Under Hartley's influence she even took to walking, though her first lesson with that somewhat thoughtless instructor left her so fatigued in body and nerve, and with such sadly blistered feet, that she had to keep to her bed for the day following their tramp up and down the entire length of Riverside Drive. But of this Hartley knew nothing.
Besides these many hours in the open air together there was an occasional luncheon at Sherry's, and rustling, odorous, subdued musicales and recitals at Mendelssohn Hall, and now and then a supper at the Waldorf after the theater, and a merry four-in-hand load or two during the month to Ardsley, and suburban automobile jaunts, and sufficient things of a like nature to cause Hartley to keep a judicious eye on his engagement list and to question himself no longer as to whether or not he was wringing the color out of life.
"Cordelia and you seem to be made for each other," said Mrs. Spaulding at supper one evening in her own dining-room, after a charity dance at the Waldorf. "At one time I actually thought the child would never care for anything but books or what the newspapers were saying about her."
Mrs. Spaulding had drunk of her third bottle of champagne, and her voice was not so carefully modulated as it might have been. Cordelia heard the speech with painfully flushing face.
"And some day she'll go back to her books again," she said as she swept from the room in a rage. Hartley was giving all his attention to his Madeira jelly. Mrs. Spaulding looked after her with blank and uncomprehending eyes.
"Poor dear!" she murmured. "She's such a silly, frail little thing. When I see her in the hands of you men I feel exactly the same as I do when Alfred gets handling my chinaware. And she's such a trustful child, too! If it wasn't for her faith in you, really I'd tremble for her future."
Then Mrs. Spaulding filled Hartley's glass and light-headedly declared that she had got hold of him just in time to save him from being a monk.
Yet Hartley was not altogether idle during these weeks. Each day he threw a little sop of work to the Cerberus of conscience, adding from time to time the finer touches to the manuscript of The Unwise Virgins while it still lay before him in the rough. This treatment resulted in an unexpected expansion of the story itself and left his pages in a sadly undecipherable condition. Even he himself, however, could see how those touches of after-thought were altering his earlier effort and rounding out his severer structure into a work of more Gothic richness.
One Sunday afternoon late in October he carried the completed manuscript over to Cordelia. A recent rain had washed the streets from curb to curb, and under foot flagstone and asphalt lay clean as steel. There was a cool freshness in the air, and the vigorous exercise as he went swinging down the river front sent the blood bounding through his veins once more. He stopped to watch the sea-gulls wheeling and dipping above the gray waters of the Hudson—the sight of them filled him with a sudden restless passion for a freedom that still seemed to have eluded him. Then he turned to the Drive itself, and let his eyes rest on the stream of flashing horses and hurrying carriages. He remembered what the Spauldings' coachman had confided to him only a few days before: "They don't last long in the city, sir, them horses; it shakes the shoulders off 'n them."
He found Cordelia, excepting the servants, alone in the house. The Spauldings had left the day before for Canada, she told him. Mrs. Spaulding was to stay in Quebec City, while her husband—who had always been fond of shooting—went north for moose. He had found it possible to snatch a three weeks' belated vacation before the winter set in, Cordelia explained, and described with not a little wit the sternness with which he had arisen and dragged away a complaining and none too willing wife.