BOOKS BY

BOOTH TARKINGTON

ALICE ADAMS

BEASLEY’S CHRISTMAS PARTY

BEAUTY AND THE JACOBIN

CHERRY

CONQUEST OF CANAAN

GENTLE JULIA

HARLEQUIN AND COLUMBINE

HIS OWN PEOPLE

IN THE ARENA

MONSIEUR BEAUCAIRE

PENROD

PENROD AND SAM

RAMSEY MILHOLLAND

SEVENTEEN

THE BEAUTIFUL LADY

THE FASCINATING STRANGER AND OTHER STORIES

THE FLIRT

THE GENTLEMAN FROM INDIANA

THE GUEST OF QUESNAY

THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS

THE MAN FROM HOME

THE MIDLANDER

THE TURMOIL

THE TWO VANREVELS

WOMEN

COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE &

COMPANY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. COPYRIGHT,

1924, 1925, BY BOOTH TARKINGTON.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE

COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

PREAMBLE

“BUT why not?” Mrs. Dodge said, leading the “Discussion” at the Woman’s Saturday Club after the reading of Mrs. Cromwell’s essay, “Women as Revealed in Some Phases of Modern Literature.” “Why shouldn’t something of the actual life of such women as ourselves be the subject of a book?” Mrs. Dodge inquired. “Mrs. Cromwell’s paper has pointed out to us that in a novel a study of women must have a central theme, must focus upon a central figure or ‘heroine,’ and must present her as a principal participant in a centralized conflict or drama of some sort, in relation to a limited group of other ‘characters.’ Now, so far as I can see, my own life has no such centralizations, and I’m pretty sure Mrs. Cromwell’s hasn’t, either, unless she is to be considered merely as a mother; but she has other important relations in life besides her relations to her three daughters, just as I have others besides that I bear to my one daughter. In fact, I can’t find any central theme in Mrs. Cromwell’s life or my own; I can’t find any centralized drama in her life or mine, and I doubt if many of you can find such things in yours. Our lives seem to be made up of apparently haphazard episodes, some meaningless, others important, and although we do live principally with our families and friends and neighbours, I find that people I hardly know have sometimes walked casually into my life, and influenced it, and then walked out of it as casually as they came in. All in all, I can’t see in our actual lives the cohesion that Mrs. Cromwell says is the demand of art. It appears to me that this very demand might tend to the damage of realism, which I take to mean lifelikeness and to be the most important demand of all. So I say: Why shouldn’t a book about women, or about a type of women, take for its subject some of the actual thoughts and doings of women like ourselves? Why should such a book be centralized and bound down to a single theme, a single conflict, a single heroine? The lives of most of us here consist principally of our thoughts and doings in relation to our children, our neighbours, and the people who casually walk into our lives and our children’s and neighbours’ lives and out again. It seems to me a book about us should be concerned with all of these almost as much as with ourselves.”

“You haven’t mentioned husbands,” Mrs. Cromwell suggested. “Wouldn’t they——”

“They should be included,” Mrs. Dodge admitted. “But I would have husbands and suitors represented in their proper proportion; that is to say, only in the proportion that they affect our thoughts and doings. In challenging the rules for centralization that you have propounded, Mrs. Cromwell, I do not propose that all rules of whatever nature should be thrown over. One in particular I should hold most advisable.”

“What rule is it?” a member of the club inquired, for at this point Mrs. Dodge paused and the expression of her mouth was somewhat grim.

“It is that a book about women should not be too long,” Mrs. Dodge replied. “Especially if it should be by a man, he would be wise to use brevity as a means of concealing what he doesn’t know. And besides,” she added, more leniently, “by brevity, he might hope to placate us a little. It might be his best form of apology.”

WOMEN

I
MRS. DODGE AND MRS. CROMWELL

WE LEARNED in childhood that appearances are deceitful, and our subsequent scrambling about upon this whirling globe has convinced many of us that the most deceptive of all appearances are those of peace. The gentlest looking liquor upon the laboratory shelves was what removed the east wing of the Chemical Corporation’s building on Christmas morning; it was the stillest Sunday noon of a drowsy August when, without even the courtesy of a little introductory sputtering, the gas works blew up; and both of these disturbances were thought to be peculiarly outrageous because of the previous sweet aspects that prevented any one from expecting trouble. Yet those aspects, like the flat calm of the summer of 1914, should have warned people of experience that outbreaks were impending.

What could offer to mortal eye a picture of more secure placidity than three smiling ladies walking homeward together after a club meeting? The particular three in mind, moreover, were in a visibly prosperous condition of life; for, although the afternoon was brightly cold, their furs afforded proof of expenditures with which any moderate woman would be satisfied, and their walk led them into the most luxurious stretch of the long thoroughfare that was called the handsome suburb’s finest street. The three addressed one another in the caressively amiable tones that so strikingly characterize the élite of their sex in converse; and their topic, which had been that of the club paper, was impersonal. In fact, it was more than impersonal, it was celestial. “Sweetness and Light: Essay. Mrs. Roderick Brooks Battle”—these were the words printed in the club’s year book beneath the date of that meeting, and Mrs. Roderick Brooks Battle was the youngest of the three placid ladies.

“You’re all so sweet to say such lovely things about it,” she said, as they walked slowly along. “I only wish I deserved them, but of course, as everyone must have guessed, it was all Mr. Battle. I don’t suppose I could write a single connected paragraph without his telling me how, and if he hadn’t kept helping me I just wouldn’t have been ready with any paper at all. Never in the world!”

“Oh, yes, you would, Amelia,” the elder of the two other ladies assured her. “For instance, dear, that beautiful thought about the ‘bravery of silence’—about how much nobler it is never to answer an attack—I thought it was the finest thought in the whole paper, and I’m sure that was your own and not your husband’s, Amelia.”

“Oh, no, Mrs. Cromwell,” Mrs. Battle returned, and although her manner was deferential to the older woman she seemed to be gently shocked;—her voice became a little protesting. “I could never in the world have experienced a thought like that just by myself. It was every bit Mr. Battle’s. In fact, he almost as much as dictated that whole paragraph to me, word for word. It seemed a shame for me to sit up there and appear to take the credit for it; but I knew, of course, that everybody who knows us the least bit intimately would understand I could never write anything and it was all Mr. Battle.”

“My dear, you’ll never persuade us of it,” the third lady said. “There were thoughts in your paper so characteristically feminine that no one but a woman could possibly——”

“Oh, but he could!” Mrs. Battle interrupted with an eagerness that was more than audible, for it showed itself vividly in her brightened eyes and the sudden glow of pink beneath them. “That’s one of the most wonderful things about Mr. Battle: his intellect is just as feminine as it is masculine, Mrs. Dodge. He’s absolutely—well, the only way I can express it is in his own words. Mr. Battle says no one can be great who isn’t universal in his thinking. And you see that’s where he excels so immensely;—Mr. Battle is absolutely universal in his thinking. It seems to me it’s one of the great causes of Mr. Battle’s success; he not only has the most powerful reasoning faculties I ever knew in any man but he’s absolutely gifted with a woman’s intuition.” She paused to utter a little murmur of fond laughter, as if she herself had so long and helplessly marvelled over Mr. Battle that she tolerantly found other people’s incredulous amazement at his prodigiousness natural but amusing. “You see, an intellect like Mr. Battle’s can’t be comprehended from knowing other men, Mrs. Dodge,” she added. “Other men look at things simply in a masculine way, of course. Mr. Battle says that’s only seeing half. Mr. Battle says women live on one hemisphere of a globe and men on the other, and neither can look round the circle, but from the stars the whole globe is seen—so that’s why we should keep our eyes among the stars! I wanted to work that thought into my paper, too. Isn’t it beautiful, the idea of keeping our eyes among the stars? But he said there wasn’t a logical opening for it, so I didn’t. Mr. Battle says we should never use a thought that doesn’t find its own logical place. That is, not in writing, he says. But don’t you think it’s wonderful—that idea of the globe and the two hemispheres and all?”

“Lovely,” Mrs. Dodge agreed. “Yet I don’t see how it proves Mr. Battle has a feminine mind.”

“Oh, but I don’t mean just that alone,” Mrs. Battle returned eagerly. “It’s the thousand and one things in my daily contact with him that prove it. Of course, I know how hard it must be for other women to understand. I suppose no one could hope to realize what Mr. Battle’s mind is like at all without the great privilege of being married to him.”

“And that,” Mrs. Cromwell remarked, “has been denied to so many of us, my dear!”

Mrs. Dodge laughed a little brusquely, but the consort of the marvellous Battle was herself so marvellous that she merely looked preoccupied. “I know,” she said, gravely, while Mrs. Dodge and Mrs. Cromwell stared with widening eyes, first at her and then at each other. “How often I’ve thought of it!” she went on, her own eyes fixed earnestly upon the distance where, in perspective, the two curbs of the long, straight street appeared to meet. “It grows stranger and stranger to me how such a miracle could have happened to a commonplace little woman like me! I never shall understand why I should have been the one selected.”

Thereupon, having arrived at her own gate, it was with this thought that she left them. From the gate a path of mottled flagstones led through a smooth and snowy lawn to a house upon which the architect had chastely indulged his Latin pleasure in stucco and wrought iron; and as Mrs. Battle took her way over the flagstones she received from her two friends renewed congratulations upon her essay, as well as expressions of parting endearment; and she replied to these cheerfully; but all the while the glowing, serious eyes of the eager little brown-haired woman remained preoccupied with the miracle she had mentioned.

Mrs. Cromwell and Mrs. Dodge went on their way with some solemnity, and were silent until the closing door of the stucco house let them know they were out of earshot. Then Mrs. Cromwell, using a hushed voice, inquired: “Do you suppose she ever had a painting made of the Annunciation?”

“The Annunciation?” Mrs. Dodge did not follow her.

“Yes. When the miracle was announced to her that she should be the wife of Roderick Brooks Battle. Of course, she must have been forewarned by an angel that she was ‘the one selected.’ If Battle had just walked in and proposed to her it would have been too much for her!”

“I know one thing,” Mrs. Dodge said, emphatically. “I’ve stood just about as much of her everlasting ‘Mr. Battle says’ as I intend to! You can’t go anywhere and get away from it; you can hear it over all the chatter at a dinner; you can hear it over fifty women gabbing at a tea—‘Mr. Battle says this,’ ‘Mr. Battle says that,’ ‘Mr. Battle says this and that’! When Belloni was singing at the Fortnightly Afternoon Music last week you could hear her ‘Mr. Battle says’ to all the women around her, even during that loud Puccini suite, and she treed Belloni on his way out, after the concert, to tell him Mr. Battle’s theory of music. She hadn’t listened to a note the man sang, and Belloni understands about two words of English, but Amelia kept right on Mr. Battle-says-ing him for half an hour! For my part, I’ve had all I can stand of it, and I’m about ready to do something about it!”

“I don’t see just what one could do,” Mrs. Cromwell said, laughing vaguely.

“I do!” her companion returned. Then both were silent for a few thoughtful moments and wore the air of people who have introduced a subject upon which they are not yet quite warm enough to speak plainly. Mrs. Cromwell evidently decided to slide away from it, for the time being, at least. “I don’t think Amelia’s looking well,” she said. “She’s rather lost her looks these last few years, I’m afraid. She seems pretty worn and thin to me;—she’s getting a kind of skimpy look.”

“What else could you expect? She’s made herself the man’s slave ever since they were married. She was his valet, his cook, and his washerwoman night and day for years. I wonder how many times actually and literally she’s blacked his boots for him! How could you expect her not to get worn out and skimpy-looking?”

“Oh, I know,” Mrs. Cromwell admitted;—“but all that was in their struggling days, and she certainly doesn’t need to do such things now. I hear he has twenty or thirty houses to build this year, and just lately an immense contract for two new office buildings. Besides, he’s generous with her; she dresses well enough nowadays.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Dodge said, grimly. “They’d both see to that for his credit; but if he comes in with wet feet you needn’t tell me she doesn’t get down on her knees before him and take off his shoes herself. I know her! Yes, and I know him, too! Rich or poor, she’d be his valet and errand girl just the same as she always was.”

“Perhaps,” said Mrs. Cromwell. “But it seems to me her most important office for him is the one she’s just been filling.”

“Press agent? I should say so! She may stop blacking his boots, but she’ll never stop that. It’s just why she makes me so confounded tired, too! She thinks she’s the only woman that ever got married!”

“Amelia is rather that way,” the other said, musingly. “She certainly never seems to realize that any of the rest of us have husbands of our own.”

“ ‘Mr. Battle can’t be comprehended from knowing other men!’ ” Here Mrs. Dodge somewhat bitterly mimicked the unfortunate Amelia’s eager voice. “ ‘Other men look at things in simply a masculine way!’ ‘I know how hard it must be for other women to understand a god like my husband just from knowing their own poor little imitation husbands!’ ”

“Oh, no,” Mrs. Cromwell protested. “She didn’t quite say that.”

“But isn’t it what she meant? Isn’t it exactly what she felt?”

“Well—perhaps.”

“It does make me tired!” Mrs. Dodge said, vigorously, and with the repetition she began to be more than vigorous. Under the spell of that rancour which increases in people when they mull over their injuries, she began to be indignant. “For one thing, outside of the shamelessness of it, some of the rest of us could just possibly find a few enthusiastic things to say of our husbands if we didn’t have some regard for not boring one another to death! I’ve got a fairly good husband of my own I’d like to mention once in a while, but——”

“But, of course, you’ll never get the chance,” Mrs. Cromwell interrupted. “Not if Amelia’s in your neighbourhood when you attempt it.”

“What I can’t understand, though,” Mrs. Dodge went on, “is her never having the slightest suspicion what a nuisance it is. I should think the man himself would stop her.”

But Mrs. Cromwell laughed and shook her head. “In the first place, of course, he agrees with her. He thinks Amelia’s just stating facts—facts that ought to be known. In the second, don’t you suppose he understands how useful her press-agenting is to him?”

“But it isn’t. It makes us all sick of him.”

“Oh, it may have that effect on you and me, Lydia, but I really wonder——” Mrs. Cromwell paused, frowning seriously, then continued: “Of course, he’d never take such a view of it. He instinctively knows it’s useful, but he’d never take the view of it that——”

“The view of it that what?” Mrs. Dodge inquired, as her friend paused again.

“Why, that it may be actually the principal reason for his success. When he left the firm that employed him as a draughtsman and started out for himself, with not a thing coming in for him to do, don’t you remember that even then everybody had the impression, somehow, that he was a genius and going to do wonders when the chance came? How do you suppose that got to be the general impression except through Amelia’s touting it about? And then, when he did put up a few little houses, don’t you remember hearing it said that they represented the first real Architecture with a capital ‘A’ ever seen in the whole city? Now, almost nobody really knows anything about architecture, though we all talk about it as glibly as if we did, and pretty soon—don’t you remember?—we were all raving over those little houses of Roderick Brooks Battle’s. What do you suppose made us rave? We must have been wrong, because Amelia says now that Battle thinks those first houses of his were ‘rather bad’—he’s ‘grown so tremendously in his art.’ Well, since they were bad, what except Amelia made us think then that they were superb? And look at what’s happened to Battle these last few years. In spite of Amelia’s boring us to death about him, isn’t it true that there’s somehow a wide impression that he’s a great man? Of course there is!”

“And yet,” Mrs. Dodge interposed, “he’s not done anything that proves it. Battle’s a good architect, certainly, but there are others as good, and he’s not a bit better as an architect than Mr. Cromwell is as a lawyer or than my husband is as a consulting engineer.”

“Not a bit,” Mrs. Cromwell echoed, carrying on the thought she had been following. “But Mr. Dodge and Mr. Cromwell haven’t had anybody to go about, day after day for years, proclaiming them and building up a legend about them. Nobody has any idea that they’re great men, poor things! Don’t you see where that puts you and me, Lydia?”

“No, I don’t.”

“My dear!” Mrs. Cromwell exclaimed. “Why, even Battle himself didn’t know that he was a great man until he married Amelia and she believed he was—and told him he was—and started her long career of going about making everybody else sort of believe it, too.”

“I think it’s simply her own form of egoism,” said the emphatic Mrs. Dodge. “She’d have done exactly the same whoever she married.”

“Precisely! It’s Amelia’s way of being in love—she’s a born idolizer. But you didn’t answer me when I asked you where that puts us.”

“You and me?” Mrs. Dodge inquired, frowning.

“Don’t you see, if she’d married my husband, for instance, instead of Battle, everybody’d be having the impression by this time that Mr. Cromwell is a great man? He’d have felt that way himself, too, and I’m afraid it would give him a great deal of pleasure. Haven’t we failed as wives when we see what Amelia’s done for her husband?”

“What an idea!” The two ladies had been walking slowly as they talked;—now they came to a halt at their parting place before Mrs. Cromwell’s house, which was an important, even imposing, structure of the type called Georgian, and in handsome conventional solidity not unlike the lady who lived in it. Across the broad street was a newer house, one just finished, a pinkish stucco interpretation of Mediterranean gaiety, and so fresh of colour that it seemed rather a showpiece, not yet actually inhabited though glamoured with brocaded curtains and transplanted arbor vitæ into the theatrical semblance of a dwelling in use. Mrs. Dodge glanced across at it with an expression of disfavour. “I call the whole thing perfectly disgusting!” she said.

II
A LADY ACROSS THE STREET

MRS. CROMWELL also looked at the new house; then she shook her head. “It’s painful, rather,” she said, and evidently referred to something more than the house itself.

“Outright disgusting!” her friend insisted. “I suppose he’s there as much as ever?”

“Oh, yes. Rather more.”

“Well, I’ll say one thing,” Mrs. Dodge declared; “Amelia Battle won’t get any sympathy from me!”

“Sympathy? My dear, you don’t suppose she dreams she needs sympathy! Doesn’t she show the rest of us every day how she pities us because we’re not married to Roderick Brooks Battle?”

“Yes, and that’s what makes me so furious. But she will need sympathy,” Mrs. Dodge persisted, with a dark glance at the new house across the street. “She will when she knows about that!”

“But maybe she’ll never know.”

“What!” Mrs. Dodge laughed scornfully. “My dear, when a woman builds a man into a god he’s going to assume the privileges of a god.”

“And behave like the devil?”

“Just that,” Mrs. Dodge returned, grimly. “Especially when his idolater has burnt up her youth on his altar and her friends begin to notice she’s getting a skimpy look. What chance has a skimpy-looking slave against a glittering widow rich enough to build a new house every time she wants to have tête-à-têtes with a godlike architect?”

“But she’s only built one,” Mrs. Cromwell cried, protesting.

“So far!” her pessimistic companion said; then laughed at her own extravagance, and became serious again. “I think Amelia ought to know.”

“Oh, no!”

“Yes, she ought,” Mrs. Dodge insisted. “In the first place, she ought to be saved from making herself so horribly ridiculous. Of course, she’s always been ridiculous; but the way she raves about him when he’s raving about another woman—why, it’s too ridiculous! In the second place, if she knew something about the Mrs. Sylvester affair now it might help her to bear a terrific jolt later.”

“What terrific jolt, Lydia?”

“If he leaves her,” Mrs. Dodge said, gravely. “If Mrs. Sylvester decides to make him a permanent fixture. Men do these things nowadays, you know.”

“Yes, I know they do.” Mrs. Cromwell looked as serious as her friend did, though her seriousness was more sympathetically a troubled one than Mrs. Dodge’s. “Poor Amelia! To wear her youth out making a man into such a brilliant figure that a woman of the Sylvester type might consider him worth while taking away from her——”

“Look!” Mrs. Dodge interrupted in a thrilled voice.

A balustraded stone terrace crossed the façade of the new house, and two people emerged from a green door and appeared upon the terrace. One was a man whose youthful figure made a pleasing accompaniment to a fine and scholarly head;—he produced, moreover, an impression of success and distinction obvious to the first glance of a stranger, though what was most of all obvious about him at the present moment was his devoted, even tender, attention to the woman at his side. She was a tall and graceful laughing creature, so sparklingly pretty as to approach the contours and colours of a Beauty. Her rippling hair glimmered with a Venetian ruddiness, and the blue of her twinkling eyes was so vivid that a little flash of it shot clear across the street and was perceptible to the two observant women as brightest azure.

Upon her lovely head she had a little sable hat, and, over a dress of which only a bit of gray silk could be glimpsed at throat and ankle, she wore a sable coat of the kind and dimensions staggering to moderate millionaires. She had the happy and triumphant look of a woman confident through experience that no slightest wish of hers would ever be denied by anybody, herself distinctly included; and, all in all, she was dazzling, spoiled, charming, and fearless.

Certainly she had no fear of the two observant women, neither of their opinion nor of what she might give them cause to tell;—that sparkle of azure she sent across the intervening street was so carelessly amused it was derisive, like the half nod to them with which she accompanied it. She and her companion walked closely together, absorbed in what they were saying, her hand upon his arm; and, when they came to the terrace steps, where a closed foreign car waited, with a handsome young chauffeur at the wheel and a twin of him at attention beside the door, she did a thing that Mrs. Dodge and Mrs. Cromwell took to be final and decisive.

Her companion had evidently offered some light pleasantry or witticism at which she took humorous offense, for she removed her white-gloved hand from his arm and struck him several times playfully upon the shoulder—but with the last blow allowed her hand to remain where it was; and, although she might have implied that it was to aid her movement into the car, the white fingers could still be seen remaining upon the shoulder of the man’s brown overcoat as he, moving instantly after her, took his seat beside her in the gray velvet interior. Thus, what appeared to be a playful gesture protracted itself into a caress, and a caress of no great novelty to the participants.

At least, it was so interpreted across the street, where Mrs. Dodge gave utterance to a sound vocal but incoherent, and Mrs. Cromwell said “Oh, my!” in a husky whisper. The French car glided by them, passing them as they openly stared at it, or indeed glared at it, and a moment later it was far down the street, leaving them to turn their glares upon each other.

“That settles it,” Mrs. Dodge gasped. “It ought to have been a gondola.”

“A gondola?”

“A Doge’s wife carrying on with a fool poet or something;—she always has that air to me. What a comedy!”

Mrs. Cromwell shook her head; her expression was of grief and shock. “It’s tragedy, Lydia.”

“Just as you choose to look at it. The practical point of view is that it’s going to happen to Amelia, and pretty soon, too! Some day before long that man’s going to walk in and tell her she’s got to step aside and let him marry somebody else. Doesn’t what we just saw prove it? That woman did it deliberately in our faces, and she knows we’re friends of his wife’s. She deliberately showed us she didn’t care what we saw. And as for him——”

“He didn’t see us, I think,” Mrs. Cromwell murmured.

“See us? He wouldn’t have seen Amelia herself if she’d been with us—and she might have been! That’s why I say she ought to know.”

“Oh, I don’t think I’d like to——”

“Somebody ought to,” Mrs. Dodge said, firmly. “Somebody ought to tell her, and right away, at that.”

“Oh, but——”

“Oughtn’t she to be given the chance to prepare herself for what’s coming to her?” Mrs. Dodge asked, testily. “She’s made that man think he’s Napoleon, and so she’s going to get what Napoleon’s wife got. I think she ought to be warned at once, and a true friend would see to it.”

In genuine distress, Mrs. Cromwell shrank from the idea. “Oh, but I could never——”

“Somebody’s got to,” Mrs. Dodge insisted, implacably. “If you won’t, then somebody else.”

“Oh, but you—you wouldn’t take such a responsibility, would you? You—you wouldn’t, would you, Lydia?”

The severe matron, Lydia Dodge, thus flutteringly questioned, looked more severe than ever. “I shouldn’t care to take such a burden on my shoulders,” she said. “Looking after my own burdens is quite enough for me, and it’s time I was on my way to them.” She moved in departure, but when she had gone a little way, spoke over her shoulder, “Somebody’s got to, though! Good-bye.”

Mrs. Cromwell, murmuring a response, entered her own domain and walked slowly up the wide brick path; then halted, turned irresolutely, and glanced to where her friend marched northward upon the pavement. To Mrs. Cromwell the outlines of Mrs. Dodge, thus firmly moving on, expressed something formidable and imminent. “But, Lydia——” the hesitant lady said, impulsively, though she knew that Lydia was already too distant to hear her. Mrs. Cromwell took an uncertain step or two, as if to follow and remonstrate, but paused, turned again, and went slowly into her house.

A kind-hearted soul, and in a state of sympathetic distress for Amelia Battle, she was beset by compassion and perplexity during what remained of the afternoon; and her husband and daughters found her so preoccupied at the dinner-table that they accused her of concealing a headache. But by this time what she concealed was an acute anxiety; she feared that Lydia’s sense of duty might lead to action, and that the action might be precipitate and destructive. For Mrs. Cromwell knew well enough that Amelia’s slavery was Amelia’s paradise—the only paradise Amelia knew how to build for herself—and paradises are, of all structures, the most perilously fragile.

Mrs. Cromwell was the more fearful because, being a woman, she understood that more than a sense of duty would impel Lydia to action: Lydia herself might interpret her action as the prompting of duty, but the vital incentive was likely to be something much more human; for within the race is a profound willingness to see a proud head lowered, particularly if that head be one that has displayed its pride. Amelia had displayed hers too long and too gallingly for Lydia’s patience;—Lydia had “really meant it,” Mrs. Cromwell thought, recalling the fierceness of Mrs. Dodge’s “I’ve had all I can stand of it!” that afternoon. A sense of duty with gall behind it is indeed to be feared; and the end of Mrs. Cromwell’s anxieties was the conclusion that Amelia’s paradise of slavery was more imminently threatened by the virtuous Lydia than by that gorgeous pagan, Mrs. Sylvester.

III
PERVERSITY OF A TELEPHONE

THE troubled lady began to wish devoutly that the sight of Mrs. Sylvester caressing Mr. Battle had not shocked her into a fluttering and indecisive state of mind;—she should have discussed the event more calmly with Lydia; should have argued against anything precipitate;—and so, as soon as she could, after her preoccupied dinner, she went to the telephone and gave Mrs. Dodge’s number.

Mr. and Mrs. Dodge were dining in town, she was informed; they were going to the theatre afterward and were not expected to return until midnight. This blank wall at once increased Mrs. Cromwell’s inward disturbance, for she was a woman readily tortured by her imagination; and in her mind she began to design terrible pictures of what might now be happening in the house of the Battles. Until she went to the telephone she thought it unlikely that Lydia had acted with such promptness; but after receiving through the instrument the information that no information was to be had for the present, Mrs. Cromwell became certain that Mrs. Dodge had already destroyed Amelia’s peace of mind.

She went away from the telephone, then came back to it, and again sat before the little table that bore it; but she did not at once put its miraculous powers into operation. Instead, she sat staring at it, afraid to employ it, while her imaginings became more piteous and more horrifying. Amelia had no talk except “Mr. Battle says”; she had no thought except “Mr. Battle thinks”; she had no life at all except as part of her husband’s life; and if that were taken away from her, what was left? She had made no existence whatever of her own and for herself, and if brought to believe that she had lost him, she was annihilated.

If the great Battle merely died, Amelia could live on, as widows of the illustrious sometimes do, to be his monument continually reinscribed with mourning tributes; but if a Venetian beauty carried him off in a gondola, Amelia would be so extinct that the act of self-destruction might well be thought gratuitous;—and yet Mrs. Cromwell’s imagination pictured Amelia in the grisly details of its commission by all the usual processes. She saw Amelia drown herself variously; saw her with a razor, with a pistol, with a rope, with poison, with a hat-pin.

Naturally, it became impossible to endure such pictures, and Mrs. Cromwell tremulously picked up the telephone, paused before releasing the curved nickel prong, but did release it, and when a woman’s voice addressed her, “What number, please?” she returned the breathless inquiry: “Is that you, Amelia?” Then she apologized, pronounced a number, and was presently greeted by the response: “Mr. Roderick Battle’s residence. Who is it, please?”

“Mrs. Cromwell. May I speak to Mrs. Battle?”

“I think so, ma’am.”

In the interval of silence Mrs. Cromwell muttered, “I think so” to herself. The maid wasn’t certain;—that was bad; for it might indicate a state of prostration.

“Yes?” said the little voice in the telephone. “Is it Mrs. Cromwell?”

Mrs. Cromwell with a great effort assumed her most smiling and reassuring expression. “Amelia? Is it you, Amelia?”

“Yes.”

“I just wanted to tell you again what a lovely impression your essay made on me, dear. I’ve been thinking of it ever since, and I felt you might like to know it.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Cromwell.”

“Lydia Dodge and I kept on talking about it after you left us this afternoon,” Mrs. Cromwell continued, beaming fondly upon the air above the telephone. “We both said we thought it was the best paper ever read at the club. I—I just wondered if—if Lydia called you up to tell you so, too. Did she?”

“No. No, she didn’t call me up.”

“Oh, didn’t she? I just thought she might have because she was so enthusiastic.”

“No. She didn’t.”

Mrs. Cromwell listened intently, seeking to detect emotion that might indicate Amelia’s state of mind, but Amelia’s voice revealed nothing whatever. It was one of those voices obscured and dwindled by the telephone into dry little metallic sounds; language was communicated, but nothing more, and a telegram from her would have conveyed as much personal revelation. “No, Mrs. Dodge didn’t call me up,” she said again.

Mrs. Cromwell offered some manifestations of mirth, though she intended them to express a tender cordiality rather than amusement; and the facial sweetness with which she was favouring the air before her became less strained; a strong sense of relief was easing her. “Well, I just thought Lydia might, you know,” she said, continuing to ripple her gentle laughter into the mouthpiece. “She was so enthusiastic, I just thought——”

“No, she didn’t call me up,” the small voice in the telephone interrupted.

“Well, I’m gl——” But Mrs. Cromwell checked herself sharply, having begun too impulsively. “I hope I’m not keeping you from anything you were doing,” she said hastily, to change the subject.

“No, I’m all alone. Mr. Battle is spending the evening with Mrs. Sylvester.”

“What!” Mrs. Cromwell exclaimed, and her almost convivial expression disappeared instantly; her face became a sculpture of features only. “He is?”

“Yes. He’s finishing the interior of her new house. With important clients like that he always interprets them into their houses you know. He makes a study of their personalities.”

“I—see!” Mrs. Cromwell said. Then, recovering herself, she was able to nod pleasantly and beam again, though now her beaming was rigidly automatic. “Well, I mustn’t keep you. I just wanted to tell you again how immensely we all admired your beautiful essay, and I thought possibly Lydia might have called you up to say so, too, because she fairly raved over it when we were——”

“No.” The metallic small voice said; and it informed her for the fourth time: “She didn’t call me up.” Then it added: “She came here.”

“No!” Mrs. Cromwell cried.

“Yes. She came here,” the voice in the instrument repeated.

“She did?”

“Yes. Just before dinner. She came to see me.”

“Oh, my!” Mrs. Cromwell murmured. “What did she say?”

“She was in great trouble about Mr. Dodge.”

“What?”

“She was in a tragic state,” the impersonal voice replied with perfect distinctness. “She was in a tragic state about her husband.”

“About John Dodge?” Mrs. Cromwell cried.

“Yes. She was hurried and didn’t have time to tell me any details, because they had a dinner engagement in town, and he kept telephoning her they’d be disgraced if she didn’t come home and dress; but that’s what she came to see me about. It seems he’s been misbehaving himself over some fascinating and unscrupulous woman, and Mrs. Dodge thinks he probably intends to ask for a divorce and abandon her. She was in a most upset state over it, of course.”

“Amelia!” Mrs. Cromwell shouted the name at the mouthpiece.

“Yes. Isn’t it distressing?” was the response. “Oh course, I won’t mention it to anybody but you. I supposed you knew all about it since you’re her most intimate friend.”

Mrs. Cromwell made an effort to speak coherently. “Let me try to understand you,” she said. “You say that Lydia Dodge came to you this afternoon——”

“It was really evening,” the voice interrupted, in correction. “Almost seven. And their engagement was in town at half past. That’s why he kept calling her up so excitedly.”

“And she told you,” Mrs. Cromwell continued, “Lydia Dodge told you that her husband, John Dodge, was philandering with——”

“There was no doubt about it whatever,” the voice interrupted. “Some friends of hers had seen an actual caress exchanged between Mr. Dodge and the other woman.”

“What!”

“Yes. That’s what she told me.”

“Wait!” Mrs. Cromwell begged. “Lydia Dodge told you that John Dodge——”

“Yes,” the voice of Amelia Battle replied colourlessly in the telephone. “It seems too tragic, and it was such a shock to me—I never dreamed that people of forty or fifty had troubles like that—but it was what she came here to tell me. Of course, she didn’t have time to tell me much, because she was so upset and Mr. Dodge was in such a hurry for her to come home. I never dreamed there was anything but peace and happiness between them, did you?”

“No, I didn’t,” gasped Mrs. Cromwell. “But Amelia——”

“That’s all I know about it, I’m afraid.”

“Amelia——”

“Probably she’ll talk about it to you pretty soon,” Amelia said, at the other end of the wire. “I’m surprised she didn’t tell you before she did me; you really know her so much better than I do. I’m afraid I’ll have to go now. One of Mr. Battle’s assistants has just come in and I’m doing some work with him. It was lovely of you to call me up about the little essay, but, of course, that was all Mr. Battle. Good-night.”

Mrs. Cromwell sat staring at the empty mechanism in her hand until it rattled irritably, warning her to replace it upon its prong.

IV
A GREAT MAN’S WIFE

SHE had a restless night, for she repeatedly woke up with a start, her eyes opening widely in the darkness of her bedroom; and each time this happened she made the same muffled and incomplete exclamation: “Well, of all——!” Her condition was still as exclamatory as it was anxiously expectant when, just after her nine-o’clock breakfast the next morning, she went to her Georgian drawing-room window and beheld the sterling figure of Mrs. Dodge in the act of hurrying from the sidewalk to the Georgian doorway. Mrs. Cromwell ran to admit her; brought her quickly into the drawing room. “Lydia!” she cried. “What on earth happened?” For, even if telephones had never been invented, the early caller’s expression would have made it plain that there had been a happening.

“I’d have called you up last night,” the perturbed Lydia began;—“but we didn’t get back till one o’clock, and it was too late. In all my life I never had such an experience!”

“You don’t mean at the theatre or——”

“No!” Mrs. Dodge returned, indignantly. “I mean with that woman!”

“With Amelia?”

“With Amelia Battle.”

“But tell me,” Mrs. Cromwell implored. “My dear, I’ve been in such a state of perplexity——”

“Perplexity!” her friend echoed scornfully, and demanded: “What sort of state do you think I’ve been in? My dear, I went to her.”

“To Amelia?”

“To Amelia Battle,” Mrs. Dodge said. “I went straight home after I left you yesterday; but I kept thinking about what we’d seen——”

“You mean——” Mrs. Cromwell paused, and glanced nervously through the glass of the broad-paned window beside which she and her guest had seated themselves. Her troubled eyes came to rest upon the pinkish Italian villa across the street. “You mean what we saw—over there?”

“I mean what was virtually an embrace between Roderick Brooks Battle and Mrs. Sylvester under our eyes,” Mrs. Dodge said angrily. “And she looked us square in the face just before she did it! I also mean that both of them showed by their manner that such caresses were absolutely familiar and habitual—and that was all I needed to prove that the talk about them was only too well founded. So, when I’d thought it over and over—Oh, I didn’t act in haste!—I decided it was somebody’s absolute duty to prepare Amelia for what I plainly saw was coming to her. Did you ever see anything show more proprietorship than Mrs. Sylvester’s fondling of that man’s shoulder? So, as you had declared you wouldn’t go, and although it was late, and Mr. Dodge and I had an important dinner engagement, I made up my mind it had to be done immediately and I went.”

“But what did you tell her?” Mrs. Cromwell implored.

“Never,” said Mrs. Dodge, “never in my life have I had such an experience! I tried to begin tactfully; I didn’t want to give her a shock, and so I tried to begin and lead up to it; but it was difficult to begin at all, because I’d scarcely sat down before she told me my husband had got home and had telephoned to see if I’d reached her house, and he’d left word for me to come straight back home because he was afraid we’d be late for the dinner—and all the time I was trying to talk to her, her maid kept coming in to say he was calling up again, and then I’d have to go and beseech him to let me alone for a minute—but he wouldn’t——”

Mrs. Cromwell was unable to wait in patience through these preliminaries. “Lydia! What did you tell her?”

“I’m trying to explain it as well as I can, please,” her guest returned, irritably. “If I didn’t explain how crazily my husband kept behaving you couldn’t possibly understand. He’d got it into his head that we had to be at this dinner on time, because it was with some people who have large mining interests and——”

“Lydia, what did you——”

“I told you I tried to be tactful,” said Mrs. Dodge. “I tried to lead up to it, and I’ll tell you exactly what I said, though with that awful telephone interrupting every minute it was hard to say anything connectedly! First, I told her what a deep regard both of us had for her.”

“Both of you? You mean you and your husband, Lydia?”

“No, you and me. It was necessary to mention you, of course, because of what we saw yesterday.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Cromwell. “Well, go on.”

“I told her,” Mrs. Dodge continued, complying. “I said nobody could have her interests more at heart than you and I did, and that was why I had come. She thanked me, but I noticed a change in her manner right there. I thought she looked at me in a kind of bright-eyed way, as if she were on her guard and suspicious. I thought she looked like that, and now I’m sure she did. I said, ‘Amelia, I want to put a little problem to you, just to see if you think I’ve done right in coming.’ She said, ‘Yes, Mrs. Dodge,’ and asked me what the problem was.”

“And what was it, Lydia?”

“My dear, will you let me tell you? I said in the kindest way, I said, ‘Amelia, just for a moment let us suppose that my husband were not true to me; suppose he might even be planning to set me aside so that he could marry another woman; and suppose that two women friends of mine, who had my interests dearly at heart, had seen him with this other woman; and suppose her to be a fascinating woman, and that my friends saw with their own eyes that my husband felt her fascination so deeply that anybody could tell in an instant he was actually in love with her;—and, more than that,’ I said, ‘suppose that these friends of mine saw my husband actually exchanging a caress with this woman, and saw him go off driving with her, with her hand on his shoulder and he showing that he liked it there and was used to having it there;—Amelia,’ I said, ‘Amelia, what would you think about the question of duty for those two friends of mine who had seen such a thing? Amelia,’ I said, ‘wouldn’t you think it was the true duty of one or the other of them to come and tell me and warn me and give me time to prepare myself?’ That’s what I said to her.”

“And what did she——”

“She jumped right up and came and threw her arms around me,” said Mrs. Dodge in a strained voice. “I never had such an experience in my life!”

“But what did she say?”

“She said, ‘You poor thing!’ ” Mrs. Dodge explained irascibly. “She didn’t ‘say’ it, either; she shouted it, and she kept on shouting it over and over. ‘You poor thing!’ And when she wasn’t saying that, she was saying she’d never dreamed Mr. Dodge was that sort of a man, and she made such a commotion I was afraid the neighbours would hear her!”

“But why didn’t you——”

“I did!” Mrs. Dodge returned passionately. “I told her a hundred times I didn’t mean Mr. Dodge; but she never gave me a chance to finish a word I began; she just kept taking on about what a terrible thing it must be for me, and how dreadful it was to think of Mr. Dodge misbehaving like that—I tell you I never in my life had such an experience!”

“But why didn’t you make her listen, at least long enough to——”

Mrs. Dodge’s look was that of a person badgered to desperation. “I couldn’t! Every time I opened my mouth she shouted louder than I did! She’d say, ‘You poor thing!’ again, or some more about Mr. Dodge, or she’d want to know if I didn’t need ammonia or camphor, or she’d offer to make beef tea for me! And every minute my husband was making an idiot of himself ringing the Battles’ telephone again. You don’t seem to understand what sort of an experience it was at all! I tell you when I finally had to leave the house she was standing on their front steps shouting after me that she’d never tell anybody a thing about Mr. Dodge unless I wanted her to!”

“It’s so queer!” Mrs. Cromwell said, bewildered more than ever. “If I’d been in your place I know I’d never have come away without making her understand I meant her husband, not mine!”

“ ‘Making her understand!’ ” Mrs. Dodge repeated, mocking her friend’s voice—so considerable was her bitterness. “You goose! You don’t suppose she didn’t understand that, do you?”

“You don’t think——”

“Absolutely! She had been expecting it to happen.”

“What to happen?”

“Somebody’s coming to warn her about Mrs. Sylvester. She did the whole thing deliberately. Absolutely! She understood I was talking about Battle as well as you do now. Of course,” said Mrs. Dodge, “of course she understood!”

Then both ladies seemed to ponder, and for a time uttered various sounds of marvelling; but suddenly Mrs. Cromwell, whose glance had wandered to the window, straightened herself to an attentive rigidity. Her guest’s glance followed hers, and instantly became fixed; but neither lady spoke, for a sharply outlined coincidence was before them, casting a spell upon them and holding them fascinated.

Across the street a French car entered the driveway of the stucco house, and a Venetian Beauty descended, wrapped in ermine too glorious for the time and occasion. Out of the green door of the house eagerly came upon the balustraded terrace a dark man, poetic and scholarly in appearance, dressed scrupulously and with a gardenia, like a bridegroom’s flower, in his coat. In his hand he held an architect’s blue print; but for him and for the azure-eyed lady in ermine this blue print seemed not more important, nor less, than that book in which the two lovers of Rimini read no more one day. They glanced but absently at the blue print; then the man let it dangle from his hand while he looked into the lady’s eyes and she into his; and they talked with ineffable gentleness together.

Here was an Italian episode most romantic in its elements: a Renaissance terrace for the trysting place of a Renaissance widow and a great man, two who met and made love under the spying eyes of female sbirri lurking in a window opposite; but it was Amelia Battle who made the romantic episode into a realistic coincidence. In a vehicle needful of cleansing and polish she appeared from down the long street, sitting in the attentive attitude necessary for the proper guidance of what bore her, and wearing (as Mrs. Cromwell hoarsely informed Mrs. Dodge) “her market clothes.” That she was returning from a market there could be no doubt; Amelia had herself this touch of the Renaissance, but a Renaissance late, northern, and robust. Both of the rear windows of her diligent vehicle framed still-life studies to lure the brush of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lowland painters: the green tops of sheaved celery nodded there; fat turnips reposed in baskets; purple ragged plumes of beets pressed softly against the glass; jugs that suggested buttermilk and cider, perhaps both, snugly neighboured the hearty vegetables, and made plain to all that the good wife in the forward seat had a providing heart for her man and her household.

The ladies in the Georgian window were truly among those who cared to look. “Oh, my!” Mrs. Cromwell whispered.

Amelia stopped her market machine and jumped out in her market clothes at the foot of the driveway, where stood Mrs. Sylvester’s French car in the care of its two magnificent young men. There was an amiable briskness, cheerful and friendly, in the air with which Amelia trotted up the terrace steps and joined the romantic couple standing beside the balustrade. The three entered into converse.

Mrs. Cromwell and Mrs. Dodge became even more breathless; and then, with amazement, and perhaps a little natural disappointment, they saw that the conversation was not acrimonious—at least, not outwardly so. They marked that Amelia, smiling, took the lead in it, and that she at once set her hand upon her husband’s arm—and in a manner of ownership so masterful and complete that the proprietorship assumed by Mrs. Sylvester in the same gesture, the preceding day, seemed in comparison the temporary claim of a mere borrower. And Mrs. Cromwell marked also a kind of feebleness in the attitude of the Venetian Beauty: Mrs. Sylvester was smiling politely, but there was a disturbed petulance in her smile. Suddenly Mrs. Cromwell perceived that beside Amelia, for all Amelia’s skimpiness, Mrs. Sylvester looked ineffective. With that, glancing at the sturdy figure of Lydia Dodge, Mrs. Cromwell came to the conclusion that since Amelia had been too much for Lydia, Amelia would certainly be too much for Mrs. Sylvester.

“Look!” said Lydia.

Amelia and her husband were leaving the terrace together. Battle walked to the “sedan” with her and held the door open for her; she climbed to the driver’s seat and seemed to wait, with assurance, for him to do more than hold the door. And at this moment the seriousness of his expression was so emphasized that it was easily visible to the Georgian window, though only his profile was given to its view as he looked back, over his shoulder, at the glazing smile of the lady upon the terrace. He seemed to waver, hesitating; and then, somewhat bleakly, he climbed into the “sedan” beside his wife.

“Open it!” Mrs. Dodge was struggling with a catch of the Georgian window.

“What for?”

“She’s shouting again! I’ve got to hear her!” Mrs. Dodge panted; and the window yielded to her exertions.

Amelia’s attitude showed that she was encouraging her machine to begin operations, while at the same time she was calling parting words to Mrs. Sylvester. “Good-bye!” Amelia shouted. “Mr. Battle says he’s been so inspired by your sympathy in his work! Mr. Battle says that’s so necessary to an architect! Mr. Battle says no artist can ever even hope to do anything great without it! Mr. Battle says——”

But here, under the urging of her foot, the engine burst into a shattering uproar: ague seized the car with a bitter grip; convulsive impulses of the apparatus to leap at random were succeeded by more decorous ideas, and then the “sedan” moved mildly forward; the vegetables nodded affably in the windows, and the Battles were borne from sight.

“I see,” said Lydia Dodge, moving back to her chair. “I understand now.”

“You understand what?” her hostess inquired, brusquely, as she closed the Georgian window.

“I understand what I just saw. I can’t tell you exactly how or why, but it was plainly there—in Roderick Brooks Battle’s look, in his slightest gesture. We were absolutely mistaken to think it possible. He’ll never ask Amelia to step aside: he’ll never leave her. And however much he philanders, she’ll never leave him, either. She’ll go straight on the way she’s always gone. He’s shown us that, and she’s shown us that.”

“Well, then,” Mrs. Cromwell inquired; “why is it? You say you understand.”

“It’s because he knows that between his Venetian romance and his press agent he’s got to take the press agent. He’s had sense enough to see he mightn’t be a great man at all without his press agent—and he’d rather keep on being a great man. And Amelia knows she’s getting too skimpy-looking to get a chance to make a great man out of anybody else; so she wouldn’t let me tell her about him, because she’s going to stick to him!”

At this Mrs. Cromwell made gestures of negation and horror, though in the back of her mind, at that moment, she was recalling her yesterday’s thought that Lydia’s sense of duty was really Lydia’s pique. “Lydia Dodge!” she cried, “I won’t listen to you! Don’t you know you’re taking the lowest, unchristianest, vilest possible view of human nature?”

Mrs. Dodge looked guilty, but she decided to offer a plea in excuse. “Well, I suppose that may be true,” she said. “But sometimes it does seem about the only way to understand people!”

V
ONE OF MRS. CROMWELL’S DAUGHTERS

IN THE spacious suburb’s most opulent quarter, where the houses stood in a great tract of shrubberies, gardens, and civilized old woodland groves, there were many happily marriageable girls; and one, in particular, was supremely equipped in this condition, for she had what the others described as “the best of everything.” In the first place, they said, Anne Cromwell had “looks”; in the second place, she had “money,” and in the third she had “family,” by which they meant the background prestiges of an important mother and several generations of progenitors affluently established upon this soil.

Sometimes they added a word or two about her manners, though a middle-aged listener might not have divined that the allusion was to manners.

“She manages wonderf’ly,” they said. Amiably reserved, and never an eager contestant in the agonizing little competitions that necessarily engage maidens of her age, she was not merely fair but generous to her rivals. “She can afford to be!” they cried, thus paying tribute. Her fairness prevailed, too, among her suitors: not one could say she favoured him more than another; but like a young princess, as politic as she was well bred and genuinely kind, she showed an impartial friendliness to everybody.

Even without her background she was the most noticeable young figure in the suburb, but never because she did anything to make herself conspicuous. At the Green Hills Country Club the eye of a stranger, watching the dancing on a summer night, would not immediately distinguish an individual from the mass. As the dancers went lightly interweaving over the floor of a roofless pavilion, where the foliage of great beech trees hung trembling above white balustrades and Venetian lamps, the spectator’s first glance from the adjoining veranda caught only the general aspect of carnival: the dancers were like a confusion of gaily coloured feathers blowing and whirlpooling across a dim tapestry. But presently, as he looked, rhythms and shifting designs would appear in the sparkling fluctuation; points of light would separate themselves, taking individual contour, and the brightest would be a lovely girl’s head of “gold cooled in moonlight.”

Then it would be observed that toward this bright head darker ones darted and zigzagged through the crowd more frequently than toward any other, as the ardent youths plunged to “cut in”; and when the music stopped the lovely girl was not for an instant left to the single devotion of her partner. Other girls, as well as the young men, flocked about her, and wherever she moved there seemed to be something like a retinue. Thus the first question of the stranger, looking on, came to be expected as customary—almost inevitable, “Who is that?” The reply was as invariable, delivered with the amused condescension of a native receiving tribute to his climate or public monuments. “That’s what visitors always ask first. It’s Anne Cromwell.”

Mrs. Cromwell, sitting among contemporaries on the veranda that overlooked the dancing-floor, had often heard both the question and the answer, and although she was one of those mothers known as “sensible,” she never heard either without a natural thrill of pride. But she was tactful enough to conceal her feeling from the mothers of other girls, and usually laughed deprecatingly, implying that she knew as well as any one how little such ephemeral things signified. Anne had her own deprecating laughter for tributes, and the most eager flatterer could not persuade her to the air of accepting them seriously; so that both mother and daughter, appearing to set no store by Anne’s triumphs, really made them all the more secure. It was a true instinct guiding them, the same that prevailed with Cæsar when thrice he refused the crown; for what hurts our little human hearts, when we watch a competitor’s triumph, is his pride and his pleasure in it. If he can persuade us that it brings him neither we will not grudge it to him, but may help him to greater.

Moreover, both Anne and her mother believed themselves to be entirely genuine in their deprecation of Anne’s preëminence, and, when they were alone together, talked tributes over with the same modest laughter they had for them in company. Yet Mrs. Cromwell never omitted to tell Anne of any stranger’s “Who is that?” nor of all the other pleasing things said to her, or in her hearing, of her daughter. And, on her own part, Anne laughed and told of the like things that had been said to her, or that she had overheard.

“Of course, it doesn’t mean anything,” she would add. “I just thought I’d tell you.”

For the truth was that Anne’s triumphs were the breath of life to both mother and daughter, and they were doomed to make the ancient discovery that our dearest treasures are those that are threatened.

The threat was perceived by Mrs. Cromwell upon one of those summer nights so exquisite that we call them “unreal,” because they belong to perished romance, and we have learned to imagine that what is real must be unlovely. Only the relics of a discredited sentimental epoch could go forth under the gold-pointed canopy of such a night, and sigh because the stars are ineffable. Mrs. Cromwell was such a relic, and, being in remote attendance upon her daughter at the country club, she had gone after dinner to walk alone upon the links in the starlight. In an old-fashioned mood, she naturally wanted to get away from the dance music of the open-air pavilion; but, when she returned, her shadow from the rising moon preceded her, and she decided that even the tomtoms and war horns of the young people’s favourite “orchestra” could never entirely ruin the moon. Then, instead of joining any of the groups upon the veranda, she went to an easy chair, aloof in a shadowy corner, where she could see the dancers and be alone to watch Anne.

She looked down a little wistfully. Only a year or so ago she had thus watched her oldest daughter, Mildred, now a matron, and in time she would probably see her youngest, the schoolgirl, Cornelia, dancing here. But Anne, though the mother strove not to know it, was her dearest, and the period of eligible maidenhood, like any other period, is not long. Mrs. Cromwell was wistful because she thought it would not be really long before Anne might sit here to watch the maiden dancing of a daughter of her own.

The pavilion was a little below the level of the veranda, and almost at once her eye found the dominant fair head it sought. Anne was talking as she danced, smiling serenely, a graceful young figure, shapely and tall, with a hint of the contented ampleness that would come later, as it had come to her mother. Mrs. Cromwell, seeing Anne’s smile, smiled too, in her seclusion, and with the same serenity; though an enemy might have said that these two smiles partook of the same complacency. However, at that moment Mrs. Cromwell could not have imagined the existence of an enemy: she had no conception that there could be in the world such a thing as an enemy to herself or to her daughter.

She was a little sorry that Anne wasn’t dancing with young Harrison Crisp. She liked to see Anne dancing with any “nice boy,” but best of all with young Crisp, and this was not only because the two were harmoniously matched as dancers, as well as in other ways, but because the mother had comprehended that this young man might prove to be her daughter’s preference for more than dancing. Mrs. Cromwell was not anxious to see Anne married; she wished her to prolong the pretty time of girlhood; but any mother must have been pleased to see so splendid a young man place himself at her daughter’s disposal. Mrs. Cromwell wondered where he was this evening, and she had just begun to look for him among the dancers when strangers intruded upon her retreat.

She heard unfamiliar voices behind her, and then a small group of middle-aged people drew up wicker chairs to the veranda railing that overlooked the dancing-floor. Mrs. Cromwell gave them a side glance and perceived that they were visitors, “put up” at the club, for this was an organization closely guarded, and she knew all of the members. The newcomers sat near her, and though she would have preferred her seclusion to remain secluded, she could not help waiting, with a little motherly satisfaction, to hear them speak of her Anne, as strangers inevitably must.

And presently she smiled in the darkness, thinking herself rewarded; for a man’s voice, deeply impressed, inquired: “Who is that wonderful girl?”

In the light of the moment’s impending revelation, the mother’s smile upon Mrs. Cromwell’s half-parted lips, as she waited for the reply, becomes a little pathetic.

“Why, it’s Sallie, of course!”

This strange answer arrested Mrs. Cromwell’s smile, of which reluctant and mirthless vestiges remained for a moment or two before vanishing into the contours that mark an astounded disapproval. Then she slowly turned her head and looked at these queer visitors, and her strong impression was that the two middle-aged women and their escort, a stout elderly man in white flannels, were “very ordinary looking people.”

Their chairs were within a dozen feet of hers, but they sat in profile to her, and possibly were unaware of her, or were aware of her but vaguely. For strangers in a strange place are often subject to such an illusion of detachment as these displayed, and seem to feel that they may speak together as freely as if they alone understood language. But, of course, to Mrs. Cromwell’s way of thinking, the greater illusion of the present group was in believing that somebody named Sallie was a wonderful girl. She failed to identify this pretender: none of her friends had a daughter named Sallie, and Anne had never spoken of any Sallie.

“I declare I didn’t recognize her!” the elderly man said, chuckling. “Who’d have thought it? Sallie!”

The woman who sat next him laughed triumphantly. “I don’t wonder you didn’t recognize her,” she said. “It’s six years since you saw her, and she was only fourteen then. I guess she’s changed some—what?”

“Well, ‘some’!” he agreed. “She makes the rest of ’em look like flivvers.”

The second of the two women tapped his head with her fan. “George, I guess you never thought you’d be the uncle of a peach like that!”

“Well, I’m not as surprised to be the uncle of a peach,” he said, with renewed chuckling, “as I am to see you the aunt of one! I’m kind of surprised to have Jennie, here, turn out to be the mother of one, too. You certainly never showed any such style as that when you were young, Jennie! Why, there ain’t a girl in that whole bunch to hold a candle to her! She’s a two-hundred-carat blazer and makes the rest of ’em look like what you see on a ten-cent-store counter! You heard me yourselves: the very first thing I said was, ‘Who is that wonderful girl?’ And I didn’t even know it was Sallie. I guess that shows!”

Sallie’s mother laughed excitedly. “Oh, we’re used to it, George! She’s never gone a place these last three years she didn’t put it all over the other girls in two shakes of a lamb’s tail! The boys go crazy over her as soon as they see her, even the ones that are engaged to other girls, and a few that are married to the other girls, too! We’ve had some funny times, I tell you, George!”

“I expect so!” he chuckled. “I guess you’re fixing for her to pick a good one, all right, Jennie!”

“She don’t need me to do any fixing for her,” Sallie’s mother explained, gaily. “She’s got a mighty good head on her, and I guess she knows she can choose anything she decides she wants. Look at her now.” She laughed in loud triumph as she spoke, and pointed to the pavilion.

Mrs. Cromwell’s eyes followed the direction of the pointing forefinger and saw a stationary nucleus among the swirl of dancers—a knot of young men gathered round a girl and engaged in obvious expostulation. The disagreement was so pronounced, in fact, as to resemble a dispute; for it involved more gesturing than is usually displayed in the mere arguments of members of the northern races;—“cutting in” to dance with this girl was apparently a serious matter.

She was a laughing, slender creature, with hints of the glow of rubies in the corn-silk brown of her hair; and the apple-green thin silk of her sparse dancing dress was the right complement for her dramatic vividness. Brilliant eyed, her face alive with little ecstasies of merriment as the debaters grew more and more emphatic, she might well have made an observer think of “laughing April on the hills”—an April with July in her hair and a ring of solemn young fauns disputing over her.

She did not allow their disagreement to reach a crisis, however, though the fauns were so earnest as to seem to threaten one;—she placed a slim hand upon the shoulder of her interrupted partner, whose arm had been all the while tentatively about her waist, and began to dance with him. But over her shoulder as she went, she flung a look and a word to the defeated, who dispersed thoughtfully, with the air of men not by any means abandoning their ambitions.

Then the coronal of ruby-sprinkled hair was seen shuttling rhythmically among the dancers; and such a glowing shuttle the eye of a spectator must follow. This pagan April with her flying grace in scant apple-green emerged from the other dancers as the star emerges from the other actors in a play; and only mothers of other girls could have failed to perceive that any stranger’s first question must inevitably be, “Who is that?”

Mrs. Cromwell had no such perception;—her glance, a little annoyed, sought her daughter and easily found her. Anne was dancing with young Hobart Simms, long her most insignificant and humblest follower. Mrs. Cromwell thought of him as “one of the nice boys”; but she also thought of him as “poor little Hobart,” for only two things distinguished him, both unfortunate. His father had lately failed in business, so that of all the “nice boys,” Hobart was the poorest; but, what was more to the point in Mrs. Cromwell’s reflections just then, of all the “nice boys” he was the shortest. He was at least four inches shorter than Anne, and it seemed to the mother that the contrast in height made Anne look too large and somehow too placid. Mrs. Cromwell wanted Anne to be kind, but she decided to warn her against dancing with Hobart: there are contrasts that may bring even the most graceful within the danger of looking a little ridiculous.

Anne was at her best when she danced with the tall and romantically dark Harrison Crisp; but unfortunately this delinquent had been discovered: he was the triumphing partner who had carried off the young person called Sallie. Mrs. Cromwell might have put it the other way, however: she might have looked upon the episode as the carrying off of young Crisp by this froward Sallie.

Sallie’s mother appeared to take this view, herself. “Look at that!” she cried. “Look at the state she’s got that fellow in she’s dancing with! Look at the way he’s looking at her, will you!” And again she gave utterance to the loud and excitedly triumphant laugh that not only offended the ears of Mrs. Cromwell but disquieted her more than she would have thought possible, half an hour earlier. It seemed to her that she had never before heard so offensive a laugh.

“Did you ever see anything to beat it?” Sallie’s mother inquired hilariously. “He looks at her that way the whole time—except when she’s dancing with somebody else. Then he stands around and looks at her as if he had an awful pain! She’s got him so he won’t dance with anybody else. It’s a scream!” And here, in her mirthful excitement, she slapped the stout uncle’s knee; for Sallie’s mother made it evident that she was one of those who repeat their own youth in the youth of a daughter, and perhaps in a daughter’s career fulfil their own lost ambitions. She became more confidential, though her confidential air was only a gesture; she leaned toward her companions, but did not take the trouble to lower her voice.

“He’s been to the house to see her four times since Monday. Last week he had her auto riding every single afternoon. The very day he met her he sent her five pounds of——”

“Who is he?” the uncle inquired. “He’s a fine looking fellow, all right, but is he——”

Sallie’s mother took the words out of his mouth. “Is he?” she cried. “I guess you’ll say he is! Crisp Iron Works, and his father’s made him first vice-president and secretary already—only two years out of college!”

“Sallie like him?”

“She’s got ’em all going,” the mother laughed;—“but he’s the king. I guess she don’t mind keeping him standing on his head awhile though!” Again she produced the effect of lowering her voice without actually lowering it. “They say he was sort of half signed up for somebody else. When we first came here you couldn’t see anything but this Anne Cromwell. She’s one of these highbrow girls—college and old family and everything—and you’d thought she was the whole place. Sallie only needed about three weeks!” And with that Sallie’s mother was so highly exhilarated that she must needs slap George’s knee once more. “Sallie’s got her in the back row to-night, where she belongs!”

The aunt and uncle joined laughter with her, and were but vaguely aware that the lady near them had risen from her easy chair. She passed by them, bestowing upon them a grave look, not prolonged.

“Who’s all that?” the stout uncle inquired, when she had disappeared round a corner of the veranda. “Awful big dignified looking party, I’d call her,” he added. “Who is she?”

“There’s a lot of that highbrow stuff around here,” said Sallie’s mother;—“but, of course, I don’t get acquainted as fast as Sallie. I don’t know who she is, but probably I’ll meet her some day.”

If Mrs. Cromwell had overheard this she might have responded, mentally, “Yes—at Philippi!” For it could be only on the field of battle that she would consent to meet “such rabble.” She said to herself that she dismissed them and their babblings permanently from her mind; and, having thus dismissed them, she continued to think of nothing else.