Sylvia Arden
SYLVIA ARDEN
DECIDES
BY
MARGARET REBECCA PIPER
AUTHOR OF
SYLVIA'S EXPERIMENT: THE CHEERFUL BOOK, (Trade Mark)
SYLVIA OF THE HILL TOP: THE SECOND CHEERFUL
BOOK, ETC. (Trade Mark)
FRONTISPIECE BY
HASKELL COFFIN
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
Copyright, 1917,
BY THE PAGE COMPANY
All rights reserved
First Impression, September, 1917
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I [Of Futures and Other Important Matters]
II [Reasons and Wraiths]
III [Twenty-Two]
IV [The Ways of a Maid]
V [September Afternoon]
VI [Of Missions, and Omissions]
VII [October Developments]
VIII [Fire and Frost]
IX [The Moth and the Star]
X [The City]
XI [Margins]
XII ["Such Stuff as Dreams"]
XIII [Into Haven]
XIV ["And Having Eyes"]
XV [The City and Sylvia]
XVI [As Might Have Been Expected]
XVII [Barb Diagnoses]
XVIII [The Cause and the Career]
XIX [Oh, Suzanne!]
XX [Sylvia and Life]
XXI [A Chapter of Revelations]
XXII [Unto the Forest]
XXIII [Aftermath]
XXIV [High Tide]
XXV [Warp and Woof]
XXVI [The End and the Beginning]
SYLVIA ARDEN
DECIDES
CHAPTER I
OF FUTURES AND OTHER IMPORTANT MATTERS
"I know what the trouble with Sylvia is," announced Suzanne, elevating herself on one elbow and leaning forward out of the hammock just enough to select and appropriate a plump bonbon from the box on the wicker stand near by.
"Well," encouraged Sylvia, "what is the trouble with me?"
At the moment as she stood leaning against the massive white pillar with a smile on her lips and in her dark eyes, the sunshine glinting warm, red-gold lights in her bronze hair, it seemed as if it would be hard indeed to find any trouble with her so completely was she a picture of radiant, joyous, care-free youth.
Suzanne demolished her bonbon, then proceeded to expatiate on her original proposition.
"The trouble with you," she averred oracularly from her cushions, "is that you are addicted to the vice of contentment."
"Well, why shouldn't she be?" demanded Barbara from the depths of the huge arm-chair which nearly swallowed her diminutive figure. "I'd like to know who has a better right? Hasn't Sylvia this minute got everything anybody in the world could want? If I had been born to live on a hill top, like Sylvia, I'd never leave it."
Suzanne sat up, brandishing a reproachful forefinger at the speaker.
"Barbie Day! I am shocked at you. What would your Aunt Josephine say? Sylvia, she must be packed off at once. She mustn't be allowed to stay even for the party. The flesh pots have gone to her head. Another day at Arden Hall will ruin her for the Cause." And, with a prophetic shake of her head, Suzanne helped herself to a "Turkish Delight" and relaxed among her cushions, the leaf green color of which, contrasting with the pale pink of her gown, made her look rather like a rose, set in its calyx. Suzanne was extraordinarily pretty, much prettier, in fact, than was at all necessary for a young person of distinct literary bent and a pronounced--audibly pronounced--distaste for matrimony. Thus Nature, willfully prodigal, lavishes her gifts.
"Speak for yourself," retorted Barbara with unusual spirit. "If the flesh pots are ruining me they shall continue on their course of destruction without let or hindrance until Wednesday next. I was born poor, I have lived poor and I shall probably die poor, but I am not above participating in the unearned increment when I get a heavenly chance like this blessed week and if anybody says 'Votes for Women' to me in the next five days he or she is likely to be surprised. I am going to turn Lotus Eater for just this once. Don't disturb me." And by way of demonstration Barb tucked one small foot up under her, burrowed even deeper in the heart of the big chair and closed her eyes with a sigh of complete satisfaction.
In the meanwhile Sylvia had absentmindedly plucked a scarlet spray from the vine which was swaying in the September breeze just above her head and her eyes were thoughtful. Unwittingly, the others had stirred mental currents which lay always fairly near the surface with her, suggested problems which had been asserting themselves of late rather continuously. The generous-hearted little schoolgirl Sylvia who had wanted to gather all the lonely people in the world into her Christmas family, the puzzled Sylvia who even five years ago had been tormented by the baffling question why she had so much and others so little was still present in the Sylvia of almost two and twenty who considered herself quite grown up and sophisticated and possessed a college diploma.
"I don't know that I am so viciously contented as you seem to think, Suzanne," she said, "and I haven't the slightest intention of staying on my hill top, as you mean it, Barb. But I can't just come down off it and go tilting at windmills at random. I've got to know what my job is, and I don't at all, at present--can't even guess at it. All the rest of you girls had your futures neatly outlined and sub-topiced. Nearly every one in the class knew, when she graduated last June, just what she wanted to do or had to do next. Every one was going to teach or travel, or 'slum' or study, or come out or get married. But poor me!" Sylvia shrugged humorously, though her eyes were still thoughtful. "I haven't any startling gifts or urgent duties. I haven't the necessity of earning bread and butter, nor any special cause to follow. It is really hopeless to be so--" She groped for a word then settled on "unattached."
"There is more than one male who would be willing to remedy that defect, I'm thinking," chuckled Suzanne wickedly. "How about the person who disburses these delectable bonbons? Won't he do for a cause?"
"I am afraid not, the person being only Jack."
"Only Jack, whom the mammas all smile upon and the daughters don their fetchingest gowns and their artfullest graces for--quite the most eligible young man in the market. Sylvia, you are spoiled if Jack Amidon isn't good enough for you!"
"I didn't say he wasn't good enough for me." Sylvia came over to the table to provide herself with one of Jack's bonbons before seating herself on the India stool beside the hammock facing out over the lawn. "Jack is a dear, but I've known him nearly all my life, seems to me, and even to oblige you it would be hard to get up any romantic thrills over him."
"Too bad!" murmured Suzanne, regretfully. "He is so good looking. You two would look lovely prancing down the aisle together à la Lohengrin."
"Suzanne!" Barb opened her eyes to expostulate. "You are so dreadfully flippant. I don't believe anything is sacred to you."
Suzanne laughed. "Maybe not," she admitted. Then she sat up abruptly to add, "I forgot my Future. I have that shrined and canonized and burn incense to it every night. It is the only thing in the world or out of it I take seriously. I-am-going-to-write-plays." She thumped a plump green cushion vigorously, allotting a single thump to each staccato syllable. "I may not succeed this year or next year or in five years, but some day I shall arrive with both feet. You two shall come and sit in my first-nighter box and it will be some play!" She vaunted slangily, imparting a last emphatic punch upon the acquiescent cushion before she relinquished it.
"We'll be there," promised Sylvia. "I only wish I had convictions like that about my Future. Mine is just a nebular hypothesis at present. How about you, Barbie? Are you as certain about your Cause as Suzanne is about her Career?"
Barb uncurled herself to testify. "Not a bit," she sighed. "You see, my Cause is a sort of inherited mantle, and I am never sure whether it fits or not, though I never have the slightest doubt as to the propriety of my attempting to wear it even if I have to take tucks in it." Barbara's eyes crinkled around the corners in a way they had when she was very much in earnest. "You know it has been understood all along that I was to be Aunt Jo's secretary and general right-hand man as soon as I graduated. That was what she educated me for. Of course I believe in suffrage and all that. When I hear Aunt Jo talk I just get thrills all up and down my spinal column and feel as strong as Samson making ready to topple over the pillars, as if I could do anything and everything to give women a chance. But when I get away from Aunt Jo I cool off disgracefully. That is what makes me think sometimes it isn't the real fire I have but a sort of surface heat generated by Aunt Jo's extraordinary personal magnetism and fearful and wonderful vocabulary. It worries me dreadfully sometimes."
Barb's small, brown, child-like face puckered in perplexity and her blue eyes blinked as if they beheld too much light.
"It needn't," commented Suzanne sagely. "I know you. By the time you have been flinging out the banner six weeks you will be white hot for the Cause, especially if you can somehow manage to martyrize yourself into the bargain. You would have made a perfect early Christian. I can see you smiling with glad Pollyannaism into the faces of the abashed lions."
"Oh, Suzanne!"
Barbara had spent many minutes all told during the past four years of her college life saying, "Oh, Suzanne!" in precisely that shocked, protesting, helpless tone. The two were the best of friends, but in code of conduct and mode of thought they were the meeting extremes.
"Aren't you going to prescribe for me now you have diagnosed my case?" Sylvia came to the rescue.
"I did prescribe, but you wouldn't swallow Mr. Jack Amidon, sugar-coated pill though he is. How about your tawny-maned, giant, ex-football-hero M.D.? He isn't so good looking as Jack but--"
"I think he is much nicer looking," Barb interposed surprisingly, then blushed and subsided.
"Oho!" laughed Suzanne. "Better keep your eye on our Barbie if you want to keep Doctor Philip Lorrimer on your waiting list, Sylvia. Such unprecedented enthusiasm! And she has beheld him but once at that. Oh, the witchery of that Commencement moon! I inadvertently nearly promised to marry Roger Minot myself in its specious glamour. I'll wager our demure Barbie flirted with your six-foot medicine man when you rashly left him on her hands on the outskirts of Paradise. 'Fess up, Barb. Didn't you flirt a teeny weeny little flirt in the moonshine?"
"No, I didn't," denied Barbara, flushed and indignant. "But I did like Doctor Lorrimer. He talked sense, and I was awfully interested in his work in the free clinic."
"Sense! Shop! By moonlight! Ye gods!" mocked Suzanne. "Never mind, Barbie. Your tactics were admirable. Listen to 'em. Keep on listening to 'em. It's what the sex likes. It gets 'em every time."
"But I don't want to get 'em," protested Barbara earnestly.
Whereupon Suzanne giggled and tossed her victim a silver sheathed bonbon by way of reconciliation. Then she returned to her charge upon Sylvia, who had sat silent during the last sally, meditatively playing with the spray of scarlet creeper in her lap.
"Sorry, Sylvia, belovedest. But I can't seem to think of a single suitable job for you except matrimony. You are eminently fitted for that."
Sylvia looked up with an expression half mirthful, half dissenting.
"Thanks. But at this juncture I don't happen to want to get married one bit more than you do, which to judge from your protestations and your treatment of poor Roger isn't much."
"Right you are. No such 'cribb'd, cabin'd and confined' business as matrimony for this child. What was the advice old Bacon cites as to when a man should marry? 'A young man not yet, an elder man, not at all.' Read woman for man and you have my sentiments in a nutshell."
"Oh, Suzanne!" Thus the refrain from the big chair. But Sylvia only laughed, knowing what Barbara seemed never to be able to learn, that Suzanne rarely meant more than a half or at best a quarter of what she said and thoroughly delighted in being iconoclastic, especially if the idols made considerable noise smashing, as she would have put it herself.
"Look at your neighbor, Mrs. Doctor Tom." Suzanne warmed her to her subject. "She used to write for all the best magazines and travel and live the broadest, freest, splendidest kind of life. How does she put in her time now? Eternally making rompers for Marjory, trying to keep Thomas Junior's face clean and his vocabulary expurgated, seeing that the dinner is warm and the cook's temper cool when Doctor Tom is late to meals, and so on and so on to the end of the chapter. Only there isn't any end to the chapter. It goes on forever like Tennyson's stupid brook. Bah! Excuse me!" And Suzanne's gesture betokened insuperable scorn for the ways of the wifely.
"But Mrs. Daly looks as if she enjoyed doing all those things, and I think it is lovely to have babies." There was a little wistful note in Barb's voice as she made the statement.
"H-mp! Maybe so. But I say it is a shame for anybody who could write the way she could to give it up. Don't you, Sylvia?"
"O dear!" groaned Sylvia. "Yes and no. Why do I always have to see both sides of things? Lois is happy. At least I think she is. You can't always tell about Lois, she is so cool and serene and deep. Anyway, the babies are lovely. But I can't help agreeing with you a little, Suzanne. It does seem a pity."
"Of course it is a pity. And there is your Felicia. She is another case in point. She gave up her work and a fortune to marry a man who lived just long enough to leave her with a big heartache to carry round inside her and two children to provide immediate bread and butter for. You can say what you like. I say it was too much of a price."
"O, but, Suzanne, Marianna and Donald are such dears!" pleaded Barb.
"Of course they are dears. They are adorable. But you can't deny they have kept her back. She is just beginning to be a real sculptor after all these years. And now she is beginning appears this Kinnard person to spoil it all."
Sylvia looked up a trifle startled.
"What do you mean, Suzanne? Mr. Kinnard isn't spoiling anything. He is helping. Felicia hasn't a bit of faith in herself. She never would have thought of entering into that mural relief competition if he hadn't made her. And I know her designs are going to be splendid. Mr. Kinnard says they are, and he knows."
Suzanne shrugged.
"I fear the Greeks bearing gifts. No man ever gave a woman something for nothing since time began. You'll see."
"What shall I see?"
"You might have seen the way he looked at your Felicia yesterday afternoon. You needn't stare. She is the loveliest thing imaginable; and, anyway, widows always marry again. They can't seem to help it. It is in the system."
"Oh, he looks at every woman. How can he help it with eyes like that? He is much more likely to be wooing Hope. He has been sketching her all summer and she makes lovely shy dryad eyes at him while he works. I don't see how he can resist her myself, she is so deliciously pretty."
"'A violet by a mossy stone.' Mr. Kinnard isn't looking for violets. You'll see, as I said before."
And in spite of her denial, Sylvia couldn't help wondering if there were any truth in Suzanne's implications. She had accepted Stephen Kinnard quite simply as Felicia had explained him, an old friend and fellow artist of Paris days. He had been in Greendale nearly all summer doing some sketches of Southern gardens for a magazine, and it had seemed perfectly natural to Sylvia that he should come often up the hill to see Mrs. Emory. They were both artists and had much in common beside their old friendship. That any factors deeper than those which appeared on the surface might be keeping Stephen Kinnard in Felicia's proximity had not until the moment occurred to Sylvia. For a moment it flashed across her mind how sadly Arden Hall would fare without Felicia who with the dear "wonder babies" had come to help Sylvia keep Christmas nearly six years ago and had remained in the old house ever since to its young owner's infinite content and well being.
"I never thought of Felicia's marrying again," she said after a moment of silence.
"Well, Stephen Kinnard has thought of it, if you haven't," pronounced Suzanne. "By the way, he said a rather nice thing about you yesterday. He said you had a genius for happiness."
Sylvia smiled a little as her gaze strayed past the white pillars, past the giant magnolia-tree lifting its shining leaves to the sun, past the pink and white glory of cosmos and the dial beyond, dedicating itself discreetly to none but sunny hours; beyond still farther to the clear turquoise space of sky visible behind it all.
"Being happy isn't much of an art when you can't help being it," she said, her gaze and her thoughts coming back from their momentary journey.
"Oh, but he didn't mean just your being happy," put in Barb in her quick, serious way. "He meant your way of making other people happy. It's true. I noticed it often in college. But it is truer than ever here. Everybody in Arden Hall is happy. It is like Shakespeare's forest. It makes you feel different--not just only happy but better, being here."
"That is the house. It has been like that ever since I had my Christmas family here. Of course, it is realty mostly Felicia. She is the mainspring of it all. But we like to pretend there is something magic about the house itself. You don't know how I love every stick and brick of it. I have never had half enough of it. I have been in school so much, I've only snatched a few vacations on the wing, as it were, and even that only in the last few years since I captured Felicia. Ugh! Nobody knows how I hated those dreadful holidays in hotels after Aunt Nell died and I came to America. And nobody knows how I love this." Her expansive gesture made "this" include house and lawn and magnolia and pink and white bloom and sun dial and all the rest, perhaps even the turquoise stretch of sky. "I've never had my fill of homeness," she concluded.
"Funny!" mused Suzanne. "Now, I don't want to be at home at all. Norton is such a stuffy, snippy, gossipy, little town, and I loathe being officially the 'parson's daughter.' Sometimes it used to seem to me I'd rather throw myself in the river than go to another prayer meeting and hear Deacon Derby drone out minute instructions to the Lord as to how he should manage his business. And being home isn't so sweet and simple as it seems either. I adore my mother, but we don't see two things alike in the wide world. She likes the chairs stiff and straight against the walls, just in the same position year in, year out. I like 'em at casual experimental angles, different every day. That is typical of our two viewpoints. She likes things eternally straight and the same. I like 'em eternally on the bias and different. We can't either of us help it. We are made that way. And we're both more or less miserable, whether we give in or whether we don't. Mother and Dad are regular darlings, both of them, but I don't mean to stay at home with them a bit more than I can help. They don't need me. They are perfectly used to doing without me and are really much happier sans Suzanne. I just stir things up and they like to snuggle down in their nice comfortable ruts. I've got to live in New York. I'd smother in Norton, Pa."
"Roger doesn't seem to be smothering in Norton," Sylvia reminded her. "Jack stopped over to see him last week and he said Roger was stirring things up with a vengeance since he has been sitting among the city fathers."
"Oh, Roger!" Suzanne shrugged Roger away as entirely negligible. "Roger Minot would stir things up in a graveyard. He likes to live in a small town. I don't. The biggest city in the world isn't one bit too big for me. New York for mine. Better change your mind, Sylvia, and come on, too. There will be plenty of room in my garret. More room than anything else probably. Aunt Sarah's legacy has its limits, more's the pity. But come on and share my crust."
"Maybe I will, temporarily. I've promised Jeanette Latham to visit her next winter and I'll include you and Barb in my rounds if invited."
"Jeanette Latham? Mrs. Francis VanDycke Latham? The Mrs. Latham who figures in 'Vanity Fair' and the Sunday supplement? The only Jack's sister? There will be some contrast between visiting her and visiting me. She inhabits a Duplex on the Drive, doesn't she? One of the utterly utter."
"That depends. Mr. Latham is awfully rich and old family, if that is what you mean, and Jeanette does like to be at the extreme of everything, but underneath all her dazzle and glitter she is really as simple and genuine as Jack is. I like her, and she is Jack's favorite sister."
"Which helps," murmured Suzanne. "See here, Sylvia, if you once get into that high society labyrinth you'll never get out."
"Oh, yes I shall--unless the Minotaur gets me. I just want a bit of Jeanette's kind of life to see what it is really like. In fact, I want to try all kinds."
Sylvia smiled as she spoke, but she meant her last assertion for all that. Hers was an eager, active, questing temperament. She was avid for life in its entirety, with a healthy zest for experience whose sword blades rather than poppy seeds appealed to her just now, as is natural with youth. The college world from which she had been recently emancipated, full and various and strenuous as it had often been, had never fully satisfied her free, quick, young spirit. She had always the memory of those early rich years in Paris with her aunt from which to draw comparison. She had once complained to Felicia that college was too much like the Lady of Shallott's tower whose occupants perceived life in a polished mirror instead of in direct contact. She was already frankly a little tired of "shadows," ready for the real thing, whatever that was.
"Maybe I am glad I don't have to do any one thing," she continued. "All through school you are so pushed and guarded and guided and instructed you don't have half a chance to be yourself. I'm thankful for a breathing space to find out who I really am."
"Why, Sylvia! How funny!" puzzled Barb. "Don't you know all about yourself?"
"No, do you?"
Barbara shook her head with a faint sigh.
"Maybe not. Or, if I do, I don't let myself look at the real Barb for fear--" She broke off and Suzanne intervened.
"Well, I know all there is to know about Suzanne Morrison. I have taken considerable pains to get acquainted, in fact. It is great to know precisely what you want and that you are going to get it sooner or later." Thus the sublime arrogance of the young twenties.
"I wish I did!" said Sylvia quickly.
"Which?"
"Both," parried Sylvia.
But Barb, who was watching her, was aware of something in her friend's face which she could not quite fathom. Was it possible there was anything in the world Sylvia Arden wanted and could not have? It was a startling thought to Barb, who was accustomed to considering Sylvia as the Princess of all the Heart's Desires.
Just then the Japanese gong from within sent out its silver-tongued invitation. With the alacrity of the healthily hungry and heart-free the three friends rose, the conclave ended, consigning to temporary oblivion Causes, Careers and all Concomitant Problems.
CHAPTER II
REASONS AND WRAITHS
Mrs. Emory laid down her sewing on the porch table and rose to greet Stephen Kinnard, a tall, lean man with a rather angular but interesting face, with hair slightly graying on the temples, and remarkably beautiful eyes, slate-gray shot with tiny topaz colored flecks, eyes which as Sylvia said "looked" at women. They looked now, which was scarcely strange considering how beautiful Felicia Emory was at thirty-three.
"Will you have tea?" inquired Felicia.
"Thanks, no." He shook his head with a humorous gesture. "I've taken tea at the Oriole Inn--almost forcible feeding, in fact. It seems they are serving a new kind of sandwich to-day and Sylvia waylaid me and insisted on trying it on the dog so to speak. She and Suzanne and Barbara and Martha and Hope all stood by to watch the effect. I was never so nervous in my life. May I smoke to calm my spirit?"
Felicia nodded assent and sat down, resuming her sewing.
"I am glad to see you still survive," she said, as he lit his cigarette and dropped into a near-by chair.
"Oh, yes, I still survive. It was really an excellent sandwich in its way, though I should hate to have to pass an examination on its contents. It was one of Sylvia's inventions it seems. Tell me, does she have the whole Hill on her hands? First it's a garden party at 'Hester house,' Sylvia at the helm; then it is the Byrd sisters who have to be petted or scolded or braced, or a patient of Doctor Tom's who needs attention, or his babies that have to be story-told to, or Marianna and Donald who have to have her assistance in a dramatic performance of Lord Ullin's Daughter. I heard her shouting 'I'll forgive your Highland Chief' yesterday while the kids eloped in the hammock, amidst high billows, I judge from the way the boat was rocking. To-day it is the Oriole Inn sandwich. She is a most remarkable young person, this Sylvia of yours, with a most insatiable energy."
"She is, indeed," agreed Felicia heartily. "The Hill can hardly get along without Sylvia. We all mope and get selfish and lazy, what she calls 'rutty' when she is away from it. I am so glad she is home for keeps now. The Hill is never quite the same without her."
"But she won't stay on it forever," warned Stephen Kinnard. "She is a live wire--that young lady. She isn't going to be content to settle down on even so lovely a hill as hers. Also she is more than likely to get married."
"I suppose so," sighed Felicia.
"What a lugubrious tone to vouchsafe to the holy state!" he teased.
"It isn't the holy state in itself. It is Sylvia. I hate to have her get grown up and married and settled down. I'd like to keep things just as they are for awhile. The dread of changes seems to grow on me as I get old."
Felicia smiled as she made the statement but there was genuine feeling behind it.
"Would you dread change for yourself?"
"For myself? I don't know. I wasn't thinking especially about myself."
"Do you ever?"
"Not oftener than is agreeable. I am getting to be a very placid, settled sort of person. That is the comfort of being in the thirties. You don't expect so much of life. Now, ten years ago if I had been thinking of submitting designs for a competition I should have been frightfully excited. Now, I think I would almost rather not win, which is fortunate considering how little chance there is of my doing so."
"There is all the chance in the world," objected Stephen. "You need a little of the virus of vanity instilled into you. Felicia, do you remember back there in Paris when old Regnier used to insist you had more talent than any man in his class?"
Felicia tranquilly snipped off her thread and admitted that she remembered.
"And do you remember how he raved when you told him you were going to marry Syd?"
Felicia nodded. She remembered that, too; remembered also, though she did not say so, how she had smiled at the old master's ravings, sure that love would prove no hindrance to her art, sure that she and Sydney would work and achieve fame together. She had not dreaded changes in those days. She had welcomed them, taken risks blithely, unafraid. And there had been risks. Her aunt had raved also, to more purpose than the Master, and in a moment of rage had changed her will, cutting off from inheritance the willful girl who chose to reject the French count her judicious relative had selected for her and insisted on marrying instead a penniless artist. The loss of her inheritance had seemed to Felicia at the time a trifle light as air, quite as irrelevant indeed as the Master's gloomy prediction as to the eternal incompatibility of art and matrimony. All these things she had thrown into the scales with love in the opposite balance and love had weighed immeasurably heaviest.
There had followed a few years of idyllic happiness. Though with the coming of the babies the art she loved had been temporarily suspended; both she and her husband promised themselves eagerly that it was only a suspension, that she would go back to it again as soon as Marianna and Brother were just a little older. But before Marianna and Brother were much older Felicia was left alone with a "big heartache to carry round inside her and two children to provide immediate bread and butter for," as Suzanne had put it. And so the old dreams had been thrust out of sight, and the young woman whom the Master pronounced to have possessed more talent than twenty talented young men, fell to earning a living for herself and her little folk by painting place cards and Christmas greetings and calendars and such like small ilk. All this drifted in retrospect through Felicia Emory's mind as she bent over her sewing, and something in the droop of her mouth touched Stephen as he perceived it. Impulsively he threw away his cigarette and leaned forward letting his hand touch hers.
"Felicia, forgive me! I didn't mean to hurt you."
"You didn't. It just came back to me for a moment how fearfully young and happy and ignorant I was in those days. But with all the wisdom I've garnered since, if I had it to do over again, I suppose I should travel precisely the same road. Isn't it queer, Stephen? Don't you feel that way about the past, too?"
"No, my road was too devilish rough. I'd like it different."
Felicia looked up, surprised both at his words and the unusual passion in his voice.
"Do you suppose I have ever forgotten I didn't get what I wanted? Felicia, I loved you before Syd ever saw you."
"I know. I'm sorry. I was always sorry. You know that, Stephen."
"You needn't be. Loving you made a man of me, though it did make the road rough. Things had come my way rather too easily up to that time. Syd was the better man. I always owned that."
"You were fine, Stephen. I've never forgotten how fine. And Sydney cared more for you than for any one else in the world--barring us." She smiled a little and her eyes strayed out to the magnolia tree beneath whose generous shade Marianna and Donald were laboriously engaged in the construction of a kite with much chatter and argument.
"Felicia."
"Yes?"
"Are you so afraid of change you wouldn't risk beginning over again--with me?"
Felicia's sewing dropped in her lap and her blue eyes opened wide with surprise and consternation as she looked up to meet his dark, eager eyes.
"Stephen!"
"Well? Is it so impossible to conceive? Haven't you guessed I was going to ask it sooner or later?"
"No. Oh, Stephen, I wish you hadn't."
"Why? I don't expect the same kind of love you gave Syd. You couldn't give it, of course. That is past. But you are too young to have life stop altogether for you--too young and too lovely. Other men will ask it if I don't, and I--well, I want to get in ahead." He laughed boyishly, but his eyes, which were grave enough, never left her face. "Is there any reason you couldn't say yes?" he asked.
"I am afraid there are many. One of them--rather two of them--are out under the tree at present."
His gaze followed her gesture.
"Are they really a reason? I love the kiddies and they like me. Surely it would be no injustice nor detriment to them. Why should it?"
"Not to them--rather to you--to any man I married. They are a very piece of me. They are me. If there ever came to be a decision between them and--well, call the man you--I should decide for them. Is that fair to you? Would you risk it?"
"Willingly. Why should there be any decision or division? What do you think I am? If I marry you I marry them too. I am crazy over children. I've always wanted them."
"Exactly," said Felicia quietly. "That would be part of the injustice to you. I don't want children. Marianna and Donald are enough."
"So they would be for me. Felicia, can't you understand, I want nothing except what you want--what will make you happy? Is there any other reason?"
"Yes, she is coming up the Hill now."
He turned quickly and saw Sylvia, with her friends on either side, just going up the path which led to the door of the Byrd sisters preparatory to an afternoon call.
"What nonsense!" He turned back to Felicia to protest. "Sylvia would be the last to stand in the way of your happiness."
"Oh, I know that. But listen, Stephen. You accused me of not understanding a moment ago. Now it is you who do not understand. Do you know what Sylvia has been to me all these years? No, you couldn't possibly know. No man could. Six years ago I was weary almost unto death, and discouraged with a weight of hopelessness which was beginning to make even the children seem a burden. That Christmas was the blackest time of all the months since Sydney went. I tell you honestly it didn't seem as if I could go on with it all. I was too near the breaking point. And then straight out of the delightful good fairyland where she lives came Sylvia begging me to be her Christmas sister and bring the babies to round out her magic Christmas circle. I believe it was Sylvia's smile and Sylvia's pleading eyes that began to heal the hurt in me then and there. I have had lonely moments since, of course, and some black ones, too, but they have never been so bad since that Christmas. Do you wonder that next to my own children I care more for Sylvia and her happiness than for anything else in the world?"
Stephen shook his head soberly, trying his best to understand since she desired it.
"After the Christmas family scattered I came to be what Sylvia calls her homekeeper and that I have been for over five years now. You can see a little what it has meant to me to have a home like Arden Hall for the children to grow up in instead of a cramped city apartment with no outdoors except public parks to play in. It has made all the difference in the world to them and to me, body, mind and soul. I couldn't have been half a mother to them the way I was working and living. And all of this we owe to Sylvia."
"But you have rendered good measure. You have given her a home no less than she has given you one. It has been a fair exchange."
"I know. It has meant almost as much to Sylvia as it has to me. It has given us both what we wanted most. I don't pretend it hasn't been give and take. It has. But this one year is the one of all the six since I've known Sylvia that she needs me most. I wouldn't fail her now for anything."
"And they say women have no sex loyalty," muttered Stephen Kinnard. "See here, Felicia, do you realize you have as good as accepted me?"
"Accepted you! I have been refusing you with reasons for fifteen minutes." Felicia's serene voice was a bit ruffled and there was a flush in her cheeks.
"You've been giving reasons, I grant you, but not refusal. Look at me, Felicia. If there weren't any Marianna and Donald and Sylvia in the world wouldn't you say this minute, 'Stephen, I'll marry you just as soon as you can get the license'? No quibble now. Honest."
Felicia laughed softly and her flush deepened.
"If there weren't any Marianna and Donald and Sylvia in the world I should be so desperately lonesome I should tell the first man that asked me I would marry him as soon as he could get the license, but seeing that there are Marianna and Donald and Sylvia, not only in the world but on this very Hill, I am not in the least lonesome and quite satisfied with my mothering-sistering job, thank you."
"Then it is really no?"
The mirth died out of her eyes at the gravity of his tone.
"Yes, Stephen. I am sorry, but it is really no. Aside from Sylvia and the children there would always be Sydney. You are too fine to be a second best, Stephen, dear. Do go and find somebody who is fresher and younger and less--tired than I am."
At her words there rose to both their minds a vision of Hope Williams' dainty, wild rose beauty and wistful "dryad" eyes. Stephen had been sketching her only that morning in the Oriole Inn garden and every line of her exquisite, fragile, flower-like face and lithe, graceful young body was in his head still. And Felicia had more than once surprised an unforgettable expression in Hope's eyes when the artist had come suddenly into the girl's presence. Hope was young, younger than Sylvia, and Stephen Kinnard was forty. But he was of the eternally young type of man, brimming over with that inexplicable, irresistible thing we call charm, and his years abroad had stamped him with a picturesque, foreign quality which was sure to appeal to the romantic fancy of youth. One ardent gaze from those strange, gold-flecked eyes of his had no doubt been enough to set many a maid dreaming ere this, and he had been kind to Hope, perhaps more than kind for all Felicia knew.
But already the vision of Hope had vanished from Stephen's mind. He saw only the mature grace and loveliness of the woman who had long ago been the one fixed star of his errant youth and to whom he now brought the homage of ripened manhood.
"I don't want anybody in the smallest particular different from yourself, sweet Lady Love. Don't worry though," as he saw her troubled eyes. "I am not going to pester you. I shall take myself off to-morrow but I shall come back and some day I shall surprise you in a lonely hour and you will say, 'Stephen, do hurry and get the license.'"
Seeing his whimsical, reassuring smile, Felicia smiled back, half relieved, and indeed not quite knowing how much of it all had been in earnest; glad, at all events, to have him slip back so easily into the familiar channels of friendliness.
And just then the girls, having finished their call, came gayly chattering up the walk, demanding of Stephen whether he had suffered any ill effects from the experimental sandwich he had so manfully encountered. And amidst the general confusion of talk and laughter Stephen rose to take his departure, giving no hint of finality about his leave taking, except a slightly lengthened clasp of Felicia's hand and a steady gaze into her blue eyes. Consequently the girls, at least, were considerably surprised the next day to receive three boxes of sweet peas each with Stephen Kinnard's card, rose pink for Suzanne, shell pink for Barb, delicate lavendar for Sylvia. Sylvia's box also contained a charming little note thanking the girl for her summer's hospitality and regretting that the writer was called out of town without opportunity for formal farewells. For Felicia had come violets, but no word at all, not even a card.
"H-m-m," murmured the astute Suzanne, when the girls were alone, "Called out of town, indeed! Needn't tell me. Your Felicia didn't have such a becoming extra bloom yesterday for nothing. You are safe for the present, Sylvia. She evidently dismissed him."
Down the Hill, at the Oriole Inn, Hope and Martha Williams reigned in the absence of the young proprietor who since her grandmother's death had been traveling in Europe with the Armstrongs, her sister Constance and her husband, Sylvia's erstwhile gardener. And to the Oriole Inn also came flowers, dainty, half-open, pink rosebuds nestled in maidenhair fern. Came also a brotherly affectionate note of thanks and adieu from the artist.
"The sketches are bound to be a success," he wrote, "for you are the very spirit of Southern gardens, the veriest rose of them all." So he had put it, poet fashion, and Hope, with fluttering pink and white in her cheeks, ran off to enjoy her treasures in happy solitude, leaving her sister Martha stolidly measuring lengths for the new dining-room curtains. No one had ever sent roses to Martha in all her life. Nor had any one ever written poet lines about her or to her. She was not that kind, as she would herself have explained. But it was not that that brought a wry twist to her lips and a worried look to her eyes as she bent over her work.
"Why couldn't he a been a little meaner to her?" she demanded of the curtains. "'Twould have been a whole lot kinder than being kind."
In which theory she unconsciously paraphrased the words of a person she had never heard of, another perturbed guardian of another flower-like maid, the Lily Maid of Astolat. Of Launcelots and Elaines there are a plenty in this somewhat uneconomical world.
CHAPTER III
TWENTY-TWO
"Please, Felicia. Look at me. Am I all right?"
Mrs. Emory turned from her mirror before which she had been adjusting a last hairpin in her blond hair and smiled at the radiant vision which hovered on her threshold. But before she had time to render verdict the vision ceased to be stationary and became before her eyes a vivid, ecstatic flash and whirl of white chiffon and silver.
"Bless us, child!" laughed Felicia. "You are as bad as Marianna. How can I tell anything about you when you are spinning like a Dervish? You look as if you might float out the window any minute and join the moon sprites."
Sylvia laughed, too, and came to a halt, though one silver slipper paused tip toe as if it scorned prosaic levels and held itself ready for further airy revolutions.
"And leave my birthday party! Not much! The moon sprites shan't get me to-night. Honest, Felicia, I just can't keep still. I'm too alive."
The chiffons and silver began to shimmer and quiver again in testimony and Felicia smiled understandingly. But even as she smiled she felt a sharp little pang--the pang of chastened maturity for exuberant youth. A vagrant bit of verse flashed through her mind.
"Pity that ever the jubilant springs should fail at their flow
And that youth so utterly knowing it not should one day know."
Yes, that was the pity. Here was Sylvia Arden, glad, and young, and free, smiling into the future with fearless eyes, challenging experience. Must she too, one day know? At any rate, the hour of too much knowing was as yet afar off. At twenty-two Sylvia was still very close to the jubilant springs. But even as she reached this comforting conclusion Felicia saw the girl's eyes grow sober.
"Felicia, sometimes I think it's a dreadful thing to grow up. Life is so fearfully complex somehow. All sorts of questions jump out and 'Boo' at you from behind every tree."
"What kind of questions?"
"Oh, all kinds!" Sylvia dropped down on the low window seat, like a bird suddenly alighting, and clasped her hands around her knees in reckless disregard of her billowing chiffons. "I'm a little afflicted with socialism and that is a sad disease for a person who has as much money as I have. But that isn't all. I am so at sea about so many things, and there are so many strings pulling in all directions. Suzanne thinks New York is the only place in the world to really live in and she wants me to come and live with her and study or do something. She doesn't think it matters much what, so long as I breathe New York, and Barb is nearly as bad. They are both full of up-to-date notions and they think I'm just going to slip behind if I stay here and maybe I shall. I can see pretty easily how I could. Everybody here expects me to do the regular coming out performance, teas and dinners and balls and the rest, with maybe a little discreet charity work thrown in, and possibly a paper on art or ethics for the literary club. You know what Greendale is. The Gordons want me to go to Japan with them and Hilda wants me to join her in Berlin, or did before the war. Goodness knows where she is now. I haven't heard since July. And--well, there are other things."
Felicia quite understood that Jack Amidon might possibly be another string pulling the girl. It was no secret from the Hill, and certainly not from the wise-eyed "Big Sister," that that devoted, persistent and "magerful" young man had every intention of storming Sylvia's hill top and carrying off its princess if such a feat were humanly possible.
"And you don't want to do any of these things?"
Sylvia smiled dubiously.
"Oh, yes, a little of me wants to do all those things. But the most of me wants to stay right here at Arden Hall and do nothing particular. I'd like a kind of year o' grace I think. I don't seem to have any especial ambitions nor desires except to learn to live as broad and deep and quick as I can." She shifted her position slightly and looked out into the night where her beloved rose garden lay in magical moonlight and shadow and a faint sigh escaped her, born of the very beauty, poignant almost as pain, so quick was her response to it. Suddenly she turned back and her eyes smiled at Felicia.
"Life's funny, isn't it?" she said, springing up. "Felicia, what ever in the world should I do without you?" She eyed a little sternly the bunch of violets Felicia was wearing, a fresh bunch which had arrived that day. "Felicia, Mr. Kinnard isn't--you aren't--?"
Felicia laughed.
"Your observations lack a certain finished coherence but I assure you I am not, nor is he--at least, not seriously."
"I'm so glad!" sighed Sylvia. "I know I'm a pig but I should simply hate Stephen Kinnard if I thought he were going to carry you off, and I should hate to hate him he is so exceedingly nice. I wish he could have stayed for the party to-night. Oh me! We ought to be downstairs this blessed minute. Am I all right, Felicia? You never did tell me." And Sylvia whirled around to the mirror for a last critical survey. Felicia, whose eyes also sought the reflected figure in the glass, thought she had never seen the girl lovelier than she was to-night in all her shimmering bravery of white and silver. But there was always something more than mere prettiness about Sylvia, something which seemed to shine from within out. She was so exquisitely alive like the fire in the heart of an opal or a jet of pure flame.
"Aren't you coming, Syl?" Suzanne's voice called from the hall as she knocked and entered almost simultaneously, followed by Barbara.
"'The feast is set,
The guests are met.
May'st hear the merry din.'"
she chanted gayly, looking more impishly charming even than usual in her beruffled corn yellow taffeta, which set off her sparkling brunette beauty to perfection. "Do come down quick and get the hand shaking over so we can begin to dance. It is a shame to waste a moment of that heavenly music. And here's Barb just dying to get to cracking the hearts of the Greendale swains. Look at her. Behold my handiwork. She even let me apply the faintest soupçon of Nature's sweet reënforcer. Madame Delphine's Parisian Bloom. Isn't she adorable? Barbie, my child, revolve for the ladies."
"Oh, Suzanne!" The roses in Barb's cheeks needed no further reënforcement at the moment. "Do please rub it off. It's dreadful. Does it show, Sylvia? She would do it."
"Nothing shows except that you're the cunningest mite I ever laid eyes on," approved Sylvia. "Felicia, do look at her. Doesn't she look precisely like one of Marianna's dolls? In that darling white baby dress and blue sash to match her eyes, would you ever suspect her of being a Summa cum Laude and a frightfully new woman?"
"You all look new enough when it comes to that," laughed Felicia. "You haven't a notion how young you really are. Now, shoo, every one of you. I'll follow as soon as I have rounded up Donald and Marianna."
It was a rather heterogeneous assembly which met at the Hall that night, as Sylvia's parties were apt to be. The guests ranged from "Grandpa McIntosh," getting to be rather an old gentleman these days but still hale and a little crusty as became a good Scotchman, down to little Mary Lane, the youngest, shyest member of the "Hester house" family which continued to hold its hospitable doors open to those who needed a home "with some one to care" as Sylvia had stipulated from the beginning.
Marianna, still fairy-like, in spite of her eleven-year-old dignity, flitted happily among the guests feeling delightfully grown up and important, but Donald, younger and shyer, boyishly conscious of his hands and feet, slipped into unobtrusive corners save for the rare moments when he could squeeze into an empty space beside his mother.
Of course the Hill was all there, Miss Priscilla, and Miss Rosalie and Julietta feasted their eyes delightedly on Sylvia, telling every one who would listen what a very picture of her Aunt Eleanor Arden the child was, rapturously reminiscent of other days and other parties when they, too, like Arden Hall were younger than at present, and Doctor Tom and Lois were there also, rallying each other on being such old fogies that a party was an event and the new dances utterly beyond their ken.
"Hester house" was present too in full force, including Mrs. Lorrimer and all the family of girls who had the luck to be mothered by her skillful hands and warm heart. All kinds of girls they were, big and little, pretty and plain, stupid and clever, but all of the workaday world and all otherwise homeless, united by one common bond, a warm adoration for Sylvia through whom they felt themselves linked to the world of their rosiest dreams. Sylvia would no more have omitted them from her list of guests on this birthday celebration than she would have omitted the Byrds or Doctor Tom. To be of the Hill was open sesame to Sylvia's favor, and moreover these girls were every one of them her personal friends and she wanted them here for their own sakes.
Hope and Martha, too, had come up from the Oriole Inn, the former still a little inarticulate and somber but happily having lost the old-young, pinched look about the mouth and the bitterness about the eyes which had been hers that night in Sylvia's garden when she had charged the owner so sternly with possessing "Hundreds of roses when Hope hasn't even one;" a charge which Sylvia had never since been able to forget for long. It was to her a symbol of the mesh of inequality and injustice of the world in which she herself was caught and struggled. For Sylvia wanted to share her roses. She always had wanted to, as Martha had long since learned. Hope was even sweeter and lovelier at twenty than she had been at fifteen, still a little frail in appearance though perfectly well. This summer there was an added grace about her, a sort of suppressed joyousness, a glow which transformed her rather ethereal charm into an even more appealing human guise. During the sunny summer days past when Stephen Kinnard had been using her as the incarnation of gardens, Hope herself had bloomed from a shy bud of a rose into a half-blown flower, though perhaps only Martha's keen, devoted eyes saw what had happened.
Professor Lane and his wife, Sylvia's original "Christmas Mother," were unfortunately unable to be present, though they sent warm greetings and hearty congratulations from the Western university to which the professor had recently been called. With them, too, was Elizabeth, also of the original famous family, who had come of late to be almost like a daughter in their childless home.
Gus Nichols was here, however, a slim, dark youth, extremely quiet, though not in the least awkward; unobtrusive, grave, giving the impression somehow of banked fires behind those solemn dark eyes of his, which followed Sylvia Arden wherever she passed. Though Gus was thoroughly American in dress and manner and articulation, the trail of his Italian ancestry was upon him. Even after all these years he looked "different," an odd contrast to the grim conservative old man, Angus McIntosh, whose adopted son and idol he was. Gus had been studying abroad for several years, had indeed just returned to America, ready to start his career on the concert stage. If this profession elected by the boy were at all a bitter pill for the old Scotchman to swallow he made no protest about it and had even furthered the lad's ambition. Mr. McIntosh was not one to indulge in half-way measures and Sylvia had long since driven home her point that if he was to transform Gus Nichols, office boy, into Augustus Nichols, his adopted son, he had no right to change the currents of the boy's being in the process. He quite understood that if Gus "had to play the music that was in him," he had to. That was the end of it. Angus McIntosh was enough of a predestinarian to perceive that. At any rate, Sylvia and her Christmas family had inoculated the fast hardening old man with a certain infusion of human tolerance and human understanding and he had all the reward for his kindness that he desired and more in the boy's usually silent but none the less deep gratitude and devotion.
Other friends there were of Greendale and the near-by city, assembled to do honor to the young mistress of Arden Hall who had at last come home to take her place among them no longer a half-fledged school girl, but a poised and very lovely young woman.
"I suppose you will be marrying her off next," observed Mr. McIntosh curtly, with bent brows, to Mrs. Emory who chanced to be standing near by as Sylvia sped past in Jack Amidon's arms.
"Not I," smiled Felicia. "I should be sorry to have her marry for a year or so yet. One is young such a very short time in this world at best. I should like to keep her just as she is for awhile if I could."
"You'll have some trouble doing it unless you muzzle that young man, I'm thinking." The speaker frowned thoughtfully at Jack Amidon's back. "I suppose that is what most people would call a suitable match, eh?" he wheeled on Felicia to ask.
"I suppose so," admitted Felicia.
"H-mp!" snorted her companion. "Most people are fools."
Whether fools or not there were plenty of people to note with interest, pleasure or alarm, according to their several viewpoints, when as the music ceased Sylvia stepped through the French window into the balcony beyond, followed by Jack Amidon. Perhaps more than one guest would have echoed Suzanne's verdict that Sylvia was spoiled indeed if Jack Amidon were not good enough for her; handsome, debonair, thoroughly charming as he was. Health, wealth, good looks and good old family on both sides. What more could be desired? Who but a canny old Scotchman would have "H-mped" in the face of such a very obviously appropriate combination? Yet Sylvia herself was still to be reckoned with; Sylvia who wore her heart on her sleeve as little now as in the old St. Anne days, Sylvia, who wanted to learn to live as broad and deep and quick as she could.
CHAPTER IV
THE WAYS OF A MAID
"You look mighty sweet and cool and moonshiny!"
Jack stooped to draw Sylvia's scarf about her bare shoulders with the protecting chivalrous touch which was characteristic of him. His ancestors had been cavaliers and none of them all knew better than he the art of little, tender, intimate, endearing ways which women--even new women--love. The ardently adoring expression in his eyes was also characteristic. Jack Amidon's eyes were accustomed to looking adoring. He could no more help making love to a pretty girl than he could have been rude to an ugly one. It was constitutional. To do him justice, however, this time the adoration came from rather deep. There had been girls and girls in his life but never but one Sylvia.
"Ah, but it's good to have you home for good and all." And he let his hands rest for a moment on her shoulders as he spoke and permitted the ardentness of his eyes to deepen.
But Sylvia slipped away from his hands and his too eloquent gaze. She turned to rest her hands on the railing and look down at the fountain which flashed and gurgled pleasantly below in the moonlight. Perhaps she knew that all the summer day playing had been leading up to this night, that a serious question was likely to "Boo" at her at any minute unless she could keep it at a safe distance, which as Jack's eyes just now betrayed was not going to be so easy.
"I am not sure I am home--for good and all," she said, still with her eyes on the fountain. "I have to find something to do. Just being 'out' isn't going to satisfy me. I have to be in something or rather. I am looking for a Cause," she turned back to him with a smile to add.
Jack dropped on the railing by her side and bent his handsome head until it was very near the girl's.
"Won't I do--for a Cause?" he asked, unconsciously echoing Suzanne.
Sylvia smiled.
"Scarcely. I am afraid you are more like an effect."
"An effect!"
"You are a fearful example of what I don't want to be and what I am bound to be if I don't watch out."
"What?"
Sylvia paused for a word, then, "A derelict," she pronounced.
Jack's head went up quickly, his self-complacency shattered for the moment. Sylvia's word had stung.
"Do I honestly remind you of anything so--dilapidated, not to say rotten?" he asked.
Sylvia caught the hurt sound in his voice and looked up, taking in at a glance his wholesome, young vigor, his essential cleanness and fineness. Excellent things these in themselves as the girl knew, though she asked for more.
"No," she admitted. "It wasn't a good figure after all. You are more like a freshly rigged, beautifully appointed yacht, without a rudder or a pilot, going nowhere--anywhere."
Jack settled back on the railing with a shrug.
"Same old Sylvia! You always did hit straight from the shoulder. What do you want me to do? There is more money in the family now than is good for us. What's the infernal use of my scrapping and scrambling for more? I'm a nincompoop at the business anyway."
"Then for goodness' sake find one you aren't a nincompoop at," retorted Sylvia.
"Easier said than done, young woman."
"Oh, I know," relented his mentor. "I haven't any right to preach till I find my own job."
"You! Girls don't need a job. Their job is to look pretty and get married."
Sylvia frowned at that.
"Heretic! That's not twentieth-century lingo. You are positively mediæval. I shall set Barb on you."
Jack smiled.
"Barb knows it's true just as well as I do for all her theories. She would marry the right man in a minute if he turned up and forget the suffrage stuff. She's by all odds the most domestic of the three of you."
Sylvia looked thoughtful. She remembered Barb's opinion about the "loveliness" of having babies and wondered. For all his inconsequence Jack had a somewhat startling habit at times of getting beneath the surface of things. She suspected he had hit upon a truth now but would not give him the satisfaction of acknowledging the fact. Therefore she said nothing, and her silence gave her companion the opening he had been waiting for. He had not brought Sylvia out in the moonlight to talk "twentieth-century lingo."
"You didn't wear my orchids," he observed irrelevantly, at least irrelevantly to everything except his ardent eyes. From the beginning his eyes had been talking a language older than that of feminism.
"I didn't wear anybody's flowers. I had too many."
"And I am not different from just anybody?" There was a caressing, proprietary note in his voice. "Sylvia, sweetheart, you know I am."
Sylvia faced him and the issue then, aware that she could fend no longer.
"Of course you are different, Jack. I've known you so much longer than the rest, but--I am afraid you are not different in the way you want me to say it. Please, Jack, don't spoil what we have by asking too much." Impulsively she put out her hand and let it rest on his. "Can't we keep on being--just friends?" She pleaded after the immemorial fashion of woman.
"I'm afraid not. You see, I don't want to be just friends. I want a whole lot more as it happens. I know I'm not much good, but I could be with you at the helm. You could do anything with me. You always could. Oh, Sylvia, wouldn't you try it? Couldn't you?" He stooped and lifted her hand to his lips. "Sylvia, isn't there any hope?" he implored, all his boy's heart in his eyes.
Sylvia couldn't help being stirred deeply. When one is loved it is not so hard to believe one loves in return and the call of youth and life is strong. But for both their sakes she steadied herself knowing the time was not ripe for yielding, if, indeed, it ever would be. This was one of the things among others that she was at sea about. She was not yet sure she knew herself, as she had told her friends.
"I am afraid there isn't--much," she said gently, apropos of his word hope.
His hand clinched.
"Sylvia, is there any one else?"
She shook her head hastily, but her eyes fell beneath his penetrating gaze.
"It isn't--Sylvia, it isn't Phil?"
Sylvia's head went up and there was a flash in her brown eyes, a deeper flush on her cheeks.
"It is nobody. Jack, you haven't any right to ask that," she rebuked him hotly.
"Sorry," he apologized. "Consider it unasked." "So it is old Phil," he thought.
"I don't want to marry anybody--not for a long, long time," Sylvia went on swiftly. "Anyway, I couldn't marry anybody who was just a boy. I've got to marry a man." In her confusion Sylvia hit hard again; harder perhaps than she really meant.
Jack rose and made one or two quick turns tip and down the balcony. Then he came to a halt before Sylvia.
"Maybe I deserve that," he said soberly. "No doubt I do. See here, Sylvia, if I can show you I am a man, will it help any?"
Sylvia hesitated. It would help a great deal and she knew it. And yet could she promise anything while she was still so uncertain of herself? Had she any right to hold out any hope?
"Sweetheart, wouldn't there be any chance for me?" he pleaded.
"I don't know," said Sylvia honestly. "I'm sorry, Jack. I'm all in a muddle myself. I do care a lot. How could I help it? You are always so dear and nice to me, and you are so twisted up with so many of the happiest times I've ever had I couldn't help caring. But it isn't enough at present, and I am not at all sure it ever could be enough of the right kind. We are awfully good playmates, but there is more ahead for both of us than play. At least I hope there is. Anyway, I don't want to belong to anybody but myself for awhile."
"I'll wait. I'll work like the devil. I'll do anything if you'll only say there is the slightest shadow of a chance."
Sylvia couldn't help smiling at the boyishness of his protestations, earnest as they were and touching in their unwonted humility. She shook her head.
"That is all there is--just a shadow of a chance. I'm sorry it isn't more. Truly I am. And don't--please, don't--hope too much," she begged.
"I'll hope all there is," he retorted grimly.
"Well, here you are! My word! Your partners are tearing their hair and rushing round like mad dogs. Pretty way for a hostess to behave, vanishing like the original Cheshire puss! Amidon, your life isn't worth a nickle if you go in there." Thus challenged a blond young medical student from the near-by University suddenly appearing in the window, blithely unconscious that he had interrupted anything more than a moonlight interlude.
"Then I'll stay out," announced Jack coolly as Sylvia rose with apologies and followed her captor.
Left alone, Jack lit a cigarette and strode to and fro in the little balcony thinking as hard as perhaps he had ever thought in his twenty-six rather heedless happy-go-lucky years. If ever a man takes square account of himself it is at the moment when he desires with all his heart and soul to win a woman. As young men go, Jack Amidon was as clean and fine as most, considerably more so than might have been expected, in fact, considering his easy-going temperament and unlimited income. But being merely negatively decent was not enough to offer Sylvia Arden. Not even shrewd old Angus McIntosh knew that better than Jack himself.
"Man indeed!" he muttered in the course of his march. "I suppose if I had studied like sin and turned into a saw bones like old Phil she would have had some use for me." The thought of Phil Lorrimer sent his thoughts on a different tangent. For with that uncanny perceptive power which Sylvia herself granted him he knew far better than Sylvia knew that if it had been Phil instead of himself who had been besieging the Princess of the hill top that evening for the boon of her hand and heart a different answer might have been forthcoming. Phil, at least, fulfilled the initial requirement. He was a man, every inch of him. Jack vouchsafed him that just as he had admitted the other lad deserved Sylvia's favor even at his own expense back in the days of the Christmas family.
It was odd how history repeated itself. Just as in that old time, Sylvia had set himself a task to "mend his fences" as she had whimsically expressed it, so she was again bidding him gird on his armor if he would win her respect without which her love was an impossibility. As if it were yesterday Jack remembered that night among the snow-laden pines, out under the stars, when Sylvia had gravely and simply without any preaching, Sylvia fashion, turned him aside from paths already beginning to be dangerous to safer, cleaner ways. Come to think of it, it had always been Sylvia who had pointed him starward, Sylvia only who believed in him enough to swear him into knighthood. Now that they were no longer boy and girl it was the prize of her love which would send him into the fray. Already he had experienced his accolade.
"Poor old Lorry!" he thought. "Why didn't he cut his blooming operations and come down here and speak for himself to-night? Thank the Lord he didn't though or yours truly would be ditched and done for. I never had a show with Lorry in the foreground. Well, here's to the breach. Sylvia will never forgive me if I omit to dance with one of her precious orphans."
So it happened that a few moments later shy little Mary Lane watching the dancers with longing eyes from a corner caught her breath with astonishment and delight as Jack Amidon stood before her, his eyes smiling encouragement and friendliness, his lips begging the boon of a dance quite as earnestly as if she had been one of the belles of the ball. So it happened also that Sylvia, being whirled past the two, smiled happy gratitude at Jack over her partner's shoulder, and he knew that his careless kindness to her little guest had scored him a high mark in her favor.
"Jack is such a dear," thought Sylvia. "He is a real knight. I wonder if I am all wrong to try to turn him into a plain workaday person. He is so thoroughly delightful as he is. When men get too much absorbed in their work you can't count on them for the little things, and, after all, the little things mean a whole lot."
Possibly this sage conclusion had some vague connection with the fact that a certain very much "absorbed in work" young doctor way off in a distant city had permitted Sylvia's birthday to come and almost go with no word or sign. If so certainly Sylvia would have been the last to admit the connection even to herself.
"Please, Miss Sylvia, there's some one downstairs in the hall asking for you," whispered a maid in Sylvia's ears as her partner brought her to a chair. "He didn't give any name."
Sylvia excused herself and slipped away wondering as to the identity of her late arriving guest. At the foot of the stairs was an extraordinarily tall, blond young man, with the bluest and friendliest of eyes and the biggest, most crushing hand grip in the world.
"Why, Phil!" gasped Sylvia. "I had no idea you could come." This as soon as she was able to regain her wits and the possession of her hands.
"Nor I. As a matter of fact, I couldn't. I just did," grinned Phil Lorrimer, cheerfully. "Here I am, B. and O. grime and all. May I come to the party just as I am without one plea?"
"You surely may. I'm so glad." And Sylvia's face corroborated her words.
"Here's a nosegay for you," and Phil's fingers fumbled with the string on the box he had deposited in a convenient chair while he had used both hands greeting Sylvia. In a moment a charming bouquet of cream yellow roses, shell pink at the heart, was disclosed.
"How lovely!" Sylvia buried her face in the nosegay. "I just have to wear them. Oh, dear, I haven't a pin."
"Here you are!" And the young doctor solemnly produced the needful article.
"Trust you!" laughed Sylvia. "There, aren't they perfect? Come on, quick. Let's not waste the music."
"Ditto my sentiments. Is this my dance?"
"It's Doctor Tom's, but he won't care. Hurry."
And in a moment the onlookers had something new to think of as Sylvia's white and silverness flashed back into the ballroom with a tall figure in plain traveling clothes by her side.
"Another country heard from," grunted Angus McIntosh as he watched the two swing into step.
Perhaps in the whole room there was no one who had more cause for a sudden reaction of feeling than Jack Amidon, whose quick eye took in even at the length of the hall that Sylvia was at last wearing somebody's flowers. But it was with apparent nonchalance and entire good will that he came to offer Phil Lorrimer a cordial greeting a few moments later, though even as he chatted with the other young man it did not escape him that there was an added radiance to Sylvia's "moonshininess," as if she had tasted some magic draught of youth and joy during those few moments in which she had been out of the room. As has been observed, Jack Amidon was a rather unexpectedly perspicuous person at times.
CHAPTER V
SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON
"Oh, me! Just think! By to-morrow afternoon at this time we'll all be scattered to the four winds," sighed Barbara. "Don't you hate to have things get different?"
"Can't say I do. The differenter the better so far as I am concerned as I have hitherto remarked," put in Suzanne. "I hate staying still, physically, mentally, or morally. I'm ready for new pricks every minute. I feel like saying to life every morning 'Come on. Do your worst. I'm ready. Give me anything--everything--except stagnation.'"
"You don't look as if you were going to stagnate just this minute," laughed Sylvia, surveying her friend, who, indeed, from the tip of her impatiently tapping shoe to the crown of her rebellious blue-black, wavy hair, appeared sufficiently dynamic for any purpose.
"I don't intend to. That is why I am transferring my spiritual and bodily allegiance from Norton, Pa., to New York City. I'd rather live on a crust in that blessed city of enchantment than fare on nectar and ambrosia elsewhere. I wish you would change your mind and come along, Sylvia. I know you are going to be discontented here or even contented, which is worse. Arden Hall is a perfect dream of a place, and I've loved every minute of this week with you, but it would swamp me with its placidity if I settled down in it, and that's the truth."
"Oh, Suzanne!" Thus Barb, always sensitive to the possibility that some one's feelings might be going to be hurt.
"Don't mind her, Barb. I know what she means precisely, and it is all more or less true. Arden Hall is placid and remote. I have to find a way to link it somehow with big moving things outside--below--or the very thing Suzanne threatens me with will happen."
"You'll find a way," prophesied Barb earnestly.
"Of course she'll find it," seconded Suzanne. "If there is anybody on this green earth capable of squeezing the traditional camel through the needle's eye it is the young person I see before me. Isn't it time our cavaliers arrived? I begin to pine for action already."
"Jack said he would be here at four sharp. We are going to take you to the most heavenly spot, right over the river with the whole Ridge for a background. Some day when you are being compressed to a wafer in the Subway in your precious old city you will remember it and be willing to give your second-most-becoming hat for a magic carpet to take you back."
"I shouldn't wonder," murmured Barb. "I believe Suzanne would rather hear the roar of the El than the wind in the pines though. She is the most urban person I ever knew."