THE EDDY

A Novel of Today

BY CLARENCE L. CULLEN

Illustrations by
CH. WEBER DITZLER

G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

Copyright, 1910, By
G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY

The Eddy

LOUISE

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE EDDY

CHAPTER I

"If only she were a boy!"

Mrs. Treharne almost moaned the words.

She tugged nervously at her absurdly diaphanous boudoir jacket, vainly attempting to fasten it with fluttering, uncontrolled fingers; and she shuddered, though her dressing-room was over-warm.

Heloise, who was doing her hair, juggled and then dropped a flaming red coronet braid upon the rug. The maid, a thin-lipped young woman with a jutting jaw and an implacable eye, pantomimed her annoyance. Before picking up the braid she glued the backs of her hands to her smoothly-lathed hips. Mrs. Treharne, in the glass, could see Heloise's drab-filmed grey-blue eyes darting sparks.

"I shall resume," croaked the maid in raucous French, "when Madame is through writhing and wriggling and squirming."

Laura Stedham—she was relaxing luxuriously in the depths of a chair that fitted her almost as perfectly as her gown—smiled a bit wickedly.

"Forgive me if I seem catty, Tony," said Laura in her assuaging contralto, "but it is such a delight to find that there is some one else who is bullied by her maid. Mine positively tyrannizes over me."

"Oh, everybody bullies me," said Mrs. Treharne, querulously, holding herself rigid in order not to again draw Heloise's wrath. "Everybody seems to find it a sort of diversion, a game, to browbeat and hector and bully-rag me."

"Surely I don't, afflicted one—do I?" Laura tacked a little rippling laugh to the question.

"You do worse, my dear—you laugh at me," plaintively replied the fading woman huddled before the glass. She was haggard as from a trouble that has been unsuccessfully slept upon, and her mouth—not yet made into a crimson bow through Heloise's deft artistry—was drawn with discontent. "Heaven on high, if only she were a boy!" she broke out petulantly again, after a little pause.

This time there was genuine enjoyment in Laura's laugh.

"Don't scowl, Antoinette—I know I am a beast for laughing," she said, abandoning her chair and lissomely crossing the room to glance at some new photographs on a mantel. "But, really, you say that so often that it sounds like the refrain to a topical song. 'If only she were a boy—If only she were a boy!'—don't you catch the rhythm of it? I wonder, Tony, how many times I have heard you give utterance to that phrase during the past few years—just?"

"You haven't heard me say it any oftener than I've meant it, my dear—be very sure of that," said Mrs. Treharne, without a symptom of a smile. Her sense of humor was embryonic, and Laura's laughter and words, obviously meant merely in mitigation, jarred upon her. "And a remark is none the less true for being repeated, is it?" she went on in her plaintive monotone. "I do wish Louise had been born a boy. You would, too, if you were in my place. You know you would."

"But, dear Tony, it is such a futile, such a dreadfully childish wish," said Laura, striving to erase the smile from her face. "It is like wishing for the fairy prince, or the magic carpet, or the end of the rainbow. Worry makes wrinkles, dear. That may sound bromidic, but it's true. Why worry yourself through all the years with wishing so impossible—I was going to say so insane—a wish? Not only that—forgive me for saying it, dear, won't you?—but it is rather a grisly wish, too; and so unfair to the girl, really. Don't you think—don't you know—that it is?"

"Don't scold, Laura—please," said Mrs. Treharne, almost in a whimper. "You don't know what a miserable mess I am in. You haven't given me time to tell you. Louise is coming home immediately."

"For the holidays, naturally," said Laura. "Why shouldn't the poor child come home for the holidays? It will be the first time she has had her holidays at home since she went away to school—nearly four years, I think—isn't it?"

"I hope you are not meaning that for a reproach," accused the haggard lady, now being corseted by the lusty-armed Heloise. "You are in a shocking humor today; and I did so depend upon you for advice and comfort, if not consolation, when I 'phoned you to come over."

"Oh, I am in a lark's humor," protested Laura, smiling as she rested a gloved hand upon one of the milky shoulders of her troubled friend. "But you puzzle me. Why should you make such a catastrophe of it, such a veritable cataclysm, because your pretty and agreeable and, as I recall her, quite lovable daughter announces that she is coming home for the holidays? Enlighten me, dear. I seem not to discern the point of your problem."

"Problem isn't the word for it!" repined the unhappy lady, upon whose nearly knee-length stays Heloise now was tugging like a sailor at a capstan. "Louise coolly announces—I had her letter yesterday—that she is not returning to Miss Mayhew's school; that she is coming to remain with me for good."

"Well?" said Laura, murdering the smile that strove to break through her visible mask.

"'Well?'" wailed Mrs. Treharne. "Is that all you have to say—'well'? Can't you see how impossible, how utterly out of the question, how——"

"Her quitting school now, you mean?" said Laura. "Really, I think you should be pleased. Her announcement shows that Louise is a woman—a girl of nineteen who has spent nearly four years at a modern finishing school no longer is a young person, but a woman—that she is a woman with a sense of humor. It is very human, very indicative of the possession of the humorous sense, to tire of school. I did that, myself, a full year before I was through. All of the king's horses could not have dragged me back, either. I hated the thought of graduation day—the foolish, fluttery white frocks, the platitudes of visitors, the moisty weepiness of one's women relatives, the sophomoric speechifying of girls who were hoydens the day before and would be worse hoydens the day after, the showing off of one's petty, inconsequential 'accomplishments'—I loathed the thought of the whole fatuous performance. And so I packed and left a full year in advance of it, resolved not to be involuntarily drawn into the solemn extravaganza of 'being graduated.' That, no doubt, is Louise's idea. She is a girl with a merry heart. You should be glad of that, Antoinette."

Laura was simply sparring with the hope of getting her friend's mind off her problem. She knew very well the nature of the problem; none better. The idea of a girl just out of school being plumped into such an environment as that enveloping the Treharne household perhaps was even more unthinkable to Laura that it was to the girl's mother, a woman who had permitted her sensibilities to become grievously blunted with what she termed the "widening of her horizon." But Laura, not yet ready with advice to meet so ticklish a situation, sought, woman-like, to divert the point of the problem by seizing upon one of its quite minor ramifications. Of course it was not her fault that she failed.

"Laura," said Mrs. Treharne, dismissing her maid with a gesture and fumblingly assembling the materials on her dressing table wherewith to accomplish an unassisted facial make-up, "your occasional assumption of stupidity is the least becoming thing you do. Why fence with me? It is ridiculous, unfriendly, irritating." She daubed at her pale wispy eyebrows with a smeary pencil and added with a certain hardness: "You know perfectly well why I dread the thought of Louise coming here."

Laura, at bay, unready for a pronouncement, took another ditch of evasiveness.

"I wonder," she said in an intended tone of detachment, "if you are afraid she has become a bluestocking? Or maybe a frump? Or, worse still, what you call one of the anointed smugs? Such things—one or other of them, at any rate—are to be expected of girls just out of school, my dear. Louise will conquer her disqualification, if she have one. Her imagination will do that much for her. And of course she has imagination."

"She has eyes, too, no doubt," said Mrs. Treharne, drily. "And you know how prying, penetrating the eyes of a girl of nineteen are. You know still better how poorly this—this ménage of mine can stand such inspection; the snooping—wholly natural snooping, I grant you—of a daughter nearly a head taller than I am, whom, nevertheless, I scarcely know. Frankly, I don't know Louise at all. I should be properly ashamed to acknowledge that; possibly I am. Moreover, I believe I am a bit afraid of her."

Laura assumed a musing posture and thus had an excuse for remaining silent.

"Additionally," went on Mrs. Treharne, a little hoarsely, "a woman, in considering her daughter's welfare, must become a trifle smug herself, no matter how much she may despise smugness in its general use and application. What sort of a place is this as a home for Louise? I am speaking to you as an old friend. I am in a fiendish predicament. Of course you see that. And I can't see the first step of a way out of it. Can you?"

"For one thing," said Laura, mischievously and with eyes a-twinkle, "you might permanently disperse your zoo."

Mrs. Treharne laughed harshly.

"One must know somebody," she said, deftly applying the rouge rabbit's-foot. "One can't live in a cave. My own sort banished me. I am declassée. Shall I sit and twiddle my thumbs? At least the people of my 'zoo,' as you call it, are clever. You'll own that."

"They are freaks—impossible, buffoonish, baboonish freaks," replied Laura, more earnestly than she had yet spoken. "You know I am not finical; but if this raffish crew of yours are 'Bohemians,' as they declare themselves to be—which in itself is banal enough, isn't it?—then give me the sleek, smug inhabitants of Spotless Town!"

"You rave," said Mrs. Treharne, drearily. "Let my zoo-crew alone. We don't agree upon the point."

"I thought you had your queer people—your extraordinary Sunday evening parties—I came perilously near saying rough-houses, Tony—in mind in bemoaning Louise's return home," said Laura, yawning ever so slightly.

"Oh, I'd thought of that, of course," said Mrs. Treharne, artistically adding a sixteenth of an inch of length to the corners of her eyes with the pencil. "But my raffish crew, as you call them, wouldn't harm her. She might even become used to them in time. She hasn't had time to form prejudices yet, it is to be hoped. You purposely hit all around the real mark. Louise is nineteen. And you know the uncanny side-lines of wisdom girls pick up at finishing schools nowadays. Since you maliciously force me to mention it point-blank, in Heaven's name what will this daughter of mine think of—of Mr. Judd?"

"Now we are at the heart of the matter," answered Laura. "Heart, did I say? Fancy 'Pudge' with a heart!" There was little mirth in her laugh.

"You must not call him that, even when you are alone with me, Laura," said Mrs. Treharne, petulantly. "I am in deadly fear that some time or other he will catch you calling him that. You know how mortally sensitive he is about his—his bulk."

"Well might he be," said Laura, drily enough. "Is there any particular reason why your daughter should have to meet Judd? Except very occasionally, I mean?"

"How can it be avoided?" asked Mrs. Treharne, helplessly. "Hasn't he the run of the house? You don't for an instant suppose that, even if I implored him, he would forego any of his—his privileges here?"

"I am not so imbecile as to suppose any such a thing," said Laura, with a certain asperity. "But the man might exhibit a bit of common decency. He knows that Louise is coming?"

"I haven't told him," said Mrs. Treharne, fluttering to her feet from the dressing table. "You will hook me, Laura? I don't want to call Heloise. She only pretends that she doesn't understand English, and she knows too much already. No, I haven't told him yet. He resents the idea of my having a daughter, you know. He will be here directly to take me out in the car. I shall tell him when we are going through the Park. Then nobody but the chauffeur and I will hear him growl. I know in advance every word that he will say," and the distraught woman looked wan even under her liberal rouge.

Laura impulsively placed an arm around her friend's shoulder.

"Tony," she said, gravely, "why don't you show the brute the door?"

"Because it is his own door—you know that," said Mrs. Treharne, her eyes a little misty.

"Then walk out of it," said Laura. "This isn't the right sort of thing. I don't pose as a saint. But I could not endure this. Come with me. Let Louise join you with me. You know how welcome you are. I have plenty—more than plenty. You shouldn't have permitted Judd to refuse to let you continue to receive the allowance George Treharne provided for Louise. That wasn't fair to yourself. It was more unfair to your daughter. You shouldn't have allowed her to get her education with Judd's money. She is bound to find it out. She would be no woman at all if that knowledge doesn't cut her to the quick. But this is beside the mark. I have plenty. She is a dear, sweet, honest girl, and she is entitled to her chance in the world. I am sure I don't need to tell you that. What chance has she in this house? The doors that are worth while are closed to you, my dear. You know I say that with no unkind intent. It is something you yourself acknowledge. The same doors would be closed to your daughter if she came here. She could and would do so much better with me. Neither you nor she would be dependent. We are too old friends for that. And I know George Treharne. He would renew the allowance that you permitted Judd to thrust back at him through yourself and his lawyer. Leave this place, this sort of thing, once and forever. I want you to—for your own sake and your daughter's."

Mrs. Treharne wept dismally, to the sad derangement of her elaborately-applied make-up. But she wept the tears of self-pity, than which there are none more pitiful. The reins of a great chance, for herself and her daughter, were in her hands. Perhaps it was the intensity of her perturbation that did not permit her to hold them. Very likely it was something else. But, at any rate, hold them she did not.

"You are a dear, Laura," she said, fighting back her tears for the sake of her make-up. "It was what I might have expected of you. Of all the friends I used to have, you are the only one who never has gone back on me. But you must see how impossible it all is. I am in over my head. So what would be the use?"

"You speak for yourself only, Antoinette," said Laura, a little coldly. "What of your daughter?"

"Oh, if only she were a boy!" the wretched woman harped again.

Laura Stedham removed her arm from her friend's shoulder and shrugged a bit impatiently.

"That refrain again?" she said, the warmth departing from her tone. "I must be going before I become vexed with you, Tony. Your own position would be quite the same in any case—if you had a son instead of a daughter, I mean. For my part, I fail to perceive any choice between being shamed in the eyes of a son of in the eyes of a daughter. True, a son would not have to tolerate so humiliating a situation. A son could, and unquestionably would, clap on his hat the moment he became aware of the state of things here, and stamp out, leaving it all behind him. A son could and would shift for himself. But a girl—a girl just out of school—can't do that. She is helpless. She is at the mercy of the situation you have made for her. I fear you are completely losing your moorings, Tony. When is Louise arriving?"

"Tonight," replied Mrs. Treharne, who had subsided into a sort of apathy of self-pity. "At nine something or other. I shall meet her at the station in the car."

Laura turned a quizzical, slitted pair of eyes upon her friend, now busy again with her tear-smudged make-up.

"Not in Judd's car, surely, Tony?" she said, in earnest expostulation. "Why do that? Why not let the girl in upon your—your tangled affairs a little more gradually? How could she help wondering at the extravagant, vulgar ornateness of Judd's car? For of course she knows perfectly well that your own finances are not equal to such a whale of a machine as that."

"It will not take her long to find out everything," said Mrs. Treharne, a little sullenly. "She need not be uncommonly observant to do that. And you remember how embarrassingly observant she was even as a child."

"Give her a chance to observe piecemeal, then," said Laura, laconically. "I shall be with you at the station. One of my poor accomplishments, you know, is the knack of ameliorating difficult situations. And I was always so fond of the child. I am stark curious to see how she has developed. She was a starchy Miss of fifteen when last I saw her. We'll fetch her home in a taxicab. That will be better. It is arranged, then?"

"Everything that you suggest is as good as arranged,' Laura," replied Mrs. Treharne, with a wan smile. "Your gift of persuasion is irresistible—I wish I knew the secret of it. It is extremely good of you to want to meet the child. If I could only meet her with—with such clean hands as—well, as I should have!"

"Never mind—there'll be a way out of it," said Laura, cheerily. "I am off."

She grazed the adeptly-applied artificial bloom of the other woman's cheek with her lips.

As they stood side by side in the juxtaposition of a caress—they were friends from girlhood—the contrast between the two women was sufficiently striking. Laura Stedham, a woman of thirty-five, had the slender yet well-rounded structural sinuosities of a girl of twenty who passes all her days in the open air—minus the indubitable blowsiness which some open-air young women can't help but reveal to the dissecting eye. Unusually tall, she had the gliding grace of movement which so many women of uncommon stature lack. Even in the cluttered dressing room of her friend she made nothing of the obstacles that barred her path, but, walking always with a sort of nervous swiftness, passed around them to her point of destination—a mantel, a table, a hanging picture—with a threading ease of locomotion that made it seem oddly doubtful if she were dependent upon the ground at all for a base. There are tall women who, if they do not collide with stationary objects when they undertake a tour of a room, at least arouse the fear that they will infallibly do so. Laura possessed an eye for the measurement of distances, and the litheness perfectly to follow her measurement. Her complexion was that of a woman to whom a long tramp, even in the city, in the mist or in the blinding rain, was not a task, but a delight. Her hair, all her own, yet worn in the final perverse mood of exaggeration of the coiffure "artist," was of an incredible burnished black, in unusual contrast with her full, kindling, Celtic-grey eyes. A certain irregularity in the outline of her features—especially of her nose, which, far from being aquiline, was too short by the merest fraction—lent a certain piquancy to her expression, even when her face was in repose. She had the habit, growing rare in a world of social avoidances and white lies, of looking the person addressing her straight in the eye. It was not an impaling, disquieting gaze, but one that fairly demanded truthfulness and candor; a gaze unconsciously calculated to cause the liar to stutter in the manufacture of his lie.

LAURA, A WOMAN OF THIRTY-FIVE, HAD THE SLENDER YET WELL-ROUNDED STRUCTURAL SINUOSITIES OF A GIRL OF TWENTY.

Mrs. Treharne, four years older than Laura, had the somewhat hollow-eyed plumpness of an indoor woman who wars fiercely but hopelessly and unequally upon ever-threatening embonpoint. Her triumphs over the enemy never were better than drawn battles; she was compelled to devote at least three hours a day to her determined, almost hysterical warfare upon the natural process of accretion, solely that she might not gain; long before she had abandoned hope of achieving the fragility of outline she pined for. The nostrums she employed in this incessant conflict had made her fragile, however, in at least one respect: her health; besides imparting a certain greenish-yellow tint to her skin which made her make-up box almost as necessary a part of her equipment as the hands wherewith she applied the mitigating tints. Five years before she had been a fresh-skinned, clear-eyed, naturally pretty woman of a somewhat inconsequential type; but the necessity—the hideous duty, as she deemed it—of banting without cessation or intermission had left her merely her regular features upon which artificially to create the illusion of a youthfulness she was far from feeling. With the final touch added for an appearance in a company, she still looked dainty, certainly of impeccable grooming. But she had learned to be uneasy under the scrutiny of eyes that she felt to be unfriendly, and she had become exceptionally partial to veils. Her hair, originally a light, unaggressive red, had been "done over" into a sort of vivid, brittle "Titian." There were occasional reddish gleams in her slightly furtive, small eyes of hazel. She had a child's foot, and she was inordinately proud of her tiny, waxy, too-white hands. In a company she smiled continuously in order to display her teeth, which were perfectly assembled and of an almost porcelain whiteness. Mrs. Treharne was called a pretty woman even by those who perhaps entertained unexpressed misgivings as to how she might look at her rising hour.

After Laura had gone Mrs. Treharne tried, before her glass, the effect of a smile—somewhat frozen and quickly obliterated—upon her carefully studied and artfully executed make-up mask; then sighed drearily as she sank into a chair and began polishing her nails upon her palms.

"Of course Laura is right, as usual—it wouldn't help matters particularly if Louise were a boy," she mused with puckered brows. "A boy might be longer in finding out how affairs stood here; but when he did find out—what a storm, what heroics, what juvenile reproaches, what a stagey to-do there would be! Perhaps, after all, it is as well that Louise is—Louise. She can adapt herself to—to things as they are. She must. There's no other way. She can't have lost the tact she possessed as a child. I wish I knew her better, so that I could have some sort of an idea just what to expect from her. I hope she understands the good sense of closing one's eyes to things that can't be improved by looking at them. Perhaps I shall be lucky enough to marry her off quickly. That would be almost too easy a solution for me, with my vile luck, to expect."

She rang for Heloise to have her furs in readiness.

"It was thoroughly decent of Laura," she thought on, finger at lip, "to advise me to bolt all this and take refuge with her. But I haven't the nerve—that's the plain truth of it. How could I ask Treharne to renew the allowance? What a triumph it would be for him if I were to do that! He would be too Quixotic to view it as a triumph, but that wouldn't alleviate my humiliation in asking him. And what would the three or four thousand a year be in comparison with—"

"The car is at the door, Madame," announced Heloise, appearing with the sables. Mrs. Treharne smiled at herself before the glass to smooth out the wrinkles of her musing, tripped lightly down the stairs, and was humming blithely when she nodded indulgently at the ponderous, shaggy-furred man who was waiting to help her into the huge, over-lavish, pulsing car.

"You take your time, don't you?" grumbled Judd, his breath vaporing into broken clouds in the raw December air. "Does that monkey-chattering maid of yours sleep all the time, or has she a case on with the butler? I've been tooting here for ten minutes."

His tone was snarling, and his thin lips were drawn away from gnarled teeth. Judd was one of those physical anomalies, a man of Falstaffian girth with sharp, peaked, predatory features. He pulled off his fur cap to readjust it before stepping into the car, showing a head wholly bald except for crinkly wisps of mixed red and gray hair at the sides and back. There was a deep crease at the back of his neck where the scant hair left off, and his deep-set, red-rimmed little watery-blue eyes were alert and suspicious.

Mrs. Treharne laughed so carelessly that it almost seemed as if she deliberately sought to intensify his irritation.

"Still in your villanous humor?" she asked him, a taunt in her tone. "I believe this is one of the days—they grow rather frequent—when you should be allowed—required, I should say—to ride alone."

"Well, that's easy enough to do," grumbled Judd in a voice curiously high-pitched for so vast a man. "See here, perhaps you are conceited enough to think—"

Very deliberately, and still smiling, Mrs. Treharne rose to leave the car. Judd looked blankly nonplussed.

"Oh, stop this infernal nonsense, Tony," he said in a tone tinged with alarm. Then his ruddy face expanded into a grin behind which there seemed to be little mirth. "D'ye know, I believe you would be cat enough to step out, before we start, and—"

"No names, if you please," Mrs. Treharne interrupted, choppily. "Decidedly I shall leave the car if you feel that it is impossible for you to behave yourself like a human being. I have ceased to extract enjoyment from your growling humors."

It was a tone she might have taken in addressing a menial. Obviously, however, it was the tone required for the proper subjugation of Judd. He exuded a falsetto laugh and patted her hand, at the same time motioning the chauffeur to start.

"I don't complain of your hellish moods, do I, Tony?" he asked her, still chuckling unpleasantly. "In fact, I believe I rather like the feel of your claws. All the same, there may come a day when—"

"When I shall enjoy the sight of your back," calmly interrupted the apparently complaisant woman at his side. "Speed the day!"

Judd's face took on a half-chagrined, half-worried look. It generally did when Mrs. Treharne was operating upon him what she privately called her "system." This "system," in essence, consisted in her invariable habit of quarreling with him and reducing him to abjectness by more or less veiled threats of abandoning him to a lonesome fate whenever she had something to ask of him, or to tell him, that she knew quite well would arouse his surliness. It was a neatly-devised balancing method, and Mrs. Treharne as well understood the vital advantage of striking the first blow as she apprehended the extent of her power over him.

"I say, Tony," said Judd, patting her gloved hands again, "you wouldn't really cut and run just because—"

"Spare me your elephantine sentimentalities, please," she put in, a little less indifferently. "You were never ordained for that sort of thing. Anyhow, I would like a sane word or two with you. I've something to tell you."

"It's money, of course," said Judd, sulkily, leaving off patting her hands with ludicrous suddenness. "More damned extravagance, eh?"

"No, it's neither money nor extravagance, beautifully as those two words trot in tandem," she said, airily, yet with a new soothing note in her tone. "It is this: Louise is coming home. At once. Tonight."

"The devil she is!" blurted Judd. "What for? Who sent for her? How long is she going to stay? What's it all about?"

"One question at a time, please," Mrs. Treharne replied, looking indifferently out toward the bleak river as they shot by Claremont. It was a palpably assumed air of indifference; but Judd, unskilled at penetrating feminine subtlety, did not discern the nervousness underlying her careless manner. "My daughter is coming home because she wants to. Nobody sent for her. She is not going back to school. She announces that in her letter to me; and she is old enough to know her mind and to be entitled to freedom of action. She is remaining permanently with me."

She had expected him to storm upon hearing the news in full. Judd, however, was an individual who owed a considerable part of his immense success as a man of affairs to his studied and carefully-elaborated habit of never doing the obvious.

He leaned back in the car and half-screened his turkey-like eyes with their small, veinous lids. Mrs. Treharne, surprised at his silence, went on hastily:

"I am wretchedly disturbed over it. I know that I have no fit home to offer her. I know that I have completely undermined her chance in life. But what can I do? She can't live alone. And she merely brings the difficulty to a head by coming now. She must come home some time, of course. The child has not spent her holidays or her summer vacations with me for four years. Always she has been pushed about among school friends, who, glad as they and their people may have been to have her, surely must have wondered why she did not come home."

Judd fluttered his eyelids and leaned forward in his seat.

"I understand perfectly, of course," he said with a sort of leer. "I understand, you understand, we understand, they understand, everybody understands. Then what are you making such a devil of a rumpus about it for?"

"Well," said Mrs. Treharne, making the mistake, in dealing with Judd, of falling into a slightly apologetic tone, "I thought that perhaps you might——"

"Wait a minute, Antoinette," interrupted Judd with suave brutality, leaning back again among the cushions and once more half-closing his eyes. "It doesn't matter a damn what I think. I can stand it if you can. She isn't my daughter, you know. She's your daughter. I suppose she has been taught to mind her own business? Very well. I can stand the situation if you can."

The slur cut like a rattan, as Judd, perceiving a rare advantage, thoroughly intended that it should. He made it worse by patting her hands as he spoke. She hated him with an almost virtuous intensity as he uttered the sneer. But she said no more about her daughter's impending arrival during the remainder of the ride.

CHAPTER II

The chair car was well filled when Louise somewhat misty-eyed from parting with the doleful group of school intimates who convoyed her to the little station, walked down the aisle just as the train began to move. Not in the least sorry because she was finally leaving school, she was affected by the glumness of the girls who had insisted upon bidding her goodbye at the train; but she had not actually wept at any stage of the parting. Perhaps the tear-reddened eyes and noses of her school friends had slightly touched her risibles; for her by no means latent sense of humor invariably struggled to the surface when she found herself figuring in anything of the nature of a "scene." She was not lacking in what the iron-jowled dowagers call "becoming sensibilities;" but she was habitually self-contained, and tears were unusual with her. Nevertheless, she found difficulty in properly discerning objects, even at close range, as she searched for her place; and it was due to her filmed vision that she took a chair that did not correspond to the number on her Pullman ticket.

Women as well as men pivoted about in their chairs for a second glance at Louise. Her unusual height was emphasized by the loose-fitting fur-lined cloth coat which fell straight from her shoulders to her skirt's hem. When she removed the coat her simple one-piece gown of blue cloth caused cogitating men in surrounding chairs to marvel as to how she had ever contrived to get into it, and, worse, how she would possibly manage to get out of it. The guimpe of the dress was of a creamy embroidery that dissolved bafflingly into the whiteness of her neck.

Louise might have reminded an imaginative traveler, had there been such in the car, of a freshly-blown, firm-petalled chrysanthemum. There are women in whom you first discern an utter, convincing wholesomeness; later you become aware of their beauty. Their wholesomeness, you think upon your first comprehensive glance, is like that of an early vernal breeze, of dew upon clean grass; then the contributing elements of their beauty emerge upon your consciousness as through a succession of lifted veils. Louise Treharne was of this type. Unusually tall, she had none of the raw-boned angularities of the over-trained young woman who makes a fad of gymnasium or out-of-doors activities and who thoughtlessly sacrifices the beauty of contour on the profitless altar of over-athleticism. Slender, yet well rounded, the fine amplitude of her proportions caused her to look several years older than her age. Her face contributed to this effect. It was a face such as the imaginary imaginative traveller might vaguely have associated with the faces of women stamped upon Roman coins. There is a sort of creamy, vivid pallor that, equally with ruddiness, denotes perfect health and vigor. This was Louise's; and the uncommon regularity of her features was tempered and softened by varying phases of expression that spoke of an habitual serenity and a searching common sense. Her hair, of the darkest shade of lustrous auburn, waved back loosely and often a bit rebelliously to the great knotted coil in which it was caught at the back of her finely-lathed head. Her eyes, the corners of which had an almost indistinguishable slant that only became agreeably noticeable when she smiled, were wide and full, and of so dark a brown that, at night or in shadowed rooms, they were often supposed to be black.

She had barely settled herself, chin in palm, to gaze out of the window at the blurred landscape of ice-crusted snow, before she became somewhat confusedly conscious of a loomful figure standing patiently in the aisle beside her. When she suddenly turned her head and surveyed him with calm, questioning eyes, he pulled off his cap of plaid a bit awkwardly and smiled. She mentally observed that his mouth was a trifle over-large; but his smile, for all of that, she thought, was the smile of a man. With the woman's mystifying ability mentally to absorb innumerable details at a mere glance, she noticed (without in the least seeming to notice) that he was of unusual stature and of the type called by women, in their between-themselves appraisals, "delightfully scrubbed-looking;" that he was perhaps a little above thirty; that he had a closely-shaven rugged jaw and somewhat jutting chin, huge, well-cared-for hands, rather closely-cropped brown hair slightly greying at the sides, candid grey eyes with tiny lines of humor and experience running away from their corners. She noticed, too, that he was not wearing gloves, which was satisfying. All of the other men in the over-warm car were wearing their heavy cold-weather gloves, and she was slightly contemptuous of this as an unmasculine affectation. Finally, in the same single glance, she perceived his visible embarrassment....

"Pray don't disturb yourself," he said, fumbling his cap with both hands. ("Why don't all men talk basso?" thought Louise.) "I can reach it without your moving at all, if you will permit me. My bag, you know. There are some papers in it that I want to go over, and——"

He stopped dead and looked quite wretched when Louise came to her feet.

"I am in your chair," she said, as he stooped to pick up a bag that, she now noticed for the first time, was wedged by the seat she had unwittingly taken. She was about to remove her coat to the back of the chair in front—her rightful place, as she quickly remembered when she saw the number on the panel—when he put out a determinedly detaining hand.

"Don't make me feel such a disgraceful nuisance, I beg of you," he said with an earnestness that was out of keeping with his twinkling eyes. "One chair is as good as another—better, in fact, when one already has possession of it. This bag is my only gear. You'll keep the seat, won't you? That's immensely kind of you," as Louise resumed the chair. "I wouldn't have had you move for——"

"Of course," she interrupted him with a quietly frank laugh, "I hadn't the slightest intention of moving. It is more than good of you to suppose that I meant to be so agreeable."

"That," he pronounced, again with his liberal smile, "is probably a neat, quickly-conceived way of letting me down easily, for which I am nevertheless grateful;" and, bowing, he took the chair in front of her, dug into his bag and quickly became immersed in a batch of formidable looking documents. Louise, again leaning back in her chair, decided that the rear of his head was decidedly shapely.

The excessive warmth of the car was making her sleepy, and she closed her eyes and surrendered herself to dozing reflections. She was dubious as to the reception her mother would give her. She had not heard from her mother since writing the letter in which she had calmly announced, as something settled and therefore not open to debate, that she was through with school and would not return to Miss Mayhew's after the holidays. Laura had been only partly right as to Louise's reason for quitting school. Louise, it was true, was glad enough to escape the nightmare of "commencement exercises" by leaving half a year in advance of her graduation. But she had a far deeper reason for quitting the school without consultation with her mother. She wanted to be at home; any sort of a home. She had no very pleasurable recollections of the places—there had been many of them, and they had not been homes—in which she had lived with her mother before being sent to the finishing school in central New York. Her young girlhood had been a period of aimless drifting, at seashore and mountain resorts in summer, and in tiny but by no means snug apartments in New York in the winter; her mother's restlessness and her frequently expressed dislike of "smug domesticity" had combined against her ever establishing anything even approximating a genuine home for herself and her daughter. Louise only vaguely remembered her father; the separation, followed by a divorce, had taken place when she was only nine years old. At fifteen she had been trundled off to the up-State finishing school; and the school had been the only home she had known for close upon four years. Her mother had visited her twice a year, taking her to the seaside for a week or so during the summer vacation and to Lakewood for a brief stay during the holidays. Her mother had always been provided with some sort of an excuse for not taking Louise to her home—Louise knew that she must have some sort of a home—in New York. The place was being overhauled, guests had unexpectedly swooped upon her, she was about to start upon a journey; Louise had listened, mystified, so often to these reasons her mother gave for not having her daughter with her in the city at times when nearly all the other girls were leaving the school for home visits that she at length came to believe that her mother was treating her with somewhat humiliating disingenuousness. This feeling, however, aroused less resentment in the girl than it did a feeling of distress; she could not avoid, as she grew older, the conviction that she was being neglected. The feeling became intensified when, year after year, she was shunted, as she considered, on visits to the homes of her schoolgirl friends. It was natural enough, when she observed how cherished the other girls were in their homes, how the arms of strong affection constantly were thrown around them, that she should compare her own thrust-aside state with theirs and that she should develop the intense longing of a normal, affectionate young woman for similar love and protection.

She had no sense of resentment against her mother; it was rather a feeling of regret that the curious aloofness between them, which she had no possible way of understanding, had ever risen. She hoped that perhaps, after all, her mother might really need her as sorely as she felt that she herself needed a mother and a home. She was returning to her mother with an open mind; no longer a child to be shunted and evaded, but a woman to be treated with frankness. There were some points in connection with her mother's affairs that she did not understand but as to which she had no undue curiosity. But she was intensely glad to be at least on her way home—on her way to her mother, at any rate—for good and all; and she formed plans for drawing nearer to her mother, wistfully hoping that the plans would have the fruition she longed for.

Louise's reflections gradually, with the purring movement of the train, became merged into dreams. She awoke with a start when the train came to a grinding stop at a station. She began cutting the pages of a magazine when, glancing up, she saw the man with whom she had held the little colloquy a while before striding down the aisle of the car. In his hand was an unopened telegram. She noticed that he was looking at her as he approached her seat, and that he was knitting his brow in a puzzled, serious sort of way.

He stopped when he came to her chair and held out the telegram.

"The boy paged the dining car, where I happened to be," he said to her, "and, thinking that you might still be asleep, I took the liberty of signing for your telegram."

The telegram was addressed to "Miss Louise Treharne." It was from one of Louise's girl friends at the school, telling her that a piece of hand-baggage that Louise had absent-mindedly left at the station was being forwarded.

Louise scarcely glanced at the contents of the telegram, so great was her astonishment over its method of reaching her.

"You grant, of course, that I have reason to be puzzled," she said to him, unconstrainedly but entirely in earnest. She noticed that he was far from being unconstrained, and that a certain seriousness sat upon his strong features which she had not before observed. "It is plain that you knew this telegram was for me."

"Otherwise, of course," he replied, a little huskily, "I should not have presumed to sign for it. I should not have signed for it in any case had I not supposed you to be asleep. I feared, you see, that you might miss it."

"But you do not in the least appease my curiosity," said Louise, smiling somewhat nervously. "If you knew me—as it seems of course you do—I cannot understand why you did not reveal yourself when we had our little conversation a while ago."

"But I did not know—I should say I did not recall you then," he said, plainly flustered.

"You only add to the mystery," said Louise. "You will enlighten me, of course?"

He whirled his chair about so that, sitting back on the arm of it, he could face her.

"It is simple enough," he explained, with a hesitancy which Louise did not fail to note. "When the lad with the telegram came through the dining car, calling out your name, I could not fail, with that startling reminder, to remember——" He broke off as if reluctant to proceed.

"Yes?" put in Louise, a bit proddingly.

"Well, I could not fail to remember your father's daughter," he said in a low tone, obviously striving to regain some ease of manner.

"You know my father?" said Louise, her sense of the mystery of it all increasing rather than abating.

"Yes," he replied, still struggling, as Louise could see, to conquer a trouble that was visible on his features. "I am your father's attorney. I know your mother quite well, too. But this is the first time I have seen you since you were a little girl in pigtails and highly-starched skirts." He strove to make his laugh sound natural and easy, but it was a failure. Some worry, as to the nature of which Louise could of course not even guess, was in his voice as well as on his face.

Louise impulsively held out her hand.

"The mystery is cleared," she said, brightly, "and it is delightful to meet so old a friend, no matter how oddly. Won't you sit down and tell me all about my father and my mother and myself and yourself and—and everybody? Or is it permissible for one to cross-examine so solemn and cautious a person as an attorney?"

He sat down in the chair facing hers and studied, constrainedly, the pattern of the cap which he held out before him. Then he glanced at his watch.

"I am leaving the train at Peekskill," he said, "so there is not much time. You are to be home for the holidays?"

"For the holidays and for all time," she replied with a certain eagerness. "You have visited my mother's home? Because, you know, I never have." She had not meant to say that so baldly, and she was sorry for the slip as soon as the words were out. "It is on Riverside Drive. Therefore it must be lovely; the view, at any rate. It is lovely, isn't it?"

He deliberately evaded the question.

"You are not returning to school at all?" he pointedly counter-questioned her instead. "Does your mother know this? I hope I don't seem inquisitive. But I am really interested in knowing."

"You trap me into a confession," replied Louise, smiling. "I simply announced to my mother that I was through with school, and here I am on my way home. I am hoping that she will not be excessively angry with me. Do you think she will be?"

Louise was finding him decidedly difficult, in spite of her efforts to put him at his ease. He became so immersed in cogitations which Louise could see were of the troubled sort that he seemed scarcely to listen to what she was saying.

"You have not answered my question, you know, Mr.—Mr.—you see I do not even know your name," said Louise, after a pause, pretending to be aggrieved.

"Oh, pardon the rudeness, won't you?" he said, hastily. "Blythe is my name—John Blythe. And forgive me for not having caught your question, Miss Treharne. You don't mind asking it again?"

"Oh, it doesn't matter," said Louise, appeased, but still curious as to the cause of the perturbation he had exhibited ever since he had brought her the telegram, and which had become more pronounced since she had told him that she was on her way to her mother's home to remain there. She had not failed to notice his quite manifest unwillingness to speak of her mother. Not of a prying nature, she concluded, without framing the thought in words, that, if he had a reason for that unwillingness, it was decidedly his privilege to keep the reason to himself. But her curiosity as to her father was not so easily repressed. She had not heard him spoken of—her mother forbade the subject—for many years, nor had he ever communicated with her directly; but her childish recollections of him were very sweet. She could not resist the temptation to speak of him to this newly-revealed friend. Why should she not, she thought, since he seemed to be so well acquainted with her parents—and was her father's attorney besides?

"Mr. Blythe," she found herself saying in a tone of unusual hesitation for her, a young woman of perfect frankness, "I feel that I may ask you about my father, seeing that you know—well, everything concerning him and my mother and—myself. It has been so many, many years since I have even heard him mentioned. Where is he? When did you see him last?"

"He lives in Hawaii, Miss Treharne—I saw him in Honolulu a few years ago," replied Blythe, promptly enough.

Louise pondered. There was nothing specific she wanted to ask about her father. But she considered that Blythe had not told her very much.

"Is he—well, nice?" she asked him.

Blythe, disturbed as he was, could not help but smile at the naïve question. But he sobered before he replied.

"He is almost, if not quite, the finest man I ever knew," he said. "I hope to be allowed to tell you all about him some time. I shall be writing to him presently. Tut! Here is Peekskill. I am dropping off here for a few hours," and he thrust his arms into his overcoat.

"You will send my love to my father in your letter?" said Louise, her eyes slightly filmed, touching him upon the sleeve. He looked gravely down upon her; her words touched him keenly.

"I am glad you have asked me to do that, Miss Treharne," he said. "And he will be more than glad—depend upon that. Goodbye—not for very long, I hope. I am overjoyed to have come upon you again—especially at this time," and he took her two hands in his huge palms for an instant and was gone.

"'Especially at this time'—I wonder what he meant by that?" thought Louise. He waved at her as he passed beneath her car window. She was conscious that his smile in doing so was slightly forced; an instant before he caught sight of her through the window she had noticed that his face was clouded with worry.

An hour later Louise was weaving her way through the rushing, holiday-chattering crowd toward the exit gate at the Grand Central station. Peering toward the gate, and able, with her unusual height, to see over the heads of the hurrying women and most of the men, she espied her mother, looking somewhat petitely stodgy beside the stately Laura, gazing rather wearily through the iron lattice. "I think I see myself being sent to bed without any supper," whimsically thought Louise, considering, as she drew nearer, her mother's bored expression. Louise was glad Laura was with her mother; when a mere growing girl she had become gratefully familiar with Laura's self-styled "ameliorating knack." She had become very fond of her mother's handsome, superbly-capricious but sunny-natured friend before being packed off to school; and now her eyes became slightly blurred at the thought that Laura had remembered her and had thought enough of her to be with her mother at her home-coming.

"Here is our blossomy, bronze-haired Boadicea!" Louise heard Laura say as she was taken into the older woman's arms and heartily kissed. Then Laura thrust her away with assumed annoyance. "But, minx, you are taller than I am; a full inch, maybe two, taller! How do you ever expect me to forgive you that, child?" and she smiled, drawing Louise toward her again, and hugged her once more.

Louise's mother brushed the girl's cheek with her lips, her daughter bending toward her.

"You are grotesquely tall, aren't you, dear?" said Mrs. Treharne, not very good-naturedly. Her petulance over Louise's return was by no means allayed; and her masseuse had told her that evening that she had gained two pounds in a week! "You will have to get clothes that will reduce your shocking stature." Then, swept by a momentary compunction, "You are well, dear? You are looking excessively well."

Louise was not hurt by the tone of her mother's greeting. She was well acquainted with her parent's irritableness, and even more familiar with her indurated indifference. The main thing was that she was back with her mother, and with a chance to strive for a better understanding.

"But aren't you a mite thinner, mother?" Louise asked, thoroughly meaning it; for there wasn't an ounce of sycophancy in Louise's make-up, and she noticed her mother's hollowness of eye and generally distraught air and so concluded that she was losing in weight.

Mrs. Treharne flared instantly.

"You are not to make game of me, my dear, whatever else you do," she said, icily, to her astonished daughter. Laura laughed outright and caught Louise's arm in her own as they started through the station.

"Don't be absurd, Antoinette—the dear is not making game of you, as you call it," said Laura. "You know she is incapable of that."

"But I am all at sea," said Louise, still mystified over her mother's inexplicable outbreak. "What is it? What did I say that was wrong?"

Her mother looked at her and saw that the girl was wholly innocent of the sarcasm she had hastily attributed to her.

"You know very well, Louise," she said, in a tone meant to be appeasing, "that I am hideously, scandalously, shockingly fat; and you cannot expect me to be cheerful when you begin to taunt me with it before you have had more than one glance at me."

"But you are anything but stout, mother dear, and I really meant what I said," put in Louise. "Why, it perfectly stuns me to think you could suppose that I——"

"Tut-tut—can't we find something more engaging to talk about than what the weighing scales do or do not tell us?" broke in Laura, gaily. "Antoinette, dear, won't you see if you can attract that taxicab man's attention?"

When Mrs. Treharne walked over to the curb to summon the chauffeur of the taxicab Laura seized the moment to say to Louise in a low tone.

"Some things have occurred to disturb your mother, dear; so don't mind if she seems a bit difficile tonight, will you? She is a little annoyed over your intention not to return to the school; but I shall help you out there. I am going home with you now for a little while. You'll depend upon your old friend Laura?"

Louise, watching her mother, furtively pressed Laura's hand.

"You know how I always loved you as a little girl?" she said simply. Laura's eyes became suddenly suffused with tears. She knew the girl's need of affection; and she vowed in her heart, then and there, crowding back the tears when she saw Mrs. Treharne beckoning to them, that she would stand in the place of the girl's mother if the time ever came—and she more than dimly apprehended that come it would—when such a thing need be.

Laura forced the conversation and strove to give to it a note of gayety as the taxicab sped through the icy streets. Once, in addressing her, Louise called her "Mrs. Stedham." Instantly Laura assumed a mighty pretence of annoyed hostility.

"Mrs. Hoity-Toity, child," she said, severely, to Louise. "You are not supposing, I hope, that I shall permit a woman a full two inches taller than I am to call me any such an outlandish name as 'Mrs. Stedham'? Great heaven, am I not old enough as it is? I am Laura to you, dear; flatter me at least, by making me believe that you consider me young enough to be called by my christened name; the aged have so few compensations, you know," and Louise, not without initial difficulty, however—for Laura had always been a woman to her—called her Laura thenceforth and was pleased to imagine that the elder woman was her "big, grown-up" sister.

On the ride to the Riverside Drive house Louise, suddenly remembering, mentioned Blythe. She described the incident through which he had made himself known to her, but forbore, out of a certain diffidence which she always felt in her mother's presence, saying anything about Blythe's allusions to her father. She omitted that part altogether.

"How extraordinary!" commented Laura. "But John Blythe's practice is always sending him prowling about the country on trains. Everybody who knows about such things tells me what an enormously important personage he is becoming in the dry-as-dust legal world. I am sure he does astonishingly well with my hideously complicated affairs—you know he is my legal man, Louise. Isn't it odd that you should have met him in such a way? Didn't you find him rather—well, distingué, we'll say, Louise?"

"I thought him very fine and——" Louise strove for a word haltingly.

"And with an air about him—of course you did, my dear; everybody does," Laura aided her. "If he wasn't such a perfectly wrong-headed, wrapped-up-in-the-law sort of a person he would have fallen in love with me long ago, even if I am old enough to be his grandmother; he is thirty-two, I believe, and I am bordering upon thirty-six; but he barely notices me in that way," with an acute emphasis on the "that," "though we are no end of first-rate friends; pals, I was going to say; for I've known him ever since——"

Laura came to a sudden stop. She had been upon the brink of saying "ever since Blythe had helped her to get her divorce from Rodney Stedham;" but she recollected in time that that was not exactly the sort of a chronological milestone that should be reverted to in the presence of a girl just that day out of school.

"Louise, did you tell Mr. Blythe that you were to remain with me—permanently?" asked Mrs. Treharne, constrainedly, suddenly joining in the conversation.

Louise reflected a moment before replying.

"Why, yes, mother, I did; he asked me about it, I recall now," she said.

"Did he have any comment to make?" asked her mother in a reduced tone.

"Why, no, dear," said Louise. "In fact, he appeared to be considerably worried about something, and so——" Louise felt herself being furtively prodded by Laura, and she left off suddenly.

Opportunely, the taxicab drew up in front of an ornate house on the Drive.

"Do you live here, mother?" Louise inquired, innocently. "I wonder how I managed to form the impression that you were living in an apartment?"

Mrs. Treharne pretended not to have heard her. The door was silently opened by a man in livery. Laura was watching Louise keenly as the girl's eyes took in the splendor of the foyer and hall. The magnificence was of a Pittsburgesque sort, in which beauty is sacrificed to a mere overwhelming extravagance; but, for its extravagance alone, not less than for its astonishing ornateness, it had a sort of impressiveness.

"Why, how dazzling!" Louise could not refrain from commenting. "How delightfully different from what I expected! I am so glad that I am home—home!" She lingered lovingly upon the word.

It was a difficult moment for Laura. But she was prepared for it. In addition to the "ameliorating knack" she had a way of being ready for contingencies.

"Antoinette," she said, mainly to stop Louise, "I have one of my headaches coming on. Can't we have some tea in your rooms?"

"I was just about to suggest that," said Mrs. Treharne, drily, and presently the three women were in her sumptuous sitting room, overlooking the twinkling lights of the Hudson. A butler spread the cloth and brought a fowl and salad and jams, while Louise roamed about exclaiming over the beauty of the rooms, and Laura fought desperately against her inclination to brood.

Laura contributed whatever of merriness there was to the home-coming feast. Mrs. Treharne confined herself to occasional questions directed at Louise, and the girl saw that her mother was tired and out of sorts; she remembered what Laura had told her at the station of her mother's state of mind "over matters," and she made the allowances that she had been accustomed to make for her mother since her earliest years.

The three women were still at the table, beginning to make allusions to bed—Laura had summoned her car by 'phone, for it was close upon eleven—when a great-girthed man, in a sealskin coat that fell almost to his heels, an opera hat set rakishly on one side of his bald head, and his turkey-like eyes still more reddened with the libations that his lurching gait made still more obvious, lumbered into the room without the least attempt at knocking on the door.

"Hay-o, folks—having a little party?" said Judd, lurching toward the table. "Am I in on it?" and he plumped himself drunkenly into a chair.

Laura rose at the first sight of him. Mrs. Treharne kept her seat but gazed at him vitriolically. Louise looked at him quietly enough. She was intensely mystified, but quite willing to wait for any information as to the intrusion. No information, however, was forthcoming.

"Your mother will show you to your room, dear," said Laura, placing an arm around Louise's waist and guiding her to the door. Under her breath she said: "No questions, dear heart. He is an—an adviser of your mother. We are going to be great cronies, are we not?" She kissed Louise and went. Her mother conducted Louise to a sleeping room done in white and silver, and kissed the girl good night with a sort of belated rush of affection. But she said nothing to her in explanation of Judd.

Toward midnight John Blythe, after striding up and down his solitary bachelor apartment for two hours in lounging robe and slippers, went to the telephone in his study and called up Laura.

"Is that you, Laura?" he said, quietly, into the transmitter when she answered the call. "What time tomorrow forenoon will you be fit to be seen?"

"By noon," Laura's voice came back to him quietly. "I know what you want to see me about, John."

"Do you? I doubt that."

"It is about Louise Treharne."

"I'll be there by noon. Goodnight."

"Goodnight."

CHAPTER III

Heloise's intentional noisiness in rearranging the toilet articles on the dressing table aroused Louise. The brilliant sunlight of a sparkling winter morning was pouring into the room. Half-awake and the brightness of the room filtering through her still-closed eyelids, she was obsessed for an instant with the fear that, over-sleeping, she was late for the exercises attending the beginning of a day at Miss Mayhew's school. She smiled at the thought, in spite of a brooding, indefinable trouble that had burdened her sleep, when, with wide eyes, she quickly sensed the lavishness of the room and saw the invincibly trig Heloise moving about.

"Mademoiselle is awake at last?" said Heloise in French, a trace of irritation in her tone. "One considered that Mademoiselle contemplated sleeping until the end of time."

Louise disarmed her with a laugh.

"Perhaps I should have," she said, lightly, but on her guard with her French in the presence of so meticulous a critic, "had I not just this moment dreamt of coffee. Am I too late for breakfast?"

Of course Mademoiselle should have her coffee instantly, said the appeased Heloise, ringing. The maid mentally pronounced that Louise's finishing-school French was almost intelligible to one understanding that language.

Mrs. Treharne had sent Heloise to look after Louise until a maid should be obtained for her. Louise, sitting up in bed, her fresh, clear-colored face aureoled by her agreeably awry mass of bronzed hair, the nocturnal braids of which she already had begun to unplait, laughed again at the thought of being attended by a maid.

"I shall have to be trained for that," she said to the mollified Heloise. "I never had a maid. I doubt if I should know how to behave with a maid doing my hair. I think I should find myself tempted to do the maid's instead; especially if her hair were as pretty as yours."

Heloise was Louise's sworn, voluble, tooth-and-nail, right-or-wrong, everlasting friend from that moment. She 'phoned to the butler, demanding to know why Mademoiselle's coffee had not been sent, although she had only called for it three minutes before, and she buzzed about the tractable Louise, arranging her hair with expert fingers, cheerful and chirpful, nothing whatever like the austere, croaking Heloise who scowled so threateningly over the slightest unruliness of her actual mistress. Heloise was prepared to give an enthusiastic recommendation of Louise to the maid who should be engaged to attend her mistress's daughter. And she began already to be envious of Louise's unobtained maid.

When Heloise had finished with her Louise, inspecting herself in the glass with frank approval, decided that never before had she looked so astonishingly well at that hour of the morning. But, when the garrulous maid had gone, Louise, sipping her coffee, sat in the streaming sunlight of the bowed window, watching the sparkling ice floes drift down the bleak Hudson, and the trouble that had weighted her sleep returned upon her, slowly taking shape with her consciousness. She had been too tired the night before to engage in much reflection, before losing herself in sleep, upon the incidents—one incident particularly—of the previous night. Now she was face to face with the gravamen of her depression, with an alert morning mind to sift over its elements. It was characteristic of her that she did not seek to thrust aside her consciousness of conditions which she imperfectly understood. She understood them, however, sufficiently to grasp at least the essentials of the situation.

Louise, whose native shrewdness was tempered by an innate and unconquerable tendency to look upon the bright side of the world and of such of the world's people as she came into contact with, was far better acquainted with her mother than her mother was with her; which was natural enough, considering that she had the receptive mind of youth, and that her mother's major trait was a sort of all-inclusive indifference. Many things in connection with her mother's manner of life, her almost hysterical love of admiration, her restlessness and her habitual secretiveness with Louise during the girl's early girlhood years, had become all too plain to the daughter as she developed into womanhood at the finishing school. Perhaps it may be added that a twentieth century finishing school for young women commonly is an institution wherein all of the pupils' deductions are not made from their text books nor from the eminently safe premises laid down by their instructors. The young woman who has spent four years at such a school does not step through a nimbus of juvenile dreams when she enters into the world that is waiting for her. It is true that, when she takes her place in the uncloistered world, she has a great deal to unlearn; but this is balanced by the indubitable fact she has not very much to learn. Those who expect her to be utterly surprised over the departures that she sees from the rules of the social game are merely wasting their surprise. It is mere futility to suppose that several hundreds of young women of the highly intelligent and eager type who attend exclusive schools of the so-termed finishing kind, thrust constantly upon each other for companionship and the comparison of notes, are going to occupy all of their leisure in discussing the return of Halley's comet, or the profounder meaning of Wagner, or even the relative starchiness of their hair ribbons.

Louise, participating in the whispered precocities of the school, had often caught herself on the defensive in her mother's behalf. To seek to brush away imputations that seemed to fit her mother's personality and way of life had become almost a habit with her.

The habit, however, was availing her little on this her first morning after leaving school in her mother's sumptuous home—"that is, if it is mother's home." She flushed when she found herself saying that. But the doubt propelled itself through her consciousness, and she resolutely refused to expel it, once it had found lodgment in her mind, merely because it caused her cheeks to burn. Her mother's favorite word, in contemptuously denominating people who lived in accordance with convention, was "smug;" Mrs. Treharne considered that she had pilloried, for the world's derision, persons to whom she had adverted as "smug." Of the smugness of the kind Mrs. Treharne meant when she employed the word, there was not an atom in Louise's composition. Her nature, her upbringing, were opposed to the thought of a narrow, restrained, buckram social rule.

But here was a situation—the investiture of almost garish splendor in which she found her mother living, considered in connection with subconscious doubts as to certain quite visible flaws in her mother's character which had been forming themselves in the girl's mind for years—here, indeed, was a situation with respect to which Louise's unquietude had no need of being based upon mere smugness.

The girl knew quite well that, up to the time of her going away to school at any rate, her mother's income had been a limited one—some three thousand a year voluntarily contributed by the father for his daughter's support and education. It had not been, in fact, her mother's income at all, but Louise's; and it had been voluntarily contributed by the father because, as he had been the plaintiff in the divorce suit, the decree had not required him to aid his detached wife or his daughter at all; the court had given him the custody of the child, and he had surrendered that custody to the mother out of sheer pity for her.

How, then, had her mother provided herself, on an income which, with a daughter to educate, called for frugality, if not positive scrimping, with such a sheerly extravagant setting?

And Judd! Louise flushed again when she remembered Judd. She did not know his name. She had never seen or even heard of him before. She only remembered him—and the thought caused her to draw her negligée more closely about her, for she experienced a sudden chill—as the girthy, red-eyed individual who, with the proprietary arrogance of an intoxicated man who seemed perfectly to know his position under that roof, had lurched into her mother's apartments on the previous night without the least attempt at announcing himself.

How would her mother explain these things? Would she, indeed, explain to her daughter at all? In any case, Louise formed the resolve not to question her mother. She possessed, what is unusual in woman, an instinctive appreciation of the rights of others, even when such rights are perversely altered to wrongs. She considered that her mother's affairs were her own, in so far as they did not involve herself, Louise Treharne, in any tacit copartnership; and as to this point she purposed ascertaining, before very long, to just what extent she had become or was expected to become involved. For the rest, she was conscious of a distinct sympathy for and a yearning toward her mother. In her reflections she gave her mother the benefit of every mitigating circumstance.

Turning from the window, Louise saw her mother standing before the dresser glass studying her haggard morning face, now lacking all of the sorely-required aids to the merely pretty regularity of her features, with a head-shaking lugubriousness that might have had its comic appeal to an unconcerned onlooker. Louise, however, was scarcely in a mood of mirth.

"I knocked, my dear, but you were too much absorbed," said Mrs. Treharne, offering her daughter her cheek. "You were in a veritable trance. Did you get enough sleep, child? Was Heloise in a scolding humor? She makes my life a misery to me with her tongue. What beautiful hair you have! And what a perfect skin! A powder puff would mar that wonderful pallor. Yet you are not too white. It becomes you, with your hair. Appreciate these things while you have them, dear; look at your mother, a hag, a witch, at thirty-nine! But, then, you will keep your looks longer than I; you pattern after the women of your——"

She came perilously close to saying "your father's family," but adroitly turned the phrase when she caught herself in time. Louise, putting on a cheerful mask, replied to her mother's trivialities and devised some of her own. Her mother had not lost her banting-killed bloom when Louise had last seen her at such an hour in the morning; and the girl was inwardly pained to note how all but the mere vestiges of her remembered prettiness had disappeared. Mrs. Treharne caught her looking at her with a certain scrutinizing reflectiveness, and she broke out petulantly:

"Don't pick me apart with your eyes in that way, Louise! I know that I am hideous, but for heaven's sake don't remind me of it with your criticizing, transfixing gazes!"

She was of the increasing type of women who, long after they have the natural right to expect adulation on account of their looks, still hate to surrender. Louise quickly perceived this and provided unguents for her mother's sensitiveness.

They chatted upon little matters, Mrs. Treharne so ill at ease (yet striving to hide her restlessness) that she found it impossible to sit still for more than a minute; she fluttered incessantly about the room, her wonderful negligée of embroidered turquoise sailing after her like the outspread wings of a moth. After many pantheress-like rounds of the room, during which Louise somehow felt her old diffidence in her mother's presence returning upon her, Mrs. Treharne, after her evident casting about for an opening, stopped before Louise and pinched her cheek between dry fingers.

"At any rate, my dear," she said with a trace of her old amiability and animation, "you are not a frump or a bluestocking! There was a time when I had two fears: that you would not grow up pretty and that you would become bookish. And here I find myself towered over by a young princess, and you don't talk in the least like a girl with crazy notions of keeping up her inane school studies." Then, after a slight pause: "Are you religious, my dear, or—er—well, broad-minded?"

Louise smothered her mounting laugh, for fear of offending her mother in her mood of amiability; but her smile was eloquent enough.

"Is there any incompatibility between those two states of mind, mother?" she asked.

"Don't dissect my words, child; you quite understand what I mean," said the mother, with a slight reversion to peevishness. "Your father, you know, was—no doubt still is—shockingly narrow; he hadn't the slightest conception of the broad, big view; he belonged in this respect, I think, in the Middle Ages; and I have been tortured by the fear that you might—might—"

She hesitated. She had not meant to mention Louise's father, much less to speak of him even in mild derogation; and she suddenly recalled how, years before, there had been a tacit agreement between them that Louise's father was not to be mentioned. The agreement had been entered into after an occasion when Louise, then a child of eleven, with the memory of her vanished father still very keen in her mind, had rushed from the room, in blinding tears, upon hearing her mother speak of him in terms of dispraise.

"I did not have much time at school for self-analysis, mother," said Louise, coming to her mother's aid. "I suppose I am normal and neutral enough. I am not conscious of any particular leaning." She flushed, swept by a sudden sense of the difficulty, the incongruity, of such a conversation with her mother amid such surroundings. "Mother," she resumed, hastily, "I am so keen to see New York again that I am hardly capable of thinking of anything else just now. Are we to go out?"

"The car is yours when you wish it, Louise," said Mrs. Treharne, absently. "I rarely go out until late in the afternoon."

"The car?" said Louise. "You have a car, then?"

Her mother glanced at her sharply. It was sufficiently obvious that she was on the lookout for symptoms of inquisitiveness on Louise's part; though Louise had not meant her question to be in the least inquisitive.

"I have the use of a car," said Mrs. Treharne, a little frigidly. "It belongs to Mr. Judd."

Instinctively Louise felt that "Mr. Judd" was the sealskinned Falstaff whose unceremonious appearance the night before had startled her. But she remained silent. Nothing could have induced her to ask her mother about Mr. Judd. Her mother did not fail to notice her silence, which of course put her on the defensive.

"Mr. Judd," she said, "is—a—" she hesitated painfully—"my business adviser. He has been very good and kind in making some investments in—in mining stocks for me; investments that have proved very profitable. He is alert in my interest. It was Mr. Judd, my dear, whom you saw last night. He was not quite himself, I fear, or he would not have made his appearance as he did. He has helped me so much that of course it would be ungrateful of me not to permit him the run of the place." She rambled on, as persons will who feel themselves to be on the defensive. "In fact, he—he—But of course, if you have formed a prejudice against him on account of last night, there will be no occasion for you to meet him except occasionally."

Louise caught the hollowness, the evasiveness, of the explanation. Not one word of it had rung true. Louise had never felt sorrier for her mother than she did at that moment. She noticed a certain hunted expression in her mother's face, and it cut her to the quick. She placed a long, finely-chiselled arm, from which the sleeve of the negligée had slipped back to the shoulder, around her mother's neck.

"But I haven't the least use for a car, dearie," she said. It was not with deliberation that she ignored altogether what her mother had been saying as to Judd; it was simply that she could not bring herself to offer any comment on that subject. "I am a walker; every day at Miss Mayhew's I did ten miles—even in rain and snow, and it is clouding for snow now, I think. You will not mind my going out for a long walk? I am wild for air and exercise."

Mrs. Treharne was grateful to the girl for turning it off in that way even if, by so doing, Louise indicated that she was of more than one mind with respect to what had been told her regarding Judd. And Mrs. Treharne, careless and indifferent as she was, could not visualize her daughter in the gigantic yellow-bodied Judd car without being swept by a feeling that was distinctly to her credit.

Laura Stedham, over her cocoa, was weaving with careless rapidity through her morning mail when John Blythe arrived shortly before noon. Laura's apartment overlooked the west side of the Park. Its dominant color scheme now was based upon a robin's egg blue; but there was a jest among Laura's friends that they never had seen her apartment look the same on two visits running; they declared that every time Laura left the city for as long a period as a fortnight, she left orders with her decorator to have her apartment completely done over so that even she herself quite failed to recognize it when she returned.

Blythe, throwing his snow-sprinkled stormcoat over the extended arm of Laura's brisk maid, strolled over to a window and watched the still, unflurried flakes sift through the bare branches of the Park trees. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets and his eyes were so unusually meditative that Laura, used to his absorption as she was, laughed quietly as she turned from her escritoire.

"Yes, John, it is snowing," she said, thrusting away a heap of still-unopened letters.

Blythe turned to her with a twinkling look of inquiry.

"I thought perhaps you might not have noticed it," chaffed Laura, "seeing that you were looking right at it. You require an excessive amount of forgiveness from your friends. I believe you have not even seen me yet, although I've employed a good hour that I might have spent in bed in devising additional fascinations in anticipation of your coming."

"Meaning, for one thing, I suppose," said Blythe with rather an absorbed smile, "that—that—"

"Don't you dare call it a kimono," interrupted Laura. "It's a mandarin's coat—a part of the Peking loot. Of course you are crazy over it?"

It was a magnificent pale blue, ermine-padded garment, with a dragon of heavy gold embroidery extending from nape to hem down the loose back.

Blythe studied it for a moment and then glanced significantly at the faint-blue walls and ceiling of the room.

"I presume," he said, solemnly, "you had your rooms done this last time to match the Mother Hub—I mean the mandarin's coat?"

They did not need thus to spar, for they were (what, unhappily, is so unusual between men and women in a world devoid of mid-paths) close friends; even comrades, in so far as Blythe's hard work permitted him to assume his share of such a relationship; and they understood each other thoroughly, with no complication differing from a genuine mutual esteem to mar their understanding. Nevertheless, both of them found it a trifle difficult to undertake the lead on the subject that was uppermost in their minds and the occasion of Blythe's forenoon visit.

Laura with her customary helpfulness, finally gave him an opening.

"She told us of having met you on the train," said Laura, as if in continuation of a conversation already begun on the theme. "An odd chance, wasn't it? I wonder if you were so enormously struck with her as I was?"

"You met her at the station, did you not?" said Blythe, quietly. "That was like you; like your all-around fineness."

"Thanks," said Laura, appreciatively. "But you evade my question. Isn't she a perfect apparition of loveliness?"

"I wish she were less so," said Blythe, not convincingly.

"No, you don't wish that," said Laura. "I know what you wish; but it is not that."

Blythe was silent for a space and then he fell to striding up and down the room.

"Did you ever come upon such an unspeakable situation, Laura?" he broke out, stopping to face her. "What is Antoinette Treharne thinking of? Is she utterly lost to any sense of—"

"I wouldn't say that, John," put in Laura, holding up a staying hand. "It is natural enough, I know, for you to reach such a conclusion; on a cursory view the case seems to be against her; but you must remember that Louise came home without warning. Antoinette had no opportunity to devise a plan. She is horribly humiliated. I know that."

"Your usual method of defending everybody—and you know how I like you for that as for so many other things," said Blythe. "But, Laura, Louise's mother knew that the girl must leave school in half a year at all events. She must have considered some way out of the hideous mess?"

"None that she ever mentioned to me," said Laura. "You know her habit of procrastination. I grazed the subject two or three times in talking with her. She dodged, or was downright brusque. She has no plan, I am sure. But she is sorely distressed over it all, now that the situation has come to a head. I am very sorry for her."

"But the girl?" said Blythe, a slight note of irritation in his tone. "How about her?"

"I should be more worried if I were not so entirely confident that Louise is amply competent to take care of herself," said Laura. "She is no longer a girl, John. She is a woman, and a woman with more than her share of plain sense. Her position, of course, is positively outrageous, heartrending. But I am at a loss to suggest a single thing that her friends—that you or I, or both of us—could do just now to better it."

"That," said Blythe, a little hoarsely, "is just the devil of it."

"I should like to have Louise with me," Laura went on, "but I doubt if she would come, although I believe she is fond of me. Not just yet, at any rate. She would not care to leave her mother after her long separation from her. Louise will find out the situation herself. No doubt she already has sensed a part of its sinister aspect. I am horribly sorry for her. But, as I say, she is a woman of character. She will know what to do. All that we can do, for the present at any rate, is to be on guard for her, without seeming to be. Of course she shall know that we are her friends. She already knows that I am her friend. Did you, on the train—"

"Yes," put in Blythe, apprehending what Laura was going to ask. "I told her that I knew her father. The matter came about in an odd way. I wish, Laura, that you'd make it clear to her, if you have the chance, that she—that I—"

He halted embarrassedly.

"I quite understand," Laura aided him, smiling. "That you mean to be her friend, too—of course I shall tell her that," and Laura looked reflective when she observed how Blythe's face brightened. It soon clouded again, however, when he broke out:

"She will find out, of course, sooner or later, that she has been taken care of and educated for the past five years and odd with Judd's money," he said, worriedly. "You can imagine how intense her mortification will be over that discovery. Judd, you know, in contempt of George Treharne, forced Mrs. Treharne to return to me the quarterly checks that Treharne sent me from Hawaii for Louise—for of course I sent the checks to Antoinette. I explained this to Treharne when I saw him in Honolulu a few years ago. He was badly cut up over it But of course he was powerless to do anything about it. He refused to take the checks back, though, and directed me to deposit the money to Louise's account. I have nearly fifteen thousand dollars—five years' accrued checks, for Treharne has never stopped sending them—on deposit for Louise now. Don't you think she had better be told this?"

"Wait a while," advised Laura. "Wait until she discovers how the land lies. Then she will be coming to you. If you told her now it would involve your telling her also that she had been educated with Judd's money. I think it better that she discover that for herself—if she must discover it. Then she will know what to do. She will be seeking you out then," and Laura smiled inwardly when again she noted how Blythe's face cleared at her last words.

"There is only one thing to do, of course, and that is to follow your advice and let the matter stand as it is for the present," said Blythe, preparing to go. "But the thing is going to sit pretty heavily upon me. I have been Treharne's legal man ever since my senior partner died, as you know, and, although it isn't of course expected of me, I can't help but feel a certain responsibility for his daughter when she is thrust into such a miserable situation as this. I wonder," catching at a new and disturbing idea, "if her mother will expect Louise to meet the wretched crew of near-poets, maybe-musicians and other rag-tag-and-bobtail that assemble at what Antoinette calls her Sunday evening 'salon?'"

"Antoinette's 'zoo,' I call it," laughed Laura. "What if Louise does meet them? They can't harm her. They, the unfortunate make-believes, will only appeal to her risibles, if I mistake not. Louise must have got her sense of humor from her father. Antoinette hasn't a particle of humor in her composition. If she had how long do you suppose she would continue her absurd 'salon?"

Laura, in extending her hand to Blythe, who had resumed his stormcoat, gazed quizzically into his rugged face.

"John," she said, "is your solicitude for Louise solely on account of the—er—sense of responsibility you feel toward her father?"

Blythe caught the twinkle in her eyes.

"Humbug!" he ejaculated, striding out to the obligato of Laura's laugh.