Vickers, on leaving the hotel, walked home in the chill night, a sickening sensation in his heart. If he had been a shrewd young man, he might have foreseen the somewhat boozy Mr. Conry, the vulgar setting of the woman he loved. If there had been the least thing base in him, he might have welcomed it, for his own uses. But being a sentimentalist and simple in nature, the few moments of intercourse with Mr. Conry had come like a revelation to him. This was what she had sold herself to for her education. This was what she was tied to! And this what she sought to escape from by her music, to place herself and her child beyond the touch of that man!
Vickers in his disgust overlooked the fact that little Delia seemed to love her father, and that though Conry might not be to his taste, he might also be a perfectly worthy citizen, given occasionally to liquor. But love and youth and the idealizing temperament make few allowances. To give her that freedom which her beauty and her nature craved, he would do what he could, and he searched his memory for names and persons of influence in the professional world of music. He had the fragments of a score for an opera that he had scarce looked at since he had begun "to sell nails"; but to-night he took it from the drawer and ran it over,—"Love Among the Ruins,"—and as he went to sleep he saw Stacia Conry singing as she had sung that last night in Rome, singing the music of his opera, success and fame at her feet….
The something that Mrs. Conry hoped for did come from that introduction at the Lawtons'. The wife of one of those men she had charmed called on her and invited her to sing "those pleasant little songs Mr. Price wrote for you" (with Mr. Price's appearance, of course!). And several women, who were anxious to be counted as of the Lawton set, hastened to engage Mrs. Conry to sing at their houses, with the same condition. Vickers understood the meaning of this condition and disliked the position, but consented in his desire to give Mrs. Conry every chance in his power. Others understood the situation, and disliked it,—among them Isabelle. Nannie Lawton threw at her across a dinner-table the remark: "When is Vick going to offer his 'Love Among the Ruins'? Mrs. Conry is the 'ruins,' I suppose!"
And the musicales, in spite of all that Vickers could do, were only moderately successful. In any community, the people who hunt the latest novelty are limited in number, and that spring there arrived a Swedish portrait painter and an Antarctic traveller to push the beautiful singer from the centre of attention. So after the first weeks the engagements became farther spaced and less desirable, less influential. Mrs. Conry still stayed at the hotel, though her husband had been called to another city on a contract he had undertaken. She realized that her debut had not been brilliant, but she clung to the opportunity, in the hope that something would come of it. And naturally enough Vickers saw a good deal of her; not merely the days they appeared together, but almost every day he found an excuse for dropping in at the hotel, to play over some music, to take her to ride in his new motor, which he ran himself, or to dine with her. Mrs. Conry was lonely. After Isabelle went to California for her health, she saw almost no one. The women she met at her engagements found her "not our kind," and Nan Lawton's witticism about "the ruins" and Vickers did not help matters. Vickers saw the situation and resented it. This loneliness and disappointment were bad for her. She worked at her music in a desultory fashion, dawdled over novels, and smoked too many cigarettes for the good of her voice. She seemed listless and discouraged. Vickers redoubled his efforts to have her sing before a celebrated manager, who was coming presently to the city with an opera company.
'She sees no way, no escape,' he said to himself. 'One ray of hope, and she would wake to what she was in Europe!'
In his blind, sentimental devotion, he blamed the accidents of life for her disappointment, not the woman herself. When he came, she awoke, and it was an unconscious joy to him, this power he had to rouse her from her apathy, to make her become for the time the woman he always saw just beneath the surface, eager to emerge if life would but grant her the chance.
His own situation had changed with the growing year. The Colonel, closely watching "the boy," was coming gradually to comprehend the sacrifice that he had accepted, all the more as Vickers never murmured but kept steadily at his work. Before Isabelle left for California, she spoke plainly to her father:—
"What's the use, Colonel! No matter how he tries, Vick can never be like you,—and why should he be any way?"
"It won't have done any harm," the old man replied dubiously. "We'll see!"
First he made his son independent of salary or allowance by giving him a small fortune in stocks and bonds. Then one day, while Mrs. Conry was still in the city, he suggested that Vickers might expect a considerable vacation in the summer. "You can go to Europe and write something," he remarked, in his simple faith that art could be laid down or resumed at will. Vickers smiled, but did not grasp the opportunity eagerly. When he told Mrs. Conry that afternoon of the proposed "vacation," she exclaimed enviously:—