THE BOOK OF EVELYN

The star of the occasion was calm and confident

THE
BOOK OF EVELYN

By

GERALDINE BONNER

Author of
TOMORROW’S TANGLE, THE PIONEER
RICH MEN’S CHILDREN, ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

ARTHUR WILLIAM BROWN

INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright 1913
The Bobbs-Merrill Company

PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.

THE BOOK OF EVELYN

I

I have moved. I am in.

The household gods that have lain four years in storage are grouped round me, showing familiar faces. It’s nice of them not to have changed more, grown up as children do or got older like one’s friends. They don’t harmonize with the furniture—this is an appartement meublé—but I can melt them in with cushions and hangings.

It’s going to be very snug and cozy when I get settled. This room—the parlor—is a good shape, an oblong ending in a bulge of bay window. Plenty of sun in the morning—I can have plants. Outside the window is a small tin roof with a list to starboard where rain-water lodges and sparrows come to take fussy excited baths. Across the street stands a row of brownstone fronts, blank-visaged houses with a white curtain in every window. The faces of such houses are like the faces of the people who live in them. They tell you nothing about what’s going on inside. It’s a peculiarity of New York—after living in a house with an expressionless front wall you get an expressionless front wall yourself.

From the windows of the back room I look out on the flank of the big apartment-house that stands on the corner, and little slips of yard, side by side, with fences between. Among them ours has a lost or strayed appearance. Never did an unaspiring, city-bred yard look more homesick and out of place. It has a sun-dial in the middle, circled by a flagged path, and in its corners, sheltered by a few discouraged shrubs, several weather-worn stone ornaments. It suggests a cemetery of small things that had to have correspondingly small tombstones. I hear from Mrs. Bushey, the landlady, that a sculptress once lived on the lower floor and spent three hundred dollars lifting it out of the sphere in which it was born.

I am going to like it here. I am going to make myself like it, get out of the negative habit into the positive. That’s why I came back from Europe, that a sudden longing for home, for Broadway, and the lights along the Battery, and dear little Diana poised against the sky. Four years of pension tables and third-class railway carriages do not develop the positive habit. I was becoming negative to the point of annihilation. I wanted to be braced by the savage energies of my native city. And also I did want some other society than that of American spinsters and widows. The Europeans must wonder how the land of the free and the home of the brave keeps up its birth-rate— But I digress.

When you have an income of one hundred and sixty-five dollars a month and no way of adding to it, are thirty-three and a widow of creditable antecedents, the difficulties of living in New York are almost insurmountable. If you were a pauper or a millionaire it would be an easy matter. They represent the upper and the nether millstones between which people like me are crushed.

And then your friends insist on being considered. I had a dream of six rooms on the upper West Side. “But the upper West Side, my dear! You might as well be in Chicago.” Then I had revolutionary longings for a tiny old house with no heat and a sloping roof in Greenwich Village— “I could never go to see you there. They would stone the motor,” ended that. There is just one slice in the center of the city in which a poor but honest widow can live to the satisfaction of everybody but herself. So here I am in the decorous Seventies, between Park Avenue and Lexington, in an eighteen-foot dwelling with floors for light housekeeping.

To enter you go down three steps to a little front door that tries to keep up to the neighborhood by hiding its decrepitude behind an iron grill. That lets you into the smallest vestibule in the world, where four bells are ranged along the door-post and four letter-boxes cling to the wall. Out of this open two more doors, one that gives egress to a narrow flight of stairs without a hand-rail, and the other to the ground-floor apartment, inhabited, so Mrs. Bushey tells me, by a trained nurse and her aunt. There was a tailor there once, but Mrs. Bushey got him out— “Cockroaches, water bugs, and then the sign! It lowered the tone of the house. A person like you,” Mrs. Bushey eyed me approvingly, “would never have stood for a tradesman’s sign.”

I murmured an assent. I always do when credited with exclusive tastes I ought to have and haven’t. It was the day I came to look the place over, and I was nervously anxious to make a good impression on Mrs. Bushey. Then we mounted a narrow stair that rose through a well to upper stories. As it approached the landing it took a spirited curve, as if in the hope of finding something better above. The stairway was dark and a faint thin scent of many things (I know it now to be a composite of cooking, gas leakage and cigars) remained suspended in the airless shaft.

“On this floor,” said Mrs. Bushey, turning on the curve, as if in the hope of finding something better up behind her, “the gas is never put out.”

I took that floor. I don’t know whether the gas decided it, or Mrs. Bushey’s persuasive manners, or an exhaustion that led me to look with favor upon anything that had a chair to sit on and a bed to sleep in. Anyway, I took it, and the next day burst in upon Betty Ferguson, trying to carry it off with a debonair nonchalance: “Well, I’ve got an apartment at last.”

Betty looked serious and asked questions: Was it clean? Did the landlady seem a proper person? Had I seen any of the other lodgers? Then dwelt on the brighter side: It’s not quite a block from Park Avenue. If you don’t like it you can find some excuse to break your lease. There is a servant on the premises who will come in, clean up and cook you one good meal so you won’t starve. Well, it doesn’t sound so bad.

And now I’m in I think it’s even less bad than it sounded. The front room is going to make the impression. It is already getting an atmosphere, the individuality of a lady of uncultivated literary tastes is imposing itself upon the department-store background. The center table—mission style—is beginning to have an air, with Bergson in yellow paper covers and two volumes of Strindberg. No more of him for me after Miss Juliet, but he has his uses thrown carelessly on a table with other gentlemen of the moment. If I am ever written up in the papers I feel sure the reporters will say, “Mrs. Drake’s parlor gave every evidence of being the abode of a woman of culture and refinement.”

The back room (there are only two) is more intimate. I am going to eat there and also sleep. Friends may come in, however; for the bed, during the day, masquerades as a divan. A little group of my ancestors—miniatures and photographs of portraits—hangs on the wall and chaperons me. Between the two rooms stretches a narrow connecting neck of bathroom and kitchenette.

There is only one word that describes the kitchenette—it is cute. When I look at it with a gas stove on one side and tiers of shelves on the other, “cute” instinctively rises to my lips, and I feel that my country has enriched the language with that untranslatable adjective. No one has ever been able to give it a satisfactory definition, but if you got into my kitchenette, which just holds one fair-sized person, and found yourself able to cook with one hand and reach the dishes off the shelves with the other, you would get its full meaning.

Before the house was cut into floors the kitchenette must have been a cupboard. I wonder if a lady’s clothes hung in it or the best china was stored there. There is a delightful mystery about old houses and their former occupants. Haven’t I read somewhere that walls absorb impressions from the lives they have looked on and exhale them to the pleasure or detriment of later comers?

Last night, as I was reading in bed—a habit acquired at the age of twelve and adhered to ever since—I remembered this and wondered what the walls would exhale on me. The paper has a trailing design of roses on it, very ugly and evidently old. I wondered if the roses had bloomed round tragedy or comedy, or just that fluctuation between the two which makes up the lives of most of us—an alternate rise and fall, soaring upward to a height, dropping downward to a hollow.

Five years ago mine dropped to its hollow, and ever since has been struggling up to the dead level where it is now—the place where things come without joy or pain, the edge off everything. Thirty-three and the high throb of expectancy over, the big possibilities left behind. The hiring of two rooms, the hanging of a curtain, the placing of a vase—these are the things that for me must take the place that love and home and children take in other women’s lives.

I got this far and stopped. No, I wouldn’t. I came back from Europe to get away from that. I put out the light and cuddled down in the new bed. Quite a good bed if it is a divan, and the room is going to be fairly quiet. Muffled by walls I could hear the clanging passage of cars. And then far away it seemed, though it couldn’t have been, a gramophone, the Caruso record of La Donna e Mobile. What a fine swaggering song and what an outrageous falsehood! Woman is changeable—is she? That’s the man’s privilege. We, poor fools, haven’t the sense to do anything but cling, if not to actualities to memories. I felt tears coming—that hasn’t happened for years. My memories don’t bring them, they only bring a sort of weary bitterness. It was the new surroundings, the loneliness, that did it. I stopped them and listened to the gramophone, and the wretched thing had begun on a new record, Una Lagrima Furtiva—a furtive tear!

With my own furtive tears, wet on the pillow, I couldn’t help laughing.

II

There is one thing in the front room I must get rid of—the rug. It is a nightmare with a crimson ground on which are displayed broken white particles that look like animalcula in a magnified drop of water. I had just made up my mind that it must be removed when Mrs. Bushey opportunely came in.

Mrs. Bushey lives next door (she has two houses under her wing) and when not landladying, teaches physical culture. I believe there is no Mr. Bushey, though whether death or divorce has snatched him from her I haven’t heard. She is a stout dark person somewhere from twenty-eight to forty-eight—I can’t tell age. I am thirty-three and have wrinkles round my eyes. She has none. It may be temperament, or fat, or the bony structure of the skull, or an absence of furtive tears.

She talks much and rapidly which ought to tend to a good combination between us, as listening is one of the things I do best. From our conversation, or perhaps I ought to say our monologue, I got an impressionistic effect of my fellow lodgers past and present. The lady who lived here before me was a writer and very close about money. It was difficult to collect her rent, also she showed symptoms of inebriety. I gathered from Mrs. Bushey’s remarks and expression that she expected me to be shocked, and I tried not to disappoint her, but I couldn’t do much with a monosyllable, which was all she allowed me.

A series of rapid sketches of the present inmates followed. Something like this:

“Mrs. Phillips, the trained nurse, and her aunt, in the basement are terrible cranks, always complaining about the plumbing and the little boys who will stop on their way home from school and write bad words on the flags. They think they own the back garden, but they don’t. We all do, but what’s the use of fighting? I never do, I’ll stand anything rather than have words with anybody.”

I edged in an exclamation, a single formless syllable.

“Of course, I knew you would. Then on the floor below you are two young Westerners in the back room, Mr. Hazard, who’s an artist, and Mr. Weatherby, who’s something on the press. The most delightful fellows, never a day late with their rent. And in the front room is Miss Bliss, a model—artist not cloak. She isn’t always on time with her money, but I’m very lenient with her.”

I tried to insert a sentence, but it was nipped at the second word.

“Yes, exactly. You see just how it is. On the floor above you, in the back, is Mr. Hamilton, such a nice man and so unfortunate. Lost every cent he had in Wall Street and is beginning all over again. Fine, isn’t it? Yes, I feel it and don’t say anything when he’s behind with his rent. How could I?” Though I hadn’t said a word she looked at me reprovingly as if I had suggested sending the delinquent Mr. Hamilton to jail. “That’s not my way. I know it’s foolish of me. You needn’t tell me so, but that’s how I’m made.”

I began to feel that I ought to offer my next month’s rent at once. I have a bad memory and might be a day or two late.

“The room in front, over your parlor, is vacant. Terrible, isn’t it? I tried to make Mr. Hamilton take the whole floor through. Even if he isn’t good pay—”

I broke in, determined to hear no more of Mr. Hamilton’s financial deficiencies.

“Who’s on the top floor?”

There was a slight abatement of Mrs. Bushey’s buoyancy. She looked at me with an eye that expressed both curiosity and question.

“Miss Harris lives there,” she answered. “Have you seen her?”

I hadn’t.

“Perhaps you’ve heard her?”

I had heard a rustle on the stairs, was that Miss Harris?

“Yes. She’s the only woman above you.”

“Does she leave a trail of perfume?”

I was going to add that it didn’t mix well with the gas leakage, the cigars and last year’s cooking but refrained for fear of Mrs. Bushey’s feelings.

“Yes, that’s Miss Harris. She’s a singer—professional. But you won’t hear her much, there’s a floor in between. That is, unless you leave the register open.”

I said I’d shut the register.

“I don’t take singers as a rule,” Mrs. Bushey went on, “but Mr. Hamilton being away all day and the top floor being hard to rent, I made an exception. One must live, mustn’t one?”

I could agree to that.

“She’s a Californian and rather good-looking. But I don’t think she’s had much success.”

A deprecating look came into her face and she tilted her head to one side. I felt coming revelations about Miss Harris’ rent and said hastily:

“What does she sing, concert, opera, musical comedy?”

“She’s hardly sung in public at all yet. She’s studying, and I’m afraid that it’s very uncertain. Last month—”

I interrupted desperately.

“Is she a contralto or soprano?”

“Dramatic mezzo,” said Mrs. Bushey. “She’s trying to get an opening, but,” she compressed her lips and shook her head gloomily, “there are so many of them and her voice is nothing wonderful. But she evidently has some money, for she pays her rent regularly.”

I felt immensely relieved. As Mrs. Bushey rose to her feet I too rose lightly, encouragingly smiling. Mrs. Bushey did not exhibit the cheer fitting to the possession of so satisfactory a lodger. She buttoned her jacket, murmuring:

“I don’t like taking singers, people complain so. But when one is working for one’s living—” Her fingers struggled with a button.

“Of course,” I filled in, “I understand. And I for one won’t object to the music.”

Mrs. Bushey seemed appeased. As she finished the buttoning she looked about the room, her glance roaming over my possessions. For some obscure reason I flinched before that inspection. Some of them are sacred, relics of my mother and of the years when I was a wife—only a few of these. Mrs. Bushey’s look was like an auctioneer’s hand fingering them, appraising their value.

Finally it fell to the rug. I had forgotten it; now was my chance. Suddenly it seemed a painful subject to broach and I sought for a tactful opening. Mrs. Bushey pressed its crimson surface with her foot.

“Isn’t this a beautiful rug?” she said. “It’s a real Samarcand.”

I smothered a start. I had had a real Samarcand once.

Mrs. Bushey, eying the magnified insects with solicitude, continued:

“I wouldn’t like to tell you how much I paid for this. It was a ridiculous sum for me to give. But I love pretty things, and when you took the apartment I put it in here because I saw at once you were used to only the best.”

I murmured faintly.

“So I was generous and gave you my treasure. You will be careful of it, won’t you? Not drop anything on it or let people come in with muddy boots.”

I said I would. I found myself engaging with ardor to love and cherish a thing I abhorred. It’s happened before, it’s the kind of thing I’ve been doing all my life.

Mrs. Bushey gave it a loving stroke with her foot.

“I knew you’d appreciate it. You don’t often find a real Samarcand in a furnished apartment.”

After she had gone I sat looking dejectedly at it. Of course I would have to keep it now. I might buy some small rugs and partly cover it up, but I suppose, when she saw them, she would be mortally hurt. And I can’t do that. I’d rather have those awful magnified insects staring up at me for the rest of my life than wound her pride so.

As to its being a Samarcand—I took up one corner and lo! attached to it by a string was a price-tag bearing the legend, Scotch wool rug, $12.75.

It was somewhat of a shock. Suppose I had found it while she was there! The thought of such a contretemps made me cold. To avoid all possibilities of it ever happening I stealthily detached the tag and tore it into tiny pieces. As I dropped them in the waste-basket I had a fancy that had I made the discovery while she was present, I would have been the more embarrassed of the two.

All afternoon I have been putting things in order, trying them and standing back to get the effect. It’s a long time since I’ve had belongings of my own to play with. I hung my mother’s two Kriegolf’s (Kriegolf was a Canadian artist who painted pictures of habitan life) in four different places. They finally came to anchor on the parlor wall on either side of a brass-framed mirror with candle branches that belongs to Mrs. Bushey. Opposite, flanking the fireplace, are Kitty O’Brien and The Wax Head of Lille. I love her best of all, the dreaming maiden. I like to try and guess what she’s thinking of. Is it just the purposeless reverie of youth, or is she musing on the coming lover? It can’t be that, because, while he’s still a dream lover, a girl is happy, and she looks so sad.

I was trying to pierce the secret of that mysterious face when the telephone rang. It was Roger Clements, a kind voice humming along the line—“Well, how’s everything?” Roger wanted to come up and see me and the kitchenette, and I told him Madame would receive to-morrow evening.

He would be my first visitor and I was fluttered. I spent at least an hour trying to decide whether I’d better bring the Morris chair from the back room for him. When the dread of starvation is lifted from you by one hundred and sixty-five dollars a month and life offers nothing, you find your mental forces expending themselves on questions like that. I once knew a man who told me he sat on the edge of his bed every morning struggling to decide whether he’d put on a turned-down or a stand-up collar. He said it was nerves. In my case it’s just plain lack of interests.

It’s natural for me to try and make Roger comfortable. He’s one of the best friends I have in the world. I’m not using the word to cover sentiment, I do really mean a friend. He knew me before I was married, was one of the reliable older men in those glowing days when I was Evelyn Carr, before I met Harmon Drake. He has been kind to me in ways I never can forget. In those dark last years of my married life (there were only five of them altogether) when my little world was urging divorce and I stood distracted amid falling ruins, he never said one word to me about my husband, never forced on me consolation or advice. I don’t forget that, or the letter he wrote me when Harmon died—the one honest letter I got.

Everybody exclaimed when I said I was going alone to Europe. Roger was the only one who understood and told me to go. I’ll carry to my grave the memory of his face as he stood on the dock waving me good-by. He was smiling, but under the smile I could see the sympathy he wanted me to know and didn’t dare to put in words. That’s one of the ties between us—we’re the silent kind who keep our feelings hidden away in a Bluebeard’s chamber of which we keep the key.

I used to hear from him off and on in Europe, and I followed him in the American papers. I remember one sun-soaked morning in Venice, when I picked up an English review in the pension and read a glowing criticism of his book of essays, Readjustments. How proud I was of him! He’s become quite famous in these last few years, not vulgarly famous but known among scholars as a scholar and recognized as one of the few stylists we have over here. I can’t imagine him on the news-stalls, or bound in paper for the masses. I think he secretly detests the masses though he won’t admit it. The mob, with its easily swayed passions, is the sort of thing that it’s in his blood to hate. If he had to sue for its support like Coriolanus he would act exactly as Coriolanus did. Fortunately he doesn’t need it. The Clements have had money for generations, not according to Pittsburgh standards, but the way the Clements reckon money. He has an apartment on Gramercy Park, lined with books to the ceilings, with a pair of old servants to fuss over him and keep the newspaper people away.

There he leads the intellectual life, the only one that attracts him. He rarely goes into society. The recent invasion of multi-millionaires have spoiled it, his sister, Mrs. Ashworth, says, and on these points he and she think alike. And he doesn’t care for women, at least to fall in love with them. When he was a young man, twenty-four to be accurate, he was engaged to a girl who died. Since then his interest in the other sex has taken the form of a detached impersonal admiration. He thinks they furnish the color and poetry of life and in that way have an esthetic value in a too sober world.

But what’s the sense of analyzing your friend? He’s a dear kind anchorite of a man, just a bit set, just a bit inclined to think that the Clements’ way of doing things is the only way, just a bit too contemptuous of cheapness and bad taste and bounce, but with all his imperfections on his head, the finest gentleman I know. I will move the Morris chair.

III

Love of flowers is one of the gifts the fairies gave me in my cradle. It’s a great possession, fills so many blanks. You can forget you’ve got no baby of your own when you watch the flowers’ babies lifting their little faces to the sun.

I bought four plants at Bloomingdales and put them in the front window, a juniper bush, a Boston fern, a carrot fern and a rubber plant. I like the ferns best, the new shoots are so lovely, pushing up little green curly tops in the shelter of the old strong ones. I remind myself of Miss Lucretia Tox in Dombey and Son, with a watering can and a pair of scissors to snip off dead leaves. There’s one great difference between us—Miss Tox had a Mr. Dombey across the way. I’ve nothing across the way. The only male being that that discreet and expressionless row of houses has given up to my eyes is the young doctor opposite. He does the same thing every morning, runs down the steps with a bag and a busy air, walks rapidly to Lexington Avenue, then, when he thinks he’s out of sight, stands on the corner not knowing which way to go.

I feel that, in a purely neighborly spirit, I ought to have an illness. I would like to help all young people starting in business, take all the hansoms that go drearily trailing along Fifth Avenue, especially if the driver looks drunken and despondent, and give money to every beggar who accosts me. They say it is a bad principle and one is always swindled. Personally I don’t think that matters at all. Your impulse is all right and that’s all that counts. But I digress again—I must get over the habit.

This morning I was doing my Miss Lucretia Tox act when Betty Ferguson came in. Betty is one of my rich friends; we were at school together and have kept close ever since. She married Harry Ferguson the same year that I married Harmon Drake. Now she has three children, and a house on Fifth Avenue, not to mention Harry. Her crumpled rose leaf is that she is getting fat. Every time I see her she says resolutely, “I am going to walk twice round the reservoir to-morrow morning,” and never does it.

She came in blooming, with a purple orchid among her furs, and the rich rosy color in her face deepened by the first nip of winter. She has a sharp eye, and I expected she would immediately see the rug and demand an explanation. I was slightly flustered, for I have no excuse ready and I never can confess my weaknesses to Betty. She is one of the sensible people who don’t see why you can’t be sensible, too.

She did not, however, notice the rug, but clasping my hand fixed me with a solemn glance that made me uneasy. Betty oblivious to externals—what had I done?

“Who was the woman I met coming out of here just now?” she said abruptly.

“Mrs. Bushey,” I hazarded, and then remembered Mrs. Bushey was off somewhere imparting physical culture.

“Is Mrs. Bushey very tall and thin with black hair and a velvet dress, and a hat as big as a tea tray?”

“No, she’s short and stout and—”

“Evie,” interrupted Mrs. Ferguson, sounding a deep note, “that woman wasn’t Mrs. Bushey. Nobody who looked like that ever leased an eighteen-foot house and rented out floors.”

I had a sudden surge of memory—

“It must have been Miss Harris.”

Betty loosed my hand and sank upon the sofa, that is, she subsided carefully upon the sofa, as erect as a statue from the waist up. She threw back her furs with a disregard for the orchid that made me wince.

“Who’s Miss Harris?” she said sternly.

I told her all I knew.

“That’s just what she looked like—the stage. Are there any more of them here?”

I assured her there were not. She gazed out of the window with a pondering air.

“After all, there are respectable people on the stage,” she said, following some subterranean course of thought.

I knew my Betty and hastened to reassure her—

“She’s on the top floor. Her contaminating influence, if she has one, would have to percolate through another apartment before it got to me.”

She did not smile and I did not expect it. Mrs. Ferguson has no sense of humor, and that’s one of the reasons I love her. There is an obsession in the public mind just now about the sense of humor. People ask anxiously if other people have it as Napoleon used to ask if attractive ladies he had wooed in vain “were still virtuous.” It’s like being a bromide— Give me a bromide, a humorless, soft, cushiony bromide, rather than those exhausting people who have established a reputation for wit and are living up to it. Betty is not soft and cushiony, but she is always herself.

“I wish you could live in a house of your own like a Christian,” she said.

We have talked over this before. This subject has an embarrassing side—I’ll explain it later—so I hastened to divert her.

“Why should you be wrought up over Miss Harris? I’m sure from what Mrs. Bushey tells me she’s a very nice person,” and then I remembered and added brightly: “She always pays her rent.”

Betty gave me a somber side glance.

“She’s very handsome.”

“There are handsome people who are perfectly convenable. You’re handsome, Betty.”

Betty was unmoved.

“At any rate you needn’t know her,” she said.

“Don’t you think I ought to say ‘Howd’ye do’ if I meet her on the stairs?”

“No, why should you? The next thing would be she’d be coming into your rooms and then, some day, she’d come when somebody you liked was there.”

She clasped her hands in her lap and drew herself up, her head so erect the double chin she fears was visible. In this attitude she kept a cold eye on me.

“And all because she’s handsome and wears a hat as big as a tea tray,” I said, trying to treat the subject lightly, but inwardly conscious of a perverse desire to champion Miss Harris.

Betty, wreathing her neck about in the tight grip of her collar, removed her glance to the window, out of which she stared haughtily as though Miss Harris was standing on the tin roof supplicating an entrance.

“We can’t be too careful in this town,” she murmured, shaking her head as if refusing Miss Harris’ hopes. Then she looked down at the floor. I saw her expression changing as her eye ranged over the rug.

“Where did you get this rug, Evie?” she asked in a quiet tone.

I grew nervous.

“It came with the apartment.”

“Get rid of it, dear, at once. I can send you up one from the library. Harry’s going to give me a new Aubusson.”

I became more nervous and faltered:

“But I ought to keep this.”

“Why? Is there a clause in your lease that you’ve got to use it?”

When Betty gets me against the wall this way I become frightened. Timid animals, thus cornered, are seized with the courage of despair and fly at their assailant. Timid human beings show much less spirit—I always think animals behave with more dignity than people—they tell lies.

“But—but—I like it,” I stammered.

“Oh,” said Betty with a falling note, “if that’s the case—” She stopped and rose to her feet, too polite to say what she thought. “Put on your things and come out with me. I’m shopping, and afterward we’ll lunch somewhere.”

I went out with Betty in the car, a limousine with two men and a chow dog. We went to shops where obsequious salesladies listened to Mrs. Ferguson’s needs and sought to satisfy them. They had a conciliating way of turning to me and asking my opinion which, such is the poverty of my spirit, pleased me greatly. I get a faint reflex feeling of what it is to be the wife of one of New York’s rising men. Then we lunched richly and clambered back into the limousine, each dropping languidly into her corner while the footman tucked us in.

We were rolling luxuriously down Fifth Avenue when Betty rallied sufficiently from the torpor of digestion to murmur.

“To-morrow morning, after breakfast, I’ll walk three times round the reservoir.”

Roger came at eight. It was the first cold night of the season and the furnace was not broken in. In spite of lamps the room was chilly. It was good to see him again—in my parlor, in my Morris chair. He isn’t handsome, a long thin man, with a long thin face, smooth shaven and lined, and thick, sleek, iron-gray hair. Some one has said all that a man should have in the way of beauty is good teeth. Roger has that necessary asset and another one, well-shaped, gentlemanly hands, very supple and a trifle dry to the touch. And, yes, he has a charming smile.

He is forty-two and hasn’t changed a particle in the last fifteen years. Why can’t a woman manage that? When I was dressing to-night I looked in the glass and tried to reconstruct my face as it was fifteen years ago. I promised to be a pretty girl then, but it was just the fleeting beauty that nature gives us in our mating time, lends us for her own purposes. Now I see a pale mild person with flat-lying brown hair and that beaten expression peculiar to females whom life conquers. I don’t know whether it’s the mouth or the eyes, but I see it often in faces I pass on the street.

It was a funny evening—conversation varied by chamber music. We began it sitting in the middle of the room on either side of the table like the family lawyer and the heroine in the opening scene of a play. Then, as the temperature dropped, we slowly gravitated toward the register, till we finally brought up against it. A faint warm breath came through the iron grill and we leaned forward and basked in it. We were talking about women. We often do, it’s one of our subjects. Of course Roger is of the old school. He’s got an early Victorian point of view; I know he would value me more highly if I swooned now and then. He doesn’t call women “the weaker vessel,” but he thinks of them that way.

“I don’t see why you can’t be content with things as they are,” he said, spreading his hands to the register’s meager warmth. “Why should you want to go into politics and have professions? Why aren’t you willing to leave all that to us and stay where you belong?”

“But we may not have anything to do where we belong. Roger, if you move nearer the corner you’ll get a little more heat.”

Roger moved.

“Every woman has work in her own sphere,” he said, while moving.

“I haven’t.”

“You, dear Evie,” he looked at me with a fond indulgent smile. “You have plenty of work and it’s always well done—to bring romance and sweetness into life.”

There is something quite maddening about Roger when he talks this way. I could find it in me to call him an ass. All the superiority of countless generations of men who have ordered women’s lives lies behind it. And he is impregnable, shut up with his idea. It is built round him and cemented with a thousand years of prejudice and tradition.

“I don’t want to bring romance and sweetness into life,” I said crossly, “I want to get something out of it.”

“You can’t help it. It’s what you were put in the world for. We men don’t want you in the struggle. That’s for us. It’s our business to go down into the arena and fight for you, make a place for you, keep you out of it all.”— He moved his foot across the register and turned it off.

“You’ve turned off the heat,” I cried.

He turned it on.

—“Keep you out of it all. Sheltered from the noise and glare of the world by our own firesides.”

“Some of us would rather have a little more noise and glare by our own register.”

“All wrong, Evie, all wrong. You’re in a niche up there with a lamp burning before it. If you come down from your niche you’re going to lose the thing that’s made you worshipful—your femininity, your charm.”

“What does our charm matter to us? What good is our femininity to us?”

He looked surprised.

“What good?”

“Look here, Roger, I feel certain that Shem, Ham and Japheth talked this way to their wives on those rainy days in the Ark. It’s not only a pre-glacial point of view, but it’s the most colossally selfish one. All you men are worried about is that we’re not going to be so attractive to make love to. The chase is going to lose its zest—”

I stopped short, cut off by a flood of sound that suddenly burst upon us from the register.

It was a woman’s voice singing Musetta’s song, and by its clearness and volume seemed to be the breath of the register become vocal. We started back simultaneously and looked about the room, while Musetta’s song poured over us, a rich jubilant torrent of melody.

“What is it?” said Roger, rising as if to defend me.

“Miss Harris,” I answered, jumping up.

“Who’s Miss Harris?”

“A singer. She lives here.”

“Does she live in there?” He pointed to the register.

“No, on the top floor, but it connects with her room.”

We stood still and listened, and as the song rose to its brilliant climax, Roger looked at me smiling, and nodded approvingly. In his heart he thinks he is something of a musician, has season seats at the opera and goes dutifully to the Symphony. I don’t think he is any more musical than I am. I don’t think literary people ever are. They like it with their imaginations, feel its sensuous appeal, but as to experiencing those esoteric raptures that the initiated know—it’s a joy denied.

The song came to an end.

“Not a bad voice,” said Roger. “Who is she?”

“A lady who is studying to be a professional.” And then I added spitefully: “Do you think she ought to give up her singing to be sheltered by somebody’s fireside?”

Roger had turned to get his coat. He stopped and looked at me over his shoulder, smiling—he really has a delightful smile.

“I except ladies with voices.”

“Because they add to the pleasure of gentlemen with musical tastes?”

He picked up his coat.

“Evie, one of the things that strengthens me in my belief is that when you get on that subject you become absolutely acid.”

I helped him on with his coat.

My sitting-room door opens close to the head of the stairs. If my visitors back out politely they run a risk of stepping over the edge and falling down-stairs on their backs. The one gas-jet that burns all the time is a safeguard against this catastrophe, but, as it is an uncertain and timid flicker, I speed the parting guest with caution.

Roger was backing out with his hat held to his breast when I gave a warning cry. It went echoing up the stairway and mingled with the sound of heavy descending feet. A head looked over the upper banister, a dark masculine head, and seeing nothing more alarming than a lady and gentleman in an open doorway, withdrew itself. The steps descended, a hand glided down the rail, and a large overcoated shape came into view. The frightened gas-jet shot up as if caught in a dereliction of duty, and the man, advancing toward us, was clearly revealed.

I am a person of sudden attractions and antipathies and I had one, sharp and poignant, as I looked at him. It was an antipathy, the “I-do-not-like-you-Doctor-Fell” feeling in its most acute form. It was evidently not reciprocal, for, as he drew near, he smiled, an easy natural smile that disclosed singularly large white teeth. He gave me an impression of size and breadth, his shoulders seemed to fill the narrow passage and he carried them with an arrogant swagger. That and the stare he fixed on us probably caused the “Doctor Fell” feeling. The stare was bold and hard, a combination of inspection and curiosity.

He added a nod to his smile, passed us and went down the stairs. We looked down on his wide descending shoulders and the top of his head, with the hair thin in the middle.

“Who’s that bounder?” said Roger.

“I haven’t the least idea.”

“Didn’t he bow to you?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t make me know him. He must be some one living in the house.”

Roger looked after him.

“I’m coming up here to see you often,” he said after a moment’s pause.

After he had gone I went into the back room and lit lights and peeled off the outer skins of my divan bed. I felt quite gay and light-hearted. I am going to like it here. With the student lamp lighted the back room is very cozy. I lay in bed and surveyed it admiringly while my ancestors looked soberly down on me. They are a very solemn lot, all but the French Huguenot lady with her frivolous curls and the black velvet round her neck. She has a human look. I’m sure her blood is strong in me. None of the others would ever have lived in an eighteen-foot house with a prima donna singing through the register, and a queer-looking man, with large white teeth, smiling at one in the passage.

IV

I have seen her—and I don’t wonder!

It was on Tuesday evening just as the dusk was falling. I had come home from a walk, and as I climbed the first narrow stair I saw in the hall above me, a woman standing under the gas, reading a letter. I caught her in silhouette, a black form, very tall and broadening out into a wide hat, but even that way, without feature or detail, arresting. Then, as she heard me, she stepped back so that the light fell on her. I knew at once it was Miss Harris, tried not to stare, and couldn’t help it.

She is really remarkably good-looking—an oval-faced, dark-eyed woman, with black hair growing low on her forehead and waving backward over her ears. Either the size of the hat, or her earrings (they were long and green), or a collarless effect about the neck, gave her a picturesque, unconventional air. The stage was written large all over her. When I got close I saw details, that she had beautifully curly lips—most people’s come together in a straight line like a box and its lid—and a fine nose, just in the right proportion to the rest of her face. Also she wore a gray fur coat, unfastened, and something in her appearance suggested a hurried dressing, things flung on.

She looked up from the letter and eyed me with frank interest. I approached embarrassed. A secret desire to have all people like me is one of my besetting weaknesses. I am slavish to servants and feel grateful when salesladies condescend to address me while waiting for change. The fear that Betty would find it out could not make me pass Miss Harris without a word. So I timidly smiled—a deprecating, apologetic smile, a smile held in bondage by the memory of Mrs. Ferguson.

Miss Harris returned it brilliantly. Her face suddenly bore the expression of one who greets a cherished friend. She moved toward me radiating welcome.

“You’re on the third floor,” she said in a rich voice, “Mrs. Harmon Drake.”

I saw a hand extended and felt mine enclosed in a grasp that matched the smile and manner. Miss Harris towered over me—she must be nearly six feet high—and I felt myself growing smaller and paler than the Lord intended me to be before that exuberantly beaming presence. My hand was like a little bundle of cold sticks in her enfolding grip. I backed against the banisters and tried to pull it away, but Miss Harris held it and beamed.

“I’ve read your name on your door every time I’ve passed,” she said, “and I’ve hoped you’d some day open the door and find me standing there and ask me to come in.”

I could see Betty’s head nodding at me, I could hear her grim “I told you so.”

I made polite murmurs and pressed closer to the banister.

“But the door was never opened,” said Miss Harris, bending to look into my face with an almost tender reproach. I felt I was visibly shrinking, and that the upward gaze I fastened on her was one of pleading. Unless she let go my hand and ceased to be so oppressively gracious I would diminish to a heap upon the floor.

“Never mind,” she went on, “now I know you I’ll not stand outside any more.”

I jerked my hand away and made a flank movement for the stairs. Five minutes more and she would be coming up and taking supper with me. She did not appear to notice my desire for flight, but continued talking to me as I ascended.

“We’re the only two women in the upper part of this house. Do I chaperon you, or do you chaperon me?”

I spoke over the banisters and my tone was cold.

“Being a married woman, I suppose I’m the natural chaperon.”

The coldness glanced off her imperturbable good humor:

“You never can tell. These little quiet married women—”

I frowned. The changed expression stopped her and then she laughed.

“Don’t be offended. You must never mind what I say. I’m not half so interesting if I stop and think.”

I looked down at her and was weak enough to smile. Her face was so unlike her words, so serenely fine, almost noble.

“That’s right, smile,” she cried gaily. “You’ll get used to me when you know me better. And you’re going to do that, Mrs. Drake, for I warn you now, we’ll soon be friends.”

Before I could answer she had turned and run down the stairs to the street.

I let myself into the sitting-room and took off my things. I have neat old-maidish ways, cultivated by years of small quarters. Before I can sit with an easy conscience I have to put away wraps, take off shoes, pull down blinds and light lamps. When I had done this I sat before the register and thought of Miss Harris.

There was something very unusual about her—something more than her looks. She has a challenging quality; maybe it’s magnetism, but whatever it is that’s what makes people notice her and speak of her. Nevertheless, she was not de notre monde—I apologize for the phrase which has always seemed to me the summit of snobbery, but I can’t think of a better one. It was not that she was common—that didn’t fit her at all—unsensitive would be a fairer word. I felt that very strongly, and I felt that it might be a concomitant of a sort of crude power. She didn’t notice my reluctance at all, or I had a fancy that she might have noticed it and didn’t care.

I was sitting thus when Mrs. Bushey came bounding ebulliently in. Mrs. Bushey bounds in quite often, after physical culture, or when the evenings in the other house pall. She wore a red dress under a long fur-lined coat and stopped in pained amaze when she saw me crouched over the register.

“Cold!” she cried aghast, “don’t tell me you haven’t enough heat?”

It was just what I intended telling her, but when I saw her consternation I weakened.

“It is a little chilly this evening,” I faltered, “but perhaps—”

Mrs. Bushey cut me short by falling into the Morris chair as one become limp from an unexpected blow.

“What am I to do?” she wailed, looking up at the chandelier as though she expected an answer to drop on her from the globes. “I’ve just got four tons of the best coal and a new furnace man. I pay him double what any one else on the block pays—double—and here you are cold.”

I felt as if I was doing Mrs. Bushey a personal wrong—insulting her as a landlady and a woman—and exclaimed earnestly, quite forgetting the night Roger and I had frozen in concert.

“Only this evening, Mrs. Bushey, I assure you.”

But she was too perturbed to listen:

“And I try so hard—I don’t make a cent and don’t expect to. I want you all to be comfortable, no matter how far behind I get. That’s my way—but I’ve always been a fool. Oh, dear!” She let her troubled gaze wander over the room— “Isn’t that a beautiful mirror? It came from the Trianon, belonged to Marie Antoinette. I took it out of my room and put it in here for you. What shall I do with that furnace man?”

I found myself telling her that an arctic temperature was exactly to my taste, and making a mental resolution that next time Roger came he could keep on his overcoat, and after all, spring was only six months off.

“No,” said Mrs. Bushey firmly, “I’ll have it right if I go to the poorhouse, and that’s where I’m headed. I had a carpenter’s bill to-day—twenty-six dollars and fourteen cents—and I’ve only eleven in the bank. It was for your floor”—she looked over it—“I really didn’t need to have it fixed, it’s not customary, but I was determined I’d give you a good floor no matter what it cost.”

I was just about suggesting that the carpenter’s bill be added to my next month’s rent when she brightened up and said an Italian count had taken the front room on the floor above.

“Count Mario Delcati, one of the very finest families of Milan. A charming young fellow, charming, with those gallant foreign manners. He’s coming here to learn business, American methods. I’m asking him nothing—a young man in a strange country. How could I? And though his family’s wealthy they’re giving him a mere pittance to live on. Of course I won’t make anything by it, I don’t expect to. His room’s got hardly any chairs in it, and I can’t buy any new ones with that carpenter’s bill hanging over me.” She smoothed the arm of the Morris chair and then looked at the floor. “It’s really made your floor look like parquet.”

I agreed, though I hadn’t thought of it before.

“You have a good many chairs in this room,” she went on, “more than usually go in a furnished apartment, even in the most expensive hotels.”

I had two chairs and a sofa. Mrs. Bushey rose and drew together her fur-lined coat.

“It’s horrible to think of that boy with only one chair,” she murmured, “far from his home, too. Of course I’d give him any I had, but mine are all gone. I’d give the teeth out of my head if anybody wanted them. It’s not in my nature to keep things for myself when other people ought to have them.”

I gave up the Morris chair. Mrs. Bushey was gushingly grateful.

“I’ll tell him it was yours and how willingly you gave it up,” she said, moving toward the door. Then she stopped suddenly and looked at the center-table lamp. “He’s a great reader, he tells me—French fiction. He ought to have a lamp and there’s not one to spare in either house.”

She looked encouragingly at me. I wanted the lamp.

“Can’t he read by the gas?” I pleaded.

“My dear,” said Mrs. Bushey, with a reproving look, “can you read by the gas?”

Conquered by her irrefutable argument, I surrendered the lamp. She was again grateful.

“It’s so agreeable, dealing with the right sort of people,” she said, fastening the last button of her coat. “All the others in the house are so selfish—wouldn’t give up anything. But one doesn’t have to ask you. You offer it at once.”

The count arrived yesterday afternoon, and we are now fast friends. Our meeting fell out thus:— I was reading and heard a sound of footsteps on the stairs, footsteps going up and down, prowling restless footsteps to which I paid no attention, as they go on most of the time. Presently there was a knock at my door and that, too, was a common happening, as most things and people destined for our house find refuge at my portal—intending lodgers for Mrs. Bushey, the seedy man who has a bill for Mr. Hamilton, the laundress with Mr. Hazard’s wash, the artist who is searching for Miss Bliss and has forgotten the address, the telegraph boy with everybody’s telegrams, the postman with the special deliveries, and Miss Harris’ purchases at the department stores.

I called, “Come in,” and the door opened, displaying a thin, brown, dapper young man in a fur-lined overcoat and a silk hat worn back from his forehead. He had a smooth dark skin, a dash of hair on his upper lip, and eyes so black in the pupil and white in the eyeball that they looked as if made of enamel.

At the sight of a lady the young man took off his hat and made a deep bow. When he rose from this obeisance he was smiling pleasantly.

“I am Count Delcati,” he said.

“How do you do?” I responded, rising.

“Very well,” said the count in careful English with an accent. “I come to live here.”

“It’s a very nice place,” I answered.

“That is why I took the room,” said the count. “But now I am here I can’t get into it or find any one who will open the door.”

He was locked out. Mrs. Bushey was absent imparting the mysteries of physical culture and Emma, the maid, was not to be found. In the lower hall was a pile of luggage that might have belonged to an actress touring in repertoire, and the count could think of nothing better to do than sit on it till some one came by and rescued him. Not at all sure that he might not be a novel form of burglar, I invited him into my parlor and set him by the register to thaw out. He accepted my hospitality serenely, pushing an armchair to the heat, and asking me if I objected to his wrapping himself in my Navajo blanket.

“How fortunate that I knocked at your door,” he said, arranging the blanket. “Otherwise I should surely be froze.”

I had an engagement at the dentist’s and disappeared to put on my things. When I came back he rose quickly to his feet, the blanket draped around his shoulders.

“I am going out,” I said. “I have to—it’s the dentist’s.”

“Poor lady,” he murmured politely.

“But—but you,” I stammered; “what will you do while I’m gone?”

Holding the blanket together with one hand he made a sweeping gesture round the room with the other.

“Stay here till you come back.”

I thought of Roger or Betty chancing to drop in and looked on the ground hesitant. There was a slight pause; I raised my eyes. The count, clasping the two ends of the blanket together over his breast, was regarding me with mild attention.

“But if any of my friends come in to see me?”

“I will receive them—varri nicely,” said the count.

We looked at each other for a solemn second and then burst out laughing.

“All right,” I said. “There are the books and magazines, there are the cigarettes, the matches are in that Japanese box and that cut glass bowl is full of chocolates.”

I left him and was gone till dark. At six I came back to find the room illuminated by every gas-jet and lamp and the count still there. He had quite a glad welcoming air, as if I might have been his mother or his maiden aunt.

“You here still,” I cried in the open doorway.

He gave one of his deep deliberate bows.

“I have been varri comfortable and warm,” he designated the center table with an expressive gesture, “I read magazines, I eat candy and I smoke—yes”—he looked with a proud air into the empty box—“yes, I smoke all the cigarettes.”

Then we went into the next house to find Mrs. Bushey.

My supper—eggs and cocoa—is cooked by me in the kitchenette. It is eaten in the dining-room or bedroom (the name of the apartment varies with the hour of the day) on one end of the table. The effect is prim and spinsterly—a tray cloth set with china and silver, a student lamp, and in the middle of the table, a small bunch of flowers. People send them sometimes and in the gaps when no one “bunches” me I buy them. To keep human every woman should have one extravagance.

I was breaking the first egg when a knock came on the door, and Miss Harris entered. She came in quickly, the gray fur coat over her arm, a bare hand clasping gloves, purse and a theater bag, all of which she cast on the divan-bed, revealing herself gowned in black velvet.

“Good evening, dearie,” she said, patting at her skirt with a preoccupied air, “would you mind doing me a service?”

I rose uneasily expectant. I should not have been surprised if she had asked for anything from one of my eggs to all my savings.

“Don’t look so frightened,” she said, and wheeled round disclosing the back of her dress gaping over lingerie effects: “Hook me up, that’s all.”

As I began the service Miss Harris stood gracefully at ease, throwing remarks over her shoulder:

“It’s a great blessing having you here, not alone for your sweet little self,” she turned her head and tried to look at me, pulling the dress out of my hands, “but because before you came I had such a tragic time with the three middle hooks.”

“What did you do?”

“Went unhooked sometimes and at others walked up and down the stairs hoping I’d find one of the inhabitants here, or a tramp, or the postman. He’s done it twice for me—a very obliging man.”

I did not approve, but did not like to say so.

“There’s an eye gone here.”

“Only one,” said Miss Harris in a tone of surprise, “I thought there were two.”

“Shall I pin it?”

“Please don’t. How could I get out a pin by myself, and I won’t wake you up at midnight.”

“But it gaps and shows your neck.”

“Then if the play’s dull, the person behind me will have something interesting to look at.”

“But really, Miss Harris—”

“My dear, good, kind friend, don’t be so proper, or do be proper about yourself if it’s your nature and you can’t help it, but don’t be about me. When I’m on the stage I’ll have to show much more than my neck, so I may as well get used to it.”

“Miss Harris!” I said in a firm cold tone, and stopped the hooking.

I caught the gleam of a humorous gray eye.

“Mrs. Drake!” She whirled round and put her hands on my shoulders and looked into my face with a sweetness that was quite bewitching. “You dear little mouse, don’t you know you’re one kind and I’m another. Both are nice kinds in their way, so don’t let’s try to mix them up.”

There is something disarmingly winning about this woman. I think for the first time in my life I have met a siren. I pulled my shoulders from the grasp of her hands, as I felt myself pulling my spirit from the grasp of her attraction.

“I’ve not finished your dress,” I said.

She turned her back to me and gave a sigh.

“Go on, Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi,” she said, and then added: “Are you the mother of anything?”

“No,” I answered.

“Too bad,” she murmured, “you ought to be.”

I didn’t reply to that. In the moment of silence the sound of feet on the stairs was audible. They came up the passage and began the ascent of the next flight. Miss Harris started.

“That’s my man, I guess,” she said quickly and tore herself from my hands.

She ran to the door and flung it open. I could see the man’s feet and legs half-way up the stairs.

“Jack,” she cried in a joyous voice, “I’m here, in Mrs. Drake’s room. Come down;” then to me: “It’s Mr. Masters. I’m going to the theater with him.”

The feet descended and Mr. Masters came into view. He was the man Roger and I had seen in the passage.

He took Miss Harris’ proffered hand, then sent a look at me and my room that contained a subtle suggestion of rudeness, of bold and insolent intrusion. Before she could introduce us he bowed and said easily:

“Good evening, Mrs. Drake. Saw you the other night in the hall.”

I inclined my head very slightly. His manner and voice increased my original dislike. I felt that I could not talk to him and turned to Miss Harris. Something in her face struck me unpleasantly. Her look was bent upon him and her air of beaming upon the world in general was intensified by a sort of special beam—an enveloping, deeply glowing beam, such as mothers direct upon beloved children and women upon their lovers.

The door was open and Mr. Masters leaned upon the door-post.

“Nice little place you’ve got here,” he said. “Better than yours, Lizzie.”

Miss Harris withdrew her glance from him, it seemed to me with an effort, as if it clung upon him and she had to pluck it away.

“Finish me,” she said, turning abruptly to me, “I must go.”

All the especial glow for me was gone. Her eyes lit on mine vacant and unseeing. I suddenly seemed to have receded to a point on her horizon where I had no more personality than a dot on a map. I was not even a servant, simply a pair of hands that prepared her for her flight into the night with the vulgar and repulsive man. This made me hesitate, also I didn’t want to go on with the hooking while Mr. Masters leaned against the door-post with that impudently familiar air.

“If Mr. Masters will go into the passage,” I said.

He laughed good-humoredly, but did not budge. Miss Harris made a movement that might easily have degenerated into an angry stamp.

“Oh, don’t be such an old maid,” she said petulantly. “Do the collar and let me go.”

I couldn’t refuse, but I went on with the hooking with a flushed face. What a fool I had been not to take Betty’s advice. Charming as she could be when she wanted, Miss Harris was evidently not a person whose manners remained at an even level.

“Have you heard Miss Harris sing?” asked Mr. Masters.

“Yes, through the register.”

“That’s a bad conductor. You must come up and hear her in her own rooms some evening.”

“If Miss Harris wants me to.”

“Mrs. Drake will some day hear me sing in the Metropolitan,” said the lady.

“Some day,” responded Mr. Masters.

There was something in his enunciation of this single word, so acid, so impregnated with a sneering quality that I stopped my work and cast a surprised glance at him.

He met it with a slight smile.

“Our friend Lizzie here,” he said, “has dreams—what I’m beginning to think are pipe dreams.”

“Jack,” she cried with a sudden note of pleading, “you know that’s not true. You know I’ll some day sing there.”

“I know you want to,” he replied, then with the air of ignoring her and addressing himself exclusively to me: “Miss Harris has a good voice, I might say a fine voice. But—all here,” he spread his fingers fan-wise across his forehead and tapped on that broad expanse, “the soul, the thing that sees and feels—absent, nil,” he fluttered the spread fingers in the air.

I was astounded at his cruel frankness—all the more so as I saw it had completely dashed her spirits.

“Rubbish, I don’t believe a word of it,” I answered hotly, entirely forgetting that I was angry with her.

“Not a bit,” he returned coolly, “I’ve told her so often. A great presence, a fine mechanism,” he swept her with a gesture as if she had been a statue, “but the big thing, the heart of it all—not there. No imagination, no temperament, just a well regulated, handsomely decorated musical box. Isn’t that so, Lizzie?”

He turned from me and directly addressed her, his eyes narrowed, his face showing a faint sardonic amusement. I wondered what she was going to say—whether she would fly at him, or whether, like the woman I knew, she would hide her mortification and refuse him the satisfaction of seeing how he hurt her.

She did neither. Moving to the divan, she picked up her coat, showing me a face as dejected as that of a disappointed child. His words seemed to have stricken all the buoyancy out of her and she shrugged herself into the coat with slow fatigued movements. Bending to pick up her gloves and glasses she said somberly:

“I’ll get a soul some day.”

“We hope so,” he returned.

“He doesn’t know anything about it,” I said in an effort to console.

“Oh, doesn’t he!” she answered bitterly. “It’s his business.”

“I’m a speculator in voices,” he said, “and our handsome friend Lizzie here has been an investment that, I’m beginning to fear, won’t pay any dividends.”

He laughed and looked at her with what seemed to me a quite satanic pleasure in his tormenting.

I could think of nothing to say, bewildered by the strange pair. Miss Harris had gathered up her belongings and moved to the door with a spiritless step.

“Good night,” she said, glancing at me as if I was a chair that had temporarily supported her weight in a trying moment.

“Good night,” said Mr. Masters cheerfully. “Some day go up and hear Lizzie sing and see if you can find the soul in the sound.”

He gave a wave with his hat and followed her down the hall.

I shut the door, and am not ashamed to confess, leaned upon it listening. I wanted to hear her attack him on the lower flight. But their footsteps died away in silence.

I cleared away my supper, sunk in deep reflections. What an extraordinary woman! One moment treating you like her bosom friend, the next oblivious of your existence, and most extraordinary of all, meekly enduring the taunts of that unspeakable man. I couldn’t account for it in any way except that she must be going to marry him—and that was a hateful thought. For if she was rude, and had the manners of a spoiled child, there was something about her that drew you close, as if her hands had hold of yours and were pulling you softly and surely into her embrace.

V

Roger and I went out to dinner last night, down-town to our favorite haunt in University Place.

I put on my best, a brown velveteen princesse gown (one of Betty’s made over), my brown hat with the gold rose and my amber beads. I even powdered my nose, which I was brought up to think an act of depravity only perpetrated by the lost and fallen. When I am dressed up I really do not look thirty-three. But I’ll have to buy two little rats to puff out my hair at the sides. It’s too flat under that hat. Roger was pleased when he saw me—that’s why I did it. What’s the fun of dressing for yourself? Some one must look at you admiringly and say, well, whatever it’s his nature to say. I suppose Mr. Masters would exclaim, “Gee, you’re a peach!” Roger said, “I like you in brown.”

I love going down Fifth Avenue in the dark of a winter evening. The traffic of business is over. Motors and carriages go spinning by, carrying people to dinners. The big glistening street is like an artery with the joyous blood of the city racing through it, coursing along with the throb, throb, throb of a deathless vitality. And the lights—the wonderful, glowing, golden lights! Two long lines of them on either side that go undulating away into the distance, and broken ones that flash by in a yellow streak, and round glaring ones like the alarmed eyes of animals rushing toward you in terror.

And I love the noise, the near-by rumble and clatter, and outside it the low continuous roar, the voice of the city booming out into the quiet of the fields and up into the silence of the skies. One great, unbroken sound made up of millions of little separate sounds, one great consolidated life made up of millions of little separate life, each of such vital importance to the one who’s living it.

We had lots to talk about, Roger and I. We always do. We might be wrecked on a desert island and go on talking for ten years without coming to the end. There are endless subjects—the books we read, the plays we see, pictures over which we argue, music of which I know nothing, and people, the most absorbing of all, probably because gossiping is a reprehensible practise. There is nothing I enjoy more. If I hadn’t been so well brought up I would be like the women in the first act of The School for Scandal. Sometimes we make little retrospective journeys into the past. But we do this cautiously. There are five years we neither of us care to touch on, so we talk forward by preference.

Of course I had to tell Roger of Miss Harris and Mr. Masters. It lasted through two courses.

“What a dog!” was Roger’s comment.

“Roger,” I said earnestly, “do you think she could be in love with such a man?”

Roger shrugged.

“How can I tell?”

“But could any woman—any possible kind of a woman? And she’s a very possible kind. Something comes from her and finds your heart and draws it right out toward her. She couldn’t.”

“Perhaps you don’t understand this enigmatical lady.”

“Maybe I don’t understand everything about her, I’ve only known her a few days. But I can feel—it’s an instinct—that underneath where the real things are she’s true and sound.”

I can see into Roger more clearly than he knows, and I saw that he wasn’t at all interested in Miss Harris. He looked round the room and said indifferently:

“Why does she have a cad like that hanging about?”

“Perhaps underneath there’s something fine in him.”

“Very far underneath, buried so deep nobody but Miss Harris can find it.”

“Roger, don’t be disagreeable. You’ve never seen either of them.”

“Evie, dear, your descriptions are very graphic. Do you know what I think?” He looked at me, smiling a little, but with grave eyes. “I think that you’re seeing Miss Harris through yourself. You’re putting your brain into her head and your heart into her body and then trying to explain her. That’s what’s making her such a puzzle.”

The waiter here produced a casserole with two squabs in it and presented it to Roger’s gaze as if it were a gift he was humbly offering. Roger looked at it and waved him away as if the gift was not satisfactory.

“They look lovely,” I called, and Roger smiled.

The squabs occupied him and my thoughts occupied me finally to find expression in a question:

“Roger, what is a gentleman?”

He looked surprised.

“A gentleman? What do you mean?”

“Just what I say—what is it?”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t. That’s just the point. There are lots of things that everybody—young people and fools—seem to understand and I don’t. One is the theory of vicarious atonement, one is why girls are educated to know nothing about marriage and children, which are the things that most concern them, and one is what makes a man a gentleman.”

Roger considered:

“Let’s see—at a blow. A gentleman is a man who observes certain rules of behavior founded on consideration for the welfare and comfort of others.”

“It sounds like the polite letter writer. Can a gentleman tell lies?”

“To benefit himself, no. To shield others, yes.”

“If he was noble inside—in his character—and uncouth outside, would he be a gentleman?”

“What do you mean by uncouth?”

“Well—wore a watch chain made of nuggets like a man I met in Dresden, and ate peas with his knife?”

“No.”

“Then, if he had beautiful manners and a bad heart, would he be one?”

“If his bad heart didn’t obtrude too much on his dealings with society, he might.”

“Is it all a question of clothes and manners?”

“No.”

“You’ve got to have besides the clothes and manners an inner instinct?”

“That’s it.”

I mused for a moment, then, looking up, caught Roger’s eye fixed on me with a quizzical gleam.

“Why this catechism?”

“I was thinking of Mr. Masters.”

“Good heavens!” said Roger crossly, his gleam suddenly extinguished. “Can’t you get away from the riff-raff in that house? I wish you’d never gone there.”

“No, I can’t. I was wondering if Mr. Masters, under that awful exterior had a fine nature, could he possibly be a gentleman?”

“Evie,” said Roger, putting down his knife and fork and looking serious, “if under that awful exterior Mr. Masters had the noble qualities of George Washington, Sir Philip Sidney and the Chevalier Bayard he could no more be a gentleman than I could be king of Spain.”

“I was afraid that’s what you’d say.” I sighed and returned to my squab.

I said no more about it, but when I got home my thoughts went back to it. I hated to think of Lizzie Harris in the company of such a man. If she was lacking in judgment and worldly knowledge some one ought to supply them for her. She was alone and a stranger. Mrs. Bushey had told me she came from California, and from what I’d heard, California’s golden lads and lassies scorned the craven deference to public opinion that obtains in the effete East. But she was in the effete East, and she must conform to its standards. She probably had never given them a thought and had no initiated guide to draw them to her attention. Whatever Betty might say, I was free to be friendly with whomever I pleased. That was one of the few advantages of being a widow, déracinée by four years in Europe. By the morning I had decided to put my age and experience at her service and this afternoon went up-stairs to begin doing it.

She was in her front room, sitting at a desk writing. A kimono of a bright blue crêpe enwrapped her, her dark hair, cloudy about the brows, was knotted loosely on the nape of her neck. She rose impulsively when she saw me, kissed me as if I was her dearest friend, then motioned me to the sofa, and went back to her place at the desk.

The room is like mine, only being in the mansard, the windows are smaller and have shelf-like sills. It was an odd place, handsome things and tawdry things side by side. In one corner stood a really beautiful cabinet of red Japanese lacquer, and beside it a three-legged wooden stool, painted white with bows of ribbon tied round each leg as if it was some kind of deformed household pet. Portions of Miss Harris’ wardrobe lay over the chairs, and the big black hat crowned the piano tool. On the window-sill, drooping and withered, stood a clump of cyclamen in a pot, wrapped in crimped green paper. Beside it was a plate of crackers and a paper bag, from whose yawning mouth a stream of oranges had run out, lodging in corners. The upright piano, its top covered with stacked music, the wintry light gleaming on its keys, stood across a rear angle of the room and gave the unkempt place an air of purpose, lent it a meaning.

It must be confessed Miss Harris did not look as if she needed assistance or advice. She was serene and debonair and the blue kimono was extravagantly becoming. I sat down upon the sofa against a pile of cushions. The bottom ones were of an astonishing hardness which obtruded through the softness of the top ones as if an eider-down quilt had been spread over a pile of bricks. I tried to look as if I hadn’t felt the bricks and smiled at Miss Harris.

“See what I’ve been doing,” she said, and handed me a sheet of note paper upon which were inscribed a list of names.

I looked over them and they recalled to my mind the heroines of G. P. R. James’ novels of which, in my teens, I had been fond.

“Suggestions for my stage name,” she explained. “How does number three strike you?”

Number three was Leonora Bronzino.

“That’s an Italian painter,” I answered.

“Is it? What a bother. Would he make a fuss?”

“He’s been dead for several hundred years.”

“Then he doesn’t matter. What do you think of number five?”

I looked up number five—Liza Bonaventura.

I murmured it, testing the sound. Miss Harris eyed me with attention, rapping gently on her teeth with the pen handle.

“Is it too long?”

I wasn’t sure.

“Of course when I got to be famous it would be just Bonaventura. And that’s a good word—might bring me luck.”

“Why don’t you use your own name?”

She laughed, throwing back her head so that I could see the inside of her mouth, pink and fresh like a healthy kitten’s.

“Lizzie Harris on a program—never!” Then suddenly serious, “I like Bonaventura—‘Did you hear Bonaventura last night in Tannhäuser’—strong accent on the hear. ‘How superb Bonaventura was in Carmen.’ It has a good ring. And then I’ve got a little dribble of Spanish blood in me.”

“You look Spanish.”

She nodded:

“My grandmother. She was a Spanish Californian—Estradilla. They owned the Santa Caterina Rancho near San Luis Obispo. My grandfather was a sailor on a Yankee ship that used to touch there and get hides and tallow. He deserted and married her and got with her a strip of the rancho as big as Long Island. And their illustrious descendant lives in two rooms and a kitchenette.”

She laughed and jumped up.

“I’m going to sing for you and you’ll see if Bonaventura doesn’t go well with my style.”

She swept the hat off the piano stool and seated herself. The walls of the room are covered with an umber brown burlap which made an admirable background for her long body clothed in the rich sinuous crêpe and her pale profile uplifted on an outstretched white neck.

“I’ll sing you something that I do rather well—Elizabeth’s going to be one of my great rôles,” she said, and struck a chord.

It was Dich Theure Halle and she sang it badly. I don’t mean that she flatted or breathed in the wrong place, but she sang without feeling, or even intelligence. Also her voice was not especially remarkable. It was full, but coarse and hard, and rolled round in the small room with the effect of some large unwieldly thing, trying to find its way out. What struck me as most curious was that the rich and noble quality one felt in her was completely lacking in her performance. It was commonplace, undistinguished. No matter how objectionable Mr. Masters might be I could not but feel he was right.

When she had finished she wheeled suddenly round on the stool and said quickly:

“Let me see your face.”

“It’s—it’s a fine voice,” I faltered, “so full and—er—rich.”

She paid no attention to my words, but sent a piercing look over my embarrassed countenance. Her own clouded and she drew back as if I had hurt her.

“You don’t like it,” she said in a low voice.

“Why do you say that—what nonsense. Haven’t I just said—”

“Oh, keep quiet,” she interrupted roughly, and giving the piano stool a jerk was twirled away from me into a profile position. She looked so gloomy that I was afraid to speak.

There was a moment’s pause, during which I felt exceedingly uncomfortable and she sat with her head bowed, staring at the floor. Then she gave a deep sigh and murmured.

“It’s so crushing—you all look the same.”

“Who?”

“Everybody who knows. And I’ve worked so hard and I’m eaten up,” she struck her breast with her clenched fist, “eaten up in here with the longing to succeed.”

The gesture was magnificent, and with the frowning brows and somber expression she was the Tragic Muse. If she could only get that into her voice!

“I’ve been at it two years, with Vignorol—you know him? I’ve learnt Italian and German, and nearly all the great mezzo rôles. And the polite ones say what you say, and the ones who don’t care about your feelings say ‘A good enough voice, but no temperament.’” She gave her body a vicious jerk and the stool twirled her round to me. “How in heaven’s name can I get temperament?”

“Well—er—time—and—er—experience and sorrow—” I had come up-stairs to give advice, but not on the best manner of acquiring temperament.

She cut me short.

“I’ve had experience, barrels of it. And time? I’m twenty-six now—am I to wait till I’m seventy? And sorrow? All my relations are dead—not that I care much, most of them I didn’t know and those I did I didn’t like. Shall I go and stand on the corner of Forty-second Street and Broadway and clamor for sorrow?”

“How in heaven’s name can I get temperament?”

“It’ll come without clamoring,” I said. Upon that subject I can speak with some authority.

“I wish it would hurry up. I want to arrive, I want to be a great prima donna. I will be a great prima donna. I will sing into that big dark auditorium and see those thousands of faces staring up at me and make those thousands of dull fat pigs of people sit up and come to life.”

She rose and walked to the window, pushed it up and picking up one of the oranges, threw it out.

“I hope that’ll hit some one on the head,” she said, banging the window down.

“Have you had the public’s opinion on your singing?” I asked, feeling it best to ignore her eccentricities of temper.

“Yes. I was in a concert in Philadelphia a year ago, with some others.”

“And what was the verdict?”

She gave a bitter smile.

“The critics who knew something and took themselves seriously, said ‘A large coarse voice and no temperament.’ The critics who were just men said nothing about the singing and a good deal about the singer’s looks—” She paused, then added with sulky passion, “Damn my looks.”

She was going to the window again and I hastily interposed.

“Don’t throw out any more oranges. You might hit a baby lying in its carriage and break its nose.”

Though she did not give any evidence of having heard, she wheeled from the window and turned back to me.

“It’s been nothing but disappointments—sickening disappointments. I wish I’d been left where I was. Three years ago in California I was living in a little town on the line between Los Angeles and San Francisco. I sang in the church and got ambitious and went up to San Francisco. They made a good deal of fuss over me—said another big singer was going to come out of California. I was just beginning to wonder if I really was some one, when one of those scratch little opera companies that tour South America and Mexico came up. Masters, Jack—the man you met here the other night—was managing it. I got an introduction and sang for him, and you ought to have heard him go up in the air. Bang—pouf!—like dynamite! Not the way he is now—oh, no—”

She stopped. The memory of those days of encouragement and promise seemed to shut off her voice. She stared out of the window as if she were looking back at them, her face set in an expression of brooding pain. I thought she was going to cry, but when she spoke her voice showed an angry petulance far from the mood of tears.

“I’d never have got such big ideas if he hadn’t given them to me. I must come on here and study, not waste myself on little towns and little people. Go for the big prize—that was what I was made for.” She suddenly turned on me and flung out what seemed the bitterest of her grievance, “He made me do it. He insisted on my coming—got Vignorol to take me, paid for my lessons. It’s his doing, all this.”

So that was the situation. That explained it all. I was immensely relieved. She might be in love with him, but if he was not in love with her (and he certainly gave no evidences of it), it would be easy to get rid of him. He was frankly discouraged about her, would probably hail with relief any means of escaping the continued expense of her lessons. The instinct that had brought me up-stairs was a good one after all.

“Couldn’t you”—I felt my way carefully for the ground was delicate—“couldn’t you put yourself in some one else’s hands. Get some one else to—I don’t know what the word is—”

She eyed me with an intent watching look that was disconcerting.

“Be my backer?” she suggested.

I nodded.

“No, I could not,” she said, in a loud violent tone. “Go back on the man who tried to make me, dragged me out of obscurity and gave me my chance? Umph!” She turned away with a scornful movement: “That would be a great thing to do.”

The change was so quick that it bewildered me. The cudgel with which she had been beating Masters was now wielded in his defense. The ground was even more delicate than I had thought, and silence was wisdom till I saw what was coming next. I rose from the rocky cushions and moved to the window.

The light in the little room had grown dim, the keys of the piano gleaming whitely from their dusky corner. With a deep sigh Miss Harris walked to the sofa, threw herself full length on it and lay still, a tall dark shape looking up at the ceiling.

I did not know what to say and yet I did not like to leave her so obviously wretched.

“Shall I light the gas?” I asked.

“No,” came the answer, “I like the dark.”

“Do you mind if I water the cyclamen? They’re dying.”

“I do. I want them to die.”

She clasped her hands under her head and continued to gaze at the ceiling. I moved to the door and then paused.

“Can I do anything for you?”

“Yes—” she shifted her glance and looked at me from beneath lowered lids. I again received the impression I had had the evening when I hooked her dress—that I was suddenly removed to an illimitable distance from her, had diminished to an undecipherable speck on her horizon. Never before had I met anybody who could so suddenly and so effectively strike from me my sense of value and importance.

“You can do something I’d like very much—go,” the voice was like a breath from the arctic.

I went, more amazed than angry. On the landing I stood wondering. What had I done to her? If I hadn’t been so filled up with astonishment I might have laughed at the contrast between my recent satisfaction in my mission and my inglorious dismissal.

My thoughts were dispersed by voices from below, resounding up through the cleft of the stairs. From a background of concerted sound, a series of short staccato phrases detached themselves:—

“My ’at! Look at it! Ruined! Smashed!”

I looked over the banister. On the floor below stood the count addressing Miss Bliss, Mr. Hamilton, Mr. Hazard and Mr. Weatherby, who stood ranged in their hallway in a single line, staring up at him. In one extended arm he held out a silk hat in a condition of collapse. Their four upturned faces were solemn and intent. Miss Bliss’ mouth was slightly open, Mr. Hamilton’s glasses glittered.

“What’s the matter?” I called, beginning to descend.

The count lifted a wrathful visage and shook the hat at me.

“Look at my ’at.”

A chorus rose from the floor below:

“Some one smashed his hat.”

“Threw an orange on it.”

“He says it came from here.”

“I think he’s wrong. It must have been the next house.”

“It was not,” cried the count, furious. “It was ’ere—this ’ouse. I am about to enter and crash—it falls on me! From there—above,” he waved the hat menacingly at the top floor.

The quartet below chorused with rising hope.

“Who’s up there, Mrs. Drake?”

“Did any one throw an orange?”

“Is Miss Harris at home?”

I approached the count, alarmed at his hysterical Latin rage.

“Who has throw the orange?” he demanded, forgetting his English in his excitement.

“You can have it reblocked,” I said comfortingly.

The count looked as if I had insulted him.

“’Ere?” he cried, pointing to the ground at his feet as if a hatter and his block were sitting there. “Never. I brought it from Italy.”

From below the voices persisted:

“Were you with Miss Harris?” This from Mr. Hamilton.

“Yes, I was.”

“Did she throw an orange?” This from Mr. Hazard.

“Why should any one throw an orange out of a front window?”

Miss Bliss answered that.

“She might. She’s a singer and they do queer things. I knew a singer once and she threw a clock that wouldn’t go into a bathtub full of water.”

This seemed to convince the count of Miss Harris’ guilt.

“She did it. I must see ’er,” he cried, and tried to get past me. I spread my arms across the passage. If he and Miss Harris met in their several fiery states of mind, there would be a riot on the top floor.

I don’t like to tell lies, but I remembered Roger had said that a gentleman could lie to shield another. Why not a lady? Besides, in this case, I would shield two others, for I had no doubt if Count Delcati intruded on Miss Harris he would be worsted. She was quite capable of throwing the other oranges at him and the three-legged stool.

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “She didn’t throw it.”

The male portion of the lower floor chorused:

“I knew she didn’t.”

“She couldn’t have.”

“Why should she?”

The count, with maledictions on the country, the city, the street and the house, entered his room, the Westerners entered theirs and Mr. Hamilton ascended to his. He puffed by me on the stairs:—

“Ridiculous to accuse a lovely woman like Miss Harris of such a thing. We ought to deport these Italians. They’re a menace to the country.”

Miss Bliss alone lingered. She is a pretty, frowsy little thing who looks cold and half fed, and always wears a kimono jacket fastened at the neck with a safety pin. She waited till all the doors had banged, then looking up, hissed softly:

“She did it. I was looking out of my window and saw it coming down and it couldn’t have come from anywhere but her room.”

“Hush,” I said, leaning over the banister. “She did. It’s the artistic temperament.”

Miss Bliss, as a model—artist not cloak—needed no further explanation. With a low comprehending murmur she stole into her room.

VI

The count and Miss Harris have met and all fear of battle is over. At the first encounter, which took place in my sitting-room, it was obvious that the young man was stricken. Since then he has seen her twice and has fallen in love—at least he says he has.

As soon as he felt sure of it he came in to tell me. So he said the other evening, sitting in the steamer chair Betty gave me to replace the one Mrs. Bushey took.

“You are a woman of sympathy,” he said, lighting his third cigarette, “and I knew you would understand.”

Numberless young men have told me of their love-affairs and always were sure I would understand. I think it’s because I listen so well.

I have a fire now. It was easier to buy coal than argue with Mrs. Bushey. The count stretched his legs toward it and smoked dreamily and I counted the cigarettes in the box. He smokes ten in an evening.

“She is most beautiful. I can find only one defect,” he murmured, “she is not thin enough.”

“Isn’t she?” I said, in my character of sympathetic woman, “I thought she was rather too thin.”

“Not for me,” answered the lover pensively; “no one could be too thin for me.”

He resumed his cigarette. It was nine and there were seven left. I calculated that they would last him till eleven.

“There was a lady in Rome I once knew,” he began in a tone of reminiscence, “thin like a match and so beautiful,” he extended his hand in the air, the first finger and thumb pressed together as if he might have been holding the match-like lady between them, “a blonde with brown eyes, immense eyes. Oh, Dio mio!” His voice trailed away into silence, swamped by a flood of memory.

“Were you in love with her, too?” I have noticed that the confiding young men expect the sympathetic woman to ask leading questions.

“Yes,” said the count gravely, “four years ago.”

“You must have been very young.”

Such remarks as this are out of character. They take me unawares and come from the American part of me—not the human universal part, but that which is individual and local.

“Oh, no, I was nineteen.” He went back to his memories. “She was all bones, but such beautiful bones. One winter she had a dress made of fur and she looked like an umbrella in it. This way,” he extended his hands and described two straight perpendicular lines in the air, “the same size all the way up. Wonderful!”

“Our young men don’t fall in love so early,” I said.

“They don’t fall in love at all,” replied the count, “neither do the women. They only flirt, all of them, except Miss Harris.”

“Doesn’t she flirt?”

I was stretching my sympathetic privileges a little too far. My excuse is curiosity, vulgar but natural. I had never before seen any one like Miss Harris and I wanted to get at the heart of her mystery.

“Flirt!” exclaimed the count. “Does a goddess flirt? That’s what she is. Think of it—in this new shiny country, in this city with telephones and policemen, in this sad street with the houses all built the same.” He sat upright and shook his cigarette at me. “She belongs where it is all sunshine and joy, and they dance and laugh and there is no business and nobody has a conscience.”

“Do you mean Ancient Greece or Modern Naples?”

The count made a vague sweeping gesture that left a little trail of smoke in the air.

“N’importe! But not here. She is a pagan, a natural being, a nymph, a dryad. I don’t know what in your language—but oh, something beautiful that isn’t bothered with a soul.”

I started, Masters and the count, raw America and sophisticated Italy, converging toward the same point.

Before I could answer her voice sounded startlingly loud through the register. For the first moment I didn’t recognize the strain, then I knew it—“Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore”—I have lived for art, I have lived for love. We looked at each other in surprised question as the impassioned song poured from the grating. It was as if she had heard us and this was her answer.

My knowledge of nymphs and dryads is small, but I feel confident if one of them had ever sung a modern Italian aria through a modern American register she could not have rendered it with less heart and soul than Miss Harris did.

Yesterday morning Betty telephoned me to come and lunch with her. Betty’s summons are not casual outbreaks of hospitality. There is always an underlying purpose in them, what a man I know who writes plays would call “a basic idea”. She is one of the few people who never troubles about meaningless formalities or superfluous small talk. It’s her way, and then she hasn’t time. That’s not just a phrase but a fact. Every hour of her day has its work, good work, well done. Only the poor know Betty’s private charities, only her friends the number of her businesslike benefactions.

Walking briskly down the avenue I wondered what was her basic idea this time. Sometimes it’s clothes: “There are some dresses on the bed. Look them over and take what you like. The gray’s rather good, but I think the pink would be more becoming. I can have it done over for you by my woman.” Sometimes it’s a reinvestment of part of my little capital suggested by Harry, a high interest and very safe. Once it was an attempt to marry me off. That was last autumn when I had just got back from Europe, to a man with mines from Idaho. When I grew tearful and reluctant she gave it up and shifted him—for he was too valuable to lose—to a poor relation of Harry’s.

We were at lunch when the basic idea began to rise to the surface, Betty at the head of the table, very tight and upright in purple cloth and chiffon, and little Constance, her eldest born, opposite me. Little Constance is an adorable child with a face like a flower and the manner of a timid mouse. She loves clothes and when I come leans against me looking me over and gently fingering my jewelry. She won’t speak until she has examined it to her satisfaction. At the table her steadfast gaze was diverted from me to a dish of glazed cherries just in front of her.

The entrée was being passed when Betty, helping herself, said:

“Harry’s just met a man from Georgia who is in cotton—not done up in it, his business.” She looked into the dish then accusingly up at the butler: “I said fried, not boiled, and I didn’t want cream sauce.”

The butler muttered explanations.

“Tell her it mustn’t happen again, no more cream sauce for lunch.” She helped herself, murmuring, “Really the most fattening thing one can eat.”

“Why do you eat it?” said little Constance, withdrawing her eyes from the cherries.

“Because I like to. Keep quiet, Constance. Mr. Albertson, that’s his name, is well-off, perfectly presentable and a widower.”

So it was matrimonial again.

“That’s very nice,” I replied meekly.

“We’ll have him to dinner some night next week and you to meet him.”

“Why do you ask me? He’d surely rather have some one younger and prettier.”

“It doesn’t matter what he’d rather have. I’ll telephone you when the day’s fixed.”

“Betty,” I murmured, looking at her pleadingly.

“Evie,” she returned firmly, “don’t be silly. The present situation’s got to come to an end some time.”

“It’ll never end.”

“Rubbish. There’s no sense in you scraping along this way in two rooms—”

“Remember the kitchenette.”

“In two rooms,” she went on, ignoring the kitchenette. “Of course I don’t want you to live in Georgia, but—”

Little Constance showed a dismayed face.

“Is Evie going to live in Georgia?”

Betty turned a stern glance on her.

“Constance, you’ll lunch up-stairs if you keep on interrupting.”

Constance was unaffected by the threat.

“When is she going?” she asked.

“Never,” I answered.

“I’m glad,” said little Constance, and seeing her mother’s glance averted, stole a cherry from the dish and hid it in her lap.

“From what Harry says, and he’s heard all about Mr. Albertson, he seems a perfectly fitting person, forty-five, of very good family and connections, and with an income of thirty thousand a year.”

“He’ll probably not like me,” I said hopefully.

“Oh, he will,” answered Betty with grim meaning, “I’ll see to that.”

I could hear her retailing my perfections to Mr. Albertson and my heart sank. Masterful, managing people crush me. If the man from Georgia liked me, as the man from Idaho did, I foresaw a struggle and I seem to have exhausted all my combative force in the year before my husband died. I looked at little Constance and caught her in the act of popping the cherry into her mouth. It was large and she had to force it into her cheek and keep it there like a squirrel with a nut. An expression of alarm was in her face, there was evidently less room for it than she had expected.

Betty went ruthlessly on.

“Your present way of living is absurd—you, made for marriage.”

I saw little Constance’s eyes grow round with curiosity, but she did not dare to speak.

“Made for companionship. If you were a suffragette or a writer, or trimmed hats or ran a tea-room, it would be different, but you’re a thoroughly domestic woman and ought to have a home.”

Little Constance bit the cherry with a sharp crunching sound. Betty looked at her.

“Constance, are you eating your lunch?”

Little Constance lifted her bib, held it to her mouth, and nodded over it.

The danger was averted. Betty turned to me.

“Marriage is the only life for a normal woman. Judkins, I’ll have some more of those sweetbreads.”

She helped herself, and under the rattle of the spoon and fork, little Constance crunched again, very carefully.

“And what is the good of living in the past. That’s over, thank heaven.”

“I’m not living in the past any more. Betty, I’m—I’m—raising my head.”

Betty looked sharply up from the sweetbreads, and I flinched under her glance. She cast an eye on Judkins, who was receding into the pantry, waited till he was gone, then said, in an eager hushed voice:

“Evie, don’t tell me there’s some one?”

Never have I been more discomfited by the directness of my Betty. I felt myself growing red to my new rat and was painfully aware that little Constance, now crunching rapidly, had fixed upon me the deadly stare of an interested child.

“Of course there isn’t. What nonsense. But time has passed and one doesn’t stay broken-hearted forever. I’m not old exactly, and I’m—that is—it’s just as I said, I’m beginning to come alive again.”

“Oh!” Betty breathed out and leaned against her chair-back, with a slight creaking of tight drawn fabrics. But she kept her eye on me, in a sidelong glance, that contained an element of inspecting inquiry. Little Constance swallowed the cherry at a gulp and the question it had bottled up burst out:

“Evie, are you going to get married?”

“No,” I almost shouted.

Little Constance said no more, but her gaze remained glued to my face in an absorption so intense that she leaned forward, pressing her chest against the edge of the table. Betty played with her knife and fork with an air of deep thought. Judkins reentered to my relief.

He was passing the next dish when little Constance broke the silence.

“Evie, why did you get all red just now?”

“Constance,” said her mother, “if you’re a good girl and stop talking you can have a cherry when lunch is over.”

“Thanks, mama,” said little Constance, in her most mouse-like manner.

After lunch we drove about in the auto and shopped, and as the afternoon began to darken Betty haled me to a reception.

“Madge Knowlton’s daughter’s coming out,” she said. “And as you used to know her before you went to Europe, it’s your duty to come.”

“Why is it my duty? I was never an intimate of hers.”

I’m shy about going to parties now; I feel like Rip Van Winkle when he comes back.

“To swell the crowd. It’s a social service you owe to a fellow woman in distress.”

We entered the house through a canvassed tunnel and inserted ourselves into a room packed with women and reverberating with a clamor of voices. We had a word and a hurried handclasp with Madge Knowlton and her daughter, and then were caught in a surging mass of humanity and carried into a room beyond. The jam was even closer here. I dodged a long hatpin, and was borne back against a mantelpiece banked with flowers whose delicate dying breath mingled with the scents of food and French perfumery. When the mass broke apart I had momentary glimpses of a glittering table with a woman at either end who was pouring liquid into cups.

At intervals the crowd, governed by some unknown law, was seized by migratory impulses. Segments of it separated from the rest, and drove toward the door. Here they met other entering segments with a resultant congestion. When thus solidified the only humans who seemed to have the key of breaking us loose were waiters. They found their way along the line of least resistance, making tortuous passages like the cracks in an ice pack.

From them we snatched food. I had a glass of punch, a cup of coffee, a chocolate cake, two marrons and a plate of lobster Neuberg, in the order named. I haven’t the slightest idea why I ate them—suggestion I suppose. All the other women were similarly endangering their lives, and the one possible explanation is that we communicated to one another the same suicidal impulse. It was like the early Christians going to the lions, the bold ones swept the weaker along by the contagion of example.

I met several old acquaintances who cried as if in rapturous delight.

“Why, Evelyn Drake, is this really you?”

“Evie—I can’t believe my eyes! I thought you had gone to Europe and died there.”

“How delightful to see you again. Living out of town, I suppose. We must arrange a meeting when I get time.”

And so forth and so on.

It made me feel like a resurrected ghost who had come to revisit the glimpses of the moon. My old place was not vacant, it was filled up and the grass was growing over it. I was glad when one of those blind stampeding impulses seized the crowd and carried me near enough to Betty to cry, as I was borne along, “I’m going home and I’d rather walk,” and was swept like a chip on a stream to the door.

It was raining, a thin icy drizzle. Beyond the thronging line of limousines, the streets were dark with patches of gilding where the lamplight struck along the wet asphalt. They looked like streets in dreams, mysteriously black gullies down which hurried mysteriously black figures. I walked toward Lexington Avenue, drooping and depressed, in accord with the chill night and the small sad noises of the rain. I was in that mood when you walk slowly, knowing your best dress is getting damp and feeling the moisture through your best shoes and neither matters. Nothing matters.

Once I used to enjoy teas, found entertainment in those brief shouted conversations, those perilous feasts. Perhaps I was sad because I was so out of it all. And what was I in—what took its place? I was going back to emptiness and silence. To greet me would be a voiceless darkness, my evening companion a book.

I got on a car full of damp passengers. As if beaten down by the relentless glare of the electric lights, all the faces drooped forward, hollows under the eyes, lines round the mouths. They sat in listless poses, exhaling the smell of wet woolen and rubber and I sat among them, also exhaling damp smells—also with hollows under my eyes and lines round my mouth. That, too, didn’t matter. What difference if I was hollowed and lined when there was no one to care?

My room was unlighted and cold. I lighted the gas and stood with uplifted hand surveying it. It was like a hollow shell, an empty echoing shell, that waited for a living presence to brighten it. Just then it seemed to me as if I never could do this—its loneliness would be as poignant and pervasive when I was there, would steal upon me from the corners, surround and overwhelm me like a rising sea. My little possessions, my treasures, that were wont to welcome me, had lost their friendly air. I suddenly saw them as they really were, inanimate things grasped and held close because associated with the memory of a home. In the stillness the rain drummed on the tin roof and the line in a forgotten poem rose to my mind, “In the dead unhappy night and when the rain is on the roof.”

I snatched a match and hurried to the fire. Thrusting the flame between the bars of the grate, I said to myself:

“I must get some kind of a pet—a dog or a Persian cat. I’ve not enough money to adopt a child.”

The fire sputtered and I crouched before it. I didn’t want any supper, I didn’t want to move. I think a long time passed, several hours, during which I heard the clock ticking on the mantel over my head, and the rain drumming on the roof. Now and then the rumbling passage of a car swept across the distance.

I have often sat this way and my thoughts have always gone back to the past like homing pigeons to the place where they once had a nest. To-night they went forward. My married life seemed a great way off, and the Evelyn Drake in it looked on by the Evelyn Drake by the fire, a stranger long left behind. The memories of it had lost their sting, even the pang of disillusion was only a remembrance. With my eyes on the leaping flames I looked over the years that stretched away in front, diminishing to a point like a railway track. My grandmother had lived to eighty-two and I was supposed to be like her. Would I, at eighty-two, be still a pair of ears for young men’s love stories and young women’s dreams of conquest?

Oh, those years, that file of marching years, coming so slowly and so inevitably, and empty, all empty!

The rain drummed on the roof, the clock ticked and the smell of my best skirt singeing, came delicately to my nostrils. Even that didn’t matter. From thirty-three to eighty-two—forty-nine years of it. I looked down at my feet, side by side, smoking on the fender. Wasn’t it Oliver Wendell Holmes, when asked to define happiness, answered, “four feet on the fender”?

There was a knock on the door, probably the count to continue the recital of his love’s young dream. My “Come in” was not warm.

The door opened and Roger entered in a long wet raincoat.

I jumped up crying “Roger,” and ran to him with my hand out.

He took it and held it, and for a moment we stood looking at each other quite still and not speaking. I was too glad to say anything, too glad to think. It was an astonishing gladness, a sort of reaction I suppose. It welled through me like a warm current, must have shone in my face, and spoken from my eyes. I’ve not often in my life been completely outside myself, broken free of my consciousness and soared, but I was then just for one minute, while I looked into Roger’s face, and felt his hand round mine.

“You’re glad to see me, Evie,” he said and his voice sounded as if he had a cold.

That broke the spell. I came back to my eighteen-foot parlor, but it was so different, cozy and pretty and intimate, full of the things I care for and that are friends to me. The rain on the roof had lost its forlornness, or perhaps, by its forlornness accentuated the comfort and cheer of my little room.

We sat by the fire. Roger’s feet were wet and he put them upon the fender.

“Now, if you’d been plodding about in the rain with me you’d put yours up, too. Hullo, what have I said? Your face is as red as a peony.”

“It’s the fire. I’ve been sitting over it for a long time,” I stammered.

Just then the register became vocal, with the habanera from Carmen.

Roger got up and shut it.

“Don’t you want to hear her sing?” I asked.

“No, I want to hear you talk,” said he.

VII

Miss Harris is going to appear in a concert. She came glowing and beaming into my room to tell me. Vignorol, her teacher, had arranged it—with a violinist and a baritone—in Brooklyn.

“Why not New York?” I asked.

“Not yet,” said Miss Harris, moving about the room with a jubilant dancing step, “but after this is over—wait and see!”

Great things are expected to come of it. The public’s attention is to be caught, then another concert, maybe an engagement in one of the American opera companies—just for experience. It is to be the opening of a career which will carry her to the Metropolitan Opera House. The baritone is another of Vignorol’s pupils, Berwick, a New Englander—nothing much, just to fill up. The violinist is a Mrs. Stregazzi, who also fills up, and little Miss Gorringe accompanies. I was shown a pencil draft of the program with Liza Bonaventura written large at the top—“Yes, it’s to be Bonaventura; I had a superstition about it,” and the dress is to be white, or, with a sudden bright air:

“I might borrow your green satin—but of course I couldn’t. You’re too small.”

Since then the house has resounded with practising from the top floor. Heavy steps and light feminine rustlings have gone up and down the stairs. Once the strains of a violin came with a thin whine through the register as if some melancholy animal was imprisoned behind the grill. In the dusk of the lower hall I bumped into a young man with tousled hair and frogs on his coat, whom I have since met as Mr. Berwick.

The star is in a state of joyful excitement which has communicated itself to the rest of us. When in the evening she goes over her repertoire, the Westerners and Miss Bliss sit on the bottom steps of their stairs, Mr. Hamilton and the count on the banisters of theirs and I on the top step of mine. A Niagara of sound pours over us, billowing and rushing down through the well, buffeted between the close confining walls. When each piece is ended Miss Harris comes out on her landing, leans over the railing and calls down:

“How was that?”

Then our six faces are upturned and we express our approbation, according to our six different natures.

Our mutual hopes for her success have drawn us together and we have suddenly become very friendly. Mr. Hazard drops in upon me in a paint-stiffened linen blouse and Mr. Weatherby has confided to me the money to pay for his laundry. Mr. Hamilton has smoked a large black cigar in my dining-room, and Miss Bliss has come shivering with hunched shoulders and clasped red arms to “borrow a warm” (her own expression) at my fire.

In my excursions to the top floor I have met Mrs. Stregazzi and Miss Gorringe. Mrs. Stregazzi is a large blond lady with an ample figure and a confidential habit. On our first meeting she called me “dearie” and told me all about her divorce from Mr. Stregazzi, who, I gathered, was her inferior, both in station and the domestic virtues. In his profession—the stage—he was something called “a headliner”, and appeared to be involved mysteriously with trained animals. Since his divorce he has married another “headliner”. It’s like that story of the Frenchman in Philadelphia: “He is a Biddle, she was a Biddle, they are both Biddles.” I must ask Lizzie Harris what it is. Miss Gorringe is a thin sallow girl with an intelligent face, and Mr. Berwick a bulky silent New Englander, in the early twenties, who bears a strong resemblance to the bust of Beethoven over Schirmer’s music store.

They are strange people, artless as children, and completely absorbed in themselves and their work. They appear to have no points of contact with any other world, and the real part of their world is the professional part. They don’t say much about their homes or their lives away from it.

A few days ago they took tea with me, and as they talked I had a series of glimpses, like quickly shifted magic lantern slides, of their life on trains, in hotels, behind the scenes and on the stage. It seemed to me a sort of nightmare of hurry and scramble, snatched meals, lost trunks, cold dressing-rooms. Maybe the excitement makes up for the rest. It must be exciting—at least that’s the impression I got as I sat behind the teacups listening.

Lizzie Harris seemed to find it enthralling, everything they said interested her. Mrs. Stregazzi told some anecdotes that I didn’t like—I don’t want to be a prig, but they really were too sordid and scandalous—and our prima donna hung on the words of that fat made-up woman as if she spoke with the tongues of men and of angels. The more I know of her the less able I am to get at the core of her being, to place her definitely in my gallery of “women I have known.” I had finally decided that in spite of her tempests, her egotism and her weather-cock moods, there was something rare and noble in her, and here she was drinking in cheap gossip about a set of people she didn’t know, and who seem to be a mixture of artist, mountebank and badly brought-up child.

As I sat pouring the tea I felt again that curious aloofness in her. But before it was more a withdrawal of her spirit into herself, a retreating into an inner citadel and closing all the doors. This time it was the spirit reaching toward others and shutting me out, like a child who forgets its playmate when a circus passes by. She listened hungrily, now and then commenting or questioning with a longing, almost a homesick note. When they rose to go, with a scraping of chair-legs and a concerted clamor of farewells, she was reluctant to lose them, followed them to the hall and leaned over the banister watching their departing heads.

She made me feel an outsider, almost an intruder. I was willing to efface myself for the moment and stood by the table waiting for her to come back and reestablish me in her regard. She said nothing, however, but brushed by the door and went up-stairs. In a few minutes Musetta’s song filled the house. The next morning she came in while I was at breakfast and asked me to lend my green satin dress to Miss Gorringe, and when I agreed kissed me with glowing affection.

That all happened early in the week. Yesterday afternoon I was witness to a scene, the effect of which is with me still, at midnight, scratching this down in my rose-wreathed back room. It was a hateful scene, a horrible scene—but let me describe it:

Calls of my name descending from the top floor in Miss Harris’ voice, took me out to my door.

“I am going over some of my things,” the voice cried. “Come up and listen.” Then, as I ascended, “It’s the scene between Brunhilda and Siegmund in Die Walkuere, the piéce de résistance of the evening.”

I didn’t find Miss Gorringe as I expected, but Mr. Masters, sitting on the piano stool and looking glum. He rose, nodded to me, and sinking back on the stool, laid his hands on the keys and broke into a desultory playing. With all my ignorance I have heard enough to know that he played uncommonly well.

The future Signorita Bonaventura was looking her best, a slight color in her cheeks, confidence shining in her eyes.

“We’ve been trying it over. Did you hear?”

The weather had been warm, the register closed, so I had only heard faintly.

“Well, it’s going to be something great,” said the prima donna.

“Is it?” said Mr. Masters with his back to us.

The sneering quality was strong in his tone and I began to wish I hadn’t come.

“Go across the room, Mrs. Drake,” he said curtly. “Sit where you can see her.”

I obeyed, sitting in the corner by the window. She faced me and Mr. Masters was in profile.

My friends tell me I am completely devoid of the musical sense. It must be true, for I can not sit through Meistersinger, and there are long reaches of Tristan and Isolde that get on my nerves like a toothache. But I have some kind of appreciation, do derive an intense pleasure from certain scenes in certain operas. It was one of these scenes they were now giving, that one in the second act of Die Walkuere when Brunhilda appears before Siegmund.

It has always seemed to me that the drama rose above the music, overpowered it. I supposed this to be the fancy of my own ignorance and never had the courage to say it. But the other day I read somewhere the opinion of Dujardin, the French critic, and he expressed just what I mean—“It is not the music, no, it is not the music, that counts in the scene, but the words. The music is beautiful—of course it is, it couldn’t be otherwise—but Wagner was aware of the beauty of the poetry and allowed it to transpire.”

That is exactly what I should have said if I had dared.

Masters struck the opening notes and she began to sing.

“Siegmund sieh’ auf mich! Ich bin’s der bald du folgst—

Siegmund, look on me. I come to call thee hence.”

What a greeting!

A stir of irritation passed through me. She looked at Masters with a friendly air and sang the lines with an absence of understanding and emotion that would have robbed them of all meaning if anything could. I wanted to shake her.

Then I forgot—Masters began.

If I was surprised at his playing his singing amazed me. He had almost no voice, but he had all the rest—the wonderful thing, imagination, the response to beauty, power of representing a state of mind. I don’t explain well, I am out of my province, perhaps it’s better if I simply say he became Siegmund.

As he played he turned and looked at her. His whole face had changed, transformed by the shadow of tragedy. To him Lizzie was no longer Lizzie, she was the helmed and armored daughter of Wotan delivering his death summons. I can pay no higher tribute to him than to say I forgot him, the burlap walls, the thin tones of the piano and saw a vision of despairing demigods.

“Wer bist du, sag

Die so schön und ernst mir erscheint?”

Then Lizzie:—

“Nur Todgeweihten

Taugt mein Anblick:

Wer mich erschaut,

Der scheidet vom Lebenslicht.”

My vision was dispelled. No one could have kept it listening to her and watching her. As they went on what he created she destroyed; it was the most one-sided, maddening performance. I found myself eager to have her stop that I might hear him. Before they had reached the end I knew that Mr. Masters was an artist and she was not. That is all there was to it.

She turned to me, proudly smiling, with a questioning “Well”.

Mr. Masters, his head drooped, heaved a sigh.

I could not be untruthful. I had been too deeply moved.

“Your voice is very fine,” I said in the flattest of voices and looked at her beseechingly.

She met my eyes steadily and her smile died away.

“Only a voice,” she said.

“Miss Harris,” I cried imploringly. “You are young, you have beauty—” She cut short my bromides with an angry exclamation.

“And no more temperament than a tomato can,” Mr. Masters finished for me.

He ran his fingers over the keyboard in a glittering flow of notes.

“You’re a liar,” she cried, turning furiously on him.

Now, for the first time, I saw her really angry, not childishly petulant as in her orange-throwing mood, but shaken to her depth with rage. She was rather terrible, glaring at Masters with a grim face.

“Am I?” he said, coolly striking a chord. “We’ll see Tuesday night in Brooklyn.”

I had expected him to answer her in kind, but he only seemed weary and dispirited. Her chest rose with a deep breath and I saw to my alarm that she had grown paler.

“You didn’t always think that,” she said in a muffled voice.

“No,” he answered quietly, “I believed in you at first.”

He spread his hands in a long clutching movement and struck another chord. It fell deep into the momentary silence as if his powerful fingers were driving it down like a clencher on his words.

“And you don’t any more?”

“No, I’ve about done believing,” he responded.

She ran at him and seized him by the shoulder. He jerked it roughly out of her grasp and twirling round on the stool faced her, exasperated, defiant, a man at the end of his patience. But his eyes said more, full of a steely dislike. She met them and panted:

“You can’t, you don’t. Even you couldn’t be so mean—” then she stopped, it seemed to me as if for the first time conscious of the hostility of his gaze. There was the pause of the realizing moment and when she burst out her voice was strangled with passion:

“Go—get out—go away from me. I’m sick of it all. I’ll stand no more—go—go.”

She ran to the door and threw it open. I got up to make my escape. Neither of them appeared to remember I was there.

“All right,” he said, calmly rising. “That suits me perfectly.”

He picked up his hat and coat and moved to the door. I tried to get there before him, dodging about behind their backs for an exit, then, like a frightened chicken, made a nervous dive and got between them. Her hand on my arm flung me back as if I had been a chair in the way. I had a glimpse of her full face, white and with burning eyes. She frightened me.

Mr. Masters walked into the hall and there came to a standstill. After looking at the back and front of his hat he settled it comfortably on his head and moved toward the stairs.

Suddenly she rushed after him and caught him by the arm.

“No—no—” she cried. “Don’t go.”

I couldn’t see her face, but his was in plain view and it looked exceedingly bored.

“What is it now?” he said.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I’m so discouraged—you take the heart out of me. I don’t know what I’m saying and I’ve tried so hard—oh, Jack—”

Her voice broke, her head sank. Mr. Master’s expression of boredom deepened into one of endurance.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked with weary patience.

“Come back. Don’t be angry. Forget what I said.”

She began to cry, shielding her face with one hand, the other still holding him by the sleeve.

He sighed, and glancing up, saw me. I expected him to drive me forth with one fierce look. Instead he made a slight grimace and reentered the room, she holding to his sleeve. He dropped heavily on the piano stool and she on the chair opposite, her hands in her lap, two lines of tears on her cheeks. Neither said a word.

The way was clear and I flew out with the wild rush of a bird escaping from a snare. As I ran down the stairs the silence of that room, four walls enclosing a tumult of warring passions, followed me.

It’s midnight and I haven’t got over the ugliness of it. What am I to think? The thing many people would think, I won’t believe, I can’t believe. No one who knew her could. That the unfortunate creature loves him is past a doubt—but how can she? How can she humiliate herself so? Where is the pride that the rest of us have for a shield and buckler. Where is the self-respect? To cry—to let him see her cry, and then—that’s the comble, as the Paris art students say—to call him back!

I feel sick, for I love her. If she hasn’t got a soul or temperament or any of the rest of it that they do so much talking about, she’s got something tucked away somewhere that’s good, that’s true. It looks at you out of her eyes, it speaks to you in her voice—and then Masters comes along and it’s gone.

I stopped here, and biting the end of my pen, looked gloomily at the wall and met the cold stare of my ancestors. I wonder what the men would have said if they had been there this afternoon. I’m not sure—men are men and Lizzie is beautiful. But about you ladies, I can make a guess. You would purse your mouths a little tighter and say, “Evelyn, you’re keeping queer company. Whatever you may think in your heart, drop her. That’s the wise course.” All but the French Huguenot lady, she’s got an understanding eye. She feels something that the others never felt, probably saw a little deeper into life and it softened the central spot.

No, my dears, you’re all wrong. You’re judging by appearances and fixed standards, which is something your descendant refuses to do. Go to sleep and try and wake up more humble and humane. Good night.

VIII

Betty had the dinner for Mr. Albertson last night and of course I went, for Betty is like royalty, she doesn’t invite, she commands. In a brief telephone message she instructed me to wear my blue crêpe and I wore it. Before dinner, in her room, she eyed me critically and put a blue aigrette in my hair.

Mr. Albertson was a gallant Southerner with courtly manners and a large bald spot. We got on very nicely, though he did not exhibit that appreciation of my charms that marked the Idaho man from the moment of our meeting. If, however, he should develop it I have resolved to crush it by strategy. I don’t know just how yet—the only thing I can think of at present is to ask him to call and pretend I’m drunk like David Garrick. I’ll get a better idea if the necessity arises. I haven’t the courage to defy Betty twice.

Betty sent me home in the limousine, without the footman and the chow dog. It was a cold still night, the kind when the sky is a deep Prussian blue and all the lights have a fixed steady shine. As the car wheeled into Fifth Avenue and I sat looking out of the window, revolving schemes for the disenchanting of Mr. Albertson, I saw Roger walking by. Before I thought I had beckoned to him and struck on the front window for the chauffeur to stop. The car glided to the curb and Roger’s long black figure came running across the street.

“You!” he cried, “like a fairy princess with a feather in your hair. What ball are you coming from, Cinderella?”

As soon as he spoke I grew shy. Do the women who have ready tongues and the courage of their moods, realize the value of their gifts?

“I—I—it’s not a ball, it’s Betty Ferguson’s and she’s sending me home.”

“All right.” He said something to the chauffeur, stepped in and the car started. “What a piece of luck. I was coming from a deadly dinner and going to a deadly club. What inspired you to hail me?”

Nothing did, or something did that I couldn’t explain. I felt round for an answer and produced the first that came.

“I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“Go ahead.” He pulled the rug over me. “It’s a nipping cold night abroad. Let’s hear what it was you wanted to talk about.”

For a moment I thought of telling him of Lizzie Harris and Mr. Masters, then I knew that wouldn’t do. Lizzie’s secrets were my secrets. I had to tell him something and in my embarrassment I told him the first thing that came into my head.

“Betty asked me to dinner to meet a man from Georgia.”

As soon as I had said it I had a sick feeling that he might be wondering why I should stop him on Fifth Avenue at eleven o’clock of a winter’s night, to impart this piece of intelligence.

He received it with the dignity of a valuable communication.

“Did she? And what was he like?”

“Very charming. His name’s Albertson and he has cotton mills down there.”

“Must be a man of means.”

“I believe he is.”

It was very nice of Roger to take it so simply and naturally, but you can always rely on his manners. My embarrassment passed away. The auto sped out into the concentrated sparklings of Plaza Square, then swerved to the left, sweeping round the statue of Sherman led to victory by a long-limbed and resolute angel.

“We’re going the wrong way. What’s Nelson doing?” I raised a hand to rap on the window.

“I told him to take us through the park. Put your hand in your muff. Why did Betty ask you to meet Mr. What’s-his-name from Georgia?”

I know every tone of Roger’s voice, and the one he used to ask that question was chilly. Betty’s plans involved no secrecy, so I said, laughing:

“I think she’s trying to make a match.”

“Oh,” said Roger.

I had thought he would laugh with me, but in that brief monosyllable there was no amusement. It came with a falling note, and it seemed to be a sort of extinguisher on the conversation, a full stop at the end of it, for we both fell silent.

The auto swept up the drive, gray and smooth between gray trees. I could see a reach of deep blue sky with the stars looking big and close, as if they had come down a few billion miles and were looking us over with an impartial curiosity. Across the park the fronts of apartment-houses showed in gleaming tiers, far up into the night, their lights yellower than the stars. It was lovely to glide on, swiftly and smoothly, with the frost gripping the world in an icy clasp while we were warm and snug and so friendly that we could be silent.

“Isn’t this beautiful, Roger?” I said, looking out of the window. “Look on the other side of the park, hundreds of lights in hundreds of homes.”

Roger gave a sound that if I were a writer of realistic tendencies, I should call a grunt.

We met a hansom with the glass down, and on an ascending curve another auto swooping by with two great glaring lamps. I felt quite oddly happy; the menacing figure of Mr. Albertson became no more than a bogy. After all even Betty couldn’t drag me struggling to the altar.

“Why is Betty so anxious to marry you off?” came suddenly from the corner beside me.

Mr. Albertson assumed his original shape as a marriageable male with a bald spot and a cotton mill, and Betty slipped back into position. I wasn’t sure she couldn’t drag any one to the altar if she made up her mind to it. My voice showed the oppression of this thought.

“She thinks all women should be married.”

“You have been married.”

Something was the matter with Roger to say that.

“Well, she thinks I’m poor and lonely.”

“Are you?”

I began to have an uncomfortable, complicated feeling. Fear was in it, also exhilaration. It made me sit up stiffly, suddenly conscious of a sensation of trembling somewhere inside.

“I am poor,” I said, “that is, poor compared to people like Betty.”

“And lonely, too?”

The disturbance grew. It made me draw away from Roger, pressed close into my corner, as if no scrap or edge of my clothing must touch him. I was afraid that my voice would show it and determined that it mustn’t.

“I’m lonely sometimes. That rainy night when you came in unexpectedly I was.”

My voice wasn’t all right. I cleared my throat and pretended to look at the stars.

Roger said nothing, but the secret subways of emotion that connect the spirits of those who are in close communion, told me he, too, was moved. The air in the closed scented car did not seem enough for natural breathing. It was like a pressure, something that put your heart-beats out of tune, and made your lips open with a noiseless gasp. I stood it as long as I could and then words burst out of me. They came anyway, ridiculous words when I write them down:

“But I’ll never marry any of them. No matter what they are, or what Betty wants, or how many of them she has up to dinner.”

The pressure was lifted and I sank back trembling. It was as if I had been under water and come up again into the air. The spiritual telegraph told me that Roger felt as I did, and that suddenly he or I or both of us, had broken down a barrier. It was swept away and we were close together—closer than the night when we had held hands and forgotten where we were, closer than we’d ever been in all the years we’d known each other. It was not necessary to say anything. In our several corners we sat silent, understanding for the first time, I and the man I loved.

The sharp landscape slid by us, naked trees, spotted lines of light, stretches of lawn grizzled with frost, woodland depths with the shine of ice about the tree roots, and then the flash of glassy ponds.

We sat as still as if we were dead, as if our souls had come out of our bodies and were whispering. It was a wonderful moment of time, one of the unforgetable moments that dot the long material years. All that’s gone before and all that’s going to come dies away and there’s only the present—the beautiful exquisite present. We only have a few like that in our lives.

It lasted till the auto drew up at my door. We said good night and parted.

Up in my room I sat a long time by the fire thinking of the hundreds of women like myself, the disillusioned ones, in the dark dens of tenements and in the splendid homes near by. I tried to send them messages through the night, telling them we could rise out of the depths. I saw life as it really is, hills and valleys, patches of blackness and then light, but always with an unresting force flowing beneath, the immortal thing that urges and upholds and makes it all possible. I remembered words I used to work on bits of perforated board when I was a little girl, “God is Love.” I never understood what it meant, even when I stopped working it on perforated board and grew to the reasoning stage. To-night I knew—got at last what a happy child might understand—love in the heart was God with us, come back to us again.

IX

Yesterday was the concert day and I couldn’t go—a bad cold. The house lamented from all its floors, for it was going en masse, even the trained nurse with a usurped right to the sun-dial.

The only way I could add to the festivity of the occasion was to distribute my possessions among that section of the audience drawn from Mrs. Bushey’s light housekeeping apartments. It began with the Signorita Bonaventura, who wore my mother’s diamond pendant, then went down the line:— Miss Gorringe my green satin (she said it would be horribly unbecoming, but the audience wouldn’t notice her), Miss Bliss my black lynx furs, Mrs. Phillips, the nurse, my evening cloak, Mr. Hazard my opera glasses, Mr. Weatherby my umbrella—his had a broken rib and it looked like snow. We were afraid the count couldn’t find anything suitable to his age and sex, but he emptied my bottle of Coty’s Jacqueminot on his handkerchief and left, scented like a florist’s. Mrs. Bushey came last and gleaned the field, a gold bracelet, a marabou stole and a lace handkerchief she swore she wouldn’t use.

Much noise accompanied the passage of the day and some threatening mishaps. At eleven we heard Berwick was hoarse, but at one (by telephone through my room) that raw eggs and massage were restoring him. At midday Miss Gorringe sent a frantic message that the sash of the green satin wasn’t in the box. Gloom settled at two with a bulletin that Mrs. Stregazzi’s second child had croup. It was better at five. Mr. Hazard’s dress suit smelled so of moth balls that the prima donna said it would taint the air, and Emma, the maid, hung it out on the sacred sun-dial. There was a battle over this. For fifteen minutes it raged up two flights of stairs, then Mr. Hazard conquered and the sun-dial was draped in black broadcloth.

At intervals Lizzie came down to see me and use the telephone. She was in her most aloof mood, forbidding, self-absorbed. On one of her appearances she found a group of us congregated about my steam kettle. Our chatter died away before her rapt and unresponsive eye. Even I, who was used to it, felt myself fading like a photographic proof in a too brilliant sun. As for the others they looked small and frightened, like mice in the presence of a well-fed lioness, who, though she might not want to eat them, was still a lioness. They breathed deep and unlimbered when the door shut on her.

In the late afternoon Roger came to see me. He brought a bunch of violets and a breath of winter into my bright little room. The threatening snow had begun to fall, lodging delicately on eaves and ledges, a scurry of tiny particles against the light of street-lamps. We stood in the window and watched it, trimming the house-fronts with white, carpeting the steps, spreading a blanket ever so softly and deftly over the tin roof. How different to the rain, the insistent ruthless rain. The night when the rain fell came back to me. How different that was from to-night!

There was a hubbub of voices from the hall and then a knock. They were coming to see me before they left. They entered, streaming in, grubs turned to butterflies. The house was going cheaply in cars over the bridge; only the prima donna and Miss Gorringe were to travel aristocratically in a cab.

Strong scents from the count’s Jacqueminot mingled with the faint odor of moth balls that Mr. Hazard’s dress suit still harbored. Miss Gorringe had rouged a little and the green satin was quite becoming. Miss Bliss had rouged a good deal and had had her hair marcelled. In the doorway the trained nurse hung back, sniffing contemptuously at Mr. Hazard’s back. Mrs. Bushey, Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Weatherby grouped themselves by the fireplace.

“Where’s the prima donna?” I asked.

“Coming,” cried a voice from the stairs, and the air was filled with silken rustlings.

It was like an entrance on the stage, up the passage and between the watching people, and I don’t think any actress could have done it with more aplomb. In her evening dress she was truly superb—a goddess of a woman with her black hair in lusterless coils and her neck and shoulders as white as curds. Upon that satiny bosom my mother’s pendant rose and fell to even breathings. Whatever anybody else may have felt, the star of the occasion was calm and confident.

Her appearance had so much of the theatrical that it must have made us suddenly see her as the professional, the legitimate object of glances and comments. Nothing else could explain why I—a person of restrained enthusiasms—should have broken into bald compliments. She took them with no more self-consciousness than a performing animal takes the gallery’s applause, smiled slightly, then looked at Roger, the stranger. I did so, too, childishly anxious to see if he admired my protégée. He evidently did, for he was staring with the rest of them, intent, astonished.

Her glance appeared to gather up his tribute as her hands might have gathered flowers thrown to her. He was one of the watching thousands that it was her business to enthrall, his face one of the countless faces that were to gaze up at her from tier upon tier of seats.

When the door shut on the last of them, laughter and good nights diminishing down the stairs, he turned to me with an air that was at once bewildered and accusing.

“Why in heaven’s name didn’t you tell me she was so good-looking?”

“I did and you wouldn’t believe me,” I answered gaily, for I was greatly pleased. It was a little triumph over Roger with his hypercritical taste and his rare approvals.

The next morning I waited anxiously for news. I thought Lizzie would be down early, but the others came before her, dropping in as the morning wore away. With each entrance I grew more uneasy.

Mr. Hazard was first, in a gray sweater.

“Well, she looked great. I wish I could have painted her that way. But—” he tilted his head, his expression grown dubious. “You know, Mrs. Drake, I don’t know one tune from another—but—”

“But what?” I said sharply.

“Well, it seemed to me Berwick got away with it.”

“Do you mean the audience liked him better?”

He nodded, a grave agreeing eye on me.

“He got them when he sang that thing about The Three Grenadiers. It made your heart swell up.”

He leaned nearer, lowering his voice. “And he got them in that German duet, too.”

He drew back and nodded again darkly, as if wishing me to catch a meaning too direful for words.

An hour later Miss Bliss blew in in a blue flannel jacket and the remnants of her marcelle wave. By contrast with her flushed and blooming appearance of the evening before, she looked pinched and pallid. She cowered over the fire, stretching her little chapped hands to the blaze and presenting a narrow humped back to my gaze.

“She didn’t seem to catch on some way or other. I don’t know why but—”

She stopped and leaned forward for the poker.

“But what?”

“Well—” She poked the fire, the edge of the flannel jacket hitched up by the movement, showing a section of corset laced with the golden string that confines candy boxes. “She doesn’t give you any thrill. I’ve heard people without half so much voice who could make the tears come into your eyes. I tell you what, Mrs. Drake,” she turned round with the poker uplifted in emphasis, “I wouldn’t spend my good money to hear a woman sing that way. If I shell out one-fifty I want to get a thrill.”

She was still there when the count came in. He sat between us gently rocking and eying her with a pensive stare. She pulled down her jacket and patted solicitously at the remains of her marcelle.

“She looked,” said the count, pausing in his rocking, “she looked like a queen.”

“Good gracious,” I cried crossly, “do drop her looks. I saw her.”

The count, unmoved by my irritation, answered mildly:

“One can’t drop them so easily.”

“But her singing, her performance?”

“Her performance,” murmured the young man, and appeared to look through Miss Bliss at a distant prospect. “It was good, but—”

I had to restrain myself from screaming, “But what?”

“It was not so good as she is, had none of the—what shall I say—air noble that she has.” He screwed up his eyes as if projecting his vision not only through Miss Bliss, but through all intervening objects to a realm of pure criticism. “It has a bourgeois quality, no distinction, no imagination, and she—” Words were inadequate and he finished the sentence with a shrug.

Miss Bliss leaned forward and poked the fire, once more revealing the golden string. The count looked at it with a faint arrested interest. I was depressed, but conventions are instinctive, and I said sternly:

“Miss Bliss, let the count poke the fire.”

The count poked and Miss Bliss slipped to the floor, and sitting cross-legged, comfortably warmed her back.

The count was gone when Mrs. Bushey entered. Mrs. Bushey says she understands music even as she does physical culture.

“It was a frost,” she explained, dropping on the end of the sofa.

“I know that,” I answered, “the paper this morning said the thermometer was twenty-two degrees.”

“Not that kind of a frost, a theatrical frost for her. She hasn’t got the quality.”

“No thrill,” murmured Miss Bliss, and no men being present, stretched out her feet and legs in worn slippers and threadbare stockings to the blaze.

I fought against my depression—Mrs. Bushey did not like Bonaventura.

“She hasn’t got the equipment,” said Mrs. Bushey with a sagacious air. Her eye roamed about the room and lighted on Miss Bliss’ legs. “Are you cold?” she asked, as if amazed.

“Frozen,” answered Miss Bliss crossly.

“How can that be possible when I’ve done everything to make your room warm, spent all my winter earnings on coal?”

Miss Bliss cocked up her chin and replied:

“You must have had very poor business this winter.” Then to me very pointedly: “I wanted to ask you, Mrs. Drake, if you’d lend me your Navajo blanket, just for a few nights. It would look so bad for the house if I was found frozen to death in bed some morning.”

I agreed with alarmed haste, but Mrs. Bushey did not seem inclined for war. She smiled, murmuring, “Poor girl, you’re anemic,” and then, her eye lighting on Marie Antoinette’s mirror:

“Yes, Miss Harris’ll never get anywhere till she gets some color into her voice. It’s the coldest organ I ever heard. Would you mind if I took that mirror away? I have a new lodger, a delightful woman from Philadelphia, and I’ve no mirror for her—I can’t, I literally can’t, buy one with my finances the way they are. I suppose after this failure Miss Harris’ll be late with her rent.”

Thus Mrs. Bushey. When she had gone—taking the mirror—Miss Bliss lay flat before the fire and reviled her.

Miss Gorringe came next with the green satin dress. It was upon Miss Gorringe I was pinning my hopes. None of the others knew anything. Miss Gorringe, lifting out the dress with cold and careful hands, looked solemn:

“No, I can’t say it was a success. I’d like to because she’s certainly one of the most lovely people I’ve ever played for, but—” She depressed the corners of her mouth and slowly shook her head.

I sat up in my shawls and did scream:

“But what?”

Miss Gorringe, used to the eccentricities of artists, was unmoved by my violence. She placed the dress carefully over the back of a chair.

“She doesn’t get over,” she said.

“Get over what?”

I had heard this cryptic phrase before, but didn’t know what it meant.

“The footlights—across, into the audience. And she ought to, but they were as cold as frogs till Berwick woke them up with The Three Grenadiers. He can do it. He hasn’t got any better voice or method but,” she gave a little ecstatic gesture, “temperament—oh, my!”

“Has she got no temperament at all?” I asked.

“I’ve never played for anybody who had less.” Miss Gorringe held up the green scarf. “Here’s the sash.”

“Not a bit of thrill,” Miss Bliss chanted, prone before the fire.

“Can’t a person get temperament, learn it in some way?”

Miss Gorringe pondered:

“They can teach them rôles, hammer it into them. When a person’s got the looks she has they sometimes do it. But I guess they’ve done all they can for her. She’s been with Vignorol for two years. He wouldn’t have taken her unless he thought there was something in it. And John Masters has been training her besides, and I’ve heard people say there’s no one better than Masters for that. You see they can teach her how to walk and stand and make gestures, but they can’t put the thing into her head or her voice. She doesn’t seem to understand, she doesn’t feel.”

I was silent. She did feel, I knew it, I’d seen it. There was some queer lack of coordination between her power to feel and her power to express.

Miss Gorringe administered the coup de grâce.

“She sang the duet from The Valkyrie as if she was telling Siegmund to put on his hat and come to supper.”

“It’s imagination,” I said.

“It’s temperament,” Miss Gorringe corrected. “And without it, the way she is, she’d better go in for church singing, or oratorio, or even teaching.”

The dusk was gathering and I was alone when she came down. She threw herself into the wicker chair beside my sofa. Her face looked thinner and two slight lines showed round her mouth.

“Well?” I said, investing my voice with a fictitious lightness. “Where have you been all day?”

“I’m tired or I’d have been down earlier. Have you seen the others?”

With her deadly directness she had gone straight to the point I dreaded.

“Yes, they’ve been in.”

“Did they like it?”

One of the most formidable things about this woman is the way she keeps placing you in positions where you must either lie and lose your self-respect or tell the truth and incur her sudden and alarming anger. I was not afraid of that now, but I couldn’t hurt her. I tried to find a sentence that would be as truthful and painless as the circumstances permitted. The search took a moment.

“They didn’t,” she answered for me.

She turned her face to the window and drummed on the chair-arm with her fingers, then said defiantly:

“They don’t know anything.”

“Of course they don’t,” I cried. “An Italian count, an artist, a model, a woman who rents floors.”

Her eye fell on the green dress.

“Miss Gorringe has been here.”

I nodded.

“What did she say?”

I got cold under my wrappings. Had I the courage to tell her? She looked at me and gave a slight wry smile.

“Did she tell you that Berwick got away with it?”

“Some one did. I think it was Mr. Hazard, but he’s a painter and—”

She interrupted roughly.

“That’s nothing—a big bawling voice singing popular songs. If they’d let me sing Oh, Promise Me I’d have had the whole house.”

For the first time in my experience of her I saw she was not open with herself. I knew that she had realized her failure and refused to admit it. She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, frowning, haggard and miserable.

“I’ll get the notices to-morrow,” she said in a low voice.

It was horribly pitiful. There would be no friendly deception about the notices.

“Vignorol’s arranged for several good men to go. He wanted their opinions. They’ll give me a fine notice on The Valkyrie duet.”

“Did that go well?” I asked just for something to say.

“Oh, splendidly,” she answered, without looking up. “It’s one of the things I do best.”

The room was getting dim and I was thankful for it. The dusk hid the drooping and discouraged face, but it could not shut out the voice with its desperate pretense. It was worse than the face.

“Well,” she said suddenly, straightening up, “I’ll see Masters to-morrow. He’s coming to bring me the notices.”

There was fear in the voice. I knew what the interview with Masters would be, and she knew, too. In a moment of insight I saw that she had been fighting against her dread all day, had come down to me for courage, was trying now to draw it from my chill and depressing presence. It was like a child afraid of the dark, hanging about in terror and unwilling to voice its alarm.

I sat up, throwing off my wraps and laid my hand on hers.

“Lizzie, don’t mind what he says.”

Her hand was cold under mine.

“He knows,” she answered almost in a whisper, “he knows.”

“I can get backers for you”—it was rash, but I know how to manage Betty—“better than he ever was, the best kind of backers.”

She jerked her hand away and glared at me.

“What do you mean by that? Do you think he’s going to give me up? Why, you must be crazy.” She jumped to her feet looking down at me with a face of savage anger. “Do you think I haven’t made good? Have they,” with a violent gesture to the door, “told you so? They’re fools, idiots, imbeciles. Masters give me up—ah—” She turned away and then back. “Why he’s never had any one with such promise as I have. He’s banking on me. I’m going to bring him to the top. He borrowed the money to send me to Vignorol. Throw me down now, just when I’m getting there, just when I’m proving he was right? Oh, I can’t talk to you. You’ve no sense. You’re as big a fool as all the rest.”

And she rushed out of the room, banging the door till the whole apartment shook.

I lay thinking about it till Emma came to get me my supper. She was right in one thing—I was a fool. In my blundering attempt at encouragement I had gone straight to the heart of her fear, dragged it out into the light, held up in front of her the thing she was trying not to see—that Masters would give her up. Fool—it was a mild name for me. And poor Lizzie—tragic Bonaventura!

It’s night again and I am dressed in my best with a fur cloak on to keep off the chill. I’ve got to write, not a sudden visitation of the Muse, but to ease my mind. If you haven’t got a sympathetic pair of ears to pour your troubles into, pouring them out on paper is the next best thing.

It’s two days since I have seen Lizzie. Yesterday I was in my room all day nursing my cold and expecting her, but she didn’t come. Neither did she to-day, and all I could surmise was that she was angry with me for being a fool. As I feel I was one and yet don’t like to hear it from other people, I made no effort to get into communication with her.

This evening I was well enough to go out in a cab with all my furs and a foot warmer, to dine with Roger’s widowed sister, Mrs. Ashworth. I was a good deal fluttered over the dinner, guessed why it had been arranged. It was a small affair, the Fergusons, Roger and I. Preceded by a call from Mrs. Ashworth, it had a meaningful aspect, a delicate suggestion of welcoming me into the family. I blush as I write it. I don’t know why I should, or why love and marriage are matters surrounded by self-consciousness and shame. Who was it explained the embarrassment of lovers, their tendency to hide themselves in corners, as an instinctive sense of guilt at the prospect of bringing children into a miserable world? I think it was Schopenhauer. Sounds like him—cross-grained old misanthrope.

Mrs. Ashworth is Roger’s only near relation and he regards her as the choicest flower of womanhood. I don’t wonder. In her way she is a finished product, no raw edges, no loose ends. Everything is in harmony—her thin faintly-lined face, her silky white hair, her pale hands with slightly prominent veins, her voice with its gentle modulations. Nothing cheap or second rate could exist near her. She wouldn’t stamp them out—I can’t imagine her stamping—they would simply wither in the rarified atmosphere. Her friends are like herself, her house is like herself. When I go there I feel strident and coarse. As I enter the portal I instinctively tune my key lower, feel my high lights fading, undergo a refining and subduing process as if a chromo were being transmuted into a Bartolozzi engraving.

As my cab crawled down-town—I need hardly say Mrs. Ashworth lives in a house on lower Fifth Avenue, built by her father—I uneasily wondered if the Bohemian atmosphere in which I dwelt had left any marks upon me. I tried to obliterate them and made mental notes of things I mustn’t mention. Memories of Miss Bliss’ golden corset string rose uneasily, and Lizzie Harris, and oh, Mr. Masters! I ended by achieving a sense of grievance against Mrs. Ashworth. No one had any right to be so refined. It was all very well if you inherited a social circle and large means, but— The cab drew up with a jolt and I alighted. All unseemly exuberance died as the light from the door fell on me. I spoke so softly the driver had difficulty in hearing my order and when I walked up the steps I minced daintily.

But it was a delightful dinner. Harry and I were on one side, Betty and Roger on the other. At the foot of the table was Mrs. Ashworth’s son, Roger Clements Ashworth, a charming boy still at college. It was all perfectly done, nothing showy, nothing in the fashion. Betty’s pearls looked a good deal too large beside the modest string that Mrs. Ashworth wore, which was given to her great, great grandmother by Admiral Rochambeau. The dining-room walls were lined with portraits, with over the fireplace, that foundation stone of the family’s glory, Roger Clements, “The Signer.”

I thought of my apartment and my late associates and felt that I was leading a double life.

When I came home the house was very silent. Mounting the dim dirty stairs with the smell of dead dinners caught in the corners, I wondered how Mrs. Ashworth could countenance me. But after all, it was part of her fineness that she had no quarrel with the obscure and lowly. If she could not broaden the walls of her world—and you had only to talk to her ten minutes to see that she couldn’t—within those walls all was choice and lovely. I would have to live up to it, that was all.

I had got that far when I heard a heavy step and Mr. Masters loomed up on the flight above. The stairs are very narrow and I looked up smiling, expecting him to retreat. He came on, however, not returning my smile, staring straight before him with an immovable, brooding glance. I can’t say he didn’t see me, but he had the air of being so preoccupied that what his eye lighted on did not penetrate to his brain. As at our first meeting I received an impression of brutal strength, his broad shoulders seeming to push the walls back, his flat-topped head upheld on a neck like a gladiator. I intended asking him about the concert and the notices, but his look froze me, and I backed against the wall for him to pass.

As he brushed by he growled a word of greeting. He was in the hall below when I broke out of the consternation created by his manner, leaned over the rail and called down:

“Mr. Masters, how is Miss Harris?”

“All right,” he muttered without stopping or looking up and went on down the lower flight to the street.

They had had the interview.

The house was as silent as a tomb. I stole to the foot of the upper flight, looked up and listened. Not a sound. The rustling of my dress as I moved startled me. What had he said to her? I couldn’t read his face—but his manner! I wavered and waited, the street noises coming muffled through the intense stillness. Then I decided I’d not intrude upon her, and came in here. Whatever happened she’ll tell me in her own good time, and the quietness up there is reassuring. Her anger is apt to take noisy forms. If she had been throwing oranges out of the window I would have heard her. But I do wish I might have seen her to-night.

X

I didn’t sleep well that night. The memory of Mr. Masters’ set sullen face kept me wakeful. At four I got up, lit the light and tried to read Kidd’s Social Evolution. Through the ceiling I could hear Mr. Hamilton’s subdued snoring on the floor above. It seemed like the deep and labored breathing of that submerged world whose upward struggle I was following through Mr. Kidd’s illuminating page.

After breakfast, when no sign or word had come from Lizzie, I decided to stay in till I heard from her. I dawdled through the morning and when Emma was cleaning up went out on the landing and listened. The upper floors were wrapt in quiet. I stole up a flight and a half and looked at her door—tight shut and not a sound. I went down again worried, though it was possible she had gone out and I not heard her. After lunch I opened the register and listened—complete silence. During the rest of the afternoon I sat waiting for her footfall. Dusk came and no woman had mounted the stairs. At seven a tap came at my door and Count Delcati pushed it open.

The count brought letters from the Italian aristocracy to its New York imitation and goes to entertainments that the rest of us read of in the papers. He was arrayed for festival and looked like an up-to-date French poster, a high-shouldered black figure with slender arms slightly bowed out at the elbows. His collar was very stiff, his shirt bosom a clear expanse of thick smooth white. He wore his silk hat back from his forehead, and his youthful yet sophisticated face, with its intense black eyes and dash of dark mustache, might have been looking at me from the walls of the Salon Independent.

He removed his hat, and standing in the doorway, said:

“Have you seen her to-day?”

“No,” I answered. “Have you?”

He shook his head.

“I think she must be away. When I came home at six I went up there and knocked, but there was no answer.”

There was nothing in this to increase my uneasiness. She came and went at all hours, often taking her dinner at what she called “little joints” in the lower reaches of the city. Nevertheless my uneasiness did increase, gripped hold of me as I looked at the young man’s gravely attentive face.

“Have you seen her since the concert?” he asked.

“Yes, the day after, when you were all in here.”

“She hadn’t seen the notices?”

I shook my head.

He leaned against the door-post and gazed at his patent leather shoes. As if with reluctance he said slowly:

“I have.”

“What were they like?”

“Rotten.”

He pronounced the word with the “r” strangled yet protesting, as if he had rolled his tongue round it, torn it from its place and put it away somewhere in the recesses of his throat.

“Oh, poor girl!” I moaned.

“That’s why I went up there. She must have seen them and I wished to assure her they were lies.”

“Did they say anything very awful?”

He shrugged.

“They spoke of her beauty—one said she had a good mezzo voice. But they were not kind to her, to Mr. Berwick, very.”

I said nothing, sunk in gloom.

The count picked up his fur-lined coat from the stair rail, and shook himself into it.

“I should wait to go to her when she comes in, but this meeserable dinner, where I sit beside young girls who know nothing and married ladies who know too much—no mystery, no allure. But I must go—perhaps you?—” He looked at me tentatively over his fur collar.

“I’ll go up as soon as she comes in,” I answered. “If there’s anything I can do for her be assured I’ll do it.”

“You are a sweet lady,” said the count and departed.

After that I sat with the door open a crack waiting and listening. The hours ticked by. I heard Mr. Hamilton’s step on the street stairs, a knock at the Westerner’s door, and as it opened to him, a joyous clamor of greeting in which Miss Bliss’ little treble piped shrilly. Hazard was painting her and she spent most of her evenings in there with them. It was a good thing, they were decent fellows and their room was properly heated.

At intervals the sounds of their mirth came from below. The rest of the house was dumb. At eleven I could stand it no more and went up. If she wasn’t there I could light up the place for her—she rarely locked her door—and have it bright and warm.

It was dimly lighted and very still on the top floor, the gas-jet tipping the burner in a small pale point of light. I knocked and got no answer, then opened the door and went in. The room was dark, the window opposite a faint blue square. In the draft made by the opening door the gas shot up as if frightened, then sunk down, sending its thin gleam over the threshold. As I moved I bumped into the table and heard a thumping of something falling on the floor. I saw afterward it was oranges. I groped for matches, lighted the gas and looked about, then gave a jump and a startled exclamation. Lizzie Harris was lying on the sofa.

“Lizzie,” I cried sharply, angry from my fright, “why didn’t you say you were there?”

She made no sound or movement and seized by a wild fear, I ran to her. At the first glance I thought she was dead. She was as white as a china plate, lying flat on her back with her eyes shut, her hands clasped over her waist. I touched one of them and knew by the warmth she was alive. I clutched it, shaking it and crying:

“Lizzie, what’s the matter? Are you ill?”

She tried to withdraw it and turned her face away. The movement was feeble, suggesting an ebbing vitality. I thought of suicide, and in a panic looked about for glasses and vials. There was nothing of the kind near her. In my lightning survey I saw a scattering of newspaper cuttings on the table among the rest of the oranges.

“Have you taken anything, medicine, poison?” I cried in my terror.

“No,” she whispered. “Go away. Let me alone.”

I was sorry for her, but I was also angry. She had given me a horrible fright. Failure and criticism were hard to bear, but there was no sense taking them this way.

“What is the matter then? What’s happened to make you like this?”

“Let me alone,” she repeated, and lifting one hand, held it palm upward over her face.

That something was wrong was indisputable, but I couldn’t do anything till I knew what it was. I put my fingers on the hand over her face and felt for her pulse. I don’t know why, for I haven’t the least idea how a pulse ought to beat. As it was I couldn’t find any beat at all and dropped her hand.

“I’ll have to get a doctor, I’ll call the man in the boarding house opposite.”

“Don’t,” she said in a voice which, for the first time, showed a note of life. “If you bring a doctor here I’ll go out in the street as I am.”

She was in the blue kimono. I didn’t know whether she had strength enough to move, but if she had I knew that she would do as she said and the night was freezing.

“I won’t call the doctor if you’ll tell me what’s happened to you?”

“I’ll tell you,” she said, and raising the hand from her face caught at my skirt. I bent down for her voice was very low, hardly more than a whisper.

“Masters has left me.”

“Left you,” I echoed, bewildered. “He was here last night. I saw him.”

Her eyes held mine.

“Left me for good,” she whispered, “forever.”

Any words that I might have had ready to brace up a discouraged spirit died away.

“What—what do you mean?” I faltered.

“He and I were lovers—lived together—you must have known it. He got tired of me—sick of me—he told me so himself—those very words. He said he was done with it all, the singing and me.” She turned her head away and looked at the wall. “I’ve been here ever since. I don’t know how long.”

“Masters has left me”

I stood without moving, looking at her, and she seemed as dead to my presence as if she had really been the corpse I at first thought her. Presently I found myself putting a rug over her, settling it with careful hands as if it occupied my entire thoughts.

I do not exactly know what did occupy them. A sort of sick disgust permeated me, a deep overwhelming disgust of life. Everything was vile, the world, the people in it, the sordid dirt of their lives. I almost wished that I might die to be out of it all.

Then I sat down beside her. She lay turned to the wall, with the light of the one burner making long shadows in the folds of the rug. Her neck and cheek had the hard whiteness of marble, her hair, like a piece of black cloth, laid along them. The sickening feeling of repugnance persisted, stronger than any pity for her. I suppose it was the long reach of tradition, an inherited point of view, transmitted by those prim and buckramed ladies on my dining-room wall, and also perhaps that I had never known a woman, well, as a friend, who had done what Lizzie Harris had done. It was the first time in my life, which had moved so precisely in its prescribed groove, that I had ever taken to my heart, believed in, grieved over, loved and trusted a woman thus stained and fallen.

I will also add, for I am truthful with myself, that when I got up and went to her, all inclination to touch her, to console and comfort her, was gone. For those first few moments she was physically objectionable to me, as if she might have been covered with dirt. Yet I felt that I must look after her, had what I suppose you would call a sense of duty where she was concerned. I have always hated the phrase; to me it signifies a dry sterile thing, and it held me there because I would have been uncomfortable if I had gone. Is it the training women get in their youth that makes them like this, makes them only give their best when the object is worthy, as we ask only the people to dinner who can give us a good dinner back? I heard the sense of duty chill in my voice as I spoke to her.

“Have you had anything to eat since—that is, to-day?”

She did not answer. I bent farther over and looked at the profile with the eyes closed. They were sunken, as if by days of pain. I have seen a good many sick people in my life, but I had never seen any one so changed in so short a time. I gazed down at her and the appeal of that marred and anguished face suddenly broke through everything, stabbed down through the world’s armor into the human core. I tried to seize hold of her, to make my hands tell her, and cried out in the poor words that are our best:

“Oh, Lizzie, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry for you.”

It was like taking hold of a dead body. Her arm fell from my hand an inert weight. Condemnation or condonement were all the same to her.

What was I to do? The clock marked midnight. The joyful sounds from below had ceased. I did not like to rouse the others, for, as far as I could see, she was in no immediate danger. She appeared to be in a condition of collapse, and I had never heard of any one dying of that. It was twenty-four hours since I had seen Masters on the stairs. She had had nothing to eat since then. Food was the best thing and I went into the kitchen to get some.

The top floor has what Miss Bliss calls “the bulge” on all others by having a small but complete kitchen. The gaslight showed it in a state of chaos, piles of plates waiting to be washed, the ice-box with opened door and a milk bottle overturned, some linen lying swathed and sodden over the edge of the laundry tub. I made a brew of tea and brought it to her, but one might as well have tried to make a statue drink. In answer to my pleadings she turned completely to the wall, moving one hand to the top of her head where it lay outstretched with spread fingers. In the faintly lighted room, in the creeping cold of a December midnight, that speechless woman with her open hand resting on her head, was the most tragic figure I have ever seen.

I took the tea back to the kitchen and washed the plates. Also I hunted over the place for any means of self-destruction that might be there. There were vials in the medicine closet that I stood in a row and inspected, emptying those I wasn’t sure about into the sink. As I worked I thought, sometimes pursuing a consecutive series of ideas, sometimes in disconnected jumps. It was revolutionary thinking, casting out old ideals, installing new ones. I was outside the limits within which I had heretofore ranged, was looking beyond the familiar horizon. In that untidy kitchen, sniffing at medicine bottles, I had glimpses far beyond the paths where I had left my little trail of footprints.

I didn’t know why she had given herself to Masters. Strange as it may sound, it did not then seem to me to matter. It was her affair, concern for her conscience, not mine. What was my concern was that I could not give my love and take it back. It went deeper than her passions and her weaknesses. It went below the surface of life, underlay the complicated web of conduct and action. It was the one thing that was sure amid the welter of shock and amaze.

And I understood Masters, was suddenly shifted into his place and saw his side. He had tried to make her understand and she wouldn’t, then on the straining tie that held them had dealt a savage blow, brought an impossible situation to the only possible end. I hated him, if she had been nothing to me I would have hated him. Shaking a bottle of collodion over the sink I muttered execrations on him, and as I muttered knew that I admired the brutal courage that had set them both free.

The dawn found me sitting by her frozen in mind and body. I had had time to think of what I should say to all inquiries: the failure of the concert, the blow to her hopes, had prostrated her. It was half true and quite plausible.

When the light was bright and the street awake I went out into the hall and waited. Miss Bliss was the first person I caught, coming up from the street door with a milk bottle. Her little face was full of sleep that dispersed under my urgent murmurings. She stepped inside the door and hailed tentatively:

“Hullo, Miss Harris.”

There was no answer and she ventured less buoyantly:

“Don’t you feel good, Miss Harris?”

The lack of response scared her, yet she stood fascinated like the street gamin eying the victim of an accident. She had seen enough to do what I wanted, and I took her by the arm and pulled her into the hall.

“She looks like she was dead,” she whispered, awed. “Would you think a big husky woman like that would take things so hard?”

I had prepared my lesson in the small hours and answered glibly:

“She’s not half so strong as you think and very sensitive, morbidly sensitive.”

“Um,” said Miss Bliss, “poor thing! I don’t see how if she was so sensitive, she could have stood that man Masters around so much.”

She went down to dress and presently the news percolated through the house. There was an opening and shutting of doors and whisperings on the top flight. Everybody stole up and offered help except the count, who rose late to the summons of an alarm clock. Mr. Hazard went across the street for the doctor, met Mrs. Bushey on her way to physical culture and sent her in.

I met her in the third-floor hall and we talked, sitting on the banister. The count’s alarm clock had evidently done its work, for he eyed us through the crack of his door.

“How dreadful—terribly unfortunate,” Mrs. Bushey muttered, then, looking about, caught the count’s eye at the crack: “Good morning, Count Delcati. You’re up early.”

The count responded, the gleaming eye large and unwinking as if made of glass.

Mrs. Bushey’s glance returned to me. The smile called forth by the greeting of the star lodger died away.

“If her concert was such a failure and she’s sick, how is she going to live?”

I hadn’t thought of that. It added a complication to the already complex situation.

“Oh, she must have something,” I said with a vaguely reassuringly air. “She hasn’t been making money but—”

“Do you know anything positive of her financial position?” interrupted Mrs. Bushey.

It was hard to be vague on any subject with Mrs. Bushey, on the subject of finances impossible. She listened to a few soothing sentences then said grimly:

“I see you don’t really know anything about it. Please try and find out. Of course I’m one of the most kind-hearted people in the world, but”—she held her physical culture manuals in the grip of one elbow and extended her hands—“one must live. I can’t be late with my rent whatever my lodgers can be.”

The count’s voice issued unexpectedly through the crack:

“I am late two times now and I still stay.”

Mrs. Bushey smiled at the eye.

“Of course, Count Delcati, but you’re different. I know all about you. But Miss Harris—a singer who can’t make good. They’re notoriously bad pay.” She turned sharply on me. “What seems to be the matter with her?”

“Collapse,” I said promptly. “Complete collapse and prostration.”

Mrs. Bushey hitched the books into her armpit and patted them in with her muff.

“Those are only words. I’m glad Mr. Hazard’s gone for the doctor.” She turned and moved toward the stair-head. “And if it’s anything contagious she must go at once. Don’t keep her here five minutes. The doctor’ll know where to send her.” She began the descent. “If I’d only myself to think of I’d let her stay if it was the bubonic plague. But I won’t expose the rest of you to any danger.” She descended the next flight and her voice grew fainter: “I’m only thinking of you, my lodgers are always my first consideration. If any of you got anything I’d never forgive myself.” She reached the last flight. “I wouldn’t expose one of you to contagion if I never made a dollar or rented a room. That’s the way I am. I know it’s foolish—you needn’t tell me so, but—” The street door shut on her.

The doctor came with speed and an air of purpose. At last he had somewhere to go when he ran down the stairs with his bag, and it was difficult for him to conceal his exhilaration. He was young, firm and businesslike, examined Lizzie, asked questions and said it was “shock”. He was very anxious to find out what had “precipitated the condition,” even read the notices, and then sat with his chin in his hand looking at the patient and frowning.

Out in the hall I enlarged on her high-strung organization and he listened, fixing me with a searching gaze that did not conceal the fact that he was puzzled. We whispered on the landing over nursing, food and the etceteras of illness, then branched into shocks and their causes till he suddenly remembered he had to be in a hurry, snatched up his bag and darted away.

That was yesterday. To-night I have brought up my writing things and while I watch am scratching this off at the desk where, not so long ago, I found her choosing her stage name. Poor Lizzie—is there a woman who would refuse her pity?

I can run over the names of all those I know and I don’t think there’s one, who, if she could look through the sin at the sinner, would entirely condemn. The worst of it is they all stop short at the sin. It hides the personality behind it. I know if I talked to Betty this way she’d say I was a silly sentimentalist with no knowledge of life, for even my generous Betty wouldn’t see over the sin. There’s something wrong with the way women appraise “the values” in these matters; actions don’t stand in the proper relations to character and intentions. We’re all either sheep or goats. Everything that makes our view-point, books, plays, precedent, public opinion, will have it that we’re sheep or goats, and though we can do a good many bad things and remain pure spotless sheep, there’s just one thing that if we do do, puts us forever in the corral with the goats.