And at the end, when the four had left the church together, to be whirled home in Stillman's car, the sudden nods and smiles and farewells that had blossomed along the path of her mother's exit! Claire could have laughed it all away if her mother had not betrayed such eagerness to drink this snobbish flattery to the lees....
Claire's father had never entered very largely into her calculations, but to-night her readjusted vision included him. Stubborn, kind, a bit weak, and inclined to copying poetry in a red-covered album, he had been no match for the disillusionments of married life. Her mother's people had felt a sullen resentment at his downfall—he had taken to drink and died ingloriously when Claire was still in her seventh year. Claire, influenced by the family traditions, had shared this resentment. But now she found herself wondering whether there was not a word or two to be said in his behalf. Her father had been a cheap clerk in a wholesale house when he had married. The uncertain Carrol fortunes were waning swiftly at the time, and Emily Carrol had been thrown at him with all the panic that then possessed a public schooled in the fallacy that marriage was a woman's only career. The result was to have been expected. Extravagance, debts, too much family, drink, death—the sequence was complete. He had been captured, withered, cast aside, by a tribe that had not even had the decency to grant his memory the kindness of an excuse.
Wide-eyed and restless, Claire Robson felt a sudden pity for her father. Tears sprang to her eyes; it overwhelmed her to discover this new father so full of human failings and yet so full of human provocation. In her twenty-four years of life she had never shed a tear for him, or felt the slightest pang for his failure. If she had ever doubted the Carrol viewpoint, she had never given her lack of faith any scope. She had taken their cast-off prejudices and threadbare convictions as docilely as she had once received their stale garments. She had shrunk from spiritual independence with all the obsequious arrogance of a poor relation at a feast. Her diffidence, her self-consciousness, her timidity, were the outward forms of an inbred snobbery. It was curious how suddenly all this was made clear to her....
At length she fell into a troubled sleep.... When she awoke the room's outlines were reviving before the advances of early morning. For the first time in her life she caught the poetry of the new day at first hand. For years she had reveled vicariously in the delights of morning. But it had always been to her a thing apart, a matter which the writers of romantic verse beheld and translated for the benefit of late sleepers. It never occurred to her that the day crawling into the light-well of her Clay Street flat was lit with precisely the same flame that colored the far-flung peaks of the poet's song. And instantly a phrase of the Serbian's harangue came to her—blood-red dawn! He had repeated these words over and over again, and somehow under the heat of his ardor and longing for his native land this hackneyed phrase took on its real and dreadful value. In the sudden sweep of this vital remembrance, Claire Robson rose for a moment above the fretful drip of circumstance.... Blood-red Dawn!... She threw herself back upon her bed and shuddered....
She rose at seven o'clock, but already the morning had grown pallid and flecked with gray clouds.
An apologetic tap came at the door, and the voice of Mrs. Robson repeating a formula that she never varied:
"Better hurry, Claire. If you don't you'll be late for the office!"
CHAPTER II
As Claire stepped out into the cold sunlight of early November, she smiled bitterly at the exaggeration of last night's mood. After the first hectic flush of dawn there is nothing so sane and sweet and commonplace as morning. The spectacle of Mrs. Finnegan, who lodged in the flat below, slopping warm suds over the thin marble steps, added a final note of homeliness, which divorced Claire completely from heroics.