The Relentless City

By

E. F. Benson

Author of 'Mammon & Co.,' etc.

London

William Heinemann

1903

CHAPTER I

The big pink and white dining-room at the Carlton was full to suffocation of people, mixed odours of dinner, the blare of the band just outside, and a babel of voices. In the hall theatre-goers were having their coffee and cigarettes after dinner, while others were still waiting, their patience fortified by bitters, for their parties to assemble. The day had been very hot, and, as is the manner of days in London when June is coming to an end, the hours for most people here assembled had been pretty fully occupied, but with a courage worthy of the cause they seemed to behave as if nothing of a fatiguing nature had occurred since breakfast. The band played loud because it would otherwise have been inaudible above the din of conversation, and people talked loud because otherwise nobody could have heard what anybody else said. To-night everybody had a good deal to say, for a case of the kind that always attracts a good deal of attention had just been given that lengthy and head-lined publicity which is always considered in England to be inseparable from the true and indifferent administration of justice, and the vultures of London life found the banquet extremely to their taste. So they ate their dinner with a sense of special gaiety, pecked ravenously at the aforesaid affair, and all talked loudly together. But nobody talked so loud as Mrs. Lewis S. Palmer.

It was said of her, indeed, that, staying for a week-end not long ago with some friend in the country, rain had been expected because one day after lunch a peacock was heard screaming so loud, but investigation showed that it was only Mrs. Palmer, at a considerable distance away on the terrace, laughing. Like the peacock, it is true, she had been making la pluie et le beau temps in London this year, so the mistake was accountable. At present, she was entertaining two young men at an ante-opera dinner. A casual observer might have had the impression that she was clothed lightly but exclusively in diamonds. She talked, not fast, but without pause. She was in fact what may be called a long-distance talker: in an hour she would get through much more than most people.

'Yes, London is just too lovely,' she was saying; 'and how I shall tear myself away on Monday is more than I can imagine. I shall cry my eyes out all the way to Liverpool. Mr. Brancepeth, you naughty man, you were thinking to yourself that you would pick them up and carry them home with you to remind you of me. I should advise you not to say so, or I shall get Lord Keynes to call you out. I always tell everyone that he takes as much care of me as if he were my father. Yes, Lord Keynes, you are what I call faithful. I say to everyone, Lord Keynes is the most faithful friend I ever had. Don't you think you are faithful, now? Well, as I was saying when Mr. Brancepeth interrupted me with his wicked inquiries, I shall cry my eyes out. Indeed, if it wasn't that Lord Keynes had faithfully promised to come over in the fall, I think I should get a divorce from Lewis S. and remain here right along.'

'On what grounds?' asked Bertie Keynes.

'Why, on the grounds of his incompatibility of residence. Just now I feel as if the sight of Fifth Avenue would make me feel so homesick for London that I guess I should rupture something. When I am homesick I feel just like that, and Lewis S. he notices it at once, and sends to Tiffany's for the most expensive diamond they've got. That helps some, because a new diamond is one of the solemnest things I know. It just sits there and winks at me, and I just sit there and wink at it. We know a thing or two, a big diamond and I. But I conjecture it will have to be a big one to make me feel better this time, for just now London seems to me the only compatible residence. I guess I'll make Lewis buy it.'

Mrs. Palmer's tact had been one of the standing dishes of the season, and it appeared that there was plenty of it still in stock. It was distributed by her with strict impartiality to anyone present, and had a firm flavour.

Bertie Keynes laughed, and drew from his pocket a small printed card.

'I don't know if you have seen this,' he said. '"Admit bearer to see the world. Signed, Lewis S. Palmer."' And he handed it to her.

Mrs. Palmer opened her mouth very wide, and screamed so loud that for a radius of three tables round all conversation ceased for a moment. The scream began on about the note selected by express trains when they dash at full speed through a station, rose an octave or two with an upward swoop like a steam siren, came slowly down in a chromatic scale, broken off for a moment as she made a hissing intake of her breath, and repeated itself. This year it had been one of the recognised cries of London.'

'Why, if that isn't the cutest thing in the world,' she screamed. 'I never saw anything so cunning. Why, I never! Admit bearer to see the world! How can I get one for Lewis? It would just tickle him to death.'

'Pray take this,' said Bertie. 'I brought it on purpose for you.'

'Well, if that isn't too nice of you! I shall just hand that to Lewis without a word the moment I set eyes on him. I guess that'll make him want to buy the world in earnest. Why, he'll go crazy about buying it now that it has been suggested. Well, I'm sure, Lord Keynes, it's just too nice of you to give me that. I shall laugh myself sick over it. I always tell everyone that you are the kindest man I ever saw. Gracious, it's half after nine! We must go at once. I'll be down with you in a moment, but I must give this to my maid to be packed in my jewel-case.'

Mrs. Palmer looked at it again as she rose, gave another shrill scream, and vanished, leaving her two guests alone.

Charlie Brancepeth moved his chair a little sideways to the table as he sat down again, crossed his legs, and took a cigarette from his case.

'If you had asked her a hundred pounds for it, she would have given it you, Bertie,' he remarked.

Bertie Keynes raised his eyebrows a shade.

'A hundred pounds is always welcome, Charlie,' he said, without a shadow or hint of comment in his voice. In fact, the neutrality of his tone was too marked to be in the least degree natural.

Charlie did not reply for a moment, but blew thoughtfully on the lighted end of his cigarette.

'Why this sudden—this sudden suppression of the mercantile spirit?' he asked.

Bertie laughed.

'Don't trouble to be more offensive than is necessary to your reasonable comfort,' he remarked with some finish.

'I am not; I should have been in considerable pain if I hadn't said that. But why this suppression?'

Bertie delayed answering long enough to upset the salt with his elbow, and look reproachfully at the waiter for having done so.

'There isn't any suppression,' he said at length. 'The mercantile spirit is going strong. Stronger than ever. Damn!'

'Is it the salt you asked a blessing on?' said Charlie.

'No; the non-suppression.'

'Then you really are going to America in the autumn?' asked he. 'I beg its pardon, the fall.'

'Yes. Fall is just as good a word as autumn, by the way.'

'Oh, quite. Over there they think it better, and they have quite as good a right to judge as we. If they called it the pump-handle it wouldn't make any difference.'

'Not the slightest. Yes, I am going.'

Charlie smiled.

'Oh, I suddenly understand about the mercantile spirit,' he said. 'It was stupid of me not to have guessed at once.'

'It was rather. Charlie, I should like to talk to you about it. The governor has been making some uncommonly sensible remarks to me on the subject.'

'He would. Your father has an immense quantity of dry common-sense. Yes, come round after the opera, and we'll talk it out lengthways. Here's Mrs. Palmer. I hope Pagani will sing extremely loud to-night, otherwise we shan't hear a note.'

Two electric broughams were waiting at the Pall Mall entrance as Mrs. Palmer rustled out between rows of liveried men, whose sole office appeared to be to look reverential as she passed, as if to have just seen her was the Mecca of their aspirations. Then, after a momentary hesitation between the two young men, Bertie followed her dazzling opera-cloak into the first brougham, and, amid loud and voluble regrets on her part that there was not room for three, and the exaction of a solemn promise that Charlie would not quarrel with his friend for having monopolized her, they started. Charlie gave a little sigh, whether of disappointment or not is debatable, and followed them alone in the second brougham.

The motor went swiftly and noiselessly up Haymarket, and into the roaring whirlpool of the Circus. It was a fine warm evening, and over pavement and roadway the season of the streets, which lasts not for a few months only, after the manner of the enfeebled upper class, but all the year round, was in full swing. Hansom cabs, newsboys shouting the latest details of all the dirty linen which had been washed that week, omnibuses nodding ten feet high above the road, and life-guardsmen nodding six, women plain and coloured, men in dress-clothes hurrying late to the theatres, shabby skulkers in shadow, obscure persons of prey, glittering glass signs about the music-halls, flower-sellers round the fountain, swinging-doors of restaurants swallowing in and vomiting out all sorts and conditions of men, winking sky—signs, policemen controlling the traffic—all contributed their essential but infinitesimal quota to the huge hodge-podge of life, bent as the great majority of life always is on the seizure of the present vivid moment, the only thing which is certainly existent. For the past is already to everyone but of the texture of a dream; the future is a dream also, but lying in impenetrable shadow. But the moment is real.

To Charlie it appeared to-night that the festival of the pavements was certainly gayer than the festival of the Carlton. His own world schemed more, it might be, and substituted innuendo for a bolder and more direct manner of talk, but it really had less capacity for enjoyment. Ten weeks of London broke its wind somewhat, and it retired into the country to graze, to digest, to recoup. But here on the pavements a lustier spirit reigned, the spirit of the people, pressing upwards and upwards like buried bulbs striving towards the light through the good, moist earth, whereas, to continue the metaphor that was in his mind, the folk among whom he moved, whose doings he continually observed with an absorbed but kindly cynicism, were like plants tended in a greenhouse, and potted out when the weather became assured.

And what if the whole of England was becoming every year more like a tended greenhouse plant, compared to the blind thrust of forces from the earth in other countries? For all the old landmarks, as the great wheel of human life whirled down the road of the centuries, seemed to be passing out of sight; the world was racing westwards, where America sat high on the seas, grown like some portentous mushroom in a single night. There, at the present moment, the inexorable, relentless logic of nature was working out its everlasting proposition that the one force in the material world was wealth. England had had her turn, even as Rome had had her turn, and even as the hordes of barbarians had swept over the countries that had been hers till they reached and took the capital itself, even so—well, had he not himself dined with Mrs. Palmer that evening? It was not in his nature to hate anything, so it cannot be said that he hated her screaming, her insensate conversation, her lack of all that is summed up in the words breeding and culture, but he saw these loud defects, and knew of their existence. On the other hand, he saw and knew also of her intense good-nature, her true kindliness of heart, and believed in the integrity of her life; so, if it was fair to consider her presence in London typically as of the nature of a barbarian invasion, it must be confessed that England had fallen into the hands of very kindly foes. They did not even actively resent culture, they were simply not aware of it, and cut it when they met. In any case they were irresistible, for the power that moved them was wealth more gigantic than any which heretofore had furthered the arts of war and peace, and that wealth was grasped by men who only yesterday had toiled with their hands in factories and workshops. Like stars reeling upwards from below the horizon, they swarmed into the sky, and looked down, not cruelly, but merely calmly, into the world which they owned.

Of such was Mrs. Palmer's husband; he had been a railway porter, now he was railways and steamships and anything else of which he chose to say 'This is mine.' Occasionally men like these watered the English greenhouse plants, and an heiress propped up the unstable fortunes of some five-hundred-years-old English name. But such gift of refreshment was but a spoonful out of the great wells; also, in a manner of speaking, having thus watered the plants, they picked them.

His motor got caught in a block at the entrance to Leicester Square, and he arrived at the Opera House some few minutes after the others had got there. A commanding white label with Mrs. Lewis S. Palmer's name printed on it was on the door of the omnibus box on the grand tier, and he found her, with her resplendent back firmly turned towards the stage, discoursing in shrill whispers to Bertie Keynes, and sighing more than audibly for the end of the act. It was the last representation for the year of 'Tristan und Isolde,' and the house was crowded. Royalty was there: a galaxy of tiaras sparkled in the boxes, and a galaxy of stars sang together on the stage. For London had suddenly conceived the almost incredible delusion that it was musical, and flocked to the opera with all the fervour of a newly-born passion. It was not, it never had been, and it never would be musical, but this particular form of the game 'Let's pretend' was in fashion, and the syndicate rejoiced. Soon London would get tired of the game, and the syndicate would be sad again.

But the longest act comes to an end at last, and even as the curtain fell, Mrs. Palmer began screaming again. She screamed when she was amused because she was amused, and she screamed when she was bored in order that it might appear that she was not. Just now she was amusing herself very tolerably, for as soon as the lights were up, the world in general flocked into her box, supplementing the very desirable company already assembled there.

'Why, of course I am coming back next year,' she was explaining. 'And if Lewis doesn't come with me, and take Seaton House for me, so as to be able to have more than one person to dinner at a time, I guess I'll have a word or two to say to him which he won't forget; and if you, Mrs. Massington, don't come over to us in the fall with Lord Keynes, I shall cry my eyes out; and if that monster, Mr. Brancepeth, is as impudent again as he was at dinner, saying that he would pick them up and take them home to remind him of me, I'll ask him to leave my box, and call him back the moment afterwards, because I can't help forgiving him.'

There was a laugh at this brilliant effort of imagination, and Mrs. Massington leaned back in her chair towards Charlie, while Mrs. Palmer continued her voluble remarks.

'You are getting quite polished, Charlie,' she said. 'I should not have suspected you of so much gallantry.'

'I hope you never suspect me of anything,' he said.

'Oh, I do—of lots of things. Chiefly of a disapproving attitude. You are always disapproving. Now, you probably disapprove of my going to America.'

'You have not gone yet,' he said.

'No, but I shall. Mrs. Palmer has asked me to stay with them, and I am going. And Bertie is really going too.'

'So he told me to-night.'

'Who suggested it? His father?'

'Yes. As usual, he has shown his immensely good sense.'

Mrs. Massington laughed.

'You are extremely old-fashioned,' she said. 'I wonder at your dining with Mrs. Palmer at all, and coming to her box.'

'I often wonder at it myself,' said he. 'Never mind that. I haven't seen you for an age. What have you been doing with yourself?'

'I haven't been doing anything with myself. It is other people who have been doing all sorts of things with me. I have been taken by the scruff of the neck and dragged—literally dragged—from place to place. All this week there's been the Serington case, you see. I was in the court for three mornings, getting up at unheard-of hours to be there. Really it was very amusing. Topsie in the witness-box was the funniest thing you can possibly imagine. He jumped every time anybody asked him a question. They seem to have had the most extraordinary manage, and the servants appear to have spent their entire time in looking through keyholes. I wonder how the house-work got done at all. Charlie, you don't appear in the least amused.'

He looked at her a moment gravely.

'Am I really so awfully old-fashioned?' he asked.

'Yes, you old darling, I think you are. Are you shocked at my calling you an old darling? It's quite true, you know.'

'Delighted to hear it. But am I old-fashioned, then?'

'Certainly. Antique, out of date, obsolete. Of course, that sort of thing, all the Serington affair, is extremely shocking, and they are done for, quite done for; nobody will ever speak to them again—at least, except abroad. But because it is shocking, I don't see why I should pretend not to be amused at the really ridiculous figure Topsie cut in the witness-box. It would argue a very imperfect sense of humour if I was not amused, and great hypocrisy if I pretended not to be. I was amused, I roared; I was afraid they would turn me out.'

He laughed.

'Somehow, whatever you do, I can't disapprove,' he said; 'though the notion of all Topsie's friends sitting there and looking at him, and talking it over afterwards, makes me feel ill. But you——'

'Dear Charlie, it is too nice of you. But break those rose-coloured spectacles through which you so kindly observe me. It is no use. I have told you before it was no use, and I don't like telling you again.'

'Why?' he asked.

'Oh, that is so like a man, and especially an Englishman. You know why. Because it hurts you.'

'You dislike hurting me? That is something,' said he.

'But that is all,' she said.

The orchestra had taken their places, and a silence began to spread over the theatre as the lights were lowered. Then suddenly he leaned towards her so that he could smell the faint, warm fragrance of her presence.

'You mean that?' he asked.

She nodded her head in reply, and the curtain rose.

CHAPTER II

Mrs. Palmer, when the opera was over, had many voluble good-byes to say to her friends, for she was leaving London next day, and sailing for her native shores in the middle of the week. Consequently, it was some time before the two young men could get off from Covent Garden, but eventually they strolled away together to pick up a hansom rather than wait for one. Charlie Brancepeth's rooms were in Half Moon Street, and it was thus nearer one than twelve when they got home. He threw himself into a long easy-chair with an air of fatigue, while the other strolled about somewhat aimlessly and nervously, smoking a cigarette, sipping whisky-and-soda, with the indolent carriage of a man who is at home with himself and his surroundings. In person he was of the fair, blue-eyed type of his family, small-featured, and thin, and looking taller, in consequence, than he really was. His eyebrows, darker than his hair, had the line of determination and self-reliance; but one felt somehow that his appearance had less to do with the essential man beneath than with the ancestors from whom he had inherited it. But his aimless, undetermined strolling one felt was more truly his own.

At last he went to the window and threw it open, letting in the great bourdon hum of London, coming somewhat muffled through the heavy air. Only the gentlest draught drew into the room from outside, barely stirring the flowers in the window-boxes, but spreading slowly over the room the warm, drowsy scent of them. Then, taking himself by the shoulders, as it were, he sat down.

'Charlie, I am going to America,' he said, 'in order, if possible, to find an extremely wealthy girl who is willing to marry me.'

'So I understood when you said the mercantile spirit was not suppressed. Well, you are frank, anyhow. Will you tell her that? Will you ask how much she expects to have as a dowry?'

'No, it will be unnecessary to tell her anything; she will know. You don't suppose the Americans really think that lots of us go there to find wives because we prefer them to English girls? They know the true state of the case perfectly well. They only don't choose to recognise it, just as one doesn't choose to recognise a man one doesn't want to meet. They look it in the face, and cut it—cut it dead.'

'I dare say you are perfectly right,' said Charlie with marked neutrality.

'I suppose you disapprove; you have a habit of disapproving, as I heard Sybil Massington say to you to-night. By the way, she is going to America, too, she told me.'

Charlie's face remained perfectly expressionless.

'Yes,' he said slowly. 'You might arrange to travel together. Never mind that now, though. You told me your father had some very sensible things to say about mercenary marriages. Do tell me what they were; he is always worth listening to.'

Bertie Keynes hailed this with obvious relief. It was easier to him to put up his father's ideas for his friend, if he chose, to box with, than receive the attack on his own person. He did not care in the least how much Charlie attacked his father's opinions on matrimony; nor, on the other hand, would the Marquis of Bolton care either, because the fact of his never caring for anything was so widely known as to have been abbreviated like a sort of hall-mark into his nick-name of Gallio.

'Yes, the governor talked to me about it yesterday,' he said to the other. 'He was very convincing, I thought. He put it like this: It is impossible for royalty to marry commoners; therefore, when royalty goes a-wooing, it goes a-wooing in its own class. It is equally impossible for me to marry a poor woman, because I can't afford it. Everything is mortgaged up to the hilt, as you probably know, and, indeed, if I don't marry a rich woman, we go smash. Therefore, I must go a-wooing, like royalty, among the class into which alone it is possible for me to marry. I see the force of that reasoning, so I am going to America. See?'

'Gallio might have gone on to say that it appeared that the English aristocracy is the only possible class for extremely rich American girls to marry into,' remarked Charlie.

'Yes, I'll tell him that,' said the other; 'he would be pleased with that. Then he went on to say that every country necessarily sends abroad for barter or exchange what it doesn't want or has too great a supply of. America has more money than it knows what to do with, so it is willing to let some of it come here, while we have just found out that titles are no longer of the slightest value to us. Nobody cares about them now, so we send them for distribution abroad too.'

'Labelled,' said Charlie. 'Ducal coronet so much, countess's coronet much cheaper, baroness's coronet for an annuity merely. You will be a marquis, won't you? Marquises come rather high. Brush up the coronet, Bertie, and put a fancy price on it.'

Charlie rose with some impatience as he spoke, and squirted some soda-water into a glass.

'Doesn't the governor's view seem to you very sensible?' asked the other.

'Yes, very sensible; that is why I find it so damnable. Sense is overrunning us like some horrid weed. Nobody thinks of anything except what will pay. That is what sense means. A sensible, well-balanced view—a sensible, bank-balanced view! That is what it comes to.'

Bertie Keynes whistled gently to himself a minute.

'I don't think I'll tell Gallio that,' he said; 'I don't think he would like that so much.'

Charlie laughed.

'Oh yes, he would; but you needn't tell him, since he knows it already. Well, in soda-water, I drink success to your wooing. Don't make yourself cheap.'

Bertie lit another cigarette from the stump of the one he had been smoking previously.

'If anybody else had said that, I should have been rather annoyed,' he remarked.

'You are annoyed as it is; at least, I meant you to be. It's no use arguing about it, because we really differ, and you cannot argue unless you fundamentally agree, which we do not. I'm in the minority, I know; almost everybody agrees with you. But I am old-fashioned; I have been told so this evening.'

'By——'

'Yes, by Sybil Massington. She, too, agrees with you.'

There was silence for a minute or two.

'It's two years since her husband died, is it not?' asked Bertie.

'Yes, two years and one month. I know what you are thinking about. I asked her—at least, she saw what I meant—again this evening, but I have asked her for the last time. I suppose it is that—my feeling for her—that to-night makes me think what a horrible cold-blooded proceeding you are going to embark on. I can't help it; I do feel like that. So there's an end of it.'

Bertie did not reply, and a clock on the chimney-piece chimed two.

'There's one more thing,' he said at length. 'You advised me to brush up the coronet. Did you mean anything?'

Charlie took out his watch, and began winding it up. Mechanically, Bertie took his coat on his arm.

'Yes, I meant exactly what you think I meant.'

'It's rather awkward,' said Bertie. 'She's going out to America in the autumn to act. I am certain to meet her in New York; at any rate, she is certain to know I am there.'

'Will that really be awkward?' asked Charlie. 'Is she—is she?'

'I haven't seen her for nearly two years,' said the other.

'I don't know whether she hates me or the other thing. In either case, I am rather afraid.'

Mrs. Massington also had spent the hour after she had got home in midnight conference. Since her husband's death, two years ago, she had lived with an unmarried sister of her own, a woman some ten years older than herself, yet still on the intelligent side of forty, and if she herself had rightly earned the title of the prettiest widow in London, to Judy, even more unquestionably, belonged the reputation of the wisest spinster in the same village. She was charmingly ugly, and relished the great distinction that real ugliness, as opposed to plainness, confers on its possessor. She was, moreover, far too wise ever to care about saying clever things, and thus there were numbers of people who could never imagine why she was so widely considered a gifted woman. To Sybil Massington she was a sort of reference in all questions that troubled her—a referee always to be listened to with respect, generally to be agreed with, but in all cases to be treated with entire frankness, for the very simple reason that Judy invariably found you out, if you concealed any part of the truth, or had been in any degree, when consulting her, what Mrs. Massington preferred to call diplomatic.

Sybil Massington herself, though now a two-years-old widow, with weeds which, as we have seen, others considered quite outworn, was still barely twenty-five. She was one of those fortunate beings who invariably through life see more smiles than frowns, more laughter than tears, for the two excellent reasons that she was always, even when herself tired or bored past the general freezing-point of politeness, alert to amuse and to be interested in other people; the second because she studiously avoided all people and places where frowns and tears were likely to be of the party. K She deliberately took the view that life is a very charming 'business at the best, but full in its very woof—inseparably from existence—of many sombre-tinted threads. It was therefore futile to darken the web of existence by serious or solemn thoughts on the sadness of life and the responsibilities which she did not really think were binding on her. She preferred dancing in the sun to reading tracts in the shade; she wished primarily to be happy herself, and, in a scarcely secondary degree, she wished all her friends to be happy too. In this way her essential selfishness yet had the great merit of giving much pleasure as it went on its pleasant course; and though she had not, to state the fact quite baldly, the slightest desire that anybody should be good, it gave her the greatest pleasure to see that they were happy, and she really spent an enormous amount of trouble and force in advancing this object. Such a nature, whatever may be its final reward or punishment, certainly reaps a rich harvest here; for strenuous and continued efforts to be agreeable, especially when made by a young and pretty woman, yield their sixtyfold and a hundredfold in immediate returns.

It must be confessed that she had immense natural advantages for the rôle she so studiously played. She was rather above the ordinary height of women, and had that smooth, lithe gracefulness which one associates with boyhood rather than womanhood. Her head, small for her height, was set on to her neck with that exquisite pose one sees in the Greek figurines from Tanagra; and her face, with its long, almond-shaped eyes, straight features, and small mouth, expressed admirably the Pagan attitude towards life that was hers. It was a face to be loved for its fresh dewy loveliness, a face as of a spring morning, to be enjoyed with a sense of unreasoning delight that such beauty exists. It gave the beholder the same quality of pleasure that is given by the sight of some young animal, simply because it is so graceful, so vital, so made for and capable of enjoyment. And behind her beauty lay a brain of the same order, subtle because she was a woman, but in other respects even as her face, a minister and pastor of the religion of innocent mirth and pleasure. In pursuance of this creed, however, she was capable of subtle and intricate thought, and just now, in her talk with her sister, it was getting abundant exercise.

'Ah, that is no use, dear Judy,' she was saying. 'I do not say to you, "Make me different, then tell me what to do," but "Take me as I am, and tell me what to do."' Judy's shrewd face broadened into a smile, and a pleasant soul looked out of her intelligent eyes—eyes that were bright and quick like a bird's.

'I don't in the least want to make you different,' she said, 'because I think you are a unique survival.'

Sybil's eyes expressed surprise.

'Survival!' she said.

'Yes, dear; you came straight out of Pagan mythology; you were a nymph in the woods by the Ilyssus, and Apollo saw you and ran after you.'

'Did he catch me?' asked Sybil, with an air of dewy innocence.

'Don't be risky; it doesn't suit you. Really, Sybil, considering what—what great natural advantages you have, you should study yourself more closely. Just as a fault of manner committed by a woman who wears a beautiful dress is worse than a fault of manner committed by a char-woman, so you, with your appearance, should be doubly careful not to say anything out of character.'

'Dear Judy, you are charming, but do keep to the point.'

'I thought you were the point; I am sure I have talked about nothing else.'

'I know: it is charming of you; and you have yawned so frightfully doing it that it is cruel to bring you back to it. But I really want your advice now at once.'

Judy poured out some hot water from a blanketed jug, and sipped it. Having an admirable digestion, she was determined to keep it. 'Take care of your health, if it is good,' was a maxim of hers. 'If it is inferior, try to think about something better.'

'State your case, then, in a very few words,' she said, looking at the clock.

'It is fast,' said Sybil, laughing, 'though not so fast as I should wish. Well, it is this: I am twenty-five years old, and I don't believe I have the faculty of what is known as falling in love. It always seems to me I haven't time, to begin with. I was married, as you know, at eighteen, but I can't imagine I was ever in love with John. Otherwise that horror couldn't have happened.'

Judy looked up, forgetting the time and the hot water.

'What horror?' she asked.

The light died out of Sybil's face; she looked like a troubled child.

'I have never told anyone,' she said, 'because I was ashamed, but I will tell you to make you understand me. He was ill, as you know, for months before he died; every day I used to grow sick at the thought of having to sit by him, to talk to him. He got more and more emaciated and awful to look at. One night I did not kiss him as usual. He asked me to, and I refused; I could not—simply I could not. I loathed the thought of the days that were coming; I longed for the end, and when the end came I was glad. I tried to persuade myself that I was glad his sufferings were over. It was not so; I was glad that mine were over. So I think I never loved him, though I liked him very much. Then he got ill and awful, and I was very sorry for him. But that was all. Ah——'

She got up, and walked up and down the room once or twice, as if to waken herself from the clutch of some horrid dream. Then she stopped behind Judy's chair, and leaned over her sister, stroking her hair.

'Yes, that was the horror, Judy,' she said; 'and I am that horror. Now, to-night again Charlie would have asked me to marry him, if I had not; "smiling put the question by." I like him very much; I think I should like to have him always in the house. I like everything about him.'

'Don't marry him,' said Judy quickly.

'Judy, when you speak like that, you are saying to yourself, "If only she was different." Well, I am not; I am as I am. I couldn't make my eyes blue by wanting, or make myself an inch taller. Well, it must surely be far more difficult to change one's nature in so radical a way.'

'I think you did not run very fast when Apollo began Judy.

'That does not suit you, either, dear,' remarked Sybil. 'Well, then, I am not to marry Charlie. Am I to marry anybody? That is the point. Or am I to consider that marriage is not for me?'

'How can I tell you, Sybil?' asked Judy, rather perplexed. 'I dare say there are men who regard marriage like you. You can calmly contemplate marrying a man whom you just like. I don't see why, if you can find a man like you, you shouldn't be far happier together than you would be single. I don't see what law, human or Divine, prevents your marrying. You promise to love, honour, and obey—well, fifty people mean exactly fifty different things by love. Because A doesn't attach the same meaning to it as B, B has no right to say that A doesn't love. And perhaps your "liking very much" will do. But don't marry a man who loves you very much. John did.'

'Yes, John did,' said Sybil, and paused a moment. 'Then I think I shall go to America,' she said.

'America?' said Judy.

'Yes; Mrs. Palmer has asked me to go, and I think I shall accept.'

'Do you mean the steam-siren?' asked Judy.

'Yes, the steam-siren. You see, I like steam, go, energy, so much that I don't really mind about the siren.'

'She has the manners,' said Judy, 'of a barmaid, and the mind of a—a barmaid.'

'I know. But I don't mind. In fact—don't howl—I like her; she is extremely good-natured.'

Judy yawned.

'Dear Sybil, she is extremely rich.'

'Certainly. If she lived in a back fourth-floor flat in New York, I shouldn't go to stay with her. You see, I like rich people; I like the quality of riches just as you like the quality of generosity. By the way, you must be rather rich to be generous to any extent, so the two are really synonymous; I'm glad I thought of that. Anyhow, I am going to stay with her.'

Judy got up.

'You are going to stay with her in order to meet other people who are rich,' she said.

'Why not?' asked Sybil. 'Other things being equal, I should prefer to marry a rich man than a poor one. Or shall I cultivate acquaintances in Seven Dials?'

Judy laughed.

'I think they would appreciate you in Seven Dials,' said she, 'and I am sure they will in America. You can make yourself very pleasant, Sybil.'

'Yes, dear, and you can make yourself most unpleasant, and I adore you for it. Judy dear, it's after two. How you keep one up talking!'

CHAPTER III

Mrs. Massington was lying on an extremely comfortable and elaborately padded wicker couch under a conveniently shady tree. The time was after lunch, the day an excessively hot Sunday in July, and the place the lawn of Lord Bolton's present residence on the hills above Winchester. His big country place at Molesworth was let, and had been for some years, since he could not afford to live in it; but in the interval he made himself fairly at home in the houses of other people in equally impecunious circumstances. As he truly said, one must live somewhere, and he very much preferred not to live at Molesworth. The plan partook of the nature of that of those ingenious islanders who lived entirely by taking in each other's washing, but, though theoretically unsound, it seemed to succeed well enough in practice.

For himself he really preferred Haworth, the place he had taken for the last four years; for Molesworth was unmanageably immense, remote from London, and really lonely, except when there was a regiment of guests in the house. Haworth, on the other hand, was small, exquisite in its way, and within an hour or so of London.

From the lawn the ground sloped sharply down to the water-meadows of the Itchen, where in the driest summer the grass was green, and streams of a translucent excellence wove their ropes of living crystal from bank to bank of their courses. A few admirable trees grew on the lawn, and all down the south front of the Tudor house a deep riband of flower-bed, all colour, gleamed and glowed in the summer sun. Sweet-peas were there in huge fragrant groups, stately hollyhocks, with flowers looking as if they had been cut out of thin paper by a master hand, played chaperon from the back; carnations were in a swoon of languid fragrance, love-lies-bleeding drooped its velvety spires, and a border of pansies wagged their silly faces as the wind passed over them. Behind, round the windows of the lower story, great clusters of clematis, like large purple sponges, blossomed, miraculously fed through their thin, dry stalks. At some distance off, in Winmester probably, which pricked the blue haze of heat with dim spires, a church bell came muffled and languid, and at the sound Mrs. Massington smiled.

'That is what I like,' she said. 'I like hearing a railway-whistle when I am not going in the train; I like hearing a church bell when I am not going to church; I like seeing somebody looking very hot when I am quite cool; I like hearing somebody sneeze when I haven't got a cold; I like—oh, I like almost everything,' she concluded broadly.

'I wonder if you, I, we shall like America,' said a voice, which apparently came from two shins and a knee in a basket-chair.

'America?' said Sybil. 'Of course you, I, we will. It is absurd to go there unless one means to like it, and it is simply weak not to like it, if one means to. Bertie, sit up!'

'I don't see why,' said Bertie.

'Because I want to talk to you, and I can't talk to a tennis-shoe.'

The tennis-shoe descended, and the chair creaked.

'Well,' said he.

'You and I are going on business,' she said. 'That makes one feel so like a commercial traveller. The worst of it is neither you nor I have got any wares to offer except ourselves. Dear me! I'm glad Judy can't hear me. Oh, there's Ginger! Ginger, come here!'

Ginger came (probably because he had red hair). He wore a Panama hat, and looked tired. He might have been eighteen or thirty, and was twenty-four, and Bertie's younger brother, his less-used name being Lord Henry Scarton. He sat down suddenly on the grass, took off the Panama hat, and prepared himself to be agreeable.

'There is a Sabbath peace about,' said he; 'that always makes me feel energetic. The feeling of energy passes completely away on Monday morning, and it and I are strangers till the ensuing Sunday. Then we meet. But now it is here, I think I shall go to church. There is a church, isn't there? Come to church, Bertie.'

'No,' said Bertie.

'That is always the way,' remarked Ginger; 'and it is the same with me. I never want to do what anybody else proposes; so don't propose to me, Sybil.'

'Ginger, why don't you do something?' asked Sybil.

'I will go to church,' said Ginger.

'No, you won't. I want you to tell Bertie and me about America. You haven't been there, have you?'

'No. The capital is New York,' said Ginger; 'and you are sick before you get there. When you get there, you are sick again. Then you come back. That is why I haven't been. Next question, please.'

'Why is Bertie going, then?' she asked.

'Because—because he is Bertie instead of me.'

'And why am I going, then?'

'Because you are not Judy. And you are both going there because you are both progressive English people.'

Ginger got up, and stood in front of them.

'All people who on earth do dwell,' said he, 'go to America if they want to dwell—really dwell—on earth. If you want to have all material things at your command, you will, if you are going to get them at all, get them quicker there than anywhere else. But if you attain your ambition, you will come back like cast iron. Everything that was a pleasure to you will be a business; you will play bridge with a cast-iron face, and ask for your winnings; you will study the nature of your soil before you plant a daisy in it; you will always get your money's worth out of everybody. You will be cast iron.'

'No, I won't,' said Sybil. 'You are quite wrong. I will come back in nature as I went.'

'You can't. If you were strong enough for that, you wouldn't go; your going is a sign of weakness.'

Sybil laughed, and stretched herself more at ease on her couch.

'I am not weak,' she said.

Ginger sat down again.

'I am not sure that to do anything is not a sign of weakness,' he said. 'It isn't so easy to loaf as you imagine. Lots of people try to loaf, and take to sheer hard work as a rest from it. I don't suppose anybody in America loafs, and that I expect you will find is the vital and essential difference between them and us. It implies a lot.'

'Go on, Ginger,' said Sybil, as he paused.

'Yes, I think I will. Now, take Mrs. Palmer. She works at pleasure in a way few people in this island work at business. It is her life's work to be gay. She doesn't like gaiety really; it isn't natural to her. But she, by the laws of her nature, which prevent her loafing, works at gaiety just as her husband works at amassing millions. They can neither of them stop. They don't enjoy it any more than a person with St. Vitus's dance enjoys twitching; simply they have lost control of their power to sit still. Now, in England we have lost a good deal; we are falling behind, I am told, in most things, but we still have that power—the power of tranquillity. I am inclined to think it is worth something. But you will go to America, and come back and tell me.'

Ginger lay back on the grass and tilted his straw hat over his eyes after this address.

'Ginger, I've never heard you say so much on end,' remarked Sybil; 'have you been getting it up?'

'I never get things up, but I scent danger,' replied Ginger. 'I am afraid you and Bertie will come back quite different. You will always be wanting to do something; that is a weakness.'

'I don't agree with you,' said Sybil.

'That's all right. If people say they agree with me, I always think I must have said something stupid. What don't you agree with me about?'

'About our power of sitting still. Look at the season in London. All the time we are doing exactly what you say Americans, as opposed to us, do. We make a business of pleasure; we rush about after gaiety, when we are not naturally gay; we——'

'Sybil, you are talking about three or four thousand people among whom you live. I hope you don't think that a few hundred people like that mean England.'

'They include almost all well-known English people.'

'Well known to whom? To themselves. No, that sleepy little misty town down there is just as important a part of England as the parish of St. James's. The parish of St. James's is the office of the company. The people there do the talking, and see after the affairs of the shareholders, and play a very foolish game called politics. They are mere clerks and officials.'

'Well, but as regards the pursuit of gaiety,' said Sybil, 'nobody can be more senseless than you or I, Ginger.'

'Oh, I know we are absurd; you are more absurd than I, though, because you are going to America.'

'You seem to resent it.'

'Not in the least. It is ridiculous to resent what anybody else chooses to do, so long as it is not a personal attack on one's self. That is the first maxim in my philosophy of life.'

'Published? I shall get it.'

'No; it will be some day. It begins with a short history of the world from the days of Adam, and then the bulk of the book draws lessons from the survey. But that is the first lesson. Let everybody go to the devil in his own way. Your way is by the White Star Line.'

'I don't think you know what you are talking about, Ginger,' said his brother.

'I'm sure I don't,' said Ginger cheerfully.

'Why desecrate the Sabbath stillness, then?'

Ginger was silent a moment.

'That is a personal assault,' he said at length, 'and I resent it. It is unjust, too, because meaningless conversation is utterly in harmony with Sabbath stillness. It completes the sense of repose. It is no tax on the brain. Besides, I do really know what I was talking about; I said I didn't because I don't like arguing.'

'You have been doing nothing else.'

'No. I have been reeling out strings of assertions, which Sybil has languidly contradicted from time to time. You can't call that argument. Look! there's Charlie. Why didn't you marry him, Sybil, and stop in England? Who is that with him? Oh, Judy, isn't it? Are they coming here? What a bore!'

Charlie and Judy strolled across the lawn towards them with extreme slowness. To walk across a lawn for tea and walk back again afterwards was the utmost exercise that Judy ever took.

'I am taking my walk,' she observed as she got near them. 'I am now exactly half way, so I shall rest. Sybil, you look as if you were resting too.'

'We are all resting, and we are making the most of it, because Ginger tells us we shall never rest again.'

'Do you want a chair, Judy?' asked Ginger.

Bertie got up.

'Sit there,' he said.

'I am rather tired,' said Judy; 'but pray don't let me turn you out.' And she sat down.

'I'm so glad your father's party broke down,' she went on to Bertie. 'It is so very much nicer to have nobody here, except just ourselves, who needn't make any efforts.'

Ginger gently applauded, his face still hidden by his straw hat.

'The voice of my country,' he remarked.

'Ah, somebody agrees with you,' said Sybil; 'so you are wrong. I am glad; I was beginning to be afraid you were right.'

'Has Ginger been sparkling?' asked Judy.

'Yes, sparkling Ginger-beer. Very tasty,' remarked Ginger fatuously. 'They swallowed it all. If you only talk enough, some of it is sure to be swallowed—not to stick. But it's finished now.'

Charlie had sat down on the bank beside Sybil's couch.

'This is the last Sunday, then,' he said; 'you go to Scotland next week, don't you?'

'Yes,' said she—' just for a fortnight. Then Aix with Judy, and I sail on September 1st.'

'That is earlier than you planned originally.'

'I know; but we get a big boat instead of a small one. I thought it worth while.'

'Do you feel inclined to stroll a bit till tea?'

'By all means.'

'They are going to desecrate the Sabbath stillness by strolling,' remarked Ginger. 'It ought not to be allowed, like public-houses.'

'Ah, we are genuine travellers,' said Sybil. 'Come, too, Ginger.'

'Do I look like it?'

'No; but one never knows with you. Judy dear, would not a good brisk walk do you good?'

'I shouldn't wonder,' said Judy; 'but I shall never know.'

Sybil put up her parasol.

'Come, Charlie,' she said.

They walked off together in the shadow of the big elm avenue that led down to the village. The huge boskage of the trees allowed no inter-penetrating ray of sun to reach them, and in the silence and sleep of the hot summer afternoon they seemed to Charlie to be very specially alone. This feeling was emphasized, no doubt, to his mind by the refusal of the others to accompany them.

'Really, Gallio always succeeds in making himself comfortable,' said she. 'What more can anyone want than a charming house like this? It is so absurd to desire more than you can use. It is a mistake the whole world makes, except, perhaps, Judy.'

'I don't think Ginger does,' said Charlie.

'Oh yes; he desires, at least, to say more than he means. Consequently people attach no importance to what he says.'

Charlie laughed.

'Which, being interpreted, means that Ginger has been saying something which you are afraid is correct.'

Sybil Massington stopped.

'Charlie, for a man you have a good deal of intuition. That is partly what makes me never think of you as a man. You are so like a woman in many ways.'

'I am wanting to have a last word.'

'Last word! What last word?'

'A last word with you, Sybil,' he said; 'I shall never bother you again.'

'Dear Charlie, it is no use. Please don't!' she said.

'I am sorry to disobey you,' said he; 'but I mean to. It is quite short—just this: if ever you change your mind, you will find me waiting for you. That is all.'

Sybil frowned.

'I can't accept that,' she said. 'You have no business to put the responsibility on me like that.'

'There is no responsibility.'

'Yes, there is; you practically threaten me. It is like writing a letter to say you will commit suicide unless I do something. You threaten, anyhow, to commit celibacy unless I marry you.'

'No, I don't threaten,' said he; 'so far from threatening, I only leave the door open in case of Hope wanting to come in. That is badly expressed; a woman would have said it better.'

Sybil was suddenly touched by his gentleness.

'No one could have said it better,' she said. 'Charlie, believe me, I am sorry, but—here is the truth of it: I don't believe I can love anybody. This also: if I did not like you so much, I think I would marry you.'

'Ah, spare me that,' he said.

'I do spare it you. I will not willingly make you very unhappy. Do you believe that?'

He stopped, and came close to her.

'Sybil, if you pointed to the sky and said it was night, I should believe you,' he said.

She made no reply to that, and they walked on in silence. Everywhere over the broad expanse of swelling downs, looking huge behind the heat-haze, and over the green restfulness of the water-meadows beneath them, even over the blue immensity of the sky, there was spread a sense of quiet and leisure. To Sybil, thinking of the after-lunch conversation, it seemed of value; to her at the moment this contented security was a big factor in life. Economically, no doubt, she was wrong; a score of dynamos utilizing the waste power of the streams below that so hurryingly sought the sea would have contributed much to the utility of the scene, and the noble timber which surrounded them could certainly have been far better employed in some factory than to have merely formed a most wasteful handle, as it were, for the great parasol of leaves which screened them and the idle, cud-chewing cattle. Here, as always, there was that silent deadly war going on between utility and beauty; soon, without a doubt, in a score of years, or a score of days, or a score of centuries, principles of economy would prevail, and the world of men would live in cast-iron mood in extremely sanitary cast-iron dwellings. Already, it seemed to her, the death-knell of beauty was vibrating in the air. The rural heart of the country was bleeding into the towns; instead of beating the swords into sickles, the way of the world now was to beat the elm-trees into faggots and the rivers into electric light. For the faggots would give warmth and the electricity would give light; these things were useful. And in the distance, like a cuttle-fish with tentacles waving and growing every moment nearer, New York, and all that New York stood for, was sucking in whatever came within its reach. She was already sucked in.

All this passed very quickly through her mind, for it seemed to her that there had been no appreciable pause when Charlie spoke again.

'Yes, the world is going westwards,' he said. 'I heard a few days ago that Mrs. Emsworth was going to act in New York this autumn. Is it true?'

'I believe so. Why?'

'Mere curiosity. Is she going on her own?'

Sybil laughed.

'Her own! There isn't any. I don't suppose she could pay for a steerage passage for her company. Bilton is taking her,' She paused a moment. 'Do you know Bilton?' she asked.

'The impresario? No,'

'He is a splendid type,' she said, 'of what we are coming to.'

'Cad, I should think,' said Charlie.

'Cad—oh yes. Why not? But a cad with a head. So many cads haven't one. I met him the other night.'

'Where?' asked Charlie, with the vague jealousy of everybody characteristic of a man in love.

'I forget. At the house of some other cad. It is rather odd, Charlie; he is the image of you to look at. When I first saw him, I thought it was you. He is just about the same height, he has the same—don't blush—the same extremely handsome face. Also he moves like you, rather slowly; but he gets there.'

'You mean I don't,' said Charlie.

'I didn't mean it that moment. Your remark again was exactly like an Englishman. But I liked him; he has force. I respect that enormously.'

On the top of Charlie's tongue was 'You mean I have none,' but he was not English enough for that.

'Is he going with her?' he asked.

'No; he has gone. He has three theatres in New York, and he is going to instal Dorothy Emsworth in one of them. Is it true, by the way——'

She stopped in the middle of her sentence.

'Probably not,' said Charlie, rather too quickly.

'You mean it is,' she said—'about Bertie.'

Charlie made the noise usually written 'Pshaw!'

'Oh, my dear Sybil,' he said, 'Queen Anne is dead, the prophets are dead. There are heaps of old histories.'

Sybil Massington stopped.

'Now, I am going to ask you a question,' she said. 'You inquired a few minutes ago whether Dorothy Emsworth was going to act in New York. Why did you ask? You said it was from mere curiosity; is that true? You can say yes again, if you wish.'

'I don't wish,' said he. 'It wasn't true then, and I don't suppose it will be by now. You mean that Bertie saw a good deal of her at one time, but how much neither you nor I know.'

Sybil turned, and began walking home again rather quickly.

'How disgusting!' she said.

'Your fault,' he said—' entirely your fault.'

'But won't it be rather awkward for him?' she asked, walking rather more slowly.

'I asked him that the other night,' said Charlie; 'he said he didn't know.'

Again for a time they walked in silence. But the alertness of Mrs. Massington's face went bail for the fact that she was not silent because she had nothing to say. Then it is to be supposed that she followed out the train of her thought to her own satisfaction.

'How lovely the shadows are!' she remarked; 'shadows are so much more attractive than lights.'

'Searchlights?' asked he.

'No; shadows and searchlights belong to the same plane. I hope it is tea-time; I am so hungry.'

This was irrelevant enough; irrelevance, therefore, was no longer a social crime.

'And I should like to see my double,' said Charlie.

The only drawback to the charming situation of the house was that a curve of a branch railway-line to Winchester passed not far from the garden. Trains were infrequent on it on weekdays, even more infrequent on Sundays. But at this moment the thump of an approaching train was heard, climbing up the incline of the line.

'Brut-al-it-é, brut-al-it-é, brut-al-it-é,' said the labouring engine.

She turned to him.

'Even here,' she said—'even here is an elbow, a sharp elbow. "Utility, utility!" Did you not hear the engine say that?'

'Something of this sort,' said he.

CHAPTER IV

A day of appalling heat and airlessness was drawing to its close, and the unloveliest city in the world was beginning to find it just possible to breathe again. For fourteen hours New York had been grilling beneath a September sun in an anticyclone; and though anticyclone is a word that does not seem to matter much when it occurs in an obscure corner of the Herald, under the heading of 'Weather Report,' yet, when it is translated from this fairy-land of print into actual life, it matters a good deal if the place is New York and the month is September. Other papers talked airily of a 'heat wave,' and up in Newport everyone reflected with some gusto how unbearable it must be in town, and went to their balls and dinner-parties and picnics and bridge with the added zest that the sauce of these reflections gave. Even in Newport the heat was almost oppressive, but to think of New York made it seem cooler.

From the corner where Sixth Avenue slices across Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street crosses both, one can see the huge mass of the Waldorf Hotel rising gigantic against the evening sky, and wonder, if one is that way inclined, how many million dollars it has taken to blot out the evening sun. But during the afternoon to-day most people were probably grateful for the shadow which those millions had undesignedly procured them; it was something as one went from Fifth Avenue to Broadway to be shielded a little by that hideous immensity, for the dazzle and glare of the sun had been beyond all telling. And though now the sun was close to its setting, the airlessness and acrid heat of the evening was scarcely more tolerable than the furnace heat of the day, for boiling was not appreciably more pleasant than baking. Yet in the relentless city, where no one may pause for a moment unless he wishes to be left behind in the great universal race for gold, which begins as soon as a child can walk, and ceases not until he is long past walking, the climbings of the thermometer into the nineties is an acrobatic feat which concerns the thermometer only, and at the junction of Sixth Avenue and Broadway there was no slackening in the tides of the affairs of men. The electric street cars which ran up and down both these streets, and the cars that crossed them, running east and west up Thirty-fourth Street, were all full to overflowing, and passengers hung on to straps and steps as swarming bees cluster around their queen. Those in the centre of the car were unable to get out where they wanted, while those at the ends who could get out did not want to. A mass of damp human heat, patient, tired, nasal-voiced, and busy, made ingress and egress impossible, and that on which serene philosophers would gaze, saying, 'How beautiful is democracy!' appeared to those who took part in it to be merely mis-management. Incessant ringings of the conductor's bell, the sudden jerks of stoppages and startings, joltings over points where the lights were suddenly extinguished, punctuated the passage of the cars up and down the street, and still the swarming crowds clustered and hung on to straps and backs of seats wherever they could find foot-hold and standing room. But all alike, in payment for this demoniacal means of locomotion, put their five cents into the hot and grimy hands of the conductor, from which, by occult and subtle processes, they were gradually transformed into the decorations of the yachts and palaces of the owners of the line.

Democracy and discomfort, too, held equal sway in the crowded trams of the elevated railway which roared by overhead down Sixth Avenue, in the carriages of which tired millionaires and tired milliners sat stewing side by side, with screeching whistles, grinding brakes, and the vomiting forth of the foul smoke from soft coal; for a strike of some kind was in progress in Pennsylvania, and the men who had stored coal and also engineered the strike were reaping a million dollars a day in increased prices and slight inconvenience to a hundred million people, for the thick pungent smoke poured in wreaths into the first-floor windows of the dingy, dirty habitations of the street. But the train passed by on the trembling and jarring trestles, and the inconvenience passed also, till the next train came.

Thunder of the passing trains above; rumbling of the electric cars; roar of heavy, iron-shod wheels of drays on the uneven, ill-paved cobbles of the street; jostling of the foot passengers on the side-walks, as they streamed in and out from the rickety wooden staircases of the elevated railway, from the crammed, perspiring cars, from dingy, sour-smelling restaurants; shouts of the newsboys with sheaves of ill-printed newspapers under their arms, giving horrible details of the latest murder, and abominable prints of the victim's false teeth, shoes, and the dress she had last been seen in; the thump-thump of the engines in the Herald office; the sickening stew of the streets; the sickening heat of the skies—Democracy, or 'Everyone for himself.'

As an antidote or warning—though it did not seem to have the least effect on the dogged, unending bustle—the note of 'Impermanence' was everywhere sounded loudly. A block or two further up, for instance, the street was torn up for some new underground enterprise (Lewis S. Palmer, as a matter of fact, had floated a company to run a new subterranean line across New York, and had been paid a million and a half dollars for the loan of his credit); and while the cars, which will certainly not cease running till the last trump has been sounded several times, passed over spindle-shanked iron girders and supports, shaken every now and again by the blasting of the rock below, thousands of workmen were toiling day and night deep down in the earth, loading the baskets of the cranes with the splinters of the riven rocks, or giving the larger pieces into the embrace of huge iron pincers that tackled them as a spider tackles a fat fly, and, rising aloft with them above street level, took them along the ropes of their iron web, over the heads of passengers and vehicles, for the carts which waited for them. Elsewhere, half a block of building had vanished almost as the night to make way for something taller, and where yesterday a five-storied building had stood, the site to-day was vacant but for a dozen pistons half buried in the ground, which puffed and shook in a sort of hellish ecstasy of glee at the work, while a gang of men with axe and pick dug out the foundations for the steel house-frames. Yet though to-morrow almost would see the newly completed building again filling up the gap in the street, the exposed walls of the adjacent houses were just for to-day only covered with advertisements, and a notice informed the bewildered shopper that business was going on as usual. That in New York might be taken for granted, but the notice omitted to say where it was going on. But for the crowd in general it was sufficient that work was to be done, and money to be made. That was the whole business and duty of each unit there, and as far as each unit was concerned, the devil might take the rest. Everyone looked tired, worn out, but indefatigable, and extraordinarily patient. One man pushed roughly by another, and where in England the one would look aggrieved, and the other probably, however insincerely, mutter an apology, here neither grievance nor apology was felt, desired, or expressed, for it is a waste of time to feel aggrieved and a waste of energy to express or feel regret. To-morrow the crowd would, on the average, be a little richer than to-day; that was all they wanted. To-morrow the world in general would be a day richer.

Sybil Massington and Bertie Keynes had arrived that morning by the Celtic, after a voyage of complete uneventfulness. The sea had been rough, but the Celtic had not been aware of it. Bertie had seen a whale blow, or so he said, and Sybil had seen three fisher boats off the banks. There had been six hours' fog, and they had got in that morning in this day of frightful heat. They had been on deck like honest tourists to see the immense green, mean statue of Liberty, or whatever that female represents, and had found the huge sky-scrapers by the docks, the bustling paddle-steamers of the ferries, the hooting sirens, the general hideousness, exactly what they had expected. They were, in fact, neither disappointed nor pleased, and when a small, tired young man with a note-book had met them on the moment of their landing, and asked Bertie his first impressions of America, they had felt that they were indeed in the authentic place. Nor had the impression been in any way dimmed all day, and now, as they sat together in the darkened sitting-room at the Waldorf, just before going to dress for dinner, they felt like old inhabitants. Bertie had bought a paper containing the account of his interview, headed, 'Marquis Bolton's eldest son lands: Lord Keynes' first impressions,' and had just finished reading to Sybil, half a column of verbose illiteracy of which, to do him justice, he had not been in any way guilty.

'You're getting on, Bertie,' said she; 'that interview shows you have struck the right note. And where have you been this afternoon?'

'Like Satan, walking up and down the earth,' said he. 'I went by an overhead railway and an underground railway. There are swing gates into the stations of the overhead railway. As I passed in, I naturally held the gate for the next man, so as not to let it bang in his face. He did not take it from me, but passed through, leaving me still holding it. I might have stood there all day, and they would have all passed through. Then I learned better, and let it slam in other people's faces. It saves time. Somehow I thought the incident was characteristic of the country.'

Sybil lit a cigarette.

'I like it,' she said. 'The air, or the people, or something, makes me feel alert. Now, when I feel alert in England it is mere waste of energy. There is nothing to expend one's alertness on; besides, one is out of tone. But here, somehow, it is suitable. I like the utter hideousness of it, too. Look from that window at the line of houses. They are like a row of jagged, broken teeth. Well, it is no worse than Park Lane, and, somehow, there is an efficiency about them here. One is ninety-five stories high for a definite reason—because land is valuable; the next is three stories high because it belongs to a millionaire who doesn't want to walk upstairs. By the way, Mrs. Palmer came in while you were out. We are going to dine with her this evening, and go to Mrs. Emsworth's first night.'

She looked at him rather closely as she said this.

'That will be charming,' he said quite naturally. 'And to-morrow we go down to Mrs. Palmer's on Long Island, don't we?'

'Yes. Really, Bertie, their idea of hospitality is very amazing. She came up here to-day to this blazing gridiron of a place simply in order not to let us be dull on our first evening here. It seemed to her quite natural. And she has put a motor-car at my disposal. I like that sort of thing.'

Bertie thought a moment.

'I know,' he said. 'But though it sounds horrid to say it, a motor-car doesn't mean anything to Mrs. Palmer.'

'It means the kindliness of thinking of it,' said Sybil.

'It was the same kindliness which brought her up from Long Island. Would you and I, if we were in the country, come up to town to entertain someone who was going to stay with us next day? You know we shouldn't.'

'That is true,' said he. 'Is Mrs. Palmer alone here?'

'Yes. Her husband and daughter are both down in Long Island. She is making a sort of rival Newport, you know. You and I plunge into it all to-morrow. I think I am rather frightened, but I am not sure. No, I don't think I am frightened. I am merely trembling with determination to enjoy it all immensely.'

'Trembling?' he asked.

'Yes; just as when you hold something as tight as you can your hand trembles. You must go and dress—at least, I must. Bertie, I am going to be very English. I think they will like it best.'

'Oh, don't pose! You are never so nice when you pose.'

'I'm not going to pose. I am going to be absolutely natural.'

'That is the most difficult pose of all,' said he.

About half-way up Fifth Avenue the two rival restaurants, Sherry's and Delmonico's, glare at each other from opposite sides of the street, each with its row of attendant hansoms and motor-cars. Though New York was technically empty—that is to say, of its millions a few hundred were still at Newport—both restaurants were full, for Mrs. Emsworth's opening night was an occasion not to be missed, and many of those who would naturally have been out of town were there in order to lend their distinguished support to the actress. Furthermore, Mr. Lewis S. Palmer, from his retreat in Long Island, had been operating yesterday on the Stock Exchange in a manner which compelled the attendance of many of the lesser magnates who at this season usually left the money-market to attend to itself. This was very inconsiderate of him, so it was generally thought, but he was not a man who consulted the convenience of others when he saw his own opportunity. But it was extremely characteristic of him that, while nervous brokers, bankers, and financiers rushed back to the furnace of the streets, he remained himself in the coolness of Long Island, and spoke laconically through the telephone.

Mrs. Palmer was waiting in the anteroom at Sherry's when her two English guests arrived, and greeted them with shrill enthusiasm. A rather stout young American, good-looking in a coarse, uncultivated kind of manner, and dressed in a subtly ill-dressed, expensive mode, was with her.

'And here you are!' she cried. 'How are you, Lord Keynes? I'm delighted to see you again. Mrs. Massington, you must let me present to you Mr. Armstrong, who has been so long dying to make your acquaintance that I thought he would be dead before you got here. Mrs. Massington, Mr. Reginald Armstrong. Lord Keynes, Mr. Armstrong.'

The American murmured his national formula about being very pleased, and Mrs. Palmer continued without intermission.

'And I've got no party to meet you,' she said, 'because I thought you would be tired with your journey, and want to have a quiet evening, and we'll go in to dinner at once. Lord Keynes, you look as if America agreed with you, and I see they have been interviewing you already. Well, that's our way here. Why, when Reginald Armstrong gave his equestrian party down at Port Washington last week, I assure you there was a string of our newspaper men a quarter of a mile long waiting to see him.'

The curious shrillness of talk peculiar to America sounded loud in the restaurant as they made their sidling way by crowded tables toward one of the windows looking on the street.

'Equestrian party?' asked Mrs. Massington. 'What is that?'

'Tell them, Reginald,' said Mrs. Palmer. 'Why, it tickled me to death, your equestrian party. Mrs. Massington, those are blue points. You must eat them. Tell them, Reginald.'

'Well, my stable was burned down last fall,' said he, 'and I've been building a new one. So I determined to open it in some kind of characteristic way.'

'His own idea,' said Mrs. Palmer in a loud aside to Bertie. 'He's one of our brightest young men; you'll see a lot of him.'

'So I thought,' continued Mr. Armstrong, 'that I'd give a stable party—make everyone dress as grooms. But then the ladies objected to dressing as grooms. I'm sure I don't know why. I should have thought they'd have liked to show their figures. But some objected. Mrs. Palmer objected. I don't know why she objected—looking at her—but she did object.'

Mrs. Palmer smiled.

'Isn't he lovely?' she said loudly across the table to Mrs. Massington.

'Well, she objected,' again continued Mr. Armstrong; 'and when Mrs. Palmer objects, she objects. She said she wouldn't come. So I had to think of something else. And it occurred to me that the best thing we could do was to have dinner on horseback in the stables.'

He paused a moment.

'Well, that dinner was a success,' he said. 'I say it was a success, and I'm modest too. I had fifty tables made, fitting on to the horses' shoulders, and we all sat on horseback, and ate our dinners in the new stables. Fifty of us in a big circle with the horses' heads pointing inwards, and simultaneously the horses ate their dinner out of a big circular manger. And that dinner has been talked about for a week, and it 'll be talked about till next week. Next week Mrs. Palmer gives a party, and my dinner will be as forgotten as what Adam and Eve had for tea when they were turned out of Paradise.'

'No, don't tell them,' screamed Mrs. Palmer. 'Reginald, if you tell them, I shall never forgive you.'

'Please don't, then, Mr. Armstrong,' said Sybil. 'I should hate it if you were never forgiven. Besides, I like surprises. I should have loved your dinner; I think it was too unkind of you to have given it before I came. Or else it is unkind of you to have told me about it now that it is over.'

She laughed with genuine amusement.

'Bertie, is it not heavenly?' she said. 'We think of that sort of thing sometimes in England. Do you remember the paper ball? But we so seldom do it. And did it all go beautifully? Did not half fall off their horses?'

'Well, Mrs. Palmer's husband, Lewis S., he wouldn't get on a real horse,' he said. 'He said that he was endangering too many shareholders. So I got a wooden horse for him, and had it covered with gold-leaf.'

'Lewis on a rocking-horse!' screamed his wife. 'I died—I just died!'

'Luckily, she had a resurrection,' said Mr. Armstrong; 'otherwise I should never have forgiven myself. But you did laugh, you did laugh,' he said.

Mrs. Palmer probably did. Certainly she did now.

The dinner went on its way. Everything was admirable: what was designed to be cold was iced; what was designed to be hot was molten. Round them the shrill-toned diners grew a little shriller; outside the crisp noise of horses' hoofs on asphalt grew more frequent. Mrs. Emsworth's first night was the feature of the evening; and even the harassed financiers, to whom to-morrow, as dictated by the voice of the telephone from Long Island, might mean ruin or redoubled fortunes, had with closing hours laid all ideas of dollars aside, and, like sensible men, proposed to distract themselves till the opening of business next morning distracted them. For Mrs. Emsworth was something of a personality; her friends, who were many, said she could act; her enemies, who were legion, allowed she was beautiful, and New York, which sets the time in so many things, takes its time very obediently in matters of artistic import from unbusiness-like England and France. In this conviction, it was flocking there to-night. Besides the great impresario, Bilton, had let her the Dominion Theatre, and was known to have given her carte blanche in the matter of mounting and dresses. This meant, since he was a shrewd man, a belief in her success, for into the value of business he never allowed any other consideration to enter. Furthermore, there had been from time to time a good deal of interest in England over Mrs. Emsworth's career, the sort of interest which does more for a time in filling a theatre than would acting of a finer quality than hers have done. The piece she was to appear in was a petit saleté of no importance whatever. That always suited her best; she liked her audience to be quite undistracted by any interest in the plot, so that they might devote themselves to the contemplation of her dresses and herself. Of her dresses the quality was admirable, the quantity small; of herself there was abundance, both of quality and quantity, for she was a tall woman, and, as we have said, even her enemies conceded her good looks.

The piece had already begun when the little partie carrée from Sherry's entered, and rustled to the large stage-box which Bilton had reserved for them. Mrs. Emsworth, in fact, was at the moment making her first entrance, and, as they took their places, was acknowledging the applause with which she was greeted. Naturally enough, her eye, as she bowed to the house, travelled over its occupants, and she saw the party arriving. This was made easy for her by Mrs. Palmer's voluble enthusiasm, which really for the moment divided the attention of the house between the stage and her box.

'I adore her, I just adore her!' she cried; 'and she promised to come down from Saturday till Monday to Long Island. You know her, of course, Lord Keynes? There's something magnetic to me about her. I told her so this afternoon. I think it's her neck. Look at her bending her head, Mrs. Massington. I really think that Mrs. Emsworth's neck is the most magnetic thing I ever saw. Reginald, isn't it magnetic?'

The magnetic lady proceeded. She acted with immense and frolicsome enjoyment, like some great good-humoured child bursting with animal spirits. To the rather tired and heated occupants of the stalls she came like a sudden breeze on a hot day, so infectious was her enjoyment, so natural and unaffected her pleasure in exhibiting her beauty and buoyant vitality. The critical element in the audience—in any case there was not much—she simply took by the scruff of the neck and turned out of the theatre. 'We are here to enjoy ourselves,' she seemed to say. 'Laugh, then; look at me, and you will.' And they looked and laughed. Whether she was an actress or not was really beside the point; there was in her, anyhow, something of the irrepressible gamin of the streets, and the gamin that there is in everybody hailed its glorious cousin. Long before the act was over her success was assured, and when Mr. Bilton came in to see them in the interval, it was no wonder that his mercantile delight was apparent in his face. Once more, for the fiftieth or the hundredth time, he had staked heavily and won heavily.

'I knew she would take,' he said. 'We Americans, Mrs. Massington, are the most serious people on the face of the earth, and there is nothing we adore so much as the entire absence of seriousness. Mrs. Emsworth is like Puck in the "Midsummer Night's Dream." They'll be calling her Mrs. Puck before the week's out. And she's playing up well. There is a crowd of a hundred reporters behind the scenes now, and she's interviewing them ten at a time, and making her dog give audience to those she hasn't time for. Do you know her dog? I thought it would knock the scenery down when it wagged its tail.'

Armstrong in the meantime was regaling Bertie with more details of the equestrian party, and the justice of Bilton's remarks about seriousness was evident from his conversation.

'It was all most carefully thought out,' he was saying, 'for one mustn't have any weak point in an idea of that sort. I don't think you go in for that sort of social entertainments in London, do you?'

'No; we are much more haphazard, I think,' said Bertie.

'Well, it's not so here—anyhow, in our set. If you want to keep in the swim you must entertain people now and then in some novel and highly original manner. Mrs. Lewis S. Palmer there is the centre, the very centre, of our American social life. You'll see things at her home done just properly. Last year she gave a farm-party that we talked about, I assure you, for a month. You probably heard of it.'

'I don't remember it, I'm afraid.'

'Well, you surprise me. All the men wore real smock-frocks and carried shepherd's crooks or cart-whips or flails, and all the women were dressed as milkmaids. It was the drollest thing you ever saw. And not a detail was wrong. All the grounds down at Mon Repos—that's her house, you know—were covered with cattle-sheds and poultry-houses and pig-sties, and the cows and sheep were driven around and milked and shorn just as they do on real farms. And inside the walls of her ballroom were even boarded up, and it was turned into a dairy. She's one of our very brightest women.'

'And next week there is to be a new surprise, is there not?' asked Bertie.

'Yes, indeed, and I think it will top everything she has done yet. What she has spent on it I couldn't tell you. Why, even Lewis S. Palmer got a bit restive about it, and when Lewis S. gets restive about what Mrs. Palmer is spending, you may bet that anyone else would have been broke over it. Why, she spent nearly thirty thousand dollars the other day over the funeral of her dog.'

'Did Mr. Palmer get restive over that?' asked Bertie.

'Well, I guess it would have been pretty mean of him if he had, and Lewis, he isn't mean. He's a strenuous man, you know, and he likes to see his wife strenuous as a leader of society. He'd be terribly mortified if she didn't give the time to American society. And he knows perfectly well that she has to keep firing away if she's to keep her place, just as he's got to in his. Why, what would happen to American finance if Lewis realized all his fortune, and put it in a box and sat on the top twiddling his thumbs? Why, it would just crumble—go to pieces. Same with American society, if Mrs. Palmer didn't keep on. She's just got to.'

'Then what happened to you all when she came to London?' asked Bertie, rather pertinently.

'Why, that was in the nature of extending her business. That was all right,' said Armstrong. 'And here's some of the returns coming in right along,' he added felicitously—' Mrs. Massington and you have come to America.' At this point Bilton interrupted.

'Mrs. Emsworth saw you to-night, Lord Keynes,' he said, 6 and hopes you will go to see her to-morrow morning. No. 127, West Twenty-sixth Street. Easier than your Park Squares and Park Places and Park Streets? isn't it?'

'Much easier,' said Bertie. 'Pray give my compliments to Mrs. Emsworth, and say I regret so much I am leaving New York to-morrow with Mrs. Palmer.'

'Ah, you couldn't have a better excuse,' said Bilton; 'but no excuse does for Mrs. Emsworth. You'd better find half an hour, Lord Keynes.'

CHAPTER V

Mrs. Emsworth's little flat in Twenty-sixth Street certainly reflected great credit on its furnisher, who was her impresario. She had explained her requirements to him briefly but completely before she signed her contract.

'I want a room to eat my chop in,' she said; 'I want a room to digest my chop in; I want a room to sleep in; and I want somebody to cook my chop, and somebody to make my bed. All that I leave to you; you know my taste. If the room doesn't suit me, I shall fly into a violent rage, and probably refuse to act at all. You will take all the trouble of furnishing and engaging servants off my hands, won't you? How dear of you! Now, please go away; I'm busy. Au revoir, till New York.'

Now, Bilton, as has been mentioned, was an excellent man of business, and, knowing perfectly well that Mrs. Emsworth was not only capable of carrying her threat into action, but was extremely likely to do so—a course which would have seriously embarrassed his plans—he really had taken considerable pains with her flat. Consequently, on her arrival, after she had thrown a sham Empire clock out of the window, which in its fall narrowly missed braining a passing millionaire, she expressed herself much pleased with what he had done, and gave a standing order to a very expensive florist to supply her with large quantities of fresh flowers every day, and send the account to Bilton.

The room in which she digested her chop especially pleased her. Carpet, curtains, and upholstery were rose-coloured, the walls were green satin, with half a dozen excellent prints on them, and by the window was an immense Louis XV. couch covered in brocade, with a mass of pillows on it. Here, the morning after her opening night in New York, she was lying and basking like a cat in the heat, smoking tiny rose-scented Russian cigarettes, and expecting with some anticipation of amusement the arrival of Bertie Keynes. Round her lay piles of press notices, which stripped the American variety of the English language bare of epithets. She was deeply absorbed in these, and immense smiles of amusement from time to time crossed her face. On the floor lay her huge mastiff, which, with the true time-serving spirit, rightly calculated to be thoroughly popular, she had rechristened Teddy Roosevelt. Her great coils of auburn hair were loosely done up, and her face, a full, sensuous oval, was of that brilliant warm-blooded colouring which testified to the authenticity of the smouldering gold of her hair. Lying there in the hot room, brilliant with colour and fragrant with the scent of innumerable flowers (the account for which was sent in to Mr. Bilton), she seemed the embodiment of vitality and serene Paganism. Not even her friends—and they were many—ever accused her of morality, but, on the other hand, all children adored her. That is an item not to be disregarded when the moralist adds up the balance-sheet.

In spite of his excuse of the night before, Bertie Keynes had taken Bilton's advice, and before long he was announced.

'Bertie, Bertie!' she cried as he came in, 'I wake up to find myself famous. I am magnetic, it appears, beyond all powers of comprehension. I am vimmy—am I really vimmy, do you think, and what does it mean? I am a soulful incarnation of adorable——Oh no; it's Teddy Roosevelt who is the adorable incarnation. Yes, that dear angel lying there is Teddy Roosevelt and an adorable incarnation, which would never have happened if we hadn't come to America, would it, darling? Not you, Bertie. I christened him on the way over, and you shall be godfather, because he wants a new collar. Let me see, where was I? Bertie, I was a success last night. Enormous. I knew I should be. Now sit down, and try to get a word in edge-ways, if you can.'

'I congratulate you, Dorothy,' he said—'I congratulate you most heartily.'

'Thanks. I say, Teddy Roosevelt, the kind young gentleman congratulates us. Now, what are you doing on these opulent shores? Looking out for opulence, I guess. Going to be married, are we? Well, Teddy is too, if we can find a suitable young lady; and so am I. Oh, such fun! and we'll tear up all our past histories, and put them in the fire.'

She sat half up on her couch, and looked at him.

'It's two years since we met last, Bertie,' she said; 'and you—why, you've become a man. You always were a pretty boy, and you don't make a bad-looking man. And I'm vimmy. I used not to be vimmy, did I? But we are all changing as time goes on. Really, I'm very glad to see you again.'

Bertie felt unaccountably relieved at her manner. His relief was of short duration. Dorothy Emsworth arranged her pillows more comfortably, and lit another cigarette.

'I wanted to see you before you left New York,' she said, 'because I am coming down to stay with Mrs. Palmer next Saturday, and we had better know how we stand. So, what are you over here for? Did you come here to get married? And if so, why not?'

She lay back as she spoke, stretching her arms out with a gesture that somehow reminded him of a cat stretching its forelegs and unsheathing the claws of its silent, padded feet. His feeling of relief was ebbing a little.

'Why not, indeed?' he said.

'Dear Bertie, echo-conversation is so tedious,' she said.

'You always used to be rather given to it. So you have come out to get married. That is settled, then. Do ask me to the wedding. The "Voice that Breathed"; wedding march from "Lohengrin"; ring dropping and running down the aisle like a hoop; orange-flowers; tears; sudden unexplained hysterics of the notorious Mrs. Emsworth; deportment of the bride; wedding-cake; puff-puff. And the curtain drops with extreme rapidity. O lor', Teddy R.! what devils we all are, to be sure!'

Bertie's feeling of relief had quite gone, but his nervousness had gone also. He felt he knew the facts now.

'I see,' he said: 'you propose to make trouble. I'm glad you told me.'

'I told you?' she asked, laughing lazily. 'Little vimmy me? I say, I'm brainy too.'

'What do you propose to do?' he asked.

'Well, wait first of all till you are engaged. I say, Bertie, I like teasing you. When you wrinkle your forehead as you are doing now, you look adorable. I don't mean a word I say, you know, any more than you meant a word of that very, very funny letter you once wrote me, which is now,' she said with histrionic utterance, 'one of my most cherished possessions.'

'You told me you had burned it,' said he.

'I know; I meant to burn it, but I couldn't. When I told you I had burnt it, I really meant to have burnt it, and so I didn't tell you a lie, because for all practical purposes it was burned. But then I found I couldn't; it was too funny for words. Really, there are so few humorous things in the world that it would be murder to destroy it. Of course, you didn't mean it. But I can't burn it. It is here somewhere.'

Bertie did not smile. He sat up straight in his chair, and put the tips of his fingers together.

'And don't look like Gallio,' remarked Mrs. Emsworth.

'Look here, Dorothy,' he said, 'you can make things rather unpleasant for me, if you choose. Now, why do you choose? You know perfectly well that at one time the world said things about you and me; you also know perfectly well that—well, that there was no truth in them. You encouraged me to fall madly in love with you because—I don't know why. I thought you liked me, anyhow. Then there appeared somebody else. I wrote you a letter expressing my illimitable adoration. That was all—all. You have got that letter. Is not what I have said true?'

'Yes—slightly edited. You see, I am a very improper person.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, if you choose to write a very fervent letter to a very improper person, people will say—it is no use denying it—they will say What a fine day it is, but hot.'

Bertie got up.

'That is all I have to say,' he said.

'People are so ill-natured,' said Mrs. Emsworth.

The catlike laziness had left her, though her attitude was the same; instead of looking sensuously lazy, she looked very alert.

'Good-bye, then,' said Bertie; 'we meet next week at Long Island.'

'Yes; it will be very pleasant,' said she.

He left the room without more words, and for five minutes she remained where she was. But slowly, as she lay there, the enjoyment and the purring content faded completely out of her face. Then it grew hard and sad; eventually, with a long-drawn sigh, half sob, she got up and called to her dog. He rose limb by massive limb, and laid his head on her lap.

'Teddy R.,' she said, 'we are devils. But there are two worse devils than you and I. One has just gone away; one is just coming. Worse-devil one is worse because he thinks—he thinks that of me. Worse-devil two is worse because he—he did that to me. So—so you and I will think nothing more about it at all, but keep our spirits up.'

She fondled the great dog's head a moment, then got up suddenly, and drew the blind down to shut out the glare of the sun, which was beginning to lay a hot yellow patch on the floor.

'He thought that,' she said to herself—'he really thought that.'

She walked up and down the room for a moment or two, then went to a table on which stood her despatch-box, opened it, and looked through a pile of letters that lay inside. One of these she took out and read through. At moments it seemed to amuse her, at moments her smile was struck from her face. When she had finished reading it, she paused a few seconds with it in her hands, as if weighing it. Then, with a sudden gesture of impatience, she tore it in half, and threw the pieces into the grate. Then, with the quick relief of a decision made and acted upon, she whistled to her dog, and went into her bedroom to make her toilet. Resplendency was part of her programme, and with the consciousness of a busy hour before her, she told her butler—Bilton's liberal interpretation of her requirements had included a manservant—that if Mr. Harold Bilton called, he was to be asked to wait.

The 'room to sleep in' was, if anything, more satisfactory than the 'room to digest her chop in.' Like all proper bedrooms, there was a bed in it, a large table, winking with silver, in the window, and very little else. By the bedside there was a bearskin; in front of the dressing-table in the window there was a rug; otherwise the room was carpetless and parquetted, and devoid of furniture and dust. Dark-green curtains hung by the window, dark-green blinds could be drawn across the window. The bathroom beyond held the hopeless but necessary accessories of dressing. Her maid was waiting for her—Parkinson by name—and it was not Dorothy who came to be dressed, but Puck.

'Parkinson,' she said, 'once upon a time there was a very fascinating woman called X.'

'Lor'm!' said Parkinson.

'Quite so. And there was a very fascinating young man called Y. He wanted to marry her, and wrote to say so. But meantime another man called Z also wanted to—to marry her. So she said "Yes," because he gave her a great deal of money. But she kept Y's proposal—I don't know why, except because it was so funny. And so now I suppose she is Mrs. Z. That's all.'

'Lor'm!' said Parkinson. 'Will you wear your shiffong and lace dress?'

'Yes, shiffong. Parkinson, supposing I suddenly burst into tears, what would you think?'

'I should think you wasn't quite well'm.'

'Quite right; also there isn't time.'

Mrs. Emsworth had not been gone more than ten minutes or so before Bilton was shown up. He appeared to be in a particularly well-satisfied humour this morning, and as he moved about the room, noting with his quick eye the stamp of femininity which Mrs. Emsworth had already impressed into the garnishing of the place, he whistled softly to himself. In his hand he carried a small jewel-case with her initials in gold upon the top. As always, in the relaxed mood the true man came to the surface; for a man is most truly himself, not at great moments of emergency or when a sudden call is made on him, but when his ambitions for the time being are gratified, when he is pleased with himself and his circumstances—above all, when he is alone. Thus, though just now the hard eagerness of his face was a little softened, yet its alertness hardly dozed; and though he had made, he felt sure, a great success in bringing Dorothy Emsworth to America, he hardly allowed himself even this momentary pause of achievement, but had called this morning to talk over with her the details of a protracted tour through the principal cities of the States. True son of his country, he realized that to pause spelled to be left behind.

As his manner was, Bilton did not sit down, but kept walking about, as if not to be caught idle either in mind or body. As in many of his countrymen, the habit of perpetually being ready and eager to snap up an opportunity had become a second nature to him, so that it was far more an effort to him to rest than to work. Working was as natural to him as breathing; to cease to work required the same sort of effort as to hold the breath. To him in his profession as impresario any movement, any glimpse at a room or a picture, could perhaps suggest what in the fertile alchemy of his mind might be transformed into a 'tip,' and he looked with special attention at two Watteau prints which hung on the walls; for in the second piece which Mrs. Emsworth was to produce under his direction a certain scene was laid in the gardens at Versailles, and the note of artificial naturalness had to be struck in the scenery as Watteau and no one else had struck it. Big trees cut formally and square in their lower branches, but with the topmost boughs left unpollarded; fountain in the centre, quite so, and a glimpse, just a glimpse, of the terrace of the palace with the two bronze fountains beneath the trees.

He stood a moment before the fireplace with eyes half closed, conjuring up the scene, and in particular seeing it with his mind's eye as a setting to that incomparable woman in whom, professionally, at this juncture, he was so deeply interested, to whom he was so managerially devoted, but of whom in other respects he was so profoundly weary. For a year he had been wildly in love with her, for another year he had slowly cooled towards her, and now it required all his steadiness of head and incessantly watchful will not to betray his tedium. Also in years he was now, though still only half way through the thirties, old enough in mind to wish to settle down. His capabilities for passionate attachments were a little cooling, and, with a cynical amusement at himself, he was beginning to realize that married domesticity, even as morals taught, was, though for other reasons, the placid river-bed into which the babbling mountain-streams of youth must eventually empty themselves. Rather bathos, perhaps, but he realized fully that everyone gets in life what they themselves bring to it. The only limitations imposed on a man are those which his own nature makes.

But these unedifying moralities did not occupy him long. They were the background to his thoughts, just as the terrace of Versailles was the background for the picture he was forming. In the foreground of the picture stood Mrs. Emsworth; on the terrace stood another figure, Sybil Massington.

He had let his cigar go out as he revolved these things in front of the two Watteau pictures, and then rose to drop it in the fireplace. A letter in an envelope torn once in half lay there, and he stooped and picked it up, laid the two pieces side by side on the table, and read it through. Then he put the pieces in his pocket, and, with that praiseworthy attention to detail which throughout his life had contributed so largely to his success, he took from the table a sheet of paper, folded it inside an envelope, tore it in half, and replaced the pieces in the grate where he had found the others. The whole thing was quickly and naturally done; it was merely one among a thousand million other cases in which his mind was ready to take advantage of any possible opportunity that Fate might cast in his way. The torn letter might conceivably at some future date be useful to him. Therefore he kept it. It is no use to guard against certainties—such was his gospel—for certainties in this life are so few as to be practically negligible. But he who guarded against contingencies and provided for possibilities was the winner in the long-run.

This done, he dismissed the matter from his mind, and, in order not to let the moments pass without seed, sketched out in some detail the plan of the stage as suggested by the two Watteau prints. He was deep in this when Mrs. Emsworth entered. The 'shiffong' suited her admirably.

'You have been waiting,' she said; 'I am sorry for keeping you. Oh, Harold, they love me over here; they just love me!'

His part was at his finger-tips.

'That doesn't seem to me in the least remarkable,' he said. 'You are a success; no one can be more. I want to be allowed to commemorate it.' And he handed her the jewel-case.

He was no niggard when business was involved; his business now was to keep her in a good temper, and the opal and diamond brooch he had chosen at Tiffany's was really admirable. Even Mrs. Palmer might have found it brought consolation to a wounded spirit.

'That is dear of you, Harold,' she said; 'I adore opals. Is it really for me? Thank you ever so much. It goes on now. Is it rather big for the morning? I think it is. A reason the more for wearing it.'

She pinned it into her dress, and sat down.

'Well?' she said.

'I came really to congratulate you,' said he; 'but as I am here, I suppose we may as well talk over some business that must be talked over. About your tour: are you willing to stop over here till April at least?'

'Yes; I don't see why not. I want to appear in London early in May.'

'Very well. I will draft an agreement, and send it you. Now, you may consider that with your extraordinary success of last night the theatre will be full for some weeks ahead. I propose your giving an evening performance on Saturdays as well as the matinee.'

'Terms?'

'Royalty. Twenty per cent, on total takings. It is worth your while.'

'Is it not more worth my while to be seen from Saturday till Monday at Mrs. Palmer's?'

'It would be if the theatre was not full. But you could fill it—for the present, anyhow—if you had a matinee every day. Besides, you can get down to Long Island with the utmost ease on Sunday morning.'

'I go to Mass on Sunday morning; you forget that!'

He smiled.

'I suggest, then, that you should omit that ceremony, if you want to go to Mrs. Palmer's. However, there is no hurry. Weigh the three things in your mind—eighty or ninety pounds by acting on Saturday evening, or Mass on Sunday morning, or Mrs. Palmer's on Sunday morning. There is another thing: I want to talk over the scenes in "Paris" with you. I am going to Mrs. Palmer's the Sunday after next. I will bring the models down with me, if you will promise to give me an hour. 'They will not be ready till then.'

'Yes. I am going there next Sunday and the Sunday after. They have a theatre there; she wants me to do something in the evening.'

Bilton thought a moment.

'What do I get?' he asked.

'The pleasure of seeing me act, silly.'

He shook his head.

'I'm afraid I must forget that pleasure,' he said. 'Your contract binds you to give no theatrical representations of any sort except under my direction.'

The gamin element rose to the surface in her.

'What a beast you are!' she said. 'It is for a charity!'

'And a cheque,' he observed.

'The cheque is purely informal. Besides, we shall be there together.'

He took a cigar out of his case, bit the end off with his long teeth, that gleamed extremely white between the very remarkable red of his lips.

'Look here, Dolly,' he said; 'there are two sides to the relations in which we are placed. One is purely businesslike; the other is purely sentimental. It is a pity to let them overlap. It spoils my devotion to you to feel that it is in a way mixed up with business, and it offends my instincts as a business man to let sentiment have a word to say in our bargains. Briefly, then, I forbid your acting for Mrs. Palmer unless you make it worth my while. After all, I didn't bring you out here for sentimental reasons; I brought you out because, from a financial point of view, I thought it would be good for both of us.'

'What do you want?' she asked.

'Half your cheque.'

'For something you haven't arranged, and which won't cost you a penny?'

'Yes. I am talking business. You can close with that offer any time to-day; to-morrow it will be two-thirds. I'm quite square with you.'

'Americans are Jews,' observed Mrs. Emsworth.

'Possibly; it would be an advantage if everyone was; it would simplify bargaining immensely. The Gentile mind is often highly unreasonable, and, instead of allowing both sides to make profits, it simply refuses to part with its goods. And a fine opportunity goes to—well, to damnation. You won't score if you don't act for her, nor will I. If you do, we both shall. Don't be a Gentile, Dolly.'

She did not answer for a moment. Her eyes saw the torn fragments of the letter in the grate, and she remembered that she had definitely and for ever torn up what Bertie had written to her. Then she got up, crossed the room to where he was standing by the fireplace, and put her hands on his shoulders.

'Are you tired of me?' she asked.

His brown eyes grew black at the fragrance and seductiveness of her close presence; for the blood is stirred long after the imagination has ceased to be fired.

'You witch! you witch!' he said.

But in the background on the terrace there still stood the other figure.

CHAPTER VI

Long Island is separated from New York by a narrow sound, across which ferry-boats ply in both directions with extreme punctuality. From any part of New York city a couple of electric cars or an electric railway will take you to the threshold of the ferry-boat, and trains await you at the back-door, so to speak, of the ferry-boats, to convey you down the length of Long Island. On board the ferry-boat you can buy a variety of badly-printed and sensational daily papers for the sum of one cent; you can get your boots blacked for very little more; and no doubt, if there was sufficient demand, the directors would enable you to have your teeth brushed or your hair combed. No part of the equipment, however, is at all lovely. It answers the purpose of conveying you cheaply and expeditiously from one point to another, and enables you to finish your toilet in transit, which is an invaluable boon to those who want to save time. As a matter of fact, everyone wants to save time, but it has been reserved for Americans to invent such methods of doing it. The rest of the world, therefore, is in their debt. The debt is acknowledged, but the rest of the world, quite inscrutably, does not choose to follow their example. All may raise the flower now all have got the seed, but they do not raise the flower.

There is no 'class' on these boats; there is no 'class' on the elevated railway; there is no 'class' on the electric cars. Millionaires in Long Island, in consequence, have the privilege of enjoying the same discomforts as other people, and even Lewis S., who could have bought up the whole system of electric cars, overhead railway, and ferry-boats (after a little judicious distribution of emoluments to the officials of New York City), habitually went by these unlovely conveyances, because there were no other. During his transit he once sent a cablegram buying, at any price, the whole dinner-service which had been used on the last occasion on which Marie Antoinette dined at Petit Trianon. It was extremely expensive, and, as he wrote, the drippings from the rain fell on to his cablegram form, for the boat was full. Subsequently he argued with the boot-boy who had blacked his boots, but gave in when the boy produced his tariff-card. And Democracy, the spirit of his fellow-passengers, sympathized in the main with him.

Once arrived on Long Island, a walk of a hundred yards or so leads to the ticket-office. Those hundred yards are uncovered, however; but since people who live on Long Island must pass them in order to get into the Delectable City, there is no reason why the railroad or the ferry-boat company should offer conveniences in the way of shelter to their passengers. Given competition, any line would vie with the others in mirrors and gilded furniture; but if there is none, why on earth spend a penny? Not a passenger the less will travel because the mode of transit is bestial. Thus, common-sense, as usual, emerges triumphant.

For the purpose of this narrative, the low-lying swamp and companies of jerry-built houses that cluster round the various stations on the line may be disregarded, and after half an hour's travelling the train emerges into a very pleasant land. There are no high uplands to dwarf the immediate landscape, but there are trees of tolerable growth and slim presence to add distinction to it. Underneath these trees, as the train nears Port Washington, grow high clumps of purple Michaelmas daisies, now, in September, full of bursting bud, and the temperate sea-winds give a vividness of colour to the prevailing green, which reminds foreigners of the Devon sea-coast.

Mrs. Palmer's new-built house stood on a charming hill-top some mile or so beyond the station. The site had been occupied till a few years before by a delightful bungalow structure, built of wood, with shingled walls, and surrounded on all sides by deep, shady verandas. The wood in those days came right up to the house on two sides, and was just lopped of its topmost branches on a third, so that where the ground fell away rapidly from the house a charming glimpse of the dim blue sound could be seen framed in sky and tree-tops, while the fourth side was open, the house-front giving on to a broad lawn of velvety turf which changed into rougher meadow-land in the middle distance, while over distant tree-tops and a wash of green country the gray smoke of New York sat on the horizon. The house, in fact, had been like a hundred other houses on Long Island, not perhaps very pretty, still less beautiful, but not without a certain haphazard picturesqueness about it, restful and unpretending, and most eminently adapted for the purpose of affording to the brain-heated business man a draught of coolness and greenness. Moreover, it had expressed somehow the genius of the place; its woods, not huge nor of magnificent trees, but of pleasant growth, always sounded in whispers through the rooms; and even as the greatest heats of summer came tempered by the passage of the winds through the filter of the woodlands, so, one would have thought, the fever of New York was abated here, even as the smoke of the city was but a gray tache on the horizon. It had, as all houses should, been in tune with the pleasant, mediocre charm of the island, even as the chateaux on the Loire express the broad grandeur and classical formality of the landscape, as the big houses of England are in the scale of their huge timbered parks, and, for that matter, as the county gaol expresses the security which His Majesty kindly affords to the criminal classes.

But within the last few years the whole place had been completely changed, and it was no longer the genius of Long Island, but the genius of mushroom wealth, that crowned the hill-top. For a quarter of a mile on every side round the house the trees had been felled and their roots dynamited, and huge lawns spread their green carpets in the most ample expanses. Four-square in the centre stood the immense house of gray stone, copied largely from one of the Valois chateaux in the South of France, but with various protuberances, in the shape of a theatre, a swimming-bath, and a tennis-court, grafted on to it. A carriage-drive lay in long curves like a flicked whip-lash, surmounting terrace after terrace set with nugatory nudities, till it reached the lead-roofed portico at the front, where two great Græco-Roman candelabra of Parian marble stood one on each side of the door, pierced for gas, and crowned by large glass globes. To the north lay the Italian garden, all laurels and tessellated pavement, cypresses and statuary, fountains and flower-beds. To the west were the tennis and croquet lawns, and to the south, where the ground in old days had fallen tumbling towards the sea, it had been built up with thousands of tons of earth and faced with masonry, so that from the edge of the terrace one looked down on to the topmost fans of the waving trees. Heavy gilded vanes crowned the lead roofs, and high over the central dome of the building a flag-staff displayed Mrs. Palmer's very original device—Love caught in a rose-bush—to the airs of heaven. Round the extreme edge of the terrace ran the bicycle track, on which Lewis S. Palmer did his ten miles a day, with black hatred in his heart of this extraordinary waste of time.

The estate, which was of great extent, and produced nothing whatever, since, to Mrs. Palmer's way of thinking, to live on an estate which produced anything was of the nature of keeping a shop, was all pressed into the amiable service of providing entertainment for the guests, and of showing the wondering world a specimen of the delectable life. For several miles the road through the woods had been run in artfully contrived gradients, carried on struts over too precipitous ravines, and quarried through cuttings to avoid undesirable steepnesses. The sides of the cuttings were admirably planted, and creepers and ivy covered the balustrades of the bridges. A golf-course, smooth as a billiard-table, and not too heavily bunkered, lay near the house, and Mrs. Palmer had tried a most original experiment last year of stocking the woods with all sorts of game, to provide mixed shooting for a couple of parties in the autumn. This had not been wholly a success, for the deer she had turned out were so tame that they gazed in timid welcome at the shooters, probably expecting to be fed, till they fell riddled with bullets, while the pheasants were so wild that nobody could touch a tail-feather. But the costume of the chasseurs—green velvet, very Robin-Hoody—had been most tasteful, and she herself, armed with a tiny pea-rifle and dressed in decent imitation of Atalanta, had shot a roebuck and a beater, the latter happily not fatally.

From the centre of the terrace on the east, which had been brought over entire from a needy Italian palace, a broad flight of steps of rose-coloured marble led down to the sea. A small breakwater was sufficient to provide station and anchorage for the two steam-yachts and smaller pleasure-boats, but otherwise the shore had not been meddled with. There was a charming beach of sand, and a little further on a fringe of seaweed-covered rock-pools. Behind this was a small natural lagoon in a depression in the sandy foreshore, some half-acre in extent, fed by a stream that came down through the woods, but brackish through the infiltration of the salt water. This that highly original woman had chosen to be the scene of the fête which was to astonish society next week; but the secret had been well kept, and no one except Reggie Armstrong knew the precise details of the new surprise. For a fortnight or so, however, it was common knowledge that a great many large pans wrapped in tarpaulin had been arriving, and the shore had been populous with men who plied some sort of bare-legged avocation, which implied wading in the lagoon. But the foreman of the company who was executing Mrs. Palmer's orders had received notice that if any word of what was being done leaked out or reached the papers, at that moment all work would be suspended, and the firm would never have another order from her. She herself, sometimes alone, sometimes with Reggie, inspected the work; otherwise no one was allowed near the place. The yachts of her dearest friends, it is true, constantly passed and repassed up the sound, and many were the opera-glasses levelled at the shore; but what the bare-legged men were doing baffled conjecture and the best glasses.

The house inside was, with the exception of one small suite, of the most sumptuous description. A huge hall, paved with marble, and covered as to its walls with superb wood-work of Grinling Gibbons, occupied the centre of the ground-floor, and en suite round it were the rooms for entertaining. Ping-pong being at this moment fashionable, it was to be expected that almost every room had its table, and it was curious to see the hideous little black board on its cheap trestle legs occupying the centre of the great French drawing-room. Old rose-coloured satin was stretched on the walls, an immense Aubusson carpet covered the floor. All the furniture was gems of the early Empire style; the big ormolu clock was by Vernier; great Dresden parrots in gilt mounts held the shaded electric lights, and a statuette by Clodion stood on the Queen's escritoire from the Tuileries. One side of the square block of house was entirely occupied by the picture-gallery, which contained some extremely fine specimens of the great English portrait-school, a few dubious old masters, some good Lancrets, and several very valuable pictures by that very bright young American artist, Sam Wallace. These, as all the world knows, represent scenes from the ballet and such subjects, and he is supposed to have a prodigious eye for colour. Here, too, of course, was an unrivalled place for ping-pong, and Mrs. Palmer had caused to be made a very large court, so that four people could play together. Great grave English footmen, when the game was in progress, were stationed at each end to pick up the balls, and hand them on silver salvers to the server; and they had rather a busy time of it, for the majority of Mrs. Palmer's guests found a difficulty in inducing the ball to go anywhere near the table. But they found it very amusing, and it produced shrieks of senseless laughter.

An observant man might have noticed in a dark corner of the hall a small green baize door. It was in shadow of the staircase, and might easily have escaped him altogether; but if he noticed it, it would have struck him as odd that this plain baize door, with three brass initials on it—L. S. P.—should find a place in this magnificence. If it had only been L. S. D., it would have been quite in place, and might have been taken to be the shrine of the tutelary god of the place. Shrine indeed it was, and the tutelary god sat within; for the initials were those of Mrs. Palmer's husband.

It was a perfectly plain, bare room, with drugget on the floor, an almanac hung near the fireplace, a large table stood in the centre of the room, on which were piles of papers, apparatus for writing, and usually a glass of milk. From the door to the right there came the subdued tickings of telegraph apparatus; near that door sat a young man on a plain wooden chair, and at the table sat a small, gray-haired man, very thin and spare, with bushy eyebrows which frowned over his work. From time to time he would throw on to the floor a scrap of paper. Then the young man would get up noiselessly, pick it up, and go through with it into the room from which came the tickings of the telegraph. Then he would return and sit down again. Occasionally a muffled knock would come at the same door, upon which he would rise and take a paper which was handed him, and lay it quite close to the right hand of the man who sat at the table, who either crumpled it up after reading it or wrote something in reply. These answers and messages were all written on small scraps of paper measuring about three inches by one; there was a pile of them always ready by his left hand. A telephone also stood on this table which rang very constantly. Then the man at the table would, as if automatically, place the receiver at his ear and listen, sometimes not even looking up from his writing, and often replacing the instrument without a word. More rarely he looked up, and he would say a few words—'Yes, yes,' 'No, certainly not,' 'Very well, buy,' or 'Sell at once.'

'Yes, all!' Sometimes, again, it would be he who first used the instrument, and he would ring up his head clerk in New York or a partner, never in a hurry, never apparently impatient. On the other hand, he would not wait idle till the answering bell rang, but go steadily on with his work. At such moments he would raise his eyes sometimes when he was speaking, and if you happened to catch his glance, it is probable you would never forget it, but would understand, though momentarily only and dimly maybe, that at the table in the bare room there sat a Force, a great natural phenomenon, before which all the splendour and magnificence of the house, all the illimitable outpouring of wealth which it implied, became insignificant—a mere shirt-button or a tie-pin to the man from whose brain it had all sprung.

In face, but for those extraordinary eyes, dark gray in colour, but of a vitality so great that it seemed as if each was a separate living entity, his features were somewhat insignificant. He had gray, rather thin whiskers, and iron-gray hair, still thick, and not yet deserting his forehead. His nose was slightly hooked, suggesting that a spoonful, perhaps, of Jewish blood ran in his veins; his mouth was very thin-lipped and compressed. In body, he was short and thin almost to meagreness, and, owing to a nearly total absence of digestive power, he lived practically exclusively on milk, of which he drank some five or six pints a day. And in nothing was his power of control so amazingly shown; for ten years ago he had been both gourmet and gourmand, and had habitually eaten enormous masses of food with a relish and palate for the curiously delicate and uncultivated sense of taste that Savarin might have envied. Even now, when he sat at the head of the table at his wife's parties, he knew, partly by keenness of nostril, partly by look, whether any dish was not perfectly cooked, and next morning the first of the slips which he dropped on to the floor to be picked up by the young man at the door might run: 'To the chef: Not enough asparagus-heads in the sauce Milanaise, Some three weeks ago I told you the same thing.—L. S. P.'

This extraordinary sense of, and attention to, detail, characteristic of the great Napoleon, was also most characteristic of Mr. Palmer. Only the night before his daughter had come down to dinner in a new dress, and found herself the instant target for the piercing gray eye of her father.

'There ought to be two straps on the shoulder, not one,' he said; 'it is copied from the figure of Madame Matignon, in the picture of the last fête of the Empress Eugenie. Pray have it altered.'

'Dear old papa,' remarked Amelie, 'I dare say you know everything, but it wouldn't be so pretty.'

'That is a matter of taste, but it would be right.'

This characteristic, which appeared so strongly even in such branches of human interest as the position of a strap or a bow on a woman's dress, appeared most piercingly of all on questions concerning finance. Figures, indeed, once seen by him, seemed to be indelibly imprinted on his mind, and, without reference, he would embark on enterprises where an accurate knowledge of previous balance-sheets and present prices was essential. It was essential to him; only, instead of referring to books which would give him the required information, he carried it about in his head. To his partners and those who were associated with him in business he was a source of constant wonder. Partners they might be to him in name, and, since they were all well-tried and trusted men, they no doubt were of assistance to him; but as far as executive power was concerned, they might as well have been junior clerks in some other firm, for Palmer went on his way automatically, self-balanced on the topmost crest of the huge wave of prosperity that was flooding America, quicker than the whole of the rest of the New York Market to scent coming trouble or prosperity in the world of money, prompter than any to take advantage of it. Then, when his day's work was done, at whatever hour that might be, it was as if the word 'business' was unknown to him, and there sat at table, dressed in loose and somewhat ill-fitting clothes, a man of very simple and kindly nature, a connoisseur in cookery, art, and millinery, a gentleman at heart, and to the backbone an American—one who, in spite of his gentleness, was without breeding; one who, in spite of his deep and varied knowledge, was without culture.

He and Amelie were seated at lunch alone together on the day following Mrs. Emsworth's triumphant debut. Amelie had only just come in from her ride—the horse she preferred to ride was one which few men could have sat—and she still wore her riding-habit. She was quite obviously the authentic daughter of her father and mother, and, like a clever girl, which she undoubtedly was, she had selected, so it seemed, all the good points possessed by both her parents, rejected all their weaknesses, and embodied the result in the adorable compound known as Amelie Palmer. She had been right, for instance, in possessing herself of her mother's extraordinary vitality and physical health, rejecting her father's digestive apparatus; on the other hand, she had chosen her father's eyes, impressing upon them, however, a certain femininity, and had set them in a complexion of dazzling fairness, which she owed to her mother. And out of the careful selection there had sprung, crowning it all, the quality that more than anything else was she—namely, her unrivalled exuberance of enjoyment. Whether it was some new social effort of her mother's to which she brought her glorious presence, whether she rode alone through the flowering woods, or accompanied her father on his hygienic bicycle ride—'papa's treadmill,' as she called it—she brought to all her occupations the great glowing lantern of her joy, the same brilliant smile of welcome for anything that might turn up, the same divine content-She took nothing seriously, but had enthusiasm for everything. Of refinement or intellectual qualities she had none whatever, but he would be a bloodless man who could really deplore their absence when he looked on that brilliant vitality. Surely it would be time enough to think of such gray gifts when the sparkling tide of her life ran less riotously; at present it would be like teaching some clean-limbed young colt of the meadows to sit up and beg or shake a paw.

In a certain way (and it is part of the purpose of this story to draw out the eventual pedigree of the resemblance) her joie de vivre was very much akin to that quality which had so captivated the Americans in New York on the occasion of Mrs. Emsworth's first night. In the older woman, since her nature had been longer in the crucible of life, it had necessarily undergone a certain change; but the critical observer, had he hazarded the conjecture that at Amelie's age Mrs. Emsworth had been very like Amelie, would, though he was quite wrong about it, have had the satisfaction of making a really clever mistake. For Mrs. Emsworth at that age had been possessed of a somewhat serious and joyless nature; her present joie de vivre was the result of her experience of life, the conviction, thoughtfully arrived at, that joy is the thing worth living for. But Amelie's exuberance was the result, not of philosophy, but of instinct; she laughed like a child merely because she laughed. And the critical observer, if, after making one clever mistake, he had been willing to hazard another, and had guessed that at Mrs. Emsworth's age Amelie would be like Mrs. Emsworth, would have risked a mistake that was not clever. For it is very seldom that experience confirms one's childish instincts; in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it either eradicates them altogether, or, at any rate, modifies them almost beyond recognition. Mrs. Emsworth had won back to what had not been in her an instinct when she was a child; and it was more unlikely that Amelie, when a woman, would retain the instincts that were now hers.

At the present moment Amelie's enthusiasm was largely taken up with food.

'Papa, you have an angelic nature,' she said; 'and how you can sit there chewing crackers and sipping milk without throwing the table things at me I can't conjecture.'

'Habit of self-control, Amelie,' said he, his eyes smiling at her; 'perhaps you will learn it some day. When does your mother come down?'

'This afternoon, with the two English folk. She's been telephoning all the morning. When mamma gets hold, real tight hold, of the telephone, she doesn't let go under an hour or two. Now, I'm not like that. The moment I ring anyone up, I forget what I was going to say, and have to ask them to dinner instead. I guess you and mamma took all the brains of the family. Papa, I had the heavenliest ride this morning, all through the fir-woods, and Tamburlaine wanted to jump the sound. The daisies are all coming out, and it smelt so good. Oh, it smelt so good, like—like a drug store. There's the telephone again!'

Mr. Palmer considered this a moment.

'When your mother gave her hunting-party last year,' he said, 'she commenced ringing the telephone at half-past ten in the morning, and she was late for lunch because she hadn't finished. Top speed all the time, too. She takes things seriously; that's why she comes out on top every time.'

'Yes, some more,' said Amelie to the footman.

Mr. Palmer looked quickly at the dish as it was handed her.

'What mess is that?' he asked.

'Pigeons once,' said she; 'it won't be anything in a minute or two.'

'There ought to be mushrooms in the stew. It's meant to be à la Toulon. I've forgotten more about cookery than our present chef ever knew.'

Amelie laughed.

'Poor papá! what a lot you must forget! I guess you're failing. Well, I've regretfully finished my lunch. Are you going treadmilling?'

'Yes. Who comes down with your mother?'

'Mrs. Massington and Lord Keynes. The others come on Saturday—Mrs. Emsworth, Bilton, and that lot. Papa, I've thought of the right name for Reggie Armstrong at last. It's Ping-pong. He's just that.'

Mr. Palmer considered this.

'Yes, Ping-pong is about the size. Small set, though. Come and treadmill, Amelie.'

She got up and stretched herself, then let one arm fall round her father's neck.

'There are schemes in the air,' she said to him, as they walked out. 'But on the day you see me marry Ping-pong you may tie me up by the heels to Tamburlaine's tail.' From which it may be seen that either Amelie was charmingly lacking in the wisdom of the world, or that her mother had more of it than one would have guessed.

CHAPTER VII

Mrs. Palmer's house-party, which was to be with her during the week of the 'Revels,' as they were called, had arrived at Mon Repos the same afternoon. Mon Repos had been taking its rest in its usual relentless manner, and Bertie Keynes and Mrs. Massington were beginning to get into training. It had dawned on them both very soon that they were engaged in the exercise of the most strenuous mental and physical activity that their dawdling English lives had ever known. The whole party breakfasted together in a marquee on the lawn, and from that moment till after the ensuing midnight were engaged ohne rast with a prodigious quantity of hast in a continuous social effort. Bathing, boating, bridge (the two latter simultaneously) lasted till lunch; these and similar pursuits, all executed in the dazzling light, in the dazzling crowd, and largely to the dazzling sound of a band, went on without pause till dinner, after which was a short one-act play in the theatre, followed by a 'quiet dance.' After one day of it Mrs. Massington's quick perceptions made discoveries which she communicated to Bertie.

'You are here to play up,' she said, 'and not to amuse yourself. Don't drink any wine at lunch, and very little at dinner.'

'Then I shall die,' said Bertie.

'No, you will not; you will feel much less tired. The whole day is a stimulant, so why take more? Besides, alcohol produces a reaction. That doesn't matter in England, because we sit down and react; here you can't. Also don't attempt to sparkle in conversation. Here they sparkle naturally—at least, they open their mouths and let it come—whereas in England we tend rather to shut our mouths unless we want to say something. But you are being a great success. Go away now; I am going to rest for three minutes before I dress for dinner.'

Bertie lingered a moment at the door of her room.

'They are awfully kind,' he said. 'If only I was stronger, I should enjoy it enormously.'

'I am enjoying it,' said she; 'it suits me. You will, too, if you take my advice.'

'I feel more inclined to take to drink,' said he.

But the fact once grasped that life at Mon Repos was not a holiday, but hard, relentless work of a most exacting kind, they began forthwith to settle down to it and grapple with it. At once the difficulty and charm of it absorbed them. It was a continual piece of acting; whatever your mood, you had to assume a species of reckless gaiety, and all day long feverishly and seriously engage in things that were originally designed to be relaxations, but which the ingenuity of social life had turned into instruments of the profession. None of those present particularly cared for bridge, boating, or bathing in themselves; they would not have boated or bathed alone, or played bridge even with a dummy, but they used these relaxations as a means of accomplishing social efforts. Such a life cannot be undertaken frivolously, though it is purely frivolous; twenty years of it ages its devotees more than thirty years of hard and reasonable brain-work, and though they find it intensely fascinating, yet they know they have to pay for their pleasure, and grow quickly old in its service. Indeed, it might almost be classed as a dangerous trade; and if the pursuit of wealth is a relentless task, not less so is its expenditure as a means of social success. Certainly Mrs. Palmer worked quite as hard as her husband.

Three days passed thus, and it was now the afternoon of the first day of the Revels. In consequence, the telegraph and telephone lines down to Port Washington were congested with messages, for the greater part of the evening papers in New York had kept their first page open for them, and nothing could be sent to press until it was known in what manner the first afternoon would be spent. A good deal, of course, was ready to be set up, for the list of the guests was public property, and their dresses could be, even if imagined only, described; but as long as the lagoon on the shore held its secret, the page could not be made up. It was known also that there would be a ball at Mon Repos in the evening, and that the walls of the ball-room were to be covered—literally covered, as a paper covers a wall—with roses. But for the secret of the lagoon the papers had to wait, since it had been inviolably kept. Another event, too, hardly less momentous, hung in the balance, for only two days before the reigning Prince of Saxe-Hochlaben, a dissolute young man of twenty-five, with a limp, a past, and no future, had arrived like a thunderbolt in New York.

Now, to the frivolous and lightminded this does not seem a world-curdling event, but that very enlightened paper, the New York Gutter Snipe, was not frivolous, and with extreme rapidity it set the red flame of war ablaze when it announced in huge headlines: 'ARRIVAL OF HIS ROYAL TRANSPARENCY THE PRINCE OF SAXE-HOCHLABEN. MRS. LEWIS S. PALMER'S REVELS DOOMED TO DIRE FAILURE. FRITZ (that was his name) PROMISES TO FAVOUR MRS. JOHN Z. ADELBODEN AT NEWPORT.'

The editor of the Gutter Snipe, it may be remarked, had once been a man of enormous wealth, and had honoured Mr. Palmer by singling him out as an adversary in a certain financial campaign. Mr. Palmer had dropped quite a number of little notes on to the floor over him, and he was now poor but spiteful.

The effect of his announcement was magical, for there was already war to the knife between Mrs. John Z. Adelboden and Mrs. Palmer, the latter of whom had planted her standard at Long Island in direct defiance of Newport; and those headlines brought things to a crisis. The news of his arrival was of course telegraphed to Newport by the Gutter Snipe, which did not telegraph it to Mon Repos. Consequently Mrs. John Z. Adelboden knew it by mid-day (the Germanic having come in at 11.49), whereas it went down to Long Island in the ordinary issue of the paper. Thus, Mrs. John Z. Adelboden had seven hours' start.

That remarkable woman grasped the event in every aspect in about three minutes and a quarter. She knew—everyone in America knows everything—that Timothy Vandercrup, the editor of the Gutter Snipe, was her ally against Mrs. Palmer; she guessed also that the news would not reach Mrs. Palmer for some hours. So, within five minutes of the arrival of the telegram, she had called on Newport to rally round her, and sent out six hundred and fifty invitations for a ball two nights later—that is to say, on the evening of the first day of Mrs. Palmer's Revels. To each invitation she added on the bottom left-hand corner, 'Arrival of Prince of Saxe-Hochlaben.' That was rather clever; she did not actually commit herself to anything. The notes were sent out by a perfect army of special messengers, and the same evening all the answers arrived. There were no refusals. Simultaneously she wrote a rather familiar little note to H. R. T., whom she had met and flirted with in England the year before, saying: 'Pray come up to our little cottage here. We have a ball on Monday night. All Newport will be there.'

At Mon Repos the same evening the papers arrived as usual, and Mrs. Palmer (as usual) picked up the Gutter Snipe, since it always contained the manoeuvres of the enemy. And, though at that moment her guests were in the middle of arriving, she left Amelie to do the honours, instantly left the room, went to her boudoir, and read the paragraph through twice. She also, it may be remarked, had met the Prince before; he had tried to flirt with Amelie, who had given him no encouragement whatever. But he had tried to flirt with so many people who had given him a great deal that she thought he might easily have forgotten that.

She sat with the paper in her hands for some five minutes, after she had read it through for the second time, her nimble brain leaping like a squirrel from bough to bough of possible policies, and she paused on each for a moment. The New York Evening Startler, for instance, would put in whatever she chose to send it, and she went so far as to seize a pen and write in capital letters: 'Mrs. Lewis S. Palmer refuses to receive Prince Fritz.'

Then she sat still again and thought. That would not do; Newport would only laugh at her—the one thing she dreaded; for to be laughed at drives the nails into the coffin of social failure. Then suddenly all the tension and activity of her leaping brain relaxed, and she smiled to herself at the extreme simplicity of The Plan. She took one of her ordinary Revel invitation-cards out of her desk, on which the word 'Revels' was printed at the bottom left-hand corner. Before this she inserted one word, so that it read 'Indiscriminate Revels.' That was all; she directed it to the Prince's address at the Waldorf, and went back to her guests.

Now, a matter so momentous is best described in the simplest possible manner, and the emotions that for the next day or two swayed two factions—that of Newport and that of Long Island—more bitterly and poignantly than the War of Independence swayed the North and the South cannot be too simply treated.

The plain upshot, then, was as follows:

Mrs. John Z. Adelboden's familiar little note to the Prince arrived the same evening as Mrs. Palmer wrote hers. H. R. T. accepted it in his own hand with some effusion. Mrs. Palmer's card arrived next morning. H. R. T. read it in bed, thought to himself—the 'Indiscriminate' did it-' That will be more amusing.' He had forgotten altogether about his acceptance of the Newport invitation, and if he had remembered it he would not have done differently. So, after a light and wholesome breakfast of a peach, washed down with some hock and soda, he accepted Mrs. Palmer's invitation.

The news was all over Newport (that he was coming there) before evening, and the Gutter Snipe gave his portrait and biography (both unrecognisable). The news was all over Long Island (that he was coming there) by evening, and the Startler gave the portrait and biography of Mrs. Lewis S. Palmer. Then followed two days of suspense and anxiety which can only be called sickening. Eventually the two announcements were laid before Prince Fritz by his trembling secretary, who asked him what he meant to do. He flew into a violent passion, and exclaimed with a strong German accent: 'Olso, I shall go where I choose, and when I choose, and how I choose.' And suspense continued to reign.

So the momentous afternoon arrived that was to bring the Prince in Mrs. Adelboden's private railway-carriage to Newport or in Mrs. Palmer's motor to Mon Repos, and still no word of enlightenment had come which should pierce the thick clouds of doubt which hid the face of the future. Newport and Long Island were both en fête, and at the rail-way-station of the one, and on the lawns of Mon Repos at the other, the rival factions were awaiting the supreme moment in a tense, unnatural calm. Mrs. Palmer alone was absent from her guests, sitting at the telephone. At length it sounded, and with a quivering lip she unhooked the receiver. Then she gave one long sob of relief, and rejoined her guests. The motor-car had started, and the Prince was in it. And the Revels began.

At the supreme moment of his arrival, when all attention was breathlessly concentrated on him, a large signboard, bearing the mystic inscription 'To the Pearl Fishery,' had been erected at the head of the staircase leading down to the lagoon, and with charming directness the Prince pointed to it, and said: 'What does that mean, Mrs. Adelboden—I should say, Mrs. Palmer?' And Mrs. Palmer replied: 'I guess, sir, we'll go and see.'

The expectant crowd followed them; it was felt that the secret on which so much fruitless curiosity had been wasted was about to be revealed, but, like a good secret, it baffled conjecture up till the very last moment. The crowd screamed and chattered through the woods, following their illustrious leader, and at last emerged on to the beach. There an immense sort of bathing establishment had been erected, containing hundreds of little cabinets; there were two wings—one for men, one for women—and in each cabinet for women was a blue serge skirt and sandals, a leather pouch, and a small fishing-net; in each cabinet for men was the same apparatus minus the skirt. The lagoon itself smelt strongly of rose-water, for thousands of gallons had just been emptied into it, and the surface was covered with floating tables laden with refreshments, and large artificial water-lilies. And scattered over the bottom of the lagoon—scattered, too, with a liberal hand—were hundreds of pearl oysters.

There was no time wasted; as soon as Prince Fritz grasped the situation, and it had been made clear to him that he might keep any pearls he found, he rushed madly to the nearest cabin, rolled his trousers up to the knee, put the sandals on his rather large, ungainly feet, and plunged into the rose-watered lagoon. Nor were the rest slow to follow his example, and in five minutes it was a perfect mob of serge-skirted women and bare-legged men. Mr. Palmer himself did not join in the wading, for, in addition to a slight cold, wading was bad for his chronic indigestion; but he seized a net, and puddled about with it from the shore. Shrieks of ecstasy greeted the finding of the pearls; cries of dismay arose if the shell was found to contain nothing. Faster and more furious grew the efforts of all to secure them; for a time the floating refreshment-tables attracted not the smallest attention. In particular, the Prince was entranced, and, not waiting to open the shells where the oyster was still alive (most, however, had been killed by the rose-water or the journey, and gaped open), he stowed them away in his pockets, in order to examine them afterwards—not waste the precious moments when so many were in competition with him; and his raucous cries of 'Ach, Himmel! there is a peauty!' resounded like a bass through the shrill din. He paid no attention whatever to the throng round him; for the present he was intent on the entertainment, and paused once only to empty a bottle of Munich beer which had been especially provided for him on a table with a scarlet tablecloth; for the day was hot, and the exertions of grubbing in the sand quite severe.

Bertie Keynes had not entered the water with the first wild scramble, but had stood on the bank a few minutes, divided between amazement and helpless giggling as he observed Mrs. Cyrus F. Bimm, a stout, middle-aged woman, lately widowed, plunge in without even pausing to take her stockings off, and fall flat on her face. But, though soaked, she was utterly undismayed, and, grasping her net, Wasted no time in idle laments or in changing her clothes. Her hat was naturally black, and streams of dye poured down her face and neck. Her dress was black, too, and as wet as her hat. But then the indescribable frolic of the thing—there is no other word for it—seized him, and just as Amelie, looking like a nymph of Grecian waterways, hurried past him, radiant, slim-limbed, an embodiment of joy, and beckoned to him, he delayed no longer, but joined the rest. But, 'Oh, if Judy could see me now!' he said to himself, as he took off his socks.

For an hour or more the pearl-hunting went on, and every oyster had been fished up and the whole lagoon churned into mud long before the Prince could be persuaded to leave it. Twice he made a false start, and came out of the water, only to seize his net again and hurry back on the chance of finding another, his pockets bulging with the shells he had not yet opened. All the time the telegraph was whirring and clicking the news of the huge success of Mrs. Palmer's first afternoon of Revels and the ecstasies of the Prince all over the country; and Mrs. John Z. Adelboden, like Marius, sat and wept among the ruins of Newport.

Bilton and Mrs. Emsworth had driven down together in a motor from New York, but the latter had to get back in time to act that evening, to return late on Saturday night, stop over Sunday, and act at Mon Repos on Sunday evening. Bilton, on the other hand, had taken a rare holiday, and was not returning to town till the next week. Constitutionally, he disliked a holiday; this one, however, he had less objection to, since there was a definite aim he wished to accomplish during it. He was a man to be described as a person of appetites rather than of emotions, and his appetites partook of the nature of the rest of him. They were keen, definite, and orderly—not clamorous or brutal in the least degree, but hard and clear-cut. He was supposed not many years ago to have proposed by telegram to the lady who subsequently became Mrs. John Z. Adelboden, who had replied by the same medium, 'Much regret; am otherwise engaged.' This had tickled Bilton tremendously, and he had the telegram framed and put up in his flat.

During the past summer Mrs. Massington had seen a good deal of him in London, and though she had frankly conceded that, according, anyhow, to Charlie Brancepeth's notions, he was a cad, there was a great deal about him she liked immensely. Just as she liked the clearness of line, absence of 'fluff,' in a room, so she liked—more than liked —precision of mind in a person. He was quick, definite, and reasonable in the sense that he acted, and could always be counted on to act, strictly in accordance with conclusions at which he had arrived, and which would be found to be based on sound reasoning. She liked also his spare, business-like habit of body, his scrupulous tidiness of attire, his quick, firm movements, his extreme efficiency of person. Underlying this, and but dimly present to her consciousness, was the fact that he so much resembled in face and frame Charlie Brancepeth, towards whom she had always felt a good deal of affection—whose devotion to her touched, though at times it irritated, her. Had things been different, she would have married him, but since matrimonially he was impossible, she did not in the least propose to practise celibacy. As she had told Judy, she believed she was incapable of what many other people would call love; but she was a great believer in happiness, and knew that she had a fine appetite for it. Many things might contribute to it, but love was by no means an essential constituent. And more and more, especially since her arrival in America, she liked the quality of mind which may be broadly called sensibleness. Americans—except when they were revelling—seemed to her to have a great deal of it.

The pearl-fishing had been succeeded by bridge, bridge by dinner, and dinner by a ball in the room entirely papered with roses. Sensationally—from the point of view, that is, of cost—it was a great success, but practically the scent was so overpowering that it was impossible to dance there for more than a few minutes at a time without, so to speak, coming up to breathe. Consequently, there was a good deal of sitting-out done, and Bilton firmly and collectedly managed to spend a large part of the evening with Sybil Massington.

'I should so like to know what you really think of us all,' he said on one of these occasions in his quiet, English-sounding voice.

'I adore you,' said she—' collectively, I mean.'

'Ah, that spoils it all,' said he; 'we all want to be adored individually.'

'There are too many of you for me to do that,' she said; 'I should have to cut my heart up into so many little bits. Wherever I go—there's a song about it—I leave my heart behind me. I always do that. People seem to me very nice.'

'You are taking the rest of the stuffing out,' remarked he in a slightly injured voice.

She laughed.

'Well, I find you all charming,' she said again. 'Will that do?'

'I suppose it will have to. And your friend, Lord Keynes?'

'Ah, he finds one person so charming that I don't think he thinks much about the rest,' she said. Look, there they are.'

Bilton did not look; he had already seen them; he usually saw things first.

'Do you think he will marry her?' he asked.

'Yes; certainly, I hope so. If he marries at all, he must marry money.'

'And Nature clearly designed Miss Palmer to be a peeress. In fact, the match was made in heaven.'

'I hope it will be ratified on earth,' she said. 'Why are you cynical about it?'

'I am never cynical; what makes you think that?'

'Well, simple, direct; it comes to the same thing. To tell the truth is often the most cynical thing you can do.'

'Not if it is a pleasant truth. And it will be very pleasant to Miss Palmer to be an English peeress. And, as you said yourself, it is only possible for Lord Keynes to marry money. And he is fortunate in his money-bag,' he added.

She frowned a little; there was something in this speech which, with all her admiration for his countrymen, struck her as both characteristic and disagreeable. He saw it.

'Ah, that offends you,' he said quickly. 'I apologize. I wish you would teach me better. You know there is a something, an inherent coarseness, about us, which I have seen get, ever so slightly, on to your nerves fifty times a day.'

She laughed.

'Teach you!' she said; 'I am learning far too much myself.'

'You learning? What, for instance?'

'Not to be finicking, not to be slack and dawdling. To go ahead and do something. If a person of my nature was in Mr. Palmer's place, do you suppose I should go on working as he does? I would never touch a business question again.'

He shook his head.

'Believe me, you would; you would not be able to help it. Lewis Palmer can't stop; his wife can't stop; I can't stop, in my small way. But you at present have the power of stopping. It is the most exquisite thing in the world. To us, to me, I assure you, it is like a cool breeze on a hot day to see you leisurely English people. In England you have a leisured class; we have none. Our wealthy class is the least leisured of all. If you adore us, as you say, grant us the privilege of seeing you like that.'

There was something in this speech that rather touched her—something also that certainly pleased her, and that was the tone of honest deference in which he spoke.

'In fact, you want to be English,' she said, laughing it off, 'and I want to be American.' And she looked at him, smiling.

But he did not smile at all, only again his brown eyes grew hot and black. That, too, pleased her. Then suddenly she felt vaguely frightened; she had not definitely intended to give him his chance now, and she did not wish him to take it. So she rose.

'Take me back,' she said. 'Take me into a crowd of your people. I want to learn a little more.'

CHAPTER VIII

The Revels ended on Saturday, on which day the wonder-stricken guests for the most part dispersed, their faces probably shining like Moses' at this social revelation, and went back to their humble homes. The success of them had been gigantic. Nobody (except Newport) talked about anything else for days, and to find news of international importance in the papers was almost impossible, for everything else except the Revels was tucked away into odd corners. Newport alone maintained an icy silence, but disaffection was already at work there, and those who were only struggling on the fringe of Newport society said openly that they would go to Long Island next year, since there really seemed to be some gaiety there, whereas Newport was like a wet Sunday afternoon. Mrs. Palmer's two English guests, however, stopped on. So also did Bilton; and Mrs. Emsworth, having decided not to go to Mass on Sunday morning, was coming down with the larger part of her company on Saturday night after her performance in New York. Sunday, however, was going to be a quiet day, with the exception that there was a large dinner-party in the evening and a play in the theatre afterwards. Ping-pong Armstrong also remained, for he was the recognised tame cat without claws about the house. Mrs. Palmer sometimes secretly wished, in her full consciousness of innocence, that people would 'talk' just a little about him and her, but nobody ever did. Even the Gutter Snipe never alluded to his constant presence in the house, but this was probably due to the fact that the editor—who knew a good deal about the meaner side of human nature—guessed that it would have pleased Mrs. Palmer. For it is a most extraordinary, though common, phenomenon to find that perfectly virtuous and upright people often like to be thought just a little wicked, whereas bad people are totally indifferent for the most part as to whether anyone thinks them good or not.

During the two or three days that had elapsed since Bilton and Mrs. Massington had their talk together, his conduct had been immensely pleasing to her. He had taken the hint she had given him like a gentleman, and had not allowed himself to drift into intimate conversation with her until she gave him the signal. He had been diplomatic and delicate—above all, he had been intelligent, not blundering, and she could not help contrasting him, much to his advantage, with the average Englishman, who either insists on 'talking the thing out,' or else looks sulky and wears a woebegone aspect. But Bilton had done neither; he had remained brisk, not brusque, and had resisted, apparently without effort, any attempt to bring her to the point, while remaining himself absolutely normal. In the meantime, during the self-imposed pause in her own affairs, Mrs. Massington watched with extreme satisfaction the development of that mission which had brought Bertie Keynes to America. Affairs for him certainly appeared to be running very smooth; she almost wished for some slight contretemps to take place in order to put things on the proper proverbial footing. In other words, Amelie and Bertie had made great friends, and owing to the extraordinary freedom which eligible young folk are given in America, with a view to letting them improve their acquaintance, they had got under way with much rapidity. The house being full, they had many opportunities for finding the isolation which exists in crowds, and took advantage of it. Mr. Palmer, however, with a strong sense of paternal duty, thought it well not to let the matter go too far without satisfying himself that he was justified in letting it go to all lengths. With this in his mind he went to his wife's rooms on Sunday morning to have a quiet talk, as was his custom.

'Pleased with your party?' he asked amiably.

'Lewis, I'm just sick with satisfaction,' she said. 'Long Island, I tell you, is made, and Newport will crumble into the sea. But what am I to do next year? Why, I believe that if at this moment I built a house on Sandy Hook, I could make it fashionable.'

'That would be very convenient,' said he. 'We could flag the liners and save half a day. I'm glad you are satisfied. Now, what do you get by it all?'

'Same as what you get when you've made a million dollars,' said Mrs. Palmer with some perspicacity. 'You don't want them. You don't know you've got them. But you like getting them.'

His bright gray eyes gleamed suddenly, and he looked at her approvingly.

'I guess that's true,' he said. 'I guess you've hit the nail on the head, as you do every time. We've got to get, you and I; and when we've got, we've got to get again. It's the getting we go for.'

His eyes wandered round the room a moment, and he went to a cabinet of bric-à-brac that stood between the windows.

'Where did you get that Tanagra figure from?' he asked. 'It's a forgery.' And he took it up and threw it into the grate, where it smashed to atoms.

'Well, I suppose you know,' said Mrs. Palmer calmly. 'Bilton sold it me.'

Lewis laughed.

'Spoiled his market,' he remarked. 'That man's very clever, but he lacks—he lacks length of vision.'

'Perhaps he didn't know it was a forgery,' said Mrs. Palmer charitably.

'That's worse. Give him the credit of knowing.'

Mrs. Palmer put down the paper she was reading.

'Lewis, you didn't come here just to break my things,' she said. 'What is it?'

'Lord Keynes. What do you know of him?' he asked, with his usual directness.

Had Mrs. Palmer been in the company of other people, she would have executed her famous scream, because she was amused. But she never wasted it, and it would have been quite wasted on her husband.

'He's charming,' she said. 'He's in excellent style; he's in the set in London. And he wants a wife with a competency. That's why I brought him here.'

'But what does he do?' asked her husband. 'Does he just exist?'

'Yes, I guess he exists. Men do exist in England; here they don't. They get.'

'Some exist here. Ping-pong does.'

'And who's Ping-pong?' she asked.

'Why, Armstrong. Amelie thought of it. He is a ping-pong, you know.'

This time Mrs. Palmer gave the scream, for she was so much amused as to forget the absence of an audience.

'Well, I'm sure, if Amelie isn't bright,' she said. 'But you're pretty far out, Lewis, if you think that Lord Keynes is a ping-pong. If he was an American, and did nothing, he would be. But men do nothing in England without being.'

'England's a ping-pong, I think sometimes,' remarked Lewis. 'She just plays about. However, we're not discussing that. Now I see you mean business with Lord Keynes. You'll run it through on your own lines, I suppose. But remember '—he paused a moment—' I guess it's rather difficult for one to say it,' he said, 'but it's just this: When a girl marries a man, if she doesn't hit it off, the best thing she can do is to make believe she does. But I doubt if Amelie can make believe worth a cent.'

'Well, she just adores him,' said Mrs. Palmer.

'That's good as far as it goes.'

'It goes just about to the end of the world,' said she.

Mr. Palmer considered this.

'The end of the world occurs sooner than you think sometimes,' he said. 'I'll get you a genuine Tanagra, if you like,' he added, 'and I'll guy Bilton about the other. I'll pretend he thought it was genuine. That'll make him tender.'

Though Mrs. Palmer had no objection to exaggeration in a good cause, she had not in the least been guilty of it when she said that Amelie adored Bertie Keynes. Most girls have daydreams of some kind, and Amelie, with the vividness that characterized her, had conjured up before now with some completeness her own complement. Unless a woman is celibate by nature (a thing happily rare), she is frequently conscious of the empty place in herself which it is her duty and her constant, though often unconscious, quest to find the tenant for. And Amelie was not in the least of a celibate nature; her warm blood beat generously, and the love of her nature that should one day pour itself on one at present overflowed in runnels of tenderness for all living things. The sprouts of the springing daisies were dear to her—dogs, horses, even the wild riot of the Revels, was worthy of her affectionate interest. But the rather unreasonable attention she bestowed on these numberless objects of affection was only the overflow from the cistern. One day it would be all given in full flood, its waters would bathe one who had chosen her, and whom her heart chose.

This morning she was riding through the woods with Bertie Keynes, the charmingly sensible laws of American etiquette making it possible for her to ride with anyone she wished, alone and unattended. They had just pulled up from a gallop through the flowering wood paths, and the two horses, muscle-stretched and quiet, were willing to walk unfrettingly side by side.

'Oh, it all smells good, it smells very good,' she said. 'And this morning somehow—I suppose it's after mamma's fête—I like the fresh, green out-of-doors more than ever. I think we live altogether too much indoors in America.'

'But the fêtes were entirely out of doors,' said Bertie.

'Yes; but the pearl-party was just the most indoor thing I ever saw,' said she. 'Certainly it was out of doors, but all the time I wanted somebody to open the windows, let in a breath—a breath of——'and she paused for a word.

'I know what you mean,' he said.

'Did you feel it too? I want to know?'

'In that case, I did.'

He looked at her a moment.

'But all the time you were my breath of out-of-doors,' he said.

Amelie was not fool enough to take this as a compliment, or to simper acknowledgments. As he spoke he wondered how she would take it, hoped she would look at him, anyhow, then hoped she would not.

'Ping-pong is indoors enough,' she said. 'Do tell me what you think of him.'

'I don't think of him,' said Bertie. 'If I sat down to think of him I should instantly begin, without meaning to, to think about something else.'

'Do you loathe him?' she asked.

'Good heavens, no! But—but there are people like husks. Just husks.'

She considered this.

'Husky Ping-pong,' she said, half to herself. 'Poor Husky Ping-Pong. Do you grow them in England?'

'Yes, heaps. They grow in London. They are always at every party, and they know everybody, and make themselves immensely agreeable. It is all they do. And you see them in the back seats of motor-cars.'

She looked at him with some mischief in her eyes.

'And what do you do?' she asked.

'No more than they. Anyone is at liberty to call one a ping-pong. Only I'm not.'

'I know. I was wondering what the difference was according to your description.'

'There is none, I suppose. But don't confuse me with ping-pongs.'

She laughed.

'Lord Keynes, you are just adorable,' she said. 'I'll race you to the end of the avenue.'

'Adoring me all the time?'

'Unless you win,' she said.

'Then I will lose on purpose.'

'That will be mean. I never adore meanness. Are you ready?'

And her beautiful horse gathered his legs up under him and whirled her down the grassy ride. Bertie got not so good a start, and rode the gauntlet of the flying turf scattered by his heels, till, a bend of the path favouring him, he drew nearly abreast, pursuing her through sunshine and the flecked shadows on the grass. He had seen her day after day in the Revels, night after night at ball or concert, yet never had her beauty seemed to him so compelling as it did now, as, swaying the rein with dainty finger-tip, her body moving utterly in harmony with the grand swing of her horse's stride, she turned her smiling face to him, all ecstasy at the exhilaration of the gallop, all wide-eyed smile of consternation at the decreasing lead which she had got at the start. And all at once, for the first time, his blood was kindled; he had admired her form as one may admire a perfect piece of sculptured grace, he had admired her splendid vitality, her charming companionship, her intense joie de vivre. But now all the separate, isolated admirations were fused and glowed flamelike. Suddenly she laughed aloud, as he had nearly caught her up.

'Ride, ride!' she cried, in a sudden burst of intimate, upwelling joy that came from she knew not where. 'You will win.'

Apollo pursued Daphne in the vale of Tempe, and in the vales of Long Island Bertie Keynes rode hard after Amelie. And she encouraged him to win, she even drew rein a shade—just a shade—though she had wanted to win so much.

All the afternoon motor-cars, bicycles, carts, tandems, brakes, were arriving, for though it was a quiet Sunday, Mrs. Palmer, it was well-known, liked to see a few friends about teatime, who usually stopped for dinner, and before evening it was as if the Revels were extended a day longer. The weather was extremely hot, and in consequence dinner was served in the great marquee on the terrace. Among others, Mrs. Emsworth had come with those of her company who were to act that night in the theatre. The petit saleté to be produced had never been presented on any stage before, the Lord-Chamberlain of England, with a fatherly regard for the morals of the nation entrusted to him, having deemed that it was too sale; and, as a matter of fact, Mrs. Emsworth rather embraced this opportunity of playing it before a private audience, with a view to seeing whether her public in New York, with their strange mixture of cynical indifference to anything but money, and the even stranger survival of the Puritan spirit, which crops up every now and then as some rare border plant will crop up among the weeds and grasses of a long overgrown garden, would be likely to swallow it. She herself was a little nervous of presenting it there. Bilton, on the other hand, who might be supposed to know the taste of the patrons for whom he catered so successfully, thought it would be an immense success.

'After all, Paris loved it,' he said, as he had a few words with her when they went up to dress for dinner. 'And what is bad enough for Paris is good enough for New York. You may take my word for it that what Paris swallows America will gobble.'

'You mean they are more—more emancipated here?'

'Not at all, but that they are eager to accept anything that has been a success in London or Paris. Why, I produced "Dram-drinking" here. Dead failure. I took it to London, where it ran well, and brought it back here. Tremendous success. We Americans, I mean, are entirely devoid of artistic taste. But we give our decided approbation to what other people say is artistic, which, for your purpose and mine, is the same thing. Left to ourselves, we like David Harum. I produce "Hamlet" here next week. The house is full for the next month. But alter the name and say it is by a new author, and it won't run a week. The papers, to begin with, would all damn it.'

'But the critics. Do you mean they don't know "Hamlet"?'

'There are no critics, and they don't know anything. They are violent ignoramuses who write for unreadable papers.'

'Then why do you ever consider them?'

'Because they are not critics, and because in New York everyone reads the unreadable. This is my room—you are next door, I think.'

'I shan't come to dinner,' she said. 'I am rather tired. By the way, is that large, beautiful girl Mrs. Palmer's daughter?'

'Probably. Why?'

'Will she be at the play to-night?'

'Probably. Why?'

Mrs. Emsworth frowned.

'It is not fit,' she said.

Bilton raised his eyebrows. This was indeed a woman of 'infinite variety.'

'You cannot alter your play for fear she will be there,' he said.

'No; I suppose not. I say, what devils we are!'

The play was an enormous success, and Mrs. Emsworth's personality seemed to lift it out of the regions of the equivocal. The part, that of a woman who represented the triumph of mind over morals, fitted her like a glove, and it was as impossible to be shocked as it is when a child uses a coarse or profane expression. Her impropriety was no more improper than is the natural instinct of a bird or animal improper; by a supreme effort of nature rather than art she seemed to roll up like an undecipherable manuscript the whole moral code, and say, 'Now, let's begin again.' Her gaiety covered her sins; more than that it transformed them into something so sunlit that the shadows vanished. Even as we laugh at Fricka when she inveighs against Siegmund and Sieglinde, feeling that condemnation is impossible, because praise or blame is uncalled for and irrelevant, so the ethical question (indeed, there was no question) of whether the person whom Mrs. Emsworth represented behaved quite 'like a lady 'never occurred to anyone. Her vitality dominated the situation.

Of all her audience, there was none so utterly surprised at the performance as Bilton. He knew her fairly well, but he had never seen in her half so clearly the triumph of temperament. Knowing her as he did, he knew it was not art; it was only an effort, unique and unsurpassable, to be herself. Again and again he longed to be a play-wright; he could write her, he felt, could he write at all, a part that would be she. For never before had she so revealed herself a sunlit pagan. And as the play went on, his wonder increased. She was admirable. Then Mrs. Massington, who sat next him, laughed at something he had not seen, and for the moment he was vexed to have been called down from the stage to a woman less vivid, for his sensualism was of a rather high order.

Late that night, after the supper that followed the entertainment, he went upstairs. In Mon Repos there was no barbaric quenching of electric light at puritanical hours, no stranding of belated guests in strange passages, and he walked up from the smoking-room with his hands in his pockets, unimpeded by any guttering bedroom candle. The evening had been a triumph for Dorothy—in the mercantile way it had been as great a triumph for him, for the cachet of success at Mrs. Palmer's would certainly float the play in New York. The Gutter Snipe, he reflected, would have at least a column of virulent abuse, since it had been performed at Mon Repos. So much the better; he would have a whole procession of sandwich men, London fashion, parading Fifth Avenue, every alternate one bearing the most infamous extracts from that paper. To use abuse as a means of advertisement was a new idea ... it interested him. Certainly, Dorothy had been marvellous. She was a witch ... no one knew all her incantations ... and he paused at his bedroom door. She had gone upstairs only five minutes before him. Since the performance she had been queen bee to the whole party; he himself had not had a word with her. Surely even Puritanical Long Island would not be shocked if he just went to her even now for a minute, and congratulated her. Besides, Puritanical Long Island would never know. So he tapped softly and entered, after the manner of a man whose tap merely means 'I am coming.'

The room was brilliantly lit. Mrs. Emsworth was standing by the bed. By her, having looked in for a go-to-bed chat, was Sybil Massington.

CHAPTER IX

Mrs. Emsworth had a rehearsal early next morning at New York, and in consequence she had to leave by the Stock Exchange train at nine, while most of the inhabitants of Mon Repos were still reposing. She herself was down and out before anyone had appeared, for she had slept but badly, and had awoke, definitely and irrevocably, soon after six. Sleeping, as her custom was, with blinds up and curtains undrawn, the glory of the morning quickly weaned her from her bed, and by soon after seven she was strolling about outside in the perfection of an early September hour. There had been a little thunder during the night, and betwixt waking and sleeping she had heard somewhat heavy rain sluicing on to the shrubberies and thirsty grass, and now, when she went out, the moisture was lying like unthreaded diamonds in the sun, and like a carpet of pearls in the shade. Many gardeners were already at work, some on the grass and flower-beds, others bringing up fruit from the greenhouses, and all looked with wide-eyed yokel amazement at the famous actress as she walked up and down. One of them had brought his small child, a boy of about six years old, with him, and the little lad, with a bunch of Michaelmas daisies in his cap, very gravely pushed at one handle of his father's wheelbarrow.

Now, children and Mrs. Emsworth were mutually irresistible, and the barrow was stopped, and the father stood by in a sort of proud, admiring sheepishness, while Mrs. Emsworth made herself fascinating. She had a story to tell about those particular flowers the child had in his hat. The fairies had made them during the night. One had brought the white silk out of which they were cut, another had brought oil-paints to colour them, a third had brought a watering-pot with a rose to sprinkle them. But the bad fairy had seen them, and had come on her broomstick, surrounded by an army of flying toads and spiders and slugs, to destroy the flowers. And a toad had just begun to eat the top of one of the flowers when the sun said, 'Pop, I'm coming,' and before the bad fairy could get under shelter it had shone on her, so that she instantly curled up like a burnt feather, and died with a pain so awful that stomach-ache was nothing to it.

This was so absorbing both to the narrator and the audience that neither had observed that someone else was listening, and as the boy broke out into childish laughter, crying, 'That was nice!' at the awful fate of the wicked fairy, Mrs. Emsworth looked behind her, half hearing a sudden rustle, and saw Amelie standing there, also absorbed.

She instantly sat down on the other handle of the barrow.

'Yes, Tommy, that was nice,' she echoed. 'And do you think the lady will tell us another story? Ask her.'

The lady was so kind as to oblige them again. This time it was about a real live person, who was always very good in the morning, and sat down and did her work as she should, with the good fairy sitting beside her. But later on the good fairy would sometimes go to sleep, and as soon as she was asleep all the bad fairies who had not curled up like burnt feathers came in. And one of them made her eat peas with her knife, and another made her spill her bread-and-milk down her new dress, and another made her lose her temper, and another made her make mud pies in the middle of her nice room, so that it had to be swept again. And she was very unhappy about this, and used to put pins in the good fairy's seat to prevent her going to sleep, and give her strong coffee to drink for the same purpose. But it was all no good, until one day she noticed that as long as a child was with her the good fairy kept awake. So the poor lady set to work again, and tried to see a child every day, because even if she talked to a child for a little in the morning, and especially if it gave her a kiss, the good fairy was much less sleepy.

Tommy's eyes grew wide.

'Oh, I do love you!' he said, and hoisted himself with his dirty boots into her lap. Then, smitten with a child's sudden shyness, he clambered down again, and the wheelbarrow went on its way.

The two others strolled on in silence for a moment over the grass, Amelie with a strange lump in her throat. Then she put her arm round Mrs. Emsworth's waist.

'Good-morning,' she said quietly, and they kissed.

'I think I love you too,' she said. 'I came out to tell you that.'

Mrs. Emsworth kissed her again.

'That is nice too,' she said. 'But what makes you?'

'I don't know. I think it was seeing you in that horrid play last night. You were like a sunbeam in—in a cesspool. But why do that sort of thing?'

Mrs. Emsworth shrugged her shoulders.

'Because people are beasts, my dear,' she said—'because they like that sort of thing. And one has to live.'

Amelie thought a moment, with her face growing grave.

'Oh, I am sorry, I am sorry,' she said.

A sudden impatience and ungovernable irritation filled Dorothy. She felt as if she was being hauled back to her ordinary life, when she was so happy in the sweetness of the early morning hour. Why did this stupid, gawky girl come and speak to her like this? But with an effort at self-control stronger than she usually bothered herself to make, she mastered it.

'Oh, never mind, never mind,' she said. 'Walk with me a little further, and let me look at you because you are beautiful, and the trees because they are beautiful, and the grass and the sky. What a heavenly moment! Do not let us waste it. Look, the lawns are empty, where yesterday they were full with all sorts of silly and wicked people. Is that an insult to your mother's guests? I think it is. Anyhow, I was one of the silly, wicked people. But now I am not silly or wicked; I am very good, and very innocent, and I want to take everything into my arms and stroke it. My God! what a beautiful world! I am so glad I did not die in the night.'

Amelie laughed. This mood found in her a ready response.

'Yes, yes,' she cried; 'go on. I know what you mean. You want to be rid of all else, to be just a consciousness in the world. I have felt that. What does it say?'

Dorothy shook her head.

'It never says the same thing for five minutes,' she said. 'Just now you and I feel that. If we sat here for a quarter of an hour we should begin to talk chiffon. If we sat here longer we might talk scandal. Only I think these moments are given us as a sort of refreshment. God washes our faces every now and then, and we proceed to soil them instantly.'

She turned to her companion eagerly.

'Don't soil yours,' she said. 'Don't let others soil it. It grows on you; it is like using rouge,' and she broke off suddenly.

There was silence a moment, then Amelie said:

'Look, here is Tommy coming back from the house.'

Mrs. Emsworth rose.

'Let us go in,' she said. 'It is time for me to have breakfast, as I am going by the early train. But remember that I was good for ten minutes—if '—and her voice quavered—' if people, as they are sure to do, tell you things.'

They passed Tommy, who paused as they got near. Mrs. Emsworth seemed not to notice him. Then she looked back.

'Dear little chap,' she said, and, retracing her steps, kissed him again.

It must be allowed that by the time they got to the station there was nothing of the early-morning Mrs. Emsworth left about her. On the platform Bilton approached her with rather an anxious face.

'I particularly want to speak to you, Dorothy,' he said in a low voice. 'You can help me.'

She looked at him with extremely vivid virulence.

'Oh, go away, you beast!' she said. 'I can help you, you say. No doubt I can. But I won't. Go away!'

Bilton had the sense to see that he needed help, for there had been a very awkward moment when he went into Mrs. Emsworth's room the night before. He himself was very good at acting quickly in any emergency he had foreseen, but this one was utterly unforeseen, and had found him helplessly unprepared. Had he had even a moment's preparation, he felt sure that he could have said something which would anyhow have been palliative; but since the thing was done, he did not trouble his head about what the palliative would have been. For he had come in—his knock unheard—and found the two ladies together. Upon which Dorothy laughed, Mrs. Massington turned pink, and he retreated. There was the situation. And the most unpromising feature of it was that Dorothy had laughed. With all his quickness he could see no way out. It was clearly impossible for him to open the subject again to Mrs. Massington; it was equally obvious that she would put a construction on his presence. The only person who could conceivably help him was Dorothy, and now she had called him a beast.

But, apparently, during the journey to New York she relented, for as they boarded the mangy-looking ferry-boat that conveyed them across the river, she threw a word to him over her shoulder.

'I shall be in at lunch,' she said. 'You can come if you like.'

He did not like that either, though it was better than nothing, for he felt that she had in a sense the whip-hand of him, and knew it. And Bilton was not accustomed to let anybody have the whip-hand of him.

Mrs. Emsworth always took her rehearsals herself; she had a stage-manager, it is true, who sat meekly in the wings, and whom she contradicted from time to time, his office being to be contradicted, and to write down stage directions which she gave him. Occasionally Bilton looked in for an hour or two; him she contradicted also at the time, but usually incorporated his suggestions afterwards. Her author, if it was a new play, was also in attendance in the stalls; his office was to cut lines out or put lines in. Though, perhaps, she could not act, she certainly had a strong sense of drama; that was why she had laughed at Bilton's entrance the night before, for the situation struck her as admirably constructed. She had seen, with a woman's sixth sense, as correctly and minutely as in a photograph on what footing he and Mrs. Massington were, and though she was not in the slightest degree in love with the man—or, indeed, ever had been—yet she looked on him as her possession, and while she did not want him, she distinctly did not wish him to change hands. Jealousy of the ordinary green variety had something to do with it. A shrewd eye to business, the knowledge of how much better her career went if the great impresario was her devoted admirer, had about as much. Only, if her devoted admirer was to become the confirmed, settled, and sealed-up admirer of someone else, she did not propose to be the candle at which the sealing was done. To be cat's-paw to an act of treason against herself was a feat of altruism of which she was hopelessly incapable. Then, finally, in this jumble of feelings which had resulted in her calling Bilton a beast, there was something neither sordid nor selfish—namely, the determination, distinct and honest, that Mrs. Massington, a woman whom she both liked and respected, should not, at any rate by any auxiliary help of hers, be deceived as to what Bilton really was. She herself, no doubt, with the aid of liquid eyes and a mouth so beautiful that it looked as if it must be made for the utterance of perfect verity, could persuade Mrs. Massington that she and Bilton had never been in intimate relations, and assure her, even to conviction, that his slightly informal visit last night was only—as was indeed true—a visit for the utterance of a few words of congratulation on her success. But she did not intend—from motives good, bad, and indifferent, all mixed—to do this for him. Only, into the composition of this intention the good and honest and fine motive entered.

It was not wonderful that this pot-au-feu of feeling, amounting to positive agitation, did not tend towards the comfort of her company at the rehearsal, nor indeed, on the part of the manageress, toward the calm attitude of the thoughtful critic. In consequence, before the rehearsal was an hour old—it was the first 'without books' rehearsal —the second leading lady was next door to tears, the leading gentleman in sulks, the author in despair, and Mrs. Emsworth in a mood of dangerous suavity that made the aspiring actors heart-sick.

'Miss Dayrell,' she was saying, 'would you mind not turning your back completely on the audience when you speak those lines. Mr. Yates'—this was the leading gentleman—' I am so sorry to interrupt your conversation, but my throat is rather sore this morning, and I cannot hear myself speak if you talk so loud to your friends. Yes; I think, as you are not on the stage just now, it would be better if you left it. Yes, Miss Dayrell, you see these are perhaps the most important lines in the play which you have to speak, and the audience will have a better chance of understanding it if you let them hear what Mr. Farquar has given you to say. Mr. Farquar, I am afraid the second act is about twice as long as it ought to be. I have cut some of it—at least, with your approval, I propose to cut some of it.'

Mr. Farquar sighed heavily in the stalls. He had spent the greater part of the last three nights in writing more of the second act, because it was not long enough.

'Thank you,' continued Mrs. Emsworth, interpreting the sigh as silence. 'You will see my alterations when we get to them. Would you kindly begin, Miss Dayrell, at "If I had a pitch-fork."'

Suddenly her voice changed to a wheedling tenderness.

'And if my own Teddy Roosevelt hasn't come down of his own delicious accord to see his aunt in her pretty theatre! Teddy, the world is very evil, and my mother bids me bind my hair. I beg your pardon, ladies and gentlemen, but I had to say a word to Popsie Tootsicums. Now, dear Miss Dayrell, let's begin again. You enter. Excellent. You turn. Yes, that's exactly what I want. Now.'

A murmur of relief went round, and the faded actors and actresses raised their drooped heads as when a shower has passed over a drought-dried garden. And Teddy R., the angel in disguise, sat sparsely down in the middle of the stage, and smiled on the spectacle of his beneficent work.

But because the happy appearance of Teddy Roosevelt had made le beau temps for the members of Mrs. Emsworth's company, it did not at all follow that Bilton, when he came to lunch, would find the same sunshine awaiting him, even as there is no guarantee that, because at twelve o'clock on an April day pellucid tranquillity flooded the earth, there will not be a smart hail-storm an hour afterwards. On the contrary, it was safe to bet that, whatever mood Mrs. Emsworth was in, she would be in a different one before long. The spring-day temperament of hers was, in fact, the only thing to be reckoned on. Consequently, since Bilton had not witnessed the varied phases exhibited at the theatre, he hoped, somehow sanguinely, that she would not be in a temper that so roundly labelled him 'beast' at Port Washington Station.

She seemed to have forgotten he was coming to lunch—as a matter of fact, she had, and welcomed him charmingly.

'Dear man,' she said, 'how nice of you to look in. I'm nearly dead with fatigue; let's have lunch at once. Harold, I've acted every part in 'Telegrams' through from beginning to end this morning. Those people are so hard-working, but they are so stupid. In fact, I know every part but my own. That I have promised them to be word perfect in by five o'clock this afternoon.'

'You don't rehearse again this afternoon?' asked he.

'Oh yes, I do. Three hours more this afternoon, then just time for dinner, then theatre again till half-past eleven, then supper at the Waldorf. To-morrow, rehearsal all morning, matinee, evening performance, every interval filled up with reporters and milliners and lime-light people. Oh, well, thank God, we shall all soon be dead. Time to rest then, and time to lunch now.'

'Don't overdo it, Dolly,' said he, as they sat down.

'Overdo it?' My dear boy, it is rather late in the day to recommend me not to overdo it. Besides, we women, and in special this woman, are so much stronger than men. My company follow me through hours of rehearsal, faint yet pursuing. They drop asleep, and I wake them with a gentle touch on their shoulders, and they say, "Is it morning yet?" And I say, "Kindly wake up for ten minutes, and go through this scene, dear, and then you shall go to sleep again." Then, at the end, when I say, "That is all for to-night, ladies and gentlemen," they all hurry away in desperate fear lest I should ask them to supper. "Il faut lutter pour l'art," as Daudet says. I'm so glad I'm not a prig, Harold, who thinks about the exigencies of the artistic temperament. I'm not an artist at all. People come to see me act because I'm (a) rather good-looking, (b) in rollicking good spirits. What delicious cantaloupe! I like my food.'

'All the same, I wish you would take more care of yourself,' said he, fostering her present temper with a light and, he hoped, skilful hand. 'I'm sure you do too much, and some day you will break down. You are spending more than your income of nervous energy, you are living on the capital.'

'Just what I mean to do. Like Mr. Carnegie, I think it would be a disgrace to die with an ounce of nervous force left in one. What use is it when one is dead? I am living on the capital; I intend to spend it all. I shall die sooner, no doubt—but, oh, Harold, what an awful old person I should be at sixty if I proposed, which I do not, to live as long. Look at the old women who have spent their youth as I have done. Rouge on their raddled cheeks, clinging to life, mortally afraid of dying, trying to get a few more successes, with one bleary eye anxiously fixed on some back door into heaven, the other roaming round to see if they can't have another little flirtation before they die. No; let me die at the height of my success. I don't want to stumble down-hill into my grave. I want to find it on the mountain-top. And I shall lie down in it quite content, for I have had a good time, and ask no further questions. And, Harold, plant a great crimson rambler, and a vine like Omar, and a few daffodils, and some Michaelmas daisies, on my grave, so that I shall flower all the year round. And come, if you like, once a year to it, and think over any occasion when I have pleased or amused you, and say to yourself if you can, "She was rather a good sort." Then go away to the woman who happens at the time to—oh, I forgot. We've got to have a talk. And I've been doing all the talking. Have you finished lunch? Come into the next room.'

The April day was behaving quite characteristically. It had got cold and cloudy, and a bitter wind blew suddenly. Mentally he shivered, and followed her.

She had thrown herself down on the big Louis XV. couch. Teddy Roosevelt was having his dinner. There was no mitigation within the horizon.

'About Sybil Massington,' she said, and shut her mouth again as if it worked on a steel spring.

Bilton lit his cigar, and took his time, wishing to appear not nervous.

'Ah, yes,' he said. 'I remember.'

'That line is no good,' remarked Dorothy critically. 'You must get more sincerity into it, or drop it.'

He dropped it, and sat down.

'I've been wanting to tell you for some time, Dorothy,' he said, 'that I hope to marry Mrs. Massington. I should have done so before, only it's an awkward thing to say.'

'There is always a slight crudeness in that situation,' said she. 'Men always try to explain away what can't be explained at all. So cut it short. I know you must say a few words, but let them be few.'

'Well, it's just this,', said he: 'we've been great friends, we've got along excellently; you have always been charming to me, and I hope I haven't treated you badly.'

'Oh no, first-class time,' said she, the gamin coming to the surface.

'Well, now I want to marry,' he said, 'and I come to you for your help. If you had been in my position, I would have helped you.'

'Thanks. Well?'

'You know it was a devilish awkward moment last night. And you made it worse. You laughed. You shouldn't have done that.'

Dorothy's face relaxed.

'I couldn't help it,' she said. 'Dramatically, it was perfect, and so funny. Harold, if you could have seen your own face of blank amazement, I really believe you would have laughed too.'

He frowned.

'A pal ought to help a man out,' he said.

'I'm sure you went out pretty quick,' she interpolated. 'Oh, don't peashoot me,' he said. 'Now, a word from you will help me. I can't offer any explanation to Mrs. Massington, simply because, if I tried, she would be convinced there is something to explain. You can. A half word from you will do it. Represent me as your business manager—very business—with an urgent question to ask, and in my stupid, unconventional American way, it not occurring to me that there was any impropriety——'

'And my laugh? How shall I explain that?'

'Because it did occur to you what construction Mrs. Massington would put on it. Because my face of horror when I saw what I had done was so funny. You said so yourself.'

Dorothy paused.

'In other words,' said she slowly, 'I am to tell Mrs. Massington, either directly or by implication, that you and I are you and I, not we—that—just that.'

'Quite so,' he said, 'and very neatly put.'

She sat up.

'I refuse,' she said.

'Why? For what possible reason?'

'For a reason you couldn't appreciate.'

'Let me try.'

'I can't explain it even. But the outline is this: I respect and like Sybil Massington, therefore I will not assist you to marry her. It is not my business to open her eyes—you may marry her if you can—but neither is it my business to close them. Even if you wished it, I would not marry you myself, because I don't think you would be a—well, a satisfactory husband. So I will not help you.' 'Bilton's face was clearly given him to conceal his thoughts. On this occasion it expressed nothing whatever, though he thought a good deal.

'You want to stand in my light, then,' he said.

'Not at all, only I won't hold the candle for you.'

'You refuse to tell the truth to Mrs. Massington; you refuse to tell her what you know—namely, that I came to your room last night merely to congratulate you on your success?'

'I refuse to tell her a fag-end of the truth like that—a truth that is designed to deceive.'

His eye wandered round the room before he replied, and in its course fell on the grate. To-day also there was a torn letter lying in it. A slight tinge of colour came into his face.

'I can't understand you,' he said. 'As far as I know, you on the whole wish me well; you have assured me that you would not marry me yourself. What do you want, then? Do you want to be paid for doing it? If you are not unreasonable in your demands, I will meet them.' She got up, her eyes blazing.

'That is enough,' she said. 'Not another word, Harold, or I assure you I will throw the heaviest and hardest thing I can lift at you. I mean it.'

A rather ugly light came into his eyes—a stale, unwholesome sort of glow.

'Pray don't,' he said; 'we will leave the subject. I think you are behaving most ungenerously—that is all. I should like a few words with you about your dresses in "Telegrams." I will wait till you are ready to discuss them with me. Take a cigarette.'

She looked at him a moment in silence. In spite of herself, she could not help feeling the infernal mastery he had over her. As always, the more violent she became the more he seemed steeped in a calm compound of indifference and almost boredom. And since it is obviously more exhausting to continue violent than to continue calm, it followed that she had to compose herself, thus changing first, while he merely remained unmoved. It had happened often before, and it happened now.

'What is it you want me to say to Mrs. Massington?' she asked at length.

'Pray do not let us discuss it. You might throw something at me,' said he, smiling inwardly.

'Don't you see my point?' she asked. 'Besides, a word from me would do no good. She saw the terms we were on. It was obvious, blatant.'

'Then no harm would be done by your saying a word. She would not be deceived.'

'No; but she would think I tried to deceive her.'

'Would you mind that?' he asked.

'Very much. I like her.'

Bilton knew well the value of the waiting game in an argument, the futility of trying to persuade a woman to do something, especially if she shows the least sign of persuading herself. So he said nothing whatever, since her re-opening the subject pointed to an already existing indecision. But her final answer, when it came, was not in the least what he expected.

'And I refuse finally to help you,' she said. 'If you wish, I will discuss the dresses.'

Bilton would never have made himself so successful a career as he had had he not possessed to a very high degree the power of concentrating his mind on one thing, to the complete exclusion of other preoccupations, and for the next half-hour no cloud of what had happened crossed in his mind the very clear sky of the new play's prospects. He was able to give his whole and complete attention to it, until between them they had settled what he desired to settle. Then, since, like all other days, it was a busy day with him, he rose.

'Good-bye, Dorothy,' he said, 'and don't overdo it.'

Once again she wavered.

'And do you forgive me?' she asked.

'Not in the least. But I don't imagine you care.'

'But I do care.'

He drew on his gloves with great precision.

'I beg your pardon; if you really cared you would do as I ask,' he said. 'Good-bye. I shall be at the theatre this evening.'

She let him go without further words, and, in spite of the heat, he walked briskly down Fifth Avenue. He was not a forgiving man, and though he would not put himself out to revenge himself on anyone, since he had more lucrative ways of employing his time and energies, he was perfectly ready, even anxious, to do her an ill-turn if he had the opportunity. And certainly it seemed to him that there was a handle ready to his grasping when he remembered the torn note from Bertie Keynes which he had picked up in the grate. How exactly to use it he did not at present see, but it seemed to him an asset.

CHAPTER X

One afternoon late in October Ginger was sitting cross-legged on the hearthrug of Judy's drawing-room. Outside a remarkably fine London fog had sat down on the town during the morning, and, like the frog footman in 'Alice in Wonderland,' proposed to sit there till to-morrow, if not for days and days. But a large fire was burning in the grate, for Judy detested unfired rooms, and the electric light was burning. The windows were not shuttered nor the blinds drawn, because Ginger, a Sybarite in sensations, said it made him so much more comfortable to see how disgusting it was outside. So the jaundiced gloom peered in through the windows, and by contrast gave an added animation to Ginger's conversation. He had usually a good deal to say, whether events of interest had occurred lately or not. But just now events of some importance to him and Judy had been occurring with bewildering rapidity, and in consequence conversation showed even less signs than usual of flagging.

'In fact, the world is like a morning paper, so crammed with news that one can't read any one paragraph without another catching one's eye. And your new paragraph, Judy, is most exciting. What has happened, do you suppose?'

'Nothing—probably nothing; Sybil is just tired of it all. She is like that. She goes on enjoying things enormously till a moment comes; at that moment she finds them instantly and immediately intolerable. I am only surprised that it didn't occur sooner.'

'Well, she had enough of New York pretty soon,' said Ginger. 'She only stopped down at Long Island for ten days. Then she had a month's travelling; she returns to New York on a Monday, and leaves for England forty-eight hours afterwards. You know, she enjoyed it enormously at first. I think something did happen.'

Judy shook her head.

'No; on her return she found she couldn't endure it for a single moment longer. And I'm sure I don't wonder. The description of the pearl-fishing party made me sick. Besides, what could have happened?'

Ginger handed his cup for some more tea.

'If you want me to guess, I will,' he said; 'but I don't think you'll like it.'

'Pray guess,' said she.

'Well, I guess that Bilton—her own Bilton—suddenly behaved like—like Bilton.'

'Why?' said Judy.

'Because she wrote me a letter full of Bilton one week, since when his name has not occurred.'

Judy nodded.

'The same applies to Mrs. Emsworth,' she said. 'Do you think——?'

'Yes,' said Ginger.

'For a fool, you are rather sharp,' said Judy. 'I wonder if it is so.'

'I don't; I know it,' said Ginger. 'By the way, I saw poor Charlie yesterday.'

'Were you down at Sheringham?'

'No; he has left Sheringham. Apparently you have to get up when a bell rings, and eat all that is given you, and live out of doors till another bell rings. Charlie said he would sooner die like a gentleman than live like a Strasburg goose. So he left. He is down at Brighton in his mother's house, living out of doors.'

Judy stirred her tea thoughtfully.

'Has he told Sybil yet?' she asked. 'You remember he would not let us tell her; he said he wished to tell her himself.'

'I don't know; I know he meant to.'

'Humanly speaking, what chance has he got?' she asked.

'A good one, if he will be sensible; he probably won't. But one person could make him sensible.'

Judy never asked unnecessary questions, and let this pass in silence.

'And have you heard from the millionaire?' she asked.

'Bertie? Yes. Bertie seems uncommonly happy. So should I be if I was going to marry the richest girl in the five continents. Also I think he's in love with her.'

'Isn't Gallio delighted?'

'Yes; for the first time in his life, he really takes an interest in Bertie. He says a man's efficiency is measured by his success. Success means income, you know. Gallio speaks of himself as the most inefficient man of his own acquaintance. But the pictures have to be sold, all the same. Bertie's news came a little too late.'

'Pictures?' asked Judy.

'Hadn't you heard. You see, Gallio, about a month ago, suddenly became aware that he had a genius for speculating on the Stock Exchange. He chose American rails to exercise his genius on. But the American rails went flat, and knocked him flat. So all the Dutch pictures are up at Christie's next week. He doesn't care. As soon as he gets the money for them, he is going to speculate again. He has written to Bertie in case he can get any sort of special information from Palmer. He has stockbrokers to dinner, and lunches with bulls and bears.'

Judy was silent a moment.

'What about Mrs. Emsworth?' she asked suddenly.

Ginger had got hold of a large Persian cat, and was stroking it. The animal was in the full ecstasy of sensuous pleasure, with eyes shut and neck strained to his hand. But, as Judy asked this, he paused a moment, and stroked it the wrong way. It hit at him with its paw, and fled in violent indignation.

'Well, what about Mrs. Emsworth?' he repeated.

'Ginger, don't be ridiculous. It is loyal of you to pretend not to know what I mean, but still ridiculous. How has Bertie managed to do this under her very guns?'

'I suppose he silenced them first,' said Ginger cautiously. 'Or perhaps she has no guns.'

'Why, then, two years ago, did we all talk about nothing else but her and Bertie?'

'Because we are gossips,' said he.

'Do you mean that?'

Ginger examined his injured hand.

'Yes, I mean that,' he said. 'Bertie told me all that happened. He fell desperately in love with her; he wrote her a very foolish letter, which proposed, oh, all sorts of things—marriage among them. Immediately afterwards she—well, we all began talking about her and Bilton.'

'What happened to the letter?' asked Judy.

'Don't know,' said he.

Judy was silent a little.

'Anyhow, it all hangs together with your idea about Sybil and Bilton,' she said at length.

'I wondered if you were going to see that,' said Ginger rather loftily.

Judy went to the window and looked out.

'I like that fog,' she said, 'because it renders all traffic and business of all sorts out of the question. I like the feeling that London, anyhow, has to pause, and just twiddle its thumbs until God makes the wind blow.'

'After all, a fog comes from smoke, and it was man who lit the fires,' remarked Ginger parenthetically.

'You needn't remind one of that,' said she. 'Now, Sybil told me there were no fogs in New York. That is awful. Her letters were awful. The whole of life was a ceaseless grind; if you stopped for a moment, you were left behind. How hopelessly materialistic! Why, the only people who do any good in the world—apart from making Pullman cars and telephones, that is to say—are exactly those who do stop—who sit down and think. All the same, it is possible to stop too much. You are always stopping. Ginger, why don't you ever do something?'

'Because it is so vastly more amusing to observe other people doing things,' said he. 'As a rule, they do them so badly. Besides, Sybil seems to me an awful warning. She deliberately went to seek the strenuous life. Well, something has happened; the strenuous life has been one too many for her. Oh, by the way, I have more news for you -the most important of all, nearly. You have been talking so much that I couldn't get a word in.'

'Slander,' said Judy. 'Get it in now.'

'Gallio, as you know, has been trying to sell Molesworth. Well, advances have been made to him through an agent about it. He wants to know the name of the purchaser, but he can't find out.'

'What does Gallio care as long as the price is a good one?'

'You can't tell about Gallio; he has some charming prejudices. Besides—I don't understand the ins and outs of it—Bertie's consent has to be obtained. But he is offered two hundred thousand for a barrack he never lives in, and some acres of land which nobody will farm. He has telegraphed to Bertie about it to-day.'

'Well, I suppose it's no use being old-fashioned,' said Judy; 'but I think it's horrible to sell what has been yours so long. Probably the buyer is some awful South African Jew.'

'Very likely. But it's nothing new. Money has always possessed its own buying power—it always will. Only there's such a devil of a lot of it now in certain hands that a poor man can't keep anything of his own. And the hands that own it are not English. But they want England. Anyhow, as you say, it is no use being old-fashioned; but it is an immense luxury. You are luxurious, Judy.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, the greatest luxury of your life was refusing to ask Mrs. Palmer to your house. How you could afford it I don't know.'

'It was delicious,' said Judy with great appreciation.

'Sybil was so sensible about it. She took just your view; she said she couldn't afford it herself, but that I was my own mistress. I wonder—I really wonder—why I find that class of person so intolerable.'

'Because you are old-fashioned; because you do not believe what is undoubtedly true—that wealth will get you anything——'

'Anything material it certainly will get you.'

'Quite so. And this is a materialistic age. I must go, as I'm dining out. Mind you let me know anything fresh in all these events that concern us.'

Ginger went out into the thick, dim-coloured evening with a sense of quickened interest in things. His only passion in life was the observation of other people, but for the last month or two he had found very little to observe. Apart from his work as a clerk in the Foreign Office, which could have been done quite as well in half the time by an ordinary bank clerk at a quarter of his salary, his life was valueless from an economical point of view, while as far as his work went (from the same point of view) he was positively fraudulent. Thus, judged by the relentless standards of America, where work is paid for strictly by the demand which exists for it, and that demand is tested simply and solely by the criterion of whether it adds directly or indirectly to the wealth of the country, Ginger's services would have been dispensed with. For he was—though the wedge was being pulled out, not pushed in—the thin end of that wedge which in the days of George III. had provided so amply for the younger sons, nephews, and connections of the nobility. But the leisured ease in which those fortunate people could live in those days was rapidly passing away, and Ginger, from an economical point of view, was a very small specimen of an interesting survival. For, provided that a thing is done equally well in a cheap way as in an expensive way, it is inexcusable in the public service not to have it done as cheaply as possible. Whether the complete application of this principle will be found wholly successful in its working will be for succeeding generations to determine. But even to-day we have, so to speak, a working model of it in America. The money, once earned, of course becomes the entire property of the individual, and it is perfectly right that beggars should starve for a crust, while on the foreshore of Mon Repos the glutted vulgarocracy gabble and search for pearls.

So the interesting survival made his groping way westwards, in order to dress for dinner. The fog was extremely dense, and the light from the street-lamps was not sufficient to pierce the thickness that lay between them, so that a man following the curb of the pavement had passed out of range of one before he came within range of the next. Dim shadows of people suddenly loomed large and close, and as suddenly vanished into the fog. In the roadway omnibuses and cabs proceeded at a foot-pace, some drivers even leading their horses; here a hansom had gone utterly astray, and was at a standstill on the pavement, being backed slowly off into the road. Through the dense air sound also came muffled and subaqueously; it was like a city in a dream.

At the corner of Bond Street a man, walking faster than is usual in a fog, ran into Ginger just below a gas-lamp, and apologized in a voice that struck him as familiar. The next moment he saw who it was.

'Pray don't mention it,' he said. 'I thought you were in America, Mr. Bilton.'

Bilton peered at him a moment, and recognised him also. 'Really, Lord Henry, if it was necessary for me to run into someone, I should have chosen you. At the present moment I may be in Australia for all I know. Is this London, and if so, what part?'

'Corner of Bond Street,' said Ginger. 'Which way are you going?'

'South Audley Street,' said the other; 'I'm going to see your father, in fact, about the sale of Molesworth.'

'Are you going to buy it?' asked Ginger.

'No; but I have been asked to communicate direct with him about it. The intending purchaser wants me to see about doing it up.'

'I am going that way too,' said Ginger; 'let us go together. Walking is the only way. You know, we don't know who the intending purchaser is.'

'That so?' asked Bilton. 'Well, there's no reason any longer for secrecy; it's Lewis S. Palmer.'

'Lewis Palmer?' asked Ginger.

'Yes; pity your father didn't ask an extra ten thousand.'

'He would have, if he had known who the purchaser was,' said Ginger candidly. 'Do you know if Mr. Palmer means to live there?' he asked.

'No more than he means to live on the new Liverpool and Southampton line.'

'Ah! he hasn't got that through yet,' said Ginger, with a sudden feeling of satisfaction that there had been considerable difficulties in getting the Bill through the House last session. There had really been no reason why it should not have been passed, except that the Commons objected to it merely because the line was practically to belong to a man who was not English.

Bilton laughed a short, rather shoulder-shrugging laugh.

'London is the last place to know what happens in London,' he said. 'The Bill was passed this afternoon. Lewis S. Palmer owns that line as much as I own my walking-stick. He could sit down on the up-track and Mrs. Palmer on the down-track, and stop all traffic if he chose. You don't seem to like it.'

Ginger rather resented this, chiefly because it was true.

'Why should I not like it?' he said.

'Can't say, I'm sure,' said Bilton. 'I guess your country ought to be very grateful. Palmer will show you how to run a line properly. He won't give you engines which are so pretty that they ought to be hung on the wall, and he won't give you cars covered with gilt and mirrors. But he'll run you trains quicker than you ever had them run yet; he'll give you express freight rates that will be as cheap as transport by sea, and he'll pull the two ports together like stringing beads, instead of letting them roll about unconnected. Of course, he'll get his bit out of it, but all the benefit of rapid transport and cheap fares will be yours. I guess your House of Commons was annoyed they didn't think of it themselves.'

They had got to Hyde Park Corner, and the fog had suddenly grown less dense and the darkness was clarified. Across the open square they could see the dark mass of the arch at the top of Constitution Hill, and farther on the dim shapes of the houses in Grosvenor Place. Hansoms no longer passed as if going to a funeral, but jingled merrily by to the cheerful beat of the horses' hoofs on the road. All the traffic was resuscitated; buses swayed and nodded; silent-footed electric broughams made known their advent by their clear metallic bells, and the two turned more briskly up Hamilton Place.

'And what has brought you to England so suddenly?' asked Ginger. 'I thought you intended to stop in America throughout Mrs. Emsworth's tour.'

'Circumstances altered my plan,' said Bilton. 'I had several pieces of business here; for instance, Lewis S. Palmer wished me to conduct the negotiations of Molesworth, as his agent seemed to be a sort of fool-man, and tell him what must be done to make it liveable in.'

'It is going to be lived in?' said Ginger, quite unable to stifle the curiosity he felt.

'Oh, certainly it is going to be lived in. Then I wanted to secure—I have secured—the lease of the Coronation Theatre for next summer.'

'I thought Mrs. Emsworth had taken it,' said Ginger.

'No; she meant to, but she did not complete her contract before leaving for America. In fact, she let an excellent chance slip.'

'You have cut her out?'

'Certainly. Then there was another thing. Now, do you know, Lord Henry, whether Mrs. Massington has arrived in London yet? She sailed the day before I did, but we made a very fast voyage. She was in the Oceanic.'

'She arrives this evening,' said Ginger.

'And goes to her sister's, to Miss Farady's?' asked Bilton.

'Yes. Here we are. Won't you come in with me? I will see if my father is at home.'

Gallio was in, and very much at Bilton's service. Personally, he detested the man, but he liked his way of doing business, and he particularly liked the business he had come to do. Bertie's consent had been received by cable that afternoon, and a short half-hour was sufficient to draw up the extremely simple deed by virtue of which Molesworth, the house and park, and all that was within, house and park passed into the possession of Lewis S. Palmer on payment of the sum of two hundred thousand pounds.

'And I'll cable to Lewis right along,' said Bilton at the conclusion, 'and you'll find the sum standing to your credit to-morrow morning. By the way, Lewis expressly told me to ask you whether you had any wishes of any sort with regard to Molesworth—any small thing you wanted out of it, or anything you wanted kept exactly as it is.'

Gallio considered a moment.

'Ah, there's the visitors' book,' he said; 'I should rather like to have that. I don't think it could be of any value to Mrs. Palmer, as it only contains the names of friends of mine who have stayed there.'

'Distinguished names?' asked Bilton.

'I suppose you might call some of them distinguished.'

'I guess Mrs. Palmer might like to keep it on,' said Bilton.

'But I'll ask. Anything else?'

'I should rather like the oak avenue left as it is,' said Gallio. 'It was planted in the reign of Henry VIII., and several what you would call distinguished people—James I. and George I. among them—planted trees there.'

'Mrs. Palmer will have a gold fence put round it,' said Bilton, with a touch of sarcasm.

'That will add very greatly to the beauty of the sylvan scene,' Gallio permitted himself to remark. 'In fact, if I ever have the pleasure of seeing Molesworth again, I shall expect to find it improved out of all recognition.'

'I expect Mrs. Palmer will smarten it up a bit,' said Bilton, quite unmoved.

That excellent man of business went down to Molesworth next day in order to inspect it generally, with a view to estimating what would have to be spent on it to make it habitable. He had sufficient taste to see the extraordinary dignity of the plain Elizabethan house; and though he felt that Mrs. Palmer would probably have called it a mouldy old ruin, he did not propose, even though he got a percentage on the sale and the costs of renovation, to recommend any scheme of gilding and mirrors. The tapestries were admirable, the Sheraton and Chippendale furniture was excellently suited to the thoroughly English character of the place, and the gardens wanted nothing but gardeners. Bilton's extremely quiet and businesslike mind had its perceptive side, and though he did not care for, yet he appreciated, the leisurely solidity, the leisurely beauty of the place, so characteristic of England, so innate with the genius of the Anglo-Saxon. The red, lichen-toned house had grown there as surely as its stately oaks and lithe beeches had grown there out of the English soil—indigenous, not bought and planted. Cedar-trees with broad fans of leaves, and starred by the ripe cones, made a spacious shade on the lawn, and whispered gently to the stirring of the warm autumn wind, as they bathed themselves in the mellow floods of October sunshine. Below the lawn ran a dimpling trout-stream, and within the precincts of the park stood the small Gothic church, grown gray in its patient, unremitting service, gathering slowly round it the sons of the soil. Attached to one aisle was the chapel of the family, and marble effigies of Scartons knelt side by side, or, reclining on their tombs, raised dumb hands of prayer. One had hung up his armour by him; by the feet of another his hunting dogs lay stretched in sleep. One, but a beardless lad, the second of the race, had been killed in the hunting-field; his wife, so ran the inscription, was delivered of a child the same day, and died within twenty-four hours of her lord. And over all was the air of distinction, of race, of culture that could not be bought, though Lewis S. Palmer, by right of purchase, was entitled to it all. Bilton felt this, but dismissed it as an unprofitable emotion, and made a note on his shirt-cuff to inquire whether the right of presentation to the living belonged to the family.

Sybil Massington, in the meantime, had arrived in London, and while Bilton was engaged in appraising the Molesworth estate, was herself in the confessional of the wisest spinster in London. All her life she had been accustomed to knowing what she wanted, and, knowing, to getting it. But now, for the first time in matters of importance, she did not know what she wanted, and was afraid of not getting anything at all. Things in America, in fact, had gone quite stupendously awry; she was upset, angry at herself and others, and, what to her was perhaps most aggravating of all, uncertain of herself. To one usually so lucid, so intensely reasonable as she was, this was of the nature of an idiocy; it was as if she—the essential Sybil—stood by, while a sort of wraith of herself sat feeble and indifferent in a chair, unable to make up its mind about anything. She longed to take this phantom by the shoulders and shake it into briskness and activity again, open its head and dust its brain for it. But perhaps Judy could do it for her; anyhow, the need, not so much of consultation, but of confession, was urgent. She did not in the least want absolution, because she had done nothing wrong; indeed, she wanted to confess because she was incapable of doing anything at all. She had to make up her mind, and she could not; perhaps stating the problem of her indecision very clearly might, even if it did not elicit a suggestion from Judy, help her, at any rate, to see what her difficulties were more clearly. And, though indecisive, she still retained her candour, and told Judy all that had happened, exactly as it had happened.

'Oh, I know it,' she said in answer to some question of Judy's. 'A woman feels in her bones when a man is going to propose to her; only I wasn't quite ready for it, and for two days I kept him from actually asking me. Then, on the night that Mrs. Emsworth was acting there, I went upstairs with her to her room. Two minutes afterwards Bilton came in—strolled in.'

'You mean he didn't knock?' asked Judy.

'Oh, my dear, what does it matter whether he knocked or not? As a matter of fact, I think he did, but he came in on the top of his knock. Anyhow, there was no doubt in my mind as to what their relations were; but, to make sure, I asked Mrs. Emsworth. It was a horrible thing to do, but I did it. I like that woman; she is what she is, but she is extremely bon enfant, a nice, straightforward boy. And she told me. I was perfectly right: he had been living with her for the last two years.'

Sybil got up, and began walking up and down the room. 'It hurt me,' she went on; 'it hurt me intolerably. It hurt my self-respect that he should come to me like that. No, he had not broken with her—at any rate, not definitely. She was perfectly straightforward with me, and in a curious sort of way she was sorry for me, as one is sorry for a pain one does not understand. She could not see, I think, that it made any difference.'

Judy's rather short nose went in the air.

'Luckily, it does not matter much what that sort of woman thinks,' she said.

Sybil did not reply for a moment.

'You don't see my difficulty, then,' she said; 'my difficulty, my indecision, is that I am not certain whether she is right or not. Look at it this way: I was attracted by Mr. Bilton; I felt for him that which I believe in me does duty for love. I liked him and I admired him; I liked the fact that he admired me. Now, all the time that I liked and admired him this thing had happened. I liked the man who had done that. What difference, then, can my knowing it make?'

Judy looked at her in surprise.

'If he had happened to be a murderer?' she said.

'I should not ever have liked him.'

'I don't know what to say to you,' said Judy, really perplexed. 'What you tell me is so unlike you.'

'I know it is. I have changed, I suppose. I think America changed me. What has happened? Is it that I have become hard or that I have learned common-sense? What I cannot make out is whether I would sooner have learned this or not. If I had not learned it, I should be now engaged to him; but, knowing it, shall I marry him?'

'Have you seen him since?'

'No. He has behaved very typically, very cleverly. He neither tried to see me again nor wrote to me. He has very quick perceptions, I am sure. I am sure he reasoned it out with himself, and came to the conclusion that it was better not to approach me in any way for a time. He was quite right; if he had tried to explain things away, or had even assured me that there was nothing to explain, I should have had nothing more to say to him. I should have told him that he and all that concerned him was a matter of absolute indifference to me. He has been wise: he simply effaced himself, and he has therefore made me think about him.'

Sybil paused in front of the looking-glass, and smoothed her hair with an absent hand. Then she turned round again.

'You will see,' she said. 'He will follow me to England. I don't think you like him, Judy,' she added.

'My approbation is not necessary to you.'

'Not in the least; but why don't you?'

'Because I am old-fashioned—because we belong to totally different generations, you and I. I don't like motor-cars, either, you see; and a person's feeling for motor-cars is a very good criterion as to the generation to which he belongs.'

Sybil laughed.

'How odd you are!' she said; 'they are fast and convenient. But about Mr. Bilton: he is a very remarkable man. He can do anything he chooses to do, and whatever he chooses to do turns into gold. He owns half the theatres in New York; he has a big publishing business there; he furnishes houses for people; he has made a fortune on the Stock Exchange. Some of those Americans are like spiders sitting in the middle of their webs, which extend in all directions, and whatever wind blows, it blows some fly into their meshes. Just as a great artist like Michael Angelo can write a sonnet, or hew a statue out of the marble, or paint a picture, fitting the artistic sense like a handle to any knife, so with a man like him. He sees money everywhere. He is very efficient.'

'Is he quite unscrupulous?' asked Judy.

'Not unscrupulous exactly, but relentless; that is the spirit of America: it fascinates me, and it repels me. Some of them remind me of destiny—Mr. Palmer does. By the way, he asked me, when I was over there, if Molesworth was for sale. Have you heard anything about it?'

'Yes; Ginger told me that negotiations were going on. He didn't know, nor did Gallio, who the possible purchaser was. No doubt it was Mr. Palmer.'

Sybil put her head on one side, considering.

'What was the price?' she asked.

'Two hundred thousand.'

'Of course, money does not mean anything particular to the Palmers,' she said; 'but I rather wonder why they bought it. Mr. Palmer has been looking out for an English house, I know, but I should have thought Molesworth was too remote.'

'I expect they paid for the spirit of ancestry which clings to the place,' said Judy. 'Molesworth seemed to me, the only time I saw it, to be the most typically English house I had ever seen. Mrs. Palmer can't procure ancestors, but she can procure the frame for them.'

'That is not charitably said, dear Judy,' said her sister; 'besides, I am sure that is not it. Ah, I know! They have bought it to give to Bertie on his marriage; that must be it.'

'If so, there is a large-leaved, coarse sort of delicacy about it,' said Judy.

'There again you are not charitable. Besides, you have not seen Amelie. She is charming, simply charming—a girl, too, a real flesh and blood girl. And she adores him; she adores him with all her splendid vitality.'

'And Bertie?' asked Judy.

'Oh, they will be very happy,' said Sybil. 'It will be a great success. He admires her immensely; he likes her immensely. Dear Judy, there are many ways of love; one way of love is Bertie's and mine. That is all.'

'Did he adore Mrs. Emsworth like that?' asked Judy.

'Well, no, I imagine not; that was the other way of love.'

She took up the morning paper. Then a sudden thought seemed to strike her, and she laid it down again.

'By the way, is Charlie in town?' she asked. 'I heard from him just before I left America; he said he had not been well. His letter made me feel rather anxious. There was an undercurrent of—of keeping something back.'

'Did he tell you no more than that?' asked Judy.

Sybil glanced up, and, seeing Judy's face, knitted her brows into a frown.

'Judy, what is it?' she asked quickly; 'tell me at once.'

'I can't, dear; he wished to tell you himself. I promised him I wouldn't.'

'But is there something wrong—something really wrong?'

Judy nodded.

'Where is he?'

'Down at Brighton with his mother.'

'Judy, you must tell me,' said her sister; 'it is merely saving me a couple of hours of horrid anxiety. I shall go down to see him this afternoon. Now, what is it? Is it lungs? I will tell Charlie I forced you to tell me.'

'There is no use in my not answering you,' said Judy.

'Yes, it is that.'

'Serious?'

'Consumption is always serious.'

Sybil said nothing for a moment.

'I shall go down this afternoon,' she said. 'Why is he at Brighton? Why is he not at some proper place?'

'He went to Sheringham for a time, but he left it.'

'But he has got to get better,' said Sybil quickly. 'He must do what is sensible.'

Judy glanced up at her a moment.

'As things at present stand, he does not much want to get better,' she said.

Sybil turned, and looked at her long and steadily.

'You mean me?' she asked.

There was silence. Sybil went to the writing-table and wrote a telegram, while her sister took up the paper she had dropped and looked at it mechanically. Almost immediately a short paragraph struck her eye, but her mind, dwelling on other things, did not at once take in its significance.

'Yet you advised me yourself not to marry him,' said Sybil, as she rang the bell.

'I know I did; nor have I really changed my mind. But it is in your power to make him want to live.'

Sybil turned on her rather fiercely.

'You have no right to load me with such responsibilities,' she said. 'It is not my fault that he loves me; it is not my fault that I am as I am.'

'I know it is not,' said Judy; 'but, Sybil, be wise—be very wise. I don't know what you can do, but certainly nobody else can do anything. I am very sorry for you.' Sybil gave the telegram, asking Charlie if she could come, to the servant, and stood in silence again by the fire. After a pause Judy took up the paper again.

'There is something here that concerns you,' she said; 'it is that Mr. Bilton arrived in London yesterday.'

Sybil turned, then suddenly threw her arms wide.

'Oh, Judy, Judy,' she cried, 'I am unutterably unhappy! I am perplexed, puzzled; I don't know what I feel.'

And she flung herself down on the sofa by Judy's side, and burst into uncontrollable sobs.

CHAPTER XI

Charlie Brancepeth was sitting in a wooden summer-house on the lawn of his mother's house at Brighton. It was set upon a pivot in the centre of its floor, so that it could be turned with little effort to any point of the compass, so as to face the sun and avoid the wind. In it—so much, at any rate, he practised of the treatment which he had compared to the fattening of a Strasburg goose—he passed the whole day, only sleeping indoors. But this he did because it seemed to him a very rational and sensible mode of life, soothing to the nerves, and producing in him a certain outdoor stagnation of the brain. He did not want to think; he wanted merely to be as quiet and drowsed as he could, and not to live very long; for, since Sybil's final rejection of him, the taste had gone out of life—temporarily it might be only—but while that was still very new and bitter within him had come this fresh blow, the discovery that he was suffering from tubercular disease of the lungs. For some months before he had suspected this; then, soon after the departure of Sybil and Bertie for America, he had had an attack of influenza from which he did not rally well; he had a daily rise of temperature, a daily intolerable lassitude, and his doctor, seeking for the cause of this, had found it. Then, following his advice, he tried a cure on the east coast of England, in which he had to get up at the sound of a bell and proceed out of doors, there to remain all day till a bell summoned him and the other patients in again. At frequent intervals he had to eat large quantities of fattening food; at other hours he had to walk quietly along a road. Work of all sorts, even more than an hour or two's reading, was discouraged, and the days had been to him a succession of nightmares, all presenting the same dull hopelessness. So, after a fortnight of it, he decided to persevere with it no more, and, if he had to die, to die. He had talked the thing out once with his mother, and had promised to go to Davos for the winter, if it was recommended to him, and in the interval to lead a mode of life that was rational for his case without being unbearable. They both agreed finally to dwell on the subject as little as possible in their thoughts, and dismiss it altogether from their conversation.

Just now she was away for a day or two, and he was alone as he waited for Sybil's arrival. That he was alone he had felt himself bound to tell her, but he felt certain that she would come all the same. And though he waited for her in a sort of anguish of expectation, he felt that life, for the first time since the Sunday at Haworth at the end of July, was interesting. What she would say to him, how he would take it, even the vaguest predication of their intercourse, was beyond him to guess. Indeed, it was scarcely worth while, he thought, trying to conjecture what it would be. For Love and Death were near to him, august guests.

The shelter was lit by an electric light, and he had just turned this on when he heard the wheels of her cab drive up. He went in through the garden-door to meet her, his heart beating wildly, found her in the moment of arrival, and advanced to her with outstretched hands.

'Ah, this is charming of you,' he said; 'I am delighted to see you!'

But she had involuntarily paused a moment as she saw him, for, though his disease had made no violent inroads on him, yet the whole manner of his face, his walk, his appearance, was changed. His eyes were always large, they now perhaps looked ever so little larger; his face was always thin, it was perhaps a shade thinner; he always stooped, he stooped perhaps a little more. But, even as one can look at a portrait and say 'I see no point on which it is not like, yet it really has no resemblance to the man,' so, though Charlie was changed so little, yet he was not like him with whom she had walked on the hot Sunday afternoon of July last. Then it was summer, now it was autumn; and, instead of the broad brightness of sun, a little bitter wind stirred among the trees. For the flame of life there was substituted the shadow of death, intangible, indescribable, untranslatable into definite thought, but unmistakable.

But her pause was only momentary; the quick, practical part of her nature leaped instinctively to the surface to do its duty. She was here, if possible, to help, and she came quickly forward to meet him.

'My dear Charlie,' she said, 'it is good to see you again.'

She took both his hands in hers.

'You bad boy,' she said, 'to get ill. Judy told me. It was not her fault; I made her.'

'I meant to tell you myself,' said he; 'but it does not matter. Now, that is enough of that subject; my mother and I never talk of it—we hardly ever think of it. Now, will you take off your things?'

Sybil drew her cloak round her.

'No, certainly not,' said she. 'Judy told me you lived in a summer-house. Well, I did not come down here to see you through the window; lead on to the summer-house.'

'It will be too cold for you,' said he.

'It will be nothing of the kind.'

They talked till dinner on indifferent subjects; she sketched New York for him with a brilliant, if not a very flattering, touch; she did her best for the Revels, but suddenly in the middle broke down.

'It really is awful what a beast one is!' she said. 'But there, somehow, where what I am describing to you is natural, where everyone is so extraordinarily kind and so entirely uncultured, the vulgarity did not strike me. I like the people, and, as you know, I like the sense of wealth. Who is it who talks about moral geography? Burke, I think. Well, that is a very suggestive expression. You can do in New York what you cannot possibly conceive doing in England, just as you can grow plants in the South which will not stand our climate.'

Charlie shook his head.

'I don't think I could stand that anywhere,' he said.

'Oh yes, you could. Milieu, environment is everything; but now, as I sit here and look at the big trees in the garden, covered with that wash of moonlight, it is different. You too—you are so very un-American. I always told you you were old-fashioned.'

Charlie looked at her in silence a moment.

'And you,' he said at length—' you yourself? Have you changed, as Ginger prophesied? Do I seem to you more old-fashioned than ever? I am a very good test question, I imagine.'

'Why?'

'Because you have seen, have you not? a good deal of my double, Bilton. The contrast of our natures ought to be all the more apparent for the similarity of our appearance.' She got up.

'I have a great deal to talk to you about, Charlie,' she said; 'but it is after-dinner talk. A good deal is about you; the rest is about myself. I have also made another discovery: I am a more profound egotist than I knew. Did I always strike you as egotistic?'

'Dominant people are always egotistic,' said he.

'Dominant? Am I dominant? You will not think so when you have heard.'

'Have things gone wrong?' he asked.

'Yes—or right; I do not know which. Anyhow, they have gone differently to what I—well, planned. Now, the plans of dominant people go as they expect them to go.'

'Until they meet a more dominant person,'

She shook her head.