HARE AND

TORTOISE

By

PIERRE COALFLEET

Author of “Solo”

McCLELLAND & STEWART

PUBLISHERS TORONTO

Copyright 1925 by

THE FORUM PUBLISHING COMPANY

Copyright 1925 by

DUFFIELD & COMPANY

Printed in U. S. A.

To

R. M.

HARE AND TORTOISE

HARE and TORTOISE

CHAPTER I

KEBLE EVELEY’S voice, rising and falling in graceful patterns, had lulled his wife’s mind into a tranquil remoteness. She had got more from the sinuosity of the sentences he was reading than from the thesis they upheld. Walter Pater had so little to tell her that she needed to know. This vaguely chagrined her, for Keble thought highly of Pater; Pater and he had something in common, something impeccable and elusive, something—

She checked her musings in alarm at the menacing word “affected.”

Was it affectation on Keble’s part? Or was there perhaps a winnowed level of civilization thousands of miles east of these uncouth hills and beyond the sea where precious phrases like Pater’s and correct manners like Keble’s were matter of course? In any such milieu what sort of figure could she hope to cut?

No doubt a pitiful one. And her thoughts drifted wistfully but resignedly down the stream of consciousness.

It was not the first time she had failed to keep stroke with Keble in the literary excursions he conducted on cool evenings before a log fire that had been burning since their marriage in the autumn, six months before. Only a few evenings past he had read a poem by Robert Browning, who was to Louise merely a name that had fallen from the lips of her English teacher at Normal School. She had felt herself rather pleasantly scratched and pommeled by the lines as Keble had read them, but they had failed to make continuous sense. And next morning, when she had gone to the book-shelves to read and ponder in private, she hadn’t even been able to identify the incoherent poem among the host of others in the red volume.

Once, too, when he had been playing the piano she had been humiliatingly inept. For an hour she had been happy to lie back and listen to harmonies which, though they had signified no more to her than a monologue in a foreign tongue, had moved her to the verge of tears. Then he had played something he called a prelude, a pallidly gay composition utterly unlike many others called preludes, and on finishing it had turned to ascertain its effect upon her. She hadn’t been listening carefully, for it had set an old tune running in her head. “It’s pretty, dear,” she had commented. “It reminds me of something Nana used to hum.”

Her remark was inspired, for the suave prelude in question was no more than a modern elaboration of a folk-theme that was a common heritage of the composer and Nana. But the association between a French-Canadian servant-girl and the winner of a recent prix de Rome had been too remote even for her musically discerning young husband, who had got up from the piano with a hint of forbearance in his manner. That had cut her to the quick, for it had implied maladdress on her part, and gradually, through an intuitive process that hurt, she had gained an inkling of the incongruity of her comparison. She had wished to state the incongruity and turn it off with a touch of satire aimed at her headlong self, but chagrin had held her mute. It was one of those occasions where an attempted explanation would only underline the regrettable fact that an explanation had been needed. Her ideas, she felt, would always be ill-assorted; her comments, however good per se, irrelevant. Her mind was a basket tumbling over with wild flowers; it must be annoying for Keble to find pollen on his nose from a dandelion in the basket after he had leaned forward at the invitation of a violet.

Rising from her couch she crossed the room on tiptoe and sat on the arm of Keble’s chair, leaning her head on his back as he continued to read.

“After that sharp, brief winter, the sun was already at work, softening leaf and bud, as you might feel by a faint sweetness in the air,” read Keble.

The faint sweet airs of a Western Canadian spring,—the first after a sharp long winter,—were at the black open window, stirring the curtains, cooling her cheek; and Keble was with Marius the Epicurean in Rome, seven thousand miles and many centuries away.

“. . . Marius climbed the long flights of steps to be introduced to the emperor Aurelius. Attired in the newest mode, his legs wound in dainty fasciae of white leather, with the heavy. . . .”

Louise placed her hands across the page and leaned forward over Keble’s shoulder to kiss the cheek half-turned in polite interrogation. “Are fasciae puttees, darling?” she inquired. Not that she really cared. Indeed she was dismayed when he began to explain, and yawned. Penitently she sank to an attitude of attention upon a stool at his feet. Keble got up for his pipe, placing the book on a large rough table beside neat piles of books and reviews.

Louise remained on her footstool looking after him; then, as he turned to come back, transferred her gaze to her hands, got up, biting her lip, and crossed the room for her needlework.

Keble’s influence during the last year had been chastening. Her own ideas were vivid, but impetuous; they often scampered to the edge of abysses—and plunged in. At times she abruptly stopped, lost in wonderment at her husband’s easy, measured stride. Keble, like Marius, mounted flights of thought in dainty fasciae,—never in plain puttees,—and always step by step. She dashed up, pell-mell, and sometimes beat him; but often fell sprawling at the emperor’s feet. Whereupon Keble would help her up, brush her, and pet her a little, only to resume the gait that she admired but despaired of acquiring. Beyond her despair there was an ache, for she had come to believe that, as Lord Chesterfield put it, “Those lesser talents, of an engaging, insinuating manner, or easy good breeding, a gentle behavior and address, are of infinitely more advantage than they are generally thought to be.” Even in Alberta.

She herself had written pages and pages of prose, and had filled an old copy-book with incoherent little poems of which Keble knew nothing. They sang of winds sweeping through canyons and across sage plains, of snowy forests and frozen rivers; they uttered vague lament, unrest, exultation. Through them surged yearnings and confessions that abashed her. She kept them as mementoes of youthful rebellion, shut them up in a corner of the old box that had conveyed her meagre marriage equipment hither from her father’s tiny house in the Valley, and then watched Keble’s eyes and lips, listened to his spun-silver sentences in the hope of acquiring clues to—she scarcely knew what.

Keble had come to the second lighting of a thoughtful pipe before the silence was broken. He looked for some moments in her direction before saying, “What sort of tea-cozy thing are you making now, dear?”

Tea-cozy thing! It was a bureau scarf,—a beautiful, beautiful one! For the birthday of Aunt Denise Mornay-Mareuil in Quebec. And Louise sacrilegiously crossed herself.

“So beautiful,” he agreed, “that Aunt Denise will take it straight to her chapel and lay it across the altar where she says her prayers. You know your father’s theory that despite oneself one plays into the hands of the priests. How are you going to get around that, little heretic?”

“By writing to Aunt Denise that it’s for her bureau! My conscience will be clear. Besides, I’m making it to give her pleasure, and if it pleases her to put it on the altar where she prays for that old scamp, then why not? She loved him, and that’s enough for her,—the poor dear cross old funny!”

“Would an atheist altar cloth intercept Aunt Denise’s Roman prayers? Perhaps turn them into curses?”

Louise ignored this and bit off a piece of silk. “Besides, I’m not such a limited heretic as Papa. I’m a comprehensive heretic.”

“What kind of thing is that, for goodness’ sake?”

“It’s a kind of thing that pays more attention to people’s gists than to whether they cross their i’s and dot their t’s. It’s a kind of thing that’s going out to the pantry and get you something to eat before bed time, even though it knows it’s bad for you.”

2

From a recalcitrant little garden in front of the log house, Louise could follow the figure of her husband on a buckskin colored pony which matched his blond hair. He was skirting the edge of the lake toward the trail that led up through pines and aspens to the ridge where their “Castle” would ultimately be built. Keble had still three months of his novitiate as rancher to fulfil before his father’s conservative doubts would be appeased and the money forthcoming from London for the project of transforming the mountain lake and plains into something worthy the name of “estate”: a comfortable house, a farm, a stock range, and a game preserve. He was boyishly in earnest about it all.

When Keble had disappeared into the trail, Louise’s eyes came back along the pebbly strip of shore, past the green slope that led through thinning groups of tall cottonwood trees to the superintendent’s cabin and the barns, resting finally upon the legend over her front door: Sans Souci. She remembered how gaily she had painted the board and tacked it up. Had the blows of her hammer been challenges to Fate?

She sighed and bent over the young flower beds. At an altitude of five thousand feet everything grew so unwillingly; yet everything that survived seemed so nervously vital! She dreaded Keble’s grandiose projects; or rather, the nonchalance with which he could conceive them intimidated her. There was something jolly about things as they had been: the cottage and the horses and dogs, the two servants, the rattling car, and the canoe. She thought, indulgently, of the awe in which she had originally held even this degree of luxury.

Her ditch was now fairly free of pebbles, and she placed the dahlia bulbs in line. As she worked, the thin mountain sunshine crept up on her, warming, fusing, gilding her thoughts. Spring could do so much to set one’s little world aright. In the winter when the mountains were white and purple and the emerald water had frozen black, when supplies from the Valley were held up for days at a time, one was not so susceptible to the notion of a universal benevolence as one could be on a morning like this, with its turquoise sky, its fluffy clouds that seemed to grow on the tops of the fir trees like cotton, and its rich silence, only intensified by the scream of a conceited crane flying from the distant river to the rock in the lake where he made a daily “grub-call” at the expense of Keble’s trout.

There was one other alien sound: the noise of a motor, a battered car from the Valley that brought mail on Tuesdays and Fridays. But this was Monday. The driver was talking to one of the hands; and a young stranger, quite obviously a “dude” and English, was looking about the place with a sort of eager, friendly curiosity. Then Mr. Brown appeared, and after a short consultation took the stranger in the direction of a road that led around by another route to the ridge.

An hour later, from her bedroom window she saw Keble approaching the cottage, his arm about the shoulders of the visitor. They might have been two boys dawdling home from school: boys with a dozen trifles which they had saved up for each other, to exchange with intimate lunges and gesticulations. She had never seen Keble thus demonstrative. Indeed, she had never seen him before in the company of a friend. She ran downstairs two steps at a time.

“Oh, Louise, here’s Windrom out of a blue sky,—you know: Walter Windrom who was at Marlborough with me.”

Keble had become suddenly casual again and shut off some current within him in the manner that always baffled her. She knew Walter Windrom from Keble’s tales of school life in England, and she had a quite special corner in her heart for the shy young man who had been his friend. She envied him for having been so close to Keble at a time when she was ignorant of his very existence. Walter could remember how Keble had looked and talked and worn his caps at that age, whereas she could only imagine. She remembered that Keble had marched off to war instead of going up to Oxford with his chum, as they had planned, and that Windrom had recently been given a diplomatic post in Washington. The image of Keble in a Lieutenant’s uniform awakened another memory: Keble had once told her that he and Windrom had played at warfare with their history master, and with her usual impetuosity she got part of this picture into her first remark to the new man: “You used to play tin soldiers together!”

“And Keble always won the battles, even if he had to violate the Hague conventions to do it!” Walter’s tone was indulgent.

“Oh!” exclaimed Louise. “But he would break them so morally! Even the Hague would be fooled.”

“The history of England in a nutshell,” agreed Walter. “We played battles like Waterloo, and I had to be Napoleon to his Wellington.”

“But you didn’t mind really, old man, you know you didn’t.”

“Not a bit! The foundation on which true friendship rests is that one of the parties enjoys to beat, and the other rather enjoys being beaten.”

“Walter has turned philosopher and poet and says clever things that you needn’t believe at all.”

“Oh, but I do believe him,” said Louise quickly, alarmed at the extent to which she did. To cover it she held out her hands with an exuberant cordiality and drew them into the house.

The luncheon table was drawn near windows framed by yellow curtains which Louise had herself hemmed. Through them, beyond the young green plants in the window-boxes, beyond the broken trees that Keble called the Castor and Pollux group, from their resemblance to the pillars in the Roman Forum, the two mountains that bounded the end of the lake could be seen coming together in an enormous jagged V, one overlapping the other in a thickly wooded canyon.

“And to think that all this marvel belongs to you, to do with as you see fit!” exclaimed Windrom. “It’s as though God had let you put the finishing touches on a monument He left in the rough.”

“We’re full of godlike projects,” said Keble. “This afternoon I’ll find a mount for you and take you over the place.”

“Let it be a gentle one,” Windrom pleaded. “Horses scare me,—to say nothing of making me sore.”

“Sundown won’t,” Louise quickly reassured him, then turned to her husband. “Let him ride Sundown, Keble . . . He’s mine,” she explained. “The only thing left in the rough by God that I’ve had the honor of improving, apart from myself! Like lightning if you’re in a hurry, but wonderfully sympathetic. I’ll give you some lumps of sugar. For sugar he’ll do anything. He’s the only horse in Alberta that knows the taste of it. But don’t let Keble see you pamper him, for he’s getting to be very Canadian and very Western and calls it dudish and demoralizing and scolds you for it.”

She paused, a little abashed by the length to which her harmless desire to help along the talk had taken her, and smiled half apologetically, half trustfully as her husband resumed inquiries about the incredible number of unheard-of people they knew in common: people who thought nothing of wandering from London to Cairo, from New York to Peking: rich, charming, clever, initiated people,—people who would always know what to do and say, she was sure of it.

3

If it was the natural fate of a tenderfoot that Sundown should have been lame from a rope-burn that afternoon and that his understudy should be a horse that had not been ridden since the previous summer, it was carelessness on the part of Keble Eveley that allowed the visitor to climb the perpendicular trail to the ridge in a loosely cinched saddle. In any case, when Windrom, in trying to avoid scraping a left kneecap on one pine tree, caught his right stirrup in the half fallen dead branch of another, the horse, reflecting the nervousness of his rider, began to rear in a manner that endangered his foothold on the steep slope, and almost before Keble knew that something was amiss behind him, a sudden forward motion of the horse, accompanied by a slipping motion of the saddle, threw his friend against a vicious rock which marked a bend in the trail.

Keble turned and dismounted anxiously when Windrom failed to rise. The body lay against the rock, the left arm doubled under it. Keble lifted his victim upon his own horse and after great difficulty brought him to the cottage, where an astonishingly calm Louise vetoed most of his suggestions, installed the patient as comfortably as possible in bed, and commanded her husband to get in communication with the Valley.

Despite the halting telephonic system, the twenty miles of bad road, the prevalence of spring ailments throughout the Valley requiring the virtual ubiquitousness of the little French doctor, it was not many hours before he arrived to relieve their flagging spirits. For his son-in-law’s naïve wonderment at Louise’s efficiency, Dr. Bruneau had only an indulgent smile. “But why shouldn’t she know what to do?” he exclaimed. “Is her father not a doctor, and was her mother not a nurse?”

When the broken ribs had been set, Louise remained in the sick-room, and the two men were smoking before the fire downstairs. The situation had put the doctor in a reminiscential humor. His daughter grown up and married, in the rôle of nurse, set in train memories of the epidemic that had swept through the Valley when Louise was nine years old. Her mother had insisted on helping, had gone out night and day nursing and administering.

“And I was so busy tending the others that she went almost before I knew she was ill. . . . Until that day, Death had been only my professional enemy. . . . It was an excellent woman, very pratique. Louis is pratique, too, but au fond romantic. That she holds from me. I’m not pratique. I don’t collect my bills. But out here, at least, the priests don’t get what I should have, as they did in Quebec. Down there they take from the poor people whatever there is, and nothing is left to pay the bills of a heretic médecin. The priests thought that was fair, since the médecin gave them nothing for their embroideries and their holy smells!

“Here at least one is not molested,—if one were permitted to enjoy one’s freedom! All my life I have wanted to sit by my fire and read, one after the other, every book discouraged by Rome. . . . But always when I get out my pipe and take down Renan or Voltaire there is a call: little Johnny has a fit, come quick; Madame Chose is having a baby,—Cré Mâtin: Madame who has had already twelve! If the baby lives they thank God; if he dies they blame me. And that’s life. . . .

“All one can do in this low world, my son, is work, without asking why. We are like clocks that Nature has wound up to keep time for her, and it’s enough that Nature knows what we are registering. The people who are always trying to read the hour on their own dials keep damn poor time. Witness my excellent sister. Denise burns expensive candles for her drôle of a husband, that rusé Mareuil who marched his socialists up the hill to give him a fine showing, then, unlike the King of France, stayed on the hill and let them march down by themselves when they had served his ambition, and got himself assassinated for his treachery. And his devout widow, after fumbling her beads in the parlor, goes into the pantry to count the gingersnaps for fear the hired girl has taken some home to her family. Denise is too spiritual to be a good human clock, and too full of wheels to be of any use to eternity. It’s a funny world, va!”

When Dr. Bruneau had gone, Keble reflected that it was indeed a funny world. Not the least ludicrous feature of it being that he, the product of many generations of almost automatic gentility, should have happened to make himself the son-in-law of a garrulous, fantastic, kind-hearted, plebeianly shrewd, Bohemian country physician, who, more like his sister than he knew, was too spiritual to be successful in his profession, and too close to the earth to be a valid sage,—a man of the people, of the soil from which Louise had come forth as the fine flower.

He recalled with a faint smile the pretexts he used to devise for dropping into the doctor’s little house on his long ski-journeys to the Valley: a fancied ailment, the desire to borrow a book or offer a gift of whisky from a recently-arrived supply. He recalled his reluctant leave-takings and the very black, mocking eyes, tantalizing lips, and jaunty curls of the girl who accompanied him to the door. He recalled the shock of his sense of fitness on realizing during the spring the significance of his visits; his abrupt pilgrimage to the family fold in England to repair his perspective; the desolating sense of absence; the sudden cablegram; and her proud, challenging reply. It had been brought to him just before dinner, and he could yet feel the thrill that had passed through him as he entered the dining-room formulating his revolutionary announcement.

He recalled with a little twinge the scared expression that had come over his mother’s face, the hurt and supercilious protest voiced by his sister, the strained congratulations offered by Girlie Windrom, Walter’s sister, who had been visiting them, and the ominous silence from the paternal end of the table. A few days later his father had seen him off to Southampton, with the final comment: “Till the soil by all means, my boy. I can understand a farmer. We’ve all farmed. But we’ve never gone so far afield for our wives.”

Then, with a more sympathetic impulse his father had said, “Your mother and I had rather set our hearts on Girlie Windrom for you. One of these days you will have to assume responsibilities as head of the family, whether it bores you or not, and it is not wholly reassuring to know that our name will be handed on to nephews of a French-Canadian traitor.” Keble had reflected that Louise could scarcely be held to account for her aunt’s marriage to a man who had brilliantly satirized some of his father’s most pompous Imperialistic speeches, but he had seen that nothing would be gained by pointing this out.

He could almost wish he had had a brother who might have satisfied the family by marrying Girlie, understudying his father in the ranks of the diehards, and going through all the other motions appropriate to the heir of a statesman, a landlord, and a viscount.

4

Walter was at first embarrassed by having his chum’s wife assume all the duties of a nurse, but gradually under her deft regime the two men, and later Mrs. Windrom, who had set out from Washington on receiving news of the accident, took Louise’s ministrations as matter of course. Louise saved her pride by announcing that she was a born Martha, but privately resolved that, for the future, her Mary personality should not so easily be caught napping.

Except for strangers who at rare intervals had strayed thither on hunting trips, Mrs. Windrom was the first woman of Keble’s world who had entered their house. After her first maternal anxiety had been allayed and she had been assured that Dr. Bruneau had not mis-set her son’s bones, Mrs. Windrom made a point of being pleasant to the young woman who was filling the place she had always expected her own daughter to occupy. Unfortunately, Louise felt that Mrs. Windrom made a point of it. Being a woman of restricted imagination, Mrs. Windrom was at a loss for ways and means to be friendly with a girl who had scarcely heard of the routines and the people comprising her stock-in-trade. There was not much to say beyond “good mornings” and “my dears,” and the very lack of an extensive common ground made it necessary for Mrs. Windrom to fill the gap with superfluous politenesses. She never failed to commend Louise’s tea and cakes, her pretty linen patterns, and her bouquets of wild flowers, but for the quick intuition, the embarrassed private cogitation, and the tortuous readjustments of manner by means of which Louise achieved absence of friction, Mrs. Windrom had necessarily only a limited appreciation.

Once or twice Louise, whose patience was particularly tried by Mrs. Windrom’s incomprehensible habit of remaining in her bedroom until eleven, experienced a sensation of deep, angry rebellion, for which she ended by chiding herself and went on grimly fulfilling her self-appointed tasks sustained by an undercurrent of pride that would not have been lost on Keble had he not been caught back into the past for the moment, to rebreathe the faded but sweet odors of the hawthorne hedges and the red-leather clubs he had abandoned nearly three years ago.

Walter, towards the end of his recovery, more than once sensed the loneliness of Louise’s position. Being conscientious as well as shy, he was at some pains to conjure up discreet words in which to couch his feeling. Meanwhile his glances and gentle acknowledgments gave her the stimulus she needed to carry her through.

On the day set for their departure, Walter made a meticulous avowal of gratitude which reached a chord in her nature that had never been made to vibrate. “Sometimes, at least once in the course of a woman’s married life,” he said, “I imagine there is some service, perhaps trifling, perhaps important, that only a man other than her husband can render. If such an occasion ever arises for you, I shall be there, eager to perform it. I think I can be impersonal and friendly at the same time. It’s my only real talent. Moreover, I’m older than Keble, in imagination if not in years, and am more acutely conscious of certain shades of things that concern him than he can be.”

The unspoken corollary was that Walter was also more acutely conscious than Keble of certain shades of herself, and in that moment a ray of light penetrated to an obscure recess of Louise’s mind, a recess that had refused to admit certain unlovely truths and heterodoxies,—a recess that had declined, for instance, to put credence in the change of heart of so many women in books and plays: Nora Helmer, Mélisande, Guinevere; and for the first time in her life she understood how there could be a psychology of infidelity. For the first time she understood that one might have to be unfaithful in the letter to remain faithful in the spirit. Just as one might have to break a twenty-dollar bill to obtain a twenty dollars’ worth. It was a strangely sweet, strangely unhappy moment, but only a moment, for almost immediately she was recalled to a consciousness of hand-bags, cloaks, veils, and small, nameless duties of eyes and hands and lips. Then Mrs. Windrom kissed her good-bye, with an emphasized friendliness that only set her mind at work wondering what it was that Mrs. Windrom had left unsaid or undone that she should feel obliged to emphasize the kiss. Louise could find no words to define the gap that lay between them; but she was sure that Mrs. Windrom defined it to a T, and had stated it to a T in letters to Girlie, who would restate it to Alice Eveley and the Tulk-Leamingtons!

As the car mounted the hill beyond Mr. Brown’s cottage, Keble turned to her, with the absent-minded intention of thanking her, following the cue of the others, for everything she had done. The visit of his friends breaking into their long days had been for him an exciting distraction, and he could be only cloudily conscious of the strain it had put upon her, whose life had been socially humble and barren. His face still bore traces of the mask which people of his world apparently always wore. He found Louise pale, with brows slightly drawn together, the mouth with its arched lips relaxed, as of one suffering a slight with no feeling of rancor.

One instinct, to take her in his arms and reassure her by sheer contact, was held in abatement by another, an instinct to stop and reason out the elements that had produced the momentary hiatus. This procrastination on his part had an almost tragic significance for the impulsive girl. She lowered her eyes, pressed her teeth against her lip, straightened her arms, and walked into the house. If he had followed more quickly on her steps she would have succumbed to a passionate desire to be petted. As it was, he reached her side only after she had had time to put on her pride.

There was still a chance, had he been emotionally nimble enough to say something humorous about the visit, something gently satiric about Mrs. Windrom’s exaggerated fear of missing connections with the stage from the Valley to Witney, something natural and relaxed and sympathetic,—if only her old nickname, “Weedgie,”—to reinstate her in the position to which, as his most intimate, she felt entitled.

A great deal, she felt, depended on what his tone would be. She held herself taut, dreading an echo of the hollow courtesies that had filled her rooms for days with such forbidding graciousness.

Keble had a congenital aversion to demonstrations. Tenderness might coax him far, but it would never induce him to “slop over.” As he went to the table for his pipe, his eyes encountered an alien object which he lifted thankfully, for it served as a cue.

“Hello, Mrs. Windrom left her pince-nez behind . . . I’ll have them put into the mail for Sweet to take out this afternoon. Hadn’t you better write a note to go with them, my dear?”

She turned and faced him. In her eyes he saw something smoldering, something whose presence he had on two or three occasions half suspected: a dark, living subtlety that he could attribute only to her Frenchness. Her nostrils were slightly dilated, her lips quietly composed. She walked very close, looked directly into his eyes, and with a little sidelong shrug that brought her shoulder nearly to her chin, whipped out the words, “If I weren’t so damn polite I’d smash them!”

The slam of the door, a few seconds later, drove her exclamation at him with a force that, after the first thrill, left him vexed and bewildered.

CHAPTER II

LOUISE had wondered why Katie Salter had not appeared to do the weekly washing. In the light of a report brought by the mail carrier the reason was now too frightfully clear. Katie’s son, a boy of twelve, had accidentally killed himself while examining an old shot-gun.

Keble was sitting at his table filling in a cheque. Louise had been silently watching him. “I’ll give this to Sweet to take to Katie on his way back to the Valley,” he said. “It will cover expenses and more.”

“Give it to me instead, dear. I’ll take it when I go this afternoon.”

“Oh! Then what about our trip to the Dam with the Browns?”

“I’m afraid I’ll have to be excused. I must do what I can for Katie. She has nobody.”

“She has the neighbors. Mrs. what’s her name, Dixon, is taking care of her. Besides, all the women for miles around flock together for an occasion of that sort. It will be rather ghastly.”

“Especially for Katie. That’s why I have to go.”

“Oh, Lord! if you feel you must. I’ll come with you.”

She rose from her chair and picked up the cheque he had left on the edge of the table. She had thought it all out within a few seconds, and in none of the pictures she had conjured up could she find a place for her husband. The fastidiousness which persisted through all his efforts to be “plain folks” could not be reconciled with the stark details of the tragedy ten miles down the road.

“No, Keble dear,” she replied with a firmness she knew he wouldn’t resist. More than once she had secretly wished he would resist her firmness, for every yielding on his part seemed to increase her habit of being firm, and that was a habit that bade fair to petrify the amiable little gaieties and pliancies of her nature. “You know you’ve been anxious about the Dam. It won’t do to put off the trip again. Katie will understand your absence, and she will feel comforted to have at least one dude present. You know I’m considered a dude, too, since my marriage. Nowadays my old friends address me as stiffly as we used to address the schoolma’am. . . . It’s strange what trifles determine the manners of this world.”

“Was our marriage such a trifle?”

Louise came out of her reflective mood and smiled, then said, as if just discovering it, “Why, yes, when you think of all the big things there are.”

“What about Billy’s death? Is that a big thing?”

“A big thing to Katie, just as our being together is a big thing to us.”

“What a horrid way of putting it!”

“. . . Marriage is being together, though.”

He let that pass and returned to his point. “A big thing to Katie, but negligible in the light of something else, I suppose you mean?”

“Exactly.”

“In the light of what, for example?”

“I don’t quite know, dear. I’ll tell you when I’ve had time to philosophize it out.”

She kissed him and went out to the saddle shed.

Sundown knew his mistress’s moods and decided on an easy trot for the first few miles of the route, which lay through groves of pine and yellowing cottonwood. Eventually the road emerged into a broad stretch of dust-green sage perforated with gopher holes, and Louise set a diagonal course toward the stony river bed which had to be forded. A flock of snow-white pelicans sailed lazily overhead, following the stream toward favorite fishing pools. A high line of mountains, pale green, violet, and buff, merged into the hazy sky. The heat was oppressive and ominous.

For an hour not one human being crossed her path. The only sign of habitation had been the villainous dog and three or four horses of a not too prosperous homestead owned by one of Keble’s horse wranglers. All along the road she had been preoccupied by the tone of her parting talk with Keble, vaguely chagrined that her husband seemed to deprecate her identifying herself too closely with the life of the natives. Strangely enough he sought to identify himself with them, while, presumably, expecting her to identify herself with the class from which he had sprung, as though, gradually, she would have portentous new duties to undertake.

She couldn’t help dreading the prospect. Not that she shrank from duties,—on the contrary; it was the menacing gentility of it all that subdued her. When Keble had first come to them, disgusted with the old order, he had persuaded her that the younger generation,—his English generation,—had learned an epoch-making lesson, that it had earned its right to ignore tradition and to build the future according to its own iconoclastic logic. He had determined to create his own life, rather than passively accept the life that had been awaiting him over there since birth. She had thrilled with pride at having been chosen partner in such a daring scheme. Only to find that, in insidious ways, perhaps unconsciously, Keble was buttressing himself with the paraphernalia of the old order which he professed to repudiate. She could love Keble without gloating over his blue prints and his catalogues of prize cattle, his nineteenth century poets, and his eighteenth century courtliness. The natives might gape at her luxurious bathroom fixtures and other marvels that were beginning to arrive in packing-cases at the Witney railway station. She had almost no possessive instinct, and certainly no ambition to be mistress of the finest estate in the province. Her most clearly defined ambition was to be useful,—useful to herself, and thereby, in some vague but effective way, to her generation. Her father, for all his obscurity, was to her notion more useful than Keble. Wherever Keble went he drove a fair bargain: took something and gave something in return. Wherever the little physician went he left healing, courage, cheerfulness, and in return took, from some source close to the heart of life, the energy and will to give more.

She dismounted to open the gate of the Dixon yard and led Sundown past a meagre field of wheat, past straggling beds of onions and potatoes, towards a small unpainted house which struck her as the neglected wife of the big, scrupulously cared-for barn. Two harnessed farm wagons were standing before it, and a dirty touring car. A group of men were lounging near the woodshed chewing tobacco with a Sunday manner, and some small boys, bare-legged, were playing a discreet, enforcedly subdued game of tag. Two saddled horses were hitched to the fence, to which she led Sundown.

One of the Dixon children had run indoors to announce her advent, and as she stepped into the kitchen she was met by a woman dressed in black cotton and motioned into the adjoining room,—a combination of parlor and bedroom,—where two or three other women were sewing together strips of white cheese-cloth. All eyes turned to her.

The walls were covered with newspaper, designed to prevent draughts. There was a rust-stained print of Queen Victoria and a fashion plate ten years out of date. At the two tiny windows blossomless geranium stalks planted in tomato tins made a forlorn pattern. The centre of the room was occupied by a rough box in which lay a powder-scarred little form clad in a coquettish “sailor suit” of cheese-cloth.

Louise drew near and looked wonderingly at the yellowish-white, purple-flecked face and hideously exposed teeth of the boy who had a few days since run errands for her, and who had planned to grow up and “drive the mail.”

The women expected her to weep, and in anticipation began to sniffle.

“At what time is the burial?” she asked, dry-eyed.

“As soon as we can git this here covering made. We’ve had to do everything pretty quick. We can’t keep him long.”

Louise shuddered and was turning away when she remembered the flowers in her hand,—dahlias and inappropriate, but the only flowers to be had, the only flowers on the scene,—and placed them in the coffin, with an odd little pat, as if to reassure Billy. Then she threaded a needle and set to work with the others.

When all the strips were sewn together and gathered, they were nailed to the boards and to the cover of the coffin. Perspiration rolled from the forehead of Mr. Dixon, and his embarrassment at having to make so much noise caused him from time to time to spit on the floor.

The sound of hammering stirred Katie’s drugged imagination, and overhead thin wails began to arise. With the continued pounding the lamentations increased in volume, and presently the sound of moving chairs could be heard, followed by indistinct consolations and footsteps on the uncarpeted stairs. The door burst open, and Katie lurched in, her face twisted and swollen behind a crooked veil. Clawing away the man with the hammer, she threw herself across the box. A long strand of greyish-red hair escaped from under a dusty hat and brushed against the redder hair of the boy.

It was some time before Katie could be drawn away. Finally, with a renewed burst of sobbing she let herself be led by Louise into a corner of the kitchen. Mixed with her sobs were incoherent statements. “It was for his health,” Katie was trying to tell Louise, “I brought him up here. And I was workin’ so hard, only for his schoolin’.”

Louise kept peering anxiously out of doors. Black clouds had gathered, and a treacherous little breeze had begun to stir the discarded pieces of cheese-cloth which she could see on the floor through the open door. A tree in the yard rustled, as if sighing in relief at a change from the accumulated heat of days.

After long delays the time arrived for the fastening down of the lid. To everyone’s surprise, and thanks largely to Louise’s tact, Katie allowed the moment to pass as if in a stupor. The coffin was placed in one of the farm wagons, and a soiled quilt thrown over it. The outer box was lifted upon the second wain, and served as a seat for the men and boys in the gathering. Katie and the women were installed in the dirty motor, which was to lead the way. And Louise, unstrapping her rain-cape, mounted Sundown and galloped ahead to open the gate.

As the clumsy procession filed past her, the clouds broke, and a deluge of hailstones beat against them, followed by sheets of water into which it was difficult to force the horses. It persisted during the whole journey toward the mound which was recognized as a graveyard, although no one but Rosie Dixon and an unknown tramp had ever been interred there.

On the approach of the bedraggled cortège two men in shirtsleeves and overalls, grasping shovels, came from under the shelter of a dripping tree to indicate the halting place. Louise dismounted at once and led Katie to a seat on some planks that rested near the grave. Mrs. Dixon, a glass of spirits of ammonia in her hand, pointed out Rosie’s resting place and for a moment transposed the object of her sorrow.

The grave proved too narrow for the outer box, and there was another long wait on the wet planks while the grave-diggers shoveled and took measurements, with muttered advice and expletives. The rain had abated. A mongrel who had followed them ran from one to another, and yelped when some one attempted to chasten him.

At length the box splashed into place, scraping shrilly against projecting pebbles, and the assembly drew near to assist or watch the lowering of the white cheese-cloth box. Katie was reviving for another paroxysm.

With a shock Louise discovered that they were preparing to put the cover in place without a sign of a religious ceremony.

“Is there no one here to take charge of the service?” she inquired.

The man with the shovel replied for the others. “You see, Mrs. Eveley, Mr. Boots is away from the Valley. We couldn’t get a parson from Witney. We thought perhaps somebody would offer to say a prayer like.”

To herself she was saying that not even her father could let poor Billy be buried so casually.

“Let me take charge,” she offered, with only the vaguest notion of what she was going to do.

Mrs. Dixon took her place beside Katie, and Louise proceeded to the head of the grave, making on her breast the sign her mother had secretly taught her.

“My dear friends,” she commenced. “We poor human beings have so little use for our souls that we turn them over to pastors and priests for safe keeping, till some emergency such as the present. In French there is a proverb which says: it is better to deal with God direct than with his saints. If we had acquired the habit of doing so, we shouldn’t feel embarrassed when God is not officially represented. With our souls in our own keeping, we could not be so cruelly surprised.

“As a matter of fact, priests and parsons know no more than we do about life and death. Truth lies deep within ourself, and the most that any ambassador of heaven can do is to direct our gaze inward. Although we know nothing, we have been born with an instinctive belief that the value of life cannot be measured merely in terms of the number of years one remains a living person. We can’t help feeling that every individual life contributes to an unknown total of Life. Our human misfortune is that we see individuals too big and Life itself too small. We forget we are like bees, whose glory is that each contributes, namelessly, a modicum to the hive and to the honey that gives point to their existence. We do wrong to attach tragic importance to the death of even our nearest friend, for their dying is a phase of their existence in the larger sense, just as sleeping is a phase of our twenty-four hour existence.

“The real tragedy is that we build up our lives upon something which is by its nature impermanent. The wisest of us are too prone to live for the sake of a person, and if that person suddenly ceases to exist the ground is swept from under us. To find a new footing is difficult, but possible, and it may even be good for us to be obliged to reach out in a new direction and live for something more permanent than ourselves.

“We are too easily discouraged by pain. We should learn from nature that pain is merely a symptom of growth. Trees could not be luxuriant in spring if in winter they hadn’t experienced privation. What we have derived from life has been at the expense of others’ privations and death; if we are unwilling to be deprived in our turn, we are stupidly selfish.

“Instinct tells us that, in a voice that can be heard above the voice of grief. It also tells us to be courageous and neighborly. In that spirit we can say that Katie’s loss is our opportunity. It affords us an occasion to prove our human solidarity by giving her a hand over the barren stretch and helping her to a new conception of life.

“In that spirit let us put a seal on the last reminder of the soul which has passed into the keeping of forces that direct us all, and let us do so with a profound reverence for all the elements in nature which are a mystery to us. Some of us have grown up without an orthodox faith. But we can all be humble enough to bow our heads in acknowledgement of the great wisdom which has created us mortal and immortal.”

Stepping back to make way for the men, Louise, on some incongruous urge, again made the sign of the cross with which she had superstitiously preluded her address. From the faces around her she knew she had spoken with an impersonal concentration as puzzling to them as it had been to herself.

One of the grave-diggers suddenly said “Amen,” and Mrs. Dixon, in tremulous tones, added, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.”

The ceremony over, and Katie installed in the home of a neighbor until she should feel able to remove with her belongings to a cabin on the Eveley ranch, Louise rode away in the twilight towards the Valley, to spend a night with her father.

The air had a tang in it that suggested October rather than August, and the storm had deposited a sprinkling of white on the summits of the mountains. Not a sign remained of the landscape which only a few hours earlier had been drooping under a sultry heat. Her knuckles ached with cold as Sundown trotted on toward the town which was beginning to sparkle far away in the gloom.

2

When Louise and her father were alone they dropped into French which gave them a sense of intimacy and of isolation which they liked. The little doctor was greatly pleased on his arrival from a trying case that night to find her in possession of the library. Her first question, issuing from some depth of revery, was even more unaccountable than her presence.

“Bon soir, Papa,” she greeted him. “Can you tell me exactly how much money I have in the bank, including what Uncle Mornay-Mareuil left me?”

Dr. Bruneau opened his eyes, made a bewildered grimace, went to a desk in the corner, and rummaged for a bank-book. “Including interest to date,” he gravely replied, “eleven thousand, two hundred and thirty-three dollars and thirty-three cents.”

He came to his own chair opposite her, picking up the pipe which she had filled for him. “What’s in that black little head?”

“Many things. More, really, than I know,—or, at least, than I knew.”

“Nothing wrong?”

“. . . I even wonder if there is anything right.”

He was at once reassured. “You’ve been with Katie Salter. How is she?”

“She’s bearing it. Papa, penses-tu, I delivered the funeral oration.”

“B’en vrai, tu en as! . . . What did you say?”

“I talked over their heads, and a little over my own, as though I were under a spell. I thought I was going to say something religious; but it was scarcely that. It was rather like what the cook scrapes together when people turn up for dinner unexpectedly,—philosophical pot-luck. Everybody seemed puzzled, but I wasn’t just inventing words, as I used to do when addressing my paper dolls. The words seemed to make sense in spite of me. . . . And I had a strange feeling, afterwards, of having grown up all at once. I don’t think I’ll ever feel sheer girlish again. And the worst of that is, I don’t quite know how a woman is supposed to feel and conduct herself. It’s very perplexing. . . . Papa, what do you believe comes after this life, or what doesn’t?”

“Precisely that,—that nothing does.”

“I told them that we were infinitesimal parts of some mighty human machinery, and although life was the most valuable thing we knew of there was something beyond our comprehension a million times more valuable; that even though we as individuals perished, our energies didn’t.”

The doctor was chuckling. “I hope they’ll take your word for it! . . . We may be immortal for all I know. But if we are, I see no reason why cats and chickens should not be. In the dissecting room they’re very much like men.”

“They are; they must be! Though not as individuals. The death of a man or the death of a cat simply scatters so many units of vitality in other directions! Tiens! when our dam broke, up at the canyon, all the electric lights went out. That was the death of our little lighting plant. But the water power that generated our current is still there, immortal, even if the water is rushing off in a direction that doesn’t happen to light our lamps, a direction that makes Keble grieve and Mr. Brown swear. . . . That’s a rock on which Keble and I have often split. I think he sincerely believes he’s going to a sort of High Church heaven, intact except for his clothes and his prayer-book. I wish I could believe something as naïve as that.”

“Pas vrai! You are too fond of free speculation, like your poor Papa. . . . And now, those dollars in the bank?”

“Oh, I was just wondering. . . . Besides, you never can tell, I might decide to run off some day and improve my education.”

Her father shot a look of inquiry across the table, but her face was impassive. “You’re not exactly ignorant; and certainly not stupid.”

She laughed. “Ah ça! . . . Will you please get me a cheque book the next time you call at the bank?”

The next morning Louise passed in helping Nana dust and straighten the accumulation of books and knick-knacks in the house. She relieved the old servant by preparing luncheon herself, and the doctor arrived from the little brown shingled hospital opposite the cement and plaster bank to rejoin her, bringing with him a new cheque book, which she carelessly thrust into the pocket of her riding breeches.

“What a sensible Papa you are, not to warn me against extravagance!”

“I’ve never doubted you, my child. It’s not likely I shall commence now. You might have gone far if you hadn’t decided to marry; I always maintained that. As it is, you made a match that no other girl in the Valley could have done,—though I for one never guaranteed it would be successful.”

“Hein ça!” she mocked, absent-mindedly. “I’ve made an omelette that no other girl in the Valley could have done, and it’s too successful for words. Keble is upset for days if he catches me in my own kitchen.”

She divided the omelette into three parts, one for Nana, who, more than any other person in the Valley, was awed by the fact that Weedgie Bruneau had turned into the Honorable Mrs. Eveley.

3

During several days Louise’s thoughtful, suddenly grown-up mood persisted, but it was destined to be violently detracked by the chance reading of a poem which had been marked in blue pencil and cut out, apparently, from the page of a magazine. It was lying on Keble’s table, among other papers. It was unsigned, and the title was Constancy. With a sense of wonderment that grew into fear she read:

You cry I’ve not been true,

Why should I be?

For, being true to you,

Who are but one part of an infinite me,

Should I not slight the rest?

Rather are you false to me and nature

In seeking to prolong the span

Of impulses born mortal;

In prisoning memories

Impalpable as the fluttering of wings.

If I’d been false,

I have but mounted higher

Toward a spacious summit,

Bourne of all soaring vows.

The buds we gathered in the vale have perished.

Branches that offered roofs of shimmering green motley,

Their summer service rendered,

Divested themselves,

Framing rude necessary heights.

Yet you sit plaintive there while I aspire,

Intent upon a goal you will not see.

Must I descend to you?

Or shall I venture still?—My staff

An accusation of inconstancy.

What did it mean? Why was it marked? Who had written it? Why was it lying on Keble’s desk? She stood cold and still, her gaze returning again and again to the paper in her hand.

Unable to answer the questions, she sat down and made an ink copy of the brutal lines. When the last word was written she replaced the original on the table and took the copy to her bedroom, reading it, unconsciously memorizing it, making room in her philosophy for its egoistic claim, and finally locking it in the box that sheltered her youthful manuscripts.

Although she did not refer to the enigmatic poem, she knew that to its discovery could be traced a breach that began to make itself felt, a breach which she knew Keble associated in some vague way with the funeral of little Billy Salter. Keble, for his part, had made no mention of the poem, and day after day those accusatory blue marks continued to peer through the unanswered correspondence that rested on his table. Although she argued the lines out of countenance, though she watched for Keble’s polite mask to fall and reveal some emotion that would disprove her interpretation of them, they ate into her heart.

The poem might have been a hint from Providence. She was an impediment to Keble’s progress, a poor creature unable to comprehend the hereditary urges that bore him along in a direction that seemed to her futile. How often must he have been legitimately impatient of her deficiencies! How often must he have starved for the internationally flavored chit-chat with which a wife like Girlie Windrom would have entertained him! With what a bitter sigh must he have read his thought thus expressed by an unknown poet! That would account for the marking and the clipping. She promised herself to profit by the hint, if hint it were.

As the breach widened, Keble maintained the deferential attitude he had always assumed in the course of their hitherto negligible misunderstandings. Technically he was always in the right. Her acquaintance with people of his class had been large enough to teach her that good breeding implied the maintenance of a certain tone, that in divergences of view between well and dubiously bred people, the moral advantage seemed always to lie with the former. It was a trick she had yet to learn.

There was a sort of finality in the nature of this breach that made it unlike any other in their relationship. This was a conclusion she admitted after days of desperate clinging to the illusion that nothing was amiss. Meanwhile Keble waited; and she sank deeper into silence.

In the midst of her self-analysis a letter arrived for Keble from the friend of the early spring. Walter Windrom had spent the intervening months in England, but was returning to his post in Washington.

The renewal of this link with the outer world had a stimulating effect upon Louise. It suggested a plan which ran through her veins like a tonic.

That night, through a blur of tears, she wrote the following letter, while her husband lay uneasily asleep.

“Hillside, September 16.

“Dear Walter: Before leaving the ranch you offered to do something for me. You may if you will. I’ve been miserable for months at the thought of what a very back-woods creature I am. I can never be what I would like to be; therefore I’ve decided to be what I can be, so hard that I shall be even with Fate. I can’t go away, but I can afford a tutor with my very own money. So will you please immediately pick out the most suitable girl you can find. Above all things she mustn’t be a teacher, or anything professional; she must simply be somebody nice, and too well-bred for words! I’ll learn by ear; I never could learn any other way.

“I will pay all expenses and whatever salary you suggest. And I’d rather it be a big salary for a paragon than economize on a second-best. She could come here as a former friend of mine, for Keble must know nothing about my conspiracy. Do you think that is too much like not playing the game? After all, it’s only that I wish to play the game better,—I mean his sort of game. Not that I especially like it; but I’ve let myself in for it.

“Would you do that, Walter, please, without making fun of me? Address me in care of Dr. Achille Bruneau.”

CHAPTER III

IN Keble’s new car, purchased with a recent birthday cheque from the family, Louise was driving swiftly over the lumpy road that wound its way down the hill, beside the river, across sage plains, around fields of alfalfa, toward the distant Valley. There was an autumn crispness in the air, and the rising sun made the world bigger and bigger every minute. She rejoiced in the freshness of the earth; and the fun of goading a powerful motor over deserted, treacherous roads made her chuckle. Most of all, she was excited by the element of adventure in the journey. She welcomed most things in life that savored of adventure. What mattered chiefly to her was that she should go forward. And this morning’s exploit was a leap. If she were ever to get out of her present impasse it would be thanks to the unknown woman she was hastening to meet.

As she swung into the long main street, passing the post office and the drug-store, the bank, the hotel, and the hospital, scattering greetings among stragglers, she was conscious of the wide-eyed interest in her smart blue car. The inhabitants made capital of their intimacy with her. In the old days she was “Doc. Bruneau’s girl;” nowadays she was, in addition, the wife of a “rich dude” and a liberal buyer of groceries and hardware.

“As though that made me any different!” she reflected, and drew the car up before the doctor’s white-washed garden fence, sending a bright hallo to an old schoolmate, Minnie Hopper, whom she had once passionately cherished for their similar taste in hair-ribbons and peppermint sticks, and who was now Mrs. Otis Swigger, wife of Oat, the proprietor of “The Canada House” and the adjoining “shaving parlor and billiard saloon.” For Minnie marriage was nine-tenths of life. She was the mother of two chalky babies; she had an “imitation mahogany bedroom set”; and her ambition was to live in Witney, beyond the mountain pass, where there was a “moving picture palace” and a railway station.

Even Keble,—Louise pursued the thought as the gate clicked behind her,—seemed to think marriage nine-tenths of life. For her!

She was burning with curiosity.

A tall, lithe, solid young woman was standing before a heaped bookcase,—a fair-skinned, clear-eyed woman of thirty-two or three, with a broad forehead over which a soft, shining, flat mass of reddish-brown hair was drawn. She wore a rough silk shirt with a brown knitted cravat; a fawn colored skirt, severely simple but so cunningly cut that it assumed new lines with the slightest motion of her body; brown stockings and stout brown golf shoes of an indefinable smartness.

Louise had never seen a woman so all-of-a-piece, and of a piece so rare. As a rule, in encountering new personalities, she was first of all sensitive to signs of intelligence, or its lack. She could not have said whether this person were excessively clever or excessively the reverse. It was the woman’s composure that baffled her. The wide-set grey eyes and the relaxed but firm lips gave no clue. She swiftly guessed that in this woman’s calculations there was a scale of values that virtually ignored cleverness, as such; that cleverness was to her merely a chance intensity that co-existed with other more important qualities in accordance with which she made her classifications, if she bothered to make classifications; and something suggested that for this woman classifying processes were automatic. What her mechanical standards of judgment were, there was no gauging: degrees of gentility, perhaps. That was what Louise would have to learn.

The lips, without parting, formed themselves into a reassuring smile, which had the contrary effect of making Louise acutely conscious of a necessity to be correct, of marshaling all the qualities in herself that had aroused approbation in the most discriminating people she had known.

The stranger replaced a book she had been inspecting and took a step in Louise’s direction. Louise shook herself, as if chidingly, and let her natural directness dispel the momentary awkwardness. She went forward quickly with outstretched hand.

“You are Miss Cread, of course. I am Mrs. Eveley. I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting overnight here.”

“Your father has been more than hospitable. He delighted me last night with his quaint ideas.”

“Oh dear,—about priests and things?” Louise was inclined to deprecate her father’s penchant for assailing the church in whatever hearing.

Miss Cread laughed. “Partly. I dote on this little house, and all its things.”

“Papa suggests that after he dies I transport it to a quai on the left bank of the Seine in Paris and knock out the front wall. He says it would make a perfect book stall. . . . Papa once won a scholarship to study medicine in Paris. It rather spoiled him for a life in these wilds. I do hope you won’t die of boredom with us. I’ve never been to Paris. Indeed I’ve never been farther than Winnipeg, and that seemed thousands of miles. Of course you’ve been abroad.”

“A great deal.”

“You’re not a bit American.” Louise was thinking of camping parties that sometimes penetrated the Valley in cars decorated with banners bearing the device “Idaho” or “Montana.” She had motioned her new friend to a chair and was leaning forward opposite her. “Do you know,” she suddenly confided, “I’m terribly afraid of you.”

“Good gracious, why?”

“You’ll laugh, but never mind. It’s because you’re so distinguished-looking.”

Miss Cread reflected. “A distinctive appearance doesn’t necessarily make one dangerous. It is I, on the contrary, who should be afraid.”

“I’m sure nothing could frighten you!”

“Oh, yes. Responsibility. You see, this is my first post. I’m quite inexperienced. I do hope Mr. Windrom made that clear.”

“Oh, experience! Why, you’re simply swimming in it,—in the kind that matters to me at this moment. I mean your life, your surroundings, all the things that decided Mr. Windrom in his selection of you as a companion, have done something for you, have made you the person who—bowled me over when I entered this room. My husband is brimming over with the same,—oh, call it genuineness. Like sterling silver spoons. I don’t know whether I’m sterling or not, but I do know I need polishing. . . . It may be entirely a matter of birth. Papa and I haven’t a crumb of birth, so far as I know,—though I have a musty old aunt who swears we have. She endows convents, and her idea of a grand pedigree would be to have descended from a line of saints, I imagine. . . . For my part I have no pretensions whatever, not one, any more than poor Papa. He thinks it rather a pity to be born at all, though he’s forever helping people get born. . . . I was rash enough to dive into marriage without holding my breath, and got a mouthful of water. Sometimes I feel that my husband wishes I could be a little more sedate, a little more,—oh, you know, Miss Cread, what I called distinguished-looking, though I could feel that you disapproved of the phrase. One of the very things you must do is to teach me what I ought to say instead of distinguished-looking. That’s what Minnie Hopper would have said, and at least I’m not a Minnie Hopper.”

“You’re like nobody I’ve ever seen or heard of!” This was fairly ejaculated, and it gave Louise courage to continue, breathlessly, as before.

“It is for my husband’s sake that I’m trying this experiment. At least I think it’s for his sake: we never quite know when we’re being selfish, do we? He will soon be a rather important person, for here. He’s getting more and more things to look after: I can hardly turn nowadays without running into some new thing that sort of belongs to us. We shall have guests from England later on, and I can’t have them dying of mortification on my threshold. . . . When I married I was blind in love, and somehow took it for granted that I’d pick up all the hints I should need. But I haven’t. . . . Am I talking nonsense?”

“Not at all. Please go on.”

“If you have any pride you can’t ask your husband to instruct you in subjects you should know more about than he,—don’t you agree? I’m sure I know more about baking bread than any of the Eveleys back to Adam, but I don’t know a tenth as much about when to shake hands and when not to, and that’s much more important than I ever dreamed.

“It may be silly, but I’ve made up my mind to be the sort of person my husband won’t feel he ought to make excuses for. Not that he ever would, of course! I’ve never admitted a word of all this to a soul. I hope you understand, and I hope you don’t think such trifles trivial!”

“My dear! . . . . Aren’t you a little morbid about yourself? I know women of the world who are uncouth compared with you. . . . As for creating an impression, you are rather formidable already! There are little tricks of pronunciation I can show you, and I shall be delighted to tell you all the stupid things I know about shaking hands and the like. . . . I’m already on your side; I was afraid I mightn’t be. One can never depend on a man’s version, you know, even as discerning a man as Mr. Windrom; and a woman usually takes the man’s part in a domestic situation.”

Louise had a sudden twinge.

“There is only one thing that worries me now.”

Miss Cread waited, with questioning eyebrows.

“How am I going to pass you off? I’ve told my husband I knew you when you taught at Harristown! I went to Normal School there for a year, you know. He’ll see with half an eye that you’re no school teacher. What are we to invent? I can’t fib for a cent.”

“Well. . . . Shall we invent that my family lost its money and I had to work for my living? And that things are better now, but my family have all perished, and I’ve come here for a change. That statement doesn’t do serious violence to my conscience.”

“There’s a little two-room log cabin you can have to retire to whenever you get bored with us. . . . And of course we’ll have to call each other by our first names. You don’t mind, do you?”

Miss Cread smiled sympathetically.

“She’s nice,” decided Louise, in relief, then said, “I’ll go out and help Nana now. After lunch, en route la bonne troupe!”

This phrase, more than anything Louise had said, afforded Miss Cread the clue to their relationship. Louise had reverted into French with a little flourish which seemed to say, “At least I have one advantage over you: I am bi-lingual.” Miss Cread saw that it was characteristic of Louise to underestimate her virtues and fail to recognize her faults, and for her, who had spoken French in Paris before Louise was born, Louise’s accent was unlovely, as only the Canadian variety can be. She would let her pupil make the discovery for herself. Miss Cread was pleased to find that her mission was going to be a subtle one.

“I shall be fearfully nervous for a few days, until we get into swing,” said Louise at the table.

“Then my first task is to restore your composure.”

“Your second will be to keep it restored. . . . I’m growing less and less afraid of you. Wouldn’t it be funny if I should get so used to you I answered you back, like in school?”

“There’s no telling where it will stop. You’re a venturesome woman.”

Louise laughed merrily. “Don’t you love adventure?” It was an announcement rather than an inquiry.

2

Late in the afternoon they reached the fields where the men were cutting the scanty crops. Keble on his buckskin mare was in consultation with the superintendent, and on hearing the honk of the car wheeled about, came toward the road, and dismounted.

“Miriam dear, this is my husband. His name is Keble, and he’s frightened to death that you’ll notice, though not call attention to, the muddy spot on the breeches that Mona cleaned this very morning. Keble, this is Miriam Cread, who is coming to stop with us as long as I can force her to stay.”

Keble took a firm white hand in his. The stranger’s smile, the confident poise of her head, the simple little hat whose slant somehow suggested Bond Street or the Rue de la Paix, amazed him. It was as though Louise had brought home a Sargent portrait and said she had bought it at the Witney emporium.

“What I can’t forgive you for, my dear,” he said blandly enough, “is that you should have kept me so long in ignorance of such a charming friend’s existence.” He turned to the guest. “I’ve heard all about Pearl and Amy and Minnie, but next to nothing about you. Don’t you think that’s perverse? My wife is sort of human feuilleton: something new every day.”

He was surprised to hear himself using a term which would certainly have conveyed nothing to Pearl or Amy or Minnie, but he knew the allusion had registered.

“I suppose that’s the first duty of a wife,” Miriam laughed. “Besides, Louise Bruneau is nothing if not original. All her friends recognize that.” She patted Louise ever so gently on the shoulder.

The modulation of the voice, the grace of the little pat, the composure, the finely-cut nostrils, the slant of the hat!

They chatted, then Louise started the engine, and in a moment the car was zig-zagging up the long hill that lay between them and the lake.

Louise was conquering an unreasonable pang. To herself she was explaining the freemasonry that existed among people of Keble’s and Miss Cread’s world; there was some sort of telepathic pass word, she knew not what. It was going to be the Windrom atmosphere all over again: permeated by exotic verbal trifles. But that was what she had bargained for; the stakes were worth the temporary disadvantage. Walter needn’t, of course, have sent quite such a perfect specimen.

What “stakes”? Well, surely there were objects to live for that outweighed the significance of petty jealousies, petty possessions, the rights of one person in another. She brought the car around to a point from which the lake spread out under them in all the glory of deep emerald water and distant walls of sun-bronzed rock. The cottages and farm buildings grouped themselves beneath, and along the pebbly shore a rich league of grey-black and dark green pine forest linked the buildings and the mountains. Two frantic sheep dogs came barking to meet them.

An exclamation of delight escaped from the travel-weary guest.

“I’m glad you like it,” remarked Louise, relenting.

“It’s superb,” Miriam replied. Again she gave Louise’s shoulder a discreet pat, as the latter began the winding descent. “You very lucky woman!” she commented.

3

Riding, fishing, and hunting for the winter’s supply of game enlivened the autumn months, and when the snow arrived, drifting through the canyons, obliterating all traces of roads and fences, there were snow-shoe and ski-journeys, skating on a swept portion of the lake, and dances before the great fireplace. Self-consciously at first, but soon without being aware of it, Louise reflected the sheen of her companion, and acquired objective glimpses of herself. There had been long discussions in which tastes and opinions had been sifted, and Louise’s speech and cast of thought subtly supervised. Throughout the program Keble made quiet entrances and exits, dimly realizing what was taking place, grateful for, yet a little distrustful of the gradual transformation. It was as though, in an atmosphere of peace, unknown forces were being secretly mobilized. There was a charm for him in the nightly fireside readings and conversations. When he was present they were likely to develop into a monologue of daring theories invented and sustained by Louise,—a Louise who had begun to take some of her girlish extravagances in earnest. In the end Keble found himself, along with Miriam Cread, bringing to bear against Louise’s radicalism the stock counter arguments of his class.

This was disconcerting, for he had been in the habit of regarding himself as an innovator, with his back to the past and his gaze fixed upon the future; and although it was pleasant to find himself so often in accord with a highly civilized and attractive young woman just appreciably his senior, it was a set-back to his illusion of having graduated from the prejudices and short-sightedness of conventional society. For the sum total of his mental bouts with Louise was that she serenely but quite decisively relegated him to the ranks of the safe and sane. And “safe and sane” as she voiced the phrase meant something less commendable than “safe and sane” as he voiced it. For Keble “safe and sane” was of all vehicles the one which would carry him and his goods most adequately to his mortal destination. He had always assumed that Louise had faith in the vehicle. Now he seemed to see her sitting on the tail-board, swinging her legs like a naughty child, ready to leap off at the approach of any conveyance that gave promise of more speed and excitement.

During his later school-days, Keble, by virtue of an ability to discriminate, had arrived at a point of self-realization that rendered his conformity to custom a bore to him but failed to provide him with the logical alternative. For this he had consulted, and responded to, the more refined manifestations of individualism in contemporary literature and art, to the extent of falling under the illusion that he himself was a thoroughgoing individualist. A victim of a period of social transition, he, like so many other young men of his generation, made the mistake of assuming that his doubts and objections were the effect of a creative urge within himself, whereas he had merely acquired a decent wardrobe of modern notions which distinguished him from his elders and, to his own eyes, disguised the inalterably conservative nature of his principles. Hence the almost irreconcilable combination: an instinctive abstemiousness and an Epicurean relish.

Whenever Louise, after some brilliant skirmish with the outriders of orthodoxy, came galloping into camp with the news that a direct route lay open to the citadel of personal freedom and personal morality, Keble found himself throwing up his cap in a sympathetic glee, but then he fell to wondering whether the gaining of the citadel were worth the trampling down of fields, the possible breaking of church windows, the discomfort to neutral bystanders.

At such moments he suspected that he was in the wrong camp; that he had been led there through his admiration for daring spirits rather than a desire for the victory they coveted. It alarmed him to discover that the topsy-turvy fancies that had endeared Louise to him were not merely playful. It alarmed him to discover that she was ready to put her most daring theories into practise, ready to regard her own thoughts and emotions as so many elements in a laboratory in which she was free to experiment, in scientific earnest, at the risk of explosions and bad odors, all for the sake of arriving at truths that would be of questionable value. Certainly, to Keble’s mind, the potential results, should the experiments be never so successful, were not worth the incidental damage,—not where one’s wife was concerned. For him “safe and sane” meant the avoidance of risk. For Louise he suspected that “safe and sane” smacked of unwillingness to take the personal risks inevitable in any conquest of truth. That brought him to the consideration of “truth,” and he saw that for him truth was something more tangible, and much nearer home, than it was for his wife. And he was in the lamentable situation of feeling that she was right, yet being constitutionally unable, or unwilling, or afraid, to go in her direction.

Miriam caught something of the true proportions in the situation, and it was her policy to remain negative in so far as possible, pressing gently on either side of the scales, as the balance seemed to require. She had a conscientious desire to help the other two attain a comfortable modus vivendi, but as the winter progressed it became increasingly evident to her that her efforts might end by having a contrary effect. Reluctantly she saw herself saddled with the rôle of referee. Furthermore, it seemed as though the mere presence of a referee implied, even incited, combat. Their evenings often ended on a tone of dissension, Louise soaring on the wings of some new radical conclusion; Keble anxiously counseling moderation; and Miriam, by right and left sallies, endeavoring, not always with success, to bring the disputants to a level of good-humored give and take.

On two or three occasions she had been tempted to withdraw entirely, feeling that as long as a third person were present to hear, the diverging views of husband and wife would inevitably continue to be expressed. But on reflection she realized that her withdrawal could in no sense reconcile their divergences. From Louise she had derived the doctrine that views must, and will, out, and that to conceal or counterfeit them is foolish and dishonest. As Miriam saw it, these two had come to the end of the first flush of excited interest in each other. Their ship had put to sea, the flags had been furled, the sails bent. They had reached the moment when it was necessary to set a course. And they might be considered fortunate in having a fair-minded third person at hand to see them safely beyond the first reefs. It hadn’t occurred to Miriam that she might be a reef.

With Louise nothing remained on the surface; the massage that polished her manners polished her thoughts, and with increasing facility in the technique of carrying herself came an increasing desire to carry herself somewhere. As a girl she had too easily outdistanced her companions. Until Miriam Cread’s advent there had been no woman with whom to compete, and her intelligence had in consequence slumbered. Keble had transformed her from a girl into a woman; but Miriam made her realize the wide range of possibilities comprised under Womanhood, and had put her on her mettle to define her own particular character as a woman. Now her personality was fully awake, and her daily routine was characterized by an insatiable mental activity, during which she proceeded to a footing on many subjects about which she had never given herself the trouble to think. She had read more books than most girls, and had dined on weighty volumes in her father’s library for the sake of their sweets; but under the pressure of her new intellectual intensity she found that, without knowing it, she had been nourished on their soups and roasts. The unrelated impressions that she had long been capturing from books and thrusting carelessly upon mental shelves now formed a fairly respectable stock-in-trade. Every new book, every new discussion, every new incident furnished fuel to the motor that drove her forward.

But there was one moment, during the Christmas festivities, when the boldness of her recent thoughts, the inhibitive tightness of her new garments of correctitude, the fatigue of standing guard over herself, became intolerably irksome, when she looked away from Keble and Miriam and the Browns towards her tubby, bald-headed, serene little father, twinkling and smoking his beloved pipe before the fire: a moment when she longed to be the capricious, dreamy girl who had curled up at his feet during the winter evenings of her first acquaintance with the English boy from Hillside.

If Keble had divined that mood, if he could have stepped in and caught her out of it with an expert caress, if he had read the thought that was then in her mind,—namely that no amount of cleverness could suppress the yearning that her conjugal experience had so far failed to gratify,—if his eyes had penetrated her and not the flames, where presumably they envisaged the air castles he would soon be translating into stone and cement, then the yards of the matrimonial ship might have swung about, the sails have taken the breeze, and the blind helmsman have directed a course into a sharply defined future. At that moment Louise might have been converted, by a sufficiently subtle lover, into a passionate partner in the most prosaic of schemes. All she needed was to be coaxed and driven gently, to a point not far off. It was too personal to be explained; and if he couldn’t see it, then she must do what she could on her own initiative, at her expense and his.

The dreamy girl faded out of her eyes, and a self-contained, positive young woman rose from her seat with an easy directness, crossed the room to switch on the lights, and said, “Keble, I’ve just decided how I shall dispose of my Christmas present.” For the benefit of the Browns she explained, “I had a colossal cheque in my stocking from a father-in-law who doesn’t know what a spendthrift I am.”

“What will you do with it?” asked her husband.

“Something very nice. You’re sure to object.”

“Is that what makes it nice: my objecting?”

“That makes it more exciting.”

“Then let me object hard, dear.”

Louise withstood the laughter that greeted Keble’s score. “Do it immediately,” she advised, “and have it over with; then I’ll say what it is.”

“Why not spare us a scene?” suggested Miriam. “We know what a brute he is.”

“You’re concerned in it,” Louise replied. “I hope you won’t object, for that would be fatal.”

This gave Keble his opportunity for revenge against Miriam’s “brute.” “Mayn’t we take Miriam’s compliance for granted? We know what a diplomat she is.”

Louise was now seated on the opposite side of the table, facing them. “Do you object, Papa?”