought of the name Jasper--going off with hermother in cabs to dinners that must have been "godless. " Shewondered if this mere attitude, the public show, were enough. And aninstinctive response told her that it was not. If all she had beeninformed about the future were true she decided that her mother'schance was no worse than that of any false display of virtue. 

She, Linda, could do nothing. 

The funeral ceremony with its set form--so inappropriate to hermother's qualities--was even more remote from Linda's sympathiesthan was common in her encounters. But Mr. Moses Feldt's griefappeared to her actual and affecting. He invested every one with thepurity of his own spirit. 

She left New York at the first possible moment with the feeling thatshe was definitely older. The realization, she discovered, happenedin that way--ordinarily giving the flight of time no considerationit was brought back to her at intervals of varying length. As sheaged they would grow shorter. 

The result of this experience was an added sense of failure; shetried more than ever to overcome her indifference, get a greaterhappiness from her surroundings and activity. Linda cultivated anattention to Lowrie and Vigné. They responded charmingly but hershyness with them persisted in the face of her inalienable right totheir full possession. She insisted, too, on going about vigorouslyin spite of Arnaud's humorous groans and protests. She forcedherself to talk more to the men attracted to her, and assumed, withdisconcerting ease, an air of sympathetic interest. But, unfortunately, this brought on her a rapid increase of the love-making that shefound so fatiguing. 

She studied her husband thoughtfully through the evenings at home, before the Franklin stove, or, in summer, in the secluded garden. Absolutely nothing was wrong with him; he had, after several deaths, inherited even more money; and, in his deprecating manner where itwas concerned, devoted it to her wishes. Except for books, and theclothes she was forced to remind him to get, he had no personalexpenses. In addition to the money he never offended her, hisrelationships and manner were conducted with an inborn niceformality that preserved her highest self-opinion. 

Yet she was never able to escape from the limitations of a calmadmiration; she couldn't lose herself, disregard herself in a floodof generous emotion. When, desperately, she tried, he, too, wasperceptibly ill at ease. Usually he was undisturbed, but once, whenshe stood beside him with her coffee cup at dinner, he disastrouslylost his equanimity. Tensely putting the cup away he caught her withstraining hands. 

"Oh, Linda, " he cried, "is it true that you love me! Do you reallybelong to us--to Vigné and Lowrie and me? I can't stand it if youwon't ... Some day. "

She backed away into the opening of a window, against the night, fromthe justice of his desire; and she was cold with self-detestation asher fingers touched the glass. Linda tried to speak, to lie; but, miserably still, she was unable to deceive him. The animation, thefervor of his longing, swiftly perished. His arms dropped to hisside. An unbearable constraint deepened with the silence in the room, and later he lightly said:

"You mustn't trifle with my ancient heart, Linda, folly and age--"

XXVIII

The only other quantity in her life was Dodge Pleydon. He wrote heragain, perhaps three months after the explanation of his love; buthis letter was devoted wholly to his work, and so technical that shehad to ask Arnaud to interpret it. He added:

"That is the mind of an impressive man. He has developed enormously--curious, so late in life. Pleydon must be fully as old as myself. It's clear that he has dropped his women. I saw a photograph of theCotton Mather reproduced in a weekly, and it was as gaunt as aPuritan Sunday. Brimmed with power. Why don't we see him oftener?Write and say I'd like to contradict him again about the Eastlakeperiod. "

He made no further reference to Pleydon then, and Linda failed towrite as Arnaud suggested. Though she wasn't disturbed at thepossibility of a continuation of his admissions of love she wasweary of the thought of its uselessness. Linda was, she toldherself, damned by practicability. Her husband used the familiarterm of reproach, material. She didn't in the least want to be. Circumstance, she had a feeling, had forced it upon her. 

Arnaud, however, who had met Dodge Pleydon in Philadelphia, broughthim home. Linda saw with a strange constriction of the heart thatPleydon's hair was definitely gray. He had had a recurrence of thefever contracted in Soochow. The men at once entered on anotherdiscussion which she was unable to follow; but it was clear that herhusband now listened with an increasing surrender of opinion to thesculptor. Pleydon, it was true, was correspondingly more impatientwith minds that disagreed with his. He was at once thinner andbigger, his face deeply lined; but his eyes had a steady vitalintensity difficult to encounter. 

She considered him in detail as the talk left dinner, the glassesand candles spent. He drank, from a tall tumbler with a single pieceof ice, the special whisky Arnaud kept. He had been neglectinghimself, too--there were traces of clay about his finger-nails, andhe ate hurriedly and insufficiently. When she had an opportunity, Linda decided, she would speak to him about these necessary trifles. Then, she had no chance; and it was not until the following winter, at a Thursday afternoon concert during the yearly exhibition of theAcademy of Fine Arts, that she could gently complain. 

It was gloomy, with a promise of snow outside; and the great spaceof the stairway to the galleries was filled with shadow and thestrains of _Armide_ echoing from the orchestra playing at therailing above the entrance. Pleydon, together with a great manyothers, had spread an overcoat on the masonry of the steps, and theywere seated in the obscurity of the balustrade. 

"You look as though you hadn't had enough to eat, " she observed. "You used to be almost thick but now you are a thing of terrifyinggrimness. You look like a monk. I wonder why you're like a monk, Dodge?"

"Linda Condon, " he replied. 

"That can't be it now; I haven't been Linda Condon for years, butMrs. Arnaud Hallet. It's very pretty, of course, and I'd like tothink you could keep a young love alive so long. Experience makes medoubt anything of the sort; but then I was always skeptical. "

"You have never been anyone else, " he asserted positively. "You wereborn Linda Condon and you'll die that, except for some extraordinaryaccident. I can't imagine what it would be--a miracle like quaker-ladiesin the Antarctic. "

"It sounds uncomplimentary, and I'm sick of being compared withpolar places. What are quaker-ladies?"

"Fragile little flowers in the spring meadows. "

"I'd rather listen to the music than you. "

"That is why loving you is so eternal, why it doesn't fluctuate likea human emotion. You can't exhaust it and rest before a new tidesweeps back; the timeless ecstasy of a worship of God ... Breedingmadness. "

She failed to understand and turned a troubled gaze to his bitterrepression. "I don't like to make you unhappy, Dodge, " she said in alow tone. "What can I do? I am a horrid disappointment to all ofyou, but most to myself. I can't go over it again. "

"Beauty has nothing to do with happiness, " he declared harshly. Herose, without consulting her wishes; and Linda followed him as heproceeded above, irresistibly drawn to the bronze he was showing inthe Rotunda. 

It was the head and part of the shoulders of a very old woman, infinitely worn, starved by want and spent in brutal labor. Therewas a thin wisp of hair pinned in a meager knot on her skull; herbones were mercilessly indicated, barely covered with drum-likeskin; her mouth was stamped with timid humility; while her eyespeered weakly from their sunken depths. 

"Well?" he demanded, interrogating her in the interest of his work. 

"I--I suppose it's perfectly done, " she replied, at a loss for asatisfactory appreciation. "It's true, certainly. But isn't it moreunpleasant than necessary?" Pleydon smiled patiently. "Beauty, " hesaid, with his mobile gesture. "Pity, _Katharsis_--the wringingout of all dross. "

The helpless feeling of her overwhelming ignorance returned. She waslike a woman held beyond the closed door of treasure. "Come overhere. " He unceremoniously led her to the modeling of a ruffledgrouse, faithful in every diversified feather. Linda thought itadmirable, really amazing; but he dismissed it with a passionateenergy. "The dull figuriste!" he exclaimed. "Daguerre. Once I couldhave done that, yes, and been entertained by its adroitness andinsolence--before you made me. Do you suppose I was able then tounderstand the sheer tragic fortitude to live of a scrubwoman! Thehead you thought unpleasant--haven't you seen her going home in theMarch slush of a city? Did you notice the gaps in her shoes, theragged shawl about a body twisted with forty, fifty, sixty years ofwet stone floors and steps? Did you wonder what she had for supper?"

"No, Dodge, I didn't. They always make me wretched. "

"Well, to realize all that, to feel the degradation of her nature, to lie, sick with exhaustion, on the broken slats of her bed under aravelled-out travesty of a quilt, and get up morning after morningin an iron winter dark--to experience that in your spirit and put itinto durable metal, hard stone--is to hold beauty in your hands. "

Her interest in his speech was mingled with the knowledge that, inorder to dress comfortably for dinner, she must leave immediately. Pleydon helped her into the Hallet open motor landaulet. Lindademanded quantities of air. He was, he told her at the door, leavingin an hour for New York. "I wish you could be happier, " sheinsisted. He reminded her that he had had the afternoon with her. Itwas so little, she thought, carried rapidly over a smooth widestreet. His love for her increased rather than lessened. Howwonderful it was.... The woman outside that barred door of treasure. 

XXIX

Linda thought frequently about Dodge and his feeling for her;memories of his words, his appearance, speculations, spread throughher tranquil daily affairs like the rich subdued pattern of a finecarpet on the bare floor of her life. She was puzzled by the depthof a passion that, apparently, made no demands other than theoccasional necessity to be with her and the knowledge that sheexisted. If she had been a very intelligent woman, and, of course, not quite bad-looking, she might have understood both Pleydon andArnaud, the latter a man whose mind was practically absorbed in thepages of books. There could be no doubt, no question, of their lovefor her. 

Then there had always been the others--the men at the parties, inher garden, through the old days of her childhood in hotels. It wasvery stupid, very annoying, but at the same time she becameinterested in what, with her candid indifference, affected them. Shehad never, really, even when she desired, succeeded in giving themanything, anything conscious or for which they moved. Judith Feldt, on the contrary, had been prodigal. And, while certainly numbers ofmen had been attracted to her, they all tired of her with markedrapidity. Men met Judith, Linda recalled, with eagerness, they cameimmediately and often to see her ... For, perhaps, a month. Then, temporarily deserted, she was submerged in depression and nervoustears. 

But, while it was obviously impossible for all lovers to be constant, two extraordinary and superior men would be faithful to her as longas she lived, no--as long as they lived. This was beyond doubt. Onewas celebrated--she watched with a quiet pride Pleydon's famepenetrate the country--and the other, her husband, a person ofthe most exacting delicacy of habits, intellect and wit. 

What was it, she wondered, that made the supreme importance of womento men worth consideration. Linda was thinking of this now inconnection with her daughter. Vigné was fourteen; a larger girl thanshe had ever been, with her father's fine abundant cinnamon-brownhair, a shapely sensitive mouth, and a wide brown gaze with a habitof straying, at inappropriate moments, from things seen to theinvisible. She was, Linda realized thankfully, transparently honest;her only affectation was the slight supercilious manner of herassociations; and she read, ridiculously like her father, withincreasing pleasure. 

However, what engaged Linda most was the fact that Vigné alreadyliked men; she had been at the fringe, as it were, of young dances, with a sparkling satisfaction to herself and the securely niceyouths who "cut in" at her brief appearances. 

The truth was that Linda saw that more than a trace of StellaCondon's warm generosity of emotion had been brought by herself toArnaud's daughter. The faults of every life, every circumstance, were endlessly multiplied through all existence. At fourteen, it wasLinda's frowning impression, her mother had very fully instructedher in the wiles and structure of admirable marriage, and she hadnever completely lost some hard pearls of the elder's wisdom. Shouldshe, in turn, communicate them to Vigné?

The moment, the anxiety, she dreaded was arriving, and it found herno freer of doubt than had the other aspects of her own responses. Yet here she was possessed by the keenest need for absoluterectitude; and perhaps this, she thought, with an unusual pleasure, was an evidence of the affection she had seemed to lack. But in theend she said nothing. 

She was still unable to disentangle the flesh from the spirit, love--thelove that so amazingly illuminated Dodge Pleydon--from comfort. Dodgehad disturbed all her sense of values, even to the point of unsettlingher allegiance to the supremacy of a great deal of money. He had workedthis without giving her anything definite, that she could explain toVigné, in return. Linda preserved her demand for the actual. If shecould only comprehend the force animating Dodge she felt life would beclear. 

She was tempted to experiment--when had such a possibility occurredto her before?--and discover just how far in several directionsPleydon's devotion went. This would be easy now, she wasunrestrained by the fact of Arnaud, and the old shrinking from thesculptor happily vanished. Yet with him before her, on one of hisinfrequent visits to their house, she realized that her courage wasinsufficient. Was it that or something deeper--a reluctance to turnherself like a knife in the source of the profoundest compliment awoman could be paid. Linda thought too highly of his love for that;the texture of the carpet had become too gratifying. 

They were all three in the library, as customary; and Linda, restless, saw her reflection in a closed long window. She waswearing yellow, the color of the jonquils on a candle-stand; butwith her familiar sash tied and the ends falling to the hem of herskirt. The pointed oval of her face was unchanged, her pallor, thestraight line of her black bang, the blueness of her eyes, were asthey had been a surprisingly long while ago. Arnaud, with adisconcerting comprehension, demanded, "Well, are you satisfied?"She replied coolly, "Entirely. " Pleydon, seated for over an hourwithout moving, or even the trivial relief of a cigarette, followedher with his luminous uncomfortable gaze, his disembodied passion. 

XXX

Linda heard Vigné's laugh, the expression of a sheer lightness ofheart, following a low eager murmur of voices in her daughter'sroom, and she was startled by its resemblance to the gay pitch ofMrs. Moses Feldt's old merriment. Three of Vigné's friends were withher, all approximately eighteen, talking, Linda knew, men and--itwas autumn--anticipating the excitements of their bow to formalsociety that winter. They had, she silently added, little enough tolearn about the latter. Through the year past they had been to adancing-class identical, except for an earlier hour and age, withmature affairs; but before that they had been practically introducedto the pleasures of their inheritance. 

The men were really boys at the university, past the first year, receptacles of unlimited worldly knowledge and experience. Theybelonged to exclusive university societies and eating clubs, andLinda found their stiff similarity of correct bigoted pattern highlyentertaining. She had no illusions about what might be called theirmorals; they were midway in the period of youthful unrestraint; butshe recognized as well that their attitude toward, for example, Vigné was irreproachable. Such boys affected to disdain the girls oftheir associated families ... Or imagined themselves incurably inlove. 

The girls, for their part, while insisting that forty was the idealage for a lover--the terms changed with the seasons, last year"suitor" had been the common phrase--were occasionally swept inyoung company into a high irrational passion. Mostly, throughskillful adult pressure or firm negation, such affairs came tonothing; but even these were sometimes overcome. And, when Linda hadbeen disturbed by the echo of old days in her daughter's tones, shewas considering exactly such a state. 

One of the nicest youths imaginable, Bailey Sandby, had lost alltrace of superior aloofness in a devotion to Vigné. He was short, squarely built, with clear pink cheeks, steady light blue eyes andcrisp very fair hair. This was his last season of academicinstruction, after which a number of years, at an absurdly lowpayment, awaited him in his father's bond brokerage concern. However, he was, Linda gathered, imperious in his urgent need forVigné's favor. 

Ridiculous, she thought, at the same time illogically rehearsingthe resemblances of Vigné to her grandmother. She had no doubt thatthe parties Vigné shared on the terraces and wide lawns, in theinformal dancing at country houses, were sufficiently sophisticated;there was on occasion champagne, and--for the masculine elementanyhow--cocktails. The aroma of wine, lightly clinging to her youngdaughter's breath, filled her with an old instinctive sickness. 

She had spoken to Arnaud who, in turn, severely addressed Vigné; butduring this Linda had been oppressed by the familiar feeling ofimpotence. The girl, of course, had properly heard them; but shegave her mother the effect of slipping easily beyond their grasp. When she had gone to bed Arnaud repeated a story brought to him bythe juvenile Lowrie, under the influence of a temporary indignationat his sister's unwarranted imposition of superiority. Arnaud wenton:

"Actually they had this kissing contest, it was at Chestnut Hill, with a watch held; and Vigné, or so Lowrie insisted, won the prizefor length of time--something like a minute. Now, when I was young--"

Submerged in apprehensive memory Linda lost most of his account ofthe Eden-like youth of his earlier day. When, at last, hisassertions pierced her abstraction, it was only to bring her to therealization of how pathetically little he knew of either Vigné orher. She weighed the question of utter frankness here--the qualityenhanced by universal obscurity--but she was obliged to check herdesire for perfect understanding. A purely feminine need to hide, even from Arnaud, any detracting facts about women shut her into adiplomatic silence. In reality he could offer them no help; theirproblems--in a world created more objectively by the hand of manthan God--were singular to themselves. Women were quite like spoiledcaptives to foreign princes, masking, in their apparent complacency, a necessarily secret but insidiously tyrannical control. It wouldn'tdo, in view of this, to expose too much. 

The following morning it was Arnaud, rather than herself, who had aletter from Pleydon. "He wants us to come over to New York and hisstudio, " the former explained. "He has some commission or other froma city in the Middle West, and a study to show us. I'd like it verymuch; we haven't seen this place, and his surroundings are not to beoverlooked. "

Pleydon's rooms were directly off Central Park West, in an apartmenthouse obviously designed for prosperous creative arts, with a hallfrescoed in the tones of Puvis de Chavannes and an elevator cagebeautifully patterned in iron grilling. Dodge Pleydon met them inhis narrow entry and conducted them into a pleasant reception-room. "It's a duplex, " he explained of his quarters; "the dining-room yousee and the kitchen's beyond, while the baths and all that are overour heads; the studio fills both floors. "

There were low book cases with their continuous top used as a shelffor a hundred various objects, deep long chairs of caressing easeand chairs of coffee-colored wicker with amazingly high backs wovenwith designs of polished shells into the semblance of spreadpeacocks' tails. The yellow silk curtains at the windows, the rugwith the intricate coloring of a cashmere shawl, the Russian teaservice, were in a perfection of order; and Linda almost resentfullyacknowledged the skilful efficiency of his maid. It was surprisingthat, without a wife, a man could manage such a degree of comfort!

Over tea far better than hers, in china of an infinitely finerfragility, she studied Pleydon thoughtfully. He looked still againperceptibly older, his face continued to grow sparer of flesh, emphasizing the aggressively bony structure of his head. When heshut his mouth after a decided statement she could see theprojection of the jaw and the knotted sinews at the base of hischeeks. No, Dodge didn't seem well. She asked if there had been anyreturn of the fever and he nodded in an impatient affirmative, returning at once to the temporarily suspended conversation withArnaud. There was a vast difference, too, in the way in which hetalked. 

His attitude was as assertive as ever, but it had less expression inwords; unaccountable periods of silence, almost ill-natured, overtook him, spaces of abstraction when it was plain that he hadforgotten the presence of whoever might be by. Even direct questionssometimes failed to pierce immediately his consciousness. Dodge, Linda told herself, lived entirely too much alone. Then she saidthis aloud, thoughtlessly, and she was startled by the suddenintolerable flash of his gaze. An awkward pause followed, broken bythe uprearing of Pleydon's considerable length. 

"I must take you into the studio before it is too dark, " heproceeded. "Every creative spirit knows when its great moment hascome. Well, mine is here. " The men stood aside as Linda, her headpositively ringing with the thrill that was like a strain of Gluck, the happy sadness, entered the bare high spaciousness of DodgePleydon's workroom. 

XXXI

Everything she saw, the stripped floor, the white walls bare but forsome casts like the dismembered fragments of flawless blanchedbodies, the inclined plane of the wide skylight, bore an impalpablewhite dust of dried clay. In a corner, enclosed in low boards, astooped individual with wood-soled shoes and a shovel was working amass of clay over which at intervals he sprinkled water, and atintervals halted to make pliable lumps of a uniform size which headded to a pile wrapped in damp cloths. There were a number ofmodeling stands with twisted wires grotesquely resembling a child'sline drawing of a human being; while a stand with some modelingtools on its edge bore an upright figure shapeless in its swathingof dampened cloths. 

"The great moment, " Pleydon said again, in a vibrant tone. "But youknow nothing of all this, " he directly addressed Linda. "Neither, probably, will you have heard of Simon Downige. He was born atCottarsport, in Massachusetts, about eighteen forty; and, after--inthe support of his hatred of any slavery--he fought through theCivil War, he came home and found that his town stifled him. Hedidn't marry at once, as so many returning soldiers did; instead hewas wedded to a vision of freedom, freedom of opinion, of spirit, worship--any kind of spaciousness whatever. And, in the pursuit ofthat, he went West. 

"He told them that he was going to find--but found was the word--a placewhere men could live together in a purity of motives and air. No more, you understand; he hadn't a personal fanatical belief to exploit andattract the hysteria of women and insufficient men. He was not apathological messiah; but only Simon Downige, an individual whocouldn't comfortably breathe the lies and injustice and hypocrisy ofthe ordinary community. No doubt he was unbalanced--his sensitivenessto a universal condition would prove that. Normally people remainundisturbed by such trivialities. If they didn't an end would come toone or the other, the lies or the world. 

"He traveled part way in a Conestoga wagon--a flight out of Egypt;they were common then, slow canvas-covered processions with entirefamilies drawn by the mysterious magnetism of the West. Then, leaving even such wayfarers, he walked, alone, until he came on ameadow by a little river and a grove of trees, probablycottonwoods.... That was Simon Downige, and that, too, was Hesperia. Yes, he was unbalanced--the old Greek name for beautiful lands. Itis a city now, successful and corruptly administered--what alwayshappens to such visions. 

"It is necessary, Linda, as I've always told you, to understand thewhole motive behind a creation in permanent form. A son of Simon's--yes, he finally married--a unique and very rich character, wife dead andno children, commissioned a monument to the founder of Hesperia, inOhio, and of his fortune. 

"They even have a civic body for the control of public building; andthey came East to approve my statue, or rather the clay sketch forit. They were very solemn, and one, himself a sculptor, a graduateof the Beaux Arts, ran a suggestive thumb over Simon and didincredible damage. But, after a great deal of hesitation, and adescription from the sculptor of what he thought excellentlyappropriate for such magnificence, they accepted my study. Thepresent Downige, really--though I understand there is anotherpretentious branch in Hesperia--bullied them into it. He cursed theBeaux-Arts graduate with the most brutal and satisfactory freedom--thetyranny of his money; the crown, you see, of Simon's hope. "

He unwrapped one by one the wet cloths; and Linda, in an eagernesssharp like anxiety, finally saw the statue, under life-size, of aseated man with a rough stick and bundle at his feet. A limp hat wasin his hand, and, beneath a brow to which the hair was plastered bysweat, his eyes gazed fixed and aspiring into a hidden dreamperfectly created by his desire. Here, she realized at last, she hada glimmer of the beauty, the creative force, that animated DodgePleydon. Simon Downige's shoes were clogged with mud, his entirebody, she felt, ached with weariness; but his gaze--nothing Lindadiscovered but shadows over two depressions--was far away in theattainment of his place of justice and truth. 

She found a stool and, careless of the film of dust, sat absorbed inthe figure. Pleydon again had lost all consciousness of theirpresence; he stood, hands in pockets, his left foot slightlyadvanced, looking at his work from under drawn brows. Arnaud spokefirst:

"It's impertinent to congratulate you, Pleydon. You know what you'vedone better than any one else could. You have all our admiration. "Linda watched the tenderness with which the other covered SimonDownige's vision in clay. Later, returning home after dinner, Arnaudspeculated about Pleydon's remarkable increase in power. "I hadgiven him up, " he went on; "I thought he was lost in those notoriousdebauches of esthetic emotions. Does he still speak of loving you?"

"Yes, " Linda replied. "Are you annoyed by it?" He answered, "Whatgood if I were?" She considered him, turned in his chair to faceher, thoughtfully. "I haven't the slightest doubt of its quality, however--all in that Hesperia of old Downige's. To love you, my dearLinda, has certain well-defined resemblances to a calamity. If youask me if I object to what you do give him, my answer must shock thegods of art. I would rather you didn't. "

"What is it, Arnaud?" she demanded. "I haven't the slightest idea. Iwish I had. "

"Platonic, " he told her shortly. "The term has been hopelesslyruined, yet the sense, the truth, I am forced to believe, remains. "

"But you know how stupid I am and that I can't understand you. "

"The woman in whom a man sees God, " he proceeded irritably:

"'_La figlia della sua mente, l'amorosa, idea_. '"

"Oh, " she cried, wrung with a sharp obscure hurt. "I know that, I'veheard it before. " Her excitement faded at her absolute inability toplace the circumstances of her memory. The sound of the wordsvanished, leaving no more than the familiar deep trouble, thedisappointing sensation of almost grasping--Linda was unable tothink what. 

"After all, you are my wife. " He had recovered his normal shy humor. "I can prove it. You are the irreproachable mother of ourunsurpassed children. You have a hopeless vision--like this Simon's--ofseeing me polished and decently pressed; and I insist on yourcontinuing with the whole show. "

Her mind arbitrarily shifted to the thought of her father, who hadwalked out of his house, left--yes--his family, without anyintimation. Then, erratically, it turned to Vigné, to Vigné andyoung Sandby with his fresh cheeks and impending penniless yearsacquiring a comprehension of the bond market. She said, "I wonder ifshe really likes Bailey?" Arnaud's energy of dismay was laughable, "What criminal folly! They haven't finished Mother Goose yet. "

XXII

Linda, who expected to see Pleydon's statue of Simon Downigefinished immediately in a national recognition of its splendor, wasdisappointed by his explanation that, probably, it would not beready for casting within two years. He intended to model it again, life-size, before he was ready for the heroic. April, the vivifying, had returned; and, as always in the spring, Linda was mainlyconscious of the mingled assuaging sounds of life newly admittedthrough open windows. A single shaded lamp was lighted by a fartable, where Arnaud sat cutting the pages of _The Living Age_with an ivory blade; Dodge was blurred in the semi-obscurity. 

He came over to see them more frequently now, through what he calledthe great moment--so tiresomely extended--of his life. Pleydon cameoftener but he said infinitely less. It was his custom to arrive fordinner and suddenly depart early or late in the evening. At timesshe went up to her room and left the two almost morosely silent mento their own thoughts or pages; at others she complained--no otherwoman alive would stay with such uninteresting and thoroughlyselfish creatures. They never made the pretense of an effort toconsider or amuse her. At this Arnaud would put aside his book andbegin an absurd social conversation in the manner of Vigné'sassociates. Pleydon, however, wouldn't speak; nothing broke thesomberness of his passionate absorption in invisible tyrannies. Shegave up, finally, a persistent effort to lighten his moods. Annoyedshe told him that if he did not change he'd be sick, and then wherewould everything be. 

All at once, through the open window, she heard Stella, her mother, laughing; the carelessly gay sound overwhelmed her with aninstinctive unreasoning dread. Linda rose with a half gasp--but ofcourse it was Vigné in the garden with Bailey Sandby. 

She sank back angry because she had been startled; but herirritation perished in disturbing thought. It wasn't, she toldherself, Vigné's actions that made her fear the future so much asher, Linda's, knowledge of the possibilities of the past. Herundying hatred of that existence choked in her throat; the chance ofits least breath touching Vigné, Arnaud's daughter, roused her toany embittered hazard. 

The girl, she was certain, returned a part at least of Bailey'sfeeling. Linda expected no confidences--what had she done to havethem?--and Arnaud was right, affairs of the heart were neverrevealed until consummated. Her conclusion had been reached byindirect quiet deductions. Vigné, lately, was different; herattitude toward her mother had changed to the subtle reserve offeminine maturity. Her appearance, overnight, it seemed, hadimproved; her color was deeper, a delicate flush burned at anysurprise in her cheeks, and the miracle of her body was perfected. 

It wasn't, Linda continued silently, that Vigné could ever follow theexample of Stella Condon through the hotels and lives of men partlybald, prodigal, and with distant families. Whatever happened to herwould be in excellent surroundings and taste; but the result--thesordid havoc, inside and out, the satiety alternating with the pointsof brilliancy, and finally, inexorably, sweeping over them in aleaden tide--would be identical. She wondered a little at thestrength of her detestation for such living; it wasn't moral in anysense with which she was familiar; in fact it appeared to have avague connection with her own revolt from the destruction of death. She wanted Vigné as well to escape that catastrophe, to holdinviolate the beauty of her youth, her fineness and courage. 

She was convinced, too, that if she loved Bailey, and wasdisappointed, some of the harm would be done immediately; Linda saw, in imagination, the pure flame of Vigné's passion fanned and thenarbitrarily extinguished. She saw the resemblance of the dead woman, all those other painted shades, made stronger. A sentence formed sovividly in her mind that she looked up apprehensively, certain thatshe had spoken it aloud:

If Vigné does come to care for him they must marry. 

Her thoughts left the girl for Arnaud--he would absolutely opposeher there, and she speculated about the probable length hisopposition would reach. What would he say to her? It couldn't behelped, in particular it couldn't be explained, neither to him norto the friendly correctness of Bailey Sandby's mother. She, alone, must accept any responsibility, all blame. 

The threatened situation developed more quickly than she hadanticipated. Linda met Bailey, obviously disturbed, in the portico, leaving their house; his manner, mechanically, was good; and then, with an irrepressible boyish rush of feeling, he stopped her:

"Vigné and I love each other and Mr. Hallet won't hear of it. Heinsulted us with the verse about the old woman who went to thecupboard to get a bone, and if he hadn't been her father--" hebreathed a portentous and difficult self-repression. "Then he took acowardly advantage of my having no money, just now; right after Iexplained how I was going to make wads--with Vigné. "

An indefinable excitement possessed Linda, accompanied by a suddenacute fear of what Arnaud might say. She wanted more than anythingelse in life to go quickly, inattentively, past Bailey Sandby and upto her room. Nothing could be easier, more obvious, than herdisapproval of a moneyless boy. She made a step forward with anassumed resolute ignoring of his disturbed presence. It was useless. A dread greater than her fright at Arnaud held her in the portico, her hand lifted to the polished knob of the inner door. Linda turnedslowly, cold and white, "Wait, " she said to his shoulder in anadmirable coat; then she gazed steadily into his frank pained eyes. 

"How do you know that you love Vigné?" she demanded. "You are soyoung to be certain it will last always. And Vigné--"

"How does any one know?" he replied. "How did you? Married peoplealways forget their own experiences, the happy way things went withthem. From all I see money hasn't much to do with loving each other. But, of course, I'm not going to be poor, not with Vigné. Nobodycould. She'd inspire them. Mr. Hallet knows all about me, too; andhe's the oldest kind of a friend of the family. I suppose when hesees father at the Rittenhouse Club they'll have a laugh--a laugh atVigné and me. " His hand, holding the brim of a soft brown hat, clenched tensely. 

"No, " Linda told him, "they won't do that. " Her obscure excitementwas communicated to him. "Why not?" he demanded. 

"Because, " she paused to steady her voice, "because I am going totake a very great responsibility. If it fails, if you let it fail, you'll ruin ever so much. Yes, Mr. Hallet, I am sure, will consentto your marrying Vigné. " She escaped at the first opening from hisincoherent gratitude. Arnaud was in the library, and she stopped inthe hall, busy with the loosening of her veil. Perhaps it would bebetter to speak to him after dinner; she ought to question Vignéfirst; but, as she stood debating, her daughter passed hertempestuously, blurred with crying, and Arnaud angrily demanded herpresence. 

XXXIII

"You were quite right, " he cried; "this young idiot Sandby has beentelling Vigné that he loves her; and now Vigné assures me, withtears, that she likes it! They want to get married--next week, tomorrow, this evening. " Linda stood by the window; soon themagnolia-tree would be again laden with flowers. She gathered hercourage into a determined composure of tone. "I saw Bailey outside, "she admitted. "He told me. It seems excellent to me. "

Arnaud Hallet incredulously challenged her. "What do you mean--thatyou gave him a trace of encouragement!" Linda replied:

"I said that I was certain you would consent. " She halted hisexasperated gesture. "You think Vigné is nothing but a child, andyet she is as old as I was at our wedding. My mother was no olderwhen Bartram Lowrie married her. I think Vigné is very fortunate, Bailey is as nice as possible; and, as he said, it isn't as if youknew nothing of the Sandbys; they are as dignified as the Lowries. "

An expression she had never before seen hardened his countenanceinto a sarcasm that travestied his customary humor. "You realize, ofcourse, that except for what his father gives him young Sandby iswretchedly poor. He's nice enough but what has that to do with it?And, in particular, how does it touch you, Linda Condon? Do yousuppose I can ever forget your answer that time I first asked you tomarry me? You wouldn't consider a poor man; you were worth, really, a hundred thousand a year; but, if nothing better came along, youmight sacrifice yourself for fifty. "

"I remember very well, " she answered; "and, curiously enough, I amnot ashamed. I was very sensible then, in a horrible position withextravagant habits. They were me. I couldn't change myself. Withoutmoney I should have made you, any man, entirely miserable. Arnaud, Ihadn't--I haven't now--the ability to see everything importantthrough the affections, like so many many women. You often told methat; who hasn't? I have always admitted it wasn't pleasant norpraiseworthy. But how, to use your own words, does all that affectVigné? She isn't cold but very warm-hearted; and, instead of myexperience, she has her own so much better feeling. "

"I absolutely refuse to allow anything of the sort, " he declaredsharply. "I won't even discuss it--for three years. Tell this Sandbyinfant, if you like, to come back then. "

"In three years, or in one year, Vigné may be quite different, yes-lesslovable. Happiness, too, is queer, Arnaud; there isn't a great dealof it. Not an overwhelming amount. If it appears for an instant itmust be held as tightly as possible. It doesn't come back, you know. Don't turn to your book yet--you can't get rid of us, of Vigné andme, like that; and then it's rude; the first time, I believe, youhave ever been impolite to me. "

"Forgive me, " he spoke formally. "You seem to think that I am asindifferent as yourself. You might be asking the day of the week tojudge from your calm appearance. The emotion of a father, or even ofa mother, perhaps, you have never explored. On the whole you arefortunate. And you are always protected by your celebrated honesty. "She said:

"I promised Bailey your consent. "

"Why bother about that? It isn't necessary for your new romanticmood. An elopement, with you to steady the ladder, would be moreappropriate. "

She repeated the fact of her engagement. Her dread for him hadvanished, its place now taken by a distrust of what, in her mergeddetachment and suffering, she might blunderingly do. At the back ofthis she realized that his case, his position, was hopeless. Withoutwarning, keen and undimmed, his love for her flashed through hisresentful misery. There was no spoken acknowledgement of surrender;he sank into his chair dejected and pitiable, infinitely gray. Hisshoes, on the brightness of the hooked rug, were dingy, his coatdrawn and wrinkled. 

Linda saw herself on her knees before him, before his patience andgenerosity, sobbing her contrition into his forgiving hands. Shelonged with every nerve--as she had so often before--to lose herselfin passionate emotion. She had never been more erect or withdrawn, never essentially less touched. After a little, waiting for him tospeak, she saw that he, too, had retreated into the profound depthsof his own illusions and despairs. 

XXXIV

For a surprising while--even in the face of Vigné's radiance--Arnaudwas as still and shadowed as the inert surface of a dammed stream. Then slowly, the slenderest trickle at first, his wit revived hisspirit; and he opened an unending mock-solemn attack on BaileySandby's eminently serious acceptance of the responsibilities of hisallowed love. 

The boy had left the university, and his father--a striking replicaof Arnaud's prejudices, impatience and fundamental kindness--exchangedwith Vigné's male parent the most dismal prophecies together withconcrete plans for their children's future security. This, inevitably, resulted in Vigné's marriage; a ceremony unattended by Pleydon exceptby the presence of a very liberal check. 

The life-size version of his Simon Downige was again under way--ithad been torn down, Linda knew, more than once--and he was in afever of composition. Nor was this, she decided with Arnaud, hisonly oppression: the Asiatic fever clung to him with disquietingpersistence. Pleydon himself admitted he had a degree or two in theevening. 

Linda was seated in his studio near Central Park West, perhaps ayear later, and she observed aloud that so much wet clay around wasbad for him. He laughed: nothing now could happen to him, he wasforever beyond accident, sickness, death--his statue for themonument in Hesperia was finished. It stood revealed before them, practically as Linda had first seen it, but enlarged, towering, asif the vision it portrayed had grown, would continue to groweternally, because of the dignity of its hope, the necessity of itsrealization. 

"Now, " she said, "it will go to the foundry and be cast. " Hecorrected her. "You will go to the foundry and be cast ... Inbronze. " A distinct graceful happiness possessed her at theknowledge that his love for her was as constant as though it, too, were metal. Not flesh but bronze, spirit, he insisted. 

The multiplying years made that no more comprehensible than when, achild, she had thrilled in a waking dream. Love, spirit, death. Three mysteries. But only one, she thought, was inevitably hers, thelast. To be loved was not love itself, but only the edge of itscloak; response was an indivisible part of realization. No, sterility was the measure--of its absence. And she was, Linda felt, in spite of Vigné and Lowrie, the latter a specially vigorouscontradiction, the most sterile woman alive. There were alwaysDodge's assurances, but clay, stone, metal, were cold for a beliefto embrace. And she was, she knew, lovelier now than she had everbeen before, than she would ever be again. 

XXXV

The faint ringing of the bell from outside that probably announcedArnaud sounded unreal, futile, to Linda. He came into the studio, and at once a discussion began between the two men of the differencein the surfaces of clay and bronze. The talk then shifted to thepictorial sources of the heroic Simon Downige before them, and Lindadeclared, "Dodge, you have never made a head of me. How veryunflattering!"

"You're an affair for a painter, " he replied; "Goya or AlfredStevens. No one but Goya could have found a white for you, with thequality of flower petals; and Stevens would have fixed you in animmortality of delicate color, surrounded by your Philadelphiagarden. " He stood quite close to her, with his jacket draggedforward by hands thrust into its pockets, and he added at the end ofa somber interrogation, "But if you would really like to know why--"

In a moment more, she recognized, Dodge would explain his feelingfor her--to Arnaud, to any one who might be present. The gleam inhis eyes, his remoteness from earthly concern, were definitely notnormal. Pleydon, his love, terrified her. "No, " she said with anassumed hurried lightness, "don't try to explain. I must manage tosurvive the injury to my vanity. "

They left New York almost immediately, Pleydon suddenly determiningto go with them; and later were scattered through the Hallethousehold. Vigné and her husband were temporarily living there; withtheir heads close together they were making endless computations, numerous floor plans and elevations. Linda, at the piano in thedrawing-room, could hear them through the hall. Pleydon was loungingin a chair beyond her. She couldn't play but she was able, slowly, to pick out the notes of simple and familiar airs--echoes of Gluckand blurred motives of Scarlatti. It was for herself, she explained;the sounds, however crude and disconnected, brought things back toher. What things, she replied to Pleydon's query, she didn't in theleast know; but pleasant. 

The fact that she understood so little depressed her with increasingfrequency. It was well enough to be ignorant as a girl, or even as ayoung woman newly married; but she had left all that behind; she hadlost her youth without any compensating gain of knowledge. Lindacould not assure herself that life was clearer than it had been toher serious childhood. It had always been easily measured on thesurface; she had had a very complete grasp of its material aspectsalmost at once, accomplishing exactly what she had planned. Perhapsthis was all; and her trouble an evidence of weakness--theindecision, she saw with contempt, that kept so many people in aconstant agitation of disappointment. 

Perhaps this was enough; more than the majority had or accomplished. She made, again, a resolute effort to be contented, at rest. Herstraying fingers clumsily wrought a fragmentary refrain that mockedher determination. It wasn't new, this--this dissatisfaction; but ithad grown sharper. As she was older her restlessness increased atthe realization that life, opportunity, were slipping from her. Soonshe would be forty. 

The conviction seized her that most lives reflected hers in thattheir questioning was never answered. The fortunate, then, were theincurious and the hearts undisturbed by a maddening thrill. She saidaloud, "The ones who never heard music. " Pleydon was without a signthat she had spoken. Her emotions were very delicate, very fragile, and enormously difficult to perceive. They were like plants in stonyground. Where had she heard that--out of the Bible? Then she thoughtof her failure to get anything from religion--a part of herinability to drink at the springs which others declared sorefreshing. Linda pressed her hands more sharply on the keys and theanswering discord had the effect of waking her to reality. 

Pleydon remained until the following afternoon, and then was lost--inthe foundry casting his statue--for six months. Arnaud went over toview the completion of the bronze and returned filled with enthusiasm. "Its simplicity is the surprising part, " he told her. "The bareststatement possible. But Pleydon himself is in a disturbing condition;I can't decide if it is mental or physical. The fever of course; yetthat doesn't account for his distance from ordinary living. The truthis, I suppose, that men weren't designed for great arts, and nature, like the jealous God of the Hebrews, retaliates. It is absurd, butPleydon reminds me of you; you're totally different. I suppose it'sbecause of the detachment you have in common. " He veered to a detailof Lowrie's first year at a university, and exhibited, against adecent endeavor to the contrary, his boundless pride in their son. 

The boy was, Linda acknowledged, more than commonly dependable andable. He was heavy, like his father, and so diffident that he almoststuttered; but his mental processes flashed in quick intuitiveperceptions. Lowrie was an easy and brilliant student; and, perhapsbecause of this, of his mental certainty, he was not intimate withher as Arnaud had hoped and predicted. It seemed to Linda that heinstinctively penetrated her inner doubt and regarded it withoutsympathy. In this he was her son. Lowrie was a confident andunsympathetic critic of humanity. 

Even now, so soon, there was no question of his success in the lawhis fitness had elected. The springs of his being were purelyintellectual, reasoning. In him Linda saw magnified her owncoldness; and, turned on herself, she viewed it with an arbitraryfeminine resentment. He was actually courteous to her; but under alltheir intercourse there was a perceptible impatience. His scorn ofother women, girls, however, was openly expressed and honest; it hadno trace of the mere affectation of pessimism natural to his age. Arnaud, less thoughtful than she, was vastly entertained by this, and drew Lowrie out in countless sly sallies and contradictions. 

Yes, he would succeed, but, after all, what would his success beworth--placed, that was, against Vigné's radiant happiness, BaileySandby's quiet eyes and the quality of his return home each evening?

Her thoughts came back to Pleydon--she had before her a New Yorkpaper describing the ceremony of unveiling his Simon Downige atHesperia. There was a long learned article praising its beauty andemphasizing Pleydon's eminence. He was, it proceeded, an anomaly inan age of momentary experimental talents--a humanized Greek force. He didn't belong to to-day but to yesterday and to-morrow. This gaveher an uncomfortable vision of Dodge in space, with no warm pointsof contact. She, too, was suspended in that vague emptiness. Lindahad the sensation of grasping at streamers, forms, of sparklingmist. A strange position in view of her undeniable common sense, thesolid foundations of her temperament and experience. She saw fromthe paper, further, that the Downige who had commissioned themonument was dead. 

XXXVI

In the middle of the festive period that connected Christmas withthe new year Arnaud turned animatedly from his breakfast scanning ofthe news. "It seems, " he told her, "that a big rumpus has developedin Hesperia over the Pleydon statue--the present Downige omnipotence, never friendly with our old gentleman, has condemned its bronze founder. You know what I mean. It's an insult to their pride, their money andposition, to see him perpetuated as a tramp. On the contrary he was avery respectable individual from a prominent family and town. 

"They have been moving the local heavens, ever since the monumentwas placed, to have it set aside. I suppose they would havesucceeded, too, if a large amount given to the city were notcontingent on its preservation. But then they can always donate moremoney in the cause of their sacred respectability. "

Linda had never, she exclaimed, heard of anything more disgusting. It was plain that Hesperia knew nothing of art. "Every one, " she ranon in the heat of her resentment, "every one, that is, who shoulddecide, agrees it's magnificent. They were frightfully lucky to getit--Dodge's finest work. " She wrote at once to Pleydon commandinghis presence and expressing her contempt of such depravity ofopinion. To her surprise he was undisturbed, apparently, by thecondemnation of his monument. 

He even laughed at her energy of scorn. She was hurt, perceptiblysilenced, with a feeling of having been misunderstood or ratherundervalued. Her disturbance at any blame attached to the statue ofSimon Downige was extremely acute. But, she thought, if it failed toworry Dodge why should she bother. She did, in spite of thisphilosophy; Simon was tremendously important to her. 

He stood for things: she had watched his evolution from the claysketch, and in Pleydon's mind, to the final heroic proportions; andshe had taken for granted that a grateful world would see him in herlight. A woman, she decided, had made the trouble; and she hated herwith a personal vigor. Pleydon said:

"I told you that old Simon was unbalanced; now you can see it by hisreception in a successful city. The sculptor--do you remember him, aBeaux-Arts graduate?--admits that he had always opposed it, but thatpolitical motives overbore his pure protest. There is a scheme nowto build a pavilion, for babies, and shut out the monument from openview. They may do that but time will sweep away their walls. If Ihad modeled Simon Downige, yes, he would go; but I modeled hisvision, his aspiration--the hope of all men for release and purity. 

"Downige and the individual babies are unimportant compared to avision of perfection, of escape. As long as men live, if they live, they'll reach up; and that gesture in itself is heaven. Notaccomplishment. The spirit dragging the flesh higher; but spiritalone--empty balloons. A dream in bronze, harder even than men'sheads, more durable than their prejudices, so permanent that it willwear out their ignorance; and in the end--always in the end--they'llbring their wreath. 

"A replica has gone to Cottarsport, from me; and you ought to see itthere, on a block of New England granite. It's in the Common, awindswept reach with low houses and a white steeple and the sea. Itmight have been there from the beginning, rising on rock against thepale salt day. They can go to hell in Hesperia. "

Still Linda's hurt persisted; she saw the unfortunate occurrence asa direct blow at her pride. Arnaud, too, failed her; he was splendidin his assault upon such rapacious stupidity; but it was only animpersonal concern. His manner expressed the conviction that itmight have been expected. He was blind to her special enthusiasm, her long intimate connection with the statue. Exasperated she almosttold him that it was more real to her than their house, than Vignéand Lowrie, than he. She was stopped, fortunately, by the perceptionthat, amazingly, the statue was more actual than Dodge Pleydon. Ittouched the center of her life more nearly. 

Why, she didn't know. 

If her mental confusion increased by as much as a feeling, Lindathought, she would be close to madness. It was unbearable atpractically forty. 

Lowrie said, at the worst possible moment, that he found the entireepisode ridiculously overemphasized. A statue more or less was ofsmall importance. If the Downige family were upset why didn't theyemploy an able lawyer to dispose of it? There were many ways forsuch a proceeding--

"I have no desire to hear them, " she interrupted. "You seem to knowa tremendous lot, but what good it will do you in the end who cansay! And, with all your cleverness, you haven't an ounce ofappreciation for art. Besides, I hate to see any one as young as youso sure of himself. Often I suspect you are patronizing your fatherand me. It's not pretty nor polite. "

Lowrie was obviously embarrassed by her attack, and managed theabrupt semblance of an apology. Arnaud, who had put down his eternalbook, said nothing until the boy had vanished. "Wasn't that rathersharp?" he asked mildly. "Perhaps, " she replied in a tone withoutwarmth or regret. "Somehow I am never comfortable with Lowrie. "

"You are too much alike, " he shrewdly observed. "It is laughable attimes. Did you expect your children to be fountains of sentiment?And, look here--if I can get along in comfort with you for life youin particular ought to put up peacefully with Lowrie. He is a damnedsight more human than, at bottom, you are; a woman of alabaster. "

"I loathe quarrels, " she admitted; "they are so vulgar. You knowthat they are not like me and just said so. Oh, Arnaud, why doeslife get harder instead of easier?"

He put his book aside completely and gazed at her in patientthought. "Linda, " he said finally, "I have never heard anything thatstirred me so much; not what you said, my dear, but the recognitionin your voice. " A wistfulness of love for her enveloped him; anineffable desire as vain as the passion she struggled to give him inreturn. She smiled in an unhappiness of apology. 

"Perhaps--" he stopped, waiting any assurance whatever, his faceeager like a dusty lamp in which the light had been turned sharplyup. She was unable to stir, to move her gaze from his hopeful eyes, to mitigate by a breath her slender white aloofness. A smiledifferent from hers, tender with remission, lingered in his fadingirradiation. The dusk was gathering, adding its melancholy to hisage--sixty-five now. Why that was an old man! Her sympathy vanishedin her shrinking from the twilight that was, as well, slowly, inevitably, deepening about her. 

It was laughable that, as she approached an age whose only resourcewas tranquillity, she grew more restless. Her present vagueagitation belonged ridiculously to youth. The philosophy of theevident that had supported her so firmly was breaking at the mostinopportune time. And it was, she told herself, too late foranything new; the years for that had been spent insensibly withArnaud. Linda was very angry with herself, for, in all her shiftingstate of mind, she preserved an inner necessity for the quality ofexactness expressed in her clothes. There were literally noneglected spaces in her conscious living. 

Her thoughts finally centered about the statue in Hesperia--itpresented an actual mark for her fleeting resentments. She wonderedwhy it so largely occupied her thoughts, moved her so personally. She watched the papers for the scattered reports of the progress ofthe contention it had roused, some ill-natured, others supposedlyhumorous, and nearly all uninformed. She became, Arnaud said, thechampion of the esthetic against Dagon. He elaborated this pictureuntil she was forced to smile against her inclination, her profoundseriousness. Linda had the feeling that she, too, was on thepedestal that held the bronze effigy of Simon Downige challengingthe fog that obscured men. Its fate was hers. She didn't pretend toexplain how. 

As time passed it seemed to her that it took her longer and longerto dress in the morning, while her preparations couldn't be simpler;her habit of deliberation had become nearly a vice, the precision ofher ruffles, her hair, a tyranny. She never quite lost thesatisfaction of her mirror's faultless reflection; and stopped, now, for a moment's calm interrogation of the being--hardly more silverycool than the reality--before her. 

Arnaud was at the table, and the gaze with which he met her wastroubled. The morning paper, she saw, was, against custom, at herplace, and she picked it up with an instinctive sense of calamity. The blackly printed sensational headline that immediatelyestablished her fear sank vivid and entire into her brain: ananonymous inflamed mob in Hesperia had pulled down and destroyedPleydon's statue. Their act was described as a tribute to theliberality of the present Downige family in the light of itsobjection to the monument. 

As if in the development of her feeling Linda had a sensation ofcrashing with a sickening violence from a pedestal to the ground. Actually, it seemed, the catastrophe had happened to her. She heard, with a sense of inutility, Arnaud denouncing the outrage; he had apencil in his hand for the composition of a telegram to Dodge. Hepaid--but perhaps only naturally--no attention to her, sufferingdully from her fall. She shuddered before the recreated lawlessapproaching voice of the mob; the naked ugly violence froze her withterror; she felt the gross hurried hands winding ropes about her, the rending brutality of force--

She sat and automatically took a small carved glass of orange-juicefrom a bed of ice, and her chilled fingers recalled a dim image ofher mother. Arnaud was speaking, "I'm afraid this will cut throughPleydon's security, it was such a wanton destruction of his uniquepower. You see, he worked lovingly over the cast with little filesand countless finite improvements. The mold, I think, was broken. What a piece of luck the thing's at Cottarsport. " He paused, obviously expecting her to comment; but suddenly phrases failed her. 

In place of herself she should be considering Dodge; her sympathyeven for him was submerged in her own extraordinary injury. However, she recovered from her first gasping shock, and made an utterlycommonplace remark. Never had her sense of isolation been stronger. "I must admit, " her husband continued, "that I looked for some smalldisplay of concern. I give you my word there are moments when Ithink Pleydon himself cut you out of stone. He isn't great enoughfor that, though; in the way of perfection you successfully gild thelily. A thing held to be impossible. "

Linda told him with amazing inanity that his opinion of her wasunreliable; and, contented, he lightly pursued his admiration ofwhat he called her boreal charm. At intervals she respondedappropriately and proceeded with breakfast. She had entered a regionof dispassionate consideration, her characteristic detachment, shethought, regained. She mentally, calmly, reconstructed the motivesand events that had led to the destruction of the statue; they, atleast, were evident to her. She reaffirmed silently her convictionthat it had resulted from the stupidity, the vanity, of a woman. Thelimitations of men, fully as narrow, operated in other directions. 

Then, with an incredulous surprise, she was aware that the clearspace of her reason was filling with anger. Never before had such aflood of emotion possessed her; and she surrendered herself, in anenormous relief, to the novelty of its obliterating tide. Itdeepened immeasurably, sweeping her far from the security of oldpositions of indifference and critical self-possession. Linda becameenraged at a world that had concentrated all its degraded vulgarityin one unspeakable act. 

XXXVII

It was fall, October, and the day was a space of pale gold foliagewreathed in blue garlands of mist. The gardener was busy with awooden rake and wheelbarrow in which he carted away dead leaves forburning. The fire was back of the low fence, in the rear, and Linda, at the dining-room window, could hear the fierce small crackle offlames; the drifting pungent smoke was like a faint breath ofammonia. Arnaud had left for the day, Lowrie was at the university, while Vigné and her husband--moving toward their ultimate colonialthreshold--had taken a small house. She was alone. 

As usual. 

However, in her present state her solitude had lost itsinevitability; she failed to see why it must continue until the endof time. She could no longer discover a sufficient reason for herlimitless endurance, her placid acceptance of all that chance, orany inconsiderable person, happened to dictate. She wasn't like thatin the least. Her temper had solidified as though it were ice, taking everywhere the form in which it was held. It was a reality. She determined, as well, that her feeling should not melt back intothe familiar acceptance of a routine that had led her blindfoldedacross such an extent of life. 

She understood now, in a large part, her disturbance at theindignity to Dodge's monument--he had assured her that she was itsinspiration; except for her it would never have been realized, hewould have kept on modeling those Newport fountains, continued withthe Susanna Nodas, spending himself ignobly. He loved her, and thatlove had resulted in a statue the world of art, of taste, honored. But it was she all the while they were approving, discussing, writing about, Linda Condon. 

She had always been that, Pleydon had informed her, never LindaHallet--in spite of Arnaud and their children. It sounded likenonsense; but, at the bottom, it was truth. Of course it couldn't beexplained, for example, to the man who had every right, everyevidence, to consider himself her husband. Nothing was susceptibleof explanation. Absolutely nothing! There was the earth, whichappeared to be everything, the houses you entered, the streets youpassed over, the people among whom you lived, yet that wasn't all. Heavens, no! It was quite unimportant compared with--with otherfacts latent in the mind and blood. 

Dodge Pleydon's love was one of those other facts; it was simplyimpossible to deny its existence, its power. Dodge had been totallychanged by it, born over again. But she, who had been the source, had had no good from it, nothing except the thrill that had alwaysbeen hers. No one knew of it, counted it as her achievement, paidthe slightest attention to her. Arnaud smiled indulgently, Lowriescoffed. When the statue had been thrown down they thought of itmerely as a deplorable part of the day's news. They hadn't seen thatshe, Linda Condon, was unspeakably insulted. 

She doubted if she could bring them to comprehend what had happened--toher. Or if Arnaud understood, if she made it plain, what good would bedone! That wouldn't save her, put her back again on the pedestal. Thelatter was necessary. Linda recognized that a great deal of her feelingwas based on pride; but it was a pride entirely justified. She had nointention of submitting to the coarse hands and ropes of public affront. Throughout her life she had rebelled against any profanation of herperson, she had hated to be touched. 

Every instinct, she found, every delicate self-opinion, was boundinto Pleydon's success; the latter had kept her alive. Without itexistence would have been intolerable. It was unbearable now. 

She discharged the small daily duties of her efficient housekeepingwith a contemptuous exactness; for years she had accomplished, inherself, nothing more. But at last a break had come. Lindarecognized this without any knowledge of what reparation it wouldfind. She wasn't concerned with that, a small detail. It would beapparent. Arnaud was silent through dinner; tired, it seemed. Shesaw him as if at the distant end of a dull corridor--as she lookedback. There was no change in her liking for him. Mechanically shenoticed the disorder of his scant hair and rumpled sleeves. 

Not until, waking sharply, in the middle of the night, did she havea glimpse of a possible course--she might live with Dodge andperfectly express both her retaliation and her accomplishment. Inthat way she would reestablish herself beside him and place theirvision in bronze on an elevation beyond the spite of the envious andthe blind. 

It was so directly simple that she was surprised it hadn't occurredto her before. The possibility had always been a part, unsuspectedand valuable, of her special being; the largely condemned faults ofher character and experience had at least brought her this--a notinconsiderable freedom in a world everywhere barred by the necessityfor upholding a hypocritical show of superiority to honest desire. The detachment that deprived her of life's conventional joysreleased her from its common obligations. That conviction, however, was too intimately connected with all her inheritance to bring herany conscious dramatic sense of rebellion or high feeling ofjustified indignation. 

Sleep had deserted her, and she waited for the dawn in the windowsthat would bring her escape. It was very slow coming; the blacknesstook on a grayer tone, like ink with added faint infusions of water. Slowly the blackness dissolved and she heard the stir of thesparrows in the ivy. There was the passing rumble of an earlyelectric car on the paved aged street, the blurred hurried shuffleof a workman's clumsy shoes. The brightening morning was cool with apremonitory touch of frost; at the window she saw a vanishing silversheen on the lawn and board fence. 

A sensation of youth pervaded her; and while, perhaps, it was out ofkeeping with her years, she had still her vitality unspent; she waswithout a trace of the momentary frost on the grass. She wastranquil, leisurely; her heart evenly sent its life through herunflushed body. Piece by piece she put on her web-like garments, black and white; brushing the heavy stream of her hair and tying theinevitable sash about her supple waist. 

Below she met Arnaud with an unpleasant shock--she hadn't given hima thought. Her feeling now was hardly more than annoyance at herforgetfulness. He would be terribly distressed at her going, and shewas genuinely sorry for this, poised at the edge of an explanationof her purpose. Arnaud was putting butter and salt into his egg-cup, after that he would grind the pepper from a French mill--pure spiceswere a precision of his--and she waited until the operation wascompleted. 

Then it occurred to her that all she could hope to accomplish byadmitting her intention was the ruin of his last hour alone withher. He was happier, gayer, than usual. But his age was evident inhis voice, his gestures. Linda marveled at her coldness, herruthless disregard of Arnaud's claim on her, of his affection asdeep as Pleydon's, perhaps no less fine but not so imperative. YetArnaud had had over twenty years of her life, the best; and she hadnever deceived him about the quality of her gift. It was right, now, for Dodge to have the remainder. But whether it were right or wrong, there was no failure of her determination to go to Pleydon in thevindication of her existence. 

She delayed speaking to Arnaud until, suddenly, breakfast was over. He seldom went to the law office where he had been a partner, butstayed about the lower floor of his house, in the library ordirecting small outside undertakings. Either that or he left, late, for the Historical Society, with which his connection and interestwere uninterrupted. As Linda passed him in the hall he was fumblingin the green bag that accompanied all his journeyings into the city;and she gathered that he intended to make one of his occasionalsallies. She proceeded above, to her room, where with steady handsshe pinned on her hat. It would be impossible to take any additionalclothes, and she'd have to content herself with something ready-madeuntil she could order others in the establishment of her living withDodge. Her close-fitting jacket, gloves, and a short cape of sableswere collected; she gazed finally, thoughtfully, about the room, andthen, with a subdued whisper of skirts, descended the stair. Arnaudwas in the library, bending over the table that bore his accumulationof papers and serious journals. A lingering impulse to speak wasoverborne by the memory of what, lately, she had endured--she saw himat the dusty end of that long corridor through which she hadmonotonously journeyed, denied of her one triumph, lost ininconsequential shadows--and she continued firmly to the door whichclosed behind her with a normal mute smoothness, an inanimatesilence. 

XXXVIII

The maid who admitted Linda to Pleydon's apartment, first replying, "Yes, Mrs. Hallet. No, Mrs. Hallet, " to her questions, continued infuller sentences expressing a triumph of sympathy over merecorrectness. She lingered at the door of the informal drawing-room, imparting the information that Mr. Pleydon had become very irregularindeed about his meals, and that his return for lunch was uncertain. Something, however, would be prepared for her. Linda acknowledgedthis briefly. Often, with Mr. Pleydon at home, he wouldn't so muchas look at his dinner. Times, too, it seemed as though he had beenin the studio all night. He went out but seldom now, and rarelyremained away for more than an hour or two. Linda heard this withoutan indication of responsive interest, and the servant, returningabruptly from the excursion into humanity, disappeared. 

She was glad to have this opportunity alone to accustom herself to anovel position. But she was once more annoyingly calm. Annoyingly, she reiterated; the fervor of her anger, which at the same time hadbeen bitterly cold, had lessened. She was practically normal. Sheregarded this, the loss of her unprecedented emotion, in the lightof a fraud on her sanguine decision. Linda had counted on itssupport, its generous irresistible tide, to carry her through theremainder of her life with the exhilaration she had so largelymissed. 

Here in Dodge's room she was as placid, almost, as though she werein the library at home. That customary term took its place in herthoughts before she recognized that, with her, it had shifted. However, it was unimportant--home had never been a magical word toher; it belonged in the vast category which, of such universalweight, left her unstirred. She resembled those Eastern peoplerestlessly and perpetually moving across sandy deserts as theyexhausted, one after another, widely separated scanty oases. 

She studied the objects around her with the pleased recognition thatthey were unique, valuable, and in faultless taste. Then she fell towondering at the difference had Dodge been poor: she would have cometo him, Linda knew, just the same. But, she admitted frankly, itwould have been uncomfortable. Perhaps that--actual poverty, actualdeprivation--was what her character needed. A popular sentimentupheld such a view; she decided it was without foundation. There wasno reason why beauty, finely appropriate surroundings, should damagethe spirit. 

Her mind turned to an examination of her desertion of Arnaud, butshe could find no trace of conventional regret; of what, she felt, her sensation ought to be. The instinctive revolt from oblivion wasan infinitely stronger reality than any allegiance to abstract duty. She was consumed by the passionate need to preserve the integrity ofbeing herself. The word selfish occurred to her but to be metunabashed by the query, why not? Selfishness was a reproach appliedby those who failed to get what they wanted to all who succeeded. Linda wasn't afraid of public opinion, censure; she didn't shrinkeven from the injury to her husband. What Dodge would think, however, was hidden from her. 

She had no doubt of his complete acceptance of all she offered;ordinary obligations to society bound him as little as they heldher. It would be enough that she wanted to come to him. 

She would bother him, change his habit of living, very little. Longyears of loneliness had taught her to be self-sufficient. Lindawould be too wise to insist on distasteful regularity in theinterest of a comparatively unimportant well-being. In short, shewouldn't bother him. That must be made clear at once. 

More than anything else he would be inexpressibly delighted to haveher with him, to find--at last--his love. Little intimacies of satinmules, glimpses, charming to an artist! He'd be faultless, too, inthe relationships where Arnaud as well had never for a momentdeviated from beautiful consideration. Two remarkable men. While herdeficiency in humor was admitted, she saw a glimmer of the absurd inher attitude and present situation. The combination, at least, wasuncommon. There had been no change in her feeling for either Arnaudor Dodge, their places in her being were undisturbed; she liked herhusband no less, Dodge no better. 

Lunch was announced, a small ceremony of covered silver dishes, heavy crystal, Nankin china, and flowers. The linen, which was old, bore a monogram unfamiliar to her--that of Dodge's mother, probably. When she had finished, but was still lingering at the narrowrefectory table, she heard Pleydon enter the hall and theexplanatory voice of the servant. An unexpected embarrassmentpervaded her, but she overcame it by the realization that there wasno need for an immediate announcement of her purpose. Dodge wouldnaturally suppose that she was in New York shopping. 

He did, to her intense relief, with a moving pleasure that she hadlunched with him. "It's seldom, " he went on, "that you are sosensible. I hope you haven't any plans or concerts to drag you awayimmediately. I owe you a million strawberries; but, aside from that, I'd like you to stay as long as possible. "

"Very well, " she replied quietly; "I will. "

She hadn't seen him since the statue at Hesperia had been destroyed, and she tried faintly to tell him how much that outrage had hurther. It had injured him too, she realized; just as Arnaud predicted. He showed his age more gauntly, more absolutely, than the other. Hisskin was dry as though the vitality of his countenance had beenburned out by the flame visible in his eyes. 

"The drunken fools!" he exclaimed of the mob that had torn SimonDownige from his eminence; "they came by way of all the saloons inthe city. Free drinks! That is the disturbing thing about what theoptimistic call civilization--the fact that it is always at themercy of the ignorant and the brutal. There is no security; none, that is, except in the individual spirit. And they, mostly, are thevictims of a singular insane resentment--Savonarola and there weregreater. 

"But you mustn't think, you mustn't suppose, that I mean it'shopeless. How could I? Who has had more from living? Love andcomplete self-expression. That exhausts every possibility. Threewords. Remember Cottarsport. But the love--ah, " he smiled, but notdirectly at her. Linda was at once reassured and disturbed; and sherose, proceeding into the drawing-room. 

There she sat gracefully composed and with still hands; she neverembroidered or employed her leisure with trivial useful tasks. Pleydon was extended on a chair, his fingers caught beyond his headand his long legs thrust out and crossed at the ankles. His gaze wasfixed on her unwaveringly; and yet, when she tried to meet itsfocus, it went behind her as though it pierced the solidity of herbody and the walls in the contemplation of a far-removed shiningimage. Her disturbance grew to the inclusion of a degree offretfulness at his unbroken silence, his apparent absorption inwhatever his meditation projected or found. 

XXXIX

Now, she decided, was the moment for her revelation; or rather, itcouldn't very well be further deferred, for it promised to behalting. But, with her lips forming the words, he abruptly spoke:

"I have lived so long with your spirit, it has become so familiar--Imean the ability of completely making you out of my heart--that whenyou are here the difference isn't staggering. You see, you are neveraway. I have that ability; it came out of the other wreck. But youknow about it--from years back. Time has only managed a greaterpower. Lately, and I have nothing to do with it, I have been seeingyou again as a girl; as young as at Markue's party; younger. Notmore than ten. I don't mean that there is anything--isn't thepresent fashionable word subliminal?--esoteric. God forbid. You'llremember my hatred of that brutal deception. 

"No, it's only a part of my ability to create the shape of feeling, of Simon's hope. I see things as realities capable of exactstatement; and, naturally, more than all the rest, you come to methat way. But as a child--who knows why?" he relinquished the answerwith an opened palm. "And young like that, perhaps ten, I love youmore sharply, more unutterably, than at any other age. What is it Ilove? Not your adorable plastic body, not that. It isn't necessaryto understand. 

"You have, as a child, a quality of blinding loveliness in a world Iabsolutely distrust. An Elysian flower. Is it possible, do yousuppose, to worship an abstract idea? It's not important to insiston my sanity. "

The question of that had occurred independently to Linda; hishurried voice and lost gaze filled her with apprehension. A dullreddish patch, she saw, burned in either thin cheek; and she toldherself that the fever had revived in him. Pleydon continued:

"Yet it is a timeless vision, because you never get old. I seeHallet failing year by year, and your children, only yesterday dabsof soft flesh, grow up and pass through college and marry. I hearmyself in the studio with an old man's cough; the chisels slip underthe mall and I can't move the clay about without help--all fading, decaying, but you. Candles burn out, hundreds of them, while yourwhiteness, your flame--

"Strange, too, how you light a world, a sky, eternity. A word wehave no business with; a high-sounding word for a penny purpose. Look, we try to keep alive because it's necessary to life, tonature; and the effort, the struggle, breeds the dream. You canunderstand that. Men who ought to know say that love is nothingmore. " He rose and stood over her, towering and portentous againstthe curtained light. "I don't pretend to guess. I'm a creativeartist--Simon Downige at Cottarsport--I have you. If it's God somuch the better. "

What principally swept over Linda was the knowledge that hispossession of her must keep them always apart. The reality, allrealities, were veils to Pleydon. Her momentary vision of thingsbeyond brick and earth was magnified in him until everything elsewas obliterated. The fever! Oh, yes, that and his passion for workmerged in his passion for her. She could bring him nothing; and shehad a curious picture of two Lindas visible to him here--the Lindathat was actual and the other, the child. And of them it was thelatter he cared most for, recreated out of his desire to defraud hisloneliness, to repay the damage to his spirit realized in bronze. 

She was, suddenly, too weary to stir or lift her hand; a depressionas absolute as her flare of rage enveloped her. Now the reason forher coming seemed inexplicable, as if, for the while, her mind hadfailed. She repressed a shudder at the thought of being, through thelong nights of his restlessness and wandering voice, alone withPleydon. She hadn't, Linda discovered, any of the transmutingfeeling for him which alone made surrender possible. She calculatedmentally how long it would take her to reach the station, what trainwould be available. 

Linda accepted dumbly the fatality to her own hope; for a few hoursshe had thought it possible to break out of the prison ofcircumstance, to walk free from all hindrance; but it had been vain. She gazed at Dodge Pleydon intensely--a comprehensive view of theman she had so nearly married, and who, more than any other force, dominated her being. It was already too late for anything butmemory; she saw--filled with pity for them both--hardly more than astrange old man with deadened hair and a yellow parchment-like skin. His suit of loose gray flannel gave her a feeling that it had beenborrowed from some one she lovingly knew. The gesture of his hand, too, had been copied from a brilliant personage with a consumingimpatience at all impotence. 

"Remember me to Arnaud, " he said, holding her gloves and the shortfur cape. "Wait!" he cried sharply, turning to the bookcase againstthe wall. Pleydon fumbled in a box of lacquered gilt with a silkcord and produced a glove once white but now brown and fragile withage. "You never missed it, " he proceeded in a gleeful triumph; "butthen you had so many pairs. Once I sent you nine dozen together fromGrenoble. They were nothing, but this you had worn. For a long whileit kept the shape of your hand. "

"Dodge, " she tried without success to steady her voice, "it stayedwith you anyhow, my--my hand. "

"But yes, " he answered impatiently. He returned the glove to itsbox, carefully tying the tasselled cord. Then, after clumsilyhelping her with the cape, he accompanied her to the elevator. "There were other things, " he told her. "Did you see the lettersabout the Hesperia affair? Heaps of them. Rodin.... But what can youexpect in a world where there is no safety--" The stopping cage cutoff his remark. She held out the hand that was less real to him thanthe dream. 

"Good-by, Dodge. "

"Yes, Linda. But watch that door, your skirt might easily be caughtin it. " He fussed over her safety until, abruptly, he seemed to risein space, shut out from her by the limitations of her faith. 

The evening overshadowed her in the train, as though she werewhirling in the swiftest passage possible, through an indeterminategrayness, from day to night. The latter descended on her as shereached the steps of her home. It was still that; now it wouldcontinue to be until death. Nothing could ever again offer herchange, release, vindication; nothing, that was, which might giveher, for a day, what even her mother had plentifully experienced--theigniting exultation of the body. 

It was inevitable, she thought, for Arnaud to be in the library. Herose unsteadily as she stood in the doorway. "Linda, " he articulatedwith difficulty. A book had rested open on the table beside him and, closing it, he put it back in its place. His arm trembled so that ittook a painfully long while. Then he moved forward, still confused. 

"What a confounded time you were gone. I had the most idiotic fancy. You see, it was so unlike you; none more exact in habit. All day. Ididn't get to the Historical Society, it seemed so devilish far off. I'd never blame you for leaving an old man without any gumption. " Hemust never think that again, she replied. Wasn't she, too, middle-aged?

XL

Linda admitted, definitely, the loss of her youth; and yet astubborn inner conviction remained that she was unchanged. In thisshe had for support her appearance; practically she was as freshlyand gracefully pale as the girl who had married Arnaud Hallet. EvenVigné, with indelible traces of her motherhood, had faint linesabsent from Linda's flawless countenance. Her children, and Arnaud, were immensely proud of her beauty; it had become a part--in theform of her ridiculously young air--of the family conversationalresources. She was increasingly aware of its supreme significance toher. 

One of her few certainties had been the discovery that, while smalltruths might be had from others, all that intimately and deeplyconcerned her was beyond questioning and advice. The importance ofher attractiveness, for example, which seemed the base of her entirebeing, was completely out of accord with the accepted standard ofvalues for middle-aged women. Other things, called moral and spiritual, she inferred, should take up her days and thoughts. There was acourse of discipline--exactly like exercises in the morning--for thepreparation of the willingness to die. 

But such an attitude was eternally beyond her; she repudiated itwith a revolt stringing every nerve indignantly tense. She had had, on the whole, singularly little from life but her fine body; it hadalways been the temple and altar of her service, and no mere wordyreassurance could now repay her for its swift or gradualdestruction. The latter, except for accident, would be her fate; shewas remarkably sound. In her social adventures, the balls to which, without Arnaud, she occasionally went, she was morbid in hersensitive dread of discovering, through a waning admiration, thatshe was faded. 

It would be impossible to spend more care on her person than she hadin the past; but that was unrelenting. Linda was inexorable in herdemands on the establishments that made her suits and dresses. Theslightest imperfection of fit exasperated her; and she regarded theendless change of fashions with contempt. This same shifting, sheobserved, occurred not only in women's clothes but in the womenthemselves. 

Linda remembered her mother, eternal in gaiety, but very obviouslydifferent from her in states of mind affecting her appearance. Shewas unable to define the change; but it was unmistakable--StellaCondon seemed a little old-fashioned. When now, to Lowrie's wife, Linda was unmistakably out-of-date. Lowrie, fast accomplishing allthat had been predicted for him, had married a girl incomprehensibleto his mother. Observing this later feminine development she had thebaffled feeling of inspecting a creature of a new order. 

To Linda, Jean Tynedale, now a Hallet, seemed harder than ever herown famous coldness had succeeded in being. This came mostly fromJean's imposing education; there had been, in addition to thepolitest of finishing schools, college--a woman's concern, BrynMawr--and then post-graduate honors in a noteworthy university. Shewas entirely addressed, in a concrete way, to the abstract problemsof social progress and hygiene; and, under thirty, the animatingspirit, as well as financial support, of an incredible number ofSettlements and allied undertakings. She spoke crisply before civicand other clubs; even, in the interest of suffrage, addressingnondescript audiences from a box on the street. 

But it was her unperturbed dissection of the motives of sex, thedenouncement of a criminal mysterious ignorance, that most dauntedLinda. She listened to Jean with a series of distinct shocks to hersense of propriety. What she had agreed to consider a namelessattribute of women, or, if anything more exact, the power of theircharm over men, the other defined in unequivocal scientific terms. She understood every impulse veiled for Linda in a reticenceabsolutely needful to its appeal. 

This, of course, the elder distrusted; just as she had no approvalfor Jean's public activities. Linda didn't like public women; herevery instinct cried for a fine seclusion, fine in the meaning of anappropriate setting for feminine distinction, the magic of dress andcut roses. Her private inelegant word for Lowrie's wife was "bold;"indeed, describing to herself the younger woman's patronage of herbearing, she descended to her mother's colloquialism "brass. "

She thought this sitting at a dinner-table which held Vigné and herhusband and Lowrie and Jean Hallet. Arnaud, drawing life from thevitality of an atmosphere charged with youth, was unflagging insplendid spirits and his valorous wit. Jean would never inspire theaffection Arnaud had given her; nor the passion that, in Pleydon, had burned unfed even by hope. 

Her thoughts slipped away from the present to the sculptor. Threeyears had vanished since she had gone with an intention of finalityto his apartment, and in that time he had neither been in theirhouse nor written. Linda had expected this; she was without thedesire to see or hear from him. Dodge Pleydon was finished for her;as a man, a potentiality, he had departed from her life. He was apiece with her memories, the triumphs of her young days. Without anactual knowledge of the moment of its accomplishment she had passedover the border of that land, leaving it complete and fair andradiant for her lingering view. Whether or not she had been happywas now of no importance; the magic of its light showed only agarden and a girl in white with a black bang against her blue eyes. 

The bang, the blueness of gaze, were still hers; but, only thismorning, brush in hand, the former had offered less resistance inits arrangement; it was thinner, and the color perceptibly not sodense. At this, with a chill edge of fear, she had determined to goat once to her hairdresser; no one, neither Arnaud, who loved itsluster, nor an unsympathetic bold scrutiny, a scrutiny of brass, should see that she was getting gray. There was no fault about herfigure; she had that for her satisfaction; she was more gracefulthan Jean's square thinness, more slim than Vigné's maternalpresence. 

Linda had the feeling that she was engaged in a struggle with time, a ruthless antagonist whom she viewed with a personal enmity. Timemust, would, of course, triumph in the end; but there would be nosign of her surrender in the meanwhile; she wouldn't bend an inch, relinquish by a fraction the pride and delicacy of her person. Theskilful dyeing of her hair to its old absolute blackness, as naturaland becoming in appearance as ever, was a symbol of herdetermination to cheat an intolerable tyranny. 

The process, dismaying her soul, she bore with a rigid fortitude; asshe endured the coldness of a morning bath from which, often, shewas slow to react. This, to her, was widely different from thefutile efforts of her mother, those women of the past, to preservefor practical ends their flushes of youth and exhilaration. She feltobscurely that she was serving a deeper reality created by the handsof Pleydon, Arnaud's faith and pure pleasure, all that countless menhad seen in her for admiration, solace and power. 

But it was inevitable, she told herself bitterly, that she shouldhear the first intimation of her decline from Jean Hallet. Rather, she overheard it, the discussion of her, from the loiterers atbreakfast as she moved about the communicating library. Jean'semphatic slightly rough-textured voice arrested her in thearrangement of a bowl of zinnias:

"You can't say just where she has failed, but it's evident. Perhapsa general dryness. Perfectly natural. Thoroughly silly to fightagainst it--" Vigné interrupted her. "I think mother's wonderful. Ican't remember any other woman nearly her age who looks soenchanting in the evening. "

Linda quietly left the flowers as they were and went up to the roomthat had been her father's. It was now used as a spare bedroom; andshe had turned into it, in place of her own chamber, instinctively, without reason. She had kept it exactly as it had been when AmeliaLowrie first conducted her there, as it was when her father, a boy, slept under the white canopy. 

Linda advanced to the mirror; and, her hands so tightly clenchedthat the finger-nails dug into the palms, forced herself to gazesteadily at the wavering reflection. It seemed to her that there hadbeen a malicious magic in Jean's detraction; for immediately, asthough the harm had been wrought by the girl's voice, she saw thather clear freshness had gone. Her face had a wax-like quality, theviolet shadows under her eyes were brown. Who had once called her agardenia? Now she was wilting--how many gardenias had she seendroop, turn brown. Her heart beat with a disturbing echo in herears, and, with a slight gasp that resembled a sob, she sank on oneof the uncomfortable painted chairs. 

What, above every other sensation, oppressed her was a feeling ofterrific loneliness--the familiar isolation magnified until it waspast bearing. Yet, there was Arnaud, infallible in his tendercomprehension, she ought to go to him at once and find support. Butit was impossible; all that he could give her was, to her specialnecessity, useless. She had never been able to establish herself inhis sympathy; the reason for that lay in the fact that she couldbring nothing similar in return. 

The room--except for the timed clangor of the electric cars, likethe measure of lost minutes--was quiet. The photograph of BartramHallet in cricketing clothes had faded until it was almostindistinguishable. Soon the faint figure would disappear entirely, as though the picture were amenable to the relentless principleoperating in her. 

The peace about her finally lessened her acute suffering, stilledher heart. She told herself with a show of vigor that she was acoward, a charge that roused an unexpected activity of denial. Shediscovered that cowardice was intolerable to her. What had happened, too, was so far out of her hands that a trace of philosophicalacceptance, recognition, came to her support. The loveliest womanalive must do the same, meet in a looking-glass--that eternalaccompanying sibyl--her disaster. She rose, her lips firmly set, composed and pale, and returned to the neglected flowers in thelibrary. 

Vigné entered and put an affectionate arm about her shoulders, repeating--unconscious that Linda had heard the discussion which hadgiven it being--the conviction that her mother was wonderful, specially in the black dinner dress with the girdle of jet. With nofacility of expression she gave her daughter's arm a quick lightpressure. 

From then she watched the slow progress of age with a newrealization, but an unabated distaste and, wherever it was possible, a determined artifice. Arnaud had failed swiftly in the past months;and, while she was inspecting the impaired supports of an arbor inthe garden, he came to her with an unopened telegram. "I abhor thesethings, " he declared fretfully; "they are so sudden. Why don'tpeople write decent letters any more! It's like the telephone.... Good manners have been ruined. "

She tore open the envelope, read the brief line within, and, a handsuddenly put out to the arbor, sank on its bench. There had beenrain, but a late sun was again pouring over the sparkling grass, androbins were singing with a lyrical clearness. "What is it?" Arnauddemanded anxiously, tremulous in the unsparing sunlight. Shereplied:

"Dodge died this morning. "

His concern was as much for her as for Pleydon's death. "I'm sorry, Linda, " his hand was on her shoulder. "It is a shock to you. A fineman, a genius--none stronger in our day. When you were young and forso long after.... I was lucky, Linda, to get you; have you all thiswhile. Nothing in Pleydon's life, not even his success, could havemade up for your loss. "

She wondered dully if Dodge had missed her, if Arnaud Hallet hadever had her in his possession. The robins filled the immaculate airwith song. It was impossible that Dodge, who was so imperious in hiscertainty that he would never say good-by to her, was dead. 

XLI

There was a revival of public interest in the destruction ofPleydon's statue at Hesperia, the papers again printed accountscolored by a variety of attitudes unembarrassed by fact; and theserious journals united in a dignity of eminently safe praise. Atfirst Linda made an effort to preserve these; but soon theirsimilarity, her inability to find, among sonorous periods, any traceof Dodge's spirit--in reality she knew so blindingly much more thanthe most penetrating critical intellect--caused her to leave thereviews unread. No one else living had understood Pleydon; and whendescriptions of his life spoke of the austerity in his later years, his fanatical aversion to women, Linda thought of the brittle glovein the gilt-lacquer box. 

Her own emotion, it seemed to her, was the most confused of all theunintelligible pressures that had converted her life into an enigma. She had a distinct sense of overwhelming loss--of something, Lindawas obliged to add, she had never owned. However, she realized thatduring Pleydon's life she had dimly expected a happy accident ofexplanation; until almost the last, yes--after she had returned fromthat ultimate journey, she had been conscious of the presence ofhope. The hope had been for herself, created out of her constantbaffled dissatisfaction. 

But now the man in whom solely she had been expressed, the onlypossible reason for her obstinate pride, had left her in a worldthat, but for Arnaud's fondness, looked on her without remark. Theloss of her distinction had been finally evident at balls, in thedresses in which Vigné had thought her so wonderful, and she droppedthem. Here, she repeated, was when affection, generously radiatedthrough life, should have reflected over her a tranquil andcontented joy. She had never given it, and she was without theability to receive. She admitted to herself, with a little annoyedlaugh, that her old desire for inviolable charm, for the integrityof a memorable slimness, was unimpaired. It was, she thought, tooridiculously inappropriate for words. 

Yet it had changed slightly into the recognition that what so oftenhad been called her beauty was all she now had for sustenance, allshe had ever had. Her mind returned continually to Pleydon, and--deep in the mystery of his passion--she was suddenly invaded by aninsistent desire to see the monument at Cottarsport. She spoke toArnaud at once about this; and alone, through his delicacy ofperception, Linda went to Boston the following day. 

The further ride to Cottarsport followed the sea--a brilliant sereneblue, fretted on the landward side by innumerable bare promontories, hideous towns and factories, but bowed in a far unbroken arc at theimmaculate horizon. She left the train for a hilly cluster ofhouses, gray and low like the rock everywhere apparent, dropping toa harbor that bore a company of motionless boats with half-spreaddrying sails. 

The day was at noon, and the sky, blue like the sea, held, still asthe anchored schooners, faint, chalky symmetrical clouds. Lindafound the Common without guidance; and at once saw, on its immovablebase of rugged granite, the bronze statue of Simon Downige. It stoodwell in advance of what, evidently, was the court-house, the whitesteeple Dodge had described. She found a bench by a path in the thingrass; and there, her gloved hands folded, at rest in her lap, hergaze and longing were lifted to the fixed aspiration. 

From where she sat the seated figure was projected against the sky;Simon's face was turned toward the west; the West that, for him, wasthe future, but which for Linda represented all the past. Thisconviction flooded her with unutterable sadness. A sense of failureweighed on her, no less heavy for the fact that it was perpetuallyvague. Her thoughts gathered about Dodge himself; and she recalledthe curious vividness of his vision of her as a child, perhaps ten. She, too, tried to remember that time and age. It was almost in hergrasp, but her realization was spoiled by absurd mental fragments--the familiar illusion of a leopard and a rider with bright hair, aforest with the ascending voices of angels, and an ominous squatfigure with a slowly nodding plumed head. 

The vista of a hotel returned, a fleet recollection of marblecolumns and a wide red carpet ... The white gleam and carbolizedsmell of a drug-store ... A thick magazine in a brown cover. These, changed into emotions of mingled joy and pain, shifted in bright ordim colors and sensations. There was a slow heavy plodding of feet, now above her head, the passage of a carried weight; and, in a flashof perception, she knew it was a coffin. She raised her claspedhands to her breast, crying into the sunny silence, to the figure ofSimon Downige lost in dream:

"He died that night, at the Boscombe, after he had told me about themeadows with silk tents--"

Her memory, thrilling with the echoed miraculous chord of the childof ten, sitting gravely, alone, among the shrill satins and causticvoices of a feminine throng, was complete. She saw herself, LindaCondon, as objectively as Pleydon's described vision: there was alarge bow on her straight black hair, and, from under the bang, hergaze was clear and wondering. How marvelously young she was! Thevindictive curiosity of the questioning women, intent on theirrings, brought out her eager defense of her mother, the effort toexplain away the ugly fact that--that Mr. Jasper was married. 

She saw Linda descending the marble stairs to the lower floor wherethe games were kept in a somber corridor, and heard a voice haltingher irresolute passage:

"Hello, Bellina. "

That wasn't her name, and she corrected him, waiting afterward tolisten to a strange fairy-like tale. The solitary, sick-looking man, with inky shadows under fixed eyes, was so actual that sherecaptured the pungent drift of his burning cigarette. He talkedabout love in a bitter intensity that hurt her. Yet, at first, hehad said that she was lovely, a touch of her ... Forever in thememory. Mostly, however, he spoke of a beautiful passion. It hadlargely vanished, his explanation continued; men had come to worshipother things. Plato started it. 

She recalled Plato, as well, in connection with Dodge; now, itappeared to her, that remote name had always been at the back of herconsciousness. There were other names, other men, of an age long agoin Italy. Their ideal, religion, was contained in the adoration of awoman, but not her body--it was a love of her spirit, the spirittheir purity of need recognized, perhaps helped to create. It was apassion as different as possible in essence from all she hadobserved about her. It was useless for common purposes, withheldfrom Arnaud Hallet. 

The man, seriously addressing the serious uncomprehending interestof ten, proceeded with a description of violins--but she had heardthem through all her life--and a parting that left only a whiteglove for remembrance. Then he had repeated that line, in Italian, which, not long back, her husband had recalled. The old gesturetoward the stars, the need to escape fatality--how she had sufferedfrom that!

Yet it was a service of the body, a faith spiritual because, here, it was never to be won, never to be realized in warm embrace. It hadno recognition in flesh, and it was the reward of no prayer orhumility or righteousness. Only beauty knew and possessed it. Hisimage grew dim like the blurring of his voice by pain and the shadowof death. Linda's thoughts and longing turned again to Dodge; itseemed to her that he no more than took up the recital where theother was silent. 

Pleydon--was it at Markue's party or later?--talking about "Homer'schildren" had meant the creations of great artists, in sound orcolor or words or form, through that supreme love unrealized inother life. The statue of Simon Downige, towering before her againstthe sky and above the sea, held in immutable bronze his conviction. The meager bundle and crude stick rested by shoes clogged with mud;Simon's body was crushed with weariness; but under the sweat-plasteredbrow his gaze pierced indomitable and undismayed to the vision of aplace of truth. 

She was choked by a sharp rush of joy at Dodge's accomplishment, anentire understanding of the beauty he had vainly explained, thedeathless communication of old splendid courage, an unshaken divineneed, to succeeding men and hope. This had been hers. She had alwaysfelt her presence in his success; but, until now, it had belongedexclusively to him. Dodge had, in his love, absorbed her, and thatresulted in the statues the world applauded. She, Linda thought, hadbeen an element easily dismissed. It had hurt her pride almostbeyond endurance, the pride that took the form of an inner necessityfor the survival of her grace--all she had. 

She had even asked him, in a passing resentment, why he had neverdirectly modeled her, kept, with his recording genius, the shape ofher features. She had gone to him in a blinder vanity for thepurpose of stamping her participation in his triumph on the stupidinsensibility of their world. How incredible! But at last she couldsee that he had preserved her spirit, her secret self, fromdestruction. He had cheated death of her fineness. The delicateperfection of her youth would never perish, never be dulled by oldage or corrupted in death. It had inspired and entered intoPleydon's being, and he had lifted it on the pedestal rising betweenthe sea and sky. 

She was in the Luxembourg, in that statue of Cotton Mather, thesomber flame, about which he had written with a comment on thechanging subjects of his creations. From the moment when he satbeside her on the divan in that room stifling with incense, with thenaked glimmer of women's shoulders, she had been the source of hispower. She had been his power. Linda smiled quietly, in retrospect, at her years of uncertainty, the feeling of waste, that had robbedher of peace. How complete her mystification had been! And, all thewhile, she had had the thrill of delight, of premonition, born inher through the forgotten hour with the man who had died. 

The sun, moving in celestial space, shifted the shadow about thebase of Simon Downige's monument. The afternoon was advancing. Sherose and turned, looking out over the sea to the horizon as brightlysharp as a curved sword. The life of Cottarsport, below her, proceeded in detached figures, an occasional unhurried passage. Theboats in the harbor were slumberous. It was time to go. She gazedagain, for a last view, at the bronze seated figure; and a word ofPleydon's, but rather it was Greek, wove its significance in theplacid texture of her thoughts. Its exact shape evaded her, adifficult word to recall--_Katharsis_, the purging of theheart. About her was the beating of the white wings of a Victorysweeping her--a faded slender woman in immaculate gloves and a smallmatchless hat--into a region without despair. 

THE END