Chapter VII: Part 7

"So we went and slew the great boar. I slew it personally, with a long spear, and with Stella clasping her hands in the background. Only there was a nicked place in the mustard-jar, where I had dropped it on the hearth some fifteen years ago, and my horse kept stumbling over this crevice, so that I knew it was the red jar and the buttons we were riding around. And afterward I made a song in honour of my Stella,--a song so perfect that I presently awoke, weeping with joy that I had made a song so beautiful, and with the knowledge I could not now recollect a single word of it; and I knew that neither I nor any other man could ever make again a song one-half so beautiful....

"Since then Ole-Luk-Oie--or someone--has been very kind at times. He always lets me into pictures, though, never into mouse-holes and hen-houses and silly places like that, as he did little Hjalmar. I don't know why....

"Once it was into the illustrations to the _Popular Tales of Poictesme_, and we met my great grandfather Jurgen there. And once it was into the picture on the cover of that unveracious pamphlet the manager of the Green Chalybeate sends in the spring to everybody who has once been there. That time was very odd.

"It is a picture of the Royal Hotel, you may remember, as it used to be a good ten years ago. Both fountains were playing in the sunlight, --they were torn down when I was at college, and I had almost forgotten their existence; and elegant and languid ladies were riding by, in victorias, and under tiny parasols trimmed with fringe, and all these ladies wore those preposterously big sleeves they used to wear then; and men in little visored skull caps were passing on tall old-fashioned bicycles, just as they do in the picture. Even the silk-hatted gentleman in the corner, pointing out the beauties of the building with his cane, was there.

"And Stella and I walked past the margin of the picture, and so on down the boardwalk to the other hotel, to look for our parents. And we agreed not to tell anyone that we had ever grown up, but just to let it be a secret between us two; and we were to stay in the picture forever, and grow up all over again, only we would arrange everything differently. And Stella was never to go driving on the twenty-seventh of April, so that we would be quite safe, and would live together for a long, long while.

"She wouldn't promise, though, that when Peter Blagden asked to be introduced, she would refuse to meet him. She just giggled and shook her sunny head. She hadn't any hat on. She was wearing the blue-and-white sailor-suit, of course."....

4

But a servant was lighting up the front-hall, and the glare of it came through the open door, and now the room was just like any other room.

"And you are Robert Townsend!" the marquise observed. "The one my mother doesn't approve of as a visitor!"

Madame d'Arlanges said, with a certain lack of sequence: "And yet you are planning to do precisely what Peter Blagden did. He liked Stella, she amused him, and he thought her money would come in very handy; and so he, somehow, contrived to marry her in the end, because she was just a child, and you were a child, and he wasn't. And he always lied to her about--about those business-trips--even from the very first. I knew, because I'm not a sentimental person. But, Bob, how can you stoop to mimic Peter Blagden! For you are doing precisely what he did; and for Rosalind, just as it was for Stella, it is almost irresistible, to have the chance of reforming a man who has notoriously been 'talked about.' Still, I see that for Stella's sake you won't lie as steadfastly to Rosalind as Peter did to Stella. It is none of my business of course; oh, I don't meddle. I merely prophesy that you won't."

But those lights had made an astonishing difference. And so, "But why not?" said I. "It is the immemorial method of dealing with savages; and surely women can never expect to become quite civilised so long as chivalry demands that a man say to a woman only what he believes she wants to hear? Ah, no, my dear Lizzie; when a man tries to get into a woman's favour, custom demands that he palliate the invasion with flatteries and veiled truths--or, more explicitly, with lies,--just as any sensible explorer must come prepared to leave a trail of looking-glasses and valueless bright beads among the original owners of any unknown country. For he doesn't know what obstacles he may encounter, and he has been taught, from infancy, to regard any woman as a baleful and unfathomable mystery--"

"She is never so--heaven help her!--if the man be sufficiently worthless."

"I rejoice that we are so thoroughly at one. For upon my word, I believe this widespread belief in feminine inscrutability is the result of a conspiracy on the part of the weaker sex; and that every mother is somehow pledged to inculcate this belief into the immature masculine mind. Apparently the practice originated in the Middle Ages, for it never seemed to occur to anybody before then that a woman was particularly complex. Though, to be sure, Catullus now--" "This is not a time for pedantry. I don't in the least care what Catullus or anyone else observed concerning anything--" "But I had not aspired, my dear Lizzie, to be even remotely pedantic. I was simply about to remark that Catullus, or Ariosto, or Coventry Patmore, or King Juba, or Posidonius, or Sir John Vanbrugh, or perhaps, Agathocles of Chios, or else Simonides the Younger, has conceded somewhere, that women are, in certain respects, dissimilar, as it were, to men." "I am merely urging you not to marry this silly little Rosalind, for the excellent reason that you _did_ love my darling Stella even more than I, and that Rosalind is in love with you." "Do you really think so?" said I. "Why, then, actuated by the very finest considerations of decency and prudence and generosity, I shall, of course, espouse her the very next November that ever is."

The marquise retorted: "No,--because you are at bottom too fond of Rosalind Jemmett; and, besides, it isn't really a question of your feeling toward _her_. In any event, I begin to like you too well, Bob, to let you kiss me any more."

I declared that I detested paradox. Then I went home to supper.

5

But, for all this, I meditated for a long while upon what Lizzie had said. It was true that I was really fond of "proper" little Rosalind Jemmett; concerning myself I had no especial illusions; and, to my credit, I faced what I considered the real issue, squarely.

We were in Aunt Marcia's parlour. Rosalind was an orphan, and lived in turn with her three aunts. She said the other two were less unendurable than Aunt Marcia, and I believed her. I consider, to begin with, that a person is not civilised who thumps upon the floor upstairs with a poker, simply because it happens to be eleven o'clock; and moreover, Aunt Marcia's parlour--oh, it really was a "parlour,"--was entirely too like the first night of a charity bazaar, when nothing has been sold.

The room was not a particularly large one; but it contained exactly three hundred and seven articles of bijouterie, not estimating the china pug-dog upon the hearth. I know, for I counted them.

Besides, there were twenty-eight pictures upon the walls--one in oils of the late Mr. Dumby (for Aunt Marcia was really Mrs. Clement Dumby), painted, to all appearances, immediately after the misguided gentleman who married Aunt Marcia had been drowned, and before he had been wiped dry,--and for the rest, everywhere the eye was affronted by engravings framed in gilt and red-plush of "Sanctuary," "Le Hamac," "Martyre Chretienne," "The Burial of Latane," and other Victorian outrages.

Then on an easel there was a painting of a peacock, perched upon an urn, against a gilded background; this painting irrelevantly deceived your expectations, for it was framed in blue plush. Also there were "gift-books" on the centre table, and a huge volume, again in red plush, with its titular "Album" cut out of thin metal and nailed to the cover. This album contained calumnious portraits of Aunt Marcia's family, the most of them separately enthroned upon the same imitation rock, in all the pride of a remote, full-legged and starchy youth, each picture being painfully "coloured by hand."

6

"Do you know why I want to marry you?" I demanded of Rosalind, in such surroundings, apropos of a Mrs. Vokins who had taken a house in Lichfield for the winter, and had been at school somewhere in the backwoods with Aunt Marcia, and was "dying to meet me."

She answered, in some surprise: "Why, because you have the good taste to be heels over head in love with me, of course."

I took possession of her hands. "If there is anything certain in this world of uncertainties, it is that I am not the least bit in love with you. Yet, only yesterday--do you remember, dear?"

She answered, "I remember."

"But I cannot, for the life of me, define what happened yesterday. I merely recall that we were joking, as we always do when together, and that on a wager I loosened your hair. Then as it tumbled in great honey-coloured waves about you, you were silent, and there came into your eyes a look I had never seen before. And even now I cannot define what happened, Rosalind! I only know I caught your face between my hands, and for a moment held it so, with fingers that have not yet forgotten the feel of your soft, thick hair,--and that for a breathing space your eyes looked straight into mine. Something changed in me then, my lady. Something changed in you, too, I think."

Then Rosalind said, "Don't, Jaques--!" She was horribly embarrassed.

"For I knew you willed me to possess you, and that possession would seem as trivial as a fiddle in a temple.... Yet, too, there was a lustful beast, somewhere inside of me, which nudged me to--kiss you, say! But nothing happened. I did not even kiss you, my beautiful and wealthy Rosalind."

"Don't keep on talking about the money," she wailed. "Why, you can't believe I think you mercenary!"

"I would estimate your intellect far more cheaply, my charming Rosalind, if you thought anything else; for of course I am. I wanted to settle myself, you conceive, and as an accomplice you were very eligible. I now comprehend it is beyond the range of rationality, dear stranger, that we should ever marry each other; and so we must not. We must not, you comprehend, since though we lived together through ten patriarchal lifetimes we would die strangers to each other. For you, dear clean-souled girl that you are, were born that you might be the wife of a strong man and the mother of his sturdy children. The world was made for you and for your offspring; and in time your children will occupy this world and make the laws for us irrelevant folk that scribble and paint and design all useless and beautiful things, and thus muddle away our precious lives. No, you may not wisely mate with us, for you are a shade too terribly at ease in the universe, you sensible people."

"But I love Art," said Rosalind, bewildered.

"Yes,--but by the tiniest syllable a thought too volubly, my dear. You are the sort that quotes the Rubaiyat. Whereas I--was it yesterday or the day before you told me, with a wise pucker of your beautiful low, white brow, that I had absolutely no sense of the responsibilities of life? Well, I really haven't, dear stranger, as you appraise them; and, indeed, I fear we must postpone our agreement upon any possible subject, until the coming of the Coquecigrues. We see the world so differently, you and I,--and for that same reason I cannot but adore you, Rosalind. For with you I can always speak my true thought and know that you will never for a moment suspect it to be anything but irony. Ah, yes, we can laugh and joke together, and be thorough friends; but if there is anything certain in this world of uncertainties, it is that I am not, and cannot be, in love with you. And yet--I wonder now?" said I, and I rose and paced Aunt Marcia's parlour.

"You wonder? Don't you understand even now?" the girl said shyly. "I am not as clever as you, of course; I have known that for a long while, Jaques; and to-night in particular I don't quite follow you, my dear, but I love you, and--why, there is _nothing_ I could deny you!"

"Then give me back my freedom," said I. "For, look you, Rosalind, marriage is proverbially a slippery business. Always there are a variety of excellent reasons for perpetrating matrimony; but the rub of it is that not any one of them insures you against to-morrow. Love, for example, we have all heard of; but I have known fine fellows to fling away their chances in life, after the most approved romantic fashion, on account of a pretty stenographer, and to beat her within the twelvemonth. And upon my word, you know, nobody has a right to blame the swindled lover for doing this--"

I paused to inspect the china pug-dog which squatted on the pink-tiled hearth and which glared inanely at the huge brass coal-box just opposite. Then I turned from these two abominations and faced Rosalind with a bantering flirt of my head.

"--For put it that I marry some entrancing slip of girlhood, what am I to say when, later, I discover myself irrevocably chained to a fat and dowdy matron? I married no such person, I have indeed sworn eternal fidelity to an entirely different person; and this unsolicited usurper of my hearth is nothing whatever to me, unless perhaps the object of my entire abhorrence. Yet am I none the less compelled to justify the ensuing action before an irrational audience, which faces common logic in very much the attitude of Augustine's famed adder! Decidedly I think that, on the whole, I would prefer my Freedom."

It was as though I had struck her. She sat as if frozen. "Jaques, is there another woman in this?"

"Why, in a fashion, yes. Yet it is mainly because I am really fond of you, Rosalind."

She handed me that exceedingly expensive ring the jeweler had charged to me. I thought her action damnably theatrical, but still, it was not as though I could afford to waste money on rings, so I took the trinket absent-mindedly.

"You are unflatteringly prompt in closing out the account," I said, with a grieved smile....

"Good-bye!" said Rosalind, and her voice broke. "Oh, and I had thought--! Well, as it is, I pay for the luxury of thinking, just as you forewarned me, don't I, Jaques? And you won't forget the hall-light? Aunt Marcia, you know--but how glad _she_ will be! I feel rather near to Aunt Marcia to-night," said Rosalind.

7

She left Lichfield the next day but one, and spent the following winter with the aunt that lived in Brooklyn. She was Rosalind Gelwix the next time I saw her....

And Aunt Marcia, whose taste is upon a par with her physical attractions, inserted a paragraph in the "Social Items" of the Lichfield _Courier-Herald_ to announce the breaking-off of the engagement. Aunt Marcia also took the trouble to explain, quite confidentially, to some seven hundred and ninety-three people, just why the engagement had been broken off: and these explanations were more creditable to Mrs. Dumby's imagination than to me.

And I remembered, then, that the last request my mother made of me was to keep out of the newspapers--"except, of course, the social items"....

20.

_He Dines Out, Impeded by Superstitions_

Within the week I had repented of what I termed my idiotic quixotism, and for precisely nine days after that I cursed my folly. And then, at the Provises, I comprehended that in breaking off my engagement to Rosalind Jemmett I had acted with profound wisdom, and I unfolded my napkin, and said:

"Do you know I didn't catch your name--not even this time?"

She took a liberal supply of lemon juice. "How delightful!" she murmured, "for I heard yours quite distinctly, and these oysters are delicious."

I noted with approval that her gown was pink and fluffy; it had also the advantage of displaying shoulders that were incredibly white, and a throat which was little short of marvellous. "I am glad," I whispered, confidentially, "that you are still wearing that faint vein about your left temple. I thought it admirable for early morning wear upon the house tops of Liege, but it seems equally effective for dinner parties."

She raised her eyebrows slightly and selected a biscuit.

"You see," said I, "I was horribly late. And when Kittie Provis said, 'Allow me,' and I saw--well, I didn't care," I concluded, lucidly, "because to have every one of your dreams come true, all of a sudden, leaves you past caring."

"It really is funny," she confided to a spoonful of _consomme a la Julienne_.

"After almost two years!" sighed I, ever so happily. But I continued, with reproach, "To go without a word--that very day--"

"Mamma--" she began.

I recalled the canary-bird, and the purple shawl. "I sought wildly," said I; "you were evanished. The _proprietaire_ was tearing his hair--no insurance--he knew nothing. So I too tore my hair; and I said things. There was a row. For he also said things: 'Figure to yourselves, messieurs! I lose the Continental--two ladies come and go, I know not who--I am ruined, desolated, is it not?--and this pig of an American blusters--ah, my new carpets, just down, what horror!' And then, you know, he launched into a quite feeling peroration concerning our notorious custom of tomahawking one another--

"Yes," I coldly concluded into Mrs. Clement Dumby's ear, "we all behaved disgracefully. As you very justly observe, liquor has been the curse of the South." It was of a piece with Kittie Provis to put me next to Aunt Marcia, I reflected.

And mentally I decided that even though a portion of my assertions had not actually gone through the formality of occurring, it all might very easily have happened, had I remained a while longer in Liege; and then ensued a silent interval and an entree.

"And so--?"

"And so I knocked about the world, in various places, hoping against hope that at last--"

"Your voice carries frightfully--"

I glanced toward Mrs. Clement Dumby, who, as a dining dowager of many years' experience, was, to all appearances, engrossed by the contents of her plate. "My elderly neighbour is as hard of hearing as a telephone-girl," I announced. She was the exact contrary, which was why I said it quite audibly. "And your neighbour--why, _his_ neighbour is Nannie Allsotts. We might as well be on a desert island, Elena--" And the given name slipped out so carelessly as to appear almost accidental.

"Sir!" said she, with proper indignation; "after so short an acquaintance--"

"Centuries," I suggested, meekly. "You remember I explained about that."

She frowned,--an untrustworthy frown that was tinged with laughter. "One meets so many people! Yes, it really is frightfully warm, Colonel Grimshaw; they ought to open some of the windows."

"Er--haw--hum! Didn't see you at the Anchesters."

"No; I am usually lucky enough to be in bed with a sick headache when Mrs. Anchester entertains. Of two evils one should choose the lesser, you know."

In the manner of divers veterans Colonel Grimshaw evinced his mirth upon a scale more proper to an elephant; and relapsed, with a reassuring air of having done his duty once and for all.

"I never," she suggested, tentatively, "heard any more of your poem, about--?"

"Oh, I finished it; every magazine in the country knows it. It is poor stuff, of course, but then how could I write of Helen when Helen had disappeared?"

The lashes exhibited themselves at full length. "I looked her up," confessed their owner, guiltily, "in the encyclopaedia. It was very instructive--about sun-myths and bronzes and the growth of the epic, you know, and tree-worship and moon-goddesses. Of course"--here ensued a flush and a certain hiatus in logic,--"of course it is nonsense."

"Nonsense?" My voice sank tenderly. "Is it nonsense, Elena, that for two years I have remembered the woman whose soft body I held, for one unforgettable moment, in my arms? and nonsense that I have fought all this time against--against the temptations every man has,--that I might ask her at last--some day when she at last returned, as always I knew she would--to share a fairly decent life? and nonsense that I have dreamed, waking and sleeping, of a wondrous face I knew in Ilium first, and in old Rome, and later on in France, I think, when the Valois were kings? Well!" I sighed, after vainly racking my brain for a tenderer fragment of those two-year-old verses, "I suppose it is nonsense!"

"The salt, please," quoth she. She flashed that unforgotten broadside at me. "I believe you need it."

"Why, dear me! of course not!" said I, to Mrs. Dumby; "immorality lost the true _cachet_ about the same time that ping-pong did. Nowadays divorces are going out, you know, and divorcees are not allowed to. Quite modish women are seen in public with their husbands nowadays."

"H'mph!" said Mrs. Dumby; "I've no doubt that you must find it a most inconvenient fad!"

I ate my portion of duck abstractedly. "Thus to dive into the refuse-heap of last year's slang does not quite cover the requirements of the case. For I wish--only I hardly dare to ask--"

"If I were half of what you make out," meditatively said she, "I would be a regular fairy, and couldn't refuse you the usual three wishes."

"Two," I declared, "would be sufficient."

"First?"

"That you tell me your name."

"I adore orange ices, don't you? And the second?" was her comment.

"Well, then, you' re a pig," was mine. "You are simply a nomenclatural Berkshire. But the second is that you let me measure your finger--oh, any finger will do. Say, the third on the left hand."

"You really talk to me as if--" But this non-existent state of affairs proved indescribable, and the unreal condition lapsed into a pout.

"Oh, very possibly!" I conceded; "since the way in which a man talks to a woman--to _the_ woman--depends by ordinary upon the depth--"

"The depth of his devotion?" she queried, helpfully. "Of course!"

I faced the broadside, without flinching. "No," said I, critically; "the depth of her dimples."

"Nonsense!" Nevertheless, the dimples were, and by a deal, the more conspicuous. We were getting on pretty well.

I bent forward; there was a little catch in my voice. Aunt Marcia was listening. I wanted her to listen.

"You must know that I love you," I said, simply, "I have always loved you, I think, since the moment my eyes first fell upon you in that--other pink thing. Of course, I realize the absurdity of my talking in this way to a woman whose name I don't know; but I realise more strongly that I love you. Why, there is not a pulse in my body which isn't throbbing and tingling and leaping riotously from pure joy of being with you again, Elena! And in time, you will love me a little, simply because I want you to,--isn't that always a woman's main reason for caring for a man?"

She considered this, dubious and flushed.

"I will not insist," said I, with a hurried and contented laugh, "that you were formerly an Argive queen. I mean I will not be obstinate about it, because that, I confess, was a paraphrase of my verses. But Helen has always been to me the symbol of perfect loveliness, and so it was not unnatural that I should confuse you with her."

"Thank you, sir," said she, demurely.

"I half believe it is true, even now; and if not--well, Helen was acceptable enough in her day, Elena, but I am willing to Italianise, for I have seen you and loved you, and Helen is forgot. It is not exactly the orthodox pace for falling in love," I added, with a boyish candour, "but it is very real to me."

"You--you couldn't have fallen in love--really--"

"It was not in the least difficult," I protested.

"And you don't even know my _name_--"

"I know, however, what it is going to be," said I; "and Mrs. 'Enry 'Awkins, as we'll put it, has found favour in the judgment of connoisseurs. So after dinner--in an hour--?"

"Oh, very well! since you're an author and insist, I will be ready, in an hour, to decline you, with thanks."

"Rejection not implying any lack of merit," I suggested. "This is damnable iteration; but I am accustomed to it."

But by this, Mrs. Provis was gathering eyes around the table, and her guests arose, with the usual outburst of conversation, and swishing of dresses, and the not always unpremeditated dropping of handkerchiefs and fans. Mrs. Clement Dumby bore down upon us now, a determined and generously proportioned figure in her notorious black silk.

"Really," said she, aggressively, "I never saw two people more engrossed. My dear Mrs. Barry-Smith, you have been so taken up with Mr. Townsend, all during dinner, that I haven't had a chance to welcome you to Lichfield. Your mother and I were at school together, you know. And your husband was quite a beau of mine. So I don't feel, now, at all as if we were strangers--"

And thus she bore Elena off, and I knew that within ten minutes Elena would have been warned against me, as "not quite a desirable acquaintance, you know, my dear, and it is only my duty to tell you that as a young and attractive married woman--"

2

"And so," I said in my soul, as the men redistributed themselves, "she is married,--married while you were pottering with books and the turn of phrases and immortality and such trifles--oh, you ass! And to a man named Barry-Smith--damn him, I wonder whether he is the hungry scut that hasn't had his hair cut this fall, or the blancmange-bellied one with the mashed-strawberry nose? Yes, I know everybody else. And Jimmy Travis is telling a funny story, so _laugh_! People will think you are grieving over Rosalind.... But why in heaven's name isn't Jimmy at home this very moment,--with a wife and carpet-slippers and a large-size bottle of paregoric on his mantelpiece,--instead of here, grinning like a fool over some blatant indecency? He ought to marry; every young man ought to marry. Oh, you futile, abject, burbling twin-brother of the first patron that procured a reputation for Bedlam! why aren't _you_ married--married years ago,--with a home of your own, and a victoria for Mrs. Townsend and bills from the kindergarten every quarter? Oh, you bartender of verbal cocktails! I believe your worst enemy flung your mind at you in a moment of unbridled hatred."

So I snapped the stem of my glass carefully, and scowled with morose disapproval at the unconscious Mr. Travis, and his now-applauded and very Fescennine jest....

3

I found her inspecting a bulky folio with remarkable interest. There was a lamp, with a red shade, that cast a glow over her, such as one sometimes sees reflected from a great fire. The people about us were chattering idiotically, and something inside my throat prevented my breathing properly, and I was miserable.

"Mrs. Barry-Smith,"--thus I began,--"if you've the tiniest scrap of pity in your heart for a very presumptuous, blundering and unhappy person, I pray you to forgive and to forget, as people say, all that I have blatted out to you. I spoke, as I thought, to a free woman, who had the right to listen to my boyish talk, even though she might elect to laugh at it. And now I hardly dare to ask forgiveness."

Mrs. Barry-Smith inspected a view of the Matterhorn, with careful deliberation. "Forgiveness?" said she.

"Indeed," said I, "I _don't_ deserve it." And I smiled most resolutely. "I had always known that somewhere, somehow, you would come into my life again. It has been my dream all these two years; but I dream carelessly. My visions had not included this--obstacle."

She made wide eyes at me. "What?" said she.

"Your husband," I suggested, delicately.

The eyes flashed. And a view of Monaco, to all appearances, awoke some pleasing recollection. "I confess," said Mrs. Barry-Smith, "that--for the time--I had quite forgotten him. I--I reckon you must think me very horrid?"

But she was at pains to accompany this query with a broadside that rendered such a supposition most unthinkable. And so--

"I think you--" My speech was hushed and breathless, and ended in a click of the teeth. "Oh, don't let's go into the minor details," I pleaded.

Then Mrs. Barry-Smith descended to a truism. "It is usually better not to," said she, with the air of an authority. And latterly, addressing the facade of Notre Dame, "You see, Mr. Barry-Smith being so much older than I--"

"I would prefer that. Of course, though, it is none of my business."

"You see, you came and went so suddenly that--of course I never thought to see you again--not that I ever thought about it, I reckon--" Her candour would have been cruel had it not been reassuringly over-emphasized. "And Mr. Barry-Smith was very pressing--"

"He would be," I assented, after consideration. "It is, indeed, the single point in his outrageous conduct I am willing to condone."

"--and he was a great friend of my father's, and I _liked_ him--"

"So you married him and lived together ever afterward, without ever throwing the tureen at each other. That is the most modern version; but there is usually a footnote concerning the bread-and-butter plates."

She smiled, inscrutably, a sphinx in Dresden china. "And yet," she murmured, plaintively, "I _would_ like to know what you think of me."

"Why, prefacing with the announcement that I pray God I may never see you after to-night, I think you the most adorable creature He ever made. What does it matter now? I have lost you. I think--ah, desire o' the world, what can I think of you? The notion of you dazzles me like flame,--and I dare not think of you, for I love you."

"Yes?" she queried, sweetly; "then I reckon Mrs. Dumby was right after all. She said you were a most depraved person and that, as a young and--well, _she_ said it, you know--attractive widow--"

"H'm!" said I; and I sat down. "Elena Barry-Smith," I added, "you are an unmitigated and unconscionable and unpardonable rascal. There is just one punishment which would be adequate to meet your case; and I warn you that I mean to inflict it. Why, how dare you be a widow! The court decides it is unable to put up with any such nonsense, and that you've got to stop it at once."

"Really," said she, tossing her head and moving swiftly, "one would think we _were_ on a desert island!"

"Or a strange roof"--and I laughed, contentedly. "Meanwhile, about that ring--it should be, I think, a heavy, Byzantine ring, with the stones sunk deep in the dull gold. Yes, we'll have six stones in it; say, R, a ruby; O, an opal; B, a beryl; E, an emerald; R, a ruby again, I suppose; and T, a topaz. Elena, that's the very ring I mean to buy as soon as I've had breakfast, tomorrow, as a token of my mortgage on the desire of the world, and as the badge of your impendent slavery." And I reflected that Rosalind had, after all, behaved commendably in humiliating me by so promptly returning this ring.

Very calmly Elena Barry-Smith regarded the Bay of Naples; very calmly she turned to the Taj Mahal. "An obese young Lochinvar," she reflected aloud, "who has seen me twice, unblushingly assumes he is about to marry me! Of course," she sighed, quite tolerantly, "I know he is clean out of his head, for otherwise--" "Yes,--otherwise?" I prompted.

"--he would never ask me to wear an opal. Why," she cried in horror, "I couldn't think of it!" "You mean--?" said I.

She closed the album, with firmness. "Why, you are just a child," said Mrs. Barry-Smith. "We are utter strangers to each other. Please remember that, for all you know, I may have an unbridled temper, or an imported complexion, or a liking for old man Ibsen. What you ask--only you don't, you simply assume it,--is preposterous. And besides, opals _are_ unlucky."

"Desire o' the world," I said, in dolorous wise, "I have just remembered the black-lace mitts and reticule you left upon the dinner-table. Oh, truly, I had meant to bring 'em to you--Only _do_ you think it quite good form to put on those cloth-sided shoes when you've been invited to a real party?"

For a moment Mrs. Barry-Smith regarded me critically. Then she shook her head, and tried to frown, and reopened the album, and inspected the crater of Vesuvius, and quite frankly laughed. And a tender, pink-tipped hand rested upon my arm for an instant,--a brief instant, yet pulsing with a sense of many lights and of music playing somewhere, and of a man's heart keeping time to it.

"If you were to make it an onyx--" said Mrs. Barry-Smith.

21.

_He is Urged to Desert His Galley_

She had been a widow even when I first encountered her in Liege. I may have passed her dozens of times, only she was in mourning then, for Barry-Smith, and so I never really saw her.

It seems, though, that "in the second year" it is permissible to wear pink garments in the privacy of your own apartments, and that if people see you in them, accidentally, it is simply their own fault.

And very often they are punished for it; as most certainly was I, for Elena led me a devil's dance of jealousy, and rapture, and abject misery, and suspicion, and supreme content, that next four months. She and her mother had rented a house on Regis Avenue for the winter; and I frequented it with zeal. Mrs. Vokins said I "came reg'lar as the milkman."

2

Now of Mrs. Vokins I desire to speak with the greatest respect, if only for the reason that she was Elena Barry-Smith's mother. Mrs. Vokins had, no doubt, the kindest heart in the world; but she had spent the first thirty years of her life in a mountain-girdled village, and after her husband's wonderful luck--if you will permit me her vernacular,--in being "let in on the groundfloor" when the Amalgamated Tobacco Company was organised, I believe that Mrs. Vokins was never again quite at ease.

I am abysmally sure she never grew accustomed to being waited on by any servant other than a girl who "came in by the day"; though, oddly enough, she was incessantly harassed by the suspicion that one or another "good-for-nothing nigger was getting ready to quit." Her time was about equally devoted to tending her canary, Bill Bryan, and to furthering an apparently diurnal desire to have supper served a quarter of an hour earlier to-night, "so that the servants can get off."

Finally Mrs. Vokins considered that "a good woman's place was right in her own home, with a nice clean kitchen," and was used to declare that the fummadiddles of Mrs. Carrie Nation--who was in New York that winter, you may remember, advocating Prohibition,--would never have been stood for where Mrs. Vokins was riz. Them Yankee huzzies, she estimated, did beat her time.

3

It was, and is, the oddest thing I ever knew of that Elena could have been her daughter. Though, mind you, even to-day, I cannot commit myself to any statement whatever as concerns Elena Barry-Smith, beyond asserting that she was beautiful. I am willing to concede that since the world's creation there may have lived, say, six or seven women who were equally good to look upon; but at the bottom of my heart I know the concession is simply verbal. For she was not pretty; she was not handsome; she was beautiful. Indeed, I sometimes thought her beauty overshadowed any serious consideration of the woman who wore it, just as in admiration of a picture you rarely think to wonder what sort of canvas it is painted on.

Yes, I am quite sure, upon reflection, that to Elena Barry-Smith her beauty was a sort of tyrant. She devoted her life, I think, to the retention of her charms; and what with the fixed seven hours for sleep--no more and not a moment less,--the rigid limits of her diet, the walking of exactly five miles a day, and her mathematical adherence to a predetermined programme of massage and hair-treatment and manicuring and face-creams and so on, Elena had hardly two hours in a day at her own disposal.

She would as soon have thought of sacrificing her afternoon walk to the Musgrave Monument and back, as of having a front-tooth unnecessarily removed; and would as willingly have partaken of prussic acid as of candy or potatoes. She was, in fine, an artist of the truest type, in that she immolated her body, and her own preferences, in the cause of beauty.

Nor was she vain, or stupid either, though what I have written vaguely sounds as though she were both. She was just Elena Barry-Smith, of whom your memory was always how beautiful she had been at this or that particular moment, rather than what she said or did. And I believe that every man in Lichfield was in love with her.

But, in recollection of any person with whom you have had intimate and tender intercourse, the pre-eminent feature is the big host of questions which you cannot answer, or not, at least, with certainty....

4

For instance: the night of the Allardyce dance, after seeing Elena home, I stepped in for a moment to get warm and have her mix me a highball. We sat for a considerable while on the long sofa in the dimly-lighted dining room, talking in whispers so as not to disturb the rest of the house: and Elena was unusually beautiful that night, and I was more than usually in love, more thanks to three of the five drinks she mixed....

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," she stated, sighing.

I did not say anything.

"Oh, well, then--! If you will just promise me," she stipulated, "that you will never in any way refer to it afterwards--"

So I promised.... And the next day she met me, cool as the proverbial cucumber, and never once did she "refer to it afterwards," nor did I think it wise to do so either. But the incident, however delightful, puzzled me. It puzzles me even now....

5

In any event, she was not only beautiful but exceedingly well-to-do likewise, since her dead father and her husband also had provided for her amply; and Lichfield sniggered in consequence, and as a matter of course assumed my devotion to be of astute and mercenary origin. But I had, in this period, a variety of reasons to know that Lichfield was for once entirely in the wrong; and that what Lichfield mistook to be the begetter of, was in reality--so we will phrase it--the almost unnecessary augmenter of my infatuation. Of course I did not exactly object to her having money....

Meantime Elena was profoundly various. I told her once that being married to her would be the very next thing to owning a harem. And in consequence of this same mutability, it was as late as March before Elena Barry-Smith made up her mind to marry me; and I was so deliciously perturbed that the same night I wrote to tell Bettie Hamlyn all about it. I had accepted Rosalind more calmly somehow. Now I was dithyrambic; and you would never have suspected I had lived within fifty miles of Bettie for an entire two years without attempting to communicate with her, for very certainly my letter did not touch upon the fact. I was, in fine, supremely happy, and I wanted Bettie, first of all, to know of this circumstance, because my happiness had always made her happy too.

The act was natural enough; only Elena telephoned, at nine the following morning, that she had altered her intention.

"My regret is beyond expression," said I, politely, "I shall come for my tea at five, however."

She entered upon a blurred protest. "You have already broken my heart," I said, with some severity, "and now it would appear you contemplate swindling the remainder of my anatomy out of its deserts. You are a curmudgeon." And I hung up the receiver.

And my first thought was, "Oh, how gladly I would give the gold of Ormus and of Alaska just to have my letter back!" But I had mailed it, shuffling to the corner in my slippers, and without any collar on, in the hushed middle of the night, because my letter had seemed so important then.

6

"Will you not have me, lady?" I began that afternoon.

"No, my lord," she demurely responded, "for I've decided it would be too much like living in my Sunday-clothes."

And "I give it up. So what's the answer?" was my annotation.

"Oh, I'm not making jokes to-day. Why are you so--Oh, as we used to say at school," she re-began, _"Que diable allais-tu faire dans cette galere?"_

"I was born in a vale of tears, Elena, and must take the consequences of being found in such a situation."

She came to me, and her finger-tips touched my hand ever so lightly. "That is another quotation, I suppose. And it is one other reason why I mean not to marry you. Frankly, you bore me to death with your erudition; you are three-quarters in love with me, but you pay heaps less attention to what I say about anything than to what Aristotle or some other old fellow said about it. Oh, that I should have lived to be jealous of Aristotle! Indeed I am, for I have the misfortune to be hideously in love with you. You are so exactly the sort of infant I would like to adopt."

"Love," I suggested, "while no longer an excuse for marriage, is at least a palliation."

"Listen, dear. From the first I have liked you, but that was not very strange, because I like almost everybody; but it was strange I should have remembered you and have liked the idea of you ever since you went away that first time."

"Oh, well, this once I will excuse you--"

"But it happened in this way: I had found everybody--very nice, you know--particularly the men,--and the things which cannot be laughed at I had always put aside as not worth thinking about. You like to laugh, too, but I have always known--and sometimes it gets me real mad to think about it, I can tell you--that you could be in earnest if you chose, and I can't. And that makes me a little sorry and tremendously glad, because, quite frankly, I _am_ head over heels in love with you. That is why I don't intend to marry you."

And I was not a little at sea. "Oh, very well!" I pleasantly announced, "I shall become a prominent citizen at once, if that's all that is necessary. I will join every one of the patriotic societies, and sit perpetually on platforms with a perspiring water-pitcher, and unveil things every week, with felicitous allusions to the glorious past of our grand old State; and have columns of applause in brackets on the front page of the _Courier-Herald_. I will even go into civic politics, if you insist upon it, and leave round-cornered cards at all the drugstores, so that everybody who buys a cigar will know I am subject to the Democratic primary. I wonder, by the way, if people ever survive that malady? It sounds to me a deal more dangerous that epilepsy, say, yet lots of persons seem to have it--"

But Elena was not listening. "You know," she re-began, "I could get out of it all very gracefully by telling you you drink too much. You couldn't argue it, you know--particularly after your behavior last Tuesday."

"Oh, now and then one must be sociable. You aren't a prude, Elena--"

"However, I am not really afraid of that, somehow. I even confess I don't actually _mind_ your being rather good for nothing. No woman ever really does, though she has her preference, and pretends, of course, to mind a great deal. What I mean, then, is this: You don't marry just me. I--I have very few relations, just two brothers and my mother; yet, in a sense, you know, you marry them as well. But I don't believe you would like being married to them. They are so different from you, dear. Your whole view-point of life is different--"

I had begun to speak when she broke in: "No, don't say anything, please, until I'm quite, quite through. My brothers are the most admirable men I ever knew. I love them more than I can say. I trust them more than I do you. But they are just _good_. They don't fail in the really important things of life, but they are remiss in little ways, they--they don't _care_ for the little elegantnesses, if that's a word. Even Arthur chews tobacco when he feels inclined. And he thinks no _man_ would smoke a cigarette. Oh, I can't explain just what I mean--"

"I think I understand, Elena. Suppose we let it pass as said."

"And Mamma is not--we'll say, particularly highly educated. Oh, you've been very nice to her. She adores you. You won _her_ over completely when you took so much trouble to get her the out-of-print paper novels--about the village maidens and the wicked dukes--in that idiotic Carnation Series she is always reading. The whole affair was just like both of you, I think."

"But, oh, my dear--!" I laughed.

"No, not one man in a thousand would have remembered it after she had said she did think the titles 'were real tasty'; and I don't believe any other man in the world would have spent a week in rummaging the second-hand bookstores, until he found them. Only I don't know, even yet, whether it was really kindness, or just cleverness that put you up to it--on account of me. And I do know that you are nice to her in pretty much the same way you were nice to the negro cook yesterday. And I have had more advantages than she's had. But at bottom I'm really just like her. You'd find it out some day. And--and that is what I mean, I think."

I spoke at some length. It was atrocious nonsense which I spoke; in any event, it looked like atrocious nonsense when I wrote it down just now, and so I tore it up. But I was quite sincere throughout that moment; it is the Townsend handicap, I suspect, always to be perfectly sincere for the moment.

"Oh, well!" she said; "I'll think about it."

7

That night Elena and I played bridge against Nannie Allsotts and Warwick Risby. I was very much in love with Elena, but I hold it against her, even now, that she insisted on discarding from strength. However, there was to be a little supper afterward, and you may depend upon it that Mrs. Vokins was seeing to its preparation.

She came into the room about eleven o'clock, beaming with kindliness and flushed--I am sure,--by some slight previous commerce with the kitchen-fire.

"Well, well!" said Mrs. Vokins, comfortably; "and who's a-beating?"

I looked up. I must protest, until my final day, I could not help it. "Why, we is," I said.

And Nannie Allsotts giggled, ever so slightly, and Warwick Risby had half risen, with a quite infuriate face, and I knew that by to-morrow the affair would be public property, and promptly lost the game and rubber. Afterward we had our supper.

When the others had gone--for my footing in the house was such that I, by ordinary, stayed a moment or two after the others had gone,--Elena Barry-Smith came to me and soundly boxed my jaws.

"That," she said, "is one way to deal with you."

A minute ago I had been ashamed of myself. I had not room to be that now; I was too full of anger. "I did make rather a mess of it," I equably remarked, "but, you see, Nannie had shown strength in diamonds, and I simply couldn't resist the finesse. So they made every one of their clubs. And I hadn't any business to take the chance of course at that stage, with the ace right in my hand--"

"Arthur would have said, before he'd thought of it, 'You damn fool--!' And then he would have apologised for forgetting himself in the presence of a lady," she said, in a sorry little voice. "Yes, you--you _have_ hurt me," she presently continued,--"just as you meant to do, if that's a comfort to you. I feel as though I'd smacked a marble statue. You are the sort that used to take snuff just before they had their heads cut off, and when _they_ were in the wrong. And I'm not. That's always been the trouble."

"Elena!" I began,--"wait, just a moment! I'm in anger now--!" It was not much to stammer out, but for me, who have the Townsend temper, it was very hard to say.

"You talk about loving me! and I believe you do love me, in at any rate a sort of way. But you'll never forget, you never _have_ forgotten, those ancestors of yours who were in the House of Burgesses when I hadn't any ancestors at all. It isn't fair, because we haven't got the chance to pick our parents, and it's absurd, and--it's true. The woman is my mother, and I'll be like her some day, very probably. Yes, she _is_ ignorant and tacky, and at times she is ridiculous. She hadn't even the smartness to notice it when you made a fool of her; and if anybody were to explain it to her she would just laugh and say, 'Law, I don't mind, because young people always have to have their fun, I reckon.' And she would forgive you! Why, she adores you! she's been telling me for months that you're 'a heap the nicest young man that visits with me.'"

Afterward Elena paused for an instant. "I think that is all," she said. "It's a difference that isn't curable. Yes, I simply wanted to tell you that much, and then ask you to go, I believe--"

"So you don't wish me, Elena, in the venerable phrase, to make an honest woman of you?"

She had half turned, standing, in pink and silver fripperies, with one bared arm resting on the chair back, in one of her loveliest attitudes. "What do you mean?"

"I was referring to what happened the other night, after the Allardyce dance."

And Elena smiled rather strangely. "You baby! how much would it shock you if I told you no woman really minds about that either? Any way, you have broken your solemn promise," she said, with indignation.

"Ah, but perfidy seemed, somehow, in tone with an establishment wherein one concludes the evening's entertainment by physical assault upon the guests. Frankly, my dear"--I observed, with my most patronizing languor, --"your breeding is not quite that to which I have been accustomed, and I have had a rather startling glimpse of Lena Vokins, with all the laboriously acquired veneering peeling off. Still, in view of everything, I suppose I do owe it to you to marry you, if you insist--"

"Insist! I wouldn't wipe my feet on you!"

"That especial demonstration of affection was not, as I recall, requested of you. So it is all off? along with the veneering, eh? Well, perhaps I did attach too much importance to that diverting epilogue to the Allardyce dance. And as you say, Elena--and I take your word for it, gladly,--once one has become used to granting these little favors indiscriminately--"

"Get out of my house!" Elena said, quite splendid in her fury, "or I will have you horsewhipped. I was fond of you. You would not let me be in peace. And I didn't know you until to-night for the sneering, stuck-up dirty beast you are at heart--" She came nearer, and her glittering eyes narrowed. "And you have no hold on me, no letters to blackmail me with, and nobody anywhere would take your word for anything against mine. You would only be whipped by some real man, and probably shot. So do you remember to keep a watch upon that lying, sneering mouth of yours! And do you get out of my house!"