Chapter V

With that perilous moment bridged, Robert given again his unquestioning security in her, Lilah began her search for experience, for satisfaction, for a vague, undetermined happiness. She had for so many years peered over the wall at the social garden-party, at women in light dresses and men in polished hats, marionettes, voiceless, yet animated, infinitely removed--she had imagined so much, given these people a wholly romantic and unnatural luster--Now she found herself about to drop into the garden, among them, and her eagerness took Robert’s breath away. He told himself that he must be patient; when the novelty had worn off, when Lilah had rubbed elbows with a world already familiar to him, she, too, would discard it. In the meantime, he tried to content himself with her rare impulses of affection, hasty caresses, light kisses that stung his flesh and penetrated to his heart like thin, precise knife-thrusts. For the most part she met him with banter and postponement, as if she were skimming over the dark depths of life, a vivid and elusive skater on silver skates....

He found himself, suddenly, a slave to hope. Some day she would skim back to him, into the circle made by his love, his arms, and remain there, safe. But she must first dart here and there, fearless and foolish, enjoying herself. It became his dubious pleasure to watch, ready to pull her out if the ice should crack.

Robert was not exactly a fool, although he took no pains to appear otherwise. What he had seen of the world had landed him back at the Point again, where, he argued, all the facts of life and death, of love and hate, were uncomplicated and recognizable. He could not see, he told Lilah, why experience should acquire anything by multiplication. You were born, you loved, hated and died. You could do all these things, and get out of it what there was in it, as well in one place as in another; nothing was gained by chasing down the horizon--once you got there, it was the same, love and life, hate and death. He preferred a limited existence to the accumulated sensations offered by such cities as New York and Paris. Crowds gave him a mental indigestion. Ideas, unless they were based on truths, caused him to suffer an intellectual heart-burn. He was not swift enough to chase the casual and elusive theories of most modernists, who were content with the haphazard because no one could pause long enough to argue or to prove.

But he was willing, after that sharp quarrel with Lilah, to experiment.

He made a hurried trip to Maine and shamefacedly kissed his spaniels, turning back to New York with an assumed eagerness that deceived even himself. In the train, he left the sleeper for the smoking-car and sat up all night trying, as he put it, to reduce Lilah to a common denominator. The secret of her fascination lay in her swift and inexplicable changes of mood; he waited for favors with a feverish sort of excitement. It was probably unhealthy, bad for him to be so buffeted about by feeling, alternately exalted to heaven and left flat, with a sense of humiliation and shame.

Another type of man might spare himself indignity by letting her see a certain brutality. But Robert was not so gifted. He could only be himself.

For her he had abandoned his “drinkin’” and had tried desperately to part his hair on the side. The green sweater had gone down before her contempt. In a hundred little ways he tried to re-make, improve, the outward man; he knew when he bored her, although he was never certain why he bored her. His enthusiasms were as authentic as hers. But Lilah was Lilah, and for such a woman he, any man, would attempt the impossible.

He had wanted a strong, sweet, fearless love, ecstasy and pride and recognition.

What he had was different, but he could not be sure that he had not wanted too much. Perhaps all women were like Lilah, and tormented you, where they should offer their breasts for you to put your head against and rest, and rest, from life.

* * * * *

When Grace Fuller moved in, Robert felt more comfortable. She was a familiar, understanding sort of woman.

He wondered whether Lilah were justified in calling Grace a deliberate celibate. He began to study her face, to question his knowledge of her. She had never enjoyed kissing him, but had always pushed him away, with an expression almost of fear in her eyes. He couldn’t say that he had enjoyed it, either; it was too much like forcing her to his will.... There were times, at night, when Lilah was strange and emotional, when she pressed against him and ran her fingers up and down the back of his neck with the caress he liked, and kissed him, quick, almost furtive kisses; when she relaxed in his arms, suddenly, as if she were about to surrender, and then was tense again, pushing him away, turning her face aside....

He couldn’t understand.

Grace left him alone, left his senses alone. She was a good companion in spite of her sharp tongue. He supposed that all nurses had that same air of watching out for you, mothering you, seeing that things were comfortable and orderly. There was no trace in her manner or her look, of remembering; she let him off, magnificently. He would say that for her; she was a sport! They began again, as people who have only just met. And all those meaningless kisses and casual, artificial embraces were forgotten in their common passion for Lilah.

Lilah became a bond between them. When Robert came in and Lilah was not at home, he sought Grace and questioned her.

Lilah was fascinating, reckless, just a little terrible and they never tired of discussing her. She had done this, or that. This one and that one had telephoned. She had bought a new dress or a new book. Everything she did startled them, because, once certain of Robert, Lilah had become more startling, more reckless and more insatiable than ever.

It was as if she had come into full possession of life without questioning her right to it. She was not, as far as Robert could see, happy, but she was, on the other hand, arrogant with fulfillment. Because she herself had succeeded, she could not help having contempt for people who had failed.

This amused Robert, but it was also cause for a certain amount of chagrin, since he saw that his position had been the lever she needed to lift her out of obscurity. She could never have done it alone.

But because he loved her, he did for her everything she seemed to require. Before long, she knew every one of importance in Robert’s world. It was a world limited by necessity to a few hundred souls. Lilah called them Murray Hill blackbirds. They were, in fact, the old guard, a thinned-out company of so-called Knickerbockers, New Yorkers long enough to cherish their few square blocks of sacred soil with a tenacity that was almost aristocratic.

They gave Lilah critical inspection; her house was less important and could, in its severe restraint and exact emphasis, be taken for granted.

Flushed, beautiful, excited, Lilah received them. The sleek Aubusson became the arena of her first social struggle. These people were fashionable but not modish. For them, sensing their prejudices, Lilah wore black and was over-careful of her accent. Her Russian atmosphere was discarded for the occasion, and Robert and Grace were amazed, embarrassed, by a totally different Lilah, a châtelaine, wistful, eager and disarming.

Robert was rather proud of the gathering; people like this made him feel safer about the future; they cemented the cracks in society. He adored dowdy wealth because it was an indication of permanence, a stand against the upstart, ’Change. There was something plucky about foulard, sensible shoes and elaborate whiskers in the Jazz age. While these people lived, the last cable held. Their names were less impressive now that their city had become unaware of them. But Lilah seemed to enjoy juggling these rather musty titles. Robert didn’t know it, but she was, consciously, laying a foundation down. She would stand, eventually, not upon the quicksand of new, untried, if glamorous names, but upon the veritable, bed-rock Manhattanese.

Afterwards, to Grace and Robert, she was explicit: “What fearful bores! All of them, except Mrs. Humphrey-hyphen-whatever-her-name-is.... The red-headed one.”

“She goes everywhere,” Robert explained, “and is invited nowhere. She _was_ glorious, thirty years ago.”

“She is now.”

“She’s a bad egg,” Robert said.

“What do you mean, exactly?”

“Oh, she left her husband, and lived with a chap--some one--I’ve forgotten.... She’s quite purple.”

Lilah laughed. “I’d die if I had to know these people.... I liked your purple one. She was human. The rest ... _blackbirds_!”

She was being Russian again.... While the new servant, placated by the announcement of so many celebrated blackbirds, removed the tea tables and gathered up cups and saucers, Lilah disposed of Robert’s friends with a tirade of pointed witticisms. She could afford to laugh at them because now, she knew, she could subjugate them. All she had to do was to snub the purple lady, entertain discreetly, grow old, and die. In ten years she would look just like the rest of them--ground-grippers and a pince-nez, a maribou boa, a bit of real lace, amethysts and rheumatism in her finger-joints.... She preferred more difficult attainment....

Suddenly she went to the piano and, still smoking, played a rakish accompaniment to a French song.

“_Je sais que c’est une folie!_”

Robert and Grace Fuller turned about in their chairs and listened. She seemed to be unaware of them. With her head thrown back, the cigarette aslant, she sang in a light, high voice, a little song about madness and youth and _la tendresse_ and, meltingly, _l’amour_.

* * * * *

From this little occasion, Lilah stepped off into New York. There were, she discovered, no barriers raised against a pretty, witty and wealthy woman. She had all the ingredients to make a very potent brew.

In the beginning, Robert was always at her elbow, puzzled, but stimulated in exact proportion to her own pleasure. New York was not “dry” and before long Robert was drinking again with that boastful abandonment characteristic of prohibition. Everywhere there was gin, and according to the social scale, it was either genuine, or frankly synthetic. Lilah drank for the first time in her life, steadily, carelessly. She explained to Robert that there was no other way to “fizz” at dinner or to hold off fatigue. And, happening to discover a substantial supply of good wines and whisky in the cellar of the Murray Hill house, she wrote to Junius Peabody and obtained his somewhat satirical permission to uncork all but the rarest vintages. Those, he explained, belonged to his “heirs” and were to be handed down as historical evidence. Lilah must consider, take pity on the parched palates of her sons....

Lilah tossed the letter into the fire. She did not intend that there should be sons. She was infected by the casuistry of the age, a total lack of interest in the coming generation. Behind men’s lives there was no longer any sustaining idealism, any heroic faith in an unbroken purpose. The war had severed a link in the chain of passions, spiritual, national and racial. The day, the needs and fulfillments of the day, sufficed.

Robert could find nothing to refute her claim that the war had made morality ridiculous and had stripped adolescent humanity of its illusions. Everywhere, in both men and women, he encountered the cynicism that goes, usually, with embittered old age, with failure and disappointment. People were reckless because the moral skids were off; there was a gay determination, everywhere evident, to meet disaster as gayly as possible. But this was not heroic; it was cowardly, and Robert found himself despising the times he lived in.

As usual, he was not expressive. Something about his physical pinkness and blondness, his air of being extremely well-fed and well-brushed, held him back from complaining. Lilah might be right. Certainly, there was no evidence of spirituality, of change.

* * * * *

New York was dancing-mad, in a mood essentially unlike the madness of Nineteen-Fourteen, when blind satiety had twirled on the lid of a seething volcano. This madness was sophisticated and purposeful. The Argentine tango had given way to the primitive rhythms of Africa and Maylasia, a brutal tom-toming, savagery stalking progress through a maze of the senses. There were very few private dances. Robert could remember the day of the cotillion leader, Ward McAllister’s reign. Now, society patronized the commercial dance-halls or the exclusive “clubs” given over to all-night dancing, in defiance of a closing law which arbitrarily separated jazzing couples at one in the morning. There were few formal occasions; hostesses relied upon haphazard dinner-parties, a box at the theater or the opera, and the confused, prismatic, exciting contact afterwards.

Lilah danced beautifully, without a trace of vulgarity, but Robert objected to the frank enticement of her gowns that displayed her flesh to the casual observer. She answered that he belonged in the Dark Ages; no one paid any attention to backs and arms; the sight was too usual. Fashion had freed women because women had first freed themselves. They were too frankly undressed to be alluring, and men ought to be grateful; nudity rid them of obscene imaginings.

Robert was not certain that women’s clothes were a symbol of masculine indifference. Lilah might be right; she was infinitely more clever than he, and besides she said things with a conviction, a finality, that floored him. It is hard to contradict a woman you love. He had his reservations.

They rarely dined at home. As the winter progressed, their program of pleasure became more complicated. The details were left to Grace Fuller, who sat at a desk the better part of every day, answering the telephone and attending to Lilah’s correspondence. An avalanche of people had swept Robert’s handful of Murray Hill blackbirds out of the picture. It had been but a step from these conservatives to their children, the reckless generation that had outlived but had not out-thought the war; and from them to the professionals, a little world of hard, bright, amazingly talented modernists, racially nondescript, intellectually polyglot, artistically indeterminate.

Robert encountered too many enthusiasms to have much faith in a standard of taste. A sort of united press-agentry conspired to prove that there was an American art. Painstakingly, Robert sought what Lilah declared already existed, and he failed to find it. He found, instead, a horde of facile, astonishing copyists. The extremists irritated him because they struck him as being too lazy to study. Further than that, he refused to express himself.

For several months he followed wherever Lilah led. Then it became an easy matter to excuse himself. He did not dance, and the rôle of caryatid to the striped awning at the Palais Royal was proving irksome. Conversation, he insisted, had been annihilated by those jungle noises produced by the saxophone, the oboe, the violin, the piano and the bass-drum. He was not capable of feeling the necessary emotion; he preferred staying at home to holding a half-dozen strange and hectic women in his arms.

“By all means, stay,” Lilah said agreeably. She kissed him on the top of his head and went out, wrapped in a voluminous coat of gold cloth, from which her face emerged, powdered, delicately rouged, like the face of a bisque figurine.

Her mistiness had taken on a certain sharp and defined quality; she was more accentuated, less shadowy. The petulant droop of her lips was pronounced; her eyes were larger and more brilliant--they sought admiration frankly, if disdainfully, and gave nothing in return.

Robert went to his easy chair with a sense of having been left flat. He expected at least a show of protest, of regret.

Grace Fuller was at work, in the library; he heard the click of her typewriter. He might go to her. Damn it, why not? She might be able to tell him what Lilah had meant when she said, “By all means, stay.”

He climbed the stairs slowly, puffing his cigar. He was, he realized, very tired. Pleasure exhausted him because he didn’t believe in it. To Lilah, it had all the luster of a Cause.

Grace Fuller glanced up.

“Not going?”

“Not going.”

“Why?”

Robert said lightly: “I’m fagged. Old age, I suppose.”

She pushed the machine away and sat staring at him with an expression which made him vaguely uncomfortable.

“What did Lilah say?”

Robert laughed: “She invited me by all means to suit myself.”

“You made a mistake. Why didn’t you tell her how tired you are and make her stay at home?”

“I can’t _make_ Lilah do anything.”

“I wouldn’t admit it, if I were you.”

“Why not? She is undisciplined, but I would be the last one to try to curb her.”

“It’s too late, Robert. Lilah has taken the bit. She’s running away from you.”

With a pang of irritable fear, Robert said sharply: “Nonsense.”

Grace Fuller jerked the typewriter forward again and struck at the keys with her long, cool fingers. Her mouth had hardened; her eyes were obstinate. “Very well,” she said.

“See here, Grace. Don’t exaggerate! Lilah’s excited. She has never seen life. She isn’t stale. And you and I are.... She’ll get over it. There’s good in her.”

“It isn’t ‘bad’ to love life,” Grace answered. “I am only suggesting that it is bad for you.”

“I can stand it.”

Grace Fuller gathered together her day’s work with deliberate gestures, sheaves of gray note-paper heavily embossed with the Thirty-eighth Street address in the English fashion, square envelopes, checks and receipted bills. Then she rose and stood for a moment looking down at Robert.

“I’m really very happy, Grace,” he said, on his guard against something in her expression.

“I’m awfully glad,” she said finally, “to hear that.”

She turned to leave the room, but Robert spoke quickly: “Don’t go. I want to talk to you....” He hesitated, and then said awkwardly, “about yourself.”

“Myself?” Grace Fuller hesitated, flushing. “Please don’t.”

But she came back, and sank with a deep sigh, a sudden, almost pathetic relaxation, into a chair before the fire. Robert had never seen her looking so positively ugly; the guards were down; her distinction had given way to the essential woman, a creature defeated by her own disbelief. It was shocking, and to Robert, humiliating. He turned his eyes away.

“Don’t talk about me,” Grace said. “I prefer to be left in my own Nirvana of self-forgetfulness. I have conquered ambition and regret, and you’re sorry for me! You ought to congratulate me....”

She caught her breath sharply. “How well that sounded! I almost convinced myself....” She smiled crookedly at him, with a funny little grimace. “You can’t get Nirvana without surrendering. I suppose there’s some primal bug of hope in my system; I still cherish the unattainable. I wish I had had the courage to fling myself away, as nuns do. What peace! To believe ... I can’t.... Here I am, talking about myself....”

“There ought to be some way,” Robert said, “to live in the world and like it. I used to. At one time I had things reduced to pretty simple terms. Lilah has shaken me out of my security. She is like a humming-bird, or something swift and alive. You’re right--she has left me behind! My own world is stale, and hers is beyond my comprehension. Those darts and flights and quick stabs at things.... When a man gets to be my age, he wants to stand on a sort of hill and look off at his future. I’m too old to be puffing up the nether side. Frankly, I don’t know where Lilah is leading me, or whether, if I ever over-take her, I shall see anything beyond. Have I said too much? This isn’t in the nature of a confession. I’m not disgruntled. Only I thought that you might....”

Grace interrupted: “I can’t analyze her. She dazzles me. For all I know she is shallow water, but I am more inclined to think that she is beyond our depth, yours and mine. We’re making rather fools of ourselves trying to reach her and drag her up to our level into the common light of day. I adore her. She is the only human being I’ve ever known I could believe in, because she is absolutely honest.”

“Then why--” Robert began.

“Because you’ll never understand her! Dear old Robert. You’re a brownstone-front and Lilah is an English basement. You’ve inherited all the prejudices and social quaverings of the ’Eighties. Lilah is--I wish there were a superlative for the word modern; would it be futurist? She has bolted into a new generation, with all its recklessness and daring and passion for facts. She likes things as they are, raw and naked. And that makes her saner than you and me, and safer.”

“I’m not sure that you’re right,” Robert said after a moment. “I think Lilah dodges reality. And what I’m afraid of is that the facts will spring out from ambush and hurt her terribly. I don’t want her hurt! There’s something ... at times ... like a willful child....” His expression changed. He became unaware of Grace Fuller’s watchfulness. “I have failed to show her anything.”

* * * * *

When Lilah came in at two o’clock, she found them still together, in the library filmed with the smoke of cigars and cigarettes and before a fire that had burned out.

She crossed the room swiftly, letting her gold cloak slip away from her as the petals of a flower fold back from a slender stamen. She was dressed in pollen yellow with amber ornaments; barbaric ear-rings brushed her shoulders. She wore no rings, not liking them; her wedding ring had been discarded an hour after her wedding.

“Hello! Still awake? I thought you were sleepy, Robert! Who has a cigarette? I came back before I wanted to because I had twinges of conscience. I thought afterwards, that you might be ill. It was foolish of me. I made apologies to the Sinclairs and painted a terrible picture--Robert with a fever. They wanted me to go on to the Club, so I went. Reluctantly! Now don’t you both feel silly? I danced with Heifetz. He has eyes like agates set in satin cushions. He dances divinely, but I was afraid he might scratch one of his famous hands on this girdle of mine--the beads are so sharp. He thought me quite Austrian, not French. He is coming here with that American violinist who made such a hit in Rome and has married a pretty American girl when he had a choice of titles and millions. It was really awfully amusing. Poiret was there, looking us over. He is rather like a Bedouin--Barker’s Constantine Madras. He thinks American women potential; but they lack something the French have. Now you know, both of you, that we don’t know how to wear hats; if we’re picturesque, we’re not _chic_, and if we’re _chic_, we’re not picturesque. I’m sick and tired of hearing about Cécile Sorel. Poiret raved, too, and there was a little Roumanian attaché from Washington who declared that she is the most beautiful woman in the world. I can’t see it. She has a wonderful neck, but that mouth! And there’s nothing subtle about flamingo-pink ostrich feathers in a Roman helmet made out of rhinestones. Bordoni is lovelier; she has the most provocative feet in the world. Heifetz likes olive women with eyebrows ... at least, I think so--he danced with one and his expression was like the last movement of Debussy’s _L’Après-Midi d’un Faune_.... Another cigarette, Robert. Aren’t you two being rather glum? What have you been talking about? Me, of course! I suppose you dished me up from soup to nuts. Is there anything left of me? Do you like me? I’m a trusting soul, to leave you together! Not a servant in sight and you two marooned in the library, picking my mortal bones....”

She perched on the arm of Robert’s chair and the cloak fell to the floor. She was as alive, as vivacious, as if the night were only begun. She had an imperishable luster, a surface brilliance that was beginning to harden, like the skin of a pearl....

* * * * *

Lilah dreaded the approach of Spring. Summer meant the Point, where she had no one to stand between Robert and herself except Junius. There had been no appreciable abatement of the New York season; very few people had gone South, since all eyes were turning again toward Europe. Lilah suggested Paris to Robert, but he was, for once, determined. He expected her to go with him, in June, to Maine.

Lilah had been launched with a certain momentum; now she could not stop. She ran from one important pleasure to another. Her time was taken up by the meaningless activities of the young married set, the débutantes of an immediate yesterday who were now tasting freedom and a characteristic dissipation; marriage seemed to be not a bondage but an excuse for license; the manners, and the casual morality of these matrons were the result, they said, of the War. Most of them had married in a hurry, but there were no signs of leisurely repentance; rather, divorce was spoken of across the dinner-table and accomplished after breakfast. Speech was reckless, profane and satirical; there was nothing left to be shocked at because everything had been said. Love was always possible, but never probable unless tinged, at least, with the illicit. Concessions were made to any one who had “a line,” and lapses from social grace were condoned and even glorified.

There was, Lilah discovered, a code, astonishing to the older generation. But this had always been so. The difference lay, not in the code itself, but in the mental condition that had produced it. This generation had been hurled against the bayonets, into the mud-pits and stench holes, the heroisms and pitiless defeats of war. Brought up to believe in progress, in their own infallibility and triumph, they had, in adolescence, been stripped of their most inestimable faith. It was natural that they should scorn both their teachers and the untruth they had been fed, as with a spoon. They made their own deductions; impatient, ironic, and without sentiment, they raced forward.

The men were more balanced than the women; a preponderance of serious-minded men were intent on finding out something, no matter what. Lilah listened to much bitter speculation. While they speculated, they either drank or danced or, without emotion, experimented in the flesh.

Lilah met some strange fish. There were times when her over-stimulated mind refused to accept impressions and she saw faces swimming, floating, snatched away, reappearing, like the fantastic denizens of an aquarium. The city required that a woman should appear impervious to fatigue; Lilah fell into the luxurious habit of having her tired face “patted” into lines of animation at so much an hour. Tilted back in a combination barber-chair and operating table, she gave herself up to the fingers of a beauty specialist. Lilah submitted to hours of manipulation; her face was smothered in clay masks, packed in ice, slapped, pinched, and stroked. These were her only moments of relaxation. At the mercy of the expert, her body rested, her mind swam in and out of the mazes. At her side, upon a highly antiseptic glass table, bottles and jars contained the supposedly mysterious ingredients of youth; Lilah believed in their advertised potency. Lulled by the touch of soothing fingers and the odor of creams, lotions, tonics, herbs, sachets, rouges and powders, Lilah spent hours in these brocaded salons. Other hours, fixed appointments rigorously kept, were spent at the hairdressers’, where, before a triple mirror, beneath a cluster of lights, her vanity was fed by a mannered Frenchman who wielded the Marcel irons with a sort of tenderness. Her hands, surrendered to a pale girl in black, became smooth and pointed, tinted, polished. She enjoyed the odor of this establishment--a combination of violet brilliantine, singed hair and a Gallic thrift.

Early in February her life took a strange turn. She went around a corner into a new street.

* * * * *

She had been invited, significantly, without Robert. May Sinclair thought Robert a wet-blanket and had said: “Come alone. It’s going to be a bit wild. Robert wouldn’t understand. Give him his slippers and leave him at home.”

The Sinclairs lived in a Park Avenue apartment, fifteen stories above ground. A columbarium maze of small rooms had been transformed, by a judicious knocking out of walls, into a stately salon. Upon this lofty shelf Mrs. Sinclair lived and entertained, in the fashion of modern New York, any one who amused her.

Lilah found the company already there. A man sat at the piano, improvising. She recognized Montague Wilder and his inevitable tumbler of whisky. He couldn’t play, he said, unless he was thoroughly drunk. Then he played divinely. He looked up as Lilah came in and, not pausing, called: “Lilah! Lovely Lilah! Dance for us! This is a waltz on a poem by von Hofmanstahl. Listen! Isn’t it lovely? Dance. Something Viennese! Cupids and garlands, hoops and little waists....”

Lilah lifted her arms. Suddenly she felt very gay and triumphant. She was conscious of people sitting in the shadowy corners of the room, watching her. She began to waltz. The little square of cloth that did for a train got between her feet and she caught it up, exposing her ankles to the frank admiration of her audience. No one said anything. This was the lazy after-dinner hour before vivacity had worked its way to the surface. Later, every one would talk at once.

Lilah said breathlessly: “Mrs. Vernon Castle!” And waltzed into the arms of Chivers Chew, who was the only man in the room on his feet. They whirled for a minute (Chew danced abominably) and then Lilah sat down beside Wilder. “That was wonderful, Montague. But play something serious. Chopin.”

“For God’s sake, Montague, cut it out,” Chew complained. “I’m blue enough.”

“Use your mind,” some one advised. “You can do anything with your mind.”

Montague Wilder improvised on the theme “Kalua.” Glittering scales ornamented the melody; he took it by the hand and led it into the Debussy half-tones, so that the South Sea ragtime tune became a wistful French song, a thing of strangeness and nuance. His left hand reached for the whisky glass without seeming to know what his right hand did, but there was no break in the invention of technical feats. Through this dissonance and unexpected harmony the familiar melody seemed classical, important. “You’re wickedly clever,” Lilah said.

“Wait until I’ve had a quart,” he answered. “I’ll play the D-flat waltz in thirds. Rosenthal could do it, but no one else ever has.”

“Who’s here?” Lilah asked.

“Oh, the Heywoods. Pound, the shipbuilder. He’s middle-class English. ‘The wife’ is with him and she’s worse. Carey; the Hawaiian Carey. Miss Wagner--pronounced with a wag. Putnam Flagg and a girl from San Diego who writes. May has never drawn such a hand--aces and eights! Why are _we_ here?”

“Who is Putnam Flagg?” Lilah interrupted.

“I don’t know.”

“What is May going to do with us?”

“The opera. Then back here. And then talk, until morning.”

“Talk?”

May Sinclair unfolded and rose from a long sofa upholstered in taupe velvet. “Come on! ‘Butterfly’!”

“‘Butterfly’! Good God,” Wilder groaned.

“Let’s stay here and play, you and I,” Lilah whispered.

“No, you don’t!” May Sinclair’s clear, high voice came between them. “Drink that whisky, Montague, and bring Lilah! Farrar’s singing.”

“Worse and worse,” Montague Wilder said. But he rose, and Lilah found her wrap.

In the elevator she brushed shoulders with a tall man who stared at her down his nose. May Sinclair never introduced any one. This, Lilah supposed, was Putnam Flagg. Afterwards, long afterwards, it used to amuse her to think of their meeting in a stuffy little elevator that slid down fifteen stories while they stared at each other.

He had a curious, rather flat nose, eyes like an animal and the beautifully modeled full mouth of a satyr.

They did not speak, but Lilah thought: “I hope May will let him come with me.”

The Sinclair motor waited at the curb, and Lilah hung back, pretending to adjust the collar of her wrap. She heard Mrs. Sinclair call: “Lilah! Lilah!” With a flurry, the writer from San Diego and the elder Carey embarked, the Englishman and his wife followed and the attendant, closing the door of the limousine, signaled for Lilah’s little brougham.... She was to have the tall man and Montague Wilder to herself.

She beckoned to them; the car slipped into the stream of downtown traffic upon the heels of May Sinclair’s crowded chariot, and again she became conscious of the pressure of her shoulder against his.

“I am Mrs. Peabody,” she explained.

“Major Flagg,” he answered briefly.

They did not speak again until a skillful and precarious landing had been made before the Opera. It was Montague Wilder’s monologue. He complained on the way across town that opera in New York was debased, a commercial side-show. There were no voices worth mentioning. No one below the peanut heaven knew anything about music; tradition was lost on the balance of the house, and therefore the singers played fast and loose with the scores. He had heard a distinguished prima donna cheat three times in one evening, substituting a b flat for a high c to the rage and mortification of Moranzoni; but the audience was unaware, so why bother to sing? Galli flatted to her heart’s content. Now that Caruso was gone, there was no one. No one, that is, save Diaz, who was permitted to sing once or twice a season--it was worth going a thousand miles to hear him do the prologue of the “Coq d’Or” and the rag-picker in “Louise.”

But who could sing “Depuis le Jour” since Mary had gone to Chicago? Jeritza would snuff out like a rocket, in two years, or less. She was too damned Teutonic....

In the lobby, May Sinclair gathered her aces and eights and led them around the red velvet corridors to her box. She was a tall, blonde, long-waisted woman who had reduced from two hundred to one hundred and thirty-five pounds in less than a year and had had a sort of personal renaissance, a rebirth. From a fat placidity, a dowdy gentleness, she had entered upon a willowy emotionalism; she was enormously interested in what she had, for years, surrendered because of her sense of the fitness of things. She was experimenting; it was no longer ridiculous to experiment. She was forty but she was not fat.

Butterfly’s relatives were retreating before a matter-of-fact Pinkerton, sung by Martinelli. Farrar, in a nasturtium-red kimono with a metallic obi, her blue-black hair a pinwheel of lacquered ornaments, crouched before an artificial cherry tree in the fullness of unnatural blossoming. Lilah saw the stage, a pool of light, and the two small gesticulating figures, across the shoulders of Mrs. Sinclair and the writer from San Diego. That music, melting, propitiating, assailed her, like a personal appeal. _Bimba, dagli occhi pieni di malia--_

If Martinelli would only cut his hair....

The house was not crowded, but, as always, the boxes made a show--poor relatives of the holders, or relatives of the poor relatives, or music teachers, or God knows who.... Lilah had not heard “Butterfly” often enough to be bored. But Montague Wilder had curled up in the ante-room and had gone sound asleep.

Suddenly Lilah’s eyes turned to Major Flagg. She had wanted him to be watching her, and he was. Their eyes held. It was a game. His eyes were unwavering and yet something kept flickering in them; it was as if a shutter opened and closed. Whenever she was about to leap into his eyes, he shut her out. More than anything she had ever wanted, she wanted to get by that barrier, whatever it was, into his eyes. Once inside, she could conquer him, but never so long as he kept her out.

She had not spoken to him except to say that she was Mrs. Peabody and to receive his polite but noncommittal answer.

He was winning the game....

Lilah shrugged her shoulders and turned back to the stage, where Pinkerton, feeling carefully behind him for the steps, drew Butterfly into the _dolce dimora_. Farrar, abandoned, Carmen in a kimono, swayed forward, lost in ecstasy; her feet, in gold lacquer sandals, mounted the steps, slowly, slowly, as her head tilted back to that kiss on the threshold....

“Oh, God,” Montague Wilder said, sitting up, disheveled and sleepy. “Puccini! Lilah--let’s go back and drink more of May’s Scotch.”

She shook her head.

It was no use pretending they had not looked at each other like that.

In the corridor, pacing up and down with Mrs. Sinclair, who couldn’t find any one to smile at because it was a parade of “loans,” Lilah heard in snatches that Putnam Flagg was “queer,” that he had “ideas.” He had been gassed and had a bad heart. It made Mrs. Sinclair jumpy because at any moment he might faint.

“Talk to him, Lilah, I can’t.” Mrs. Sinclair caught sight of old “Rosie” Jackson and shed Lilah.

Lilah found herself at Flagg’s side. He was too tall. She felt little and silly. But more than that she was excited, a dangerous, unfamiliar excitement. She could not explain it, then, or later. He spoke of the opera. He liked it. He liked Farrar. “Because she is alive. A woman like that....”

“Well?”

“Magnificent! Not quite feminine.”

“Do you know her?”

“No. I shouldn’t want to.”

“Why?”

“I hate finding sawdust in dolls.”

“Perhaps you wouldn’t.”

“I might.” He smiled down at her. “And then I’d have one less enthusiasm. I can’t do with too few! It’s lonely enough as it is. Rows of ’em, prone, with the sawdust spilling out of their heads! Leave me Farrar, please.”

After a moment he said: “This is the first opera I’ve heard in five years. I’ve been in New Mexico for two years. Before that, in France, I didn’t care to go. I hope Mrs. Sinclair won’t leave early. I want to be in at the death.”

“Montague Wilder would consider you very unsophisticated. He laughs at Puccini, or, as you know, he goes to sleep.”

Flagg seemed for a moment to consider. “I don’t dare to laugh at things,” he said presently. “It’s dangerous. You begin by laughing at your pet little detestations and you wind up by losing your big faiths. It doesn’t pay to be too fastidious.”

“Doesn’t it?” Lilah said lightly.

He shut her out again. As if embarrassed by having made a confidence, he turned his head away. People were staring at them and Lilah wondered whether she had been recognized. Her photograph, taken by a flattering man of title against a background of Florentine brocade, had been published broadcast in those magazines whose business it is to foster the idea that an American society really exists. Lilah had discovered that it is not altogether easy to get yourself advertised, even though you happened to be Mrs. Robert Peabody. But she had taken this hurdle, as she took all of them, with alacrity, and it was therefore not improbable that this strolling crowd stared at her for the reason that the American crowd loves its celebrity as the Englishman loves his duke. Ordinarily, she would have been content to enjoy the flattery implied by this attention alone, but to-night her pleasure was doubled because she particularly wanted this man to be aware of her. He could scarcely be unaware that she was attracting attention.

At the box door, Mrs. Sinclair waited with the air of being about to sweep them into a net. “We’re going on to the Rendezvous after the second act. Montague’s fearfully bored and Carey has a Gilda Gray complex. I hope you won’t mind, you two.”

Flagg made a polite if not enthusiastic gesture and Lilah, catching his eyes deliberately, permitted her own to say: “I’m sorry, for your sake.”

As they entered the box, he remarked simply: “I have a rotten heart and can’t dance.... Who is Gilda Gray?”

“She is a lovely, initiated, transplanted savage,” Lilah explained, “who dances the hula-hula on Forty-fourth Street.”

Again their eyes held. The lights dimmed; with a sigh, a rustle, the great audience faced again the glowing proscenium. Lilah had a curious sensation of being isolated, alone, in a crowded emptiness, with this man. Life, for the moment, was immeasurably suspended. There was a dignity, a beauty about the impending, the imminent disaster. She would love this man. She could not help herself. She paused, amazed, before the strangeness and the splendor of that recognition. The moment prolonged itself, until, in the fixed and intense meeting of their eyes there was mutual declaration. It seemed that they must sit thus, strangers, in a shadowy balcony above a pool of music, forever....