“Oh, this!—I didn’t look at the cover—thought it was from Jack—”
Mark snatched the telegram and read, “Joe and Margaret killed wreck Trenton come if—” then rolled the paper into his palm. Olive saw his eyes swell and gasped, “Who’s Margaret?”
“Joe’s wife. Where’s cab?”
“At the gates. Run.”
He dashed into the sun beyond the open doors then the red hair gleamed as he came wheeling back to gulp, “Send you a check from—”
Olive spread her hands out crying, “No! I shan’t take it!” and saw him rush off again. The cab made no noise that she could hear. She shivered as if a warming fire died suddenly in winter and left her cold. Presently she struck a palm on the stone beside her and said, “Sentimentalist! Sentimentalist!” while she wept. She made use of Mark, though, in her next novel, The Barbarian, which began her success. Mark was rather flattered by the picture and glad that he hadn’t insulted this clever, wise woman by making love to her. He thought of Olive as exalted from the ranks of passionate, clutching females and often wrote long, artless letters to her.
III
Full Bloom
THE family council prudently allowed Mark to adopt his brother’s orphan, Margaret. He sometimes borrowed Gurdy Bernamer to keep the dark child company in his New York flat. By 1905 the borrowing settled into a habit. Gurdy provided activity for a French nurse and then for an English governess despatched by Olive Ilden. He was a silent, restless creature. He disliked motorcars for his own unrevealed reason that they resembled the hearses of his uncle’s funeral. He had a prejudice against small Margaret because she looked like her dead mother, an objectionable person smelling of orange water, and because Mark made a fuss over the child. He learned to read newspapers, copying Mark’s breakfast occupation, and in September, 1907, noted that Carlson and Walling would tonight inaugurate their partnership by the presentation of “Red Winter” at their new 45th Street Theatre. “Inaugurate” charmed Gurdy. It conveyed an image of Mark and the bony Mr. Carlson doing something with a monstrous auger. Mark had for ever stopped acting in May, would henceforth “manage.” Curiosity pulled Gurdy from the window seat of his playroom in Mark’s new house on 55th Street. He waited for a moment when the governess, Miss Converse, was scolding young Margaret and wouldn’t see him slide down the hall stairs. He scuttled west, then south and navigated Broadway until he reached the mad corner of 45th Street where a gentleman took him by the collar of his blouse and halted him.