THE COMPLICATIONS OF MAISIE
I
Tabs was not very familiar with Chelsea. He had seen it from the river a score of times, red-walled, umbrageous and old-fashioned. But of the district itself he knew next to nothing, save that up to the war it had been the favorite roosting-place of short-haired women and long-haired men. He wondered whether Maisie's hair was short. He decided in the negative. To have attracted three husbands in four and a half years she must be outwardly conventional. An unconventional woman might persuade one man to marry her, but not three in such rapid succession. She probably belonged to the apparently harmless, sympathetic, sisterly, domestic type. And yet she must be something more than conventional; millions of merely conventional women lacked the prowess to anchor only one man in all the years of their life, whereas, judging by the Adair incident, Maisie had not yet completed her list of husbands. There was an undefined danger in coming into contact with such a woman, which lent this expedition to Chelsea an atmosphere of adventure.
Did she know for what purpose he was visiting her? If she did, she was a bold woman—a strategist. Her position was strengthened by his coming to her in the guise of an invited guest. Then he remembered that he had made a bargain with himself to meet her with a mind unclouded by prejudice.
He had been traveling mean thoroughfares, when suddenly the cab swung into an old-world street of dignified respectability and turned again abruptly into a tiny quadrangle of color-washed, stucco-fronted, timbered houses. In the center was a lawn, surrounded with white posts between which black painted chains hung in loops; the apparent intention was to create the illusion of a village-green. Tabs entered instantly into the spirit of the game—the littleness and childishness of the attempt at quaintness. He liked the bijou privacy of the Court, its greenness and tidiness, and the absurdity of the narrow windows which glinted at him like spectacles. But there was something that he missed.
The driver had climbed down and was opening the door. "Mulberry Tree Court, mister. I forget which number you told me; but there ain't so much of it that you're likely to lose yourself."
"But where's the mulberry tree?" Tabs asked. There was in his voice the discontent of a disappointed child.
"There never was no mulberry tree," the man replied in all seriousness.
"Well, if there isn't a mulberry tree," Tabs laughed, "I suppose we must make shift to do without it."