[BOOK ONE]
[CHAPTER I,] [ II,] [ III,] [ IV,] [ V,] [ VI,] [ VII,] [ VIII,] [ IX,] [ X,] [ XI,]
[BOOK TWO]
[ XII,] [ XIII,] [ XIV,] [ XV,] [ XVI,] [ XVII,] [ XVIII,] [ XIX,] [ XX,] [ XXI,]
[BOOK THREE]
[ XXII,] [ XXIII,] [ XXIV,] [ XXV,] [ XXVI,] [ XXVII,] [ XXVIII,] [ XXIX,] [ XXX.]
[TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE]

HALF LOAVES
——————
MARGARET CULKIN BANNING

HALF LOAVES

BY
MARGARET CULKIN BANNING
AUTHOR OF “THIS MARRYING,” ETC.
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
A. T. B.

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER I

IT was dusk in the convent. All the stillness of the hour of prayer was deepened by the soft twilight coming through the narrow windows of the long corridor that led from the study room to the chapel. The statue of the Blessed Virgin above the holy-water font caught the last rays of light in the folds of her blue gown and dimly held them.

Cecily sat opposite the statue on the ledge of the window, and gravely watched the world darken. It was not quite time for Benediction and she had a great deal to think about. The convent was having a mission for its pupils and especially for the small class of girls who were to graduate next week. They had been exhorted to take the words of the missionary priest with great earnestness, for it would be his especial purpose to prepare these young souls for life in the world. The Jesuit, tall, spiritually emaciated, seethingly emphatic, had caught the spirit of his work. He had told them of temptation, of sin, of eternal life, of hope, of the grace of God, painting his pictures with a vividness of beauty and horror. And this afternoon in his last talk he had laid before them a choice of lives. There were three paths into which the life of a woman might direct itself or be directed, he had said. And the girls, hushed into immense seriousness and expectation, had hung upon his words.

The life of a woman in the world who did not marry—the life of a woman of the world who married—the life of a nun. One must choose, though it seemed that eternal salvation was possible along any of these roads. The unmarried woman must devote her life to saving her soul and, because she had no cares of home or children, she had more time than other women to devote to the salvation of other souls. The affection and care which she did not give to a husband and children she might devote to the alleviation of suffering, to the work of a lay woman in the church, or the care of an aged parent. To Cecily it somehow did not sound alluring—these women sinking into respected, dutiful cares—it did not sound alluring. The life of a nun—Mother Fénelon came along the corridor, her hands held together under the loose panel of her black robe, her face half concealed by the stiff fluted ruff around it, her step noiseless in her felt slippers. She smiled at Cecily and Cecily, slipping respectfully to her feet, smiled back. She loved Mother Fénelon. It was true what the priest had said. Nuns were happy—it was a beautiful, peaceful, sure life—a life of blessing and fun too. Perhaps, thought Cecily, it is because I am not a Catholic that I would not want to be a nun. Yet even the Catholic girls—even the devout Agnes, who spent an extra half hour in prayer every day, kneeling with her long body bent in real and voluntary discomfort over the back of a pew—even Agnes did not want to be a nun. Cecily took out of her memory the other choice of the priest. He had not placed it last. The life of a nun, highest in his estimation, had come as the climax of choices. But Cecily felt differently. The life of a married woman in the world—the life of a married woman—a little quiver of excitement ran through her imagination—a married woman. Yet the priest had not made it attractive.

No, he had seemed to make it deliberately rather unattractive. Sacrifice, pain, endurance of pain—these the lot of the married woman. He pictured her with her children, teaching them the love of God and devotion to Him. He pictured her bearing troubles which the children brought. And he had said, “Marriage is a sacrament which has for its purpose the establishment of a home and the bringing up of children. There are those in the world who will try to make you believe not only that marriage is not a sacrament and that it may be dissolved at will, but that the bodies and souls of little children do not belong to it. Who listens to such counsels willingly, who allows them to prevail upon him is in a state of mortal sin.”

And he had not said one word about love, thought Cecily. Lover’s love, that is. Perhaps because he did not know about it, not ever having been married. Or perhaps he thought all such things were sinful. Cecily reflected on love and the little thrill ran through her again. Decidedly he could not have shown marriage at its best. There was love—being made love to—and of course he did not know, could not be expected to know about such things as engagements and weddings. He did not know.

The girls began to come into the chapel, and jumping up again from her window ledge, she took from her pocket the black net veil, without which none of the students might enter the chapel, and pinned it on her hair. Between the black folds, falling on either side of her head, her face looked out charmingly. She was eighteen, but if it had not been for her tallness she would have seemed younger, for her eyes were depths of unsophistication and her hair swept back in soft brown waves as simply arranged as a child’s.

In the chapel Mother Barante began to sing softly the first hymn of the Benediction. It was the most precious hour of the day to many of the nuns as well as to the students. Mother Barante’s voice was one of the chief prides of the cloister and the nuns told with gentle satisfaction of the triumphs Mother Barante had been promised professionally, of the cathedrals which had wanted her for soloist and how she had preferred to sing like this—here in this white chapel at Benediction. Cecily had often thought that perhaps, after all, the singer had chosen wisely. Here in this exquisite chapel where everything except the high oaken stalls of the nuns and the seats for the students was spotlessly white and polished, where there were always flowers on the altar and soft reverential lights before the shrines of the saints, was a perfect setting. People came from great distances to hear Mother Barante sing, and, worldly and ostentatious as some of the girls were, they all took pride in the fact that none of these visitors saw the singer—only heard her glorious voice from the organ loft above them, where she stood, her glance always on the statue of the Mother of God.

Chapel was over. The mission was over. It was suppertime, and the girls filed in two long rows to the refectory hall. And, with the relief which came after the concentration of the mission, they were very gay. The nun who presided over the hundred girls was unexacting and the laughter echoed from the head table, where the older girls sat, down to the table where the littlest girls giggled and chattered over their gingercookies and preserves. The enormously fat sister who waited on table smiled at the children and left them an extra plate of cookies. Sister Loretta liked the little ones best and they loved her for she was as happy as she was fat, and always ready to find a hungry child something to eat. Not having enough education to aspire ever to become a mother of the order, Sister Loretta was completely content in being allowed to serve the others.

Cecily looked interestedly at Sister Loretta as she piled the dishes on her tray. What had made Sister Loretta choose the life of a nun, she wondered? She wished that she could ask her. She was anxious to find out more about this matter of choice of life—more especially why all these women had deliberately given up the life of a married woman in the world. There must be something more—there must be some objection which she did not know.

“Why do they choose to be nuns?” she asked reflectively, leaning one elbow on the table in a most forbidden way.

Agnes, sitting beside her, made the orthodox reply.

“It’s the holiest life—and the safest.”

“Safest from what?”

“Oh, temptations, troubles, sorrows.”

“Then I don’t see,” said Cecily, “why we don’t all just be nuns and make an end to it.”

There was a silence and then a giggle.

“Have to enlarge the convent some.”

“Be pretty dull outside.”

“Never get me to agree to that. Besides, there are reasons——”

Some of the reasons occurred to Cecily. She blushed a little and let the subject pass in a chorus of inconsequent and flippant comment. But later, in a corner of the recreation hall Agnes herself revived it. There were four of them—Agatha Ward, Madeline von Vlectenburg, Agnes Hearding and Cecily. They drew together in an earnest little group around the green shaded lamp by the divan and discussed it. For no one of them wanted that supreme choice of the Jesuit priest’s for a woman’s life—no one of them wanted to be a nun. Their faces were vivid with interest and excitement. Madeline, plump and blond and glowing, had already a personal interest in a man. She would see him when she got home again, and now that she was through school—she paused thrillingly. And Agnes began to talk of love with all the ardor that she threw sometimes into her sensuous enjoyment of religion. If she really loved a man, said Agnes——. Agatha was not so sure of love. She knew a woman who wrote and who had a flat of her own and who deliberately had not married. A life-work was sometimes better than marriage and more interesting. The girls listened seriously, for Mother Benedict herself had said that there was great talent in Agatha’s verses.

But Cecily contributed nothing. Deeper than the easy talk of the girls ran the message of the priest, and deeper still ran that strange adventurous wonder as to the solution of it all. The girls were choosing for themselves. They were not telling why one chose as one did.

Graduation week was busy. One had no time to think. The orderly days were crammed full and the life of the convent centered protectingly, admiringly, lovingly about the fifteen girls who were leaving it for the world. The simple parties, the award of the medal for composition, the medal for oratory, the coming of the parents, the special music for the last Mass, the unpacking of graduation dresses sent from home, the gentle flurry of the convent world absorbed the girls. It was only on the last night—the night before the final exercises—that Mother Fénelon, alone in the study room, looked up to see Cecily standing before her. Cecily’s eyes were frightened and fearful and excited and the nun drew the girl down upon a chair beside the desk, holding the nervous hands in the hollow of her own.

“It’s hard to go, Mother Fénelon, and I thought it would be easy. I thought, not being a Catholic, that so much of it wouldn’t matter. But it is hard. And I feel so afraid—and lost.”

“We keep you here in our hearts, dear—and you take us with you.” The old words, never tiresome, because always real.

“I know.”

“Is there anything especially bothering you, Cecily?”

“Yes,” said Cecily bravely, “the choice.”

“The choice?”

“You know. Of course I shan’t be a nun, but to marry—or not to marry.”

The nun did not smile. She had been cloistered in the convent many years and, perhaps because she had time to reflect upon them, was wise in the ways of the world. And she knew the reality of even the adolescent struggle.

“Cecily, dear, Father Aloysius called it your choice. It is yours. But only ultimately. Events, happenings which we cannot foresee but which come to us under the guidance of God, affect our choice in most matters. Do you see, dear—you can’t decide that now? You must wait and let events shape themselves—and only pray that your vision may be clear and your heart pure.”

A look of relief came over Cecily’s face. She nodded. But Mother Fénelon still held her hand.

“You are a pretty girl, Cecily,” she went on, “and the world rates prettiness very highly. There are people—there are men—who think it is all that matters—that pleasure is all that matters. Don’t believe them, dear.”

“What matters most—pain?”

“Neither pleasure nor pain.” The old nun transcended her philosophy in a phrase, “Life matters.”

CHAPTER II

THE Convent of the Sacred Heart was a curiously cloistral structure, situated in a manner quite unanticipated by its founders, in the spreading outskirts of the city itself. It was old as age went in Carrington—its wooden turrets and wasteful curves testified to that—and it had been built at a time when no one dreamed that the fields and pastures and wooded stretches which lay around the convent’s site would be filled within thirty years by prosperous looking residences, sleek lawns and neat hedges. But so it was. As the red brick of the convent walls grew tawny brown with age, the city crept up around them and only the great expanse of its own grounds and that five-foot wall remained to keep the peace of the cloister. But the wall was high and the pine trees within it thickly green in both winter and summer, and the convent, growing richer every year as its property increased in value, gave as little recognition as possible to the modernity outside its gates. It had abandoned its huge windmill for modern plumbing, gradually gas had supplanted lamps and electric wiring supplanted gas—but there the obvious changes stopped. The parlor was still the severe old Victorian parlor of its first furnishing, the study hall still had desks with lid tops and the stone flagging of the corridors was hollowed with the footsteps of thirty-five years. Its shabby permanency gave it peace and aristocracy and this atmosphere was breathed by the nuns themselves, for they, like the place, were cloistered. There were those among them who had been in the convent precincts for thirty years—those whose only voyage outside had been the most inconspicuous and hurried progress from one convent to another, when the Order had transferred them. There were those who came from France, where, until the exile of priests and nuns, they had taught the children of the aristocracy in high walled convents like this one; those who had come from England; and those who in the early part of their lives must have been simple American children. But no matter where they had come from, they were bound together by the same experiences and qualities now—tremendous religious devotion, a gentle love of seclusion and a fine, faint flavor of aristocracy of birth and education, for the order was no common order. It demanded a background of breeding and learning in its novices, and indeed a substantial dowry for them. All this because it devoted itself to the bringing up of ladies and could not risk the wrong kind of instruction for them.

The city, in a worldly, not too serious, way, was proud of its convent. It was proud of its cloistral bearing, of its aristocratic refusal to market even the smallest of its lots, as a tightfisted money maker may respect and be fond of some unworldly old lady who refuses to measure the world by his measure of dollars and cents. The esteem in which the convent was held was regardless of creed. Catholic and Protestant alike with pride pointed out the walled domain to visitors—and Catholics and Protestants alike tried to enter their daughters into its limited classes, if they or the daughters had a taste for that sort of education.

But the classes were limited and the work, after all, not college preparatory, so the convent did not compete seriously with the smart High School displaying itself, a quarter of a mile away, in the middle of its well kept lawns and two tennis courts (supported by private subscription). The High School did not consider the convent at all a competitor any more than the convent would have considered itself one. The flavor of the convent was lost in the general breeziness and bustle of the High School. From October until June its halls and classrooms swarmed with life, with restlessness, with innovations in everything from hair dressing to pedagogy. Its daily six hour-periods were jammed with the efforts of teachers and supervisors and the propagandists of some cause or other, and distinguished visitors and class leaders came, too, to impress facts and emotions upon eight hundred boys and girls. From Monday until Friday it seethed with excitement, and on Saturday the basket ball games in the perfectly equipped gymnasium or the crowds cheering the football games in the field at the back, and the parties in the evenings kept the school humming.

One period of the academic year, of course, transcended all others in interest and in holiday excitement. That was the week before Commencement, when the festivities attendant on that event threw the whole building into confusion and anticipation. Commencement week had the evil habit of being preceded by a week of “exams”—a rather nerve-racking time for all the classes, for a great deal of information had to be investigated in the bright and facile young minds under the High School’s control. Study became very real for a week or so, scholarship took on new dignity, and the amazing cleverness of both teachers and students showed through the blur of distractions. In spite of all their other interests, the students seemed to have learned a great deal about very definite subjects and they wrote, for the most part, very creditable examination papers and took due pride in them. Then the week passed and the spirit changed. The academic standard fell by the wayside among the things that counted not. What counted was to be pretty, to be attractive, to be a football hero (or at least on a class team), to be a good dancer, to have had the greatest number of “bids” to the Commencement dance or to the dance the Juniors gave to the Seniors, or to have a part in the class play.

On the night when Mother Fénelon talked to Cecily and soothed her vague nervousness about marriage, the great High School building, half a mile away, was ablaze with light. It was the occasion of occasions in the school social year—the Senior dance. On the wide macadam street automobiles were parked in long lines and through the open windows of the second floor gymnasium an orchestra was playing indefatigably. Young girls in gay taffeta dance frocks, made scrupulously like the fashionable evening dresses of older women, and boys in well brushed and pressed clothes were dancing, and dancing well, with a spirit and abandonment to enjoyment lacking in many an older party. Yet, in the midst of all the color and gayety a few of these adolescents struck a higher note of brilliance than the rest, and the most conspicuous was a girl in a cerise frock. Her dress was cut a little lower than the others, and her hair, bunched low over her ears like most of the rest, managed to make itself individual by being drawn tightly across her pretty forehead, accentuating its whiteness and height. She had one other triumph of individuality. She had a feather fan, as cerise as her gown, and completely out of keeping as it was, it still made her an irresistible picture. The mammoth fan, the short, brilliant little skirt, the restless feet and ankles and great bunches of black hair made her a model for a poster. She seemed fully conscious of her effect and of her overcrowded program of dances, for it was as if her laugh and vivacity led the others by natural right. It was one of her moments of triumph and she never wasted them.

Florence Horton, commonly known as “Fliss,” had gone through High School on sheer strength of wit. She was the only child of rather inconsequent parents whom she ruled completely. They had given her no social position so, in her early teens, she had set about making one for herself. And so far she had done it. “Fliss” went everywhere with the girls of her age who came from wealthy and exclusive families, used their automobiles, dined at their homes, was a favorite with their fathers and mothers, and called their servants and chauffeurs by their first names. She did it by sheer virtue of the color in her which, like the color in the cerise dress, was outrageous, unsuitable and immensely stimulating.

In her academic work she was invariably in difficulties. There was not a teacher who was not perfectly aware that Fliss studied practically not at all. She “bluffed” continually. But her bluff was so skillful and sometimes approximated so closely to real intelligence on the subject involved that it was impossible to drop her altogether. Now and then she failed in an examination, tutored frantically and made the work up again, and here she was, graduating with the rest, though there had been some dubious hours in this last week when it had taken several consultations between the chemistry teacher and his assistant to decide to give her passing credits. She was through with school. College was an impossibility from the standpoint of work, even if she could have afforded to go, and the only thing which might have allured her—a year at some fashionable Hudson River boarding school—was quite out of her range as being even more expensive than college. So Fliss made the best of it and declared that she was glad to be through with books forever, and that she meant for the rest of her life to have a good time.

It appeared that there would be plenty of people to give it to her. She had already managed to get the attention of several young men who were well past the High School age, and, though she danced and coquetted with the younger boys too, she was more interested in those slightly older than herself. Old and young, and brilliant, she was a perfect type of the woman who matures early and ages so imperceptibly that her reign is long.

She was out in the hall now with Gordon Ames and they sat on the top of the oiled stairs in semi-darkness. The music had started but Gordon ignored Fliss’s impatient little toe tapping on the step beneath her.

“I wish I didn’t have to go to college,” he grumbled.

“Why?”

“Because you’ll stay here and flirt with every boy in town.”

“Aren’t you horrid, Gordon Ames!” Fliss pouted with great pleasure.

“You know you will—and then some day somebody’ll marry you and there I’ll be off at college.”

“I might have something to say about that,” said Fliss, “and I haven’t any intention of getting married. I don’t want to marry. I’m going to stay home, and after a while, maybe I’ll do something—or go on the stage.”

“You’d better keep away from that,” said Gordon with much meaning and manly wisdom in his voice.

“I think I’d like it maybe.”

“Yes, you would.” He changed the subject impatiently. “Fliss, will you wear my frat pin?”

Fliss patted her knee with the ostrich fan, and regarded the pin. It was set with pearls in the most extravagant manner that a fraternity pin could be. But she hesitated.

“You know what that always means to everybody—all the girls laugh and talk——”

“That’s what I’d like it to mean—that we’re engaged.”

“Oh, I don’t want to be engaged.”

“I suppose it would have to be awfully indefinite. But it doesn’t have to mean that we’re engaged, just to wear my pin. Lots of girls wear them when they don’t mean a single thing. Please.”

She took the pin from him yieldingly, with a graceful little smile of pleasure and gratitude playing about her mouth. The boy was watching her closely and his face flushed suddenly at her smile.

“And because it’s our last night,” he whispered awkwardly, “you’ll let me kiss you——”

But he did not wait for permission. Most of the boys did not with Fliss. Fliss might not give you the kiss you wanted when you wanted it, but she could be kissed and they knew it. Usually they were silly enough, little giggling kisses, but to-night there was a new quality in Gordon. Fliss felt it and pulled herself away, a little abashed. But most of all Gordon seemed to feel it himself, for he released her and stood up suddenly, flushed and silent.

“I think this is what it is to be in love—really,” he said, soberly.

But she had recovered her gay little self.

“If you act like that another time, I’ll stop speaking to you, Gordon,” she said, “and I’m going down to dance.”

They went down into the crowded hall, but the boy did not dance again. Going home later, he crowded into the back of a big touring car with Fliss and three other couples of boys and girls, all excited and laughing, sitting on each other’s laps and indulging in foolish little caresses and rebuffs. He did not touch Fliss.

And Fliss, still later, sat on the edge of the bed in the room of a friend where she was spending the night. It was a rather luxurious room and the two girls made a lovely picture against its background. They discussed the dance and the boys.

“Oh, they are just boys,” said Fliss, somewhat slightingly. “You’ll see a different type in the men who come to college dances, I suppose. Real men.”

“I wish you were coming to college, Fliss.”

“Too much work.”

“But if you stay on here you’ll probably just marry——”

Fliss grew suddenly angry. “That’s the second time I’ve been told that to-night and it is perfectly absurd. Why should I marry just because I don’t go to college?”

Her friend ruminated a little. She was a pretty girl herself and a thoughtful one.

“I thought you might like to,” she answered simply. “And when there’s nothing much else to do, the girls all seem to——”

“Because they are stupid,” flashed Fliss, “of course they do. Like Dorothy Maynard. And then they have babies and get fat and stop dancing and don’t care about anything except babies and food. If I get married I won’t do that sort of thing anyhow. I won’t get married unless I’m sure I won’t have to. Anyway who could I marry?”

“You’d probably find some one.” The other girl slipped into her bed. “My feet are tired,” she added, “but I wish I could dance to that orchestra forever.”

Fliss did not answer. She sat, watching her image in the pier glass opposite her. It was a strangely young image for one possessed of such crowding thoughts.

CHAPTER III

CECILY’S mother had been married twice. That was as it should be, for she had not managed to get much happiness out of her first marriage. Allgate Moore, Cecily’s father, had been handsome and brilliant and well placed socially and his young wife, so very charming, so very much in love, had surely expected—must have expected—that all the good things of the world were to be laid at her feet. The wedding had been staged with considerable ceremony, as a picture of Mrs. Moore in the midst of banks of stiff white bridal satin still showed. But the aftermath had been less brilliant. The future prophesied for Allgate Moore had not come to pass and instead a great deal of dissipation and debt as well as a cherubic but upsetting Cecily had come to crowd young Mrs. Moore’s life.

It was fortunate, people soon said, that nothing seemed to disturb or harass Mrs. Moore greatly. She had an air of moving among her own troubles as if they concerned some one else to whom she was lending every aid and sympathy. And there was no trace of hysteria to be seen by the casual observer even when her young husband died of pneumonia three years after they were married and left her nothing but a somewhat soiled memory and some badly tangled financial affairs.

The debts were settled as scrupulously as they could be and there were several relatives and friends who opened their doors to Mrs. Moore with a real sincerity in their wish that she would make her home with them. But that, it seemed, was impossible to her. With her baby Cecily, she did a little visiting in various cities at first, but, wearying of that, took a small apartment in Carrington and managed somehow to pay her rent, satisfy her dressmaker, and tide over the three years during which she was rejecting proposals of marriage. She probably had more than the usual pretty widow because she had seemed to come so unscathed through the business of marriage once. To look at her cool, unlined face and watch the graceful slimness of her movements was to doubt that harassing affair of Allgate Moore entirely. But it must to some extent have made Mrs. Moore afraid, for she refused several offers of homes and fortunes which almost any woman might have felt too valuable to lose. Or perhaps she was more tired than any one knew or than she confessed even to herself. When she did decide to marry again she chose as complete a contrast to her first husband as could have been found. Allgate Moore had been the handsomest man of his group. Tall, dark, magnetic, he could ride, dance, or convince a stupid woman that the plans he had made for building her a mansion were perfection, with equal ease. He had flashes of brilliance in his work as an architect, but with his brilliance went an unscrupulousness, a readiness to cheapen himself by passing off inferior work, which had kept him from going very far. The man his widow chose as his successor was so deliberate a contrast to him as to be almost a repudiation of his memory unless it showed simply the versatility of her affection. She married Leslie Warner, a successful business man of forty who had distinguished himself by indefatigable work and unerring business judgment. He had in addition a keen sense of humor, a real kindliness of spirit and of manner, and a leaning towards fine solidity in his possessions. Why he married Mrs. Moore after forty years of bachelorhood was a puzzle to many people, but his emotions were as inscrutable as hers and certainly gave the public a chance for nothing more than conjecture. They built a spacious imitation Colonial house shortly after they were married and Mrs. Warner furnished its large halls and sunny rooms with quiet luxury, utterly disregarding the bizarre colorings and furnishings which had characterized her first home. Subsequently the Warners had two children, both boys.

Cecily admired her mother more than she found it easy to say and was as fond of her stepfather as he deserved. But perhaps, because she had come ready-made into the big white Colonial house, or perhaps because that curious characteristic aloofness had descended to her from her mother, there was something more than the difference in Cecily’s surname to remind people that she was the child of Mrs. Warner’s first marriage. She was four years old when her mother married Leslie Warner. When she was ten her mother, at a loss for proper schooling for her, dissatisfied with a succession of inefficient governesses and unwilling to let Cecily go to public school, had decided to try the Convent of the Sacred Heart. There were no Catholics in the family, but it was apparent to Mrs. Warner that these well-bred nuns would make no effort to proselytize her daughter and with confidence she intrusted Cecily to them as a boarding pupil, that being the only way they would take students. And so it was the convent rather than her home which had made the deepest impress on Cecily during the years of her adolescence. To be sure, she had come home for vacations, but the sense of permanency had always been connected with her life in the convent—with the going back to the quiet halls and definite routine rather than with the vacationing which had so kindly but so deliberately been made pleasant for her. She wondered what she was going to do with all her time at home. Perhaps her mother had been wondering too, for after the few first days of Cecily’s return, she came into the girl’s room one night and somewhat uncertainly seemed to settle herself for a talk. Mrs. Warner was still a very lovely woman, not quite forty, and Cecily looked at her with the irrepressible admiration she always felt.

“I wish you’d show me how to do my hair like yours, so that I’d know always which way it was going to wave,” said the girl.

Mrs. Warner smiled. “It’s much prettier to see yours as it is,” she answered. “Cecily, I’ve been thinking about you a good deal. Now that you are through school we must arrange things so that you will be happy. Later on we may travel, but this year your father is tied down in Carrington for most of the year, so I can’t see much ahead except a few weeks in New York with me this fall, a month in the South in the spring and after we get back from New York I thought I had better give a rather large party for you so you could meet people and become an orthodox débutante. Would you like that?”

Cecily looked a little perturbed, but what fear there was seemed to be overlaid with delight.

“I think I’d like it,” she said, “but, mother—you know I don’t dance very well—or know a thing about society.”

“The dancing we shall arrange and the other is no drawback.”

Cecily’s mother came over to lay her slim white hands on her daughter’s shoulders. “Were you happy in the convent?”

“So happy.”

“I want you to be happy outside of it, too. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be. And I want you to be rather close to me until you marry, Cecily. I want you to marry the right sort of man, one who will care for you and protect you.”

“I’ve been thinking about marrying,” said Cecily ingenuously.

Her mother looked at her aghast. “Marrying whom?”

“Oh, just marrying.”

“You mustn’t think about it at all, dear. I want you to marry some time. But put it out of your mind until the time comes. Just be happy and then, when the time comes when you want to choose a man, let me know him a little first.”

“Of course,” Cecily became judicious, “I may never marry at all.”

Mrs. Warner smiled and closed the conversation rather rapidly.

“We can let that rest, dear.”

She lingered to look over Cecily’s wardrobe, criticizing with severity the frocks which Cecily put before her. Heretofore there always had been three new black Peter Thompson suits, a blue mohair and a white net dress each year. Now it seemed all the standards were to be changed. Even Cecily’s loved blue sweater was cast into the discard. She was to have new things, an appalling amount.

She lay wide awake, too happy to sleep, while her mother went into the library and sat down before her husband with a gesture of mock despair.

“Cecily frightens me to death,” she declared. “Here she is, all grown-up and absolutely terrifying. She is full of a kind of wiseness which I suppose reflects the nuns. Imagine, she has just been talking about marriage. Said she had been thinking about it.”

Mr. Warner reflected her own dismay and question. “But where did she meet any men?”

“That’s just it—she hasn’t. She thinks about marriage in general. I didn’t encourage the subject. Imagine, at eighteen, coolly contemplating it without a giggle.”

“Cecily doesn’t giggle much. I wonder if she has a sense of humor.”

“She doesn’t giggle at all. But I think she has humor. She’s not stupid. She’s puzzling.”

Mr. Warner smiled in a kind, wise fashion of his own. It was interesting to hear his wife reflect on herself as exemplified in her daughter—and funny—and pathetic.

“You were puzzling too, my dear—you are puzzling.”

She did not share his smile.

“She is like me—and I won’t be able to get close to her because she is. I tell you that she frightens me, Leslie. If I thought she had to go through some things——”

“She won’t, my dear. We’ll take jolly good care of that. She shall be cared for.”

He rose a little heavily. “What we shall have to do now is to knock some of the sanctity out and replace it with gayety. I think I’ll teach her to smoke and play poker.”

So Cecily’s secular education began; with her stepfather’s wonderful and surprising gift of a saddlehorse which she must learn to ride at once to please him; with her mother’s new and fascinating interest in her clothes and her own awakening interest in them too; with dancing lessons which made her quickly forget the two-step and Virginia reel of the convent; with a new kind of world to watch and explore and adjust to. She startled herself. In her mirror she saw not the girl in black sailor suits, to whom she was accustomed, but a new figure, a slim, lovely, dark haired girl, with wondering eyes and glowing cheeks, to whom every new frock seemed the most becoming. She was not alone in being startled. Her mother had much the same sensation, having not realized Cecily’s possibilities until recently. She seemed very proud to take her daughter about with her. So Cecily was initiated into a new routine. Instead of rising in the chilly dormitory and hurrying down to a breakfast of oatmeal porridge, toast and milk and then to an early class in French, she still rose early, but to go horseback riding with her stepfather and come back to a sunny breakfast-room where, over shining silver dishes and a great bowl of fruit, she and her mother planned the course of the day. Perhaps they would shop in the morning or sometimes attend some morning lecture which was attracting attention from society and lunch with friends at a city tearoom or go to a more formal luncheon to be followed by a matinée. This in place of lessons or basketball in the convent garden or chapel attendance. It was not a riotously gay life to which Mrs. Warner introduced her daughter. She had far too good taste for that. It was wholesome and the hours were as pleasantly regular as they had been in the convent. Cecily felt it the gayest of existences and it was not until much later that she discovered from how much cheapness and excitement her mother had shielded her at first, or how carefully chosen her pleasures had been. But Mrs. Warner saw to it that the city became conscious of Cecily as a new star on the social horizon, and that she was kept remote only added to her prestige.

CHAPTER IV

THERE was a well-bred society in Carrington—new perhaps in the sense that Carrington itself was young, but though the aggregate society might be new, most of its members were not novices in the enjoyment of beautiful things or in the traditions of manners. They came from a great many places in the United States, settling in Carrington for the “business reasons” of their sons or husbands or sons-in-law, and they went back whence they had come, on visits, establishing valuable rapports between the cities of their genesis and the one of their habitation. The women went to New York to shop, if their incomes were large enough, and, also, Carrington had its spring colony in California and its winter colony in Florida. All these interchanges were useful. They made of the mid-western city a place less provincial and less conglomerate. Carrington could indeed bear its social head with more pride and real distinction than many a larger place, overrun by parvenus. Bluffing was difficult. A newcomer always found persons who knew people of consequence in his former city, persons from his college who would easily place him. Yet, for all that, where bluffing was not involved to the point of being obnoxious, Carrington was tolerant and allowed the newcomer every chance to make good; was not too cruel in its comments, too exacting as to previous records. It had the laxities of the great world and many of the fine distinctions of the smaller worlds which revolve around the life of old cities. On the whole, a gracious place—the kind of place that Europeans too rarely credit to the United States.

Cecily was high enough on the social ladder to be unconscious of any rungs to climb. And it had never been suggested at the Convent of the Sacred Heart that it was a modern and edifying pursuit to watch people swarming up from the ground and struggling to maintain a foothold on that ladder. So it never occurred to her that it meant a great deal to Fliss Horton to meet her, or that Fliss marked the day that she did meet her as a red-letter one of social success.

Cecily had been singing at a musicale at the home of one of her mother’s friends. She had sung two short songs in French and she had been both worried and diffident about her performance. Still she did it admirably and looked delightful, dressed in a soft silk velvet dress of black, with only a silver cord to set off the exquisite lines of the frock and of her slenderness. Fliss had been invited to the musicale. Invitations came with reasonable ease to these semi-charitable affairs and they could be made extremely useful. She listened to Cecily singing, but her heart was in her eyes instead of her ears, watching Cecily’s clothes and undoubtedly shrewdly guessing at their cost, for Fliss shopped much with her lips in places where she could not at all afford to buy. Later she met Cecily and told her how much she had enjoyed the singing. Cecily actually blushed with pleasure.

“I was frightfully nervous,” she said. “It was the first time I had ever sung anything in French without going over it with one of the French nuns, you see. You imagine you are sure of your French until you have to do something like that, absolutely on your own. Then you get so scared for fear some one who really knows French will be listening.”

“I don’t know much about it, but it certainly sounded beautiful and you didn’t seem the least bit frightened.”

Cecily smiled her thanks again and they moved off together, talking. There were more older than younger people at the musicale and Fliss was quick to seize on the other girl’s temporary lack of companionship. She herself was looking very pretty—less overdressed than usual—and though any of the older women might have criticized the high tan kid shoes and the tight, short tan suit-dress, Cecily only admired its effect and found herself interested in the new girl, who, it appeared, lived in town, not far from her own house, who was the friend of other girls she knew—as Fliss skillfully brought out—and who had an air of piquancy about her that was very interesting and even charming. What Fliss thought about did not matter. She was working hard to make an impression, to be remembered if an occasion should arise on which she would want Cecily to remember her. And there was a certain effectiveness in the conversation between herself and the beautifully dressed convent girl, of which Fliss was far too clever an artist to be unconscious. Cecily might make her suffer in a way by the contrast—but it would always be “in a way.”

It was late afternoon and a few men came in, most of them calling for their wives by previous arrangement, with two or three who recognized the occasion as a social one or had been called upon especially to come with their checkbooks and charitable consciences. Bachelors came, too—past the age of fearing such feminine social affairs, most of them—and then one who came unexpectedly, for no expressed reason. The older ladies beamed at the sight of him; the dark eyes of Fliss took on a more excited radiance; and the slow color crept up into Cecily’s cheeks as a tall figure singled itself out from the rest and Dick Harrison made his way—his popular, friendly way—across the room to her. He was good looking. Every one admitted that his brown hair, which would curl even at thirty, and his athletic figure were in his favor. But Cecily was beginning to see more than that. She had been meeting him for a month now at one place and at another—dances, dinners, theater parties. Dick was always an addition to any party, always desirable—she had quickly discovered that people thought that. Partly it was because he was wealthy and handsome; and because Carrington and Carrington’s affairs were closely identified with all his interests; he was truly a favorite son. No mother frowned upon any attentions he paid her daughter unless she felt they were over-slight, and few daughters were altogether indifferent. Dick was excused for dalliance with years of freedom, because as a bachelor he was so desirable.

As for Dick himself, he had a good time and believed in his business, which had to do with promotion of mining interests and the development of the city, and had fairly tolerant political views, and lived with his worldly-minded mother in a thoroughly pleasant house which seemed to him far pleasanter than any of the apartments of most of his married contemporaries. He had no desire to get married at all. That is, he had had no desire until he met Cecily. He met her one night at her mother’s house, and after that he sat back and let all the conventional things happen to him, enjoying each one of them extremely. He thought about her continually; he arrayed a new ideal of woman with all of her attributes; he freshened up all the old phrases about purity and love—about men not being fit for decent women. He could not keep his mind off possible scenes in which he and she participated alone and he blushed hotly and secretly at them—and recurred to them. He wanted to do all the things that men have ever done to win women, and to enjoy his winning of her.

So he had seen Cecily even oftener than she guessed and he had aroused a little whirlpool of comment around himself and her which he rather gloried in. In the eyes of the city there was no possible objection to any love-making which he might see fit to carry on, except a possible reservation that a girl of nineteen was very young for marriage. But with these two young people there was so much to make marriage easy that it was hard to make an objection out of youth, especially when Dick’s ten extra years were added to Cecily’s youth. Dick’s mother was highly in favor of seeing her son married. Even Cecily’s mother——.

Cecily’s mother said very little. She put Dick next to herself at dinner whenever he came to the house and talked to him about all kinds of subjects, always making him talk a little more than she herself. She did not mention him to Cecily except incidentally and not at all as a subject for discussion. Now, as she saw him cross the room to her daughter, she crossed too, most casually. That to the mixed glory and discomfiture of poor Fliss.

Mrs. Warner smiled at Dick and the two girls and it became obvious that she did not know who Fliss was. If Fliss had been of the slightest consequence, Mrs. Warner would have known. As it was, she acknowledged her introduction with great graciousness.

“Have you, like Cecily, just finished school? Where have you been studying?”

It hurt Fliss to admit that sum total of High School, but she was far too wise not to be frank.

“I’ve just finished High School,” she answered. “There was no use sending me anywhere else. I wasn’t nearly clever enough.”

“She’s the infant prodigy when it comes to dancing, though,” said Dick lightly.

After all, it was a great moment for Fliss. She was part of an intimate group which was peerless socially—Cecily Warner, Mrs. Warner, Dick Harrison—and then the moment passed. With what was almost a gesture of dismissal, Mrs. Warner withdrew her daughter.

“We must hurry, dear. There are to be guests for dinner. Are you riding with me or walking? Did you get any exercise to-day?”

Dick cut in lightly, taking Cecily’s arm, “She hasn’t had any exercise, I’m sure. Let me walk her home, Mrs. Warner. And I’ll get her home in lots of time because I have to speed on and get dressed myself if I’m to get any of your dinner to-night.”

Fliss slipped out of the group a little awkwardly and, moving past the indifferent hand of her hostess, found herself in the street. The motors for the guests were gliding skillfully up and down before the house. Here and there, a group before the open door of a limousine were still gossiping, or three or four people turning away for a brisk walk home. The little tan figure, drawing a modish, unpaid-for fur about her trim little neck, stood for a moment on the steps, seeming to look on at the spectacle of her own social inconsequence. Then she too slipped into the shadows and on towards her own home.

A year ago she had prevailed upon her parents to take an apartment, for the old, brown-porched house in which she had been brought up had been almost intolerably shabby. It had seemed a very fine change to Fliss at first. She liked the nouveau art touches in the apartment living-room, the frescoed grapes in the dining-room, the mirrored door of the small, inconvenient bathroom. But the glamour had largely gone by this time. And to-night it was rather more faded than usual. To drive up to the apartment house door in some one’s limousine was not so bad. To walk down the stupid street by which she must approach the house was different. It was depressing. Fliss, who seldom knew depression, had the visible lines of it around her mouth as she pushed open the door of the tiny hall and smelled the frying grease of the lamb chops in the kitchen. She stood before the hall mirror, taking off her hat and putting it away carefully, hanging her suit coat up carefully too, with the fur draped over it. Her mother came in to watch her.

“Did you have a good time, dearie?”

“As good as I expected.” The girl’s tone was rather pathetically tired.

“Any one bring you home?”

“No, I walked—for exercise.”

Her mother heard no sarcasm. “It’s a nice night out,” she said. “I just came in myself. I went to the White Sale at Barney’s and then dropped in at the Majestic—Dorothy Danby in ‘Other Men’s Wives,’ you know. It wasn’t very good—not worth a quarter.”

Fliss must have had a swift vision of the women who did not go to see Dorothy Danby—of Mrs. Warner dealing at long range with her dinner parties. Her face was dark and bitter.

“I hate this not being anybody—why aren’t we somebody?” she broke out.

Her mother looked daunted. “I’m sure you go everywhere you want to—going to stay at the Spragues’ to-morrow night, out all this afternoon, and there’s that swell dance at the Mortons’ next week—I think you have a good time. It’s not my fault your father hasn’t more money.”

“It’s nobody’s fault—nothing is. But that doesn’t make it easier. A girl can’t do it all alone—she needs houses, automobiles, if she is to get anywhere.” She stopped and looked at the stupid figure in front of her, which could not seem to understand its own failure as a mother. “It’s just that I’m tired and I think I’m getting a cold and it’s so darn lonesome with all the girls away. That musicale was the deadest thing you ever saw.”

She went to the kitchen and watched the chops sizzling, drearily, but none the less with a certain interest. After all, the walk home had been exercise.

CHAPTER V

BUT it seemed rather unimportant, except to three rather frowzy, struggling persons, what was happening to Fliss. The important thing was what was happening to Cecily—what did happen during those next three marvelous months of her life. However much Dick might have been willing to drift along through a prolonged love-making and slow courtship, however much Cecily’s parents might have wished for such developments, it was soon obvious that they were impossible. The young freshness, the rarity, of Cecily attracted other men. There was one, one desperately in earnest older man, who even spoke to Cecily of marriage and drove her, white and trembling, to her mother. After that, a new diffidence, a new hesitation in her manner towards Dick puzzled him and stimulated him.

“I see nothing to do except let Dick Harrison try,” said Mrs. Warner rather sadly to her husband. “I don’t want any of the rest of them to take the bloom off Cecily with a lot of coarse, commonplace love-making. She’s too young, but she’s also too attractive. And it will come to Dick sooner or later, if she cares anything at all about him. I feel curiously helpless.”

“Dick fills the bill pretty well, after all, doesn’t he? He has a good record, a clean bill of health, and they would live here in town so that you could keep an eye on her.”

Dick found things made easy for him—opportunity easy, that is. His love-making was no easier for him than a man’s serious love-making ever is. He felt it was a time which harrowed his very soul, a time when a new character and a new psychology seemed to grow up in him, decrying everything he had ever done in his life—a time of strange humilities and reverences, soaring plans and queer discouragements. But the night came when he did ask Cecily to marry him and at the fright in her eyes regained his own courage.

Cecily did not answer him at once. He had laid his hope before her with a simplicity that surprised himself, for he had been full of fine phrases the day before. And then, when the moment came, he could only hold out his arms in helpless appeal and plead, “If you’ll marry me, Cecily, I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to make and keep you happy. I will—truly.”

Cecily only looked at him, drawing away a little from his eagerness. A moment before she had been all gayety. But the very word “marry” stirred depths in her which were frightening. And again she was in the convent, listening to the Jesuit priest, hearing him tell them of the choices before women. She was afraid and allured—and stirred. Those same choices pressing upon her—Dick no longer just a companion, just fun to be with, but Dick wanting to marry her! It was enough to make her spirit draw back as it did. Dick could get no answer. And he had grace enough not to press for one. But Cecily’s mother, seeing what had happened in the new awkwardness between Dick and her daughter, knew that the time for interference had come. She found Cecily sitting in her room, looking into space, much as Mother Fénelon had found her on the last day of the retreat. Cecily took her mother’s hand as she sat down beside her and held it, and the simple gesture affected Mrs. Warner greatly.

“Trouble, Cecily?”

“Dicks wants me to marry him,” said Cecily, without classifying.

“Dick loves you,” her mother answered.

“But—marrying—ought I to get married, mother?”

“Surely not unless you want to.”

“I don’t—not want to. And he—Dick makes it seem possible. But I don’t know anything about it, mother. I wouldn’t know how to be married.”

There were tears in her mother’s eyes now.

“A little of marriage I can tell you about, Cecily dear—but the rest you learn from your husband—the rest you and he learn together. And that’s why it’s hard to help you now, dear. If Dick is the person you want to learn with, you should marry him. But I can’t tell whether he is or not. If he isn’t, he mustn’t be your husband. As far as an outsider can tell—yes, even I must be an outsider here—he would be a good husband for you. But unless you want him, unless you want him badly, there’s no good in it.”

The reserved, the aloof Mrs. Warner had broken some barrier to talk like that. She seemed to feel the unaccustomed mood and changed quickly—again Cecily’s quiet, controlled mother.

“Go to bed now, Cecily,” she finished. “When you see more of Dick you can tell better. And I won’t let him hurry or worry you. And I want you to have a good rest.”

They all made it as easy as possible for Cecily. As easy as possible. Dick did not harass her. Her mother would have prevented that even if he had had the inclination. Mr. and Mrs. Warner took her away for a few weeks to New York, and, if she thought of the decision before her, she did it without their pressing it upon her. As a matter of fact she did think about it constantly. She found she missed Dick and in her deft, direct, mental way knew that meant a great deal. Then there was a memory which clung to her consciousness and would not be detached. It was the memory of Dick’s embrace the night he had asked her to marry him. It was a unique memory. When she thought about it it was not like recalling a single happening. It was like looking backward and forward over the whole of her life—as if all life had been leading up to this, as if all life would point back to it. But still the indefinable fear, the indefinable threat of the priest who had seemed to be deliberately making marriage hard, persisted. She thought a great deal in the gaps between shopping and theater-going in New York.

They came back to Carrington after three weeks and Dick came to see her at once. He looked a trifle thinner—a trifle more eager even—and he was obviously impatient of the presence of others. When he and Cecily were finally alone, a throbbing silence settled over them. Then Dick put out his hands and took hers.

“Have you thought about me at all, Cecily?”

“Almost all the time I thought.”

“And—you—how do you feel about it now? Not afraid any longer? Ready to trust me—to let me love you, Cecily—Cecily?”

She lifted her eyes to his and let him decide.

After that it became much different and nearly all joy. Suddenly all the ominousness, the queerness, the vague fears disappeared. It was partly knowing Dick so much better, of course; partly becoming used to the gay, adoring laugh he had for her and more than that, to the touch of his arms and the rapture in his voice when he and she were alone and he could make love to her; it was partly meeting the approbation of every one, seeing in the eyes of girls and of women that they thought she had something which they would like to have, and partly the gay excitement of plans and arrangements. Dick was impatient now. He wanted to be married at the first possible moment; he had all sorts of contradictory plans and suggestions for a home and he was full of enthusiasm which would scarcely bear restraining. But Cecily’s marriage would, under her mother’s guidance, have neither haste nor incongruity. There was Cecily’s wardrobe, Cecily’s house and the marriage itself to be attended to in due course. Dick might plan, but he had no deciding voice in any of these matters.

The marriage was to take place in the early summer, and then, too, the house would be ready for occupancy. The house itself was the gift of the Warners. It was not new and it was not at all the sort of place which most brides began with, for it was large and had much more space inside and out than the usual bridal apartment. Its red brick walks surrounded the long, gray shingled house and garage neatly, and there were flowers and shrubs and trees. When Cecily first saw the house, new sensations woke in her. She turned to Dick with a strange sense of proprietorship for the first time. It was as if suddenly she saw a responsibility of her own in marriage. Thereafter came interviews with decorators and painters and upholsterers and visits to furnishers’ shops. Happiest of all was Mrs. Warner. Cecily’s house was to be a radiant place, full of sunshine and happy color. Cecily’s bridal wardrobe was to be exquisite and simple and beautiful. Cecily’s wedding——

Cecily’s wedding fell upon one beautiful day in June. The sun had been shining all day so that the evening was permeated with a softness and clearness that seemed left over from the radiance of the day. In the church great banks of green set off the tall candles, burning with flames that went straight up, and faintly fragrant, yellow pink roses filled the niches in the walls. It was one of those esthetically religious weddings in which the religion depends largely on the success of the esthetic effect. Cecily visualized the place as a chapel and wished that she could have heard the cloistered nuns singing as she approached. But the wish was vague. The plans were very completely made and she must carry them out to the satisfaction of herself and everybody. Then, as she went down the aisle she saw Dick—strange, familiar, Dick crowding out every one else. She realized suddenly that she and Dick were responsible for the future; she remembered that she was going away with Dick to-night, and she had two immense, sudden desires in conflict—one to run out of the church and hide herself where she would never be found and one to get close to Dick for comfort. But her mind was telling her how to act. She was going down the aisle, catching a fleeting glimpse of her new mother-in-law, standing beside her stepfather, repeating words which she had memorized, hearing Dick repeat them too, though he sounded strangely far off. She was going out of the church now and forgetting to look up and smile as she had said she was going to. Almost at the back of the church she remembered. She looked up and her eyes met the curious, envying eyes of Fliss. Cecily smiled. She had asked her mother to ask Fliss to the wedding for she had seen her a few times after the musicale and always been interested. She smiled and passed on. Fliss drew a long breath and turned to the man beside her.

“Beautiful, wasn’t she? And she has everything in the world—everything ahead of her!”

Everything ahead of her. So Cecily felt in the dim confusion of the Pullman. Curtains swung from the berths already occupied when she and Dick finally boarded their train. The electric lights seemed strangely dull after the brightness of the house she had left. She was alone in their drawing-room waiting for the porter to bring in their bags. Their bags—Dick’s too, of course. She wished he would come—would stay away—would come.

He came in marshaling a smiling, well-tipped porter. Then the porter was gone again and her husband, with a strangely timorous look on his face, was standing by her. He lifted her hand to his lips and then, as their eyes met wonderingly, dropped to his knees with his curly head in her lap.

CHAPTER VI

EVEN the unhappy, disillusioned man or woman who looks back at a wrecked marriage with cynicism or disgust or who does not look back at all because it is too painful, will, none the less, carry about with him until the end of his life a few poignant memories which never lose their power to thrill him anew, though desire to relieve them may be gone or the companion of his memories have become ludicrous. It is the fat dowager still able to blush at her daughter’s teasing inquiry about the time father asked her to marry him, it is the faded, washed-out woman who sobs in the movies as the heroine tells the hero that she is going to have a child and they fade out in an embrace, it is the old gentleman who grows sentimental over a popular song, who bear this out. Troubles, bitternesses, grief—temporary drama, mock drama they may be—but the drama of undying poetry is in love and not in disillusion or hate.

The hesitation of the first steps of marriage, the explanation of love, the abandonment, the amazing tendernesses, the secret rivalry in affection for each other—those are the moments of greatest dramatic intensity. Stories give us, as is natural for them, perhaps, the odd cases—the ill-matched couples—but for the great number of people who follow nature and are led by her there never comes again greater poignancy in life than steeps the wedding night and the hour of the birth of their children. More excitement, more pleasure, more joy at other times perhaps—but it is then that human life sounds its depths. It is the memory of such times which may account, more than the pressure of society or the weight of habit, for the strange fidelities of men to unworthy women and of women to unworthy men.

Cecily stored her memory with very beautiful things during the first days of marriage. There were times when she walked in an exalted dream. She had become immensely conscious of herself. It seemed to her that she could not walk unnoticed on the street—the glory of her happiness must show to other people. Fear, the strange fears in her contemplation of her marriage, the nervous fears during the ceremony had been blown away in a very wind of happiness. She had no care, no thought except Dick and their amazing joy in each other. They had gone to New York and then, after a few days, motored up the Hudson, keeping to the State road only as the fancy took them and wandering off for half days along country by-ways, leading through valleys of farms and steep little towns set on hills. Through the long evenings of slow twilight they drove by the river, and when it was dark there was some hotel or road house transformed by the magic of the journey into a hospitable inn for wayfarers. And night came and they were in strange rooms but always with the new warmth of intimacy contrasting with the strangeness of the setting and making them closer together. So on through a golden month—a month which held moments of sacredness, of steady joy, of sheer laughter.

Dick was making himself real to Cecily and enjoying her as he had never enjoyed anything before. There was not so much glamour for him as for her, partly because he was a man and partly because the world kept its proportions for Dick almost always. As a lover and a suitor he had done exactly what a lover and suitor should do—tortured himself with feelings of unworthiness and with doubts and lain awake with his hopes. As a husband, his feelings changed. He was no longer doubtful, no longer bothered about unworthiness. He was Cecily’s husband and radiantly, boyishly satisfied. Marriage was accomplished in his life and it was all that was delightful. And Cecily was the most beautiful and charming of women. His feeling was partly inspired directly by his wife; also it went with the code of men in marriage. There was room in his mind for other things, too—for business plans, for politics.

Cecily had no code. To her all that had happened had happened to her first and singly, of all women in the world. She could not conceive of grouping her experiences or sharing them with all women. Nor did she have thoughts which did not concern Dick. He had suffused her mind. She was very innocent and her husband, entering her mind and heart, had taken complete possession. She thought through him, and it never occurred to her that she was subordinating herself. She wanted to share everything in the world with him and to identify herself with him. Into her first month of marriage she brought exactly the elements to make it perfect and if she failed to establish exactly the proper basis for a modern marriage she built for herself and her husband a perfect memory and dropped an anchor thereby.

Dick had glimpses of insight. “I wonder if you are really very innocent or very wise,” he said laughingly to her. “Sometimes I guess one and sometimes the other. You avoid disagreeable things so—so exquisitely. Most women are so controversial nowadays.”

“I’ve nothing to be controversial about. Besides I don’t like controversies.”

“Wonderful woman!” admired Dick.

He enjoyed making Cecily presents, took delight in the almost childish pleasure she showed over his thoughtfulness and over new possessions. And he liked to see people admire her, as people invariably did.

They had planned on a month of vacation and then were to join Cecily’s mother and stepfather in New York for a few days before going home. Cecily’s mother awaited that meeting with some anxiety. In the days before the wedding she had kept close to Cecily, a little shyly, as if she wished to compress into those days a closer companionship than they had ever had before. But it was too late, perhaps, to create a feeling that grows naturally with years. They admired each other immensely, but they were not intimate.

Mrs. Warner’s manner, with its unaccustomed trace of nervousness as she stood with her husband before the gates of the train yards, was not reflected in him. He was the first to catch a glimpse of Dick and Cecily and chuckled.

“There they are”—he waved boisterously—“and they don’t see us; they aren’t even looking at us. Like to know what we came for to break in on that—if we could break in!”

They came along the platform, absorbed in something they were discussing, and with one glance at Cecily Mrs. Warner’s face lost its anxiety. Cecily walked regardless of the world. Dick must have been very good to her and very gentle to make her look like that. Then the young people saw the elder ones and hurried to them.

There was something fairly humorous in Cecily’s new sophistication. She felt much older, much more learned, thoroughly admitted to the class of married women. Even her mother smiled. And her stepfather teased her.

“She swaggers when she gives her name,” she said. “Did you hear her tell the clerk that the order was for Mrs. Richard Harrison? He grew pale at the august name. You mustn’t be such a snob, Cecily. Almost anybody can get married.”

“Not to Dick,” said Cecely, unperturbed.

“No—not without some penalty as things stand now,” admitted Mr. Warner.

Such swaggers—Dick sported his complacencies too—amused the Warners and delighted them. Dick had a proprietary way of deciding when Cecily was tired and the note in his voice as he said “my wife” reflected the superiority of Cecily’s “Mrs. Harrison.” The older people showed their pleasure in all this by spending a great deal of money and being willing to postpone their Atlantic City trip still further. But Cecily demurred. She wanted to get back to Carrington now to take the final step that might prove to be the happiest—to begin her home.

When by night they reached Carrington she felt she was right. No one met them, for they had told no one of their coming and Dick put his wife into a taxi and gave the magic address of their home. It was ready for them, they knew, and Mrs. Warner had already installed a servant to keep it open and comfortable.

Dick threw open the door and drew his wife inside. To him it was a glorious adventure, but Cecily’s face reflected more than adventure. She was very grave. Instinctively she felt that her part of things was beginning. Until now it had been Dick’s game—Dick was responsible for what they did and she had been happily content to leave things in his hand—but now her share in the responsibility of marriage began.

“You look so solemn,” said Dick. “It’s a house, not a church, you know.”

“It feels like a church. I never felt so subdued—and holy—in any church before.”

“Why, Cecily, dear!” Dick did not let her maintain that tone. She was tired and he was afraid she was a little overstrained. He made her laugh, led her on a triumphal tour of the house, gave a graphic description of himself caring for a furnace. She met his gayety with gayety, but underneath the gayety persisted that feeling of responsibility and—holiness. It was like a church, her mind kept persisting.

With the next morning came a bustle that drove those thoughts away. Cecily assumed command of her household and Dick went to his office. The telephone began to ring persistently. The maid appealed to Cecily for decisions about food and the housekeeping machinery. Cecily went about using all her new dignity to its best advantage, and repeating to herself under her breath, “This is mine—my home,” with unfading wonder that it was so. She would pause to look about her in admiration, justified admiration, for the sunlight pouring into the big simple living-room, gleaming on the brasses before the fireplace, bringing out the dull colors of the upholstery, made it a very charming room. The living-room and her bedroom were the rooms she liked best, for they both caught the sunlight more than any other rooms in the house, and her bedroom was peaceful as well as beautiful, most of its color concentrated in the Chinese rug which covered the floor and set off the ivory colored furniture and walls. It was all spacious and exquisitely clean and orderly. Housekeeping instincts crowded to the front of Cecily’s consciousness.

She lunched alone that day, for she and Dick had decided, Dick guiding, that it was better for him not to attempt to come home for lunch and lose two hours in the middle of the day. Cecily had agreed with him, but lunching alone, as she tried it, seemed to her a waste of time. And the hours hanging a little heavy on her hands after that first lonely luncheon, she took out the little coupé which had been her stepfather’s wedding gift to her and manufactured a shopping list.

In one of the shops she met Fliss Horton. Fliss was standing in an attitude of reflection before the blouse counter, pretending to the clerk that she was unable to decide which blouse to choose and actually wondering desperately if her father’s account was too large and too long unpaid to justify the purchase of a twenty dollar blouse, reduced from forty. She was idly speculating on the practical use of the blouse and the possible occasions for wearing it when Cecily stopped beside her.

“I thought,” said Fliss, “that brides didn’t need to buy clothes for years and years, especially brides who have just come from New York.”

“They wouldn’t have to if their trousseaux were a little more practical. I have any number of afternoon clothes and pictorial blouses and traveling things with long sleeves. What I need above all and haven’t is a short-sleeved smock to work in mornings.”

“There again I thought all brides wore trailing negligees until noon.”

They laughed together and felt very well acquainted.

“Not brides who keep house. I shall find plenty of ways to assist my maid and I need a good bare arm to do it.”

Fliss, buying the twenty dollar “bargain” of chiffon, was looking enviously at Cecily, who was inspecting cotton smocks at three dollars and ninety-eight cents. Fliss didn’t buy working clothes. She worked in the morning with her mother, hating it, but she and her mother wore “old things” that had to be worn out.

“Are you all settled?”

“Mother and I did that before we went away and so there was nothing to do but enter the house when we came back. You must come to see me.”

“I want to.”

They lingered, talking casually, and Fliss gained several advantages, being seen by half a dozen people with Cecily and finally being asked to ride home in the new coupé. She spoke to every one she knew from the window of the car and Cecily marveled openly at the number of people she knew and at the number of hats that were lifted from handsome masculine heads as Fliss smiled and nodded at them.

“You know every one,” she commented.

Fliss laughed with much pleasure. “I’ve met a lot of people during this last year,” she admitted. “If you and your husband don’t scorn the Assembly and Club dances you’ll see all these people there.”

“Indeed we won’t scorn them. I think I had cards to the Assembly once or twice last winter, but mother thought I was a bit young.”

“Now that you are married you aren’t too young for anything, are you?”

Cecily caught a hint of mockery in the tone and looked surprised. “Well, I shall be twenty in a few months and that’s pretty old. You see I was nearly nineteen when I finished the convent.”

“I’m twenty now.”

“You look about seventeen.”

“Because I’m small. I was in High School five years, because they cruelly flunked me one year. But High School was fun.”

“Yes,” said Cecily vaguely. She was watching some one in the passing crowd and suddenly with a smile she blew her horn and pulled up beside the pavement. “There’s my husband,” she added.

Dick came smilingly to the side of the car.

“It’s exciting meeting your wife on the street,” he said gayly. “I’ve been wondering how soon I could cut and run for home, despite my self-respect as a business man.”

“Oh, come now,” begged Cecily.

She, too, found it exciting to meet her husband on the street. A delicious sense of intimacy underran all this casualness. It made her flush and the flush was becoming. Fliss looked at her, leaning forward towards her husband, with that abandon of interest and affection. It was a new way with men for Fliss. Fliss made them fight for favors and interest—mock battles, no doubt, but well staged.

Dick yielded.

“I will go home now. The house has probably gone to rack and ruin in my absence,” he said, getting in beside Fliss, who had moved to the back seat. They kept up a gay banter, throwing an occasional remark at Cecily, who was driving. The slight embarrassment Fliss sometimes showed when talking to Cecily had vanished now. Fliss was sure of her ground instinctively with men. Hers were methods as old as woman and as deft—flattering, piquing, stimulating.

They dropped her at the door of the apartment house, still smiles and coquetry.

“Funny little thing, isn’t she?” said Dick, climbing over to Cecily’s side. “Where did you pick her up, sweetheart? She doesn’t seem like your kind.”

“I’m always half sorry for her and quite interested.”

“Oh, she’s just a little climbing gutter-pup. Smart—and pretty. She’ll land a man with a million some day if she plays it right.”

“She’s not as bad as that, Dick, and she can’t help it if she’s poor and wants things.”

“All right, Mrs. Charity. Be as good to her as you like. Only don’t blame me if she doesn’t measure up. She’s been going around to dances for years with men twice her age. She’s decent enough, but sophisticated—sophisticated as you never will be.”

“You sound very condemning.”

“No, I didn’t mean to. But I’ve lost my taste for chickens. I prefer—swans.” And he slipped an arm around her, regardless of her driving.

The house was very lovely in the late afternoon light. The door was open, welcoming them into the softly darkened hall.

CHAPTER VII

FLISS, opening her eyes reluctantly, found them resting on a fat gray roll of dust under her bureau. It made her uncomfortable and discouraged. She closed her eyes and shifted her position in bed, but waking on the other side was just as bad. Her window curtain hung saggily in soiled folds to greet her. She hated to see such things, not that they aroused in her any ambition to remedy the particular phases of slack housekeeping and tawdry living, but they emphasized her dislike of her home and all that surrounded it. She thought it utterly unjust that she should have to live in such an environment when there were so many girls her own age awaking to pleasant, clean, beautifully furnished rooms, and her ambition was not to reform the things about her but to discard them as quickly as possible. In this revealing morning hour Fliss usually faced her problems. There was no occasion for bluff since she was alone and her background gave her no advantages. Last night at one of the club cotillions she had worn a yellow malines scarf about her head and yellow satin slippers and never for a moment lost her rôle of gayety incarnate. This morning the yellow slippers poked their toes out from under a chair, streaks on them showing only too plainly that they had been dyed and the yellow scarf lay abandoned on her bureau, its charm and crispness gone forever. Her mood matched her wrecked finery. The crispness and charm had gone out of her too.

For nearly a year and a half now she had been out of school, searching in her vague, unskilled way for a chance to establish herself more securely and comfortably. A year and a half might not be long for a débutante, but Fliss knew that she could not take her own time. It was hard enough now to maintain her place, such as it was, without letting people tire of her. Also the time had sharpened her sense of values. She was not yet quite sure of what she wanted, but she knew most definitely what she did not want. Marriage for the sake of marriage had not the least appeal for her. She knew too much about the sordid parts of domesticity for that. There were too many girls who had a brief career of local popularity and were now wheeling baby carriages and making over last year’s hats; too many young men who, unmarried, had danced and flirted their gay way through society only to become preoccupied, somewhat shabby, hard-working flat-dwellers after their marriage. Fliss had no intention of making any blunder which would land her in such an existence. She was nice to all men. That was because it was wise, lest they become malicious, and because it kept her in practice. But she was more chary with her kisses than she had been in High School and she had learned many new ways of getting without giving.

She had learned too how to take snubs with considerable grace; not humbling herself too much, but rather ignoring them, pretending not to see what for the sake of her scrap of dignity she could not afford to see. But she did see. It was one thing to be a popular girl in High School, to hold the record for the number of invitations to dances, to be the best dancer and the most sought after girl—and another to be left when the school circles broke up and resolved into the social groups to which their families belonged, to be a girl without family backing or a college education, who was determined not to be “dropped.” There were many parents who had found Fliss an attractive little girl, but now saw no reason to include her in their parties for their daughters. Their daughters were young women with futures to be planned for, who must take their places in the community, and Fliss was a social anomaly, pretty but nondescript. People were less cruel, of course, than forgetful. Fliss “didn’t occur to them.” They were full of interests in which she could not share for lack of money, for lack of direction and chaperonage.

Working, as an alternative to marriage, was quite as distasteful to Fliss. She felt that working, especially at the things she could do, would put her definitely in the wrong class and out of the reach of the people to whom she pinned her ambitions. She preferred to be classless rather than to be in the wrong class. To her idleness her parents did not really object. Mr. Horton had little enough to give his wife and daughter, but he expected to give them what he had and to live in shabbiness and self-denial himself. He had suggested once that Fliss learn stenography, but at her scornful protest had dropped the matter, assuming that he did not, as Fliss said, “understand.” The suggestion had been made merely because he felt that Fliss must have time heavy on her hands, and not that he had any theory about her being a wage earner. Like millions of men of all grades of strength and success, he expected to be eternally liable for the women he accumulated in his family, and to be subject to them. Mrs. Horton had educated him in domestic life. He took it mildly as a blend of disorderly bedroom, where his possessions were crowded into the smallest possible space by an array of unattractive feminine things over which inevitably hung the smell of face powder, thick and sweet, a dining room in which food and service were inferior to his quick lunch place and a living-room in which he might sit unmolested, unless Fliss or his wife wanted him out of it, which often happened. When they did, he went to the moving picture house on the corner and saw the program through twice.

It was hard for Fliss to find the slightest interest in her parents. She might have been thrown with them casually, instead of sharing one of the closest of ties. Perhaps it was equally hard on the parents to be even semi-responsible—responsible as far as she wished to allow—for a bit of cold, hard brilliance like Fliss, whom their easy-going philosophy could never hope to comprehend. Mr. Horton would have been satisfied with the most commonplace of sons-in-law and Mrs. Horton delighted merely to have Fliss attain the vague dignity of marriage. How was it possible for them to imagine the scheming and plotting, the steps and retreats which filled the mind of their daughter? She did not bother to tell them about her status with different men—even when the men asked her to marry them. She had had three proposals in this year and a half. One was from a handsome young man who worked in a broker’s office in the daytime and danced and flirted in the evenings with as much abandon as did Fliss. She gave little thought to his offer. The frivolity which had stood him in such good stead as a companion on many an evening was absolutely against him as a candidate for husbandhood. And added to this was the fact that he was an unknown young man who came from another city, presumably from obscurity, and without money.

The second offer was a curious one, made half in jest and half in earnest by one of the city’s wealthiest and most dissipated young men. He was a young man whom Fliss might have handled to advantage had she taken his laughing proposal seriously, but she did not choose to take it so. She merely laughed at him, shrewdly gauging behind her mirth the difficulty of living with dissipation even if it were guarded by wealth. Fliss was in pursuit of solidity. That she might have found in some measure in the repeated boyish offers of Gordon, her High School companion. Gordon’s position was unassailable and in each college vacation he followed Fliss about with a devotion which was unremitting and should have been touching to her. He wanted to leave college and marry her—wanted to run away with her—but she held him off too, not quite so definitely as the others. There was a good chance that Gordon would always be useful to her. But he was very young and entirely dependent on his parents.

What Fliss was anxious for now was some definite opportunity to present itself. She was vaguely conscious that her technique was fairly perfect, but that she must have something to work on soon. The roll of dust, more obnoxious every morning, the torn window curtain, the dyed slippers, and, most of all, the sound of her mother’s voice in the other room, engaged in some interminable conversation over the telephone, filled her with an almost unbearable desire to do something about her situation soon.

The voice ceased, the receiver clicked and she heard her mother’s footsteps turned towards her room.

“Not up yet, Flissy?” Her mother came in a little apologetically. “I suppose you are tired after last night I heard you come in and then the cuckoo struck two. That’s pretty late.”

“I can’t very well come home by myself, can I? I’ve got to stay until things are over whether I like it or not. There’s no limousine waiting my orders every night.”

Her mother did not take up the point. She moved heavily about the room, picking up the strewn finery of the night before, settling things into a kind of order.

“Would you like a cup of coffee in bed? I can heat it up in a minute.”

Fliss yawned. “No, I’ll get up. I’d sooner eat anywhere than in this room. I should think father could make that landlord decorate these rooms. They’re like a slum.”

“They won’t do a thing for you. Rents are terrible and they just tell you to take them or leave them. Mrs. Nesbit is looking for a flat and she said——”

“I can repeat what she said without hearing it,” interrupted Fliss, not without a glint of humor. “Come have some coffee with me, mother.” She had an occasional lazy affection for her mother when she was not too much irritated by her. Also she was company when there was no one else.

Mrs. Horton poured the coffee and set it on the edge of the near-mahogany dining table, while Fliss hung languidly over the gas stove making toast. She was an untidy little figure now—negligee trailing, hair straggling, but her eyes, deep and soft from sleep, made up for the rest of her unattractiveness. They sat down and emptied the coffee-pot, cup after cup, a kind of lazy planlessness about them which was characteristic of their usual mornings. But Mrs. Horton roused herself into attempted action sooner than she usually did.

“I suppose you’ve forgotten, haven’t you, that the bridge club meets here to-day, Fliss?”

“Lord, mother, not those terrible women again!”

“Don’t talk so, Fliss. They’re all nice women. Just as good as we are.”

“Well, I shan’t be here.”

“Now, please, Fliss. You know how they talk. If you aren’t here they’ll think it’s awfully funny. I don’t care about your being here all the time, but to help with the refreshments anyway. There’s no one who can serve them as you do.”

“You know how I hate that crowd. Sitting around retailing gossip about women who wouldn’t know them on the street. Backstairs stuff! Oh, why don’t you drop them?”

“Now, you mustn’t be so snobby, Fliss. I’ve known these women for years. Mrs. Ellis——”

“Don’t tell me again that Mrs. Ellis assisted at my birth. Maybe that’s one thing that’s wrong with me.”

“You’ll stay in and help me, won’t you, dear?”

“Washing dishes all afternoon?”

“No, you won’t have to do that sort of thing. I’ve called up Ellen and she will come in at three to help. She’s working now but she asked for an afternoon off.”

“Ellen,” echoed Fliss with deeper gloom.

“Ellen’s a nice girl,” said her mother with an unusually defensive note.

“Of course she’s nice. She’s a lot nicer than the members of your club. But it is tough to have a cousin who’s a servant.”

“What else can the poor girl do? She has to earn her living and she can’t choose. She gets much better money than she would clerking.”

“I suppose.”

Ellen was a sore point. She was a cousin of Mrs. Horton’s who had been brought up on her father’s farm and been a person of some consequence in the farming district. Her father had died and Ellen had sold the farm, finding it heavily weighted with mortgages, and come to the city to work. She knew how to do housework and housework suited her, so she went into service quite simply and without feeling herself depreciated in the least. The aggressiveness of the city servant had been left out of her, and while she did not feel herself at all the equal in position of the ladies she worked for, she had no feeling of common interest with the city servant class, so slavishly imitating their mistresses, so insolent of manner and cheap of ideal. Ellen chose her employers with discretion, and always managed to pick ladies. She treated them not as if they were above her, but merely as if they were engaged on a different sort of job, social as well as economic, and in so doing solved the servant problem in her own small way. But she was an unavoidable cause of suffering to Fliss. Every time she came to see the Hortons—and they could not help being glad to see her, for she brought not only presents to Fliss, but an atmosphere of comfort and devotion into that chaotic apartment—she was a torturing reminder to Fliss that her own social position was founded on nothing and that she ate at the table with a person who served at the tables at which she wished to sit. But she somehow did not say anything to Ellen about the way she felt. There was a quiet dignity about the farm girl as well as a generosity that kept Fliss’s complainings in check.

Another thing was that Ellen always had ready money. She was extremely well paid, spent very little on herself and was always ready to finance some small extravagance for Fliss. The Hortons never had enough ready money and it was a satisfaction to Fliss to possess a blouse or an expensive pair of gloves which were really paid for before she wore them. There was physical comfort, even if mental rancor, in being a cousin of Ellen’s.

Mrs. Horton was bringing out that very point now. “Ellen said she’d stop at Scott’s and get some cream cheese and we can have brown bread sandwiches with the salad and coffee. And she said if she bought a lobster there would be lots of time to cook that after she got here. She works so fast and they are sure to play until five, anyway. Coffee, salad, brown bread sandwiches and cake, and your father can just piece on what’s left over, when he comes home.”

The telephone interrupted them. Fliss answered it in the omnipresent hope of something interesting, and it seemed to galvanize her drooping spirits. As if it were necessary to touch up her appearance in order to get her spirits into action, at the first words she heard she twisted back her hair and drew her negligee around her with her free hand. Her face, so listless a moment before, began to sparkle—to live again—and her voice changed from its discouraged tone into one which fairly sang with interest and desire to please and to coquet.

“Of course you didn’t get me out of bed—no, not tired at all, thought it was fun—I’m glad you liked to dance with me—so do I—I’d love to. What do you suggest?—The music there is good, but the food really too terrible—why I think so, who else is going?—to-morrow night, then, about eight-thirty—yes, you can find it easily enough if you can read numbers. We’re flat dwellers, you know—cliff dwellers, you might say—208 Gladstone Street, Flat H. That’s three flights up—if you groan I’ll meet you with a glass of water—all right—good-by.”

Smiling still, clinging to the atmosphere of jocularity, Fliss hung up the receiver. Her mother watched her without questioning. It was curious that there was not any of the eager curiosity in her face which animates most women in contemplation of their daughter’s flirtations. Mrs. Horton had been well trained to keep out of things. Perhaps she felt that even her daughter’s successful marriage would mean nothing to her. She would be organized and managed through the proper things to do, but there would be no confidence, no dependence. So she waited for Fliss to speak.

Fliss did, though more in reflection than as if anxious to produce any effect on her listener. “Funny—I didn’t know he was at all taken with me. I only met him last night. Mother, I’ve simply got to have that red georgette mended before to-morrow night. I haven’t a rag to wear and maybe if that were fixed up a little—it isn’t dressy at the Palladium and with my black hat I could make the georgette do.”

“Maybe Ellen can do it for you to-night before she goes.”

“I’ll ask her. The sleeves ought to be shorter too, you know. Maybe she could cut them and I’ll help her with the sandwiches if she does and wipe the dishes for her.”

They seemed to forget that Ellen’s labors at Mrs. Horton’s party were given as favors. Mrs. Horton’s face had brightened at her daughter’s new tone of co-operation. She even ventured a question and was answered without rebuff.

“Who was it, Flissy?”

“Why, it was Matthew Allenby. You wouldn’t know, mother, but he is the hardest man in town to get to notice you. He’s not a boy, you know. The man must be nearly forty and a bachelor. I’d never met him till last night; Owen introduced him and we had three dances. He dances horribly and is perfectly crazy about it. He’s a mining man—scads of money—and lives alone somewhere. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if——”

She was really rather pathetic and almost sweet as she fell into her dream, mercenary as it was, for she wanted only things of beauty and she had no cruelty developed in her yet—no deliberate cruelty; unconscious disregard of other people perhaps was the worst of her. She sat dreaming her dream of advancement as most girls of her age dream of love and she did love the things of which she dreamt.

“Come, Fliss, please dress. It’s getting on towards noon and I want to clear this room out.”

Fliss went her way to her room and thence to the little bathroom, where she lay in the tub, from which the enamel was peeling, and wondered just how she would handle Matthew Allenby. Then she dressed for the bridge party, for it was after noon and she knew that her mother’s guests arrived early and stayed late. Her oldest afternoon dress served for them, but with her black fringe of hair setting off the softness and whiteness of her skin, she was so pretty even in her old dress that her mother, bustling into corsets in the next room—she and Fliss always omitted lunch if possible—looked at her with an expression of pride. It meant a good deal to show off Fliss to her friends. She had so little chance.

“But don’t expect me to fill in at a bridge table if any of the old prize-hunting harpies don’t come, because I won’t. I’m going to talk to Ellen and plan the best way to fix over my georgette. By the way, where is Ellen working, now that the Grangers have gone to California?”

Her mother did not know. She knew that Ellen had just taken a new place.

Ellen arrived a little later. She came in heavily burdened with brown packages and bags, having added to the cream cheese and lobster an extra fresh head of lettuce and a small steak for Mr. Horton, so that he wouldn’t “have to eat all that sweet stuff that men hate.” That was like Ellen and they were rare days for Mr. Horton when she came. Broiled steak for him, who was used to a thin sirloin, pounded and fried. Ellen deposited her packages on the kitchen table and looked with admiration at her young cousin.

“My, but that’s a pretty dress, Fliss.”

“This old thing? Just fit for the ragbag.”

Ellen herself was not a person to be ashamed of as far as appearance went. She had no variety in her clothes, but her neat dark blue suit was well-pressed and well-fitted (by Ellen herself). She was quite tall and pleasant-faced, her complexion a trifle steamed into floridness by much cooking, but her hands were as soft and well-kept as those of Fliss. Ellen had her few prides, and her hands were one of them. Seen on the street she looked like a pleasant, middle-class young matron. In markets and shops where she was not known she was invariably called “Mrs.,” the obvious domestic capability in her manner bringing forth that title. The tradespeople always liked to deal with her. She knew what to buy and permitted no extortions or frauds, but she was friendly and uncomplaining and businesslike.

Going about the kitchen of the flat she made a new place of it. It became a hospitable place, a pleasant workshop, with the lobster unwrapped and lying on a platter, the mayonnaise quickly beaten to yellow smoothness, the sandwiches beginning to pile up on two plates and Ellen herself bustling about, but lending an ear of interest to the tale of the red georgette.

“What you want to do with those sleeves, Fliss, is to slit them and then hemstitch them around the corners. I’ll turn them up this evening, slit them and to-morrow all you’ll have to do is to take them into the hemstitching shop down on Third Street and they’ll finish it for you. They won’t charge more than a quarter for that, though if I were you I’d rip off the lace yoke and we’ll turn that in and run a couple of lines of hemstitching around there and then, with that little organdy collar you wear on your velveteen, it’ll look like a new dress.”

Fliss beamed. She knew that it would look like a new dress. She sat on the edge of the shelf, swinging her feet and really admiring Ellen. She liked Ellen’s lack of pose too, just as she liked the lack of pose in Cecily. It was so glorious not to have to pose or pretend. Meanwhile the little girl in her, the really often undernourished girl, was vastly enjoying the sandwiches which Ellen pressed upon her now and then.

“Where are you now, Ellen?”

“Nicest place I’ve ever been. I didn’t mean to take any more general work—just cooking—but I was asked specially to go to this place by Mrs. Granger and I like it. Just a bride and groom. Such a nice young couple and she is lovely to me. Helps me with the work wherever she can and so considerate.”

“What’s her name?”

“Mrs. Richard Harrison. Do you know her?”

Fliss had a funny little sinking feeling. “Yes—a little—oh, yes.”

“I thought you would probably. She’s very young—not more than your age I should say. Now, Fliss,” she caught a fleeting look on her cousin’s face, “I’ll not do anything that is going to make you feel bad.”

“Oh, Ellen, I don’t mean——”

“I know, Fliss—you don’t want to hurt me. You can’t help feeling a little though that you don’t like to have me work for your friends, me being your cousin and all, but you needn’t fuss. No one is going to know I’m your cousin unless you tell them. I decided that long ago.”

Ellen had never been so frank or so expansive and Fliss felt a little ashamed, but somehow vastly relieved. She shifted the blame for her snobbery.

“People are such fools, Ellen.”

“I know.”

With her fears laid to rest, Fliss began to get a glimpse of a silver lining. It wouldn’t be so bad to have Ellen at Cecily’s. She could get information about what Cecily liked, whom she entertained, and learn how to strengthen her friendship with Cecily.

“She must have lovely things,” she began.

“It’s a beautiful house and the best of everything in it. And how Mrs. Harrison does love it! She takes good care of things too, and she won’t let you be extravagant, not that I’d want to. She was brought up in a convent, you know, and she’s neat as wax.”

This to Fliss was irrelevant.

“Is she crazy about her husband?”

But there she blundered. A reticence came over Ellen’s whole manner. Admitted though she might be to the sight of her employer’s feelings, it was not in Ellen to gossip about them. She was willing to tell Fliss about the pattern of Cecily’s silver and the drawn-work in her lunch cloths, but what she saw of Cecily’s emotions was revealed to her in a kind of unconscious confidence and Ellen was incapable of betraying it.

“Of course,” she said shortly, and there was no way of expanding the point. For the second time Fliss felt a little ashamed. She took another sandwich and was silent.

Mrs. Horton’s guests began to arrive and Fliss had to greet them before they took their places at the four bridge tables crowded together in the living-room. They were middle-aged ladies in silk dresses, who took their hats off in Mrs. Horton’s bedroom, used her face powder profusely and then settled down to a game of bridge which was surprisingly cut-throat. On the mantel two packages wrapped in tissue paper stimulated them immensely. Not that the prize—possibly a brass-plated candlestick or a pair of stockings—(silk to the knee)—was of any great value, but the idea of getting something for nothing enthralled them. Their faces grew shrewd and their glances at their opponents inimical; and the table bell which rang now and then as the signal to move from one table to the next was also the signal for a burst of discussion, commiseration and congratulation. Fliss knew them all. Most of them belonged to the district in town holding the brown house whence she had persuaded her parents to move, and she had no good word for them. They were good ladies, addicted to boudoir caps in the morning, who liked to gossip and did it generously. But they were kindly enough, good to their families and on the whole unambitious and satisfied. And for this last quality it was hardest for Fliss to tolerate them. They were so settled; they did not recognize Fliss as a person of ambition, calling her Flissy and speaking about her age, her hair, her dress; comparing her to Clara or Jessie whom Fliss had known in grammar school and who now were stenographers or department store clerks. If they had stood a little in awe of Fliss she would have been much more kindly. But to them she was just “pretty little Flissy Horton” and she knew it.

Her limited cordiality having no effect at all on the matronly conversation, she fled again to the kitchen and took refuge with Ellen, who was already busy with the red georgette dress. Fliss put it on to demonstrate its lacks and possibilities and became, with the donning of it, a curiously unsuitable figure to mix with pots and pans, melted butter and lobster. Fliss was decorative and stimulating enough to be out of place in the midst of mere utilities.

“My, how I hate that gang in there,” she said.

Ellen continued cutting deftly. “Why?”

“They’re so awfully cheap.”

“How do you mean? Clothes?”

“Clothes, of course, but I could stand that if they weren’t so cheap in their ideas—if they had some ambition—if they weren’t so ghastly self-satisfied. Look at them in there, playing cards all the blessed afternoon for a silly, ugly painted plate.”

Fliss knew what was inside the tissue paper packages on the mantel.

“Most women play cards. All the women you admire so much have bridge-luncheons.”

“I know, but they play for something worth while; give the proceeds to charities.”

“I’ve seen them playing for money that they couldn’t afford to lose,” answered Ellen.

“Well—even that. My goodness, it’s better to play for money—have real stakes—than to get all worked up and hot and cross over silly cake plates. Oh, I don’t know—the other women are so different, anyway, so much more alive. This is sort of sordid.”

“Um——,” said Ellen noncommittally.

“If I thought,” went on Fliss, “that I would settle down and get like those old harpies, I’d—well, I’d just want to die now,” finished Fliss, with drama.

Ellen did not seem impressed.

“People are different, Fliss,” she said gravely. “They’re nice women—these friends of your ma’s—even if they don’t seem very genteel. And it’s been my experience that it’s best to take folks as you find them.”

“I don’t want to take folks like this—at all. I just want to get away from them.”

“So you do; but your ma likes them. They’re the people she knows best and some of them have been awfully good to her. She was telling me how Mrs. Ellis——”

“I know, Ellen. She probably enjoyed it, too. All those women think about is babies and who’s going to have one next.”

Ellen flushed a little. “That’s awful talk, Fliss.”

“Awful! It’s all you hear. Honestly, I don’t know who’s worst—the women in there or the girls I know. If you get shocked at a little thing like that, you ought to hear the way the girls talk. Marjorie Foster—she’s Marjorie Grant now—who was married last month had all the girls in to tea the other day. And you should hear them talk! All about their husbands—and babies—and such.”

The flush on Ellen’s face had risen to her very eyebrows.

“Well, you needn’t talk it to me, Fliss. I think it’s disgusting. I may be country and all that, but I know what’s decent and I don’t think girls who talk like that are.”

Fliss let it drop. She wondered what Ellen would have said if she could have heard her airing her views at Marjorie Grant’s tea on the way she meant to run marriage.

The crowning event of the afternoon approached—the presentation of the prize—to be followed quickly, as if to forestall the disappointment of the losers, by the “refreshments.” Fliss watched the lady with the highest score receive the tissue paper package with anticipatory smiles and giggling, untie the ribbon and hold the painted plate up for the group to see. There was great admiration, a general close inspection. The booby prize, a box of chocolates, was given and received with even more merriment and the ladies settled back, ready for Fliss to proceed with a folded napkin for each capacious lap. Fliss dropped them with a careless little air of detachment that did not quite pretend to hauteur, but approached it. She did not want to talk to them; serve them if she must, but preserve her aloofness at all costs. But even that was not left to her. It was the same Mrs. Ellis, no doubt with a kind of proprietary interest in this slim, silk-clad girl, whom she had first seen as a red little baby emerging into the world under difficulties, who insisted on detaining her for an intimate bit of conversation.

“You’re getting to be quite a swell, aren’t you, Fliss? I see your name in the papers all the time—running around to dances and all kinds of didoes with real society folks. Must cost a lot to keep that up. How does pa like footing the bills?”

Fliss flushed an angry red and stood, biting her lip. She had to stand still because Mrs. Ellis had a friendly hold on her dress.

“Got your eye on some swell fellow, too, Flissy? No one’s going to be too good for that girl I always said when you were growing up. I knew you’d fly high.”

“Please, Mrs. Ellis.” Fliss detached her dress and marched away, but Mrs. Ellis only laughed.

“Guess I was treading on somebody’s toes then,” she said to Mrs. Horton. “Fliss always was touchy. Has she really got her eye on somebody?”

Her own eye on the kitchen door, Mrs. Horton answered with caution. “Oh, Fliss has lots of beaux. Always has had, since she was a little thing, you know.”

They turned the talk to the excellence of the salad dressing. But when the cakes came in, Fliss did not reappear. It was Ellen who passed them. “I won’t go in there again!” Fliss had declared. “Not for anything on earth. No, I won’t, Ellen, I couldn’t stand it.”

She was on the point of tears and Ellen’s quick sympathy saw how overwrought she was. So she passed the cakes herself. Fliss was grateful enough to wipe the dishes, and as she and Ellen worked they heard the voices of the departing guests raised in high cordiality to their hostess and the door shutting on one after another.

Mrs. Horton came out, her face beaming. “Your salad was elegant, Ellen, and they had a real nice time, though I must say I was surprised at Mrs. Hyland’s getting the prize because she doesn’t play a very good game. However, she said a cake plate was the thing of all things she wanted. Where’d you go to, Fliss?”

“I couldn’t stand that old Mrs. Ellis.”

But Mrs. Horton was on the high tide of her big day and Fliss did not greatly disturb her. “Oh, she meant all right. You mustn’t mind what old friends say. Well, here’s your father.”

Mr. Horton came slowly into the kitchen and smiled at Ellen.

“Quite a party, eh?”

“And your supper will be late,” said Ellen, “but it won’t be long now.”

It was equally surprising to the three Hortons to have supper at all, but Ellen cleared her kitchen of them—Mrs. Horton to change her garb, Fliss to finish the red dress and Mr. Horton to read his paper while she prepared the meal. Half an hour later they all sat down to supper as if there had been no party—no left-over sandwiches, but hot rolls and meat and coffee. It was curious to see how they all reacted to it, and as they became better fed became also more definite personalities. Mrs. Horton insisted on doing the fresh batch of dishes, her husband became actually talkative on the subject of the railroad strike, even though no one listened, and the sharp edge of Fliss’s manner softened perceptibly.

Ellen did not notice or reflect on what she had done. It was all of a normal day’s work for her. But she kissed Fliss as she left and there was a trace of pity in her eyes. Going back through the city, she stopped at the gay windows to look at clothes displayed there that were pretty like Fliss herself—gay like Fliss. As she looked, she sighed. But when she approached the house of her employer her face took on a look of satisfaction. There were lights in the living-room. Mr. and Mrs. Harrison were back from their theater party, and as she went past the long windows Ellen saw them—Cecily curled up in a big chair, her evening coat thrown back, and Dick sitting on the arm of the chair fondling his wife’s hair. It was a pretty picture—and pleasantly real. Ellen wound her alarm clock and set her bread with great satisfaction. She loved the convenient, pretty kitchen. As she mounted the back stairs quietly, the lights in the living-room still burned.

“Did you have an awfully good time to-night?” Cecily was asking.

“Didn’t you?”

“Yes, except I’m always glad to get home. It doesn’t seem as if we had much chance to be home these days.”

“No—three nights this week—and to-morrow night, I meant to tell you. I told Mollie Heathcote that I was sure we could join them at the Palladium.”

“Dick, why on earth? I was going to have the most heavenly evening here.”

Dick looked perplexed. “Why, she wanted us and I knew we didn’t have anything on and it didn’t occur to me to say no.”

Cecily sighed.

“The Palladium is rather fun, sometimes,” suggested Dick.

“I suppose it is, but—well, any place is fun where we can be together.”

“Of course, dear. I’ll call Mollie up, though, if you like and tell her I forgot that we were to be busy.”

“No, don’t do that. Mollie’s a dear and I wouldn’t like to play a trick on her. We’ll go.”

“You know we won’t be going about like this all our married life. Just now we’re a novelty as a couple, but we’ll get to the slippered stage. Especially——”

“Especially,” agreed Cecily, with a tender little laugh.

“And now,” said Dick, jumping off the chair, “as the good Lady Macbeth said—to bed! And may the good days of domesticity thicken around us, shutting out all ribald pleasure!”

CHAPTER VIII

SO it was, through the curious little twirl of circumstance which took Fliss, elated, and Cecily, reluctant, to the Palladium Hotel on the same night, that Matthew Allenby met Cecily. He saw her across the room at first. The Palladium was one of those public places to which people went to get rid of the ennui caused by their own circle of friends, but they were always careful to surround themselves with enough of their friends to put their attendance in the proper light. The fact that you were at the Palladium had no significance. The point was—with whom were you at the Palladium?

Fliss was delightfully conscious of the “rightness” of her companions. Matthew Allenby and the young Frederick Craigs were an effective trio and Fliss was radiant in the red georgette. Allenby watched her with enjoyment. He liked vivid things, alive things, and possibly it was to that fever for life in Fliss that her invitation to-night was due. She tried to teach him to dance, scolding him for his awkwardness in her impudent way and he seemed to like that too.

They were seating themselves after a dance when he followed Fliss’s gay little nod with his eyes and saw Cecily. She had not been dancing, but her head was lifted to smile at Dick and Mollie, coming back breathless.

“Who is that girl?” asked Matthew.

“What girl?”

“The one over there smiling at Dick Harrison.”

The Craigs and Fliss laughed together. “Why, that’s his wife!”

“Of course,” said Matthew. “I’d forgotten he was married. He did it up in haste and I was East all last spring. Her name was Moore, wasn’t it?”

“Good-looking, isn’t she?”

“Very.”

He looked again at Cecily. “Funny—I haven’t seen a girl who looked like that in a long while.”

“How do you mean?”

“Dick Harrison is a lucky wretch, as usual.”

“He’s been vamped,” said Fliss. “Come over and I’ll introduce you to her.” It was one of those openings which Fliss could never resist.

“Here’s a man who has been begging to meet you,” she said a moment later to Cecily. She might have said more, but she was not quite free with Cecily yet.

Cecily gave Matthew her hand and the shadow of the smile that she had given Dick. Then, as the music began and Fliss and Dick danced away, the Heathcotes followed suit.

“I’d ask you to dance,” apologized Matthew, “but I’m rotten at it.”

“I’m tired of it, anyway. I was just wondering if I was getting middle-aged.”

“Only in the first stages, I should judge.”

“Don’t laugh at me.”

“I assure you I won’t. I was looking at you from the other side of the room and thinking that it was strange that I didn’t want to laugh. Most girls do affect me that way. Do you mind if I ask you something? Are you an ardent anything?”

Cecily looked bewildered.

“I mean feminist, sociologist, politician—have you a heavy purpose?”

“Dick,” said Cecily definitely.

“There you are. I knew it. I hadn’t seen a girl look at a man in years as you looked at Dick. Men aren’t the heavy interests of women any more.”

“Nonsense. It seems to me girls aren’t interested in anything else.”

“You don’t understand me. I used the wrong word anyhow. Girls are interested enough in men, but not singly in a man. That’s what I mean. You don’t see that ’till death do us part’ look around on girls’ faces.”

“Are you just being silly?”

“Probably,” Matthew grinned, “but I expressed myself anyway. It did me good. I feel that I have made a real contribution to thought.”

Cecily looked at him. He was older than Dick, she thought, probably approaching forty, though his face might be older than his age warranted. It had lines set on a skin that was hardly ready for them. It might have been a discouraged face, or a sad face, but the eyes kept it from being that. They were too interested, too alert for sadness or despondency. She liked the smile in his gray eyes. She liked his strong, alert figure. It lacked Dick’s lean athleticism and he was heavy about the shoulders as a man near forty might be, but he had the appearance of power. “Have you been amusing Fliss Horton with contributions to thought?”

“No. I have merely stepped on her feet. But I like to look at her. She’s so immensely vigorous and vigor in frail things is always inspiring, isn’t it?”

“I wonder if that’s what I feel about her.”

“Maybe. Watch her now. Watch her amusing your husband. She’s working at it hard.”

“He is amused,” said Cecily. “I can tell by the way his eyes slant down at her. He likes her.”

“That must be,” said Matthew, reflectively, “just the way she was working on me the other night. I had the most insistent desire to be amused again, so I got up this party.”

“You’re hardly gracious.”

He was suddenly different. “I didn’t mean to be rude, Mrs. Harrison. I was only thinking aloud. You mustn’t think I don’t feel immensely obliged to Miss Horton—awfully grateful to her for being willing to put up with me for an evening.”

“Of course,” said Cecily, “I didn’t think you were rude.”

“Do you know that I used to be quite a friend of your husband?”

“Used to be? I remember writing your name on an invitation to our reception.”

“Only I was out of town and missed it. Don’t you think that, because I did miss it, I’m entitled to see more of you now, to make up for what I lost?”

Dick, coming back to the table again, bore him out. “I remember telling Cecily that I was going to bring you to see her when you got back to town. He’s a great fellow, Cecily. One of our leading politicians—one of these amateur European generals! Never lets it interfere with business though, do you, Matt?”

Fliss and Matthew wandered back to their own table and Matthew, devoting himself to Fliss, apparently forgot the sudden interest he had taken in Cecily. He gave all his attention to Fliss, took her home, flattered her, laughed with her—gave Fliss the tingle of a thoroughly successful evening. Then he wandered home and read a book on French politics until he was half asleep. The European political situation was absorbing him these days since the war had begun. His rooms were full of war stuff, both English and French; “Land and Water,” full of Hilaire Belloc’s guarded prophecies, dozens of pamphlets, maps.

It was characteristic of him that he could read French—not in translation, not with the help of a dictionary, but fluently, with enjoyment and understanding. He could read it because he had wanted to so much and he understood the technique of wanting things until they became realized desires. He had wanted knowledge, success and friends and he had these things now in spite of an education cut cruelly short when he was sixteen, in spite of lack of money and of having been born in the obscurity of a little village. Through poverty and opposition he had quietly pushed his way and established himself. Carrington did not question him. He had been a successful young man when he came there. He had come to look after mining interests near Carrington and smaller interests in the city. Now he was wealthy and useful to the city in a hundred ways. They wanted him in politics and he gave some of the time which he might have had for leisure to that. But he would not let political interests absorb him. He advised, did some speaking, lent his influence where it seemed fit and let it go at that.

He had apparently never yet needed women or he would have managed to get the one he wanted, if he had followed the simple processes of his philosophy. Or perhaps he found his companionship with women in the books he read. On his laden, well-used bookshelves there were so many stories, poems, thoughts of beautiful women and noble women. Little contemporary fiction—it was the library of a man who had guided himself through literature, full of books which were cross references to each other, books which showed how his mind, setting out to pursue some line of thought, had gone off at a tangent on some philosophical quest. He needed no order or cataloguing of all his books; he could always put his hand on the one he wanted.

The rooms in which he lived were on the second floor of an old house which had been turned into an apartment building. There was an old-fashioned alcove in his living-room, and the circular walls were lined with books except where a long window cut into the structure of shelves. The rest of the living-room was furnished with a taste and skill which hit just the right note of spaciousness without seeming bare—a few easy-chairs, a dark red Turkish rug and a black oak table. It was on this table that he ate his meals, prepared for him by the Swedish woman who cooked and cleaned for him. There was a bedroom which was furnished almost with ascetic plainness, and that was all except for the kitchen and the room occupied by the cook. It was not an elaborate establishment for as wealthy a man as Matthew Allenby, but he had lived there in complete satisfaction for five years.

A week after the encounter at the Palladium he called on the Harrisons and found them at home. They were pleasant enough in their welcome and before half an hour he had justified himself for breaking in on one of their deliberately domestic evenings. He knew how to be entertaining, how to talk business with Dick in such a way that Cecily was not excluded from the conversation, how to make the conversation broaden itself into interesting fields outside of the specific ones in which the talk might begin. Dick enjoyed himself hugely. He had always liked Matthew Allenby and had various plans for business deals with him. Matthew was some years older and had drifted into the companionship of older men than Dick.

They talked war for the most part, as people did in 1915—with abstract enthusiasm, impersonal analysis. Then Cecily played for them. She played well, without brilliance, but with an accuracy and feeling for melody that the convent was directly responsible for. It was less her playing than the fact of her playing, the picture she made at the piano, singing and playing softly in the light of the tall candles which framed her, that was charming. The men watched her silently from across the room.

“I don’t want in the least to go home,” said Matthew, as Cecily turned to them finally. “I could sit here for days and days sipping this very remarkable liqueur that your husband is offering up and watching a very perfect picture of what homes may be—and rarely are outside of the Victrola advertisements.”

“Haven’t you a home, Mr. Allenby?”

“Two of them. One is a little frame house in Indiana where my mother lives and where she insists she will always live. It is a very small house, atrociously furnished and heated by a Franklin stove and a coal range, but she likes it. That’s my home—maternal home, homestead—the place where I don’t have to knock or ring a bell, you know. The other home is on the second floor of the big green house at River Street and Fourth Avenue. It is a pleasant place, a very pleasant place, but it lacks life in a way. All bachelor places do. Bachelor places are safe, but they never quite touch the high spots. A bachelor never lives a very rich life and his home reflects that.”

“But you think bachelor places are safer?” asked Dick smiling.

“It’s always safer to be alone than to risk close companionship, isn’t it?”

“I know what you mean,” said Cecily. “I never could see why homes were considered dull places. People in relations to each other always seem wonderful to me. My mother’s home was always exciting to me. There were my mother with my two stepbrothers—who worship her just as I do—and mother and I and mother and father—all of us reacting on each other. Then when I began to keep my own home I found it even more interesting. I am completely responsible for everything that happens in the house; that’s quite a lot of excitement.”

“Of course you’re new at it,” said Dick. “In time habit may wear off the edge of looking after my meals and my comfort.”

“No, I will not let the edge wear off!”

“You won’t,” said Matthew. “Life will deepen for you.”

It was odd that, though Cecily was looking at her husband, Matthew was reassuring her. Dick laughed a little. He thought the conversation somewhat obscure and over-personal and poured Matthew another tiny glass of cordial.

“Well, I’ve nothing to say for bachelor living. Here’s to charming wives, Allenby, and may you find one soon. Cecily will help you.”

They met again within a week. Cecily was walking home from the convent one afternoon, where she sometimes stopped to see Mother Fénelon, and she met Matthew at his very doorstep. Cecily felt curiously well-acquainted with him and was glad when he asked to walk with her. She told him about the convent and how much she liked to stop there for a few minutes to feel again the atmosphere of the cloister.

“And then you go away with your appetite for home whetted?”

“Not because the convent is less attractive than a home in its own way, but they set each other off so stunningly.”

He laughed in great amusement.

“You have a way of making me most confidential,” said Cecily. They had reached the brick walk leading up to her house. “I’d ask you in, but it’s too near dinner time. Some day you must come to dinner with us.”

“Any day.” He went briskly down the street and Cecily forgot him. She was not feeling quite so gay as she had sounded or tried to sound. Strange things seemed to be happening to her. She had recently gone to her stepfather’s house and spent an afternoon in his library looking up important medical words and finding little information. She supposed the things that were happening meant that she was going to have a baby and she was frightened. So she could not tell Dick. She felt terribly ashamed of her own fears. They had talked about it and it had seemed very beautiful and fine in talking. Now when it had to be done—done by her, through her, with these strange processes diagrammed in encyclopedias—it was different. It was very different. It seemed to cut her off from Dick instead of bringing her closer—it absorbed her thoughts. And with the fears went this strange weakness and dizziness, so foreign to her. That was why she had gone to the convent. And there the little white chapel had seemed to ring with the words of the Jesuit priest in his last instruction, “the sacrament which has for its purpose the bringing up of children.” Cecily’s whole soul seemed to rebel. Marriage was not that. Marriage was Dick—Dick to play with, talk with—Dick to make a home for—Dick to love. This other business was not Dick. The chapel helped her not at all.

Mother Fénelon, meeting her as she had done before, had helped. She had stopped and kissed Cecily swiftly on each cheek and asked about Dick and her mother. Mother Fénelon had a way of reconciling the worldly and the divine. Then she looked at Cecily very steadily and asked, “Still afraid, Cecily?”

“A little, Mother.”

“That will pass, my dear. Experience will help you—and prayer to our Blessed Lady.”

That was all, but somehow Cecily felt that the nun understood the whole business and that she was right. She went out into the afternoon toned up a little.

CHAPTER IX

THE word love must not be narrowed or we shall lose the key to many a chamber of life. In our cross-section of life, which shows itself the most beautiful love? The love of Matthew which spends itself in pleasure in Cecily’s existence rather than in personal desire, the tornado which must storm the frail soul of Fliss, the rare devotion of Ellen, the servant, for her mistress, the fine normality of Dick’s feeling for his wife, or the love of Cecily herself, tormented and abused as such free-given love so often is tormented and abused by life? The spotlight of circumstance is turned now on one, now on another, as if seeking to find out.

Its light is focused on Cecily now. Dick knows about his expected child and every quality in his manhood has leapt into eager response to this proof of his own continuity. He cannot be too tender; he is fearful lest somehow things go wrong, and yet immensely sure that everything will be successful. He assures himself that this is a common happening and carries within himself the proud knowledge of an event that is absolutely unique. He is very curious about the physiological marvel, as all men are who for the first time watch themselves so mysteriously reproduced. And with it all—all the pride that he feels in his coming child—Cecily remains his young wife as well as his child’s mother and he feels apologetic that this must hurt her—even endanger her—and he loves her beyond his pride and hope. Cecily’s mother knows and surrounds Cecily with every precaution and comfort, seeming to guard her a little jealously now, even from Dick. Cecily has given up dancing and most society, and society, noticing—ever on the qui vive for these domestic interludes and their reactions on the people concerned in them—accepts the situation with a sigh and a smile and a touch of sentiment. Young Mrs. Harrison is going to have a baby—“so soon.” Well, opinion divides here.

Matthew hears of it among the casual gossip, through some chance remark about Dick, and goes to call on Cecily again, as if her interest were enhanced for him. Cecily receives him gladly, feeling that she is making a permanent friend and he is one of the few constant visitors at the gray-shingled house. Another is Madeline Von Vlectenburg, now Madeline Ensign, who has married a Carrington man and come to Carrington to live and whose acquaintance is still so small that she clings to Cecily’s companionship; and another is Fliss Horton, who has become very assiduous and helpful in bringing Cecily gayety and Madeline useful gossip. Fliss has the freedom of Cecily’s house now and treats Ellen with a charming, friendly informality and Ellen is always glad apparently to set an extra place for Miss Horton at her employer’s request.

Ellen knows about the baby too and will let Cecily do nothing for herself if she can help it. She has a tremendous maiden excitement about all the preparations and in secret is knitting a pink afghan. In secret—for she never refers to the coming event except by the most modestly veiled of allusions.

Yet, with all this light focused upon her, with all this care and tenderness surrounding her, Cecily withdrew into herself, more like her mother than she had ever been before. Her fears had lessened with the sense of enveloping support and knowledge and the many preparations normalized the months, but there grew in her a consciousness of isolation like nothing she had ever known before. It would come upon her sometimes in the midst of her friends, listening to the idle talk of Madeline and Fliss—sometimes when she was with Dick. It was not at all lonely or unpleasant—only a feeling of being set apart. She tried to explain it to Dick.

“It’s like recognizing suddenly that you are part of a design—it’s strangely impersonal.”

And again——

“But I’m not worried, Dick, dear. I’m interested and happy. Just because I’m silent now and then you mustn’t think I’m sad. I can’t help feeling responsible.”

“It’s the first time I’ve ever felt really responsible, you see. I’ve always been guided; people have always taken me all the way. Once in the convent when the priest told us about marriage I got awfully afraid. I suppose I sensed then that you had to go part of the way alone.”

“Yes, I know. You’re all with me and will be, but you can’t go all the way, darling. I don’t mind and I’m not afraid. I’ve something to go after, something to get.”

“Being born,” she told him, more whimsically, “must be a terrific process. Perhaps that’s why it’s fixed so that we can’t remember it at all.”

Those were the more sober moments, but there was on the whole more gayety than sobriety about the impending birth. Even Fliss, who held strong views on motherhood and had more than once remarked that she did not mean to be ever “tied down,” enjoyed looking at the beautiful baby clothes and the elaborate equipment which were showered upon Cecily, and they all talked about it a great deal with a gay frankness and humor utterly unrestrained by the presence of the men of the intimate circle.

At dinners, at which Cecily, dressed in some lovely loose robe, presided, Fliss naturally fell to Matthew and every one but Matthew himself fostered the pairing. Fliss, playing her game and hating her home background more every day, waited for something to come of all this. While she waited she played with Dick and it often happened that Matthew drifted to Cecily’s side while the others amused themselves. And Fliss made a confidant of Dick and asked his advice, thereby establishing a bond, for not only did Dick enjoy giving the advice, but he was naturally curious to see whether Fliss would take it and if she did take it, whether it would work out well and prove him wise.

Fliss asked him if he didn’t think she ought to go to work. That was her temporary line of conversation, but Dick didn’t know that. He pondered it seriously.

“At what?”

“I’ve had no training and of course I’m not clever. I suppose I’d have to take up stenography and go into some one’s office.”

“Surely you can find something better than that.”

“What? I can’t teach and I wouldn’t want to, anyway. And what else is there for a girl who doesn’t know anything about anything and whose only cleverness is in trimming hats?”

“Start a hat shop.”

“You need money for that, Dick.”

“You need money for everything. You’ll have to face that, unless you marry it.”

“That, too, has been suggested. But it’s not so easy to find some one with money whom you can marry.”

Dick’s eyes strayed to the other end of the room.

“How about Matthew?”

“Matthew hasn’t asked me.”

“Shall I tell him to ask you?” teased Dick.

“If you like. But he won’t—even though I wouldn’t marry him if he did. I want something a little different from Matthew.”

“A shade more jazz.”

“A shade more jazz is right!”

“Matthew is ruled out.”

Matthew turned to call to them. “Who is taking my name in vain?”

Fliss crossed the room negligently. “We were discussing,” she told him with her engaging impudence, “the possibility of your marrying me.”

“Am I going to do it?”

“No. Rest easy. I’ve refused you in advance.”

“Because you haven’t enough jazz,” contributed Dick.

“Reason enough. But I wonder why I haven’t more of that peculiar quality. Of course it’s always existed under a variety of names so I can’t say I didn’t happen along in the right generation. I never did have it. Perhaps because I had to go to work too young.”

“Well, I should have gone to work young, and I always had it,” said Fliss.

Cecily was following them amusedly. “And I never had to work at all and I haven’t it.”

“Convent training.”

“No, look at Madeline. She’s full of the same spirit Fliss is full of.”

“And Dick?”

“Dick’s a jazzer thrown into high company,” mocked Fliss.

“Dick’s a jazzer—reformed.” Dick put his arm about his wife’s shoulders and drew her close to him. “You’re all wrong. Jazzing or whatever you call it is purely a matter of age. When you draw near thirty you get over it, just as the average man gets over tennis.”

“But I’m not thirty.”

“No,” said Dick, looking down at her tenderly, “but you’ve other fish to fry. Besides you can’t be classified.”

“French model, one only.” Fliss could always be counted on to remain flippant. The others caught her note with amusement.

It was one of their many idle, undeveloped, cross-purposed conversations, which in spite of its lightness had a kind of function in bringing them nearer together, teaching them what to expect from each other, revealing their quality to each other. The weeks slipped along, each one important and interesting in its relation to the coming of Cecily’s child, bringing that great anticipation closer to them. And the lives of all of them clung to their own little orbits in the midst of a storm already world devastating, though there were many moments when they all shivered as some great tragedy, dulled by distance, came over the wires and through the papers to them. Cecily, of course, dated all things by the fifteenth of May, and as the winter changed into spring and the whole world opened happily under the warming sun, she was more and more eager to bring her waiting to a close. Dick was impatient, she knew, and that made her more so. She was catching some of Dick’s quality as she lived with him. She was trying to learn how to frost the depths of the spiritual isolation which was absorbing her with a surface companionship during hours which demanded lightness. There was some sacrifice in learning this new lightness, but she had a vague feeling that it would make Dick happy if she were not only happy, but gay.

The wonder of Cecily was that she was twenty, as yet unbigoted, and that her personality was still vague in its outlines. The convent was of course mainly responsible for this—in leaving so much to God. The implied educational method of most schools and colleges is that you have to work things out “on your own” as definitely as possible—work out God, too, when you get to it—but the convent method was not so. When things became tangled or overerudite, or too introspective, or embarrassing and indelicate, the gentle nuns turned the solutions over to God and left them there without asking for an accounting. Working with material like Cecily they took care to perfect her English and her French, even if they totally neglected economics, gave her a cultural knowledge of science and a knowledge of history, which was colored by faith in the church, and sent her out with a clean mind. There were plenty of fine fresh minds coming out of women’s colleges every day, but their freshness was like the antiseptic freshness of a laboratory after corruption has been studied and its traces scoured away; Cecily’s was the freshness of the out-of-doors, which is different. Mental and emotional qualities were still to develop and, stepping as she did into marriage so quickly, she had all of psychology, all of philosophy, to learn. The bag of women’s tricks, already so thoroughly ransacked by Fliss, was quite unknown to Cecily.

While Dick was teaching her love and some gayeties as well, she was learning other things. It was absurd to say that Matthew had set himself to the forming of her mind—what he did was too intangible for him to have had a definite purpose—but still, he did try to help Cecily to think. Undoubtedly it was at first for the pure pleasure of seeing the effect that much discussed themes would have upon a mind as inexperienced as hers that Matthew introduced many of his conversations. Her ready response led him further. He lent her books, catching up the broken thread of a conversation about some problem by sending her relevant printed thought; he stimulated her mind constantly. And the mind, which must have been a reproduction in part at least of Allgate Moore’s mind, the part which was responsible for the fact that people called him “genius,” began to grow. Such a year for Cecily! There were many nights when she sat listening to the men talking about the affairs which were absorbing almost all thinking people’s minds—the sinking of ships at sea, the slaughters of war, the advances and retreats of the hostile armies, the surmises as to new alliances—all of it deepening in Cecily her natural sense of the gravity of the world’s affairs and of the world’s dangers. Then when they stopped—and they would stop when her comments or queries became too intense, too worried—she always marveled at the way they, and Dick especially, could spring back to lightness of thought and word.

It was at Matthew’s suggestion that they went to Allenby. Allenby, as well as being Matthew’s surname, was the name given in his honor to a little village at the mouth of one of the mines in which Matthew had large interests. Dick had been offered the stock which one of the directors was relinquishing and expressed a curiosity to see the place. Matthew said he would drive him down if he would take a day off.

“I can’t leave Cecily very well,” said Dick.

“Bring Cecily.”

“Now?”

“It won’t hurt her. The roads are fine; state roads—no frost holes. We can get across to Judith for the night. There’s a very decent inn there where we could stop.”

“Yes, I know the place. I’ll ask Cecily. Maybe she’d like it.”

It was the second week in April. Mrs. Warner did not especially approve of the trip, but Cecily had set her heart on it.

“Well,” compromised her mother, “if they drive slowly it probably won’t hurt you. Don’t go down any mines. And it’s still cold; take plenty of rugs.”

To balance the party they had asked Fliss, though, as Fliss said, she was not sure whether she was chaperoning Cecily or Cecily her, and they started off early on a Saturday morning, Matthew and Dick proving that it was a business trip by sitting together in the front seat. Lunch from thermos bottles and a picnic basket hardly halted them and they reached Allenby in the middle of the afternoon.

It was, as Matthew said, hardly a village. There was a railway station and about it were grouped houses and cheap stores flanking the side of brief indefinite streets of rutted red clay. Its newness was ugly, but, looking at it, one knew its age would be worse. It had no possibility of growing to charm and dignity from such beginnings. It was a necessity—nothing more. Their comments as they looked at it were characteristic. Fliss had the first word.

“So this is where your money comes from.”

Matthew and Dick both laughed. “It’s quite a settlement, isn’t it?” said Dick. “I’d no idea the place was so big. You must have a thousand people in the village.”

“And more squatted around the mine itself. You’ll see later.” Matthew turned to Cecily. “What do you think of my namesake?”

“It seems a desolate place for people to live—a miserable place. I should think you could make it a little more attractive.”

“That’s not good sociology; that’s charity.”

They left their car at the railroad station and wandered about the village, Dick growing enthusiastic over things which seemed pathetic to Cecily, and Fliss amusing herself with comments and trying to dazzle the people she saw. She insisted that they should have a soda at the store and over that she was very merry and mocking. Matthew dragged them away.

“It gets dark early and we must see the mine yet.”

The road to the mine was rough and led through a waste of ugly fields, covered with discolored vegetation. It was growing colder and the dead bushes shook in the wind. The girls huddled themselves in rugs and began to think of dinner and the Inn. The mine was interesting, but——

Dick and Matthew, however, had grown absorbed by this time. They were deep in statistics; they looked interestedly and speculatively over the barren fields and with real admiration at a group of one story huts grouped together near the great red pit which was the mine.

“Some of the people have to live close for various reasons,” explained Matthew over his shoulder. “In case of a blizzard we have to keep a force fairly close. There are about a hundred men who live here. A few have their families, but most of them are unmarried and live in bunk houses.”

A number of children bore witness to the existence of the families. They were very dirty children—stolid little Scandinavians, most of them. The automobile awoke their interest. They measured its difference from the half-dozen begrimed Fords which were casually lined up on one side of the mine office.

“Want to go down, Fliss? Cecily mustn’t.”

“Love it,” said Fliss.

“We’ll just go down to the first level,” Matthew decided, “to give Fliss an idea. You must put on overalls though. Come in the office and they’ll fix you out. I’ve had lots of women here. It’s all right.”

Cecily watched them from the depths of the car as they disappeared over the edge of the mine, walking on a kind of circular path—Fliss looking like an extremely rakish boy in her overalls. Then she settled herself to wonder again how these people lived and how it was worth living without any beauty or any comfort—or love. She wondered if women loved these rough, unpleasant-looking men now emerging in little groups. They all went to the office. It was Saturday night and they were getting their pay. They stared at Cecily and the car, some stolidly, some hostile in their glances. Vaguely she wished Dick would come back.

Suddenly a man paused beside the car. He was obviously angry. She had seen him leave the office, slamming the door with an oath that carried to her ears, and as he came down the road and she knew he must pass the car, she felt his hostility even before he spoke. He did not shout, but he came to a pause and his voice was low and menacing and his face full of hate.

“Sit there, damn you, and grin. They fired me—and they’ll pay for it. You’ll all pay for it, you damned blood suckers. You——”

Then he called Cecily a name which she had never heard before, but which was utterly clear in its implication, even to her, and went swiftly down the road, lost in the increasing crowd of homegoing men. Cecily had gone dead white. She became conscious of crowds of men pouring past her now and she felt every face ferocious. She did not want to look at them and yet she could not help it. She felt suddenly that she was affronting them. This car, her furs, her luxury of robes, their shacks! And Dick did not come. Where was he? Why did he not come? Had they caught him and Matthew down in the mine? Had something happened? She tried to reassure herself, but her shocked mind went tearing on into confusion. Then in the midst of it came a pain, a tearing pain like nothing she had felt ever before. Dick, coming up beside Fliss and Matthew, all three laughing and talking to one of those men who had so terrified Cecily, saw his wife, white-faced—staring.

They were all immensely frightened and too inexperienced to be sure what steps were best to take. Even Cecily was not sure that her hour had really begun, but before they got back to the little village there was not much room for doubt. Dick and Matthew looked at each other in utter consternation. They were four hours away from all the elaborate preparations for the advent of Cecily’s child; they both had heard of accidents. The ride back home was not to be attempted, but here, in this forlorn little mining town——

In those first hours it was Cecily herself who took the initiative. In an interval between the pains she lifted her head from Dick’s shoulder with an actual smile.

“Apparently I’m going to spoil the party; and I can’t get back home. Find me a place to stay over night, Dick—the cleanest house there is. And telephone Dr. Wilson. In the meantime get hold of the doctor here.”

They did as she said. The little frame house of the mine superintendent was made ready and the superintendent’s wife, a Swedish woman of forty, after her first bewilderment took command of the situation and Cecily with stolid sympathy. Cecily, in a strange hummocky bed, wearing a coarse cotton flannel nightgown, soon lost the connection between reality and nightmares. Nothing was real about her—the face of the Swede woman with her guttural reassurances, the bearded man who they said was the doctor, but who seemed unable to relieve her torture—but through it all her mind pounded along on a steady track of fear and determination. She might lose her baby—she would not lose her baby—they must take care. She kept giving directions, pathetic directions, about that.

Matthew had found the doctor and after a look at Cecily he told them that they would have no time to send for their own physician. He did not seem much concerned about it all and was inclined to take it all very easily. He was a middle-aged man—Swedish also—with a blond beard and abstracted blue eyes.

“But,” said Dick, “there’s not even a nurse!”

The doctor smiled. “Fifty babies in six months in this village,” he said, “and no nurse for any of them. This lady (pointing to Fliss) and Mrs. Olson will help me—and you, if I need you.”

But it seemed none the less terrible. Matthew and Dick pooled their knowledge of such events. Fliss stayed by Cecily, remarkably calm, helping Mrs. Olson in her meager preparations, but white to her lips. And each half hour the cloud of pain and worry thickened over the little house. It was a cold night. Mrs. Olson had sent her children to a neighbor’s house. Dick and Matthew, in the kitchen, tried to conceal their fears.

“Why was I such a damned fool as to bring her?” cried Dick.

“I wish I hadn’t suggested it, but we did and we’re here. We’ll have to see it through, Dick. The chances are ninety to one that it will come out all right, old man.” But he, too, was white and his hand shook a little as he poked at the fire in the stove.

Fliss came in and stood leaning against the door. They jumped up. She gave them a few directions.

“Hunt through the drug store yourself,” she finished. “We must be sure the things are right. I’ll watch.”

“Do you think you can, Fliss?” Dick sounded doubtful and Fliss, leaning against the door, did not look too competent. Her skirt was too short and her hair too elaborate.

“I’ve got to,” she answered. “I don’t know much, but I’ve heard things—enough to know what to avoid.”

They had reached Carrington by telephone and knew that Cecily’s mother, Cecily’s nurse and Cecily’s doctor were now on their way to Allenby, but it would be three or four hours before they could arrive even with the greatest of speed. The local doctor had assured them that it would be over before that. The two men could hear strange sounds that did not seem natural—cries that hurt almost unbearably to hear. The footsteps overhead were hurried.

“Do you think—already?” asked Dick.

Then they both heard it.

Fliss came in again. Her hair was disordered and her face as pale as before. She faced them with startled, angry eyes.

“So that’s what women have to go through,” she said, “and you never get a taste of it! My Lord, but it’s fierce!”

Dick had pushed past her, upstairs. It seemed as if Matthew were about to follow, and restrained himself.

“Is something wrong?” he asked hoarsely. “Is she——”

Fliss actually laughed. All the primitive sex antagonism in her had seemed to leap out suddenly. She was angrily on guard, fiercely angry at all men, so free of this agony—quite at her best as she stood there in her wrath.

“Oh, no, nothing’s wrong. It’s bad enough when it’s right. Dick’s got his baby all right.”

She sat down at table with her face in her hands. Matthew’s face relaxed a little and he patted Fliss clumsily on the shoulders.

“You’re a brick, Fliss.”

She recovered herself quickly and looked up, brushing her hair back, her burst of anger seeming quite spent, a wan humor asserting itself.

“There was much the same situation when I was born,” she said reflectively. “Do you suppose that child will have the same sentiments towards me that I have towards Mrs. Ellis? I forgot to tell you—it’s a girl.”

CHAPTER X

THE dawn brought confidence and no small feeling of triumph to all of them. The nurse, the Carrington specialist and Cecily’s mother all arrived and with the verdict of the trusted doctor that the baby was small but healthy and that Cecily was in no danger, they all began to enjoy the adventure in retrospect. Cecily could not be moved for at least ten days and the nurse tried to arrange the room as pleasantly and conveniently as possible, rather arousing a smoldering ire in Mrs. Olson until Dick, taking her aside, slipped a check into her hand of sufficient size to feed and clothe the little Olsons for the winter. After that the nurse had things her own way. Much of Cecily’s equipment had been brought already and her stepfather arrived later with a great bunch of roses that towered above Mrs. Olson’s best white water pitcher. It was obviously impossible for them all to stay in Allenby. Mrs. Warner took a room at a neighbor’s house, the nurse stayed with Cecily on a camp bed imported from Carrington, and everything became quickly ordered and made comfortable by the ease of wealth. But the shock, the healthy encounter with an experience which is no respecter of wealth and convenience, was to remain in the minds of each of the four participants for a long time.

Matthew was to take Fliss back to Carrington in the afternoon, for Dick refused to stir for another twenty-four hours. Sleeping in the kitchen with Mr. Olson meant nothing to him, he declared. So he stayed. The nurse was keeping Cecily very quiet, but she let the departing adventurers in for a few moments. Matthew saw first the big clothes basket on a chair by the window and then Cecily, with her hair braided tightly back and dark circles under her eyes. For an instant he looked from one to the other, obviously unable to speak.

“Take a look at my daughter,” said Cecily.

Matthew obeyed. Then he came over to the bedside and looked at Cecily, laying a nervous, strangely hot hand on hers.

“It’s a shame I got you into all this.”

“It’s worked out all right and it wasn’t your fault at all. I insisted on coming. The baby’s healthy and I’m strong—and the experience! You’ve told me I lacked experience and that my life was cushioned. Well, this wasn’t cushioned.”

“God knows it wasn’t.”

The girls looked at each other and Cecily suddenly felt her eyes fill with tears.

“I’ll never forget your seeing me through, Fliss. Never.”

Fliss bent over her and kissed her. She had passed the stage of her first emotion and was ready to recognize what a lucky incident the whole thing had been for her. Mrs. Warner had said the same thing that Cecily had just said. She was established in that family and she knew it. Now that Cecily was comfortable, that she was out of peril and surrounded by American Beauty roses, down comforters and in her own silk nightdress, Fliss could afford to take account of stock and see how her own had risen.

“Good-by, Cecily. When you get back to town I’ll be around to see you.”

“As soon as I get back,” Cecily pledged her.

“Take care of my foster daughter.”

There was an interesting moment—as Fliss crossed to the improvised cradle and stood looking down at the baby, an expression on her face which could mask no ulterior motive. The queer little thing that she had seen come into the world, struggling, seemed to make her feel shaken.

“Come on, Matthew, Cecily’s tired and we must hurry.”

It was a strange convalescence and perhaps an unusually healthy one, for there was no excitement and a great deal of quiet. The brunt of the inconvenience now fell on the nurse and Cecily had only to lie for long, silent hours, thinking over the whole wonderful event. She listened to the voices of the children outside her window, marveling that they had been born just as her child was born, and the roots of that solidarity of motherhood which all mothers feel for each other began to grow in her. She had come to that stage in marriage when the mysteries are shared, not with one other individual, but with a whole sex. Dimly the great expansiveness of motherhood began to dawn upon her mind.

All this expressed itself not only in her dreaming, but in her curiosity. She plied the nurse with questions. Physiology and psychology of other mothers fascinated her. The cases of the nurse, in so far as she would talk about them, were an endless source of interest. Dick joined her in her interest. Step by step they went over the story of the birth again and again. But then Dick left it and went to town, carrying with him the consciousness of his fatherhood, to be sure, but temporarily overlaying that interest with business and masculine contact. Cecily lay in bed and thought and talked on about women and mothers. She had not the slightest intention of playing upon her illness. She was quick to feel her energy coming back and rejoiced in it. There was not a suggestion of querulousness in her manner. That she took the luxury and the petting which surrounded her as things natural to her was not to be wondered at.

But there was a great deal of praising and petting, and while Dick was triumphant he was also surrounded by an atmosphere that made him feel vaguely apologetic for having to undergo so little inconvenience himself. He was ready enough to admit the apparent unfairness of the situation. Not that it had ever struck him before. If he had considered it at all before his marriage he would have said that women had to have children, but men had to rustle to support them and called it fair enough. In the face of his personal situation it seemed different. Cecily, frail and pitiable, seemed indeed to be bearing the heavy end.

It was Fliss who got a real sociological slant on the situation. She visited Cecily’s house before Cecily returned to Carrington, ostensibly to return a scarf which she had borrowed of Cecily for the eventful ride, but really to see and have a gossip with Ellen. Ellen was scrupulous. She would not join Fliss in the living-room and Fliss was compelled to sit in Cecily’s room while Ellen polished the furniture. Ellen was very much excited about all that had happened—a little disappointed at not having been nearer the center of action herself, but determined to make up for that by making Cecily’s homecoming as comfortable as possible. The baby having been born, the pink afghan had been hastened to completion and now lay in state on the foot of the crib.

“Poor Mrs. Harrison,” said Ellen, “she’s been through a lot, hasn’t she?”

Fliss shrugged her shoulders in impatience. “You all make me sick,” she said; “she hasn’t been through more than any other woman, has she?”

But she gave Ellen no chance to answer.

“She had a bad time for twenty-four hours—no, about twelve hours. And for that the whole town sits back and gasps with pity, because it’s Cecily—Cecily who’s been used to ‘everything.’ What got on my nerves was to see what all women had to suffer. But I don’t see that Cecily hasn’t got it so much easier than most people that she doesn’t need my pity or any one else’s. Nurses and doctors and silk quilts and embroidered layettes take a good deal of sting out of having babies, I should think. And Dick acting as if he ought to grovel in the earth because his wife presented him with a baby! I dropped in to see May Robinson on the way here to-day. She’s expecting another and doing her own housework. And her husband is on the road and only gets home for week ends. May isn’t being so darn coddled. She’s worried sick about how they’re going to afford the new one. I can’t say that I’m especially sorry for Cecily.”

Ellen gave the dressing table a last flourishing polish and took refuge in her usual philosophy.

“Well, that’s how things are,” she said. “Some people have more than others. But that’s no reason why you can’t be sorry for a pretty young girl like Mrs. Harrison having a thing like that happen when she’s miles away from home and help and all.”

“She had me,” grinned Fliss, and went on with a brief recital of what she and Mrs. Olson had done. Ellen listened with interest, although with some embarrassment.

“It was certainly fine of you, Fliss.”

“Fine nothing. It was the luckiest thing that ever came my way.”

Ellen looked her question.

“Don’t you see how solid it makes me with the Harrisons? It gives me a real connection. Cecily never will forget a single thing that happened, and among other things she probably won’t forget that I was the first person to hold her baby. Yes—the greatest luck I ever had, for there’s more than that to it. Matthew Allenby knows I’m on earth at last. Of course, it’s Cecily he’s gone on, but because he thinks I was useful for once—especially to the angelic Cecily—he actually noticed me as if I were more than a mechanical toy. And he’s quite a person, Ellen!”

Ellen did not answer and Fliss began to wander around the room looking at things. She opened Cecily’s wardrobe and pushed dress after dress along the sliding rod in envious review.

“Lord, what it must be to be rich,” she sighed, “what fun—what fun!”

“Come,” said Ellen, “come out in the kitchen and I’ll fix you a bit of lunch. You need it,” she added sagely. “You’re always sort of longing when you’re hungry.”

Fliss laughed and caught her cousin around the waist, waltzing her about ecstatically.

“You old darling—wait till I am rich and see what I’ll do for you.”

“Look out—Mrs. Harrison’s rugs,” cautioned Ellen.

CHAPTER XI

THE baby changed from a novelty into a treasure; to the period of ecstatic delight there succeeded the scientific business of infant care. The expert nurse having brought her patient back to Carrington and attended her there until she was full of renewed energy, left and Cecily took charge of her own baby. There was a nursemaid during the daytime, but at night when the sudden, piercing little cry sounded from the next room it was Cecily herself who went to find out whether it was hunger or cold that caused it. The responsibility matured her as responsibility matures the average woman. It tired her physically and numbed her mind a little.

“You mustn’t let your cradle become an obsession,” said her mother.

“Of course not. I wouldn’t let myself get too absorbed. It wouldn’t be fair to Dick,” said Cecily, rather automatically.

“I wonder if you give Dick quite the attention you used to?”

Cecily looked up, surprised.

“It’s very common,” said her mother easily, “to think too much about the baby and too little about the husband at this time. I hope I don’t seem intrusive, darling, but you stay at home rather a lot.”

“I have to get back to the baby, you see, if I do go out.”

“The baby is six months old, now. You and Dick ought to go away for a vacation. I’ll stay here and get a trained nurse for the baby.”

Cecily did not take her up, but she watched Dick that night at dinner. They did not seem to talk as much as they used to—except about Dorothea. She crossed over to his place and put her hand softly under his chin.

“Do I neglect you, Dick, dear—for the baby?”

“Do I look neglected?” countered Dick. “Nonsense. Don’t talk like a problem play. Besides, how could you neglect me for Dorothea? She’s me, isn’t she?” And he smiled engagingly as only Dick could smile. “If I catch you neglecting me, you’ll hear from me. Who brought this on? Who’ve you been talking to?”

“Nobody. Mother just suggested that I might be a bit too concentrated. She wanted me to go away and leave her in charge.”

“Good idea. I think I could do it next month—if we aren’t going to war.”

“We must wait until after Christmas,” demurred Cecily.

But after Christmas they did not go at once. In January Cecily paid a secret visit to her doctor. When she came home she sat down in her straightest living-room chair and looked about her a little queerly. She was still sitting there half an hour later when Dick came home.

“Well,” said Dick, “how’s my family?”

Cecily made a feeble little joke, which showed considerable progress in adjustment.

“Increasing,” she said, with a catch in her voice.

Dick wheeled around.

“Why, Cecily,—why, you don’t mean we’re going to have another!”

She nodded at him, a medley of expressions on her face, all of them overlaid with that wondering question as to how he would take it.

“You’re sure?”

“Quite.”

They sat down and held each other rather tightly. Responsibilities, more than toys, more than novelties, spread before them. Then like a clear ray of light the same thought came to both of them.

“They’ll be great companions for each other.”

“I was thinking about that.”

Fliss came in that night. There was more than usual radiance in her face. She dashed up for a visit to the nursery, down again to show Dick a new dance step and Cecily felt a little wistful as she watched her. Waiting—illness—the stretch looked very long. She wondered what Fliss would say if she knew.

But Fliss was full of herself and in no mood to inspire confidences. “Why the million-dollar mood?” asked Dick.

Fliss laughed and flushed a little. “I’ve had something happen to me—something nice.”

“Secret? Tell us,” begged Cecily. “I want to hear something pleasant.”

“It’s a real thrill. I’m engaged to be married. I’m to be married next month.”

“Who?”

Fliss had never looked more charming, more provocative. She dangled a gay little slipper from her toes and looked at them half teasingly.

“You’d never guess. A real high-brow. What he’ll ever do with me I don’t know. But he can’t get away now.” And then, worked up to her climax, “I told him I was going to tell you when he wasn’t around—I wanted the fun. It’s Matthew.”

“Well, isn’t that great!” said Dick, with the sincerest congratulation for Fliss and a more than faint wonder in his tone. But Fliss, if she analyzed his tone at all, was not disturbed. She was looking at Cecily.

Over Cecily’s first shock of surprise there clouded a sense of relinquishment, unacknowledged. Deliberately she made herself pleased.

“It’s wonderful.” And, more courteous than Dick, she added, “I’m awfully glad for Matthew.”

Possibly she was not quite quick enough to say it. A little flash lit up Fliss’s brilliant face and she countered with quick frankness. “I get a lot more out of it than Matthew, but he’ll get something, according to my lights, and I may make him happier than people will expect. And,” most laughingly, “we can’t all be perfect Cecilys. And you were taken.”

If Cecily thought the remark based on more than flippancy she gave no sign. When Matthew and Fliss came to see them a few days later and he was alone with Cecily for a few moments she was all congratulation.

“She’ll keep you young, Matthew. She’s always so gay. I can see Dick brighten up whenever she comes in until I’m almost jealous. All men like her.”

“Is that a recommendation for a wife?” he asked a little gravely.

“Don’t be foolish. You know that I mean you’ll be very happy.”

“I will be happy,” he answered. “I am happy.” He paused and looked at her intently. “I am glad that I am going to be married to Fliss and I am glad that you are alive. We take what we can get of happiness.”

When he had gone she did not analyze his words. She did not want to. She put the thought of them aside, her thoughts turning to the things that were always in her mind now. The new baby, and was there going to be a war?

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER XII

FLISS—still Fliss despite the dignity of the name of Allenby—was, after two years, still attracting attention. She reacted to it exactly as she had reacted to her own popularity at the High School dances. It enhanced every sparkling quality.

She had been busy. After her marriage, enforcedly quiet because it would never do to draw unnecessary attention to the social unimportance of her family, she and Matthew had gone traveling. They had had a good time. She hung on his arm and petted him; she begged for things and was enthusiastically grateful for them when he gave them to her. She kept him laughing and herself in constant good temper and in every fresh extravagance of silk or fur or velvet she was prettier than before. Matthew laughed at her and let her pet him and expanded. He called her a little crook and she admitted it, but he never had the bad taste to ask her if she would have married him if he had been poor. They were frank with each other, but never moved much below the easy surface of things. Never had Matthew really played before, and under her skillful leadership he learned a good deal about play. He learned the fun of extravagance. His mother had not been a person to accept money or presents easily. Fliss rose resplendent from a shower of them. And from the depths of her little savage heart she was grateful for presents, for relief from sordidness; and grateful most of all for the sheer content with the life he made possible.

“Don’t we have fun?” she would say in her strongest italics, every now and then, with a swift little caress that was perfectly honest in its affection as far as it went.

“We do,” he would acknowledge with smiling, amused understanding—more than that, with pleasure.

He had his second glimpse of his wife’s remarkable adaptability when they visited his mother. His mother had been duly written of his marriage, had duly written to say she expected to see them while they were on their wedding trip, and, moved by some impulse, Matthew had deliberately sandwiched a week in the little Indiana town between the more brilliant points on their itinerary. They arrived in Peachtree about nightfall, stepping from the jumpy local train to a station platform dripping with rain and lit only by the dingy glow from a quick lunch counter window. Fliss, well acclimated by this time to waiting red-caps and taxis, looked about her and then at Matthew with amusement.

“You are completely out of the picture,” said Matthew. “You look shockingly resplendent up against Peachtree. Don’t look about you for cabs; there are no cabs. No one needs cabs here.”

His mother rounded the corner of the station house, driving her umbrella before her. Matthew seemed to recognize her by the swish of her skirts in the rain. He took her umbrella and kissed her gravely.

“Good boy,” she said. “Is this Florence?”

Fliss reached half way up on Mrs. Allenby’s spare, tall form. She was silhouetted for a moment against the black dress of the older woman. Then Mrs. Allenby inspected the bags.

“Dave Johnson can bring up your grips. You can’t manage the four of them in this rain, even if it is only a step.”

They left the bags and Fliss, as they went along together, had a consciousness of wooden sidewalks in indifferent repair, of the stillness of a country village after the train has gone through, of a town gone to bed unreasonably early.

Up a little path which crunched under their feet, on a tiny porch where a rocking chair stood grotesquely upside down so that its seat might be protected from the rain, through a low door. Matthew struck a match and, moving familiarly in the darkness, lit a lamp. They were in the parlor.

Fliss had known poverty and shabbiness. This was different from anything she had ever known. It was the acme of thrift, of cleanliness, of economy and respectability, and pride. The very glow in the Franklin stove, coming through the isinglass, was stiff and correct. The furniture, the prideful Brussels rug with its over-pink central cluster of roses was clean to extremity. The tidies on the chair backs were straight. The Bible, flanked by an imposing parlor table volume, margined the white cover on the center table. The young Mrs. Allenby, standing in the midst of the intensity of order, felt as exotic and out of place as she looked. But her mother-in-law, quickly divested of coat and hat, was on her own ground. She gave Fliss a moment to gain her impression and then led her upstairs to a bedroom which carried out the spirit of the parlor. Fliss looked dubiously at the white crocheted bedspread so perfectly wrinkleless, at the smooth chair tidies and then at Matthew.

“If I should soil something!” she exclaimed in mock terror. “I shall die if I do, Matthew! Where did your mother keep you when you were home? Not in here?”

“No, I slept in the back room. Can you make yourself comfortable?”

“Well, I’m frightened.”

“Little liar! I want you to behave yourself.”

“Behave? I’m a model of decorum. But, oh, for a gingham dress! How long are we going to stay—how long will your mother keep me?”

“A week is about the shortest.”

“Well,” sighed Fliss, inspecting her face in the mirror, “this mirror makes humps in my face, but I’d do a lot for you, Matthew. If your mother can stand me—all right, down we go.”

The supper was laid in the tiny dining-room off the living-room. A polished china lamp in the middle of the table was the centerpiece, and the dishes and linen were as spotless as everything else. Matthew and his mother talked casually about local gossip and Fliss watched Matthew, totally unfamiliar in this aspect, in his pleasant interest in the lives of the grocer, the new druggist and the business of the church. Mrs. Allenby, it seemed, was religious. Fliss decided, as she listened to her mother-in-law, that Matthew’s business ability must have come from his mother. She faced a picture of Matthew’s father, hanging over the low door. It was an enlarged photograph, done in cruel colors, but even the glassy blue which the enlarger had given to the eyes of Mr. Allenby, senior, could not disguise the fact that their expression was mild and guileless. Perhaps he, too, had an undeveloped taste for French poetry.

“Have you furnished your house?” asked Mrs. Allenby.

“We aren’t going to take a house at once. There’s an apartment hotel where we shall live for a while.”

“Hotel?”

“It’s not a traveler’s hotel, mother,” said Matthew. “It is a place where the apartments are furnished and there is a common dining-room where you can take your meals if you like.”

“Later we can find a house,” supplied Fliss, “but rents are high.”

“I should think you’d buy a house, now that you’re well off, Matthew.” The sharp, questioning eyes of the old lady flashed from her son to his wife. “Don’t you like housekeeping, Florence?”

“I don’t know a thing about it,” said Fliss, with her usual frankness. She seemed to have hit the right note with Matthew’s mother.

“Well, most girls don’t until they marry. But after you’re married, it comes natural—like taking care of children.”

There was no embarrassment in the face of her daughter-in-law, only a trace of distaste. She was silent, and the older woman did not pursue the subject. They talked of the price of food and of Mrs. Allenby’s gooseberry jam. Then Matthew smoked in the little parlor and Fliss insisted, in the human way she could, upon swathing her broadcloth suit with one of Mrs. Allenby’s aprons and helping with the dishes. Mrs. Allenby eyed her a little grimly as Fliss stacked the dishes one on top of the other without scraping off the left-over food, and Fliss caught the look.

“I’m a shock as a daughter-in-law,” she said flippantly, and yet without impudence.

“Well,” answered Mrs. Allenby, “I might not have picked you out for Matthew, but he might have done a lot worse. You’re pretty and a man likes a pretty woman. I always wished I’d been prettier. Matthew’s father was a gentleman, but he did like pretty things. And then you’re honest with my boy.”

“I am honest; I’ll always be honest. I promise you, Mrs. Allenby. I’m silly and I haven’t much brains and I suppose you can see that in most ways I’m not in Matthew’s class, but I’m going to try to give him a good time and I’m honest with him.”

She meant more than that, but it was hard to say and, after all, unnecessary. Mrs. Allenby gave her a little approbative tap on the shoulder.

“Good girl,” she said. “Don’t you worry. I can see things. It isn’t always the useful woman a man likes. I can see you aren’t much for housekeeping—and babies. Some women aren’t. But just so as you make him happy”—she paused and finished on a beautifully soft note—“he’s a lovely boy.”

It was rarely that Fliss felt that some one understood her. She felt it now. But both of them being very practical and unsentimental, they carried the discussion no further. Mrs. Allenby cloaked herself in her sharp efficiency and Fliss airily polished the plates. She told Matthew that night that she was going to get on well with his mother. It was then that he told her that she was adaptable.

“I shall never forget how you acted that night Cecily’s baby was born. That was the first time I guessed how adaptable you were.”

“That was a funny time,” said Fliss, somewhat coldly.

They stayed a week with Mrs. Allenby and by the time they left Fliss had begun to be very jocose and free with her mother-in-law. She showed her how she was teaching Matthew to dance, she rendered popular vaudeville songs on the wheezy old piano, she exhibited all her trousseau lingerie to the old lady with a running fire of absurd comment, and tried to bestow a lace trimmed boudoir cap upon her.

Then they left Peachtree for Chicago and spent a few weeks there, Matthew doing business while Fliss soaked her pagan soul in the luxury of hotels. Fliss loved hotels, their over-deep porcelain baths and the little breakfast tables with shiny silvered dishes and wasteful expanses of white linen, always immaculate. She liked having nothing to do with the machinery of her comfort, to have a telephone at her bedside which could whisk servitors out of space to do her bidding. And she liked the great hotel lounges and parlors, with their heavy commercialized luxury of velvet and gilt, their desks with low lights at which one might sit and write letters while engaging the attention of any good-looking men who might be passing. Padded corridors, handsome men and luxurious women, dining-rooms pompous with elaborate service, the ceaseless flow of people who might be coming from anything and going anywhere—it all completely captured that roving spirit of excitement which was Fliss’s imagination. She watched with ecstasy, copying here, adapting there, learning every minute.

The nervousness of buying which always accompanies a small, overworked purse, had disappeared. Fliss had money and she bought with glory, with a certain amount of dignity and restraint too. She passed, as cheap and tawdry, things which she had formerly coveted, but she penetrated the French millinery shops, the dressmaking establishments with a new air, head held high, demanding service like a barbaric princess. It seemed to her that all she had needed to give her complete content was a husband and money. She had no discontents now. She sparkled and glowed and enjoyed from morning until night.

The glow was at its best when they returned to Carrington, hurried by the long-pending declaration of war with Germany. From the apartment hotel, where Matthew had rented a friend’s suite temporarily, Fliss dashed up to see her mother. She knew exactly how she meant to deal with her mother. Mrs. Horton must not obtrude or be tedious, and if she were not she would share in Fliss’s good fortune. She entered the dreary little flat, infinitely more dreary after the glories of the wedding trip. Her mother came to meet her, kissing her affectionately and admiringly.

“I would have come to the train if you hadn’t especially said you didn’t want me to, Flissy.”

“We got in too late. It was nearly midnight and we were too tired to talk.”

Her mother surveyed her with an unconfident look as if not sure of the propriety of her own interest.

“Is everything going nicely, dearie?” she ventured.

“Of course. I had the time of my life. Such fun!” Her glance swept the tawdry walls and furnishings. “I never knew there were such lovely things in the world as I’ve seen.”

“And how is Matthew?”

“Matthew is a darling. He gives me everything, mother. Of course, he’s got it to give, but he’s such a dear about it. Oh, you just watch me make this town sit up and take notice. Mrs. Matthew Allenby! This fur alone cost Matthew a cool eight hundred. And you should see the things he bought me in Chicago.”

“Are you going to live in the hotel?”

“Just until I look around. I want a place of my own, but I don’t want to make any mistakes. There’s a lot to plan and you and father must come to see us. By the way”—and here she was for once a trifle shamefaced—“I want you to take this. Buy yourself a suit—no, I’ll come with you—and a fur (it should be mink, I think).”

“No, Flissy, you spend it on yourself.”

“I’ve gobs of money, mother, and it would help me if you fussed up a bit. I’ll want you and dad for dinner, and you see I want you to look nice.” So it was settled and the principle established. Fliss dressed her mother handsomely, and upon that rather protesting lay figure descended certain duties of chaperonage, occasional appearance with Fliss, so that no story could be started regarding Fliss’s neglect of her parents. She regulated her mother’s appearances, painted in a background. Mrs. Horton was obviously to the world a quiet woman of no social pretensions who had no worse fault than obscurity, and that was no doubt traceable to lack of money. Plain, but nice. In suppressing her parents Fliss would have done herself harm. Bringing them forward in her seemingly ingenuous, but actually deliberate way, she helped herself, and gave them a certain amount of uncomfortable pleasure.

But she gave her mother no intimacy. At first Mrs. Horton took advantage of her daughter’s married state to make several leading statements about men and matrimony and was even curious as to the possible plans for a baby. But Fliss repressed such attempts at intimacy ruthlessly. It became very apparent to her mother that as far as Fliss had planned it there were to be no grandchildren, and other domestic confidences were never made.

Fliss established herself and Matthew, after a few months in a hotel, in a house. There had been a few bad weeks when Matthew had told her he was going into the army and she had been compelled to look up the advantages of being left alone so soon after her marriage. But it had come out all right. Matthew was rejected on examination. Some leaky, treacherous valve in his heart cheated him out of his war service. That, coupled with his age, put him out of the running, and a little depressed, but quite controlled, he had accepted as his personal war service the chairmanship of the Carrington draft board. He cautioned Fliss about the propriety of economy, but he gave her her house. It was a very new house and its only sins were its newness and its rather elaborate interior decoration. Fliss had not quite learned the restraint of the inner circles of the wealthy. She could imitate them in lavishness, but to pin herself down, hold herself in—that took more careful discipline. Her house was a bit too complete and it showed that Fliss carried nothing over from the past. There was none of her mother’s furniture which Fliss could use and though she had coveted some of the things in Matthew’s rooms, she found to her dismay that she was not to be allowed to ransack his bachelor apartments. In regard to those Matthew told Fliss that he thought he would keep the furniture for his rooms on the third floor of the new house.

“Of course I have the office, but that is crowded and noisy and impossible to get to after the elevator stops running nights, unless I want to die of heart failure after the tenth flight of stairs. I think I’d like a place where I could study a bit by myself now and then. Let me have my sanctuary upstairs and then when you are entertaining people I don’t care about or too many of them I’ll sneak off there and not bother you.”

Fliss had that divine gift of being able to leave a man alone. She puckered her brow a bit, sized up the fact that his wish was very real, and agreed.

“You are a very satisfactory person to have married,” he finished.

“Do you like this place at all?” asked Fliss, looking around her breakfast-room with its old blue curtains, painted furniture and long windows at which two canaries sang charmingly.

“I like it a lot. I like to charm my eyes with it. It suits you exactly, but it’s young and there may be times when I’ll feel my age. Then the old furniture will rest me. Understand?”

“Yes,” said Fliss, quite truthfully.

So it was arranged. And sometimes when the crowd of people who flocked to Fliss’s house—an ever-increasing crowd, whether they came for Red Cross work or for amusement—were too noisy or too heterogeneous for Matthew’s taste, he undoubtedly found it sanctuary indeed. It kept him from getting tired of his home, too, kept him able to appreciate its color, its spirit, its accord with a gay, fashionable time. With all these things it was also always comfortable. Fliss could not cook, but she had discretion enough to hire a good cook, to spare no expense on her table, even though she conformed to war regulations outwardly, to have a housemaid who knew how to keep bedrooms fresh and clean and sweet smelling. Matthew’s home was orderly; he was subject to no discomforts and he had good food, as well as a wife who carried no flavor of the domestic side of living around with her. Matthew used to like to come into her room, morning or night, and see her, elaborate in negligees, always pretty, always light, always with a smile for him. He called her a good investment and he never criticized her expenditures.

Matthew came first. Fliss was thoroughly honest about that. She attended to his wants with ungrudging pleasure. Then came her next interest, the business that intrigued her greatly and aroused less kindliness and perhaps a slight feeling of revenge—establishing her position in Carrington society.

It was not nearly enough to be counted smart and fashionable by the public who read the society columns and sighed for them. Fliss could gain that end easily enough, but she wanted to be genuinely accepted by the inner circles as well—to have none of the finer lines of distinction drawn against her. She was armed with a thorough knowledge of the city. She knew who was merely rich and who combined riches with social standing approved not only in Carrington, but in New York, Florida, California. In those rather cruel years between her school and her marriage she had studied little else except the shadings of people’s importance. That was to stand her in good stead now, as was her consciousness of her own best weapons in any attack on social citadels—her frankness, her power of deference and her brilliance of manner.

She gave little parties that were very gay and bright and somehow different from other people’s little parties—probably because Fliss gave individual attention to each of her guests, in selection and entertainment. She struck the note between the amusing and the risqué and never wavered as she held it. People responded by forgetting that Fliss Allenby had anything to gain by playing her social game well, having too good a time in her company to keep recalling that her steps were premeditated.

To gain an end, she was willing to be bored indefinitely. She went to the war time charitable affairs of older women, if they were important enough, and made a bright spot of color in the company, always deferential to the elder ladies, a little simple in her talk (she avoided pretense of intellectuality like the plague and played up a certain ingenuousness of ignorance that aroused the protective, educative instinct in others). She gave Matthew’s money lavishly. She was backed by his real importance and the solidity of his war work. Also she was willing to spend any amount of time on planning her clothes. She was always different from every one else, never fading into the inconspicuous, but always managing to avoid being called cheap or tawdry, even when, like every one else, she made a fashion of economy.

In her own way she was soon unassailable. She became a figure on the social lists. She became important. Then, to crown her luck, just as the war was beginning to make Matthew always unsmiling, always worried; just as she was beginning to see that the world was veering shockingly towards pain and horror—the war was over suddenly. In the reaction from the seriousness, the reaction shared largely by people who had suffered from no strain, Fliss knew how to lead. She led. After more than two years of marriage she was still a person to brighten the public eye with interest. Matthew had taken her traveling several times and it had improved her confidence. She knew pretty largely now what people were talking about when they referred to things they had seen and places they had been outside of Carrington.

Forced out of the City Club one October day by an influx of visiting salesmen come to some convention, Dick Harrison met Fliss at the Lennox restaurant. It occurred to him as he nodded to her that he had not seen much of her lately and, taking a second look which was really due the green feathered turban which closed so piquantly down on her black fringe of hair, he saw that she was apparently alone and crossed at once to sit opposite her. She told him that she was alone and only down town at all because she had been delayed in her shopping.

“It’s an awfully busy week. There’s such a lot going on that if I don’t get my shopping done to-day I’ll not have another chance.”

“Is it awfully busy?”

“Don’t you really know, Dick?” She rattled off a list of functions to him. “Where are you and Cecily anyway these days? Aren’t you just a bit too domestic?”

“With three babies you’re apt to be a bit domestic. You haven’t any, have you, Fliss?”

Fliss laughed at his thrust. “Don’t be nasty, Dick. You know well I haven’t. You and Cecily have probably decided I’m a vicious wretch because I haven’t. People with children are always so much holier-than-thou to those who haven’t. They insist not only on the fun of having them, but on making the world unpleasant for the rest of us because we aren’t sharing the fun. Isn’t it a curious attitude?”

Fliss was decidedly more sophisticated.

“How’s Cecily?”

“Busy—struggling with servants.”

“Has she a lot of trouble?”

“Some. Of course we always have the faithful Ellen, but it isn’t nearly enough.”

“I remember Ellen,” said Fliss.

“She’s a regular member of the family now.”

He ordered his lunch and Fliss, eating hers slowly so that he could catch up, contemplated him gravely.

“You haven’t been in my house for six months,” she said.

“My Lord, Cecily’s baby’s only three months old. We haven’t been able to go about.”

“I know, but sometimes you surely could. When you and Matthew got so tied up with that mining business last winter I supposed it meant seeing a lot more of you. Instead it’s been less and less.”

“Well, Cecily and I are going through the baby phase now.”

“I know—but isn’t it possible that you are overdoing it?” Dick flushed a little, and Fliss leapt over his embarrassment. “It’s really bad for Cecily to be so tied down, you know.”

“How can she help it?”

“She should help it for her own sake. Don’t tell her I said so. It’s impudent enough to say it to you. Cecily has come to think I’m anathema.”

“What nonsense!”

“Truly. It began during war time. She couldn’t take the things I was doing seriously. Well, some of them weren’t too serious, but somebody had to do the cheering up! And now that the mess is all over she thinks we still ought to be long-faced. I won’t! I think we’re in for a good time. It isn’t going to help any of the poor boys who got theirs to be gloomy now.”

“How do you know?” asked Dick, teasingly, lighting his cigarette.

Fliss leaned on two unwrinkled elbows and looked at him. “Look here, Dick, if you’d been killed over there——”

“Instead of hanging around on this side nearly killing myself.”

“Poor Dick! It was rotten luck. But it wasn’t your fault they wouldn’t send you over. Or maybe it was; you were too useful on this side. But listen! If you had gone over and been killed do you think your soul would still be hanging around glooming because a few people were trying to amuse themselves? You would not!”

“I would not!” grinned Dick cheerfully.

“That’s what I told Cecily once. Cecily is in grave danger of getting too serious. With all those babies——”

“Don’t over-count, now.”

“Oh, Dick!” said Fliss, patting his hand ever so lightly with her slim glove. “Come on and play once in a while! You really mustn’t drop us, Dick, even if I am frivolous. For Matthew’s sake you ought to stand by. He considers you and Cecily the high spots in our whole list of friends.”

“Oh, I see Matthew every day,” protested Dick.

“I suppose you do, but Matthew doesn’t see Cecily and he misses it when he doesn’t. He says so. He likes to talk to her. I’ve always been jealous of her and rather glad you saw her first.”

“Don’t be foolish, Fliss.”

“As you say. Well, it’s been nice to see you. No, I must pay for my own lunch. It makes our lunching together so definitely respectable.”

It ran through Dick’s mind that afternoon at intervals that perhaps he and Cecily were getting a bit too domestic. He decided to take the matter up with her. There had been a time, immediately after his disappointing war service—a service which had kept him from going overseas because he was found to be immensely useful in training camps on his own side of the ocean—when Dick had felt like plunging into society a bit more deeply than he had ever done since his marriage; when the allurement of light talk and loose manners had been strong for a few months.

But the imminent coming of their third child had been announced and Cecily herself was too thoroughly out of sympathy with moods of lightness to even have him suggest that she join in them. She herself had been willing to make any necessary sacrifice during the war. She had waited, during the year and a half when the United States was at war, to see Dick go at any moment to France and to death. She had maintained herself in a continual state of sacrifice. The evils of the world and the crusading spirit had pressed upon her. That she had not been called upon for personal sacrifice did not mean that she could alter the attitude in which she was ready for sacrifice. And the seriousness of childbearing again had weighed her down. “Yes,” thought Dick, “we’re getting a bit heavy.”

The impression lasted until he went into his house that night and then he felt suddenly absurd. Upstairs he could hear the sounds of the babies being put to bed. Around him everything was orderly and still, waiting for him. It was comfortable and quiet and the sense of possession which so often came over him as he entered his home quite destroyed that vague feeling that he and Cecily weren’t quite getting all they might be getting out of things. And a sense of shame at even this slight disloyalty to all she had done to make him happy put extra devotion into his greeting of her.

She came down the stairs a little abstractedly. In two years she seemed, like Fliss, to have changed little—very pretty, very young still—only where the magnetism of Fliss had increased, Cecily’s had perhaps somewhat diminished. The constant day by day responsibility of caring for her babies had weighted her manner. Her mind was on the business of being a mother and a housekeeper—not on Dick, even when she kissed him.

“They are all quiet now,” she said. “If you must go up, don’t disturb them, will you?”

“No,” he promised. “Did the new housemaid come?”

“Yes, she’s here. I don’t think she’s going to be very good, though.”

“Don’t be critical, if she’s just here.”

Dick went past the nursery door, looking in to call to the two older children, then to Cecily’s room to see the new baby, so pink and well-cared for in its bassinet. Finally he went to his own room. He felt a little lonesome and would have been amazed if he had analyzed his feelings far enough to know what it was that he felt. But that was it. He wanted to be singled out for attention, and all he was getting was general care.

Cecily and Ellen were in quiet conference when he went down. They were talking in the hall about the merits of the new housemaid. He gathered that they were very disparaging and felt that their standards were over-high.

“I had lunch with Fliss Horton to-day—Fliss Allenby, I mean,” he told Cecily when she faced him as usual over the pleasant table.

“Lunch with Fliss? How did that happen?”

“I ran into her at the Lennox Restaurant. The Club was crowded and I went there at noon. She was kicking about not seeing more of us. Rattled off a bunch of talk about this and that engagement she had for this week. Are we asked to the things that go on—the Harris’s reception and this big dance Leonard Pollen is pulling off?”

“Of course we are. I don’t bother to show you the cards because we decided that we couldn’t do that sort of thing now.”

“Fliss said that she thought we were getting too domestic.”

“Fliss would think so.”

“Did you and Fliss ever quarrel?”

“Why, no, Dick. Why?”

“I just wondered, after she called it to my attention, why we hadn’t seen them in a long while. Not that I wanted to especially,” he added unnecessarily.

“We haven’t seen them for a long while. I miss Matthew, too. We used to have the finest talks. He had a way of making me think about things. I don’t know why I haven’t seen them, but I really haven’t seen anybody. For a while you know I was a bit down—low in my spirits, after——”

“Poor old Cecily. You certainly had every right”

“We mustn’t, Dick. It doesn’t sound as if we wanted the baby. I feel so guilty when I look at him to think I ever didn’t. Well, when I was feeling like that I didn’t want to see Fliss. She was so awfully gay—and so pretty and slim, you know. It used to irritate me. So I didn’t ask her here any more. And that meant not asking Matthew, of course, though I did miss him a lot.”

“Well, you’re slim enough now—and a lot prettier than Fliss ever was or could be—and with something to show for your trouble.”

“I know. But we don’t somehow jibe in ideals—Fliss and I. She likes that endless party-giving and party-going. I don’t think she wants any children.”

“Well,” said Dick, tolerantly, “she’s hardly the type.”

Cecily became a little rigid. “She hasn’t any right to dodge responsibilities. And I’m sure Matthew would like children. He is so fond of Dorothea and Leslie.”

“It’s hardly our business, dear.”

“Of course it isn’t. But I was fond of Fliss, especially after she was so fine when Dorothea was born. You know we did entertain for her and tried to make her know a few more people when she was just married, until we went to war. But she doesn’t seem to have much depth. Do you like a person who hasn’t more depth than Fliss?”

“I have all grades of liking,” pleaded Dick. “She’s amusing.”

“Well, if you feel so keenly about it,” said Cecily, “I’ll ask them to dinner next week. I’ll be glad to see Matthew and we’ll have an old time party.”

“Theater afterwards—maybe the Orpheum? We can get home early from there.”

“If you like,” assented Cecily.

Dick felt as if a point had been conceded to him when he was not in the least anxious for a personal concession. He went a few mental steps backward to see just where he had gone off the point, but it was an idle chase and he abandoned it after a moment.

Their evenings now had become rather of one pattern. They talked or read; Mrs. Warner came in; they went driving in the Warner’s big car or in Dick’s small one; they went to a moving picture or made a call on Dick’s mother—but always with the need of getting home early to the baby—always with the fear that Cecily was getting overtired hanging over them. Even their pleasures, their diversions, were never carefree. There were times when Dick felt that nurses and doctors and precautions about health had surrounded them rather unpleasantly long. But any such thoughts were always suppressed by the feeling that it was immensely selfish to feel any personal repressions when he had three healthy children and Cecily had been through so much. Three babies in four years! He had come to know and abhor the tone in which people, especially women, made that statement.

His talk seemed to bother Cecily. She brought it up again later in the evening when they had come home from a ride in the country and were giving the children a final inspection for the night. Dorothea and Leslie, in their white cribs, sturdy little bodies outlined under the miniature coverlets, were very pleasant to look at. It was a rite with Cecily—this last look—a reward for all the care they caused her and a further prayer for their health and safety.

“Don’t you think,” she said softly, as she stood looking at them, “that they are much more important than all the fun we might have had playing like Fliss?”

“You can’t compare two such dissimilar things,” said Dick, and then knew immediately that his remark had been true, but inadequate.

“But you’d sooner have these?”

He became a little irritated that she should have to ask such a question. Merely asking it assumed that he was hankering after things that he was not even wanting—that he wasn’t a devoted parent.

“Wouldn’t you?” he countered, rather cruelly.

Cecily merely looked at him in high reproach.

Then, because he felt a little conscience-smitten at the fact that Cecily was hurt, he followed her into her room and played with the little baby, who had waked up for his supper. He was a very gay father and ordinarily Cecily loved this mood and joined him in it, but to-night she was wrapped in seriousness.

“Of course they’ll be older soon, and then I can leave them to a nurse, but while I am still nursing the baby, I don’t see how I can manage a lot of society.”

“For Heaven’s sake, Cecily, don’t be so absurd. Who wants you to do society? I wouldn’t let you if you wanted to. Who could be happier than I am just as I am?”

Cecily sighed. “I know you’re happy,” she said, “and I’m happy. But this thing that came up to-night isn’t new. I hear it from other people—people who talk about my being ‘tied down’ and say I ought to enjoy myself while I’m young; people who say that they never see you about any more and talk about how you used to enjoy dancing and such things; women who say they don’t intend to have babies. You’ve no idea how they talk.”

“Haven’t I? Don’t I get the looks from the women who imply I’m some sort of monster because you have three children at your age?”

“I love the children. I couldn’t not have them.”

“Now, look here, Cecily, you’re tired out to-night. The worry of that new maid and the change in the baby’s feeding have left you flat. You just stop worrying about all this. We’ve been over it before, you know, lots of times, and we like our way of doing things. We may be a little out of fashion—we may not do things just as other people are doing them, but we are doing them the way we want to do them and that ought to satisfy us. I’m absolutely with you and I’m not hankering after any gay society. I do think we ought to get out as much as we can—for your sake—but while these kids are small and with the damned lack of servants—or lack of damned servants—we’ll just have to stay by the ship. And you mustn’t worry.”

All of which was very logical and straight. Only Cecily had developed a little taste for virtue and the praise of virtue and the fact that they had chosen their own way was not enough. She wanted to be reassured that they had chosen the higher and better way and Dick should not have qualified by saying that they should go out as much as possible. However, he had stated the case, and Cecily was reasonable enough to know it.

She lay awake rather late, pondering things—whether things weren’t a bit unjust, since Fliss and her kind (she wanted to pin the problem down to Fliss somehow) had such a good time without responsibilities—what men liked in women and why Fliss looked so well in flame colored things—whether Matthew wanted children and wasn’t secretly unhappy. Finally, catching herself in the midst of a picture of Fliss miserable in a childless old age while she herself—she laughed, proving that she had that sense of humor which her stepfather had questioned once, said aloud, “Can this be the fair Wendy?” and went to sleep.

CHAPTER XIII

IT was Alumnæ Day at the convent. Alumnæ Day meant a half holiday for the students, frosted cakes for “gouter” at four o’clock, the formal rooms and study halls and dormitories extra well cleaned and polished, the Chapel sweet with the fragrance of garden flowers sent by some graduate, the nuns a little more hurried than usual, though always composed, their immaculate ruffs whiter, if possible, than ever. Alumnæ Day brought with it a reception for the graduates who came to inspect the convent and to be present at the awarding of the gold medal for Composition and the silver one for French Verse, always given in October to members of the graduating class and worn proudly throughout the year. Benediction was especially beautiful with the extra candles on the altar and Mother Barante’s voice singing the “Tantum Ergo,” and many a graduate, mentally scarred from some of her contacts with life, often a little heart-sick at the failure of her ideals or broken by some sorrow, eased herself in memories of the peace of her schooldays. There was always a sale, too, of the handiwork of the girls and the money went to the support of the little charity school on the back of the convent grounds. Embroidered towels, pillow cases and such little luxuries were sold for ridiculously high sums and the graduates brought their friends to buy, too, and swell the fund for the charity school.

It was here that Cecily first met Fliss after the discussion with her husband and his rather disturbing lunch at the Lennox. By tacit consent Cecily and Dick had abandoned the plan for a “little dinner and the Orpheum” for the time being, both feeling a little fraid to reopen the discussion on points which might prove sensitive.

Madeline had brought Fliss. Madeline had attached herself to Fliss after Cecily’s comparative retirement and was quite one of the gayest people in that group which revolved around and with Mrs. Allenby. Agnes Hearding was there—tall, plainly dressed, a rather affected expression of continual high nobility on her face. Agatha Ward, too, and she had changed more than the others. Agatha had stopped writing verses, finding a more fruitful field in short stories, and she had been markedly successful for so young a person. Her first novel was on the press now. She bore the notoriety which surrounded her and all its attendant praise with considerable grace, a trifle conscious of making literary sentences perhaps, but not unpleasantly so.

The old, severely furnished convent made an austere background for the reception. Its proof that luxury was unnecessary to aristocracy was never more incontestable than on this day when the black robed nuns in the bare corridors and study rooms received the deference of beauty and wealth. No matter how powerful a graduate had become, no matter what she had excelled in, when she returned to the convent it was not to shed glory on her former surroundings, but to pay a tribute to the convent itself. So they all felt.

The groups gathered in the parlors and on the long wooden porch which overlooked the orchard. Cecily and her old group drew together again, extremely interested in each other as they always were.

“I haven’t seen you since we graduated, Cecily,” said Agnes. “I visited in Carrington once or twice, but you were always incapacitated. But I always try to make a point of coming for Alumnæ Day.”

“I come to the convent rather often, but I haven’t been to an Alumnæ Day before, since the first year.”

“That’s what it is to be a devoted mother. How are the children, Cecily?” asked Agatha.

“All very well; all very cunning.”

“Darling things,” said Madeline.

“But doesn’t it seem funny to think of Cecily with three children?” persisted Agnes.

“It’s very interesting,” said Agatha. “I think I’ll have to use you in a book, Cecily.”

“Type of the domesticated woman?”

“Dear, no—nothing so trite. No one deals with types any more, anyhow. It’s the vogue to be terrifically ‘inner.’ I’ll have to study you.”

“Don’t waste your time. Study Agnes.”

“I wouldn’t be interesting to modern fiction,” said Agnes, with some superiority. “I am a conservative, you know, and holding true to the things we learned in this dear old place.”

“What do you think the rest of us are doing, I wonder? It isn’t exactly immoral to write books or have babies, is it?”

“Or to be stupid?” put in Madeline. “Not to have any babies or any books—only a husband?”

“What I meant,” said Agnes, “is that simple religious ideals have gone out of fashion.”

“No, they’re coming in again.” Conscious that she was baiting Agnes a little, Agatha kept it up. “You’ll soon be fashionable, Agnes.”

“It’s possible that I may, after all, decide to enter the convent.”

That remark of Agnes did make a little ripple of excitement.

“Do you remember?” asked Cecily, looking about her, “the night we all sat in the parlor and discussed things? The night after the graduates’ retreat. Whether we should marry or not? Isn’t it funny that we are all doing just about what we thought we would do? Agatha writing, Madeline married and Agnes—I remember you said that if you really loved some one, Agnes, you’d marry. Now to enter——”

Agnes looked a little embarrassed and angry. “If I loved some one; but it is hard to find in these days a worthy person.”

They all knew then that Agnes must have been disappointed and no one pursued the subject.

“I remember that Cecily refused to commit herself,” said Agatha. “She didn’t know what she wanted to do.”

Cecily agreed a little dreamily, her eyes wandering off through the window.

“No, I didn’t know much about anything. As for knowing what I wanted to do I wonder if it isn’t all pretty much decided in advance for us; I wonder if we have much choice.”

“Here’s Mother Fénelon. Mother, Cecily has become a fatalist and Agnes is going to enter the convent.”

Mother Fénelon smiled. “Agnes going to enter?” she questioned. “Oh, no, dear Agnes hasn’t a vocation. She mustn’t joke about such things. And why is Cecily a fatalist?”

“She says we haven’t much choice in what happens to us.”

The nun turned and looked at Cecily. Under the beauty of Cecily’s face a kind of weariness showed for a moment, as she looked back into the eyes that reflected the peace of the cloister.

“Cecily was joking, too. You girls mustn’t talk this way. You’ll corrupt yourselves and each other.”

Fliss joined the circle.

“Having a reunion?” she said, as Madeline introduced her. “I’ve been wandering around, wishing I’d been educated here instead of in a noisy co-educational High School. Maybe sometimes I could talk to my husband if I had been brought up here. Where have you been keeping yourself, Cecily? I told Dick the other day that it was ages since I’d seen you.”

“He said he’d had lunch with you.”

“I hope he didn’t pretend he paid for my lunch.”

“No,” laughed Cecily. She always had a liking for Fliss when she saw her that her reason protested against. Every one liked to see Fliss around, especially with the new confidence which had replaced the impudence she had had before her marriage. “But he came home and told me that I didn’t go out enough and that he’d had lunch with you. I felt very domestic and badly dressed.”

“And I told Matthew that I had had lunch with Dick and he said, ‘It would do me good to see Cecily once in a while,’ and I felt pert and overdressed and ignorant.”

“There’s your story, Agatha,” said Madeline. “Each of them intriguing the other’s husband. Mismated.”

“Hush,” said Mother Fénelon. “Madeline, even if you are married, I’ll give you a penance if you talk like that.”

“Give me the penance,” begged Fliss, laughingly. “I started it and I’ve never had a penance. I never have had any one to expurgate my conversation.”

“Will you have your tea now?” asked the nun.

They followed her, Fliss and Cecily together. The curious attraction, which was not always friendly, that they felt for each other—had always felt since that day when Cecily met Fliss—and which had been cemented at the birth of Dorothea, was rather stronger than ever, in spite of the way they had drifted into different camps. It was as if each of them possessed something the other lacked or desired.

“It is a beautiful place,” said Fliss. “I’m glad to see it, though it makes me feel, as I say, raw and ignorant.”

“It shouldn’t. It should just make you feel peaceful. That’s what it tries to do.”

“That’s what it would do to me if I were its kind of person. It would make you feel peaceful. Isn’t it funny? You don’t really belong to it religiously and yet you fit in here much better than Madeline. You’re like the place. Matthew would explain that all in high sounding terms. I can’t explain it, but I do feel it.”

Cecily appreciated the half thought-out compliment. “The convent means a great deal to girls who were brought up here.”

“Did you have to study hard?”

“Not too hard. Have you seen where we studied?”

She took Fliss through the study halls, through the garden, down to the refectory and the winter playroom.

“It’s so different,” was Fliss’s comment. “Of course I liked the old High, and I had a corking time there. And I suppose it was pretty dull here with no boys, but it did make—ladies of you all.”

“Perhaps it didn’t make us very wise.”

“No, I know a lot more than you do about ways to get what I want. I think I know more about handling men than you do. But then you seem to get them without handling.”

That struck Cecily as a bit coarse and Fliss knew it. So she acknowledged it.

“That sounds rather coarse, doesn’t it? But most things outside of this enclosure are a bit coarse, I think.”

“They needn’t be,” said Cecily.

“I wonder. I wonder if most people aren’t a little too coarse grained to like a place like this.”

They were talking of the convent, but Cecily felt an implied criticism of herself.

“Most people prefer High Schools, you think.”

“Most people are the High School type now—talk a lot and pretty freely. Wasn’t it funny to see how shocked the nun got at Madeline? And Madeline wasn’t saying a circumstance to most of what you hear. Most people are a little broad and most women pretty used to having men around, knowing a lot of them easily and being friendly and a bit flirtatious.”

Was she warning her, thought Cecily? Her pride rose against such a warning.

“Yet there are men who don’t like that sort of women,” she answered, a faint edge of hauteur in her voice.

Then to make up for that remark she asked Fliss if she couldn’t come home for dinner.

“We’ve a temporary supply of servants and plenty of dinner. Can’t you telephone Matthew?”

“We’ll stop for him,” said Fliss, “if you can drive home with me. Are you in your own car?”

“No, mother dropped me here; my own car’s laid up.”

That was glorious for Fliss. This time it was her car that took Cecily home. It was a Fliss-like car—lean and low and yellow-brown. They piled into it and went down town, people turning to watch them, Fliss skimming through the streets, letting other drivers save her life and get out of her way because she was a pretty woman in a handsome car.

Matthew seemed delighted. Cecily was struck by the fact that he looked younger, laughed more easily, was not quite so inclined to heaviness in conversation. They dropped Madeline at her house and went on to surprise Dick and please him too.

Cecily had telephoned Ellen, who had a ready half-familiar smile for Fliss. Fliss returned it a bit quizzically. She even dared, while Cecily was busy with the baby, to slip out into the pantry where Ellen was working.

“How’s your ma?” asked Ellen promptly.

“Fine. I dropped in on her last week just after I’d made her buy some new window curtains and found her tying them all up with loops of blue ribbon. She and dad are attending movie serials.”

“Is everything all right with you at your house?”

“Slick. I wish you’d come and live with me, now, Ellen. I’d make you my housekeeper and after a bit I’d like to tell Cecily you’re a cousin of mine. This seems so queer.”

“Better not. No, I won’t leave Mrs. Harrison. Help’s hard to get. She counts on me, and I love the babies.”

“Good old Ellen.”

“Not a bit. I like it here. It’s very homey.”

“Don’t you think my house would be homey?”

Ellen looked at her dubiously and let that pass.

“Well, if you prefer the highly charged domesticity of this place to me and my Matthew, it’s up to you.”

Dick came out, seeking cocktails.

“I’m getting a drink and flirting with Ellen,” said Fliss.

“You’re probably trying to get Ellen away from us,” laughed Dick, “but I warn you that she won’t go. It’s been tried.”

It was only natural that Ellen should take an interest in the table conversation. She answered the bell herself, for the housemaid had cut her hand a few days before and, deliberately or otherwise, was retaining her clumsy bandages. It was obvious even to a listener so utterly untrained as Ellen that the old free give-and-take of the quartet was gone. They laughed just as much, gossiped as interestedly and haggled over their bits of philosophy as eagerly. Yet one could see that in these bits of philosophy, especially when they touched or seemed to touch upon habits of living, Cecily seemed to make an appeal to Matthew and Fliss to Dick. Ellen was very thoughtful as she washed her dishes, which the housemaid dried superciliously.

“Isn’t that Mrs. Allenby the prettiest thing you ever saw?” asked the housemaid.

“Not as pretty as Mrs. Harrison,” said Ellen, “but she’s very nice looking.”

“Well, Mrs. Harrison has looks all right—style, too, in a way, by which I mean she has nice things and expensive things—but to my way of thinking,” expounded Jenny, “she’s not in it with Mrs. Allenby for real class. Now, Mrs. Allenby knows how to dress. She’s an awful swell too. My goodness, you see her name everywhere. She’s the very center of that Country Club set.” Jenny had waited on table at the Country Club during the summer months and made fine distinctions.

“The men,” she went on, not at all disturbed by Ellen’s silence, “just flock around her. She livens things up so. Why, just think of the way she livened up that dining-room to-night. She knows how to put some pep into things. Everybody’s crazy about her. I wonder she can put up with a stupid little home dinner like this.”

Ellen chuckled at the marvelous reversals of standards.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, with a fairly good imitation of sarcasm, “maybe she wasn’t used to much before she married.”

Jenny cocked an elbow. “Used to much? That girl’s been a débutante, you can just be sure of that. She’s got a real aristocratic manner. You don’t appreciate standards like that, being from the country yourself, but to a town girl there’s no mistaking.”

“Don’t bang those cups.”

“Good Heavens, any one would think they were yours,” said Jenny. “I wouldn’t spend my life worrying about other people’s cups—or bothering about their kids either. You’re a fool, Ellen, and you’ll never get anywhere. Of course I don’t know what Mrs. Harrison pays you (this lack of confidence was a rankling thing), but if it’s a cent less than sixty-five you’re stung!”

“No!” said Ellen, who was banking seventy-five dollars a month.

“Yes, ma’am!” said Jenny, and banged another cup.

The Victrola started in the living-room, playing dance music. Jenny jazzed a bit.

“Lord, why don’t they play it when they’re alone?”

CHAPTER XIV

CECILY started on a fairly determined round of gayety for a few weeks. She found it interesting at first and a little boring afterwards. It was very difficult for her to take or even pretend to take casual interest in people, and casual interest was all that society wanted of her. She was beautiful and had a charming manner. So much every one admitted. But she was a married woman with three children and the faint flavor of mystery which had made her so alluring before she had been married had gone. Of course she would consciously seek to charm no one, and her unconscious charm so definitely belonged to Dick Harrison that there was not much left for other men. She was not an invigorating presence or a stimulating companion unless she was really stirred to interest, and the net result was that Cecily found herself bored fairly often.

Dick was not. He could still amuse himself greatly with a pretty girl, because she was pretty; he enjoyed dancing and being foolish. Unlike Cecily he did not always carry depths around with him. Cecily had to fit play into a scheme of life or she could not enjoy it. Dick just played. He appreciated that Cecily went about to please him, thanked her for it, always told her and always sincerely thought that she was the loveliest woman in any group and proceeded to have a good time. It was not quite subtle enough for Cecily.

In the society into which she was thrown there was no one who marked the course of her development with interest. There were plenty of spectacular women doing interesting things, paradoxical things, and they saw in Cecily only passivity. The very domestic women who liked to talk babies and husbands rather intimately and eternally found her a little aloof and reserved; and those of a gayer, hedonistic type thought her overserious. She was an individual in an age in which individuality has to be advertised and she had not the faintest ability or desire to advertise herself.

Older men and women said that she was a “good wife and mother”; women of her own age said she was “hard to get to know”; the younger girls said, like Jenny, “beautiful, but without pep.” So she was a little lonely.

Being uninterested, she saw many things of which she disapproved. Her early training had been all towards a fastidiousness of manner and a perhaps exaggerated modesty, so that it hurt her to see the manners of the girls and women. They were greedy for notice, in politics and on the dance floor; they were unreserved in thought and noisy in manner. Ugly—ugly in thought and manner—she found them often. It was partly the forced seclusion of her life, during the periods before and after her children’s births, that had kept her from any understanding of the reasons underlying the lack of stability and absence of dignity which bothered her so much. She had gone through war worries, borne war problems, but she had not known the terrors or horrors of war at first hand or through those dear to her. She had maintained her standards in her seclusion; and she could not see that some of this noise had been deliberately begun to silence the thoughts of those who had seen standards overthrown and trodden upon; who had seen them scorned, doubted, analyzed away.

Of course she was told that, but it did not make her more lenient. She could not condone the spirit of those she saw around her or see its relation to the spirit of exaltation into which the war had been popularly preached. It bothered her that girls were not more delicate; it bothered her that married women did not seem to appreciate the possible joy in a husband and in having children; she heard remarks that seemed to her to prove that the world was on its way to corruption.

The criticism which she felt of things around showed in her attitude towards her stepbrothers. They were in college now, boys of nineteen and twenty. Walter, the older boy, was extremely handsome; Gerald not so handsome, but even more spirited than his brother. Mr. Warner’s attitude towards his sons was to let them do pretty much what they would while they were finding themselves. To his wife and Cecily it seemed a very dangerous policy.

“It’s not as if the atmosphere of society itself were wholesome,” said Mrs. Warner, discussing with her husband the matter of further increasing Walter’s allowance. “It isn’t just gayety and frivolity. There’s something dangerous in the air. No one has any repose.”

“Except Cecily.”

“Cecily has it and the fact that she stands out sometimes as almost prudish shows what we are coming to.”

Her sons had brought Mrs. Warner almost to the point of developing and acknowledging a philosophy. Not quite. She, like her daughter, was still somewhat negative.

“Well, shall we give Walter that extra hundred?” asked her husband.

“He hasn’t said why he needs it. What do you suppose he does with it? Gambling or some woman?”

“I don’t think so. You might talk to him, dear. As far as I can make out it’s just that girls and clothes are expensive. It costs an appalling amount to take a girl to a Prom.”

“Any special girl?”

“I think he likes a girl in Philadelphia.”

But when Walter came for Christmas a few weeks later and they sounded him about the girl from Philadelphia he looked astonished.

“Oh, her—no, I haven’t seen her lately. Good reason, too, hey, Gerald?”

They burst into confidential chuckles and told nothing more.

Both boys had always been extremely fond of Cecily, even though she had been away from home so much that the children had not been much together, and Cecily was five years older than Walter. But they were proud of her and had a very good time with Dick. Cecily was equally proud of them, but they, too, worried her.

The two weeks before Christmas brought with them an unceasing round of parties, dances of one kind and another. Cecily was tired before it began. She nearly suggested that they should decline all Christmas holiday entertaining, but neither Dick nor the boys gave her any chance for that. So she shopped for the children and made preparations all day for Christmas at home, and in the evening her only rest came while she leaned back against the cushions of the car as they drove to some club, house or hotel to dance and be gay for hours. When she got there she usually found her brothers there, too, for Carrington society was small enough to include all the possible young men from eighteen to thirty-five at its functions. Walter would be dancing with some pretty girl, held caressingly close in his arms, flirting furiously. Gerald might be dancing or he might be standing on the side lines looking debonairly on, or worse yet, already adjourned to some dark corner with a girl. It obsessed Cecily. She could not let them alone. She wanted them to be reserved, dignified even, in their gayety and they were not. To-morrow she knew they would tell hilarious tales to each other about the very girls they were flirting so scandalously with.

Gerald, bending over her, “It’s my dance, Cecily.”

She felt herself horrified at the very way he held her. “Don’t dance so close,” she protested. Then, “Who was that girl you were dancing with?”

“Helen Ramsay—pretty fluffy chicken, isn’t she?”

“You shouldn’t talk that way.”

“That’s what she is.”

“Gerald, haven’t you any respect for women—for yourself—that you can cheapen yourself so?”

“Where do you get that stuff, Cecily?”

Gerald’s intolerance hurt. The situation grew out of all proportions for Cecily. Gerald was being corrupted. He must be taken out of this. He must be reasoned with, shown that he was making himself cheap.

But he did not take to the reasoning kindly.

“What’s the matter with all of you? Mother rowing because I’m a few hundred dollars short; dozens of fellows are a few thousands; and now you making a male vamp out of me. What do you want me to do? Study for the ministry and wear blinders so I can’t see the girls?”

“I hate to see you with such stupid, inconsequent girls. That’s what bothers me. I hate to see you get flippant”—she stumbled in her speech—“valuing love lightly.”

“Lord, I’m not in love with the little Ramsay, if that’s what’s on your mind.”

“I know you’re not. Why play at it?”

“Fun!” said Gerald.

He left her and Cecily sat thinking of his last word and how she had come to hate it. It typified all the cheapness she despised. It amazed her to see how, during these few weeks of semi-unwilling participation in “fun” she had come to formulate a philosophy which definitely excluded it. Where she had been indifferent, she was now condemnatory.

From where she sat on the veranda she could see the ballroom. Dick was looking for her, Walter was dancing, not with a girl his own age, but with Fliss. Fliss was dancing just as Helen Ramsay had danced, close up to Walter, head against his shoulder, and Walter was talking to her in admiration. That was clear. An unaccustomed anger rose in Cecily. Her bodily weariness and her spasm of anger left her faint. As she turned, shuddering a little, she saw Matthew.

“Aren’t you well?”

“Tired—could you slip out and take me home?”

But, once in his big car he did not take her home, a matter of a dozen blocks. Instead he turned to the road which circled the boulevards.

“Hush,” he said, at her protest. “I told Dick that you were too tired to dance and that I was going to take you for a ride. It’s all fixed. I’ll be back there long before Fliss is ready to go. And I’ve not had a chance to talk to you for ages.”

But they did not talk much. They watched the city below them, spreading so big, a thousand lights coming from places of comedy and tragedy all intermingled. Once she roused herself out of her relaxation to tell him how peaceful she felt. He merely nodded.

High over the city he stopped on the very crest of the hills and shut off the motor. The place was black and silent and isolated. Stars hung close and the city looked small and remote.

“How infinitesimal it all is—all the fuss down there,” said Cecily.

“Of course you’d feel that,” said Matthew, lighting a cigarette. “That’s why I brought you up. It’ll do you good. You mustn’t let things as small as that eat you up, Cecily.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t let things bother you. Nothing matters an awful lot.”

“Life matters. So Mother Fénelon said once.”

“Perhaps it does—perhaps she’s right. But only in the large. Certainly little habits of life don’t.”

“It’s easy to feel that way up here, but down in the midst of those lights you can’t get the sweep of things. Little things irritate—habits of life do matter.”

“You ought to get away by yourself more. When I feel irritated I go up to my rooms and read what a lot of my betters, long dead, had to say and had to think.”

“Can’t be done by the mother of three.”

“I question that. The mother of three would certainly profit. I hate to see you all harassed. It isn’t right. Since the first day I saw you it’s always been a satisfaction to me just to think of you—even when I didn’t see you—as being calm and peaceful and beautiful. You mustn’t lose those things.”

“I wonder if I ever was calm and peaceful, passing up the other exaggeration. Now I nag at myself. I don’t know when it began.”

“Anything special on your mind, or just the accumulation of domestic duties?”

“I hate it,” cried Cecily suddenly, with a passion quite unlike her. “I hate the way people are living. I can’t make it out—anything out. If the principle they taught me that marriage is an institution for the home, for the bringing up of children is right, then all this—this fun—is wrong. You can’t have what they call ‘fun’ and be a good woman. You can’t play at making love with all this dancing that is only embracing—with all this loose talk—and keep your feeling for your husband or wife clean. And if you don’t you’re stupid or a bore—out of date. I know what people think of me. Women have actually told me that I’m foolish to have three children; that I shouldn’t let my household submerge me; that Dick is bound to crave ‘fun’! He does like it; he’s happier when we are going out places all the time; he makes himself cheap with these silly women; he uses the words he used to me when he talks to them—oh, that seems trivial, doesn’t it?”

“No, no, not trivial! Don’t talk any more, Cecily. You’ll regret it if you do. I’m going to drive on. I’m afraid, a little, that you are battering yourself against a real difficulty, against things which can’t be obviated. I want to think about it. See if I can’t explain some things to you later. But it’s hard to have to explain things when I am so sorry, Cecily, that I lose my philosophy.”

“Don’t bother, Matthew. I guess perhaps I’m just tired and a little jealous.”

“No. You are tired and a little jealous, too, but it’s deeper than that. You’ve been slipped into an age that doesn’t fit you and instead of making things better for you by hardening you young they preserved your quality to your own—no, not destruction. It mustn’t be that.”

He didn’t say any more. Nor let her talk.

“Hush. Now you are to rest. There’s nothing to worry about. Think of those nice healthy babies that ought to make you eternally grateful to your fate. Three of them to bring up. That gives you a reason to straighten out all these problems—so you can help them. But you can’t straighten them out by fretting.”

“Or by bothering you.” Her face, against the dark fur collar of her cloak, and dimly visible in the night, was very beautiful as Matthew turned to her.

“You couldn’t bother me. I care for you,” said Matthew with restraint and yet conviction. “I care for you more than any other single thing in life. And,” he went on quickly, warned by her little gasp, “there’s not the faintest disloyalty to Fliss or jealousy of Dick involved. It’s a different kind of feeling than any one else gives or could give you.”

Cecily’s slim arms, outlined under her wrap as she clasped her hands in sudden fear, relaxed again. “You’re beautiful, Matthew.”

He left her at her door and went back to find Fliss. The ballroom was very hot by this time. On the faces of the men perspiration or pallor showed that even they were beginning to feel the strain of five hours’ dancing. The circles under the eyes of the women showed the weariness which their rouge could not hide. But, tired though they might be physically, relaxation seemed the last thing in any one’s mind. The music was gayer, encores more frequent, the laughter was keyed higher, the abandon of dancing greater than before.

The men were cutting in on the dances of other men, women slipping from the arms of one man to those of another. Indefatigable. Fliss was wonderfully vivid. She never became disarranged when she danced. The bit of color that was his wife caught Matthew’s eye and held it. She waved at him, nodding to him to come in and claim her. But he shook his head. He wanted to see Dick first. Dick was talking to Gerald by the wall. They were quite uproarious over something. Matthew joined them.

“Cecily get home?” asked Dick. “Already?”

“We went for a ride around the boulevards first; she seemed pretty tired.”

“She is tired,” said Dick. “It’s too bad. With the babies and the maids and Christmas.”

“It’s making her cross,” said Gerald. “She called me down to-night. Didn’t like the way I was dancing.”

“Cecily really doesn’t care for going out much. She doesn’t like all the jazz stuff.” Dick’s smile was one of tolerance as he said it.

“Well, I wouldn’t let Cecily get to be a prig.” Gerald was, in intention, very worldly and broadminded.

“Oh, she’s not that,” said Dick.

“Not at all that!” Matthew interrupted. “Cecily is vastly superior to all this rabble and their doings. Do you really like this stuff yourself, Dick?”

“It’s sort of fun, but I’m off it for to-night. That’s sure. No, I’m going to have one more foxtrot with Fliss. She’s showing me how to get in an extra step.”

He stole Fliss from her partner. Matthew was alone again.

“Have a good time, Fliss?” asked her husband, unlocking their front door.

“Lots of fun,” said Fliss.

He looked at her crossly. “What in hell is fun, anyway?”

“Poor Matthew. You’ll never know. It’s a gift. You’re born with it, or you never get it.”

CHAPTER XV

DICK, a little under-slept, a trifle red about the eyes, was shaving. He knew he was late for breakfast and that that would bother Cecily. He knew the mechanism of his house ought not to be disturbed when the comfort and routine of the children depended on it. He did not feel quite fit for work and the hang-over of dance tunes persisted in his head. Moreover it was the first time that he and Cecily had not come home together from a party and while the arrangement was perfectly amicable at the time it was made with Matthew, it did seem a trifle irregular this morning. Dick hurried and it made him cross.

Cecily hurried him at breakfast, too. She wanted to go over lists of Christmas presents with him, to plan the trimming of the tree. Christmas was day after to-morrow. She did not refer to the night before. He wondered with some irritation whether that was deliberate, and forced the opening of the subject.

“Did you have a good ride last night?”

“Wonderful. It rested me ever so much. I slept hard.”

“I hope,” said Dick, “that you’ll try to keep a bit more fit. You ought to be in good enough condition to stand a few hours’ dancing. Don’t you think you need a tonic, perhaps?”

It seemed very much off the point to Cecily. “I’d hate to have to take medicine so I could get myself to the point of dancing all night. Hardly worth while, is it?”

“I’m not sure it isn’t.”

She let that pass, and merely sat there answerless, looking hurt and cold. Dick got up.

“I’ll meet you down town and we’ll finish our shopping. Five o’clock at my office.”

“That’s fine.”

He kissed her, wishing that she did not look so virtuous and hurt, that she would fly at him, get in the wrong somehow, and went out of the house whistling the tunes he had carried over from the night before. Cecily, conscious of a hundred things to do, sat still, and Ellen, passing through the room, looked at her commiseratingly.

“Tired after last night, Mrs. Harrison?”

“A little. Everybody’s much gayer than I am, Ellen. No one else seems to get tired.”

“They don’t all have three children and go to dances.”

“Don’t they? I wonder how they manage. Ellen, I’m going to have every one here to-morrow night for the tree—Mrs. Harrison, my mother and father, Mr. Gerald and Mr. Walter. Then we will carry the children down after the tree is lit.”

“Won’t it be lovely?”

Dorothea ran in, clamoring. The business of the day pressed on Cecily. She lost her over-serious mood of the night before, a little ashamed, as Matthew had understood she would be, that she had let her half-grown thoughts out so freely. Well, Matthew was not like other people.

By the time she met Dick her day of activity had put her troubles into the background. She dressed rather carefully to go shopping with him and in her soft gray fur coat and hat, with a sprig of holly in her muff, she looked like an illustration for some Christmas story. Dick appreciated that. He was always proud of her. They sent the car on to meet them at the confectioner’s, and walked through the sparkling streets, gazing into windows. In the toyshops they were madly extravagant, though Cecily kept insisting that all the possible toys for the children were already bought.

“They’ll smash and then they’ll have these,” said Dick. “These are my own contribution to the Christmas wreckage.”

He took her to the jeweler’s while he bought presents for his mother and hers, cigarette cases for the boys and was furtively given a package which he did not show her. Then to a florist’s where he supplemented the holly with a great bunch of violets. They were so happy, so young and handsome that many a man and woman turned to look at them in admiration and envy. And the snow covered streets, the street lights and sparkling windows, the faces of happy people passing, all the setting made Dick and Cecily feel a magic in the air.

In the car Dick turned Cecily’s face up to his and kissed her, as he had not kissed her lately—without any savor of duty or habit.

“Quite as if you wanted to,” said Cecily breathlessly.

“Quite,” laughed Dick. “I always want to, but I’m a bit afraid of hurting you or you are busy with the children or have your mind on something else. To-night you seem so particularly mine.”

They had come upon a mood which was the breath of life to Cecily—exalted, joyous, without a note of ribaldry. Dick could share those moods at times, but he did not live for them as did Cecily. She went about the next day in a happy blur of excitement. The house was full of the smell of Christmas baking and Ellen’s face, steamed and red, fairly shone with pride as she loaded the shelf in the butler’s pantry with the things she was making. Dorothea was full of excited baby questions. The tree was brought in and stood in a corner of the living-room which seemed particularly made for it. The fireplace had a Christmas log, thick and round. Presents were delivered. Expressmen brought packages. The postman left dozens of Christmas cards. The glitter, the greeting of the holiday season permeated the house. Dick was like a boy, stealing up to his room to hide still more extravagances. And by evening, after the tree was ready to light and Dorothea was in a wild palpitation about staying up after seven o’clock, the Christmas charm had reached its height. Mrs. Harrison came early. Her chauffeur brought her basket of packages to the door and the dainty, aristocratic little lady came in, all aglow herself with the excitement of spending a Christmas eve where there were children. Mrs. Harrison was very fond of Cecily and loved to enjoy herself with unsuitable indulgences for the children, which because she was a lady who thought in terms of material things, meant embroidered dresses and superfluous bonnets.

Mrs. Warner was there, looking as beautiful as only she could look, and Mr. Warner’s pockets were bulging with white packages, his arms laden with mechanical toys, already almost destroyed because he and his sons had been trying them out at home. The two young men were there, carrying on systematic “jollying” of Ellen, who adored it and them as only an old maidservant can enjoy the notice of the young men in the family. They gathered in the breakfast-room and then marched to the living-room, even Mrs. Harrison entering into the spirit of the procession. Dorothea whooped with joy, the elder baby blinked at the candles and waved an incoherent hand at them all and Dick began delivering the presents.

Cecily, whose household budget was always leaving her in financial straits, found herself in delighted possession of a thousand-dollar check from her stepfather because “she had been a good girl.” She had no way of realizing then how much that money of her own would mean to her later. They joked a good deal about how she would spend it. Dick gave her a slim platinum bracelet, slipping it on her arm himself, calling it his “handcuff.” There was a deluge of tissue paper as the dozens of gifts were unwrapped. Then they all focused on Dorothea, somewhat dazed and bewildered by the onpouring of new things to amuse her. Mr. Warner set a mechanical duck, a toy train and a self-starting toy automobile in uncanny procession across the room, Gerald tooted the horns, and Dick started to build a toy house out of blocks which were far too complicated for the children to handle. Cecily sat on the floor and watched him and Mrs. Warner watched them both as she talked inconsequences with Dick’s mother. Ellen had retreated to the kitchen, full of grateful embarrassment because she had been given a fur piece that amazed her and she poured dandelion wine and cut the richest fruitcakes recklessly, for Jenny, of course, was out at a “swell dance” somewhere or other. The nurse took Dorothea to bed. The tissue paper was collected and the dandelion wine drunk with much jesting. Cecily was sitting with her head against Dick’s arm when the door bell rang and Matthew and Fliss came in.

“Do you mind?” asked Matthew. “Our house is celebrating Christmas by six dollar holly wreaths in the windows, but we’ve no excuse for a tree.”

A warm, treacherous little sense of virtue rose in Cecily. She was immensely cordial to them both. She wanted them to see the tree, taste the warm spicy atmosphere of her home on Christmas, see the toys that meant plenty of children. She wanted Matthew to enjoy it all. She wanted Fliss to see it all.

But it worked out a little differently. Perhaps Gerald and Walter began it. They had been gay all evening, but they were gayer with the advent of Fliss. They insisted on making her presents, giving her cigarette cases and cuff links so that she wouldn’t feel neglected and putting one of the baby’s fat dolls on the heap of nonsense they laid at her feet. They plied her with dandelion wine and Fliss, taking just a cordial glass more than the other ladies had, proceeded to make herself interesting. Under Cecily’s influence the evening would have mellowed, changed from gayety to soft quiet and seriousness. Under Fliss’s influence gayety mounted higher and higher. It was Fliss who dominated. It was Fliss who got them all into gales of laughter by her tales of her Christmas shopping for Matthew, Fliss who started the competition to see who could blow the candles on the tree out at longest range, Fliss who started a sophisticated little gossip with Mrs. Harrison about the latest and most fascinating scandal, and finally Fliss who offered to show Dick again just how that dance step was managed.

“Sorry I can’t demonstrate here,” she said.

“Sure you can. Here, roll up the corner of the rug,” suggested Dick.

There was a Christmas carol on the Victrola. Cecily watched them whisk it off and change it to a dance tune—watched them wrecking the Christmas scene that she had planned and loved.

“Why dance to-night?” she protested, trying to be jocular about it all and succeeding so poorly that every one turned to look at her. There was an undercurrent of angry pain in her voice.

Walter came over pulling her to her feet by both hands.

“Now, don’t be a crab, Cecily. You’re getting too old for your age. Let’s have some fun.”

He whirled her into an absurd dance and when he had finished she was laughing in earnest. But she went over to the sofa on which her mother sat and dropped down beside her.

“It wasn’t the kind of evening I’d planned,” she said in an undertone.