Though the young authoress from the South had been a willing enough captive, under what roof, indeed, did the eagle wings of genius ever unfurl with ease? Cordelia, however, had hungered for a little of the fulness of life. Her earlier New York existence, bright and attractive as it had seemed to the outer eye, had been an unutterably lonely and hollow one. Life in a Washington Square boarding-house had proved no better than a more irregular existence in a dilapidated old studio on lower Fifth Avenue, where for several months she invariably burned her own toast and regularly boiled her own tea, and where her callers were equally divided between overinquisitive reporters and impoverished authors looking for assistance.
So Mrs. Spaulding felt that she had taken a new grip on life when her timorous little protégée was installed in the yellow-tinted study which had been made ready for her. It was an eminence by proxy, but it was better than nonentity; and in her silent gratitude she saw to it that Cordelia wanted for nothing, and, on the whole, was not unhappy.
Alfred Spaulding himself had hoped to see grow up about him a family, but having no children, he drank deep of the anodyne of the dollar; and so, during the day at least, his loneliness was forgotten. In the evening, when not too tired, he dressed and went with his wife to the theater, enjoying it passively, but liking most of all those pieces "which had lots of music," especially those Broadway performances characterized as "Gaiety Successes." Sometimes they dined out, and sometimes he sent Cordelia and his wife off together and ate at home alone. In his earlier day he had looked toward his wife as the symbol and embodiment of that softer and, he thought, that higher life which was necessarily alien to him. Then as her prettiness passed away, and her limitations came poignantly home to him, he concluded with pious secrecy that womankind is the upholstery of life, wearing the soonest where it is the softest.
Cordelia Vaughan, when she became a member of his household, did not fail to realize the narrow and lonely existence he led. This touched her keenly in some way, and she did what she could to throw a little more of the lightness and color of life about his absent-minded coming and going. He saw and appreciated this generous effort, and if the two did not become fast friends, they at least grew into more or less good comrades. Often in the mornings she drove down with him as far as his office, for Southerner though she was, it was an inexorable rule of her life to rise early. In some way, though, she was finding her time of late less and less her own, and their morning drives had become more and more infrequent.
It was the thought of this, and the sudden pang of regret that came with it, that took her down to breakfast with Alfred Spaulding not many days after her first meeting with Hartley. All the way down through the crowded, narrow cañon of lower Broadway she talked to him with a wistful attentiveness that left him with his morning papers still contentedly jammed down in his overcoat pocket.
As she drove home alone in the bright, glimmering little yellow-bodied Victoria she wondered if it was the soft balminess of the September air that was stirring in her a new sense of something that she had been crowding out of her life. It was a morning on which one wished to be always young.
As the little Victoria swung from Broadway into Fourth Street, she suddenly caught sight of Hartley, and called for the coachman to pull up at the curb. Before the young Oxonian had quite realized who it was and before he had recovered his composure she was stretching a prettily gloved hand down to him.
"Isn't this lucky?" she cried joyfully.
"It is, indeed," he said, taking her hand and looking into her bright face, across which a tress or two of her hair had blown. There was something so airy and light and buoyant about her that she seemed to him like a bird of passage, alien to the roar and dust about her.
"Can't you steal an hour or two and run away from all this dust and rattle and noise down here?" she asked, bending over him with her tremulously wistful smile.