THE

CRYSTAL CUP

By GERTRUDE ATHERTON

Author of

“Black Oxen,” “The Avalanche,” “Sisters-in-Law,”

“Sleeping Fires,” etc.

Into a crystal cup the dusky wine

I pour, and, musing at so rich a shrine,

I watch the star that haunts its ruddy gloom.

—George Sterling

A. L. BURT COMPANY

Published by arrangement with Boni & Liveright

Printed in U. S. A.

Copyright, 1925, by

Boni & Liveright, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

PART I

THE CRYSTAL CUP

CHAPTER I

“Old age will be served,” said Mrs. Carteret grimly. “But I suppose you think I am a long time dying.”

Gita made a face in the heavy shade of the bed-hangings, but replied politely: “I am glad to be here, grandmother, and when it’s my turn to die I’ll take all the time I choose.”

She had a crisp clear voice and a staccato delivery, which she made no attempt to modify in the sick-room, and the old lady frowned.

“I never cared for your mother, but she had a soft low voice, ‘an excellent thing in woman.’ Why did you not model your own upon it? And you do all you can to distort and destroy the Carteret beauty in your attempt to look like a boy. The Carteret women were all dashing brunettes, but feminine. Otherwise they never would have had men crawling at their feet, generation after generation.”

“If men crawled at my feet—which they don’t do these days, anyhow—I’d kick them out of the way. And if I were a man myself—and I wish to God I were—I’d see women to the devil before I’d make a fool of myself——”

“I don’t like your language. I don’t like your voice. I don’t like your bobbed hair——”

“My hair is not bobbed.”

“Bad enough whatever it is. I don’t like your ‘brooding brows,’ to quote an expression I read in a silly novel. I don’t like your boyish defiant bearing; it is not ladylike. I don’t like your ugly tailored suits—I’ve never seen you with a single feminine adornment——”

“You never will. Haven’t I told you I hate—loathe—being a female?”

“Fiddlesticks. I don’t pretend to know what bee you’ve got in your bonnet, but if you’ll take my advice you’ll pluck it out before it’s too late——”

“It’s not in my bonnet. It’s inside my skull.”

“Don’t interrupt me. You’ve no manners. . . . But you’re a Carteret all the same, in spite of your ridiculous airs and notions, and you look—could look—exactly as I did in my youth: I was your grandfather’s second cousin and a Carteret to my finger-tips—except that you are not tall enough. I was five-feet-eight and you must be quite three inches shorter. I was the beauty and the belle of my day, and that is more than you will ever be unless you take heed before it is too late.”

The gray old voice, with its sudden moments of vehement life, trailed off and her gaze turned inward. The light from the open window shone on her face high on the pillows in the ancient four-post bed, and Gita looked at it with the cold appraisement of youth. Beautiful? Once, perhaps. The black eyes were still keen and bright, although sunken deep in sockets as yellow and crinkled as an old Asiatic’s. The bony ridge of the nose was high and thin, but the cheeks were seamed with a thousand little wrinkles and the mouth was a pale satiric line. She looked more like an old bird of prey than the remnants of a woman, and Gita decided it was not worth the mental effort to repad that face with firm young flesh and give it the pedestal of a swan-like neck or any of the other absurdities of archaic youth. She looked longingly through the window at the sunlight, but she had made up her mind to “do the decent thing” as the old lady had rescued her from poverty and heaven knew what not. Besides, she admitted grudgingly, blood was blood, and her grandmother had no one else. Noblesse oblige. Moreover, she rather liked this new-found relative, with her sharp, sarcastic, if superannuated, mind. If she had been affectionate life would have been unendurable once more.

The old Carteret Manor was not far from the island covered by Atlantic City, and behind the Old Shore Road. It was surrounded on three sides by pine woods but open to the sea on the east. There had been a storm the night before and from this high window Gita could see the tossing spray that hid the horizon. She forgot her grandmother until the old lady spoke again.

“They named you Gita, anyhow!” she said triumphantly. “The first daughter of every son was always named Gita, but it would have been like your father to break the tradition, especially as your mother disliked me. . . . There have been many Gita Carterets! And you are a Carteret through and through. Not a trace of your mother, thank heaven——”

“I won’t hear a word against my mother! My mother was an angel and a martyr, and as for my father—I don’t care if he was your son——”

“He was a scallywag. I’ll not deny it. Many of the Carteret men were. My sympathies were with your mother although I liked her as little as she liked me. She was no wife for Gerald—I told her so—but for that matter only a Carteret could handle a Carteret. Nevertheless, young lady, it behooves a child to speak of its parents with respect.”

Miss Carteret gave an unladylike snort.

“Oh, yes! And there is one thing you have not inherited, and that is the Carteret grand manner. Even your father had that, and when he was most intoxicated. You have neither manner nor manners.”

“Both are out of date.”

“Are they? I am not so sure. The world is not entirely composed of what you call the younger generation. Are you a specimen of the flappers all these magazines and novels are full of?”

“I am not. Silly little females. Besides, I’m twenty-two.”

“I can’t make out whether you seem to hate men or women more, and you won’t give any reason.”

“I don’t hate women. I only resent being one. If you had been my old grandfather I’d have starved in the streets before I’d have come here.”

“It is a wonder, with your remarkable freedom of speech, you don’t say you would have gone on the streets.”

“Oh, never! I’d have died a thousand deaths first. Not,” she added hurriedly, “because I’d have been too good for it, but because—well, I’d have killed the first man that touched me.”

“Of course you are virtuous,” said the old lady complacently. “All the Carteret women have been. Flirts and coquettes, perhaps——”

“Virtuous nothing. I don’t care a damn——”

“You are not a boy, after all, so kindly refrain from swearing in my presence. The Carteret men swore like troopers, but their women never forgot themselves. And please remember that I am helpless. I cannot rise and leave the room.”

“Sorry, grandmother. I’ll not do it again.”

“You have a good heart, anyhow——No, you needn’t snort. It’s a hideous noise, and a good heart is no disgrace in even a modern young woman. I like you in spite of everything, and I wish I could have had the bringing-up of you.”

“I wish to God you had!” the girl exclaimed with unexpected passion. “I wish my mother could have died when I was born, or at least too young to remember anything, and that my father had brought me to you and then blown out his cruel brains.”

“Well, I do not. There are some words I dislike exceedingly and ‘suicide’ is one of them. And I despise cowards.” (“Old cliché,” muttered Gita.) “That is another thing in you that pleases me. You have a high courage. All the Carterets had that.”

“One more reason for being a Carteret!”

“You are an impertinent minx. . . . But I thought your parents were happy for a few years? I was given to understand that, although I never saw your mother again and Gerald only came home twice.”

“Before my time, then. I can remember back to the age of four, and one of my first recollections is his knocking my mother about.”

“What an expression! I suppose you mean he struck her. It is bad enough, heaven knows, however you express it. Gerald! I never thought he would so far forget himself, for a gentleman is never more of a gentleman than when he is in his cups. But he always had an ungovernable—yes, a vicious temper. But what a handsome dog he was! I was so proud of him. He was the youngest of ten and I am afraid I spoiled him. Is that the secret of your hatred of men?”

“Among others.”

“Well, I should hope you had a better reason than that. You should have too much common sense to judge all men by one. What are your other reasons?” she asked curiously. “I don’t understand you at all. Too many years between us, I suppose. I don’t understand any of the modern young women, and you appear to be the most singular of them all. Not that I have met many, bed-ridden as I am, but I have read some of the modern novels and they horrify me. You have certain points of difference, and I am thankful for that much. No doubt it is because you are a Carteret. You are not a fool at all events. Do you smoke cigarettes?”

“I do.”

“Well, don’t you ever dare bring one in here, or smell of one. Do you drink cocktails?”

“No. ’Fraid of bootlegger stuff.”

“I don’t mind you drinking a glass of wine with your dinner. There is some old Burgundy and port in the cellar, and, no doubt, a case or two of champagne. Tell Topper to bring up anything you like—but only one glass at a meal, though; and as the champagne is in quart bottles——”

“Thanks, grandmother, but I really don’t care about it. It’s time for your medicine.”

She came out into the light, and Mrs. Carteret looked at her with a frown. “You could be a beauty,” she said plaintively. “Why won’t you, my dear? And at least don’t stick your hands in your pockets again when you are in my presence—like a whistling schoolboy.”

“Well, I can’t just now.” Gita’s somber face broke into a smile that revealed even white teeth brilliantly enameled, and for the moment she looked feminine and roguish in spite of her cropped head and rigid spine. “Let me lift you a little higher. You nearly choked last time.”

She thrust her arm under the pillow and held the glass to the old lady’s sunken lips, then lowered her gently and returned to her chair in the shade of the curtains.

Mrs. Carteret sighed. “You have your good points, Gita, and I do wish you could have come to me before, although a sick-room is no place for a young girl. Eighty-two! It is a great age. Too old for a woman to live to by thirty—forty years. Your generation won’t live as long.”

“I should hope not. But I wish you wouldn’t die.” For the first time the hard boyish voice quivered. “I haven’t anyone else. Why don’t you try this rejuvenation thing?”

“Not I. Thirty years ago, perhaps, if they hadn’t been so long discovering it. But I’ve had enough of life. Eighty-two! All the friends of my youth, all my children, dead. Nobody left but you, and I do not love you. You came to me too late and you are too different, if you are a Carteret. But it is kind of you to say that, my dear, and I am glad I can leave you independent, if not wealthy. You will have the old place and about eight thousand a year, although it may be less, what with the inheritance tax and all.” A look of sharp anxiety came into her eyes. “You won’t sell the manor, Gita? I could not rest in my grave.”

“I shouldn’t think of selling it. Sometimes I think I’d like to live here alone for the rest of my life.”

“Nonsense. But it doesn’t take much to keep it up, aside from the taxes. The grounds went to ruin long ago, and the greater part of the house has been closed since taxes and prices began to go up and my income down. . . . Carteret Manor was a great domain in the seventeenth century, and even in your great-grandfather’s time, but we were always an extravagant and improvident race. There’s nothing left of the old manor now but forty acres. Most of that is in woodland, although there are two farms, rented to decent folk. The rest of my small fortune is in securities, and there is a house in Atlantic City. Mr. Donald will be over from Philadelphia again in a day or two and I’ll tell him to have a talk with you. If I thought I could live a year longer I’d transfer everything to you, but there is some sort of law——”

“That would be rather a reckless thing to do!” For a moment Gita’s brilliant black eyes softened as she leaned forward. “I might sell out and skip, having first run you into the poorhouse.”

“You may have bad manners and worse language, but I’ve lived too long to make any mistake about character——”

“And of course I’m a Carteret,” said Gita mischievously.

“Of course. But it’s not worth talking about. I’ll not live a month, much less a year. . . . There’s something else. I’ve wanted to speak of it ever since you came, but this is the first time I’ve had my way with that nurse and the opportunity for something like a real talk with you. Moreover—I suppose you’ll spit fire.”

“Fire away. Don’t mind me.”

“Well, it’s this. I don’t like the old name to die out. None of my sons married except your father and William, who died without issue. The other two died young, one out yonder in the Thoroughfare, when he was fourteen. Three of the girls died in childhood during a diphtheria epidemic—my own Gita among them! Violet and Rose withered away in this house, unmarried; they were plain, and I would not countenance such suitors as they attracted. In the few plain Carteret women the Carteret spirit seemed also to be lacking. Evelyn had her full measure. She cut a great swath in New York, where my sister gave her a season, and then married to suit herself. But she died childless—long since. Now, you and I are the only Carterets left and unless you do as I ask the old name will be forgotten—like many another old name only to be found in some history of New Jersey.”

“Well?” Gita’s crisp voice rose a key.

“I should die content if you would promise me to ask—yes, insist, that your husband take our name——”

“I’ll never marry! Never! Never!” Now Gita’s voice was harsh and defiant.

“Fiddlesticks. All girls say that. I said it myself—and did not marry until I was twenty-seven. I was too fond of being a belle—I had more scalps at my belt than any girl of my time.” Again her gaze turned inward. “My father was one of the founders of Atlantic City—one of that group of far-sighted men that all Philadelphia laughed at—and put more than a penny in the old United States Hotel. Ah, what gay times we had! That old hotel was the scene of my triumphs, season after season. People of quality went to resorts in those days. Now they avoid them as they would the plague, if one may judge from the hordes on the Boardwalk. I used to be wheeled up and down in one of those chairs before I was bed-ridden . . . Nothing but tourists——”

“Well, why not?” demanded Gita, who was growing restless. “It is a public walk and even tourists want to enjoy themselves, I suppose.”

Mrs. Carteret, recalled, drew her scant brows together. “I am not talking of rights,” she said coldly. “I merely regret a time when the beach and even the Boardwalk was a promenade of fashion, of beautiful well-dressed women and handsome men. They were better to look at, and I happen to dislike common and undistinguished people. I hope you do not think yourself ‘democratic,’ among other things?”

“Certainly I do. About the only decent treatment I’ve ever had has been from ‘common’ people—until we went to California, at all events. It was gentlemen, men of my father’s class, that made my mother’s life unendurable. And we hardly set up to be aristocrats on five cents a year.”

“Your mother should have written me she was in such dire straits. I knew that your father was living extravagantly in Europe but I never suspected he was spending his capital. He told me on both his visits that he was temporarily hard up. The first time I lent him a large sum of money. The second time I refused, under the advice of Mr. Donald’s father, and reproached him with extravagance. He flew into a terrible temper, flung himself out of the house, and never even wrote to me again. Well, he died soon after. . . . But I would never have permitted his wife and child to suffer.”

“My mother would have starved before she would have taken a cent from a Carteret.”

“She should not have permitted her child to starve. . . . However—there is one question I should like to ask before we go further—and I have other things to say. I wish you would move your chair into the light. I can hardly see you.”

Gita moved her chair obediently although with an impatient jerk.

Mrs. Carteret regarded her grandchild with a penetrating sharp gaze.

“Answer me this question, truthfully, and without quibbling. Have you actually no pride of race?”

“I think such things ridiculous.”

“You do? And would you—honestly, mind you—rather be a Jenks or a Hobbs than a Carteret? With no generations of breeding and education behind you? Just a common young woman with rudely modeled features and a blowsy prettiness, without an atom of distinction? Answer me that.”

Gita moved uneasily. “It is good enough as a background, I suppose. But I’m no snob.”

“No Carteret was ever a snob. But they were aristocrats. Vulgar people do not know the difference, and you are not vulgar, absurd as you are. There are worse things in life than poverty, and you may thank your stars you have escaped a few of them, owing to your despised Carteret ancestry. You begin where they left off, instead of struggling from the gutter upward. You realize that, I hope?”

“Yes, I realize it, grandmother. As you say, there are a few things I don’t have to overcome. I know the proper use of forks and I dislike a common voice and bad table manners. Being a Carteret, so far, hasn’t been of much use to me, but I am quite willing to make use of what little it may do for me in the future. Does that satisfy you?”

“Not at all. But I trust to time to bring you to your senses.”

“What next?”

“I was about to say, when my mind wandered to the past—as an old woman’s will—that my intention never to marry died a natural death when your grandfather came back from Europe, where he had been in the diplomatic service for years. I married him six weeks later. You have had an unfortunate experience which has given you all sorts of distorted views and ideas, but you will get over them in time. Wait until the right man comes along.”

Gita writhed as much at the old-fashioned idiom as at the idea involved. She set her lips in a straight line.

“I shall never marry. Might as well make up your mind to it, grandmother.”

The old lady sighed heavily, although her eyes flashed with temper. “Well! I shan’t live long enough to see you come to your senses; but just mark my words: you are a woman, a female, as you choose to call it, much as you may resent the fact; and trying to look like a boy does not make you one. You may hold yourself like a ramrod, but you have a graceful body if it is as thin as a plank, and the fine points of the Carterets. You have a lovely round throat and your eyelashes would make any boy ridiculous. Oh, yes, you are a girl, my dear, you are a girl. Don’t grind your teeth. It’s bad for the enamel. Now run out and take a walk. It’s time for my nap—and I hear the starched petticoats of that nurse.”

CHAPTER II

Gita stood with her hands in the pockets of her sport skirt surveying the old manor house from the drive. It was built of oblong blocks of stone obviously cemented together in the fashion of so many Northern Colonial mansions: a great square box of a house, surmounted by a gabled roof; without architectural grace but solid and imposing, and immune to the elements and time. The gardener was as old as her grandmother and the lawns were thin, the rose-bushes and other flowering plants looked as senile as himself. But the pine woods on three sides were beautiful and dim and old, and Gita was conscious of a thrill of pride in her inheritance. She frowned, then shrugged her shoulders philosophically.

“Why not? It’s all I’ve got. And perhaps a background is something to lean against, anyhow.” She would not admit that she had felt curiously at home from the hour of her arrival.

She sauntered out of the park and across the bridge of the Thoroughfare, a narrow body of salt water dividing the mainland from the most famous of its islands. Atlantic City amused her, but she did not turn toward the town. Some distance to the south, below the hotels, the Boardwalk had been demolished during a storm uncommonly heavy for even that wild part of the Atlantic coast; with its record, during the days of sailing vessels, of thousands of wrecks and bodies washed ashore, of evil men and false lights and ghouls crouching in wait.

Since the disaster to this end of the promenade it was deserted by idle saunterers. Walking briskly, sometimes running, with elbows pressed close to her sides, Gita made directly for this solitary spot and sat down on the sands, embracing her knees and staring out at the tossing ocean. Gradually her hard spine drooped forlornly, and although she scorned tears and self-pity, her mouth relaxed into the soft and charming curves of her youth. She felt small and desolate and alone. What was a dilapidated old manor to a girl who had been deprived of a far more significant birthright? If she could have grown up in that old place, a Carteret of the Carterets, she would have been a normal innocent girl, full of hope and day-dreams and every kind of delightful nonsense. At twenty-two she had not an illusion, and a horror and hatred of life. And her mother, the one person she had ever been able to care for, the one person who had it in her power to make her feel young and human and necessary, was dead.

More than once she had taken herself to task, scowled ferociously at her distorted ego. Common sense dictated that she should ignore her unfortunate experience of life as too uncommon to warp any educated woman’s viewpoint, readjust, reorient, herself. Other girls had had unfortunate experiences—but not hers. Not hers.

Her earliest memory was of Paris . . . an old detached house in Passy . . . a constant uproar downstairs that kept her awake in the nursery under the roof . . . ribald laughter and singing, brawls, banging doors all over the house. . . . Sometimes she would hang over the banisters in her nightgown, shivering with cold, fretful but curious. . . . Her mother with white desperate face, running up the stairs, snatching the child, darting into the nearest room, locking the door . . . a man running after her . . . mumbling at the keyhole, cursing. . . . Gerald Carteret, later, pounding on the door, commanding her to return to his guests and not make a silly little fool of herself. . . . Her mother’s terrified sobbing, then quailing obedience lest he keep his threat and break down the door.

And moving, always moving. As Gita grew older she learned that her father and his guests not only drank and caroused but gambled, sometimes all day as all night . . . that his friends persecuted her mother, whom they called the Blonde Madonna. She received little protection from her husband, with whom, nevertheless, she was at that time infatuated; she hated him later. Gita begged her mother to leave him and return to San Francisco, but this seemed a poor alternative to the tormented Millicent. Her parents were dead, her only relative was an aunt, whom she disliked. She had no desire to return to a city, where, in her first season, and to the envy of the other girls, she had captured the handsome and dashing Easterner, visiting polo friends in Burlingame. Now they thought of her as living brilliantly in Europe, although it must have struck them as odd sometimes that they never were able to communicate with her in their many trips abroad.

Moreover, a wife’s duty was to her husband, no matter what he might be. Even at the age of ten Gita sniffed. But her lovely mother was the one perfect being in a too imperfect world, and if she said it was right to live with a man who was intoxicated most of the time, hit her, subjected her to every form of insult, then right it must be. But she conceived a strong distaste for husbands and abominated her father, informing him more than once she wished he were dead. He would scowl or grin down at the small child, straight and defiant, and smack her or toss her to the ceiling, according to his mood.

Carteret was an unlucky gambler, on the whole, and lived “on the interest of his debts,” after his own and his wife’s inheritances had expired. When his creditors became too pressing he bundled his family out in the night and set up in another capital. When fortune ran with him he was charming and generous; when luck jibed he struck his wife, his child, his servants, whoever got in his raging way, raved like a madman, then collapsed in drunken tears at his Madonna’s feet and implored her forgiveness. . . .

Gita hated him increasingly, hated the other men, with their well-bred dissipated faces, who persecuted her mother . . . in time herself. . . . Herself! These were the ugliest and most indelible memories of all. . . .

This life, in which the war made no appreciable difference, ended abruptly when Gita was sixteen. Gerald Carteret died of typhoid fever in a French provincial town where he was hiding from his creditors. Gita sold her grandmother Sears’ engagement-ring, the only remaining jewel, and buried him thankfully; then sat for three months at her mother’s bedside in the charity ward of a hospital, exercising her will frantically to keep life in her mother’s exhausted body; a poor family in the neighborhood keeping life in her own.

Mrs. Carteret recovered and the two faced starvation. Then for her child’s sake Millicent wrote to her aunt, and received much scornful criticism in return, more sound advice, and a promise of a hundred dollars a month.

After that life was a succession of cheap pensions, with poor food, dingy company, and always some idle husband who made love to the indestructibly charming Millicent; to the expressed indignation of his wife. Constant peregrinations interfered with Gita’s schooling but she received an education of sorts. She was quick at languages and had ample opportunity to pick them up. As men ogled her on the street as well as in the pensions she abandoned the graceful languid carriage that had been a part of her anxious training, throwing back her shoulders and striding along like a stiff young soldier on parade; finally, to her mother’s wailing accompaniment, cut off her abundant black hair.

“I should have been a boy anyhow,” she told the superlatively feminine Millicent. “It was a horrid mistake of Nature. Then I not only could have taken you out of this rotten poverty-stricken life one day, and given you lovely gowns and delicate food, but I could have stood up to these awful men that annoy you.”

When she was seventeen the old aunt died and left her small fortune and the house built by the first Sears to adventure in California, to “my only remaining relative and not unloved niece, Millicent Sears Carteret.” The heiress decided to leave Europe, which she frankly hoped never to see again, and take her child to San Francisco. It was far from Carteret Manor, pride had gone the way of vanity, and she longed for her old friends; moreover, Gita could finish her education and have proper associates for the first time.

In San Francisco Gita was almost happy for two years. She enjoyed her school, the cool electric climate, the magnificent views, the drifting fogs, the long walks over the hills, and the Chinese cook’s admirable confections. Millicent’s friends were as faithful as she had anticipated, and Gita drifted into a semi-intimacy with girls who filled her at first with wonder and then with emulation. They were very modern young people, with the wisdom of the serpent, a fixed intent to do as they pleased, and a canny ability to take care of themselves. Gita, with her extensive and barely interrupted knowledge of the nocuous side of life and the hideous lust of men, at times felt old enough to be their grandmother, at others like the little sister of these amused and cynical maidens. Her mother had inculcated obedience, to one’s maternal parent, at least, as the first law of nature, and the only time Gita had ever defied her was when she had done her best to transform herself into a boy. She had been as severely chaperoned as was possible and admonished against all things unladylike, particularly cigarettes. It had been unnecessary to warn her against too free a manner with men as she hated all men, and never danced as she would have preferred to be embraced by a snake; but the consequence was that she had not the most elementary knowledge of flirtation.

Flirtation, however, she was informed by her new friends, was out of date. Past was the day of subtle methods, of practiced coquetry, of recourse to every feminine device to win and keep a man, while he, poor dupe, played the hollow rôle of hunter. The girls called the “boys” up on the telephone as often as the boys called them, and even took them out to restaurants and paid the bill. This was the day of fifty-fifty, of equality of the sexes. Gita looked in vain for romance, still in a measure the mainspring of fiction. But these girls laughed at the word, in spite of the movies, where, in the intervals between parties, they took their followers of an evening; conversation, apparently, was among the lost arts. One young married woman told Gita casually that her husband, after a more or less desultory wooing, suggested they “hitch up,” and she had accepted him, not because she liked him better than several others, but because his type pleased her, she was in the mood to marry, and wanted a baby. By this time Gita had ceased to blush at a frankness which would have horrified her mother, and at one time herself, accustomed to the finesse of Europeans (when sober); and, with the plasticity of youth, superimposed something of a new self upon what she had believed to be a finished and permanent structure.

But although, after her graduation, she went out to dinners, she refused to go to parties, since that would have meant dancing, and she recoiled from contact with even these innocuous young men. Not, as she was aware, that she would have been importuned for dances, for the boys had “no use for her,” she was a “highbrow,” wasn’t a “regular girl,” “ought to have been a boy and tried to look like one.” The girls, with whom she was popular, tried to give her “points,” but desisted when they understood that her dislike of men was sincere, although they did not guess the cause. If she could have brought herself to tell the story of both her surface and her psychic life to these wise maidens, no doubt they would have blown the chaff from the wheat with their laughing common sense, told her to “forget it,” remember that youth was the only thing that mattered, and, when she had had a good time for a year or two, marry and have a baby. But Gita would rather have gone out into the breakers at the Cliff House and drowned herself than to have revealed the festering sores in her soul to anyone. And no less than three noxious experiences with married men, fascinated by her vivid youth and intolerance of their sex, extinguished any possibility she may have unconsciously cherished of forgetting the past.

Upon one occasion only did she appear to attract a “boy.” He had made an average record in the war, was the son of a rich man, and although he “played about” with the girls he “fell for” none of them. The other young men disliked and criticized him, but the girls retorted that he was too good a dancer and mah-jongg player to lose. One night he met Gita at a dinner, and more than once she saw him watching her with covert speculation. Later, with considerable finesse for a San Francisco youth, he lured her into the conservatory, and after telling her admiringly that she looked the real thing and made chromos of the other dear little daisies, seized her in his arms and tried to kiss her. He received an abraded shin, a scratch across his cheek, and a loosened front tooth, which sent him cursing out of her presence to find an exit at the back of the house. They met some weeks later and he said airily: “My mistake. Sorry. Hope you’ll forget it.” But she knew that he hated her and looked exultingly at the gold band across his front teeth.

The girls discussed her psychoanalytically and decided she had a complex, induced no doubt by resentment that she had not been born a boy. On the other hand she had not “rushed” any of them and was anything but masculine, in spite of her funny little swagger and lack of feminine adornment. Ann Melrose came nearer the truth. “She is so precocious on one side of her that she may have had a desperate love-affair at the age of sixteen, and the man turned out a rotter. Did something that horrified her. But if she doesn’t mend her ways she’ll never give any other man the chance to administer the right kind of shock. She’s about as approachable as a hedgehog and as adaptable as a wire fence. ’Fraid she’s got too much brains and not enough common sense. Something gave her a bad twist. That’s good enough for me. I’m sick of psycho. Too bad! She’s a game kid and as straight as they come. Wonder how she’ll turn out.”

When Gita was nineteen misfortune once more fell upon them. The trustee of the small estate, failing in his wooing of Millicent, absconded with all but the house, which was mortgaged. Life was gray once more. They took in lodgers, dismissed the cook, and did their own work. Gita saw less of her friends, although they ran in every few days and occasionally made the beds. Millicent’s friends sent her hampers from the country and carried her off now and then for a day in San Mateo, Menlo Park, Burlingame, or San Rafael. One of her old beaux proposed for the fifth time since her arrival, but Millicent had had her fill of marriage. Moreover, she knew that if she married again she would lose her daughter; of whom, although she was a rather silly woman, she had a considerable understanding.

The enterprise was not a success. The lodgers either made love to their pretty landlady or did not pay their rent and had to be evicted. Finally Gita turned them all out and took in only women; to find that some were respectable and others not. Recommendations were easily forged. After a scandal Millicent sold the house for a little more than the mortgage and accepted the position of housekeeper to one of her friends in San Mateo, while Gita taught French and Italian to a class of youngsters hastily assembled. Neither would accept invitations for “long visits until something turns up.”

Gita, saw her friends constantly once more although she refused to go to dinners or luncheons. Her clothes barely held together, and they dared not offer her presents. But she learned to ride, to play tennis, to swim (in pools), and her naturally robust health, which had been impaired by too much confinement and hard indoor work, was restored.

By this time Millicent’s spirit was broken and her strength had been failing for some time. Gita took her to a sanitarium for the tubercular on the California desert, paying the expenses with the few hundreds left from the sale of the house. On her death-bed Millicent wrote to Mrs. Carteret.

CHAPTER III

The tide was coming in. Gita realized that she was cold and rather tired. She ran along the beach to quicken her blood, then took a trolley to the mainland. As she walked up the avenue of the manor she saw a motor standing before the door of the house and hoped she would be able to slip upstairs to her room unseen. The elderly and middle-aged daughters of her grandmother’s contemporaries did not interest her and she was inclined to pay little heed to the old lady’s adhortations to lose no time making friends in her new life. She had been at the manor a month and not met anyone of her own age. Few of any other. She saw her grandmother in brief interviews only, for the nurse maintained that this alien relative excited the invalid.

As she was stepping carefully over the old rugs of the hall she sniffed a familiar aroma, and then observed that the door of the drawing-room was open, and that a blind had evidently been raised. She had entered this room only once, on the day after her arrival, when curiosity had led her to explore the cradle of her ancestors. She had felt no inclination to visit it again. It was immense and dark and dreary, paneled with mahogany to the ceiling and crowded with ill-assorted furniture representing every period from 1660 to 1880. She assumed that her grandmother’s funeral would be held in its musty grandeur and after that it would be less inviting than ever.

She heard a light movement. For whom could the drawing-room have been opened today? Mrs. Carteret’s friends were escorted directly upstairs by Topper. Curiosity overcame her and she tiptoed to the door and looked through the crack. Then her heart gave a leap. A girl was standing in the middle of the room wrinkling her nose. Gita forgot that she hated everybody and remembered the unfailing kindness of her friends in California. She had not loved any of them and was too self-centered for intimacies, but they had given her what little tolerance of life she had ever known.

This girl looked rather jolly. She wore a very smart tailored suit that gave her the proper geometrical outline, and the prevailing hat of a shape once identified only with sport. Her face looked out triumphantly from its austere setting, for it was a really beautiful face, with its flower-like eyes and regular features. The bright fair hair was shingled and a cigarette projected from a mouth like pink coral. There was a touch of orange in the costume and Gita noted vagrantly that it clashed with the lips.

Gita hoped she was not married. It was as impossible to tell a young married woman from a girl as a smart déclassée from a woman of fashion, and Gita was not interested in babies and housekeeping. But a girl!

However, there was but one way to find out.

She entered the cold drawing-room and held out her hand with a smile.

“I am Gita Carteret,” she said. “I hope you have come to see me.”

The other girl removed her cigarette and shook hands heartily.

“Have I? Rather. I’m Polly Pleyden, and as you’ve rescued me from melancholia I’m that much more glad to see you. Was just thinking of laying myself out to see what it would feel like.”

Gita’s eyes sparkled with appreciation. “Isn’t it—just? And we can’t talk in a mausoleum. Come up to my room.”

“Good! I’ve been walking about to keep myself from freezing to death. Topping old house, though. Not many of them left. Most of the old houses about here were built of wood and have vanished long since. Luckily for me the rats monopolized our old barn before I was born and granny moved out to Chelsea. Not much tradition there but plenty of light and modern furniture. Glory! Do you sleep in that?”

They had entered Gita’s bedroom. Large as it was a four-poster seemed to take up fully a third of it, and highboys, chests, an immense wardrobe, heavy chairs and sofas, covered with horsehair, left little space for movement. The windows looked out into the wood. Gita had jerked off the bed-hangings on the night of her arrival.

“Well,” pursued the irreverent Miss Pleyden, “if you ever get hard up you can sell this old junk. There are imbeciles that will pay any price for mahogany and black old oak. I’d pass out if I had to sleep in this room.”

“I only do sleep in it! Take this chair. I’ve tried them all and it’s not quite as hard as the others. Have one of mine?”

“Thanks. I prefer Happy Stars. Debased taste. One of the fell results of the war. Jolly old war. Did us a good turn.”

Both girls smoked in silence for a moment, secretly appraising each other. Miss Pleyden wriggled until she made herself comfortable and Gita seated herself on the one unbroken spring of a sofa.

“Going to stay with us long?” asked Polly. “I hope so. I must give you a party and have you meet our crowd. We do our little best to amuse ourselves.”

“You look as if you amused yourself,” said Gita, smiling. “But I can’t go anywhere at present. My grandmother won’t live much longer, I’m afraid, and I must remain on tap.”

“I should hope not! Over eighty, isn’t she? Well, you’ll molder if you have to live here much longer. Mother says she’s leaving everything to you, and I hope you’ll sell this old tomb and buy something over in Chelsea—no, I take that back. Even I’d keep this house if I had it. All it needs is new furniture and not so much woods.” She took off her hat and threw it on the floor. Gita, now that this fashionable extinguisher was removed, saw how completely beautiful she was. Such locks as had been spared by the shears curled naturally about her face. She had a charming little head alertly poised; her forehead was low and full, her delicate nose a straight line, her curved mouth soft and pink, with happy corners. She looked sweet and innocent and utterly charming and as cool and pure as an arum lily; but Gita was wary of judging by Nature’s irrelevancies. And she had heard her San Francisco friends discuss these Eastern girls. “Hard-boiled, my dear, doesn’t express it. They’d turn nails green. We’re little ba-bas beside ’em.”

“Surely you go out occasionally?” asked Miss Pleyden anxiously.

“Oh, yes, I go for a long walk every day. The salt marshes fascinate me, and I never saw anything like the Boardwalk. It is rather amusing.”

“Amusing is the word for it until you’re tired of looking at people you never see anywhere else. Ever see the Digue at Ostend?”

“Oh . . . yes!” But Gita scowled. She had particularly unpleasant memories of Ostend. Her father had gambled away his last sou in the Kursaal, and been obliged to sneak out in the night as he could not meet his I.O.U’s. And one of his friends! Gentlemen! Carterets!

“Well, don’t look so tragic about it—I’m going to call you Gita and you must call me Polly—at once. Time was, I’m told, when we Atlantans were cold and formal, but that’s ancient history. Our poor parents try to keep it up, but they’ve given us up. And then you are one of us,” she added, sincerely casual. “Are you engaged?”

“No!”

“That’s right. Plenty of time. We don’t have to marry these days for the sake of freedom, and life’s one long dream when you haven’t a responsibility and can do as you please. Thank heaven I was born twenty years ago, not forty. Moreover, I’m waiting until the men get over prohibition and stop acting like naughty boys. I hate the sight of a hip-pocket. Some of the girls drink because they think it’s funny or think the men think they like it. But I’m afraid I’d go blind or something or come out in a rash. Believe in keeping one’s head, too.”

“Rather! Life’s hard enough without looking round for ways to make it harder.”

“Oh, come now, life’s a jolly nice proposition. I’ve heard you’ve had a lot of trouble and I’m damn sorry. Trouble never was meant for youth. We’ll change all that when—ah—you’re free. No use blinking facts. Old people have to die and not such a bad idea at that. My granny was a real affliction. We had to kiss her twice a day and she wouldn’t wear her false teeth. I was always afraid I’d fall in. What’s your type?”

“Type?”

“Men.”

“Oh!” Gita’s black brows met. “I don’t like any type.”

“Wow! Wow! That’ll never do. I haven’t the least respect for men, but life would be a desert without them. When I’ve exhausted the girl racket and am ready to satisfy my curiosity about those things our parents never mention before us, I’ll pick out a New Yorker—father’s one, thank heaven, and we spend our winters there—with a few millions, dark good looks, and a pastmastership in the art of love-making. About thirty, say. It takes an American that long to acquire any sort of technique. Then when that phase has run its course, he’ll know enough to let me go my own way. I certainly shall let him go his. Meanwhile a boy and a girl, blonde and brunette. That’s the perfect life.”

Gita laughed for the first time since she had left San Mateo for the desert. “Wonderful if life were as simple as that! Why are you so sure you are going to have your own way in everything?”

“If you know what you want and go for it you get it.” Miss Pleyden had a crisp metallic voice, which, Gita inferred, expressed her ego more veritably than her lovely shell.

“That may be,” said Gita. “All things being equal. Life has always dandled you on her lap and fondled your golden curls. But when she kicks instead of kisses and you have to fight her every inch of the way, you don’t get what you want, not by a damn sight.”

Polly Pleyden gave her a long stare. “Now, that is the last thing I should have expected you to say,” she remarked. “You look high-spirited and courageous. You don’t mean to tell me you’ve given up——”

“No!” Gita spat out the word. “I’ll fight till I die. But I’ve no illusions. I’m not one of life’s pets.”

“Look here, Gita Carteret, I’m not going to pretend I don’t know a lot of what you’ve been through. All your grandmother’s friends, including my mother, have talked of nothing else since you got here. Uncle Bill spent half his time in Paris before the war, and we cork-screwed the whole rotten story out of him. Mrs. Gaunt, mother’s crony, ran across your mother once, some time after your father’s death. Met her in some provincial town or other and carried her off to lunch—she had met your mother when she was visiting here, just after she had married, and admired her immensely; said she was the loveliest thing she ever looked at, and far too good for Gerald Carteret, who seems to have been the last word. Well, she got a few things out of your mother, who was too glad to talk to a woman of her own sort once more to keep up her natural attempt at reserve. It wasn’t difficult to find out she was poor and living in horrid pensions on a pittance from some relative. But she made Mrs. Gaunt vow she’d never tell Mrs. Carteret, and she never did. You’ve had a rotten life and I don’t wonder you’re bitter. But—how old are you?”

“Twenty-two.” Gita, angry at first, had softened at the tribute to her mother.

“Well—that’s old in one sense, these days. Jane Bull had had three affairs, married and settled down to a baby before she was twenty-three. But on the other hand it’s only a bit over three and one-tenth of the allotted span—less if this rejuvenation thing pans out. Between our new way of looking at life, and science, we can be young about thirty years longer than any generation that’s preceded us. What’s more, your troubles of one sort, at least, are over. You’ll have an independent income when the old lady shuffles off. For all you know life may have done her worst by you at the start and have relented for keeps. Don’t go on making faces at her. That old saying about man’s being his own worst enemy isn’t such a cliché as most. First thing you know you’ll be down and out again. Come now. You’re young enough to put all you’ve been through out of your mind and begin over. And you’ve ripping looks, if you don’t mind just one personal remark!”

“You are very kind,” said Gita, almost humbly. “But I don’t think it is possible to forget—the impressions of one’s plastic years are indelible. It is easier, I fancy, to forget at forty than at twenty.”

“I believe the will can do anything—in spite of Coué. Fancy that’s what’s the matter with you! Too much imagination, plus habit.”

“Perhaps. But I assure you I have no intention of brooding too much and making matters worse than they are. Now that I have the chance of ruling my own life—as far as anyone may—I intend to get something out of it. But men will play no part in it. Although I’ll be glad to talk to any intelligent ones I may meet. I haven’t met many so far.”

“I think I can guess the reason for your hatred of men,” said Miss Pleyden, who appeared to be disconcertingly shrewd. “But that will wear off, now that you are in a position where they no longer can take advantage of you. As I told you, I haven’t any respect for the lot I run with, but there must be men somewhere that have glamour enough to make a girl feel she’s head over. And what you want is a thumping love-affair.”

“That sounds almost romantic.” The subject was distasteful, but Gita was forced to smile.

“Not romantic. Merely undiluted nature. Fancy we all get it sooner or later, although nothing’s worrying me less at present. But what I haven’t seen I could inscribe on my thumb-nail. You’re built for it. Just you refurnish this old barrack and leave the rest to me.”

“Oh, I’ll refurnish it if there’s money enough—air it, anyway. But I’ll stay here for a time and read——”

“For God’s sake don’t tell me you’re intellectual!”

“Far from it. Been too busy. But there are many things I ought to read.”

“Don’t you dare queer my little game! Or if you will read tomey books keep it dark. It’s what you don’t know that gets you there. Life’s the Book, anyhow, when you’re young. . . . There’s no hope this summer, but you’ll visit me in New York next winter if I have to kidnap you. I haven’t been so interested in anyone before in all my young life. Wish I’d called before, but mother said you were inhuman and I kept putting it off. So did the other girls, but they’ll be along soon now. I’m Columbus, however, and shan’t let them forget it. That means I must go—mother’s been calling on Mrs. Carteret—but I’ll be over again in a day or two.”

A motor-horn had sounded discreetly. Miss Pleyden caught her hat on the point of her swagger-stick, tossed it to the other hand, settled it carefully on her head, opened her vanity-case and applied her lip-stick. Then she sprang to her feet and laid her hand on Gita’s shoulder. “You’re all right,” she said emphatically. “I had an idea you weren’t——Well, never mind what I mean,” as Gita jerked up her head. “In some things, I fancy, you’re as green as mint. Dear old Dr. Freud would say you were heading straight for the rocks, but there’s a thing or two he didn’t know when he set to work on the sub. Fancy you’ve been saved by a sound endocrine constitution. You see I know a thing or two myself, even if I never let on, owing to a perfect policy. There’s another toot. We’ll have to go down.”

CHAPTER IV

Gita felt inclined to dance as she swaggered about the dilapidated old garden, her hands in her pockets. She felt uncommonly buoyant. Whether she liked Polly Pleyden or not she hardly knew, but the creature was certainly stimulating. And the future looked less gray. She would have felt no desire to go to the wild parties she had read about during those long days on the desert, even were her grandmother well and amenable, but if the other girls were as amusing as Polly she would have a lot of fun with them.

California had helped her, but it was time for another superstructure.

What would it be like? For a moment her feet in their heavy boy’s shoes danced on the path. Then she saw Topper approaching and tried to look indifferent and dignified.

“Mrs. Carteret would like to see you, miss,” said the old butler, who never looked otherwise than dignified.

She ran into the house and up the stair and for the first time showed a smiling face at the door of the sick-room. The old lady was sitting up in bed, an antiquated jewel-casket open beside her. She gave her grandchild a sharp glance.

“So! What you needed was young folks,” she commented dryly. “Polly Pleyden is a frivolous, fast, pert, painted minx, but I suppose she’s better than nothing. If she’d been properly brought up she’d have called a day or two after your arrival. But never mind Polly. Come here. I’ve something to show you.”

Gita, more interested in the contents of the casket than in her grandmother’s opinion of Polly Pleyden, came to the side of the bed and bent over a tray of necklaces, bracelets, rings, and brooches. The settings were old-fashioned, but the stones: diamonds, rubies, emeralds, were of fair size and perfect clarity. For the moment she felt acutely feminine. Her eyes sparkled and she touched them lingeringly with her finger-tips. She had read stories demonstrating the fascination of jewels, but had never imagined that her own response would be keen and ardent. In jewelers’ windows she had not given them more than a casual glance. But to be as close to them as this! To touch them, to bend low over their fire. . . . For a moment she was almost angry.

“Lift out that tray,” said Mrs. Carteret.

The next held a rope of pearls, large, evenly matched, very white, and with a sheen that gave Gita a curious thrill. There was a sense of life, of mystery . . . strangely remote and desirable.

“I always wore them at night until lately to keep them from dying. They are to be yours, of course. Put them on.”

Gita lifted the pearls over her head reverently, and ran to a mirror. “Are they really for me?” she gasped. “How can I thank you, grandmother! I never knew that pearls were beautiful before. But these! Mine!”

“Oh! You’re not a boy after all! Good.” Then as Gita frowned she added hastily, “Come back and lift out this tray.”

In the large compartment beneath was a heavy and hideous tiara of diamonds and emeralds. Mrs. Carteret sighed. “I suppose you’ll never wear it. I’m told such things are no longer in fashion. But many’s the time I wore it in the old Academy of Music—and in Covent Garden. Evelyn wore it in her day and was the most splendid figure in the Metropolitan Opera House. Her husband sent it back to me when she died. . . . Well, you can have the stones made into a necklace when you are older.”

“I? Am I to have all these wonderful jewels?”

“Who else? But you are not to sell them.”

“I’d never dream of selling them. When I’m blue I’ll just take them out and play with them.”

“That is the first sensible thing I’ve heard you say. And many are heirlooms, remember. . . . There was a magnificent diamond necklace your grandfather gave me, but it went to pay racing-debts after an unfortunate season at Saratoga. He was a good man, but insane about horses. I often feel thankful he died before this era of shrieking motors. They would have broken his heart. Sit down and play with these things now. I see they have cast a spell over you and I am beginning to feel hopeful.”

Gita took a low chair beside the bed and poured the contents of the upper tray into her lap, letting the chains run through her fingers, trying on the bracelets and rings. The fine stones seemed to wink at her knowingly.

“They’ll have to be reset,” said the old lady sadly. “Tout passé. Now,” she added briskly, “there’s another thing I want you to promise. If you don’t I’ll leave every one of these jewels to a hospital.”

“Grandmother! Blackmail! What is it?”

“You must wear mourning for me. I’m told it’s more or less out of date, but I believe in the decencies of life. You say neither you nor your mother approved of mourning, but that has nothing to do with me. You will do as I ask, I suppose?”

“Of course.” Gita was in a mood to promise anything.

“Well, that’s one point gained! And six months will be enough. I’m only your grandmother. But after that you are to dress not only like a girl, but a fashionable girl; you’ll give those ridiculous suits to the servants.”

“But all the girls wear tailored suits—and as for sport——”

“Like yours? No furbishing up?”

“Oh, they wear scarves and bright hats—other things, I suppose. I’ve hardly noticed.”

“But you have noticed they indulge in every feminine vanity, even if they’ve cut off the hair that Nature meant to be woman’s chief adornment and have neither the full busts nor the swelling hips that once made a beautiful woman’s ‘figger,’ as we called it. And the tiny waists!”

“They must have looked horrid,” said Gita sincerely.

“Not at all. Quite the contrary. I wonder men are ever attracted to women these days. Nature intended women to have figures entirely different from men. Else why didn’t she make them on the same plan and save them the trouble of starving themselves? Answer me that!” said the old lady triumphantly. “A girl in my day, my daughters’ day, had no chance if she looked like a lath. She padded. And these young ninnies of today may have a certain style but not a particle of elegance. No wonder they wear little straight frocks. It takes a figger to show off elegant gowns. What in the world started such a fashion?” she asked querulously. “Do you mean to tell me men admire girls that look like boys?”

“They seem to. Probably that’s the reason the girls have sacrificed woman’s chief adornment.”

“But men used to rave over woman’s tresses.”

“Well, the men nowadays don’t rave much except over bootleggers and motors. Perhaps that’s the reason they want the girls to look as much like themselves as possible. Or maybe they’re more in love with themselves than ever since the war and the girls imitate them without realizing it is a sort of subtle flattery.” Gita was unconsciously groping. She had never given the matter a thought.

Mrs. Carteret cackled, her frail body shaking. “I suppose that’s the reason you shaved your head, didn’t even leave a few locks in front to cover your ears and soften your forehead!”

“I?” Gita forgot the jewels. “I should think not. It’s about the last reason!”

“Well, jewels and hairless heads don’t go together. It will be a good time to let your hair grow, while you’re in mourning, and some clever hair-dresser will find a way to tuck it up. I suppose it is naturally straight but it could be waved. And that reminds me. I am making you promise a good many things but this is one of the most important. When the proper time comes Mary Pleyden will introduce you to Society, and you are to go to the best dressmaker you can afford and wear the most elaborate clothes that fashion permits.”

“Nothing is very elaborate these days.”

“So I understand. But you are to dress like other girls—the most sensible and feminine. That’s all I have to ask. Is it understood?”

“Yes, grandmother, but I don’t care for clothes, really——”

“Never had ’em. That’s the reason. You’re a stoic, I imagine, and wouldn’t permit yourself to want what you couldn’t have. Wait until you have a wardrobe full of pretty things.”

Gita shrugged her thin shoulders. “Perhaps. But I don’t care for society either, grandmother. I—I—don’t know how to dance.”

“I never heard of such a thing! But you can learn, I suppose. You’re naturally graceful. You wouldn’t be a Carteret if you weren’t.”

Gita hastily changed the subject. “And I never know what to talk to men about. I’d really rather live quietly here and go over to New York occasionally—to the theater and concerts and lectures. And the opera! I haven’t been to an opera since I was fourteen.”

“Shocking! Well, go to the opera and show yourself. And as for men they’ll soon teach you what to talk about, or you’re not a Carteret. We were all great gabblers. Now, put those jewels back in the casket and put that in the wall-safe over there behind the open panel, before that nurse comes back. She may be as good as she looks, but I never trust outsiders. I told her to send up Topper and he got it out for me. You may keep the pearls. Wear them as often as you can.”

After Gita had hidden the casket she returned to the bedside and brushed her lips against the old lady’s tabid cheek. “You are very kind and generous, grandmother,” she said gratefully.

“Thanks!” Mrs. Carteret’s voice was as dry as usual but her eyes gleamed. “And your lips are very soft, my dear. Here comes that woman. It is time for your dinner. And when you have replenished your wardrobe I hope you will dress for dinner every night, even when you are alone.”

CHAPTER V

That was Gita’s last talk with her grandmother. The next day Mr. Donald called, and on the following the old lady had what the nurse alluded to vaguely as one of her attacks. Two nights later she died quietly in her sleep. At the earliest moment consistent with cherished proprieties, Topper telephoned to Mrs. Pleyden, and she came to the manor an hour later.

“Polly had a telegram from Bar Harbor yesterday asking her to a house-party,” she said sympathetically to Gita, looking as if she would kiss her if she dared, “and she went off last night. But she’ll be home in a few days and I know she’d want you to come to us for a bit. You will, won’t you, my dear? You’ve hardly had time to get accustomed to this gloomy old house. Do run up and pack a bag.”

But Gita shook her head. She felt uncommonly bereft. Her grandmother was a person to be missed, whether she had unconsciously grown fond of her or not. At all events she felt a desire to stand by until the last of the ceremonies. And the old house, in which so many of her blood had lived and died, mysteriously held her.

“You are very kind,” she said. “And I’ll be glad to see Polly when she comes back. But I’d better stay here. I’m sure grandmother would have wished it. If—if—you’ll attend to things, though, I’d be grateful.”

“I will indeed.” Mrs. Pleyden was a tall slender woman, admirably dressed and poised, but although her life for the most part was spent in a round of bridge, she was by nature executive and always willing to exercise her talent. Her house in Chelsea and her apartment in New York were models of bland extravagance and housewifely skill. In an earlier day she would have been a “leader,” and, as it was, her large and exclusive circle deferred to her and regarded her as a personage. Between herself and Polly there was an unspoken compact. Mrs. Pleyden moved with the times, and life had taught her philosophy.

“Better go out of doors,” she continued. “Perhaps you will change your mind later, but meanwhile don’t stay in the house any more than you can help. I’ll do the telephoning, and Topper always knows what to do. He’s seen many a funeral in this house.”

Gita shuddered and went out into the garden.

The more intimate of her grandmother’s friends were in and out constantly during the next three days. Flowers arrived by the motor-load. The heavy perfume in the unaired rooms was unendurable. It seemed to Gita as if all the dead Carterets had fertilized the roots of those flowers and contributed their odor of decay.

The old lady lay in state, not in the drawing-room but in the great central hall. Her face looked like an ancient wax mask. It was devoid of expression, and it had had so much in life! Gita did not give it a second glance. She preferred to remember that wise sarcastic old face on the pillows, lit by the indomitable dark brilliancy of the eyes.

Mrs. Pleyden had telephoned to a New York house for Gita’s mourning and it arrived early on the day of the funeral. It was merely a straight little frock of crêpe de Chine and a black straw hat like an inverted bowl, from which a short veil of chiffon depended. Gita wondered what her grandmother would have thought of it. Her crêpe veils no doubt had trailed the ground like those of the afflicted in French provincial towns.

She rummaged in the drawers of a chest in the old lady’s room and found a long necklace of jet and oxidized silver and put it on. The act made her feel less modern than usual, but she thought, somewhat humorously, that her grandmother would approve of this subtle, if momentary, linking of her unruly descendant with the past.

She had heard the rolling of many motors, and as she descended the broad stair she saw that the hall as well as the large and smaller drawing-rooms were crowded with ladies and gentlemen, who, as she learned later, had come not only from Atlantic City, but from Philadelphia and many of the country estates in New Jersey. It was a last tribute from friends and acquaintances that would have pleased Mrs. Carteret, although she would have regarded it as a matter of course. The Carteret funerals had always been affairs of state, a signal for all affiliated clans.

There were even reporters on the lawn.

Topper, in a rusty dress suit, once in the wardrobe of Mr. Carteret, and black gloves, was master of ceremonies, and Andrew, the old gardener, bent nearly double with rheumatism, had been given a chair near the casket. The other servants, housemaid and cook, were more recent acquisitions, but sniffled audibly. Topper’s eyes were red, but no Carteret could have presented a more immobile front to the world.

Mr. Donald, the family lawyer, met Gita at the foot of the stair and offered his arm. She was conscious of a ripple of decorous interest and several hundred examining eyes as they made their way to the upper end of the hall and took the seats reserved for them. There were no young people present. Polly, who had returned the night before, had telephoned that she would be over after the funeral; she would pass out if she found herself at one of those hang-overs of barbarism.

Gita privately made up her own mind that it was the last funeral she would ever attend. In an effort to look grave the company was as if suddenly bereft of individuality, and all the women who possessed black gowns wore them whether they were cut in the latest fashion or not. The pall-bearers, most of them keen business or professional men, looked like expressionless mutes. Mr. Donald, who was one of them, wore a band of black cloth on his sleeve and flourished a handkerchief with a black border. Polly would have said he looked like a walking monument to conservatism, but he was an urbane and pleasant person, inclined to be fatherly in manner to his younger clients and had been sincerely attached to Mrs. Carteret.

The atmosphere was sickening. The day was hot and close. Several of the women surreptitiously inhaled smelling-salts. The clergyman in his Episcopal robes droned on interminably. Not a phrase of the long funeral service could be omitted on so august an occasion. Gita felt as if she were on the verge of hysterics. At her mother’s simple funeral on the desert, where Millicent had asked to be buried—she was “tired of traveling”—Gita had felt only numbness and desolation, and had passively permitted herself, when it was over, to be carried off to San Francisco by Mrs. Melrose to await a possible letter from Carteret Manor. The numbness had not passed until she found herself alone in the train, free of solicitudes and plans for her future, should Mrs. Carteret ignore her. But today she felt a wild desire to laugh and shock some sort of expression into these portentously solemn faces. What a comedy! They were swooning with boredom and tuberoses, and what one of them had really cared for her grandmother? More than once they must have writhed under her merciless tongue. But it was an inherited ritual to attend a Carteret funeral and they were stern devotees of the passing conventions.

The sonorous voice rounded its final period. There was a sigh, a rustle. Mr. Donald left her to join the pall-bearers. Mrs. Pleyden took her firmly by the arm and led her past many staring eyes to her own motor.

“You are going with me to the cemetery,” she said kindly, “and then I’ll turn you over to Mr. Donald, who’ll bring you home and read the will to you in the library. . . . Abominable!” She had heard the click of a camera. “But your features will hardly be distinguishable through that veil. I only hope the paper is one that decent people take in.” She looked askance at the necklace but concluded to ignore it. Tact never failed her.

CHAPTER VI

The casket had been placed on its shelf in the Carteret vault and wreaths and crosses piled to the roof. Mr. Donald conducted Gita to his motor and they returned in silence to the manor. Gita drew a long breath. Her grandmother had made her final exit. She might regret, but she had mourned too deeply for her mother to confuse regret with grief. And she was conscious of a thrill of expectation. She had seen plays where wills were read by a solemn lawyer to a solemn family and thought them highly dramatic. Now she was to be the central figure in such a scene and that old library would be a proper setting.

Topper was standing in the hall. She gave him her first order.

“Please send all these flowers that are left to some hospital—at once. And open every window in the house.”

Topper, who distrusted fresh air even by day, shook his head in protest, but his eyes fell before the dark imperious gaze that had mastered his will for seventy-odd years. He had never expected to have a young mistress in his old age, and he and Andrew retired to the pantry and wept into two generous glasses of old port.

Gita followed Mr. Donald into the library and opened its windows herself. It was a very large room with books to the ceiling, galleries, alcoves, flights of steps. Over the paneled oak mantel was a half-length portrait of her grandfather, at which she had scowled more than once; it bore a fatal resemblance to her father. The room, when closed, had that subtle odor of death that comes from rotting calf, and, possibly, from those silent emanations of brains long still. But when the sunlight poured in and the salt winds from the Atlantic purified the air, it looked less like a tomb of dead thought, merely a dignified old library in a stately old manor house.

Gita took a chair close to one of the windows and Mr. Donald settled himself with a sigh of relief in a large leather chair by the central table.

“This has been a trying day,” he said, “and I am not as young as I was. I shall miss my old friend, who was a remarkable woman, Miss Carteret, a remarkable woman.”

“Yes,” said Gita sincerely, “she was. I wish I could have known her longer—and that she could have been sixty instead of eighty.”

Mr. Donald looked at her approvingly. Proper sentiments, certainly. Hardly to have been expected perhaps, brought up as she had been, and with her boyish hardness. He had never before seen a Carteret who did not look feminine, however imperious. He had met her twice before and had anticipated impatience, slang, and a total lack of respect. But Gita looked rather meek sitting there by the window and quite properly subdued. She had laid aside her hat, and her rough cropped head, which had excited her grandmother’s ire, and no less his own, was bent over a honeysuckle bush, inhaling its delicate fragrance.

It was a beautiful head. Mr. Donald studied it against the light, and with approval. Lines of face and head perfectly balanced. Set on a long throat. Small high ears. A spirited profile and the magnificent black eyes of the Carterets. It was something, at least, that this girl was a Carteret in looks. But what was she inside that almost blasphemous exterior? Had she any regard for tradition, or would she take the bit in her teeth, laugh at his advice, sell the manor in spite of her promise to her grandmother, and behave like a young colt generally? She looked as if her next step would be to wear trousers, and Mr. Donald, who gave the present generation of young people his unqualified disapproval, wished she were more like them and less like an absent-minded compound of Old Dame Nature. He was a mere sixty, but he had inherited the Carterets from his father and known many of them, although none that gave him a clew to this last of the line. However, he was used to trouble and generally knew how to deal with it.

He cleared his throat, adjusted his spectacles, and opening his bag, drew out a document.

“This is the last will and testament of your grandmother,” he said solemnly, “and, as is customary, it is my duty to read it to the family immediately after the final ceremonies.”

“Yes,” said Gita, smiling, “I always wanted to hear a will read. I know what is in it, but it will be fu—interesting, all the same.”

Mr. Donald frowned. “This is not an occasion for levity, my dear Miss Carteret.”

“Of course. Sorry. But I really do want to hear a will read.”

“Are you romantic?” asked Mr. Donald hopefully.

“Good lord, no! But I have a sense of drama.”

“Well, I shall not argue the point. But I think—first—may I ring for Topper and order a glass of sherry? This really has been a very trying day.”

“Indeed, yes!” There was no lack of Carteret hospitality at least.

Topper brought the sherry and retired. Mr. Donald filled two glasses, handed one to Gita, and lifted his own gallantly. “Here’s to your very good health, Miss Carteret, and a long and useful life.”

“Thanks,” said Gita dryly, but drinking the sherry, of which she suddenly felt the need. “Same to you. But please call me Gita. Miss Carteret doesn’t suit me at all.”

“Ah!—well, yes—I’ll call you Gita with pleasure. And now I shall read this last testament of my dear old friend.”

He began to read in a dry legal voice. Gita, warmed by the sherry, smiled at the lines beginning: “Being of sound mind,” etc. Nothing more aptly could have described her grandmother.

Mrs. Carteret, after generous bequests to Topper and Andrew, left her entire fortune to Gita, with instructions that she give her late grandfather’s studs, cuff-links and scarf-pins to Mr. Donald, who was named sole executor of the estate.

“It consists of this house and grounds, two farms, a house on States Avenue, Atlantic City, and good securities,” Mr. Donald informed his client. “There are no mortgages. The value of the estate after the inheritance tax has been paid will be something under two hundred thousand dollars. The rent of the house in Atlantic City just about pays for itself these days, what with taxes and repairs. When the present lease expires I should advise you to sell it. It was built for your grand-uncle, Byllynge Carteret, who left it to your grandfather in payment for moneys borrowed at various times. Most of those old homes have been turned into boarding-houses, since fashion moved out to Chelsea, and summer visitors come to Atlantic City in increasing hordes—the great majority of whom cannot afford the hotels on the Boardwalk. But——” He paused, coughed, and polished his spectacles. “I hope, my dear Gita, that you do not contemplate selling or even renting the manor.”

“I shall not sell it, but I certainly shall rent it if I should at any time want a larger income.”

“That would be almost as bad,” grumbled Mr. Donald, who, however, was relieved. “Of course it is rather a dismal home for a young girl, and I can imagine you would prefer to live for a time in a large city; but I feel sure that later in life you will be glad to know that you still possess this historic old manor of your ancestors.”

“My ancestors are not worrying me. I’m glad I’ve no relations to ding-dong about them. But I like the old place and I intend to hang on to it.”

“Ah—yes—well, I’m glad to hear that. May I ask if you have any immediate plans?”

“I intend to stay here for the present.”

“Couldn’t do better. Finest climate in the world.”

“Better say that to a Californian! Must you go?”

Mr. Donald had disposed of his spectacles and risen. “I am very grateful to you,” added his young hostess with unexpected graciousness. “And to my grandmother. If she hadn’t left me all this I’d have had to go to work. I hate work, and all the insincere jargon about it. Nobody works who doesn’t have to, even those who have great gifts that demand expression. They merely go on mental jags and enjoy themselves. Otherwise there’s no joy in work well done. The only joy is not having to do it.”

Mr. Donald was returning to his office to prepare a case to be argued in court next morning and felt no inclination to exhaust himself in debate with a young woman who would probably fling one defiance after another at his head under the impression that she was modern. He answered suavely:

“Very creditable of you to think for yourself. And it certainly would be unbecoming for one of the Carteret ladies to work for her living.”

“That isn’t worrying me, either. My objections to looking for a job and holding it down are purely personal.”

“You are very modern.” Mr. Donald sighed.

“Oh, that’s rather old-fashioned.”

“I mean in your complete indifference to tradition. But that seems to be one of the many phases of the present unrest. The war no doubt. Now, is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Of course you will continue to take care of the estate? I am hopelessly ignorant.”

“With the greatest pleasure!” Another apprehension was laid. In money matters at least this young rebel did not purpose to take the bit between her teeth. “And remember, if you need advice of any kind my services are at your immediate disposal.”

“I’d like to sell the house in Atlantic City at once and renovate this. I’ll keep the best of the furniture, of course, but the rest will go to the stables. My grandmother’s room I shall keep intact—as a memorial to the Carterets!”

“Well, I can’t blame you. But the lease of the house on States Avenue has a year to run. After the inheritance tax has been disposed of I’ll see what can be done.”