One winter day while Vickers Price was "selling nails," as he still expressed his business career, there came in his mail a queer little scrawl, postmarked Pittsburg. It was from Delia Conry, and it ran:—
"We've been home a month. We live in a hotel. I don't like it. The bird you gave me died. Mother says she'll get me a new one. I wish I could see you. Love from Delia."
But not a word from Mrs. Conry! Fosdick, drifting through Rome on his way to Turkestan, wrote:—
"… What has become of the Conry? She has disappeared from the cities of Europe with her melodious songs and beautiful hair. Are you touring the States with her? Or has she rediscovered Mr. Conry—for a period of seclusion? … To think of you serving hardware to the barbarians across the counter enlivens my dull moments. From the Sargasso Sea to St. Louis,—there is a leap for you, my dear."…
While he "served hardware to the barbarians" and in other respects conformed to the life of a privileged young American gentleman, Vickers Price dreamed of those Roman days, the happiest of his life. If that night they two had taken life in their hands? … Could the old Colonel have read his son's heart,—if from the pinnacle of his years filled with ripe deeds he could have comprehended youth,—he might have been less sure that the hardware business was to be "the making of Vick"!
What had come to her? Had she accepted her lot, once back in the groove of fate, or had she rebelled, striking out for her own vivid desire of joy and song, of fame? Vickers would have liked to hear that she had rebelled, was making her own life,—had taken the other road than the one he had accepted for himself. His tender, idealizing heart could not hold a woman to the sterner courses of conduct.
For, as Fosdick had told him in Rome, the young man was a Sentimentalist with no exact vision of life. His heart was perpetually distorting whatever his mind told him was fact. This woman, with her beauty, her love of music, had touched him at the lyric moment of life, when reality was but the unstable foundation for dream. Life as might be, glowing, colored, and splendid,—life as it was within him, not as this hideous maelstrom all about him reported. And why not the I, the I! cried the spirit of youth, the egotistic spirit of the age. For all reply there was the bent, gray head of the Colonel at his desk in the office beside him. "One sentiment against another," Fosdick might say….
Finally Stacia Conry wrote, a little note: she was to be in St. Louis on the fourteenth for a short time and hoped that he would call on her at the hotel. A perfectly proper, colorless little note, written in an unformed hand, with a word or two misspelled,—the kind of note that gave no indication of the writer, but seemed like the voice of a stranger. However, as Vickers reflected, literary skill, the power to write personal little notes did not go necessarily with a talent for music—or for life. Nannie Lawton wrote intimate notes, and other women, single and married, whom Vickers had come to know these past months. But their cleverest phrases could not stir his pulses as did this crude production.
The woman who was waiting for him in the little hotel parlor, however, gave him a curious shock,—she was so different in her rich street costume from the woman in black and white, whose picture had grown into his memory. She seemed older, he thought, thus accounting for that strange idealizing power of the mind to select from a face what that face has specially given it and create an altogether new being, with its own lineaments graven in place of actual bone and tissue. It takes time to correct this ideal misreport of the soul, to accept the fact! Except for the one glance from the gray eyes which she gave him as they shook hands, Stacia Conry did not stir the past. But she was voluble of the present.
"You did not expect this! You see my husband had some work to attend to near here, and I thought I would come with him…. No, we left Delia in Pittsburg with his mother,—she wanted to see you, but she would be in the way."