Chapter I: Book I: The Mother’s Recompense (1)

I.

Kate Clephane was wakened, as usual, by the slant of Riviera sun across her bed.

It was the thing she liked best about her shabby cramped room in the third-rate Hôtel de Minorque et de l’Univers: that the morning sun came in at her window, and yet that it didn’t come too early.

No more sunrises for Kate Clephane. They were associated with too many lost joys--coming home from balls where one had danced one’s self to tatters, or from suppers where one had lingered, counting one’s winnings (it was wonderful, in the old days, how often she had won, or friends had won for her, staking a _louis_ just for fun, and cramming her hands with thousand franc bills); associated, too, with the scramble up hill through the whitening gray of the garden, flicked by scented shrubs, caught on perfidious prickles, up to the shuttered villa askew on its heat-soaked rock--and then, at the door, in the laurustinus-shade that smelt of honey, that unexpected kiss (well honestly, yes, unexpected, since it had long been settled that one was to remain “just friends”); and the pulling away from an insistent arm, and the one more pressure on hers of lips young enough to be fresh after a night of drinking and play and more drinking. And she had never let Chris come in with her at that hour, no, not once, though at the time there was only Julie the cook in the house, and goodness knew.... Oh, but she had always had her pride--people ought to remember _that_ when they said such things about her....

That was what the sunrise reminded Kate Clephane of--as she supposed it did most women of forty-two or so (or was it really forty-four last week?) For nearly twenty years now she had lived chiefly with women of her own kind, and she no longer very sincerely believed there were any others, that is to say among women properly so called. Her female world was made up of three categories: frumps, hypocrites and the “good sort”--like herself. After all, the last was the one she preferred to be in.

Not that she could not picture another life--if only one had met the right man at the right hour. She remembered her one week--that tiny little week of seven days, just six years ago--when she and Chris had gone together to a lost place in Normandy where there wasn’t a railway within ten miles, and you had to drive in the farmer’s cart to the farm-house smothered in apple-blossoms; and Chris and she had gone off every morning for the whole day, while he sketched by willowy river-banks, and under the flank of mossy village churches; and every day for seven days she had watched the farm-yard life waking at dawn under their windows, while she dashed herself with cold water and did her hair and touched up her face before he was awake, because the early light is so pitiless after thirty. She remembered it all, and how sure she had been then that she was meant to live on a farm and keep chickens; just as sure as he was that he was meant to be a painter, and would already have made a name if his parents hadn’t called him back to Baltimore and shoved him into a broker’s office after Harvard--to have him off their minds, as he said.

Yes, she could still picture that kind of life: every fibre in her kept its glow. But she didn’t believe in it; she knew now that “things didn’t happen like that” for long, that reality and durability were attributes of the humdrum, the prosaic and the dreary. And it was to escape from reality and durability that one plunged into cards, gossip, flirtation, and all the artificial excitements which society so lavishly provides for people who want to forget.

She and Chris had never repeated that week. He had never suggested doing so, and had let her hints fall unheeded, or turned them off with a laugh, whenever she tried, with shy tentative allusions, to coax him back to the idea; for she had found out early that one could never ask him anything point-blank--it just put his back up, as he said himself. One had to manœuvre and wait; but when didn’t a woman have to manœuvre and wait? Ever since she had left her husband, eighteen years ago, what else had she ever done? Sometimes, nowadays, waking alone and unrefreshed in her dreary hotel room, she shivered at the memory of all the scheming, planning, ignoring, enduring, accepting, which had led her in the end to--this.

Ah, well--

“Aline!”

After all, there was the sun in her window, there was the triangular glimpse of blue wind-bitten sea between the roofs, and a new day beginning, and hot chocolate coming, and a new hat to try on at the milliner’s, and--

“_Aline!_”

She had come to this cheap hotel just in order to keep her maid. One couldn’t afford everything, especially since the war, and she preferred veal for dinner every night to having to do her own mending and dress her hair: the unmanageable abundant hair which had so uncannily survived her youth, and sometimes, in her happier moods, made her feel that perhaps, after all, in the eyes of her friends, other of its attributes survived also. And besides, it looked better for a lone woman who, after having been thirty-nine for a number of years, had suddenly become forty-four, to have a respectable-looking servant in the background; to be able, for instance, when one arrived in new places, to say to supercilious hotel-clerks: “My maid is following with the luggage.”

“_Aline!_”

Aline, ugly, neat and enigmatic, appeared with the breakfast-tray. A delicious scent preceded her.

Mrs. Clephane raised herself on a pink elbow, shook her hair over her shoulders, and exclaimed: “Violets?”

Aline permitted herself her dry smile. “From a gentleman.”

Colour flooded her mistress’s face. Hadn’t she known that something good was going to happen to her that morning--hadn’t she felt it in every touch of the sunshine, as its golden finger-tips pressed her lids open and wound their way through her hair? She supposed she was superstitious. She laughed expectantly.

“A gentleman?”

“The little lame boy with the newspapers that Madame was kind to,” the maid continued, arranging the tray with her spare Taylorized gestures.

“Oh, poor child!” Mrs. Clephane’s voice had a quaver which she tried to deflect to the lame boy, though she knew how impossible it was to deceive Aline. Of course Aline knew everything--well, yes, that was the other side of the medal. She often said to her mistress: “Madame is too much alone--Madame ought to make some new friends--” and what did that mean, except that Aline knew she had lost the old ones?

But it was characteristic of Kate that, after a moment, the quaver in her voice did instinctively tilt in the direction of the lame boy who sold newspapers; and when the tears reached her eyes it was over his wistful image, and not her own, that they flowed. She had a way of getting desperately fond of people she had been kind to, and exaggeratedly touched by the least sign of their appreciation. It was her weakness--or her strength: she wondered which?

“Poor, poor little chap. But his mother’ll beat him if she finds out. Aline, you must hunt him up this very day and pay back what the flowers must have cost him.” She lifted the violets and pressed them to her face. As she did so she caught sight of a telegram beneath them.

A telegram--for her? It didn’t often happen nowadays. But after all there was no reason why it shouldn’t happen once again--at least once. There was no reason why, this very day, this day on which the sunshine had waked her with such a promise, there shouldn’t be a message at last, the message for which she had waited for two years, three years; yes, exactly three years and one month--just a word from him to say: “_Take me back._”

She snatched up the telegram, and then turned her head toward the wall, seeking, while she read, to hide her face from Aline. The maid, on whom such hints were never lost, immediately transferred her attention to the dressing-table, skilfully deploying the glittering troops on that last battlefield where the daily struggle still renewed itself.

Aline’s eyes averted, her mistress tore open the blue fold and read: “Mrs. Clephane dead--”

A shiver ran over her. _Mrs. Clephane dead?_ Not if Mrs. Clephane knew it! Never more alive than today, with the sun crisping her hair, the violet scent enveloping her, and that jolly north-west gale rioting out there on the Mediterranean. What was the meaning of this grim joke?

The first shock over, she read on more calmly and understood. It was the other Mrs. Clephane who was dead: the one who used to be her mother-in-law. Her first thought was: “Well, serve her right”--since, if it was so desirable to be alive on such a morning it must be correspondingly undesirable to be dead, and she could draw the agreeable conclusion that the other Mrs. Clephane had at last been come up with--oh, but thoroughly.

She lingered awhile on this pleasing fancy, and then began to reach out to wider inferences. “But if--but if--but little Anne--”

At the murmur of the name her eyes filled again. For years now she had barricaded her heart against her daughter’s presence; and here it was, suddenly in possession again, crowding out everything else, yes, effacing even Chris as though he were the thinnest of ghosts, and the cable in her hand a cock-crow. “But perhaps now they’ll let me see her,” the mother thought.

She didn’t even know who “they” were, now that their formidable chieftain, her mother-in-law, was dead. Lawyers, judges, trustees, guardians, she supposed--all the natural enemies of woman. She wrinkled her brows, trying to remember who, at the death of the child’s father, had been appointed the child’s other guardian--old Mrs. Clephane’s overpowering assumption of the office having so completely effaced her associate that it took a few minutes to fish him up out of the far-off past.

“Why, poor old Fred Landers, of course!” She smiled retrospectively. “I don’t believe he’d prevent my seeing the child if he were left to himself. Besides, isn’t she nearly grown up? Why, I do believe she must be.”

The telegram fell from her hands, both of which she now impressed into a complicated finger-reckoning of how old little Anne must be, if Chris were thirty-three, as he certainly was--no, thirty-one, he couldn’t be more than thirty-one, because _she_, Kate, was only forty-two ... yes, forty-two ... and she’d always acknowledged to herself that there were nine years between them; no, eleven years, if she were really forty-two; yes, but was she? Or, goodness, was she actually forty-five? Well, then, if she was forty-five--just supposing it for a minute--and had married John Clephane at twenty-one, as she knew she had, and little Anne had been born the second summer afterward, then little Anne must be nearly twenty ... why, quite twenty, wasn’t it? But then, how old would _that_ make Chris? Oh, well, he _must_ be older than he looked ... she’d always thought he was. That boyish way of his, she had sometimes fancied, was put on to make her imagine there was a greater difference of age between them than there really was--a device he was perfectly capable of making use of for ulterior purposes. And of course she’d never been that dreadful kind of woman they called a “baby-snatcher”.... But if Chris were thirty-one, and she forty-five, then how old _was_ Anne?

With impatient fingers she began all over again.

The maid’s voice, seeming to come from a long way off, respectfully reminded her that the chocolate would be getting cold. Mrs. Clephane roused herself, looked about the room, and exclaimed: “My looking-glass, please.” She wanted to settle that question of ages.

As Aline approached with the glass there was a knock at the door. The maid went to it, and came back with her small inward smile.

“Another telegram.”

Another? This time Mrs. Clephane sat bolt upright. What could it be, now, but a word from him, a message at last? Oh, but she was ashamed of herself for thinking of such a thing at such a moment. Solitude had demoralized her, she supposed. And then her child was so far away, so invisible, so unknown--and Chris of a sudden had become so near and real again, though it was three whole years and one month since he had left her. And at her age--She opened the second message, trembling. Since Armistice Day her heart had not beat so hard.

“New York. Dearest mother,” it ran, “I want you to come home at once. I want you to come and live with me. Your daughter Anne.”

“You asked for the looking-glass, Madame,” Aline patiently reminded her.

Mrs. Clephane took the proffered glass, stared into it with eyes at first unseeing, and then gradually made out the reflection of her radiant irrepressible hair, a new smile on her lips, the first streak of gray on her temples, and the first tears--oh, she couldn’t remember for how long--running down over her transfigured face.

“Aline--” The maid was watching her with narrowed eyes. “The Rachel powder, please--”

Suddenly she dropped the glass and the powder-puff, buried her face in her hands, and sobbed.

II.

She went out an hour later, her thoughts waltzing and eddying like the sunlit dust which the wind kept whirling round the corners in spasmodic gusts. Everything in her mind was hot and cold, and beating and blowing about, like the weather on that dancing draughty day; the very pavement of the familiar streets, and the angles of the buildings, seemed to be spinning with the rest, as if the heaviest substances had suddenly grown imponderable.

“It must,” she thought, “be a little like the way the gravestones will behave on the Day of Judgment.”

To make sure of where she was she had to turn down one of the white streets leading to the sea, and fix her eyes on that wedge of blue between the houses, as if it were the only ballast to her brain, the only substantial thing left. “I’m glad it’s one of the days when the sea is firm,” she thought. The glittering expanse, flattened by the gale and solidified by the light, rose up to meet her as she walked toward it, the pavement lifting her and flying under her like wings till it dropped her down in the glare of the Promenade, where the top-knots of the struggling palms swam on the wind like chained and long-finned sea-things against that sapphire wall climbing half-way up the sky.

She sat down on a bench, clinging sideways as if lashed to a boat’s deck, and continued to steady her eyes on the Mediterranean. To collect her thoughts she tried to imagine that nothing had happened, that neither of the two cables had come, and that she was preparing to lead her usual life, as mapped out in the miniature engagement-book in her hand-bag. She had her “set” now in the big Riviera town where she had taken refuge in 1916, after the final break with Chris, and where, after two years of war-work and a “Reconnaissance Française” medal, she could carry her head fairly high, and even condescend a little to certain newcomers.

She drew forth the engagement-book, smiling at her childish game of “pretending.” At eleven, a hat to try on; eleven-thirty, a dress; from then to two o’clock, nothing; at two, a slow solemn drive with poor old Mrs. Minity (in the last-surviving private victoria in the town); tea and bridge at Countess Lanska’s from four to six; a look in at the Rectory of the American church, where there was a Ladies’ Guild meeting about the Devastated Regions’ Fancy Fair; lastly a little dinner at the Casino, with the Horace Betterlys and a few other pals. Yes--a rather-better-than-the-average day. And now--Why, now she could kick over the whole apple-cart if she chose; chuck it all (except the new dress and hat!): the tedious drive with the prosy patronizing old woman; the bridge, which was costing her more than it ought, with that third-rate cosmopolitan set of Laura Lanska’s; the long discussion at the Rectory as to whether it would “do” to ask Mrs. Schlachtberger to take a stall at the Fair in spite of her unfortunate name; and the little dinner with the Horace Betterlys and their dull noisy friends, who wanted to “see life” and didn’t know that you can’t see it unless you’ve first had the brains to imagine it.... Yes, she could drop it all now, and never never see one of them again....

“My daughter ... my daughter Anne.... Oh, you don’t know my little girl? She _has_ changed, hasn’t she? Growing up is a way the children have.... Yes, it is ageing for a poor mother to trot about such a young giantess.... Oh, I’m going gray already, you know--here, on the temples. _Fred Landers?_ It is you, really? Dear old Fred! No, of course I’ve never forgotten you.... Known me anywhere? You would? Oh, nonsense! Look at my gray hair. But _men_ don’t change--lucky men! Why, I remember even that Egyptian seal-ring of yours.... My daughter ... my daughter Anne ... let me introduce you to this big girl of mine ... my little Anne....”

It was curious: for the first time she realized that, in thinking back over the years since she had been parted from Anne, she seldom, nowadays, went farther than the episode with Chris. Yet it was long before--it was eighteen years ago--that she had “lost” Anne: “lost” was the euphemism she had invented (as people called the Furies The Amiable Ones), because a mother couldn’t confess, even to her most secret self, that she had willingly deserted her child. Yet that was what she had done; and now her thoughts, shrinking and shivering, were being forced back upon the fact. She had left Anne when Anne was a baby of three; left her with a dreadful pang, a rending of the inmost fibres, and yet a sense of unutterable relief, because to do so was to escape from the oppression of her married life, the thick atmosphere of self-approval and unperceivingness which emanated from John Clephane like coal-gas from a leaking furnace. So she had put it at the time--so, in her closest soul-scrutiny, she had to put it still. “I couldn’t breathe--” that was all she had to say in her own defence. She had said it first--more’s the pity--to Hylton Davies; with the result that two months later she was on his yacht, headed for the West Indies.... And even then she couldn’t breathe any better; not after the first week or two. The asphyxiation was of a different kind, that was all.

It was a year later that she wrote to her husband. There was no answer: she wrote again. “At any rate, let me see Anne.... I can’t live without Anne.... I’ll go and live with her anywhere you decide....” Again no answer.... She wrote to her mother-in-law, and Mrs. Clephane’s lawyer sent the letter back unopened. She wrote, in her madness, to the child’s nurse, and got a reply from the same legal firm, requesting her to cease to annoy her husband’s family. She ceased.

Of all this she recalled now only the parting from Anne, and the subsequent vain efforts to recover her. Of the agent of her release, of Hylton Davies, she remembered, in the deep sense of remembering, nothing. He had become to her, with his flourish and his yachting-clothes, and the big shining yacht, and the cocoa-palms and general setting of cool drinks and tropical luxury, as unreal as somebody in a novel, the highly coloured hero (or villain) on the “jacket”. From her inmost life he had vanished into a sort of remote pictorial perspective, where a woman of her name figured with him, in muslin dresses and white sunshades, herself as unreal as a lady on a “jacket”.... Dim also had grown the years that followed: lonely humdrum years at St. Jean-de-Luz, at Bordighera, at Dinard. She would settle in a cheap place where there were a circulating library, a mild climate, a few quiet bridge-playing couples whom one got to know through the doctor or the clergyman; then would grow tired and drift away again. Once she went back to America, at the time of her mother’s death.... It was in midsummer, and Anne (now ten years old) was in Canada with her father and grandmother. Kate Clephane, not herself a New Yorker, and with only two or three elderly and disapproving relatives left in the small southern city of her origin, stood alone before the elaborately organized defences of a vast New York clan, and knew herself helpless. But in her madness she dreamed of a dash to Canada, an abduction--schemes requiring money, friends, support, all the power and ruse she was so lacking in. She gave that up in favour of a midnight visit (inspired by _Anna Karénine_) to the child’s nursery; but on the way to Quebec she heard that the family had left in a private car for the Rocky Mountains. She turned about and took the first steamer to France.

All this, too, had become dim to her since she had known Chris. For the first time, when she met him, her soul’s lungs seemed full of air. Life still dated for her from that day--in spite of the way he had hurt her, of his having inflicted on her the bitterest pain she had ever suffered, he had yet given her more than he could take away. At thirty-nine her real self had been born; without him she would never have had a self.... And yet, at what a cost she had bought it! All the secluded penitential years that had gone before wiped out at a stroke--stained, defiled by follies she could not bear to think of, among people from whom her soul recoiled. Poor Chris! It was not that he was what is called “vicious”--but he was never happy without what he regarded as excitement; he was always telling her that an artist had to have excitement. She could not reconcile his idea of what this stimulus consisted in with his other tastes and ideas--with that flashing play of intelligence which had caught her up into an air she had never breathed before. To be capable of that thought-play, of those flights, and yet to need gambling, casinos, rowdy crowds, and all the pursuits devised to kill time for the uninventive and lethargic! He said he saw things in that kind of life that she couldn’t see--but since he also saw this unseeable (and she knew he did) in nature, in poetry and painting, in their shared sunsets and moonrises, in their first long dreaming days, far from jazz-bands and baccarat tables, why wasn’t that enough, and how could the other rubbishy things excite the same kind of emotions in him? It had been the torment of her torments, the inmost pang of her misery, that she had never understood; and that when she thought of him now it was through that blur of noise and glare and popping corks and screaming bands that she had to grope back to the first fleeting Chris who had loved her and waked her.

* * * * *

At eleven o’clock she found herself, she didn’t know how, at the milliner’s. Other women, envious or undecided, were already flattening their noses against the panes. “That bird of Paradise ... what they cost nowadays!” But she went in, cool and confident, and asked gaily to try on her new hat. She must have been smiling, for the saleswoman received her with a smile.

“What a complexion, ma’am! One sees you’re not afraid of the wind.”

But when the hat was produced, though it was the copy of one she had already tried on, it struck Mrs. Clephane as absurdly youthful, even ridiculous. Had she really been dressing all this time like a girl in her teens?

“You forget that I’ve a grown-up daughter, Madame Berthe.”

_“Allons, Madame plaisante!”_

She drew herself up with dignity. “A daughter of twenty-one; I’m joining her in New York next week. What would she think of me if I arrived in a hat more youthful than hers? Show me something darker, please: yes, the one with the autumn leaves. See, I’m growing gray on the temples--don’t try to make me look like a flapper. What’s the price of that blue fox over there? I like a gray fur with gray hair.”

In the end she stalked out, offended by the milliner’s refusal to take her gray hair seriously, and reflecting, with a retrospective shiver, that her way of dressing and her demeanour must have thoroughly fixed in all these people’s minds the idea that she was one of the silly vain fools who imagine they look like their own daughters.

At the dress-maker’s, the scene repeated itself. The dashing little frock prepared for her--an orange silk handkerchief peeping from the breast-pocket on which an anchor was embroidered--made her actually blush; and reflecting that money wouldn’t “matter” now (the thought of the money had really not come to her before) she persuaded the dress-maker to take the inappropriate garment back, and ordered, instead, something sober but elaborate, and ever so much more expensive. It seemed a part of the general unreal rapture that even the money-worry should have vanished.

Where should she lunch? She inclined to a quiet restaurant in a back street; then the old habit of following the throng, the need of rubbing shoulders with a crowd of unknown people, swept her automatically toward the Casino, and sat her down, in a blare of brass instruments and hard sunshine, at the only table left. After all, as she had often heard Chris say, one could feel more alone in a crowd.... But gradually it came over her that to feel alone was not in the least what she wanted. She had never, for years at any rate, been able to bear it for long; the crowd, formerly a solace and an escape, had become a habit, and being face to face with her own thoughts was like facing a stranger. Oppressed and embarrassed, she tried to “make conversation” with herself; but the soundless words died unuttered, and she sought distraction in staring about her at the unknown faces.

Their number became oppressive: it made her feel small and insignificant to think that, of all this vulgar feasting throng, not one knew the amazing thing which had befallen her, knew that she was awaited by an only daughter in a big house in New York, a house she would re-enter in a few days--yes, actually in a few days--with the ease of a long-absent mistress, a mistress returning from an immense journey, but to whom it seems perfectly natural and familiar to be once again smiling on old friends from the head of her table.

The longing to be with people to whom she could tell her news made her decide, after all, to live out her day as she had originally planned it. Before leaving the hotel she had announced her departure to the astonished Aline (it was agreeable, for once, to astonish Aline) and despatched her to the post-office with a cable for New York and a telegram for a Paris steamship company. In the cable she had said simply: “Coming darling.” They were the words with which she used to answer little Anne’s calls from the nursery: that impatient reiterated “Mummy--Mummy--I want my _Mummy_!” which had kept on echoing in her ears through so many sleepless nights. The phrase had flashed into her head the moment she sat down to write the cable, and she had kept murmuring to herself ever since: “Mummy--Mummy--I want my _Mummy_!” She would have liked to quote the words to Mrs. Minity, whose door she was now approaching; but how could she explain to the old lady, who was deaf and self-absorbed, and thought it a privilege for any one to go driving with her, why little Anne’s cry had echoed so long in the void? No; she could not speak of that to any one: she must stick to her old “take-it-for-granted” attitude, the attitude which had carried her successfully over so many slippery places.

Mrs. Minity was very much pre-occupied about her foot-warmer. She spent the first quarter of an hour in telling Mrs. Clephane that the Rector’s wife, whom she had taken out the day before, had possessed herself of the object without so much as a “may I,” and kept her big feet on it till Mrs. Minity had had to stop the carriage and ask the coachman in a loud voice how it was that _The Foot-warmer_ had not been put in as usual. Whereupon, if you please, Mrs. Merriman had simply said: “Oh, I have it, thanks, dear Mrs. Minity--such a comfort, on these windy days!” “Though why a woman who keeps no carriage, and has to tramp the streets at all hours, should have cold feet I can’t imagine--nor, in fact, wholly believe her when she says so,” said Mrs. Minity, in the tone of one to whom a defective circulation is the recognized prerogative of carriage-owners. “I notice, my dear, that _you_ never complain of being cold,” she added approvingly, relegating Kate, as an enforced pedestrian, to Mrs. Merriman’s class, but acknowledging in her a superior sense of propriety. “I’m always glad,” she added, “to take you out on windy days, for battling with the _mistral_ on foot must be so very exhausting, and in the carriage, of course, it is so easy to reach a sheltered place.”

Mrs. Minity was still persuaded that to sit in her hired victoria, behind its somnolent old pair, was one of the most rapid modes of progression devised by modern science. She talked as if her carriage were an aeroplane, and was as particular in avoiding narrow streets, and waiting at the corner when she called for friends who lived in them, as if she had to choose a safe alighting-ground.

Mrs. Minity had come to the Riviera thirty years before, after an attack of bronchitis, and finding the climate milder and the life easier than in Brooklyn, had not gone back. Mrs. Clephane never knew what roots she had broken in the upheaval, for everything immediately surrounding her assumed such colossal proportions that remoter facts, even concerning herself, soon faded to the vanishing-point. Only now and then, when a niece from Bridgeport sent her a bottle of brandy-peaches, or a nephew from Brooklyn wrote to say that her income had been reduced by the foreclosure of a mortgage, did the family emerge from its transatlantic mists, and Mrs. Minity become, for a moment, gratified or irate at the intrusion. But such emotions, at their acutest, were but faint shadows of those aroused by the absence of her foot-warmer, or the Salvation Army’s having called twice in the same month for her subscription, or one of the horses having a stiff shoulder, and being replaced, for a long hazardous week, by another, known to the same stable for twenty years, and whom the _patron_ himself undertook to drive, so that Mrs. Minity should not miss her airing. She _had_ thought of staying in till her _own_ horse recovered; but the doctor had absolutely forbidden it, so she had taken her courage in both hands, and gone out with the substitute, who was not even of the same colour as the horse she was used to. “But I took valerian every night,” she added, “and doubled my digitalis.”

Kate Clephane, as she listened (for the hundredth time), remembered that she had once thought Mrs. Minity a rather impressive old lady, somewhat arrogant and very prosy, but with a distinct “atmosphere,” and a charming half-obsolete vocabulary, suggesting “Signers” and Colonial generals, which was a refreshing change from the over-refinement of Mrs. Merriman and the Betterlys’ monotonous slang. Now, compared to certain long-vanished figures of the Clephane background--compared even to the hated figure of old Mrs. Clephane--Mrs. Minity shrank to the semblance of a vulgar fussy old woman.

“Old Mrs. Clephane never bragged, whatever she did,” Kate thought: “how ridiculous all that fuss about driving behind a strange horse would have seemed to her. After all, good breeding, even in the odious, implies a certain courage....” Her mother-in-law, as she mused, assumed the commanding yet not unamiable shape of a Roman matron of heroic mould, a kind of “It-hurts-not-O-my-Pætus,” falling first upon the sword.

The bridge-players in Countess Lanska’s pastille-scented and smoke-blurred drawing-room seemed to have undergone the same change as Mrs. Minity. The very room, as Kate entered, on fire from the wind, seemed stuffier, untidier and, yes--vulgarer--than she had remembered. The empty glasses with drowned lemon-peel, the perpetually unemptied ash-trays, the sketches by the Countess’s latest protégé--splashy flower markets, rococo churches, white balustrades, umbrella-pines and cobalt seas--the musical instruments tossed about on threadbare cashmere shawls covering still more threadbare sofas, even the heart-rending gaze of the outspread white bear with the torn-off ear which, ever since Kate had known him, had clung to his flattened head by the same greasy thread: all this disorder was now, for the first time, reflected in the faces about the card-tables. Not one of them, men or women, if asked where they had come from, where they were going, or why they had done such and such things, or refrained from doing such other, would have answered truthfully; not, as Kate knew, from any particular, or at any rate permanent, need of concealment, but because they lived in a chronic state of mental inaccuracy, excitement and inertia, which made it vaguely exhilarating to lie and definitely fatiguing to be truthful.

She had not meant to stay long, for her first glance at their new faces told her that to them also she would not be able to speak of what had happened. But, to subdue her own agitation and divert their heavy eyes, the easiest thing was to take her usual hand at bridge; and once she had dropped into her place, the familiar murmur of “No trumps ... yes ... diamonds.... Who dealt?... No bid.... No ... yes ... no ...”, held her to her seat, soothed by the mesmeric touch of habit.

* * * * *

At the Rectory Mrs. Merriman exclaimed: “Oh, _there_ she is!” in a tone implying that she had had to stand between Mrs. Clephane and the assembled committee.

Kate remembered that she was secretary, and expected to read the minutes.

“Have I kept you all waiting? So sorry,” she beamed, in a voice that sang hallelujahs. Mrs. Merriman pushed the book toward her with a protecting smile; and Mrs. Parley Plush of the Villa Mimosa (she always told you it had been quite her own idea, calling it that) visibly wondered that Mrs. Merriman should be so tolerant.

They were all there: the American Consul’s wife, mild, plump and irreproachable; the lovely Mrs. Prentiss of San Francisco, who “took things” and had been involved in a drug scandal; the Comtesse de Sainte Maxime, who had been a Loach of Philadelphia, and had figured briefly on the operatic stage; the Consul’s sister, who dressed like a flapper, and had been engaged during the war to a series of American officers, all of whom seemed to have given her celluloid bangles; and a pale Mrs. Marsh, who used to be seen about with a tall tired man called “the Colonel”, whose family-name was not Marsh, but for whom she wore mourning when he died, explaining--somewhat belatedly--that he was a cousin. Lastly, there was Mrs. Fred Langly of Albany, whose husband was “wanted” at home for misappropriation of funds, and who, emerging from the long seclusion consequent on this unfortunate episode, had now blossomed into a “prominent war-worker”, while Mr. Langly devoted himself to the composition of patriotic poems, which he read (flanked by the civil and military authorities) at all the allied Inaugurations and Commemorations; so that by the close of the war he had become its recognized bard, and his “Lafayette, can we forget?” was quoted with tears by the very widows and orphans he had defrauded. Facing Mrs. Merriman sat the Rector, in clerical pepper-and-salt clothes and a secular pepper-and-salt moustache, talking cheerful slang in a pulpit voice.

Mrs. Clephane looked about her with new eyes. Save for their hostess, the Consul’s wife and Mrs. Langly, “things” had been said of all the women; even concerning Mrs. Parley Plush, the older inhabitants (though they all went to her teas at the Villa Mimosa) smiled and hinted. And they all knew each other’s stories, or at least the current versions, and affected to disapprove of each other and yet be tolerant; thus following the example of Mrs. Merriman, who simply wouldn’t _listen_ to any of those horrors, and of Mr. Merriman, whose principle it was to “believe the best” till the worst stared him in the face, and then to say: “I understand it all happened a long while ago.”

To all of them the Rectory was a social nucleus. One after another they had found their way there, subscribed to parochial charities, sent Mrs. Merriman fruit and flowers, and suppressed their yawns at Mothers’ Meetings and Sewing Circles. It was part of the long long toll they had to pay to the outraged goddess of Respectability. And at the Rectory they had made each other’s acquaintance, and thus gradually widened their circle, and saved more hours from solitude, their most dreaded enemy. Kate Clephane knew it all by heart: for eighteen years she had trodden that round. The Rector knew too; if ever a still youngish and still prettyish woman, in quiet but perfect clothes with a scent of violets, asked to see him after service, he knew she was one more recruit. In all the fashionable Riviera colonies these ladies were among the staunchest supporters of their respective churches. Even the oldest, stoutest, grimmest of his flock had had her day; Mr. Merriman remembered what his predecessor had hinted of old Mrs. Orbitt’s past, and how he had smiled at the idea, seeing Mrs. Orbitt, that first Sunday, planted in her front pew like a very Deborah.

Some of the prettiest--or who had been, at least--exchanged parishes, as it were; like that sweet Lady de Tracey, who joined the American fold, while Miss Julia Jettridge, from New York, attended the Anglican services. They both said it was because they preferred “the nearest church”; but the Rector knew better than that.

Then the war came; the war which, in those bland southern places and to those uprooted drifting women, was chiefly a healing and amalgamating influence. It was awful, of course, to admit even to one’s self that it could be that; but, in the light of her own deliverance, Kate Clephane knew that she and all the others had so viewed it. They had shuddered and wept, toiled hard, and made their sacrifices; of clothes and bridge, of butter and sweets and carriage-hire--but all the while they were creeping slowly back into the once impregnable stronghold of Social Position, getting to know people who used to cut them, being invited to the Préfecture and the Consulate, and lots of houses of which they used to say with feigned indifference: “Go to _those_ dreary people? Not for the world!” because they knew they had no chance of getting there.

Yes: the war had brought them peace, strange and horrible as it was to think it. Kate’s eyes filled as she looked about the table at those haggard powdered masks which had once glittered with youth and insolence and pleasure. All they wanted now was what she herself wanted only a few short hours ago: to be bowed to when they caught certain people’s eyes; to be invited to one more dull house; to be put on the Rector’s Executive Committees, and pour tea at the Consuless’s “afternoons”.

“May I?” a man’s voice fluted; and a noble silver-thatched head with a beak-like nose and soft double chin was thrust into the doorway.

“Oh, Mr. Paly!” cried Mrs. Merriman; and murmured to the nearest ladies: “For the music-- I thought he’d better come today.”

Every one greeted Mr. Paly with enthusiasm. It _was_ poky, being only women and the Rector. And Mr. Paly had the dearest little flat in one of the old houses of the “Vieux Port”, such a tiny flat that one wondered how any one so large, manly and yet full of quick womanish movements, managed to fit in between the bric-a-brac. Mr. Paly clasped his hostess’s hand in a soft palm. “I’ve brought my young friend Lion Carstairs; you won’t mind? He’s going to help me with the programme.”

But one glance at Mr. Carstairs made it clear that he did not mean to help any one with anything. He held out two lax fingers to Mrs. Merriman, sank into an armchair, and let his Antinous-lids droop over his sullen deep gray eyes. “He’s awfully good on Sicilian music ... noted down folk-songs at Taormina....” Mr. Paly whispered, his leonine head with its bushy eye-brows and silver crown bending confidentially to his neighbour.

“Order!” rapped the Rector; and the meeting began.

* * * * *

At the Casino that night Kate Clephane, on the whole, was more bored than at the Rectory. After all, at the Merrimans’ there was a rather anxious atmosphere of kindliness, of a desire to help, and a retrospective piety about the war which had served them such a good turn, and of which they were still trying, in their tiny measure, to alleviate the ravages.

Whereas the Betterlys--

“What? Another begging-list? No, my dear Kate; you don’t! Stony-broke; that’s what I am, and so’s Harry--ain’t you, Harry?” Marcia Betterly would scream, clanking her jewelled bangles, twisting one heavy hand through her pearls, and clutching with the other the platinum-and-diamond wrist-bag on which she always jokingly pretended that Kate Clephane had her eye. “Look out, Sid, she’s a regular train-robber; hold you up at your own door. I believe she’s squared the police: if she hadn’t she’d ’a been run in long ago.... Oh, the _war? What war?_ Is there another war on? What, that old one? Why, I thought _that_ one was over long ago.... You can’t get anybody _I_ know to talk about it even!”

“Guess we’ve got our work cut out paying for it,” added Horace Betterly, stretching a begemmed and bloated hand toward the wine-list.

“Well, I should _say_!” his wife agreed with him.

“Sid, what form of liquid refreshment?” And “Sid”, a puffy Chicago business man, grew pink in his effort to look knowing and not name the wrong champagne....

It was odd: during her drive with Mrs. Minity, at Madame Lanska’s, and again at the Rectory, Kate Clephane had meant to proclaim her great news--and she had not yet breathed a word of it. The fact was, it was too great; too precious to waste on Mrs. Minity’s inattention, too sacred to reveal to Madame Lanska’s bridge-players, and too glorious to overwhelm those poor women at the Rectory with. And now, in the glare and clatter of the Casino, with the Sids and Harrys exchanging winks, and the Mrs. Sids and Harrys craning fat necks to see the last new cocotte, or the young Prince about whom there were such awful stories--here, of all places, to unbare her secret, name her daughter: how could she ever have thought it possible?

Only toward the end of the long deafening dinner, when Marcia and Mrs. Sid began to make plans for a week at Monte Carlo, and she found herself being impressed into the party (as she had, so often and so willingly, before) did Mrs. Clephane suddenly find herself assuming the defensive.

“You can’t? Or you _won’t_? Now, you Kate-cat you,” Marcia threatened her with a scented cigarette, “own up now--what’s doing? What you onto this time? Ain’t she naughty? _We_ ain’t grand enough for her, girls!” And then, suddenly, at a sign from Horace, and lowering her voice, but not quite enough to make the communication private: “See here, Kate darling--of course, you know, _as our guest_: why, of course, naturally.” While, on the other side, Mrs. Sid drawled: “What I want to know is: where else _can_ anybody go at this season?”

Mrs. Clephane surveyed her calmly. “To New York--at least I can.”

They all screamed it at her at once: “N’York?” and again she dropped the two syllables slowly from disdainful lips.

“Well, I never! Whaffor, though?” questioned Horace from the depths of a fresh bumper.

Mrs. Clephane swept the table with a cool eye. “Business--family business,” she said.

“_Criky!_” burst from Horace. And: “Say, Sid, a drop of _fine_, just to help us over the shock? Well, here’s to the success of the lady’s Family Business!” he concluded with a just-perceptible wink, emptying his champagne goblet and replacing it by the big bubble-shaped liqueur glass into which a thoughtful waiter had already measured out the proper quantity of the most expensive _fine_.

III.

As Kate Clephane stood on deck, straining her eyes at the Babylonian New York which seemed to sway and totter toward her menacingly, she felt a light hand on her arm.

“Anne!”

She barely suppressed the questioning lift of her voice; for the length of a heart-beat she had not been absolutely certain. Then ... yes, there was her whole youth, her whole married past, in that small pale oval--her own hair, but duskier, stronger; something of her smile too, she fancied; and John Clephane’s straight rather heavy nose, beneath old Mrs. Clephane’s awful brows.

“But the eyes--you chose your own eyes, my darling!” She had the girl at arms’-length, her own head thrown back a little: Anne was slightly the taller, and her pale face hung over her mother’s like a young moon seen through mist.

“So wise of you! Such an improvement on anything we had in stock....” How absurd! When she thought of the things she had meant to say! What would her child think her? Incurably frivolous, of course. Well, if she stopped to consider _that_ she was lost.... She flung both arms about Anne and laid a long kiss on her fresh cheek.

“My Anne ... little Anne....”

She thirsted to have the girl to herself, where she could touch her hair, stroke her face, draw the gloves from her hands, kiss her over and over again, and little by little, from that tall black-swathed figure, disengage the round child’s body she had so long continued to feel against her own, like a warmth and an ache, as the amputated feel the life in a lost limb.

“Come, mother: this way. And here’s Mr. Landers,” the girl said. Her voice was not unkind; it was not cold; it was only muffled in fold on fold of shyness, embarrassment and constraint. After all, Kate thought, it was just as well that the crowd, the confusion and Fred Landers were there to help them over those first moments.

“Fred Landers! Dear old Fred! Is it you, really? Known me anywhere? Oh, nonsense! Look at my gray hair. But _you_--” She had said the words over so often in enacting this imagined scene that they were on her lips in a rush; but some contradictory impulse checked them there, and let her just murmur “Fred” as her hand dropped into that of the heavy grizzled man with a red-and-yellow complexion and screwed-up blue eyes whom Time had substituted for the thin loose-jointed friend of her youth.

Landers beamed on her, silent also; a common instinct seemed to have told all three that for the moment there was nothing to say--that they must just let propinquity do its mysterious work without trying to hasten the process.

In the motor Mrs. Clephane’s agony began. “What do they think of _me_?” she wondered. She felt so sure, so safe, so enfolded, with them; or she would have, if only she could have guessed what impression she was making. She put it in the plural, because, though at that moment all she cared for was what Anne thought, she had guessed instantly that, for a time at least, Anne’s view would be influenced by her guardian’s.

The very tone in which he had said, facing them from his seat between the piled-up bags: “You’ll find this young woman a handful--I’m not sorry to resign my trust--” showed the terms the two were on. And so did Anne’s rejoinder: “I’m not a handful now to any one but myself--I’m in my own hands, Uncle Fred.”

He laughed, and the girl smiled. Kate wished her daughter and she had been facing each other, so that she could have seen the whole stretch of the smile, instead of only the tip dimpling away into a half-turned cheek. So much depended, for the mother, on that smile--on the smile, and the motion of those grave brows. The whole point was, how far did the one offset the other?

“Yes,” Mr. Landers assented, “you’re a free agent now--been one for just three weeks, haven’t you? So far you’ve made fairly good use of your liberty.”

Guardian and ward exchanged another smile, in which Kate felt herself generously included; then Landers’s eye turned to hers. “You’re not a bit changed, you know.”

“Oh, come! Nonsense.” Again she checked that silly “look at my gray hair.” “I hope one never is, to old friends--after the first shock, at any rate.”

“There wasn’t any first shock. I spotted you at once, from the pier.”

Anne intervened in her calm voice. “I recognized mother too--from such a funny old photograph, in a dress with puffed sleeves.”

Mrs. Clephane tried to smile. “I don’t know, darling, if I recognized you.... You were just there ... in me ... where you’ve always been....” She felt her voice breaking, and was glad to have Mr. Landers burst in with: “And what do you say to our new Fifth Avenue?”

* * * * *

She stood surveying its upper reaches, that afternoon, from the window of the sitting-room Anne had assigned to her. Yes; Fred Landers was right, it was a new, an absolutely new, Fifth Avenue; but there was nothing new about Anne’s house. Incongruously enough--in that fluid city, where the stoutest buildings seemed like atoms forever shaken into new patterns by the rumble of Undergrounds and Elevateds--the house was the very one which had once been Kate’s, the home to which, four-and-twenty years earlier, she had been brought as a bride.

Her house, since she had been its mistress; but never hers in the sense of her having helped to make it. John Clephane lived by proverbs. One was that fools built houses for wise men to live in; so he had bought a fool’s house, furniture and all, and moved into it on his marriage. But if it had been built by a fool, Kate sometimes used to wonder, how was it that her husband found it to be planned and furnished so exactly as he would have chosen? He never tired of boasting of the fact, seemingly unconscious of the unflattering inference to be drawn; perhaps, if pressed, he would have said there was no contradiction, since the house had cost the fool a great deal to build, and him, the wise man, very little to buy. It had been, he was never tired of repeating, a bargain, the biggest kind of a bargain; and that, somehow, seemed a reason (again Kate didn’t see why) for leaving everything in it unchanged, even to the heraldic stained glass on the stairs and the Jacobean mantel in a drawing-room that ran to Aubusson.... And here it all was again, untouched, unworn--the only difference being that she, Kate, was installed in the visitor’s suite on the third floor (swung up to it in a little jewel-box of a lift), instead of occupying the rooms below which had once been “Papa’s and Mamma’s”. The change struck her at once--and the fact that Anne, taking her up, had first pressed the wrong button, the one for the floor below, and then reddened in correcting her mistake. The girl evidently guessed that her mother would prefer not to go back to those other rooms; her having done so gave Kate a quick thrill.

“You don’t mind being so high up, mother?”

“I like it ever so much better, dear.”

“I’m so glad!” Anne was making an evident effort at expansiveness. “That’s jolly of you--like this we shall be on the same floor.”

“Ah, you’ve kept the rooms you had--?” Kate didn’t know how to put it.

“Yes: the old nursery. First it was turned into a schoolroom, then into my den. One gets attached to places. I never should have felt at home anywhere else. Come and see.”