The Beautiful and Damned

—and so on, into phrases still more strange and barbaric.When she caught the amused glances of Anthony and Gloria she acknowledged them only with a faint smile and a half-closing of her eyes, to indicate that the music entering into her soul had put her into an ecstatic and exceedingly seductive trance.

The music ended and they returned to their table, whose solitary but dignified occupant arose and tendered each of them a smile so ingratiating that it was as if he were shaking their hands and congratulating them on a brilliant performance.

"Blockhead never will dance!I think he has a wooden leg," remarked Gloria to the table at large.The three young men started and the gentleman referred to winced perceptibly.

This was the one rough spot in the course of Bloeckman's acquaintance with Gloria.She relentlessly punned on his name.First it had been "Block-house."lately, the more invidious "Blockhead."He had requested with a strong undertone of irony that she use his first name, and this she had done obediently several times—then slipping, helpless, repentant but dissolved in laughter, back into "Blockhead."

It was a very sad and thoughtless thing.

"I'm afraid Mr. Bloeckman thinks we're a frivolous crowd," sighed Muriel, waving a balanced oyster in his direction.

"He has that air," murmured Rachael.Anthony tried to remember whether she had said anything before.He thought not.It was her initial remark.

Mr. Bloeckman suddenly cleared his throat and said in a loud, distinct voice:

"On the contrary.When a man speaks he's merely tradition.He has at best a few thousand years back of him.But woman, why, she is the miraculous mouthpiece of posterity."

In the stunned pause that followed this astounding remark, Anthony choked suddenly on an oyster and hurried his napkin to his face.Rachael and Muriel raised a mild if somewhat surprised laugh, in which Dick and Maury joined, both of them red in the face and restraining uproariousness with the most apparent difficulty.

"—My God!"thought Anthony."It's a subtitle from one of his movies.The man's memorized it!"

Gloria alone made no sound.She fixed Mr. Bloeckman with a glance of silent reproach.

"Well, for the love of Heaven!Where on earth did you dig that up?"

Bloeckman looked at her uncertainly, not sure of her intention.But in a moment he recovered his poise and assumed the bland and consciously tolerant smile of an intellectual among spoiled and callow youth.

The soup came up from the kitchen—but simultaneously the orchestra leader came up from the bar, where he had absorbed the tone color inherent in a seidel of beer.So the soup was left to cool during the delivery of a ballad entitled "Everything's at Home Except Your Wife."

Then the champagne—and the party assumed more amusing proportions.The men, except Richard Caramel, drank freely; Gloria and Muriel sipped a glass apiece; Rachael Jerryl took none.They sat out the waltzes but danced to everything else—all except Gloria, who seemed to tire after a while and preferred to sit smoking at the table, her eyes now lazy, now eager, according to whether she listened to Bloeckman or watched a pretty woman among the dancers.Several times Anthony wondered what Bloeckman was telling her.He was chewing a cigar back and forth in his mouth, and had expanded after dinner to the extent of violent gestures.

Ten o'clock found Gloria and Anthony beginning a dance.Just as they were out of ear-shot of the table she said in a low voice:

"Dance over by the door.I want to go down to the drug-store."

Obediently Anthony guided her through the crowd in the designated direction; in the hall she left him for a moment, to reappear with a cloak over her arm.

"I want some gum-drops," she said, humorously apologetic; "you can't guess what for this time.It's just that I want to bite my finger-nails, and I will if I don't get some gum-drops."She sighed, and resumed as they stepped into the empty elevator: "I've been biting 'em all day.A bit nervous, you see.Excuse the pun.It was unintentional—the words just arranged themselves.Gloria Gilbert, the female wag."

Reaching the ground floor they naïvely avoided the hotel candy counter, descended the wide front staircase, and walking through several corridors found a drug-store in the Grand Central Station.After an intense examination of the perfume counter she made her purchase.Then on some mutual unmentioned impulse they strolled, arm in arm, not in the direction from which they had come, but out into Forty-third Street.

The night was alive with thaw; it was so nearly warm that a breeze drifting low along the sidewalk brought to Anthony a vision of an unhoped-for hyacinthine spring.Above in the blue oblong of sky, around them in the caress of the drifting air, the illusion of a new season carried relief from the stiff and breathed-over atmosphere they had left, and for a hushed moment the traffic sounds and the murmur of water flowing in the gutters seemed an illusive and rarefied prolongation of that music to which they had lately danced.When Anthony spoke it was with surety that his words came from something breathless and desirous that the night had conceived in their two hearts.

"Let's take a taxi and ride around a bit!"he suggested, without looking at her.

Oh, Gloria, Gloria!

A cab yawned at the curb.As it moved off like a boat on a labyrinthine ocean and lost itself among the inchoate night masses of the great buildings, among the now stilled, now strident, cries and clangings, Anthony put his arm around the girl, drew her over to him and kissed her damp, childish mouth.

She was silent.She turned her face up to him, pale under the wisps and patches of light that trailed in like moonshine through a foliage.Her eyes were gleaming ripples in the white lake of her face; the shadows of her hair bordered the brow with a persuasive unintimate dusk.No love was there, surely; nor the imprint of any love.Her beauty was cool as this damp breeze, as the moist softness of her own lips.

"You're such a swan in this light," he whispered after a moment.There were silences as murmurous as sound.There were pauses that seemed about to shatter and were only to be snatched back to oblivion by the tightening of his arms about her and the sense that she was resting there as a caught, gossamer feather, drifted in out of the dark.Anthony laughed, noiselessly and exultantly, turning his face up and away from her, half in an overpowering rush of triumph, half lest her sight of him should spoil the splendid immobility of her expression.Such a kiss—it was a flower held against the face, never to be described, scarcely to be remembered; as though her beauty were giving off emanations of itself which settled transiently and already dissolving upon his heart.

...The buildings fell away in melted shadows; this was the Park now, and after a long while the great white ghost of the Metropolitan Museum moved majestically past, echoing sonorously to the rush of the cab.

"Why, Gloria!Why, Gloria!"

Her eyes appeared to regard him out of many thousand years: all emotion she might have felt, all words she might have uttered, would have seemed inadequate beside the adequacy of her silence, ineloquent against the eloquence of her beauty—and of her body, close to him, slender and cool.

"Tell him to turn around," she murmured, "and drive pretty fast going back...."

Up in the supper room the air was hot.The table, littered with napkins and ash-trays, was old and stale.It was between dances as they entered, and Muriel Kane looked up with roguishness extraordinary.

"Well, where have you been?"

"To call up mother," answered Gloria coolly."I promised her I would.Did we miss a dance?"

Then followed an incident that though slight in itself Anthony had cause to reflect on many years afterward.Joseph Bloeckman, leaning well back in his chair, fixed him with a peculiar glance, in which several emotions were curiously and inextricably mingled.He did not greet Gloria except by rising, and he immediately resumed a conversation with Richard Caramel about the influence of literature on the moving pictures.

MAGIC

The stark and unexpected miracle of a night fades out with the lingering death of the last stars and the premature birth of the first newsboys.The flame retreats to some remote and platonic fire; the white heat has gone from the iron and the glow from the coal.

Along the shelves of Anthony's library, filling a wall amply, crept a chill and insolent pencil of sunlight touching with frigid disapproval Thérèse of France and Ann the Superwoman, Jenny of the Orient Ballet and Zuleika the Conjurer—and Hoosier Cora—then down a shelf and into the years, resting pityingly on the over-invoked shades of Helen, Thaïs, Salome, and Cleopatra.

Anthony, shaved and bathed, sat in his most deeply cushioned chair and watched it until at the steady rising of the sun it lay glinting for a moment on the silk ends of the rug—and went out.

It was ten o'clock.The Sunday Times, scattered about his feet, proclaimed by rotogravure and editorial, by social revelation and sporting sheet, that the world had been tremendously engrossed during the past week in the business of moving toward some splendid if somewhat indeterminate goal.For his part Anthony had been once to his grandfather's, twice to his broker's, and three times to his tailor's—and in the last hour of the week's last day he had kissed a very beautiful and charming girl.

When he reached home his imagination had been teeming with high pitched, unfamiliar dreams. There was suddenly no question on his mind, no eternal problem for a solution and resolution.He had experienced an emotion that was neither mental nor physical, nor merely a mixture of the two, and the love of life absorbed him for the present to the exclusion of all else.He was content to let the experiment remain isolated and unique.Almost impersonally he was convinced that no woman he had ever met compared in any way with Gloria.She was deeply herself; she was immeasurably sincere—of these things he was certain.Beside her the two dozen schoolgirls and debutantes, young married women and waifs and strays whom he had known were so many females, in the word's most contemptuous sense, breeders and bearers, exuding still that faintly odorous atmosphere of the cave and the nursery.

So far as he could see, she had neither submitted to any will of his nor caressed his vanity—except as her pleasure in his company was a caress.Indeed he had no reason for thinking she had given him aught that she did not give to others.This was as it should be.The idea of an entanglement growing out of the evening was as remote as it would have been repugnant.And she had disclaimed and buried the incident with a decisive untruth.Here were two young people with fancy enough to distinguish a game from its reality—who by the very casualness with which they met and passed on would proclaim themselves unharmed.

Having decided this he went to the phone and called up the Plaza Hotel.

Gloria was out.Her mother knew neither where she had gone nor when she would return.

It was somehow at this point that the first wrongness in the case asserted itself.There was an element of callousness, almost of indecency, in Gloria's absence from home.He suspected that by going out she had intrigued him into a disadvantage.Returning she would find his name, and smile.Most discreetly!He should have waited a few hours in order to drive home the utter inconsequence with which he regarded the incident.What an asinine blunder!She would think he considered himself particularly favored.She would think he was reacting with the most inept intimacy to a quite trivial episode.

He remembered that during the previous month his janitor, to whom he had delivered a rather muddled lecture on the "brother-hoove man," had come up next day and, on the basis of what had happened the night before, seated himself in the window seat for a cordial and chatty half-hour.Anthony wondered in horror if Gloria would regard him as he had regarded that man.Him—Anthony Patch!Horror!

It never occurred to him that he was a passive thing, acted upon by an influence above and beyond Gloria, that he was merely the sensitive plate on which the photograph was made. Some gargantuan photographer had focussed the camera on Gloria and snap!—the poor plate could but develop, confined like all things to its nature.

But Anthony, lying upon his couch and staring at the orange lamp, passed his thin fingers incessantly through his dark hair and made new symbols for the hours.She was in a shop now, it seemed, moving lithely among the velvets and the furs, her own dress making, as she walked, a debonair rustle in that world of silken rustles and cool soprano laughter and scents of many slain but living flowers.The Minnies and Pearls and jewels and jennies would gather round her like courtiers, bearing wispy frailties of Georgette crepe, delicate chiffon to echo her cheeks in faint pastel, milky lace to rest in pale disarray against her neck—damask was used but to cover priests and divans in these days, and cloth of Samarand was remembered only by the romantic poets.

She would go elsewhere after a while, tilting her head a hundred ways under a hundred bonnets, seeking in vain for mock cherries to match her lips or plumes that were graceful as her own supple body.

Noon would come—she would hurry along Fifth Avenue, a Nordic Ganymede, her fur coat swinging fashionably with her steps, her cheeks redder by a stroke of the wind's brush, her breath a delightful mist upon the bracing air—and the doors of the Ritz would revolve, the crowd would divide, fifty masculine eyes would start, stare, as she gave back forgotten dreams to the husbands of many obese and comic women.

One o'clock.With her fork she would tantalize the heart of an adoring artichoke, while her escort served himself up in the thick, dripping sentences of an enraptured man.

Four o'clock: her little feet moving to melody, her face distinct in the crowd, her partner happy as a petted puppy and mad as the immemorial hatter....Then—then night would come drifting down and perhaps another damp.The signs would spill their light into the street.Who knew?No wiser than he, they haply sought to recapture that picture done in cream and shadow they had seen on the hushed Avenue the night before.And they might, ah, they might!A thousand taxis would yawn at a thousand corners, and only to him was that kiss forever lost and done.In a thousand guises Thaïs would hail a cab and turn up her face for loving.And her pallor would be virginal and lovely, and her kiss chaste as the moon....

He sprang excitedly to his feet.How inappropriate that she should be out!He had realized at last what he wanted—to kiss her again, to find rest in her great immobility.She was the end of all restlessness, all malcontent.

Anthony dressed and went out, as he should have done long before, and down to Richard Caramel's room to hear the last revision of the last chapter of "The Demon Lover."He did not call Gloria again until six.He did not find her in until eight and—oh, climax of anticlimaxes!—she could give him no engagement until Tuesday afternoon.A broken piece of gutta-percha clattered to the floor as he banged up the phone.

BLACK MAGIC

Tuesday was freezing cold.He called at a bleak two o'clock and as they shook hands he wondered confusedly whether he had ever kissed her; it was almost unbelievable—he seriously doubted if she remembered it.

"I called you four times on Sunday," he told her.

"Did you?"

There was surprise in her voice and interest in her expression.Silently he cursed himself for having told her.He might have known her pride did not deal in such petty triumphs.Even then he had not guessed at the truth—that never having had to worry about men she had seldom used the wary subterfuges, the playings out and haulings in, that were the stock in trade of her sisterhood.When she liked a man, that was trick enough.Did she think she loved him—there was an ultimate and fatal thrust.Her charm endlessly preserved itself.

"I was anxious to see you," he said simply."I want to talk to you—I mean really talk, somewhere where we can be alone.May I?"

"What do you mean?"

He swallowed a sudden lump of panic.He felt that she knew what he wanted.

"I mean, not at a tea table," he said.

"Well, all right, but not to-day.I want to get some exercise.Let's walk!"

It was bitter and raw.All the evil hate in the mad heart of February was wrought into the forlorn and icy wind that cut its way cruelly across Central Park and down along Fifth Avenue.It was almost impossible to talk, and discomfort made him distracted, so much so that he turned at Sixty-first Street to find that she was no longer beside him.He looked around.She was forty feet in the rear standing motionless, her face half hidden in her fur coat collar, moved either by anger or laughter—he could not determine which.He started back.

"Don't let me interrupt your walk!"she called.

"I'm mighty sorry," he answered in confusion."Did I go too fast?"

"I'm cold," she announced."I want to go home.And you walk too fast."

"I'm very sorry."

Side by side they started for the Plaza.He wished he could see her face.

"Men don't usually get so absorbed in themselves when they're with me."

"I'm sorry."

"That's very interesting."

"It is rather too cold to walk," he said, briskly, to hide his annoyance.

She made no answer and he wondered if she would dismiss him at the hotel entrance.She walked in without speaking, however, and to the elevator, throwing him a single remark as she entered it:

"You'd better come up."

He hesitated for the fraction of a moment.

"Perhaps I'd better call some other time."

"Just as you say."Her words were murmured as an aside.The main concern of life was the adjusting of some stray wisps of hair in the elevator mirror.Her cheeks were brilliant, her eyes sparkled—she had never seemed so lovely, so exquisitely to be desired.

Despising himself, he found that he was walking down the tenth-floor corridor a subservient foot behind her; was in the sitting room while she disappeared to shed her furs.Something had gone wrong—in his own eyes he had lost a shred of dignity; in an unpremeditated yet significant encounter he had been completely defeated.

However, by the time she reappeared in the sitting-room he had explained himself to himself with sophistic satisfaction.After all he had done the strongest thing, he thought.He had wanted to come up, he had come.Yet what happened later on that afternoon must be traced to the indignity he had experienced in the elevator; the girl was worrying him intolerably, so much so that when she came out he involuntarily drifted into criticism.

"Who's this Bloeckman, Gloria?"

"A business friend of father's."

"Odd sort of fellow!"

"He doesn't like you either," she said with a sudden smile.

Anthony laughed.

"I'm flattered at his notice.He evidently considers me a—" He broke off with "Is he in love with you?"

"I don't know."

"The deuce you don't," he insisted."Of course he is.I remember the look he gave me when we got back to the table.He'd probably have had me quietly assaulted by a delegation of movie supes if you hadn't invented that phone call."

"He didn't mind.I told him afterward what really happened."

"You told him!"

"He asked me."

"I don't like that very well," he remonstrated.

She laughed again.

"Oh, you don't?"

"What business is it of his?"

"None.That's why I told him."

Anthony in a turmoil bit savagely at his mouth.

"Why should I lie?"she demanded directly."I'm not ashamed of anything I do.It happened to interest him to know that I kissed you, and I happened to be in a good humor, so I satisfied his curiosity by a simple and precise 'yes.'Being rather a sensible man, after his fashion, he dropped the subject."

"Except to say that he hated me."

"Oh, it worries you?Well, if you must probe this stupendous matter to its depths he didn't say he hated you.I simply know he does."

"It doesn't wor——"

"Oh, let's drop it!"she cried spiritedly."It's a most uninteresting matter to me."

With a tremendous effort Anthony made his acquiescence a twist of subject, and they drifted into an ancient question-and-answer game concerned with each other's pasts, gradually warming as they discovered the age-old, immemorial resemblances in tastes and ideas.They said things that were more revealing than they intended—but each pretended to accept the other at face, or rather word, value.

The growth of intimacy is like that.First one gives off his best picture, the bright and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humor.Then more details are required and one paints a second portrait, and a third—before long the best lines cancel out—and the secret is exposed at last; the planes of the pictures have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture.We must be satisfied with hoping that such fatuous accounts of ourselves as we make to our wives and children and business associates are accepted as true.

"It seems to me," Anthony was saying earnestly, "that the position of a man with neither necessity nor ambition is unfortunate.Heaven knows it'd be pathetic of me to be sorry for myself—yet, sometimes I envy Dick."

Her silence was encouragement.It was as near as she ever came to an intentional lure.

"—And there used to be dignified occupations for a gentleman who had leisure, things a little more constructive than filling up the landscape with smoke or juggling some one else's money.There's science, of course: sometimes I wish I'd taken a good foundation, say at Boston Tech.But now, by golly, I'd have to sit down for two years and struggle through the fundamentals of physics and chemistry."

She yawned.

"I've told you I don't know what anybody ought to do," she said ungraciously, and at her indifference his rancor was born again.

"Aren't you interested in anything except yourself?"

"Not much."

He glared; his growing enjoyment in the conversation was ripped to shreds.She had been irritable and vindictive all day, and it seemed to him that for this moment he hated her hard selfishness.He stared morosely at the fire.

Then a strange thing happened.She turned to him and smiled, and as he saw her smile every rag of anger and hurt vanity dropped from him—as though his very moods were but the outer ripples of her own, as though emotion rose no longer in his breast unless she saw fit to pull an omnipotent controlling thread.

He moved closer and taking her hand pulled her ever so gently toward him until she half lay against his shoulder.She smiled up at him as he kissed her.

"Gloria," he whispered very softly.Again she had made a magic, subtle and pervading as a spilt perfume, irresistible and sweet.

Afterward, neither the next day nor after many years, could he remember the important things of that afternoon.Had she been moved?In his arms had she spoken a little—or at all?What measure of enjoyment had she taken in his kisses?And had she at any time lost herself ever so little?

Oh, for him there was no doubt.He had risen and paced the floor in sheer ecstasy.That such a girl should be; should poise curled in a corner of the couch like a swallow newly landed from a clean swift flight, watching him with inscrutable eyes.He would stop his pacing and, half shy each time at first, drop his arm around her and find her kiss.

She was fascinating, he told her.He had never met any one like her before.He besought her jauntily but earnestly to send him away; he didn't want to fall in love.He wasn't coming to see her any more—already she had haunted too many of his ways.

What delicious romance! His true reaction was neither fear nor sorrow—only this deep delight in being with her that colored the banality of his words and made the mawkish seem sad and the posturing seem wise. He would come back—eternally. He should have known!

"This is all.It's been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful.But this wouldn't do—and wouldn't last."As he spoke there was in his heart that tremulousness that we take for sincerity in ourselves.

Afterward he remembered one reply of hers to something he had asked her.He remembered it in this form—perhaps he had unconsciously arranged and polished it:

"A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress."

As always when he was with her she seemed to grow gradually older until at the end ruminations too deep for words would be wintering in her eyes.

An hour passed, and the fire leaped up in little ecstasies as though its fading life was sweet.It was five now, and the clock over the mantel became articulate in sound.Then as if a brutish sensibility in him was reminded by those thin, tinny beats that the petals were falling from the flowered afternoon, Anthony pulled her quickly to her feet and held her helpless, without breath, in a kiss that was neither a game nor a tribute.

Her arms fell to her side.In an instant she was free.

"Don't!"she said quietly."I don't want that."

She sat down on the far side of the lounge and gazed straight before her.A frown had gathered between her eyes.Anthony sank down beside her and closed his hand over hers.It was lifeless and unresponsive.

"Why, Gloria!"He made a motion as if to put his arm about her but she drew away.

"I don't want that," she repeated.

"I'm very sorry," he said, a little impatiently."I—I didn't know you made such fine distinctions."

She did not answer.

"Won't you kiss me, Gloria?"

"I don't want to."It seemed to him she had not moved for hours.

"A sudden change, isn't it?"Annoyance was growing in his voice.

"Is it?"She appeared uninterested.It was almost as though she were looking at some one else.

"Perhaps I'd better go."

No reply.He rose and regarded her angrily, uncertainly.Again he sat down.

"Gloria, Gloria, won't you kiss me?"

"No."Her lips, parting for the word, had just faintly stirred.

Again he got to his feet, this time with less decision, less confidence.

"Then I'll go."

Silence.

"All right—I'll go."

He was aware of a certain irremediable lack of originality in his remarks.Indeed he felt that the whole atmosphere had grown oppressive.He wished she would speak, rail at him, cry out upon him, anything but this pervasive and chilling silence.He cursed himself for a weak fool; his clearest desire was to move her, to hurt her, to see her wince.Helplessly, involuntarily, he erred again.

"If you're tired of kissing me I'd better go."

He saw her lips curl slightly and his last dignity left him.She spoke, at length:

"I believe you've made that remark several times before."

He looked about him immediately, saw his hat and coat on a chair—blundered into them, during an intolerable moment.Looking again at the couch he perceived that she had not turned, not even moved.With a shaken, immediately regretted "good-by" he went quickly but without dignity from the room.

For over a moment Gloria made no sound.Her lips were still curled; her glance was straight, proud, remote.Then her eyes blurred a little, and she murmured three words half aloud to the death-bound fire:

"Good-by, you ass!"she said.

PANIC

The man had had the hardest blow of his life.He knew at last what he wanted, but in finding it out it seemed that he had put it forever beyond his grasp.He reached home in misery, dropped into an armchair without even removing his overcoat, and sat there for over an hour, his mind racing the paths of fruitless and wretched self-absorption.She had sent him away!That was the reiterated burden of his despair.Instead of seizing the girl and holding her by sheer strength until she became passive to his desire, instead of beating down her will by the force of his own, he had walked, defeated and powerless, from her door, with the corners of his mouth drooping and what force there might have been in his grief and rage hidden behind the manner of a whipped schoolboy.At one minute she had liked him tremendously—ah, she had nearly loved him.In the next he had become a thing of indifference to her, an insolent and efficiently humiliated man.

He had no great self-reproach—some, of course, but there were other things dominant in him now, far more urgent.He was not so much in love with Gloria as mad for her.Unless he could have her near him again, kiss her, hold her close and acquiescent, he wanted nothing more from life.By her three minutes of utter unwavering indifference the girl had lifted herself from a high but somehow casual position in his mind, to be instead his complete preoccupation.However much his wild thoughts varied between a passionate desire for her kisses and an equally passionate craving to hurt and mar her, the residue of his mind craved in finer fashion to possess the triumphant soul that had shone through those three minutes.She was beautiful—but especially she was without mercy.He must own that strength that could send him away.

At present no such analysis was possible to Anthony.His clarity of mind, all those endless resources which he thought his irony had brought him were swept aside.Not only for that night but for the days and weeks that followed his books were to be but furniture and his friends only people who lived and walked in a nebulous outer world from which he was trying to escape—that world was cold and full of bleak wind, and for a little while he had seen into a warm house where fires shone.

About midnight he began to realize that he was hungry.He went down into Fifty-second Street, where it was so cold that he could scarcely see; the moisture froze on his lashes and in the corners of his lips.Everywhere dreariness had come down from the north, settling upon the thin and cheerless street, where black bundled figures blacker still against the night, moved stumbling along the sidewalk through the shrieking wind, sliding their feet cautiously ahead as though they were on skis.Anthony turned over toward Sixth Avenue, so absorbed in his thoughts as not to notice that several passers-by had stared at him.His overcoat was wide open, and the wind was biting in, hard and full of merciless death.

...After a while a waitress spoke to him, a fat waitress with black-rimmed eye-glasses from which dangled a long black cord.

"Order, please!"

Her voice, he considered, was unnecessarily loud.He looked up resentfully.

"You wanna order or doncha?"

"Of course," he protested.

"Well, I ast you three times.This ain't no rest-room."

He glanced at the big clock and discovered with a start that it was after two.He was down around Thirtieth Street somewhere, and after a moment he found and translated the

in a white semicircle of letters upon the glass front.The place was inhabited sparsely by three or four bleak and half-frozen night-hawks.

"Give me some bacon and eggs and coffee, please."

The waitress bent upon him a last disgusted glance and, looking ludicrously intellectual in her corded glasses, hurried away.

God!Gloria's kisses had been such flowers.He remembered as though it had been years ago the low freshness of her voice, the beautiful lines of her body shining through her clothes, her face lily-colored under the lamps of the street—under the lamps.

Misery struck at him again, piling a sort of terror upon the ache and yearning.He had lost her.It was true—no denying it, no softening it.But a new idea had seared his sky—what of Bloeckman!What would happen now?There was a wealthy man, middle-aged enough to be tolerant with a beautiful wife, to baby her whims and indulge her unreason, to wear her as she perhaps wished to be worn—a bright flower in his button-hole, safe and secure from the things she feared.He felt that she had been playing with the idea of marrying Bloeckman, and it was well possible that this disappointment in Anthony might throw her on sudden impulse into Bloeckman's arms.

The idea drove him childishly frantic.He wanted to kill Bloeckman and make him suffer for his hideous presumption.He was saying this over and over to himself with his teeth tight shut, and a perfect orgy of hate and fright in his eyes.

But, behind this obscene jealousy, Anthony was in love at last, profoundly and truly in love, as the word goes between man and woman.

His coffee appeared at his elbow and gave off for a certain time a gradually diminishing wisp of steam.The night manager, seated at his desk, glanced at the motionless figure alone at the last table, and then with a sigh moved down upon him just as the hour hand crossed the figure three on the big clock.

WISDOM

After another day the turmoil subsided and Anthony began to exercise a measure of reason.He was in love—he cried it passionately to himself.The things that a week before would have seemed insuperable obstacles, his limited income, his desire to be irresponsible and independent, had in this forty hours become the merest chaff before the wind of his infatuation.If he did not marry her his life would be a feeble parody on his own adolescence.To be able to face people and to endure the constant reminder of Gloria that all existence had become, it was necessary for him to have hope.So he built hope desperately and tenaciously out of the stuff of his dream, a hope flimsy enough, to be sure, a hope that was cracked and dissipated a dozen times a day, a hope mothered by mockery, but, nevertheless, a hope that would be brawn and sinew to his self-respect.

Out of this developed a spark of wisdom, a true perception of his own from out the effortless past.

"Memory is short," he thought.

So very short.At the crucial point the Trust President is on the stand, a potential criminal needing but one push to be a jailbird, scorned by the upright for leagues around.Let him be acquitted—and in a year all is forgotten."Yes, he did have some trouble once, just a technicality, I believe."Oh, memory is very short!

Anthony had seen Gloria altogether about a dozen times, say two dozen hours.Supposing he left her alone for a month, made no attempt to see her or speak to her, and avoided every place where she might possibly be.Wasn't it possible, the more possible because she had never loved him, that at the end of that time the rush of events would efface his personality from her conscious mind, and with his personality his offense and humiliation?She would forget, for there would be other men.He winced.The implication struck out at him—other men.Two months—God!Better three weeks, two weeks——

He thought this the second evening after the catastrophe when he was undressing, and at this point he threw himself down on the bed and lay there, trembling very slightly and looking at the top of the canopy.

Two weeks—that was worse than no time at all.In two weeks he would approach her much as he would have to now, without personality or confidence—remaining still the man who had gone too far and then for a period that in time was but a moment but in fact an eternity, whined.No, two weeks was too short a time.Whatever poignancy there had been for her in that afternoon must have time to dull.He must give her a period when the incident should fade, and then a new period when she should gradually begin to think of him, no matter how dimly, with a true perspective that would remember his pleasantness as well as his humiliation.

He fixed, finally, on six weeks as approximately the interval best suited to his purpose, and on a desk calendar he marked the days off, finding that it would fall on the ninth of April.Very well, on that day he would phone and ask her if he might call.Until then—silence.

After his decision a gradual improvement was manifest.He had taken at least a step in the direction to which hope pointed, and he realized that the less he brooded upon her the better he would be able to give the desired impression when they met.

In another hour he fell into a deep sleep.

THE INTERVAL

Nevertheless, though, as the days passed, the glory of her hair dimmed perceptibly for him and in a year of separation might have departed completely, the six weeks held many abominable days.He dreaded the sight of Dick and Maury, imagining wildly that they knew all—but when the three met it was Richard Caramel and not Anthony who was the centre of attention; "The Demon Lover" had been accepted for immediate publication.Anthony felt that from now on he moved apart.He no longer craved the warmth and security of Maury's society which had cheered him no further back than November.Only Gloria could give that now and no one else ever again.So Dick's success rejoiced him only casually and worried him not a little.It meant that the world was going ahead—writing and reading and publishing—and living.And he wanted the world to wait motionless and breathless for six weeks—while Gloria forgot.

TWO ENCOUNTERS

His greatest satisfaction was in Geraldine's company.He took her once to dinner and the theatre and entertained her several times in his apartment.When he was with her she absorbed him, not as Gloria had, but quieting those erotic sensibilities in him that worried over Gloria.It didn't matter how he kissed Geraldine.A kiss was a kiss—to be enjoyed to the utmost for its short moment.To Geraldine things belonged in definite pigeonholes: a kiss was one thing, anything further was quite another; a kiss was all right; the other things were "bad."

When half the interval was up two incidents occurred on successive days that upset his increasing calm and caused a temporary relapse.

The first was—he saw Gloria.It was a short meeting.Both bowed.Both spoke, yet neither heard the other.But when it was over Anthony read down a column of The Sun three times in succession without understanding a single sentence.

One would have thought Sixth Avenue a safe street!Having forsworn his barber at the Plaza he went around the corner one morning to be shaved, and while waiting his turn he took off coat and vest, and with his soft collar open at the neck stood near the front of the shop.The day was an oasis in the cold desert of March and the sidewalk was cheerful with a population of strolling sun-worshippers.A stout woman upholstered in velvet, her flabby cheeks too much massaged, swirled by with her poodle straining at its leash—the effect being given of a tug bringing in an ocean liner.Just behind them a man in a striped blue suit, walking slue-footed in white-spatted feet, grinned at the sight and catching Anthony's eye, winked through the glass.Anthony laughed, thrown immediately into that humor in which men and women were graceless and absurd phantasms, grotesquely curved and rounded in a rectangular world of their own building.They inspired the same sensations in him as did those strange and monstrous fish who inhabit the esoteric world of green in the aquarium.

Two more strollers caught his eye casually, a man and a girl—then in a horrified instant the girl resolved herself into Gloria.He stood here powerless; they came nearer and Gloria, glancing in, saw him.Her eyes widened and she smiled politely.Her lips moved.She was less than five feet away.

"How do you do?"he muttered inanely.

Gloria, happy, beautiful, and young—with a man he had never seen before!

It was then that the barber's chair was vacated and he read down the newspaper column three times in succession.

 

The second incident took place the next day.Going into the Manhattan bar about seven he was confronted with Bloeckman.As it happened, the room was nearly deserted, and before the mutual recognition he had stationed himself within a foot of the older man and ordered his drink, so it was inevitable that they should converse.

"Hello, Mr. Patch," said Bloeckman amiably enough.

Anthony took the proffered hand and exchanged a few aphorisms on the fluctuations of the mercury.

"Do you come in here much?"inquired Bloeckman.

"No, very seldom."He omitted to add that the Plaza bar had, until lately, been his favorite.

"Nice bar.One of the best bars in town."

Anthony nodded.Bloeckman emptied his glass and picked up his cane.He was in evening dress.

"Well, I'll be hurrying on.I'm going to dinner with Miss Gilbert."

Death looked suddenly out at him from two blue eyes.Had he announced himself as his vis-à-vis's prospective murderer he could not have struck a more vital blow at Anthony.The younger man must have reddened visibly, for his every nerve was in instant clamor.With tremendous effort he mustered a rigid—oh, so rigid—smile, and said a conventional good-by.But that night he lay awake until after four, half wild with grief and fear and abominable imaginings.

WEAKNESS

And one day in the fifth week he called her up.He had been sitting in his apartment trying to read "L'Education Sentimental," and something in the book had sent his thoughts racing in the direction that, set free, they always took, like horses racing for a home stable.With suddenly quickened breath he walked to the telephone.When he gave the number it seemed to him that his voice faltered and broke like a schoolboy's.The Central must have heard the pounding of his heart.The sound of the receiver being taken up at the other end was a crack of doom, and Mrs. Gilbert's voice, soft as maple syrup running into a glass container, had for him a quality of horror in its single "Hello-o-ah?"

"Miss Gloria's not feeling well.She's lying down, asleep.Who shall I say called?"

"Nobody!"he shouted.

In a wild panic he slammed down the receiver; collapsed into his armchair in the cold sweat of breathless relief.

SERENADE

The first thing he said to her was: "Why, you've bobbed your hair!"and she answered: "Yes, isn't it gorgeous?"

It was not fashionable then.It was to be fashionable in five or six years.At that time it was considered extremely daring.

"It's all sunshine outdoors," he said gravely."Don't you want to take a walk?"

She put on a light coat and a quaintly piquant Napoleon hat of Alice Blue, and they walked along the Avenue and into the Zoo, where they properly admired the grandeur of the elephant and the collar-height of the giraffe, but did not visit the monkey house because Gloria said that monkeys smelt so bad.

Then they returned toward the Plaza, talking about nothing, but glad for the spring singing in the air and for the warm balm that lay upon the suddenly golden city.To their right was the Park, while at the left a great bulk of granite and marble muttered dully a millionaire's chaotic message to whosoever would listen: something about "I worked and I saved and I was sharper than all Adam and here I sit, by golly, by golly!"

All the newest and most beautiful designs in automobiles were out on Fifth Avenue, and ahead of them the Plaza loomed up rather unusually white and attractive.The supple, indolent Gloria walked a short shadow's length ahead of him, pouring out lazy casual comments that floated a moment on the dazzling air before they reached his ear.

"Oh!"she cried, "I want to go south to Hot Springs!I want to get out in the air and just roll around on the new grass and forget there's ever been any winter."

"Don't you, though!"

"I want to hear a million robins making a frightful racket.I sort of like birds."

"All women are birds," he ventured.

"What kind am I?"—quick and eager.

"A swallow, I think, and sometimes a bird of paradise.Most girls are sparrows, of course—see that row of nurse-maids over there?They're sparrows—or are they magpies?And of course you've met canary girls—and robin girls."

"And swan girls and parrot girls.All grown women are hawks, I think, or owls."

"What am I—a buzzard?"

She laughed and shook her head.

"Oh, no, you're not a bird at all, do you think?You're a Russian wolfhound."

Anthony remembered that they were white and always looked unnaturally hungry.But then they were usually photographed with dukes and princesses, so he was properly flattered.

"Dick's a fox terrier, a trick fox terrier," she continued.

"And Maury's a cat."Simultaneously it occurred to him how like Bloeckman was to a robust and offensive hog.But he preserved a discreet silence.

Later, as they parted, Anthony asked when he might see her again.

"Don't you ever make long engagements?"he pleaded, "even if it's a week ahead, I think it'd be fun to spend a whole day together, morning and afternoon both."

"It would be, wouldn't it?"She thought for a moment."Let's do it next Sunday."

"All right.I'll map out a programme that'll take up every minute."

He did.He even figured to a nicety what would happen in the two hours when she would come to his apartment for tea: how the good Bounds would have the windows wide to let in the fresh breeze—but a fire going also lest there be chill in the air—and how there would be clusters of flowers about in big cool bowls that he would buy for the occasion.They would sit on the lounge.

And when the day came they did sit upon the lounge.After a while Anthony kissed her because it came about quite naturally; he found sweetness sleeping still upon her lips, and felt that he had never been away.The fire was bright and the breeze sighing in through the curtains brought a mellow damp, promising May and world of summer.His soul thrilled to remote harmonies; he heard the strum of far guitars and waters lapping on a warm Mediterranean shore—for he was young now as he would never be again, and more triumphant than death.

Six o'clock stole down too soon and rang the querulous melody of St.Anne's chimes on the corner.Through the gathering dusk they strolled to the Avenue, where the crowds, like prisoners released, were walking with elastic step at last after the long winter, and the tops of the busses were thronged with congenial kings and the shops full of fine soft things for the summer, the rare summer, the gay promising summer that seemed for love what the winter was for money.Life was singing for his supper on the corner!Life was handing round cocktails in the street!Old women there were in that crowd who felt that they could have run and won a hundred-yard dash!

In bed that night with the lights out and the cool room swimming with moonlight, Anthony lay awake and played with every minute of the day like a child playing in turn with each one of a pile of long-wanted Christmas toys.He had told her gently, almost in the middle of a kiss, that he loved her, and she had smiled and held him closer and murmured, "I'm glad," looking into his eyes.There had been a new quality in her attitude, a new growth of sheer physical attraction toward him and a strange emotional tenseness, that was enough to make him clinch his hands and draw in his breath at the recollection.He had felt nearer to her than ever before.In a rare delight he cried aloud to the room that he loved her.

He phoned next morning—no hesitation now, no uncertainty—instead a delirious excitement that doubled and trebled when he heard her voice:

"Good morning—Gloria."

"Good morning."

"That's all I called you up to say-dear."

"I'm glad you did."

"I wish I could see you."

"You will, to-morrow night."

"That's a long time, isn't it?"

"Yes—" Her voice was reluctant.His hand tightened on the receiver.

"Couldn't I come to-night?"He dared anything in the glory and revelation of that almost whispered "yes."

"I have a date."

"Oh—"

"But I might—I might be able to break it."

"Oh!"—a sheer cry, a rhapsody."Gloria?"

"What?"

"I love you."

Another pause and then:

"I—I'm glad."

Happiness, remarked Maury Noble one day, is only the first hour after the alleviation of some especially intense misery.But oh, Anthony's face as he walked down the tenth-floor corridor of the Plaza that night!His dark eyes were gleaming—around his mouth were lines it was a kindness to see.He was handsome then if never before, bound for one of those immortal moments which come so radiantly that their remembered light is enough to see by for years.

He knocked and, at a word, entered.Gloria, dressed in simple pink, starched and fresh as a flower, was across the room, standing very still, and looking at him wide-eyed.

As he closed the door behind him she gave a little cry and moved swiftly over the intervening space, her arms rising in a premature caress as she came near.Together they crushed out the stiff folds of her dress in one triumphant and enduring embrace.

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER I

THE RADIANT HOUR

After a fortnight Anthony and Gloria began to indulge in "practical discussions," as they called those sessions when under the guise of severe realism they walked in an eternal moonlight.

"Not as much as I do you," the critic of belles-lettres would insist."If you really loved me you'd want every one to know it."

"I do," she protested; "I want to stand on the street corner like a sandwich man, informing all the passers-by."

"Then tell me all the reasons why you're going to marry me in June."

"Well, because you're so clean.You're sort of blowy clean, like I am.There's two sorts, you know.One's like Dick: he's clean like polished pans.You and I are clean like streams and winds.I can tell whenever I see a person whether he is clean, and if so, which kind of clean he is."

"We're twins."

Ecstatic thought!

"Mother says"—she hesitated uncertainly—"mother says that two souls are sometimes created together and—and in love before they're born."

Bilphism gained its easiest convert....After a while he lifted up his head and laughed soundlessly toward the ceiling.When his eyes came back to her he saw that she was angry.

"Why did you laugh?"she cried, "you've done that twice before.There's nothing funny about our relation to each other.I don't mind playing the fool, and I don't mind having you do it, but I can't stand it when we're together."

"I'm sorry."

"Oh, don't say you're sorry!If you can't think of anything better than that, just keep quiet!"

"I love you."

"I don't care."

There was a pause.Anthony was depressed....At length Gloria murmured:

"I'm sorry I was mean."

"You weren't.I was the one."

Peace was restored—the ensuing moments were so much more sweet and sharp and poignant.They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two: the passion of their pretense created the actuality.Here, finally, was the quintessence of self-expression—yet it was probable that for the most part their love expressed Gloria rather than Anthony.He felt often like a scarcely tolerated guest at a party she was giving.

Telling Mrs. Gilbert had been an embarrassed matter.She sat stuffed into a small chair and listened with an intense and very blinky sort of concentration.She must have known it—for three weeks Gloria had seen no one else—and she must have noticed that this time there was an authentic difference in her daughter's attitude.She had been given special deliveries to post; she had heeded, as all mothers seem to heed, the hither end of telephone conversations, disguised but still rather warm—

—Yet she had delicately professed surprise and declared herself immensely pleased; she doubtless was; so were the geranium plants blossoming in the window-boxes, and so were the cabbies when the lovers sought the romantic privacy of hansom cabs—quaint device—and the staid bill of fares on which they scribbled "you know I do," pushing it over for the other to see.

But between kisses Anthony and this golden girl quarrelled incessantly.

"Now, Gloria," he would cry, "please let me explain!"

"Don't explain.Kiss me."

"I don't think that's right.If I hurt your feelings we ought to discuss it.I don't like this kiss-and-forget."

"But I don't want to argue. I think it's wonderful that we can kiss and forget, and when we can't it'll be time to argue."

At one time some gossamer difference attained such bulk that Anthony arose and punched himself into his overcoat—for a moment it appeared that the scene of the preceding February was to be repeated, but knowing how deeply she was moved he retained his dignity with his pride, and in a moment Gloria was sobbing in his arms, her lovely face miserable as a frightened little girl's.

Meanwhile they kept unfolding to each other, unwillingly, by curious reactions and evasions, by distastes and prejudices and unintended hints of the past.The girl was proudly incapable of jealousy and, because he was extremely jealous, this virtue piqued him.He told her recondite incidents of his own life on purpose to arouse some spark of it, but to no avail.She possessed him now—nor did she desire the dead years.

"Oh, Anthony," she would say, "always when I'm mean to you I'm sorry afterward.I'd give my right hand to save you one little moment's pain."

And in that instant her eyes were brimming and she was not aware that she was voicing an illusion.Yet Anthony knew that there were days when they hurt each other purposely—taking almost a delight in the thrust.Incessantly she puzzled him: one hour so intimate and charming, striving desperately toward an unguessed, transcendent union; the next, silent and cold, apparently unmoved by any consideration of their love or anything he could say.Often he would eventually trace these portentous reticences to some physical discomfort—of these she never complained until they were over—or to some carelessness or presumption in him, or to an unsatisfactory dish at dinner, but even then the means by which she created the infinite distances she spread about herself were a mystery, buried somewhere back in those twenty-two years of unwavering pride.

 

"Why do you like Muriel?"he demanded one day.

"I don't very much."

"Then why do you go with her?"

"Just for some one to go with.They're no exertion, those girls.They sort of believe everything I tell them—but I rather like Rachael.I think she's cute—and so clean and slick, don't you?I used to have other friends—in Kansas City and at school—casual, all of them, girls who just flitted into my range and out of it for no more reason than that boys took us places together.They didn't interest me after environment stopped throwing us together.Now they're mostly married.What does it matter—they were all just people."

"You like men better, don't you?"

"Oh, much better.I've got a man's mind."

"You've got a mind like mine.Not strongly gendered either way."

Later she told him about the beginnings of her friendship with Bloeckman.One day in Delmonico's, Gloria and Rachael had come upon Bloeckman and Mr. Gilbert having luncheon and curiosity had impelled her to make it a party of four.She had liked him—rather.He was a relief from younger men, satisfied as he was with so little.He humored her and he laughed, whether he understood her or not.She met him several times, despite the open disapproval of her parents, and within a month he had asked her to marry him, tendering her everything from a villa in Italy to a brilliant career on the screen.She had laughed in his face—and he had laughed too.

But he had not given up.To the time of Anthony's arrival in the arena he had been making steady progress.She treated him rather well—except that she had called him always by an invidious nickname—perceiving, meanwhile, that he was figuratively following along beside her as she walked the fence, ready to catch her if she should fall.

The night before the engagement was announced she told Bloeckman.It was a heavy blow.She did not enlighten Anthony as to the details, but she implied that he had not hesitated to argue with her.Anthony gathered that the interview had terminated on a stormy note, with Gloria very cool and unmoved lying in her corner of the sofa and Joseph Bloeckman of "Films Par Excellence" pacing the carpet with eyes narrowed and head bowed.Gloria had been sorry for him but she had judged it best not to show it.In a final burst of kindness she had tried to make him hate her, there at the last.But Anthony, understanding that Gloria's indifference was her strongest appeal, judged how futile this must have been.He wondered, often but quite casually, about Bloeckman—finally he forgot him entirely.

HEYDAY

One afternoon they found front seats on the sunny roof of a bus and rode for hours from the fading Square up along the sullied river, and then, as the stray beams fled the westward streets, sailed down the turgid Avenue, darkening with ominous bees from the department stores.The traffic was clotted and gripped in a patternless jam; the busses were packed four deep like platforms above the crowd as they waited for the moan of the traffic whistle.

"Isn't it good!"cried Gloria."Look!"

A miller's wagon, stark white with flour, driven by a powdery clown, passed in front of them behind a white horse and his black team-mate.

"What a pity!"she complained; "they'd look so beautiful in the dusk, if only both horses were white.I'm mighty happy just this minute, in this city."

Anthony shook his head in disagreement.

"I think the city's a mountebank.Always struggling to approach the tremendous and impressive urbanity ascribed to it.Trying to be romantically metropolitan."

"I don't.I think it is impressive."

"Momentarily.But it's really a transparent, artificial sort of spectacle.It's got its press-agented stars and its flimsy, unenduring stage settings and, I'll admit, the greatest army of supers ever assembled—" He paused, laughed shortly, and added: "Technically excellent, perhaps, but not convincing."

"I'll bet policemen think people are fools," said Gloria thoughtfully, as she watched a large but cowardly lady being helped across the street."He always sees them frightened and inefficient and old—they are," she added.And then: "We'd better get off.I told mother I'd have an early supper and go to bed.She says I look tired, damn it."

"I wish we were married," he muttered soberly; "there'll be no good night then and we can do just as we want."

"Won't it be good!I think we ought to travel a lot.I want to go to the Mediterranean and Italy.And I'd like to go on the stage some time—say for about a year."

"You bet.I'll write a play for you."

"Won't that be good!And I'll act in it.And then some time when we have more money"—old Adam's death was always thus tactfully alluded to—"we'll build a magnificent estate, won't we?"

"Oh, yes, with private swimming pools."

"Dozens of them.And private rivers.Oh, I wish it were now."

Odd coincidence—he had just been wishing that very thing.They plunged like divers into the dark eddying crowd and emerging in the cool fifties sauntered indolently homeward, infinitely romantic to each other ...both were walking alone in a dispassionate garden with a ghost found in a dream.

Halcyon days like boats drifting along slow-moving rivers; spring evenings full of a plaintive melancholy that made the past beautiful and bitter, bidding them look back and see that the loves of other summers long gone were dead with the forgotten waltzes of their years.Always the most poignant moments were when some artificial barrier kept them apart: in the theatre their hands would steal together, join, give and return gentle pressures through the long dark; in crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other's eyes—not knowing that they were but following in the footsteps of dusty generations but comprehending dimly that if truth is the end of life happiness is a mode of it, to be cherished in its brief and tremulous moment.And then, one fairy night, May became June.Sixteen days now—fifteen—fourteen——

THREE DIGRESSIONS

Just before the engagement was announced Anthony had gone up to Tarrytown to see his grandfather, who, a little more wizened and grizzly as time played its ultimate chuckling tricks, greeted the news with profound cynicism.

"Oh, you're going to get married, are you?"He said this with such a dubious mildness and shook his head up and down so many times that Anthony was not a little depressed.While he was unaware of his grandfather's intentions he presumed that a large part of the money would come to him.A good deal would go in charities, of course; a good deal to carry on the business of reform.

"Are you going to work?"

"Why—" temporized Anthony, somewhat disconcerted. "I am working. You know—"

"Ah, I mean work," said Adam Patch dispassionately.

"I'm not quite sure yet what I'll do.I'm not exactly a beggar, grampa," he asserted with some spirit.

The old man considered this with eyes half closed.Then almost apologetically he asked:

"How much do you save a year?"

"Nothing so far—"

"And so after just managing to get along on your money you've decided that by some miracle two of you can get along on it."

"Gloria has some money of her own.Enough to buy clothes."

"How much?"

Without considering this question impertinent, Anthony answered it.

"About a hundred a month."

"That's altogether about seventy-five hundred a year."Then he added softly: "It ought to be plenty.If you have any sense it ought to be plenty.But the question is whether you have any or not."

"I suppose it is."It was shameful to be compelled to endure this pious browbeating from the old man, and his next words were stiffened with vanity."I can manage very well.You seem convinced that I'm utterly worthless.At any rate I came up here simply to tell you that I'm getting married in June.Good-by, sir."With this he turned away and headed for the door, unaware that in that instant his grandfather, for the first time, rather liked him.

"Wait!"called Adam Patch, "I want to talk to you."

Anthony faced about.

"Well, sir?"

"Sit down.Stay all night."

Somewhat mollified, Anthony resumed his seat.

"I'm sorry, sir, but I'm going to see Gloria to-night."

"What's her name?"

"Gloria Gilbert."

"New York girl?Someone you know?"

"She's from the Middle West."

"What business her father in?"

"In a celluloid corporation or trust or something.They're from Kansas City."

"You going to be married out there?"

"Why, no, sir.We thought we'd be married in New York—rather quietly."

"Like to have the wedding out here?"

Anthony hesitated.The suggestion made no appeal to him, but it was certainly the part of wisdom to give the old man, if possible, a proprietary interest in his married life.In addition Anthony was a little touched.

"That's very kind of you, grampa, but wouldn't it be a lot of trouble?"

"Everything's a lot of trouble.Your father was married here—but in the old house."

"Why—I thought he was married in Boston."

Adam Patch considered.

"That's true. He was married in Boston."

Anthony felt a moment's embarrassment at having made the correction, and he covered it up with words.

"Well, I'll speak to Gloria about it.Personally I'd like to, but of course it's up to the Gilberts, you see."

His grandfather drew a long sigh, half closed his eyes, and sank back in his chair.

"In a hurry?"he asked in a different tone.

"Not especially."

"I wonder," began Adam Patch, looking out with a mild, kindly glance at the lilac bushes that rustled against the windows, "I wonder if you ever think about the after-life."

"Why—sometimes."

"I think a great deal about the after-life."His eyes were dim but his voice was confident and clear."I was sitting here to-day thinking about what's lying in wait for us, and somehow I began to remember an afternoon nearly sixty-five years ago, when I was playing with my little sister Annie, down where that summer-house is now."He pointed out into the long flower-garden, his eyes trembling of tears, his voice shaking.

"I began thinking—and it seemed to me that you ought to think a little more about the after-life. You ought to be—steadier"—he paused and seemed to grope about for the right word—"more industrious—why—"

Then his expression altered, his entire personality seemed to snap together like a trap, and when he continued the softness had gone from his voice.

"—Why, when I was just two years older than you," he rasped with a cunning chuckle, "I sent three members of the firm of Wrenn and Hunt to the poorhouse."

Anthony started with embarrassment.

"Well, good-by," added his grandfather suddenly, "you'll miss your train."

Anthony left the house unusually elated, and strangely sorry for the old man; not because his wealth could buy him "neither youth nor digestion" but because he had asked Anthony to be married there, and because he had forgotten something about his son's wedding that he should have remembered.

 

Richard Caramel, who was one of the ushers, caused Anthony and Gloria much distress in the last few weeks by continually stealing the rays of their spot-light."The Demon Lover" had been published in April, and it interrupted the love affair as it may be said to have interrupted everything its author came in contact with.It was a highly original, rather overwritten piece of sustained description concerned with a Don Juan of the New York slums. As Maury and Anthony had said before, as the more hospitable critics were saying then, there was no writer in America with such power to describe the atavistic and unsubtle reactions of that section of society.

The book hesitated and then suddenly "went."Editions, small at first, then larger, crowded each other week by week.A spokesman of the Salvation Army denounced it as a cynical misrepresentation of all the uplift taking place in the underworld.Clever press-agenting spread the unfounded rumor that "Gypsy" Smith was beginning a libel suit because one of the principal characters was a burlesque of himself.It was barred from the public library of Burlington, Iowa, and a Mid-Western columnist announced by innuendo that Richard Caramel was in a sanitarium with delirium tremens.

The author, indeed, spent his days in a state of pleasant madness.The book was in his conversation three-fourths of the time—he wanted to know if one had heard "the latest"; he would go into a store and in a loud voice order books to be charged to him, in order to catch a chance morsel of recognition from clerk or customer.He knew to a town in what sections of the country it was selling best; he knew exactly what he cleared on each edition, and when he met any one who had not read it, or, as it happened only too often, had not heard of it, he succumbed to moody depression.

So it was natural for Anthony and Gloria to decide, in their jealousy, that he was so swollen with conceit as to be a bore.To Dick's great annoyance Gloria publicly boasted that she had never read "The Demon Lover," and didn't intend to until every one stopped talking about it.As a matter of fact, she had no time to read now, for the presents were pouring in—first a scattering, then an avalanche, varying from the bric-à-brac of forgotten family friends to the photographs of forgotten poor relations.

Maury gave them an elaborate "drinking set," which included silver goblets, cocktail shaker, and bottle-openers.The extortion from Dick was more conventional—a tea set from Tiffany's.From Joseph Bloeckman came a simple and exquisite travelling clock, with his card.There was even a cigarette-holder from Bounds; this touched Anthony and made him want to weep—indeed, any emotion short of hysteria seemed natural in the half-dozen people who were swept up by this tremendous sacrifice to convention.The room set aside in the Plaza bulged with offerings sent by Harvard friends and by associates of his grandfather, with remembrances of Gloria's Farmover days, and with rather pathetic trophies from her former beaux, which last arrived with esoteric, melancholy messages, written on cards tucked carefully inside, beginning "I little thought when—" or "I'm sure I wish you all the happiness—" or even "When you get this I shall be on my way to—"

The most munificent gift was simultaneously the most disappointing.It was a concession of Adam Patch's—a check for five thousand dollars.

To most of the presents Anthony was cold.It seemed to him that they would necessitate keeping a chart of the marital status of all their acquaintances during the next half-century.But Gloria exulted in each one, tearing at the tissue-paper and excelsior with the rapaciousness of a dog digging for a bone, breathlessly seizing a ribbon or an edge of metal and finally bringing to light the whole article and holding it up critically, no emotion except rapt interest in her unsmiling face.

"Look, Anthony!"

"Darn nice, isn't it!"

No answer until an hour later when she would give him a careful account of her precise reaction to the gift, whether it would have been improved by being smaller or larger, whether she was surprised at getting it, and, if so, just how much surprised.

Mrs. Gilbert arranged and rearranged a hypothetical house, distributing the gifts among the different rooms, tabulating articles as "second-best clock" or "silver to use every day," and embarrassing Anthony and Gloria by semi-facetious references to a room she called the nursery. She was pleased by old Adam's gift and thereafter had it that he was a very ancient soul, "as much as anything else." As Adam Patch never quite decided whether she referred to the advancing senility of his mind or to some private and psychic schema of her own, it cannot be said to have pleased him. Indeed he always spoke of her to Anthony as "that old woman, the mother," as though she were a character in a comedy he had seen staged many times before. Concerning Gloria he was unable to make up his mind. She attracted him but, as she herself told Anthony, he had decided that she was frivolous and was afraid to approve of her.

Five days!—A dancing platform was being erected on the lawn at Tarrytown.Four days!—A special train was chartered to convey the guests to and from New York.Three days!——

THE DIARY

She was dressed in blue silk pajamas and standing by her bed with her hand on the light to put the room in darkness, when she changed her mind and opening a table drawer brought out a little black book—a "Line-a-day" diary.This she had kept for seven years.Many of the pencil entries were almost illegible and there were notes and references to nights and afternoons long since forgotten, for it was not an intimate diary, even though it began with the immemorial "I am going to keep a diary for my children."Yet as she thumbed over the pages the eyes of many men seemed to look out at her from their half-obliterated names.With one she had gone to New Haven for the first time—in 1908, when she was sixteen and padded shoulders were fashionable at Yale—she had been flattered because "Touch down" Michaud had "rushed" her all evening.She sighed, remembering the grown-up satin dress she had been so proud of and the orchestra playing "Yama-yama, My Yama Man" and "Jungle-Town."So long ago!—the names: Eltynge Reardon, Jim Parsons, "Curly" McGregor, Kenneth Cowan, "Fish-eye" Fry (whom she had liked for being so ugly), Carter Kirby—he had sent her a present; so had Tudor Baird;—Marty Reffer, the first man she had been in love with for more than a day, and Stuart Holcome, who had run away with her in his automobile and tried to make her marry him by force.And Larry Fenwick, whom she had always admired because he had told her one night that if she wouldn't kiss him she could get out of his car and walk home.What a list!

...And, after all, an obsolete list.She was in love now, set for the eternal romance that was to be the synthesis of all romance, yet sad for these men and these moonlights and for the "thrills" she had had—and the kisses.The past—her past, oh, what a joy!She had been exuberantly happy.

Turning over the pages her eyes rested idly on the scattered entries of the past four months.She read the last few carefully.

"April 1st—I know Bill Carstairs hates me because I was so disagreeable, but I hate to be sentimentalized over sometimes.We drove out to the Rockyear Country Club and the most wonderful moon kept shining through the trees.My silver dress is getting tarnished.Funny how one forgets the other nights at Rockyear—with Kenneth Cowan when I loved him so!

"April 3rd—After two hours of Schroeder who, they inform me, has millions, I've decided that this matter of sticking to things wears one out, particularly when the things concerned are men.There's nothing so often overdone and from to-day I swear to be amused.We talked about 'love'—how banal!With how many men have I talked about love?

"April 11th—Patch actually called up to-day!and when he forswore me about a month ago he fairly raged out the door.I'm gradually losing faith in any man being susceptible to fatal injuries.

"April 20th—Spent the day with Anthony.Maybe I'll marry him some time.I kind of like his ideas—he stimulates all the originality in me.Blockhead came around about ten in his new car and took me out Riverside Drive.I liked him to-night: he's so considerate.He knew I didn't want to talk so he was quiet all during the ride.

"April 21st—Woke up thinking of Anthony and sure enough he called and sounded sweet on the phone—so I broke a date for him.To-day I feel I'd break anything for him, including the ten commandments and my neck.He's coming at eight and I shall wear pink and look very fresh and starched——"

She paused here, remembering that after he had gone that night she had undressed with the shivering April air streaming in the windows.Yet it seemed she had not felt the cold, warmed by the profound banalities burning in her heart.

The next entry occurred a few days later:

"April 24th—I want to marry Anthony, because husbands are so often 'husbands' and I must marry a lover.

"There are four general types of husbands.

"What grubworms women are to crawl on their bellies through colorless marriages!Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one.Mine is going to be outstanding.It can't, shan't be the setting—it's going to be the performance, the live, lovely, glamourous performance, and the world shall be the scenery.I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity.Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one's unwanted children.What a fate—to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers....Dear dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden, golden wings——

"Such children, however, poor dear babies, have little in common with the wedded state.

"June 7th—Moral question: Was it wrong to make Bloeckman love me?Because I did really make him.He was almost sweetly sad to-night.How opportune it was that my throat is swollen plunk together and tears were easy to muster.But he's just the past—buried already in my plentiful lavender.

"June 8th—And to-day I've promised not to chew my mouth.Well, I won't, I suppose—but if he'd only asked me not to eat!

"Blowing bubbles—that's what we're doing, Anthony and me.And we blew such beautiful ones to-day, and they'll explode and then we'll blow more and more, I guess—bubbles just as big and just as beautiful, until all the soap and water is used up."

On this note the diary ended.Her eyes wandered up the page, over the June 8th's of 1912, 1910, 1907.The earliest entry was scrawled in the plump, bulbous hand of a sixteen-year-old girl—it was the name, Bob Lamar, and a word she could not decipher.Then she knew what it was—and, knowing, she found her eyes misty with tears.There in a graying blur was the record of her first kiss, faded as its intimate afternoon, on a rainy veranda seven years before.She seemed to remember something one of them had said that day and yet she could not remember.Her tears came faster, until she could scarcely see the page.She was crying, she told herself, because she could remember only the rain and the wet flowers in the yard and the smell of the damp grass.

...After a moment she found a pencil and holding it unsteadily drew three parallel lines beneath the last entry.Then she printed FINIS in large capitals, put the book back in the drawer, and crept into bed.

BREATH OF THE CAVE

Back in his apartment after the bridal dinner, Anthony snapped out his lights and, feeling impersonal and fragile as a piece of china waiting on a serving table, got into bed.It was a warm night—a sheet was enough for comfort—and through his wide-open windows came sound, evanescent and summery, alive with remote anticipation.He was thinking that the young years behind him, hollow and colorful, had been lived in facile and vacillating cynicism upon the recorded emotions of men long dust.And there was something beyond that; he knew now.There was the union of his soul with Gloria's, whose radiant fire and freshness was the living material of which the dead beauty of books was made.

From the night into his high-walled room there came, persistently, that evanescent and dissolving sound—something the city was tossing up and calling back again, like a child playing with a ball.In Harlem, the Bronx, Gramercy Park, and along the water-fronts, in little parlors or on pebble-strewn, moon-flooded roofs, a thousand lovers were making this sound, crying little fragments of it into the air.All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness—and by that promise giving it.It gave love hope in its own survival.It could do no more.

It was then that a new note separated itself jarringly from the soft crying of the night.It was a noise from an areaway within a hundred feet from his rear window, the noise of a woman's laughter.It began low, incessant and whining—some servant-maid with her fellow, he thought—and then it grew in volume and became hysterical, until it reminded him of a girl he had seen overcome with nervous laughter at a vaudeville performance.Then it sank, receded, only to rise again and include words—a coarse joke, some bit of obscure horseplay he could not distinguish.It would break off for a moment and he would just catch the low rumble of a man's voice, then begin again—interminably; at first annoying, then strangely terrible.He shivered, and getting up out of bed went to the window.It had reached a high point, tensed and stifled, almost the quality of a scream—then it ceased and left behind it a silence empty and menacing as the greater silence overhead.Anthony stood by the window a moment longer before he returned to his bed.He found himself upset and shaken.Try as he might to strangle his reaction, some animal quality in that unrestrained laughter had grasped at his imagination, and for the first time in four months aroused his old aversion and horror toward all the business of life.The room had grown smothery.He wanted to be out in some cool and bitter breeze, miles above the cities, and to live serene and detached back in the corners of his mind.Life was that sound out there, that ghastly reiterated female sound.

"Oh, my God!"he cried, drawing in his breath sharply.

Burying his face in the pillows he tried in vain to concentrate upon the details of the next day.

MORNING

In the gray light he found that it was only five o'clock.He regretted nervously that he had awakened so early—he would appear fagged at the wedding.He envied Gloria who could hide her fatigue with careful pigmentation.

In his bathroom he contemplated himself in the mirror and saw that he was unusually white—half a dozen small imperfections stood out against the morning pallor of his complexion, and overnight he had grown the faint stubble of a beard—the general effect, he fancied, was unprepossessing, haggard, half unwell.

On his dressing table were spread a number of articles which he told over carefully with suddenly fumbling fingers—their tickets to California, the book of traveller's checks, his watch, set to the half minute, the key to his apartment, which he must not forget to give to Maury, and, most important of all, the ring.It was of platinum set around with small emeralds; Gloria had insisted on this; she had always wanted an emerald wedding ring, she said.

It was the third present he had given her; first had come the engagement ring, and then a little gold cigarette-case.He would be giving her many things now—clothes and jewels and friends and excitement.It seemed absurd that from now on he would pay for all her meals.It was going to cost: he wondered if he had not underestimated for this trip, and if he had not better cash a larger check.The question worried him.

Then the breathless impendency of the event swept his mind clear of details.This was the day—unsought, unsuspected six months before, but now breaking in yellow light through his east window, dancing along the carpet as though the sun were smiling at some ancient and reiterated gag of his own.

Anthony laughed in a nervous one-syllable snort.

"By God!"he muttered to himself, "I'm as good as married!"

THE USHERS

Six young men in CROSS PATCH'S library growing more and more cheery under the influence of Mumm's Extra Dry, set surreptitiously in cold pails by the bookcases.

THE FIRST YOUNG MAN: By golly!Believe me, in my next book I'm going to do a wedding scene that'll knock 'em cold!

THE SECOND YOUNG MAN: Met a débutante th'other day said she thought your book was powerful.As a rule young girls cry for this primitive business.

THE THIRD YOUNG MAN: Where's Anthony?

THE FOURTH YOUNG MAN: Walking up and down outside talking to himself.

SECOND YOUNG MAN: Lord!Did you see the minister?Most peculiar looking teeth.

FIFTH YOUNG MAN: Think they're natural.Funny thing people having gold teeth.

SIXTH YOUNG MAN: They say they love 'em.My dentist told me once a woman came to him and insisted on having two of her teeth covered with gold.No reason at all.All right the way they were.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: Hear you got out a book, Dicky.'Gratulations!

DICK: (Stiffly) Thanks.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: (Innocently) What is it?College stories?

DICK: (More stiffly) No.Not college stories.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: Pity!Hasn't been a good book about Harvard for years.

DICK: (Touchily) Why don't you supply the lack?

THIRD YOUNG MAN: I think I saw a squad of guests turn the drive in a Packard just now.

SIXTH YOUNG MAN: Might open a couple more bottles on the strength of that.

THIRD YOUNG MAN: It was the shock of my life when I heard the old man was going to have a wet wedding.Rabid prohibitionist, you know.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: (Snapping his fingers excitedly) By gad!I knew I'd forgotten something.Kept thinking it was my vest.

DICK: What was it?

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: By gad!By gad!

SIXTH YOUNG MAN: Here!Here!Why the tragedy?

SECOND YOUNG MAN: What'd you forget?The way home?

DICK: (Maliciously) He forgot the plot for his book of Harvard stories.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: No, sir, I forgot the present, by George!I forgot to buy old Anthony a present.I kept putting it off and putting it off, and by gad I've forgotten it!What'll they think?

SIXTH YOUNG MAN: (Facetiously) That's probably what's been holding up the wedding.

(THE FOURTH YOUNG MAN looks nervously at his watch.Laughter.)

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: By gad!What an ass I am!

SECOND YOUNG MAN: What d'you make of the bridesmaid who thinks she's Nora Bayes?Kept telling me she wished this was a ragtime wedding.Name's Haines or Hampton.

DICK: (Hurriedly spurring his imagination) Kane, you mean, Muriel Kane.She's a sort of debt of honor, I believe.Once saved Gloria from drowning, or something of the sort.

SECOND YOUNG MAN: I didn't think she could stop that perpetual swaying long enough to swim.Fill up my glass, will you?Old man and I had a long talk about the weather just now.

MAURY: Who?Old Adam?

SECOND YOUNG MAN: No, the bride's father.He must be with a weather bureau.

DICK: He's my uncle, Otis.

OTIS: Well, it's an honorable profession.(Laughter.)

SIXTH YOUNG MAN: Bride your cousin, isn't she?

DICK: Yes, Cable, she is.

CABLE: She certainly is a beauty.Not like you, Dicky.Bet she brings old Anthony to terms.

MAURY: Why are all grooms given the title of "old"?I think marriage is an error of youth.

DICK: Maury, the professional cynic.

MAURY: Why, you intellectual faker!

FIFTH YOUNG MAN: Battle of the highbrows here, Otis.Pick up what crumbs you can.

DICK: Faker yourself! What do you know?

MAURY: What do you know?

LICK: Ask me anything.Any branch of knowledge.

MAURY: All right.What's the fundamental principle of biology?

DICK: You don't know yourself.

MAURY: Don't hedge!

DICK: Well, natural selection?

MAURY: Wrong.

DICK: I give it up.

MAURY: Ontogony recapitulates phyllogony.

FIFTH YOUNG MAN: Take your base!

MAURY: Ask you another.What's the influence of mice on the clover crop?(Laughter.)

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: What's the influence of rats on the Decalogue?

MAURY: Shut up, you saphead. There is a connection.

DICK: What is it then?

MAURY: (Pausing a moment in growing disconcertion) Why, let's see.I seem to have forgotten exactly.Something about the bees eating the clover.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: And the clover eating the mice!Haw!Haw!

MAURY: (Frowning) Let me just think a minute.

DICK: (Sitting up suddenly) Listen!

(A volley of chatter explodes in the adjoining room.The six young men arise, feeling at their neckties.)

DICK: (Weightily) We'd better join the firing squad.They're going to take the picture, I guess.No, that's afterward.

OTIS: Cable, you take the ragtime bridesmaid.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: I wish to God I'd sent that present.

MAURY: If you'll give me another minute I'll think of that about the mice.

OTIS: I was usher last month for old Charlie McIntyre and——

(They move slowly toward the door as the chatter becomes a babel and
the practising preliminary to the overture issues in long pious groans
from ADAM PATCH'S organ.)

ANTHONY

There were five hundred eyes boring through the back of his cutaway and the sun glinting on the clergyman's inappropriately bourgeois teeth.With difficulty he restrained a laugh.Gloria was saying something in a clear proud voice and he tried to think that the affair was irrevocable, that every second was significant, that his life was being slashed into two periods and that the face of the world was changing before him.He tried to recapture that ecstatic sensation of ten weeks before.All these emotions eluded him, he did not even feel the physical nervousness of that very morning—it was all one gigantic aftermath.And those gold teeth!He wondered if the clergyman were married; he wondered perversely if a clergyman could perform his own marriage service....

But as he took Gloria into his arms he was conscious of a strong reaction.The blood was moving in his veins now.A languorous and pleasant content settled like a weight upon him, bringing responsibility and possession.He was married.

GLORIA

So many, such mingled emotions, that no one of them was separable from the others!She could have wept for her mother, who was crying quietly back there ten feet and for the loveliness of the June sunlight flooding in at the windows.She was beyond all conscious perceptions.Only a sense, colored with delirious wild excitement, that the ultimately important was happening—and a trust, fierce and passionate, burning in her like a prayer, that in a moment she would be forever and securely safe.

 

Late one night they arrived in Santa Barbara, where the night clerk at the Hotel Lafcadio refused to admit them, on the grounds that they were not married.

The clerk thought that Gloria was beautiful.He did not think that anything so beautiful as Gloria could be moral.

"CON AMORE"

That first half-year—the trip West, the long months' loiter along the California coast, and the gray house near Greenwich where they lived until late autumn made the country dreary—those days, those places, saw the enraptured hours.The breathless idyl of their engagement gave way, first, to the intense romance of the more passionate relationship.The breathless idyl left them, fled on to other lovers; they looked around one day and it was gone, how they scarcely knew.Had either of them lost the other in the days of the idyl, the love lost would have been ever to the loser that dim desire without fulfilment which stands back of all life.But magic must hurry on, and the lovers remain....

The idyl passed, bearing with it its extortion of youth.Came a day when Gloria found that other men no longer bored her; came a day when Anthony discovered that he could sit again late into the evening, talking with Dick of those tremendous abstractions that had once occupied his world.But, knowing they had had the best of love, they clung to what remained.Love lingered—by way of long conversations at night into those stark hours when the mind thins and sharpens and the borrowings from dreams become the stuff of all life, by way of deep and intimate kindnesses they developed toward each other, by way of their laughing at the same absurdities and thinking the same things noble and the same things sad.

It was, first of all, a time of discovery.The things they found in each other were so diverse, so intermixed and, moreover, so sugared with love as to seem at the time not so much discoveries as isolated phenomena—to be allowed for, and to be forgotten.Anthony found that he was living with a girl of tremendous nervous tension and of the most high-handed selfishness.Gloria knew within a month that her husband was an utter coward toward any one of a million phantasms created by his imagination.Her perception was intermittent, for this cowardice sprang out, became almost obscenely evident, then faded and vanished as though it had been only a creation of her own mind.Her reactions to it were not those attributed to her sex—it roused her neither to disgust nor to a premature feeling of motherhood.Herself almost completely without physical fear, she was unable to understand, and so she made the most of what she felt to be his fear's redeeming feature, which was that though he was a coward under a shock and a coward under a strain—when his imagination was given play—he had yet a sort of dashing recklessness that moved her on its brief occasions almost to admiration, and a pride that usually steadied him when he thought he was observed.

The trait first showed itself in a dozen incidents of little more than nervousness—his warning to a taxi-driver against fast driving, in Chicago; his refusal to take her to a certain tough café she had always wished to visit; these of course admitted the conventional interpretation—that it was of her he had been thinking; nevertheless, their culminative weight disturbed her.But something that occurred in a San Francisco hotel, when they had been married a week, gave the matter certainty.

It was after midnight and pitch dark in their room.Gloria was dozing off and Anthony's even breathing beside her made her suppose that he was asleep, when suddenly she saw him raise himself on his elbow and stare at the window.

"What is it, dearest?"she murmured.

"Nothing"—he had relaxed to his pillow and turned toward her—"nothing, my darling wife."

"Don't say 'wife.'I'm your mistress.Wife's such an ugly word.Your 'permanent mistress' is so much more tangible and desirable....Come into my arms," she added in a rush of tenderness; "I can sleep so well, so well with you in my arms."

Coming into Gloria's arms had a quite definite meaning.It required that he should slide one arm under her shoulder, lock both arms about her, and arrange himself as nearly as possible as a sort of three-sided crib for her luxurious ease.Anthony, who tossed, whose arms went tinglingly to sleep after half an hour of that position, would wait until she was asleep and roll her gently over to her side of the bed—then, left to his own devices, he would curl himself into his usual knots.

Gloria, having attained sentimental comfort, retired into her doze.Five minutes ticked away on Bloeckman's travelling clock; silence lay all about the room, over the unfamiliar, impersonal furniture and the half-oppressive ceiling that melted imperceptibly into invisible walls on both sides.Then there was suddenly a rattling flutter at the window, staccato and loud upon the hushed, pent air.

With a leap Anthony was out of the bed and standing tense beside it.

"Who's there?"he cried in an awful voice.

Gloria lay very still, wide awake now and engrossed not so much in the rattling as in the rigid breathless figure whose voice had reached from the bedside into that ominous dark.

The sound stopped; the room was quiet as before—then Anthony pouring words in at the telephone.

"Some one just tried to get into the room! ...

"There's some one at the window!"His voice was emphatic now, faintly terrified.

"All right!Hurry!"He hung up the receiver; stood motionless.

...There was a rush and commotion at the door, a knocking—Anthony went to open it upon an excited night clerk with three bell-boys grouped staring behind him.Between thumb and finger the night clerk held a wet pen with the threat of a weapon; one of the bell-boys had seized a telephone directory and was looking at it sheepishly.Simultaneously the group was joined by the hastily summoned house-detective, and as one man they surged into the room.

Lights sprang on with a click.Gathering a piece of sheet about her Gloria dove away from sight, shutting her eyes to keep out the horror of this unpremeditated visitation.There was no vestige of an idea in her stricken sensibilities save that her Anthony was at grievous fault.

...The night clerk was speaking from the window, his tone half of the servant, half of the teacher reproving a schoolboy.

"Nobody out there," he declared conclusively; "my golly, nobody could be out there. This here's a sheer fall to the street of fifty feet. It was the wind you heard, tugging at the blind."

"Oh."

Then she was sorry for him.She wanted only to comfort him and draw him back tenderly into her arms, to tell them to go away because the thing their presence connotated was odious.Yet she could not raise her head for shame.She heard a broken sentence, apologies, conventions of the employee and one unrestrained snicker from a bell-boy.

"I've been nervous as the devil all evening," Anthony was saying; "somehow that noise just shook me—I was only about half awake."

"Sure, I understand," said the night clerk with comfortable tact; "been that way myself."

The door closed; the lights snapped out; Anthony crossed the floor quietly and crept into bed.Gloria, feigning to be heavy with sleep, gave a quiet little sigh and slipped into his arms.

"What was it, dear?"

"Nothing," he answered, his voice still shaken; "I thought there was somebody at the window, so I looked out, but I couldn't see any one and the noise kept up, so I phoned down-stairs.Sorry if I disturbed you, but I'm awfully darn nervous to-night."

Catching the lie, she gave an interior start—he had not gone to the window, nor near the window.He had stood by the bed and then sent in his call of fear.

"Oh," she said—and then: "I'm so sleepy."

For an hour they lay awake side by side, Gloria with her eyes shut so tight that blue moons formed and revolved against backgrounds of deepest mauve, Anthony staring blindly into the darkness overhead.

After many weeks it came gradually out into the light, to be laughed and joked at.They made a tradition to fit over it—whenever that overpowering terror of the night attacked Anthony, she would put her arms about him and croon, soft as a song:

"I'll protect my Anthony.Oh, nobody's ever going to harm my Anthony!"

He would laugh as though it were a jest they played for their mutual amusement, but to Gloria it was never quite a jest.It was, at first, a keen disappointment; later, it was one of the times when she controlled her temper.

The management of Gloria's temper, whether it was aroused by a lack of hot water for her bath or by a skirmish with her husband, became almost the primary duty of Anthony's day.It must be done just so—by this much silence, by that much pressure, by this much yielding, by that much force.It was in her angers with their attendant cruelties that her inordinate egotism chiefly displayed itself.Because she was brave, because she was "spoiled," because of her outrageous and commendable independence of judgment, and finally because of her arrogant consciousness that she had never seen a girl as beautiful as herself, Gloria had developed into a consistent, practising Nietzschean.This, of course, with overtones of profound sentiment.

There was, for example, her stomach.She was used to certain dishes, and she had a strong conviction that she could not possibly eat anything else.There must be a lemonade and a tomato sandwich late in the morning, then a light lunch with a stuffed tomato.Not only did she require food from a selection of a dozen dishes, but in addition this food must be prepared in just a certain way.One of the most annoying half hours of the first fortnight occurred in Los Angeles, when an unhappy waiter brought her a tomato stuffed with chicken salad instead of celery.

"We always serve it that way, madame," he quavered to the gray eyes that regarded him wrathfully.

Gloria made no answer, but when the waiter had turned discreetly away she banged both fists upon the table until the china and silver rattled.

"Poor Gloria!"laughed Anthony unwittingly, "you can't get what you want ever, can you?"

"I can't eat stuff!"she flared up.

"I'll call back the waiter."

"I don't want you to! He doesn't know anything, the darn fool!"

"Well, it isn't the hotel's fault.Either send it back, forget it, or be a sport and eat it."

"Shut up!"she said succinctly.

"Why take it out on me?"

"Oh, I'm not," she wailed, "but I simply can't eat it."

Anthony subsided helplessly.

"We'll go somewhere else," he suggested.

"I don't want to go anywhere else. I'm tired of being trotted around to a dozen cafés and not getting one thing fit to eat."

"When did we go around to a dozen cafés?"

"You'd have to in this town," insisted Gloria with ready sophistry.

Anthony, bewildered, tried another tack.

"Why don't you try to eat it?It can't be as bad as you think."

"Just—because—I—don't—like—chicken!"

She picked up her fork and began poking contemptuously at the tomato, and Anthony expected her to begin flinging the stuffings in all directions.He was sure that she was approximately as angry as she had ever been—for an instant he had detected a spark of hate directed as much toward him as toward any one else—and Gloria angry was, for the present, unapproachable.

Then, surprisingly, he saw that she had tentatively raised the fork to her lips and tasted the chicken salad.Her frown had not abated and he stared at her anxiously, making no comment and daring scarcely to breathe.She tasted another forkful—in another moment she was eating.With difficulty Anthony restrained a chuckle; when at length he spoke his words had no possible connection with chicken salad.

This incident, with variations, ran like a lugubrious fugue through the first year of marriage; always it left Anthony baffled, irritated, and depressed.But another rough brushing of temperaments, a question of laundry-bags, he found even more annoying as it ended inevitably in a decisive defeat for him.

One afternoon in Coronado, where they made the longest stay of their trip, more than three weeks, Gloria was arraying herself brilliantly for tea.Anthony, who had been down-stairs listening to the latest rumor bulletins of war in Europe, entered the room, kissed the back of her powdered neck, and went to his dresser.After a great pulling out and pushing in of drawers, evidently unsatisfactory, he turned around to the Unfinished Masterpiece.

"Got any handkerchiefs, Gloria?"he asked.Gloria shook her golden head.

"Not a one.I'm using one of yours."

"The last one, I deduce."He laughed dryly.

"Is it?"She applied an emphatic though very delicate contour to her lips.

"Isn't the laundry back?"

"I don't know."

Anthony hesitated—then, with sudden discernment, opened the closet door.His suspicions were verified.On the hook provided hung the blue bag furnished by the hotel.This was full of his clothes—he had put them there himself.The floor beneath it was littered with an astonishing mass of finery—lingerie, stockings, dresses, nightgowns, and pajamas—most of it scarcely worn but all of it coming indubitably under the general heading of Gloria's laundry.

He stood holding the closet door open.

"Why, Gloria!"

"What?"

The lip line was being erased and corrected according to some mysterious perspective; not a finger trembled as she manipulated the lip-stick, not a glance wavered in his direction.It was a triumph of concentration.

"Haven't you ever sent out the laundry?"

"Is it there?"

"It most certainly is."

"Well, I guess I haven't, then."

"Gloria," began Anthony, sitting down on the bed and trying to catch her mirrored eyes, "you're a nice fellow, you are!I've sent it out every time it's been sent since we left New York, and over a week ago you promised you'd do it for a change.All you'd have to do would be to cram your own junk into that bag and ring for the chambermaid."

"Oh, why fuss about the laundry?"exclaimed Gloria petulantly, "I'll take care of it."

"I haven't fussed about it.I'd just as soon divide the bother with you, but when we run out of handkerchiefs it's darn near time something's done."

Anthony considered that he was being extraordinarily logical.But Gloria, unimpressed, put away her cosmetics and casually offered him her back.

"Hook me up," she suggested; "Anthony, dearest, I forgot all about it.I meant to, honestly, and I will to-day.Don't be cross with your sweetheart."

What could Anthony do then but draw her down upon his knee and kiss a shade of color from her lips.

"But I don't mind," she murmured with a smile, radiant and magnanimous."You can kiss all the paint off my lips any time you want."

They went down to tea.They bought some handkerchiefs in a notion store near by.All was forgotten.

But two days later Anthony looked in the closet and saw the bag still hung limp upon its hook and that the gay and vivid pile on the floor had increased surprisingly in height.

"Gloria!"he cried.

"Oh—" Her voice was full of real distress.Despairingly Anthony went to the phone and called the chambermaid.

"It seems to me," he said impatiently, "that you expect me to be some sort of French valet to you."

Gloria laughed, so infectiously that Anthony was unwise enough to smile.Unfortunate man!In some intangible manner his smile made her mistress of the situation—with an air of injured righteousness she went emphatically to the closet and began pushing her laundry violently into the bag.Anthony watched her—ashamed of himself.

"There!"she said, implying that her fingers had been worked to the bone by a brutal taskmaster.

He considered, nevertheless, that he had given her an object-lesson and that the matter was closed, but on the contrary it was merely beginning.Laundry pile followed laundry pile—at long intervals; dearth of handkerchief followed dearth of handkerchief—at short ones; not to mention dearth of sock, of shirt, of everything.And Anthony found at length that either he must send it out himself or go through the increasingly unpleasant ordeal of a verbal battle with Gloria.

GLORIA AND GENERAL LEE

On their way East they stopped two days in Washington, strolling about with some hostility in its atmosphere of harsh repellent light, of distance without freedom, of pomp without splendor—it seemed a pasty-pale and self-conscious city.The second day they made an ill-advised trip to General Lee's old home at Arlington.

The bus which bore them was crowded with hot, unprosperous people, and Anthony, intimate to Gloria, felt a storm brewing.It broke at the Zoo, where the party stopped for ten minutes.The Zoo, it seemed, smelt of monkeys.Anthony laughed; Gloria called down the curse of Heaven upon monkeys, including in her malevolence all the passengers of the bus and their perspiring offspring who had hied themselves monkey-ward.

Eventually the bus moved on to Arlington.There it met other busses and immediately a swarm of women and children were leaving a trail of peanut-shells through the halls of General Lee and crowding at length into the room where he was married.On the wall of this room a pleasing sign announced in large red letters "Ladies' Toilet."At this final blow Gloria broke down.

"I think it's perfectly terrible!"she said furiously, "the idea of letting these people come here!And of encouraging them by making these houses show-places."

"Well," objected Anthony, "if they weren't kept up they'd go to pieces."

"What if they did!"she exclaimed as they sought the wide pillared porch."Do you think they've left a breath of 1860 here?This has become a thing of 1914."

"Don't you want to preserve old things?"

"But you can't, Anthony.Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay.And just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they're preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them.That graveyard at Tarrytown, for instance.The asses who give money to preserve things have spoiled that too.Sleepy Hollow's gone; Washington Irving's dead and his books are rotting in our estimation year by year—then let the graveyard rot too, as it should, as all things should.Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants."

"So you think that just as a time goes to pieces its houses ought to go too?"

"Of course! Would you value your Keats letter if the signature was traced over to make it last longer? It's just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty. It hasn't any right to look so prosperous. It might care enough for Lee to drop a brick now and then. How many of these—these animals"—she waved her hand around—"get anything from this, for all the histories and guide-books and restorations in existence?How many of them who think that, at best, appreciation is talking in undertones and walking on tiptoes would even come here if it was any trouble?I want it to smell of magnolias instead of peanuts and I want my shoes to crunch on the same gravel that Lee's boots crunched on.There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses—bound for dust—mortal—"

A small boy appeared beside them and, swinging a handful of banana-peels, flung them valiantly in the direction of the Potomac.

SENTIMENT

Simultaneously with the fall of Liège, Anthony and Gloria arrived in New York.In retrospect the six weeks seemed miraculously happy.They had found to a great extent, as most young couples find in some measure, that they possessed in common many fixed ideas and curiosities and odd quirks of mind; they were essentially companionable.

But it had been a struggle to keep many of their conversations on the level of discussions.Arguments were fatal to Gloria's disposition.She had all her life been associated either with her mental inferiors or with men who, under the almost hostile intimidation of her beauty, had not dared to contradict her; naturally, then, it irritated her when Anthony emerged from the state in which her pronouncements were an infallible and ultimate decision.

He failed to realize, at first, that this was the result partly of her "female" education and partly of her beauty, and he was inclined to include her with her entire sex as curiously and definitely limited.It maddened him to find she had no sense of justice.But he discovered that, when a subject did interest her, her brain tired less quickly than his.What he chiefly missed in her mind was the pedantic teleology—the sense of order and accuracy, the sense of life as a mysteriously correlated piece of patchwork, but he understood after a while that such a quality in her would have been incongruous.

Of the things they possessed in common, greatest of all was their almost uncanny pull at each other's hearts.The day they left the hotel in Coronado she sat down on one of the beds while they were packing, and began to weep bitterly.

"Dearest—" His arms were around her; he pulled her head down upon his shoulder."What is it, my own Gloria?Tell me."

"We're going away," she sobbed."Oh, Anthony, it's sort of the first place we've lived together.Our two little beds here—side by side—they'll be always waiting for us, and we're never coming back to 'em any more."

She was tearing at his heart as she always could.Sentiment came over him, rushed into his eyes.

"Gloria, why, we're going on to another room.And two other little beds.We're going to be together all our lives."

Words flooded from her in a low husky voice.

"But it won't be—like our two beds—ever again.Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost—something's left behind.You can't ever quite repeat anything, and I've been so yours, here—"

He held her passionately near, discerning far beyond any criticism of her sentiment, a wise grasping of the minute, if only an indulgence of her desire to cry—Gloria the idler, caresser of her own dreams, extracting poignancy from the memorable things of life and youth.

Later in the afternoon when he returned from the station with the tickets he found her asleep on one of the beds, her arm curled about a black object which he could not at first identify.Coming closer he found it was one of his shoes, not a particularly new one, nor clean one, but her face, tear-stained, was pressed against it, and he understood her ancient and most honorable message.There was almost ecstasy in waking her and seeing her smile at him, shy but well aware of her own nicety of imagination.

With no appraisal of the worth or dross of these two things, it seemed to Anthony that they lay somewhere near the heart of love.

THE GRAY HOUSE

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before.At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ—and once he was an organ-grinder!The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory.A brilliant ball, gay with light romantic laughter, wears through its own silks and satins to show the bare framework of a man-made thing—oh, that eternal hand!—a play, most tragic and most divine, becomes merely a succession of speeches, sweated over by the eternal plagiarist in the clammy hours and acted by men subject to cramps, cowardice, and manly sentiment.

And this time with Gloria and Anthony, this first year of marriage, and the gray house caught them in that stage when the organ-grinder was slowly undergoing his inevitable metamorphosis.She was twenty-three; he was twenty-six.

The gray house was, at first, of sheerly pastoral intent.They lived impatiently in Anthony's apartment for the first fortnight after the return from California, in a stifled atmosphere of open trunks, too many callers, and the eternal laundry-bags.They discussed with their friends the stupendous problem of their future.Dick and Maury would sit with them agreeing solemnly, almost thoughtfully, as Anthony ran through his list of what they "ought" to do, and where they "ought" to live.

"I'd like to take Gloria abroad," he complained, "except for this damn war—and next to that I'd sort of like to have a place in the country, somewhere near New York, of course, where I could write—or whatever I decide to do."

Gloria laughed.

"Isn't he cute?" she required of Maury. "'Whatever he decides to do!' But what am I going to do if he works? Maury, will you take me around if Anthony works?"

"Anyway, I'm not going to work yet," said Anthony quickly.

It was vaguely understood between them that on some misty day he would enter a sort of glorified diplomatic service and be envied by princes and prime ministers for his beautiful wife.

"Well," said Gloria helplessly, "I'm sure I don't know.We talk and talk and never get anywhere, and we ask all our friends and they just answer the way we want 'em to.I wish somebody'd take care of us."

"Why don't you go out to—out to Greenwich or something?"suggested Richard Caramel.

"I'd like that," said Gloria, brightening."Do you think we could get a house there?"

Dick shrugged his shoulders and Maury laughed.

"You two amuse me," he said."Of all the unpractical people!As soon as a place is mentioned you expect us to pull great piles of photographs out of our pockets showing the different styles of architecture available in bungalows."

"That's just what I don't want," wailed Gloria, "a hot stuffy bungalow, with a lot of babies next door and their father cutting the grass in his shirt sleeves—"

"For Heaven's sake, Gloria," interrupted Maury, "nobody wants to lock you up in a bungalow.Who in God's name brought bungalows into the conversation?But you'll never get a place anywhere unless you go out and hunt for it."

"Go where?You say 'go out and hunt for it,' but where?"

With dignity Maury waved his hand paw-like about the room.

"Out anywhere.Out in the country.There're lots of places."

"Thanks."

"Look here!"Richard Caramel brought his yellow eye rakishly into play."The trouble with you two is that you're all disorganized.Do you know anything about New York State?Shut up, Anthony, I'm talking to Gloria."

"Well," she admitted finally, "I've been to two or three house parties in Portchester and around in Connecticut—but, of course, that isn't in New York State, is it?And neither is Morristown," she finished with drowsy irrelevance.

There was a shout of laughter.

"Oh, Lord!"cried Dick, "neither is Morristown!'No, and neither is Santa Barbara, Gloria.Now listen.To begin with, unless you have a fortune there's no use considering any place like Newport or Southhampton or Tuxedo.They're out of the question."

They all agreed to this solemnly.

"And personally I hate New Jersey.Then, of course, there's upper New York, above Tuxedo."

"Too cold," said Gloria briefly."I was there once in an automobile."

"Well, it seems to me there're a lot of towns like Rye between New York and Greenwich where you could buy a little gray house of some—"

Gloria leaped at the phrase triumphantly.For the first time since their return East she knew what she wanted.

"Oh, yes!" she cried. "Oh, yes!that's it: a little gray house with sort of white around and a whole lot of swamp maples just as brown and gold as an October picture in a gallery.Where can we find one?"

"Unfortunately, I've mislaid my list of little gray houses with swamp maples around them—but I'll try to find it.Meanwhile you take a piece of paper and write down the names of seven possible towns.And every day this week you take a trip to one of those towns."

"Oh, gosh!"protested Gloria, collapsing mentally, "why won't you do it for us?I hate trains."

"Well, hire a car, and—"

Gloria yawned.

"I'm tired of discussing it.Seems to me all we do is talk about where to live."

"My exquisite wife wearies of thought," remarked Anthony ironically."She must have a tomato sandwich to stimulate her jaded nerves.Let's go out to tea."

As the unfortunate upshot of this conversation, they took Dick's advice literally, and two days later went out to Rye, where they wandered around with an irritated real estate agent, like bewildered babes in the wood.They were shown houses at a hundred a month which closely adjoined other houses at a hundred a month; they were shown isolated houses to which they invariably took violent dislikes, though they submitted weakly to the agent's desire that they "look at that stove—some stove!"and to a great shaking of doorposts and tapping of walls, intended evidently to show that the house would not immediately collapse, no matter how convincingly it gave that impression.They gazed through windows into interiors furnished either "commercially" with slab-like chairs and unyielding settees, or "home-like" with the melancholy bric-à-brac of other summers—crossed tennis rackets, fit-form couches, and depressing Gibson girls.With a feeling of guilt they looked at a few really nice houses, aloof, dignified, and cool—at three hundred a month.They went away from Rye thanking the real estate agent very much indeed.

On the crowded train back to New York the seat behind was occupied by a super-respirating Latin whose last few meals had obviously been composed entirely of garlic.They reached the apartment gratefully, almost hysterically, and Gloria rushed for a hot bath in the reproachless bathroom.So far as the question of a future abode was concerned both of them were incapacitated for a week.

The matter eventually worked itself out with unhoped-for romance.Anthony ran into the living room one afternoon fairly radiating "the idea."

"I've got it," he was exclaiming as though he had just caught a mouse."We'll get a car."

"Gee whiz!Haven't we got troubles enough taking care of ourselves?"

"Give me a second to explain, can't you?just let's leave our stuff with Dick and just pile a couple of suitcases in our car, the one we're going to buy—we'll have to have one in the country anyway—and just start out in the direction of New Haven.You see, as we get out of commuting distance from New York, the rents'll get cheaper, and as soon as we find a house we want we'll just settle down."

By his frequent and soothing interpolation of the word "just" he aroused her lethargic enthusiasm.Strutting violently about the room, he simulated a dynamic and irresistible efficiency."We'll buy a car to-morrow."

Life, limping after imagination's ten-league boots, saw them out of town a week later in a cheap but sparkling new roadster, saw them through the chaotic unintelligible Bronx, then over a wide murky district which alternated cheerless blue-green wastes with suburbs of tremendous and sordid activity.They left New York at eleven and it was well past a hot and beatific noon when they moved rakishly through Pelham.

"These aren't towns," said Gloria scornfully, "these are just city blocks plumped down coldly into waste acres.I imagine all the men here have their mustaches stained from drinking their coffee too quickly in the morning."

"And play pinochle on the commuting trains."

"What's pinochle?"

"Don't be so literal.How should I know?But it sounds as though they ought to play it."

"I like it.It sounds as if it were something where you sort of cracked your knuckles or something....Let me drive."

Anthony looked at her suspiciously.

"You swear you're a good driver?"

"Since I was fourteen."

He stopped the car cautiously at the side of the road and they changed seats.Then with a horrible grinding noise the car was put in gear, Gloria adding an accompaniment of laughter which seemed to Anthony disquieting and in the worst possible taste.

"Here we go!"she yelled."Whoo-oop!"

Their heads snapped back like marionettes on a single wire as the car leaped ahead and curved retchingly about a standing milk-wagon, whose driver stood up on his seat and bellowed after them.In the immemorial tradition of the road Anthony retorted with a few brief epigrams as to the grossness of the milk-delivering profession.He cut his remarks short, however, and turned to Gloria with the growing conviction that he had made a grave mistake in relinquishing control and that Gloria was a driver of many eccentricities and of infinite carelessness.

"Remember now!"he warned her nervously, "the man said we oughtn't to go over twenty miles an hour for the first five thousand miles."

She nodded briefly, but evidently intending to accomplish the prohibitive distance as quickly as possible, slightly increased her speed.A moment later he made another attempt.

"See that sign?Do you want to get us pinched?"

"Oh, for Heaven's sake," cried Gloria in exasperation, "you always exaggerate things so!"

"Well, I don't want to get arrested."

"Who's arresting you?You're so persistent—just like you were about my cough medicine last night."

"It was for your own good."

"Ha!I might as well be living with mama."

"What a thing to say to me!"

A standing policeman swerved into view, was hastily passed.

"See him?"demanded Anthony.

"Oh, you drive me crazy!He didn't arrest us, did he?"

"When he does it'll be too late," countered Anthony brilliantly.

Her reply was scornful, almost injured.

"Why, this old thing won't go over thirty-five."

"It isn't old."

"It is in spirit."

That afternoon the car joined the laundry-bags and Gloria's appetite as one of the trinity of contention.He warned her of railroad tracks; he pointed out approaching automobiles; finally he insisted on taking the wheel and a furious, insulted Gloria sat silently beside him between the towns of Larchmont and Rye.

But it was due to this furious silence of hers that the gray house materialized from its abstraction, for just beyond Rye he surrendered gloomily to it and re-relinquished the wheel.Mutely he beseeched her and Gloria, instantly cheered, vowed to be more careful.But because a discourteous street-car persisted callously in remaining upon its track Gloria ducked down a side-street—and thereafter that afternoon was never able to find her way back to the Post Road.The street they finally mistook for it lost its Post-Road aspect when it had gone five miles from Cos Cob.Its macadam became gravel, then dirt—moreover, it narrowed and developed a border of maple trees, through which filtered the weltering sun, making its endless experiments with shadow designs upon the long grass.

"We're lost now," complained Anthony.

"Read that sign!"

"Marietta—Five Miles.What's Marietta?"

"Never heard of it, but let's go on.We can't turn here and there's probably a detour back to the Post Road."

The way became scarred with deepening ruts and insidious shoulders of stone.Three farmhouses faced them momentarily, slid by.A town sprang up in a cluster of dull roofs around a white tall steeple.

Then Gloria, hesitating between two approaches, and making her choice too late, drove over a fire-hydrant and ripped the transmission violently from the car.

It was dark when the real-estate agent of Marietta showed them the gray house.They came upon it just west of the village, where it rested against a sky that was a warm blue cloak buttoned with tiny stars.The gray house had been there when women who kept cats were probably witches, when Paul Revere made false teeth in Boston preparatory to arousing the great commercial people, when our ancestors were gloriously deserting Washington in droves.Since those days the house had been bolstered up in a feeble corner, considerably repartitioned and newly plastered inside, amplified by a kitchen and added to by a side-porch—but, save for where some jovial oaf had roofed the new kitchen with red tin, Colonial it defiantly remained.

"How did you happen to come to Marietta?"demanded the real-estate agent in a tone that was first cousin to suspicion.He was showing them through four spacious and airy bedrooms.

"We broke down," explained Gloria."I drove over a fire-hydrant and we had ourselves towed to the garage and then we saw your sign."

The man nodded, unable to follow such a sally of spontaneity.There was something subtly immoral in doing anything without several months' consideration.

They signed a lease that night and, in the agent's car, returned jubilantly to the somnolent and dilapidated Marietta Inn, which was too broken for even the chance immoralities and consequent gaieties of a country road-house.Half the night they lay awake planning the things they were to do there.Anthony was going to work at an astounding pace on his history and thus ingratiate himself with his cynical grandfather....When the car was repaired they would explore the country and join the nearest "really nice" club, where Gloria would play golf "or something" while Anthony wrote.This, of course, was Anthony's idea—Gloria was sure she wanted but to read and dream and be fed tomato sandwiches and lemonades by some angelic servant still in a shadowy hinterland.Between paragraphs Anthony would come and kiss her as she lay indolently in the hammock....The hammock!a host of new dreams in tune to its imagined rhythm, while the wind stirred it and waves of sun undulated over the shadows of blown wheat, or the dusty road freckled and darkened with quiet summer rain....

And guests—here they had a long argument, both of them trying to be extraordinarily mature and far-sighted.Anthony claimed that they would need people at least every other week-end "as a sort of change."This provoked an involved and extremely sentimental conversation as to whether Anthony did not consider Gloria change enough.Though he assured her that he did, she insisted upon doubting him....Eventually the conversation assumed its eternal monotone: "What then?Oh, what'll we do then?"

"Well, we'll have a dog," suggested Anthony.

"I don't want one.I want a kitty."She went thoroughly and with great enthusiasm into the history, habits, and tastes of a cat she had once possessed.Anthony considered that it must have been a horrible character with neither personal magnetism nor a loyal heart.

Later they slept, to wake an hour before dawn with the gray house dancing in phantom glory before their dazzled eyes.

THE SOUL OF GLORIA

For that autumn the gray house welcomed them with a rush of sentiment that falsified its cynical old age.True, there were the laundry-bags, there was Gloria's appetite, there was Anthony's tendency to brood and his imaginative "nervousness," but there were intervals also of an unhoped-for serenity.Close together on the porch they would wait for the moon to stream across the silver acres of farmland, jump a thick wood and tumble waves of radiance at their feet.In such a moonlight Gloria's face was of a pervading, reminiscent white, and with a modicum of effort they would slip off the blinders of custom and each would find in the other almost the quintessential romance of the vanished June.

One night while her head lay upon his heart and their cigarettes glowed in swerving buttons of light through the dome of darkness over the bed, she spoke for the first time and fragmentarily of the men who had hung for brief moments on her beauty.

"Do you ever think of them?"he asked her.

"Only occasionally—when something happens that recalls a particular man."

"What do you remember—their kisses?"

"All sorts of things....Men are different with women."

"Different in what way?"

"Oh, entirely—and quite inexpressibly.Men who had the most firmly rooted reputation for being this way or that would sometimes be surprisingly inconsistent with me.Brutal men were tender, negligible men were astonishingly loyal and lovable, and, often, honorable men took attitudes that were anything but honorable."

"For instance?"

"Well, there was a boy named Percy Wolcott from Cornell who was quite a hero in college, a great athlete, and saved a lot of people from a fire or something like that.But I soon found he was stupid in a rather dangerous way."

"What way?"

"It seems he had some naïve conception of a woman 'fit to be his wife,' a particular conception that I used to run into a lot and that always drove me wild.He demanded a girl who'd never been kissed and who liked to sew and sit home and pay tribute to his self-esteem.And I'll bet a hat if he's gotten an idiot to sit and be stupid with him he's tearing out on the side with some much speedier lady."

"I'd be sorry for his wife."

"I wouldn't.Think what an ass she'd be not to realize it before she married him.He's the sort whose idea of honoring and respecting a woman would be never to give her any excitement.With the best intentions, he was deep in the dark ages."

"What was his attitude toward you?"

"I'm coming to that.As I told you—or did I tell you?—he was mighty good-looking: big brown honest eyes and one of those smiles that guarantee the heart behind it is twenty-karat gold.Being young and credulous, I thought he had some discretion, so I kissed him fervently one night when we were riding around after a dance at the Homestead at Hot Springs.It had been a wonderful week, I remember—with the most luscious trees spread like green lather, sort of, all over the valley and a mist rising out of them on October mornings like bonfires lit to turn them brown—"

"How about your friend with the ideals?"interrupted Anthony.

"It seems that when he kissed me he began to think that perhaps he could get away with a little more, that I needn't be 'respected' like this Beatrice Fairfax glad-girl of his imagination."

"What'd he do?"

"Not much.I pushed him off a sixteen-foot embankment before he was well started."

"Hurt him?"inquired Anthony with a laugh.

"Broke his arm and sprained his ankle.He told the story all over Hot Springs, and when his arm healed a man named Barley who liked me fought him and broke it over again.Oh, it was all an awful mess.He threatened to sue Barley, and Barley—he was from Georgia—was seen buying a gun in town.But before that mama had dragged me North again, much against my will, so I never did find out all that happened—though I saw Barley once in the Vanderbilt lobby."

Anthony laughed long and loud.

"What a career!I suppose I ought to be furious because you've kissed so many men.I'm not, though."

At this she sat up in bed.

"It's funny, but I'm so sure that those kisses left no mark on me—no taint of promiscuity, I mean—even though a man once told me in all seriousness that he hated to think I'd been a public drinking glass."

"He had his nerve."

"I just laughed and told him to think of me rather as a loving-cup that goes from hand to hand but should be valued none the less."

"Somehow it doesn't bother me—on the other hand it would, of course, if you'd done any more than kiss them. But I believe you're absolutely incapable of jealousy except as hurt vanity. Why don't you care what I've done? Wouldn't you prefer it if I'd been absolutely innocent?"

"It's all in the impression it might have made on you. My kisses were because the man was good-looking, or because there was a slick moon, or even because I've felt vaguely sentimental and a little stirred. But that's all—it's had utterly no effect on me. But you'd remember and let memories haunt you and worry you."

"Haven't you ever kissed any one like you've kissed me?"

"No," she answered simply."As I've told you, men have tried—oh, lots of things.Any pretty girl has that experience....You see," she resumed, "it doesn't matter to me how many women you've stayed with in the past, so long as it was merely a physical satisfaction, but I don't believe I could endure the idea of your ever having lived with another woman for a protracted period or even having wanted to marry some possible girl.It's different somehow.There'd be all the little intimacies remembered—and they'd dull that freshness that after all is the most precious part of love."

Rapturously he pulled her down beside him on the pillow.

"Oh, my darling," he whispered, "as if I remembered anything but your dear kisses."

Then Gloria, in a very mild voice:

"Anthony, did I hear anybody say they were thirsty?"

Anthony laughed abruptly and with a sheepish and amused grin got out of bed.

"With just a little piece of ice in the water," she added. "Do you suppose I could have that?"

Gloria used the adjective "little" whenever she asked a favor—it made the favor sound less arduous. But Anthony laughed again—whether she wanted a cake of ice or a marble of it, he must go down-stairs to the kitchen.... Her voice followed him through the hall: "And just a little cracker with just a little marmalade on it...."

"Oh, gosh!" sighed Anthony in rapturous slang, "she's wonderful, that girl! She has it!"

 

"When we have a baby," she began one day—this, it had already been decided, was to be after three years—"I want it to look like you."

"Except its legs," he insinuated slyly.

"Oh, yes, except his legs.He's got to have my legs.But the rest of him can be you."

"My nose?"

Gloria hesitated.

"Well, perhaps my nose.But certainly your eyes—and my mouth, and I guess my shape of the face.I wonder; I think he'd be sort of cute if he had my hair."

"My dear Gloria, you've appropriated the whole baby."

"Well, I didn't mean to," she apologized cheerfully.

"Let him have my neck at least," he urged, regarding himself gravely in the glass."You've often said you liked my neck because the Adam's apple doesn't show, and, besides, your neck's too short."

"Why, it is not!"she cried indignantly, turning to the mirror, "it's just right.I don't believe I've ever seen a better neck."

"It's too short," he repeated teasingly.

"Short?"Her tone expressed exasperated wonder.

"Short? You're crazy!" She elongated and contracted it to convince herself of its reptilian sinuousness. "Do you call that a short neck?"

"One of the shortest I've ever seen."

For the first time in weeks tears started from Gloria's eyes and the look she gave him had a quality of real pain.

"Oh, Anthony—"

"My Lord, Gloria!" He approached her in bewilderment and took her elbows in his hands. "Don't cry, please!Didn't you know I was only kidding?Gloria, look at me!Why, dearest, you've got the longest neck I've ever seen.Honestly."

Her tears dissolved in a twisted smile.

"Well—you shouldn't have said that, then.Let's talk about the b-baby."

Anthony paced the floor and spoke as though rehearsing for a debate.

"To put it briefly, there are two babies we could have, two distinct and logical babies, utterly differentiated.There's the baby that's the combination of the best of both of us.Your body, my eyes, my mind, your intelligence—and then there is the baby which is our worst—my body, your disposition, and my irresolution."

"I like that second baby," she said.

"What I'd really like," continued Anthony, "would be to have two sets of triplets one year apart and then experiment with the six boys—"

"Poor me," she interjected.

"—I'd educate them each in a different country and by a different system and when they were twenty-three I'd call them together and see what they were like."

"Let's have 'em all with my neck," suggested Gloria.

THE END OF A CHAPTER

The car was at length repaired and with a deliberate vengeance took up where it left off the business of causing infinite dissension.Who should drive?How fast should Gloria go?These two questions and the eternal recriminations involved ran through the days.They motored to the Post-Road towns, Rye, Portchester, and Greenwich, and called on a dozen friends, mostly Gloria's, who all seemed to be in different stages of having babies and in this respect as well as in others bored her to a point of nervous distraction.For an hour after each visit she would bite her fingers furiously and be inclined to take out her rancor on Anthony.

"I loathe women," she cried in a mild temper."What on earth can you say to them—except talk 'lady-lady'?I've enthused over a dozen babies that I've wanted only to choke.And every one of those girls is either incipiently jealous and suspicious of her husband if he's charming or beginning to be bored with him if he isn't."

"Don't you ever intend to see any women?"

"I don't know.They never seem clean to me—never—never.Except just a few.Constance Shaw—you know, the Mrs. Merriam who came over to see us last Tuesday—is almost the only one.She's so tall and fresh-looking and stately."

"I don't like them so tall."

Though they went to several dinner dances at various country clubs, they decided that the autumn was too nearly over for them to "go out" on any scale, even had they been so inclined.He hated golf; Gloria liked it only mildly, and though she enjoyed a violent rush that some undergraduates gave her one night and was glad that Anthony should be proud of her beauty, she also perceived that their hostess for the evening, a Mrs. Granby, was somewhat disquieted by the fact that Anthony's classmate, Alec Granby, joined with enthusiasm in the rush.The Granbys never phoned again, and though Gloria laughed, it piqued her not a little.

"You see," she explained to Anthony, "if I wasn't married it wouldn't worry her—but she's been to the movies in her day and she thinks I may be a vampire.But the point is that placating such people requires an effort that I'm simply unwilling to make....And those cute little freshmen making eyes at me and paying me idiotic compliments!I've grown up, Anthony."

Marietta itself offered little social life.Half a dozen farm-estates formed a hectagon around it, but these belonged to ancient men who displayed themselves only as inert, gray-thatched lumps in the back of limousines on their way to the station, whither they were sometimes accompanied by equally ancient and doubly massive wives.The townspeople were a particularly uninteresting type—unmarried females were predominant for the most part—with school-festival horizons and souls bleak as the forbidding white architecture of the three churches.The only native with whom they came into close contact was the broad-hipped, broad-shouldered Swedish girl who came every day to do their work.She was silent and efficient, and Gloria, after finding her weeping violently into her bowed arms upon the kitchen table, developed an uncanny fear of her and stopped complaining about the food.Because of her untold and esoteric grief the girl stayed on.

Gloria's penchant for premonitions and her bursts of vague supernaturalism were a surprise to Anthony.Either some complex, properly and scientifically inhibited in the early years with her Bilphistic mother, or some inherited hypersensitiveness, made her susceptible to any suggestion of the psychic, and, far from gullible about the motives of people, she was inclined to credit any extraordinary happening attributed to the whimsical perambulations of the buried.The desperate squeakings about the old house on windy nights that to Anthony were burglars with revolvers ready in hand represented to Gloria the auras, evil and restive, of dead generations, expiating the inexpiable upon the ancient and romantic hearth.One night, because of two swift bangs down-stairs, which Anthony fearfully but unavailingly investigated, they lay awake nearly until dawn asking each other examination-paper questions about the history of the world.

In October Muriel came out for a two weeks' visit.Gloria had called her on long-distance, and Miss Kane ended the conversation characteristically by saying "All-ll-ll righty.I'll be there with bells!"She arrived with a dozen popular songs under her arm.

"You ought to have a phonograph out here in the country," she said, "just a little Vic—they don't cost much.Then whenever you're lonesome you can have Caruso or Al Jolson right at your door."

She worried Anthony to distraction by telling him that "he was the first clever man she had ever known and she got so tired of shallow people."He wondered that people fell in love with such women.Yet he supposed that under a certain impassioned glance even she might take on a softness and promise.

But Gloria, violently showing off her love for Anthony, was diverted into a state of purring content.

Finally Richard Caramel arrived for a garrulous and to Gloria painfully literary week-end, during which he discussed himself with Anthony long after she lay in childlike sleep up-stairs.

"It's been mighty funny, this success and all," said Dick."Just before the novel appeared I'd been trying, without success, to sell some short stories.Then, after my book came out, I polished up three and had them accepted by one of the magazines that had rejected them before.I've done a lot of them since; publishers don't pay me for my book till this winter."

"Don't let the victor belong to the spoils."

"You mean write trash?"He considered."If you mean deliberately injecting a slushy fade-out into each one, I'm not.But I don't suppose I'm being so careful.I'm certainly writing faster and I don't seem to be thinking as much as I used to.Perhaps it's because I don't get any conversation, now that you're married and Maury's gone to Philadelphia.Haven't the old urge and ambition.Early success and all that."

"Doesn't it worry you?"

"Frantically.I get a thing I call sentence-fever that must be like buck-fever—it's a sort of intense literary self-consciousness that comes when I try to force myself.But the really awful days aren't when I think I can't write.They're when I wonder whether any writing is worth while at all—I mean whether I'm not a sort of glorified buffoon."

"I like to hear you talk that way," said Anthony with a touch of his old patronizing insolence."I was afraid you'd gotten a bit idiotic over your work.Read the damnedest interview you gave out——"

Dick interrupted with an agonized expression.

"Good Lord!Don't mention it.Young lady wrote it—most admiring young lady.Kept telling me my work was 'strong,' and I sort of lost my head and made a lot of strange pronouncements.Some of it was good, though, don't you think?"

"Oh, yes; that part about the wise writer writing for the youth of his generation, the critic of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterward."

"Oh, I believe a lot of it," admitted Richard Caramel with a faint beam."It simply was a mistake to give it out."

 

In November they moved into Anthony's apartment, from which they sallied triumphantly to the Yale-Harvard and Harvard-Princeton football games, to the St.Nicholas ice-skating rink, to a thorough round of the theatres and to a miscellany of entertainments—from small, staid dances to the great affairs that Gloria loved, held in those few houses where lackeys with powdered wigs scurried around in magnificent Anglomania under the direction of gigantic majordomos.Their intention was to go abroad the first of the year or, at any rate, when the war was over.Anthony had actually completed a Chestertonian essay on the twelfth century by way of introduction to his proposed book and Gloria had done some extensive research work on the question of Russian sable coats—in fact the winter was approaching quite comfortably, when the Bilphistic demiurge decided suddenly in mid-December that Mrs. Gilbert's soul had aged sufficiently in its present incarnation.In consequence Anthony took a miserable and hysterical Gloria out to Kansas City, where, in the fashion of mankind, they paid the terrible and mind-shaking deference to the dead.

Mr. Gilbert became, for the first and last time in his life, a truly pathetic figure.That woman he had broken to wait upon his body and play congregation to his mind had ironically deserted him—just when he could not much longer have supported her.Never again would he be able so satisfactorily to bore and bully a human soul.

CHAPTER II

SYMPOSIUM

Gloria had lulled Anthony's mind to sleep. She, who seemed of all women the wisest and the finest, hung like a brilliant curtain across his doorways, shutting out the light of the sun. In those first years what he believed bore invariably the stamp of Gloria; he saw the sun always through the pattern of the curtain.

It was a sort of lassitude that brought them back to Marietta for another summer.Through a golden enervating spring they had loitered, restive and lazily extravagant, along the California coast, joining other parties intermittently and drifting from Pasadena to Coronado, from Coronado to Santa Barbara, with no purpose more apparent than Gloria's desire to dance by different music or catch some infinitesimal variant among the changing colors of the sea.Out of the Pacific there rose to greet them savage rocklands and equally barbaric hostelries built that at tea-time one might drowse into a languid wicker bazaar glorified by the polo costumes of Southhampton and Lake Forest and Newport and Palm Beach.And, as the waves met and splashed and glittered in the most placid of the bays, so they joined this group and that, and with them shifted stations, murmuring ever of those strange unsubstantial gaieties in wait just over the next green and fruitful valley.

A simple healthy leisure class it was—the best of the men not unpleasantly undergraduate—they seemed to be on a perpetual candidates list for some etherealized "Porcellian" or "Skull and Bones" extended out indefinitely into the world; the women, of more than average beauty, fragilely athletic, somewhat idiotic as hostesses but charming and infinitely decorative as guests.Sedately and gracefully they danced the steps of their selection in the balmy tea hours, accomplishing with a certain dignity the movements so horribly burlesqued by clerk and chorus girl the country over.It seemed ironic that in this lone and discredited offspring of the arts Americans should excel, unquestionably.

Having danced and splashed through a lavish spring, Anthony and Gloria found that they had spent too much money and for this must go into retirement for a certain period.There was Anthony's "work," they said.Almost before they knew it they were back in the gray house, more aware now that other lovers had slept there, other names had been called over the banisters, other couples had sat upon the porch steps watching the gray-green fields and the black bulk of woods beyond.

It was the same Anthony, more restless, inclined to quicken only under the stimulus of several high-balls, faintly, almost imperceptibly, apathetic toward Gloria.But Gloria—she would be twenty-four in August and was in an attractive but sincere panic about it.Six years to thirty!Had she been less in love with Anthony her sense of the flight of time would have expressed itself in a reawakened interest in other men, in a deliberate intention of extracting a transient gleam of romance from every potential lover who glanced at her with lowered brows over a shining dinner table.She said to Anthony one day:

"How I feel is that if I wanted anything I'd take it.That's what I've always thought all my life.But it happens that I want you, and so I just haven't room for any other desires."

They were bound eastward through a parched and lifeless Indiana, and she had looked up from one of her beloved moving picture magazines to find a casual conversation suddenly turned grave.

Anthony frowned out the car window.As the track crossed a country road a farmer appeared momentarily in his wagon; he was chewing on a straw and was apparently the same farmer they had passed a dozen times before, sitting in silent and malignant symbolism.As Anthony turned to Gloria his frown intensified.

"You worry me," he objected; "I can imagine wanting another woman under certain transitory circumstances, but I can't imagine taking her."

"But I don't feel that way, Anthony.I can't be bothered resisting things I want.My way is not to want them—to want nobody but you."

"Yet when I think that if you just happened to take a fancy to some one—"

"Oh, don't be an idiot!"she exclaimed."There'd be nothing casual about it.And I can't even imagine the possibility."

This emphatically closed the conversation.Anthony's unfailing appreciation made her happier in his company than in any one's else.She definitely enjoyed him—she loved him.So the summer began very much as had the one before.

There was, however, one radical change in ménage.The icy-hearted Scandinavian, whose austere cooking and sardonic manner of waiting on table had so depressed Gloria, gave way to an exceedingly efficient Japanese whose name was Tanalahaka, but who confessed that he heeded any summons which included the dissyllable "Tana."

Tana was unusually small even for a Japanese, and displayed a somewhat naïve conception of himself as a man of the world.On the day of his arrival from "R.Gugimoniki, Japanese Reliable Employment Agency," he called Anthony into his room to see the treasures of his trunk.These included a large collection of Japanese post cards, which he was all for explaining to his employer at once, individually and at great length.Among them were half a dozen of pornographic intent and plainly of American origin, though the makers had modestly omitted both their names and the form for mailing.He next brought out some of his own handiwork—a pair of American pants, which he had made himself, and two suits of solid silk underwear.He informed Anthony confidentially as to the purpose for which these latter were reserved.The next exhibit was a rather good copy of an etching of Abraham Lincoln, to whose face he had given an unmistakable Japanese cast.Last came a flute; he had made it himself but it was broken: he was going to fix it soon.

After these polite formalities, which Anthony conjectured must be native to Japan, Tana delivered a long harangue in splintered English on the relation of master and servant from which Anthony gathered that he had worked on large estates but had always quarrelled with the other servants because they were not honest.They had a great time over the word "honest," and in fact became rather irritated with each other, because Anthony persisted stubbornly that Tana was trying to say "hornets," and even went to the extent of buzzing in the manner of a bee and flapping his arms to imitate wings.

After three-quarters of an hour Anthony was released with the warm assurance that they would have other nice chats in which Tana would tell "how we do in my countree."

Such was Tana's garrulous première in the gray house—and he fulfilled its promise.Though he was conscientious and honorable, he was unquestionably a terrific bore.He seemed unable to control his tongue, sometimes continuing from paragraph to paragraph with a look akin to pain in his small brown eyes.

Sunday and Monday afternoons he read the comic sections of the newspapers.One cartoon which contained a facetious Japanese butler diverted him enormously, though he claimed that the protagonist, who to Anthony appeared clearly Oriental, had really an American face.The difficulty with the funny paper was that when, aided by Anthony, he had spelled out the last three pictures and assimilated their context with a concentration surely adequate for Kant's "Critique," he had entirely forgotten what the first pictures were about.

In the middle of June Anthony and Gloria celebrated their first anniversary by having a "date."Anthony knocked at the door and she ran to let him in.Then they sat together on the couch calling over those names they had made for each other, new combinations of endearments ages old.Yet to this "date" was appended no attenuated good-night with its ecstasy of regret.

 

Later in June horror leered out at Gloria, struck at her and frightened her bright soul back half a generation.Then slowly it faded out, faded back into that impenetrable darkness whence it had come—taking relentlessly its modicum of youth.

With an infallible sense of the dramatic it chose a little railroad station in a wretched village near Portchester.The station platform lay all day bare as a prairie, exposed to the dusty yellow sun and to the glance of that most obnoxious type of countryman who lives near a metropolis and has attained its cheap smartness without its urbanity.A dozen of these yokels, red-eyed, cheerless as scarecrows, saw the incident.Dimly it passed across their confused and uncomprehending minds, taken at its broadest for a coarse joke, at its subtlest for a "shame."Meanwhile there upon the platform a measure of brightness faded from the world.

With Eric Merriam, Anthony had been sitting over a decanter of Scotch all the hot summer afternoon, while Gloria and Constance Merriam swam and sunned themselves at the Beach Club, the latter under a striped parasol-awning, Gloria stretched sensuously upon the soft hot sand, tanning her inevitable legs.Later they had all four played with inconsequential sandwiches; then Gloria had risen, tapping Anthony's knee with her parasol to get his attention.

"We've got to go, dear."

"Now?"He looked at her unwillingly.At that moment nothing seemed of more importance than to idle on that shady porch drinking mellowed Scotch, while his host reminisced interminably on the byplay of some forgotten political campaign.

"We've really got to go," repeated Gloria."We can get a taxi to the station....Come on, Anthony!"she commanded a bit more imperiously.

"Now see here—" Merriam, his yarn cut off, made conventional objections, meanwhile provocatively filling his guest's glass with a high-ball that should have been sipped through ten minutes. But at Gloria's annoyed "We really must!" Anthony drank it off, got to his feet and made an elaborate bow to his hostess.

"It seems we 'must,'" he said, with little grace.

In a minute he was following Gloria down a garden-walk between tall rose-bushes, her parasol brushing gently the June-blooming leaves.Most inconsiderate, he thought, as they reached the road.He felt with injured naïvete that Gloria should not have interrupted such innocent and harmless enjoyment.The whiskey had both soothed and clarified the restless things in his mind.It occurred to him that she had taken this same attitude several times before.Was he always to retreat from pleasant episodes at a touch of her parasol or a flicker of her eye?His unwillingness blurred to ill will, which rose within him like a resistless bubble.He kept silent, perversely inhibiting a desire to reproach her.They found a taxi in front of the Inn; rode silently to the little station....

Then Anthony knew what he wanted—to assert his will against this cool and impervious girl, to obtain with one magnificent effort a mastery that seemed infinitely desirable.

"Let's go over to see the Barneses," he said without looking at her."I don't feel like going home."

—Mrs. Barnes, née Rachael Jerryl, had a summer place several miles from Redgate.

"We went there day before yesterday," she answered shortly.

"I'm sure they'd be glad to see us."He felt that that was not a strong enough note, braced himself stubbornly, and added: "I want to see the Barneses.I haven't any desire to go home."

"Well, I haven't any desire to go to the Barneses."

Suddenly they stared at each other.

"Why, Anthony," she said with annoyance, "this is Sunday night and they probably have guests for supper.Why we should go in at this hour—"

"Then why couldn't we have stayed at the Merriams'?"he burst out."Why go home when we were having a perfectly decent time?They asked us to supper."

"They had to.Give me the money and I'll get the railroad tickets."

"I certainly will not!I'm in no humour for a ride in that damn hot train."

Gloria stamped her foot on the platform.

"Anthony, you act as if you're tight!"

"On the contrary, I'm perfectly sober."

But his voice had slipped into a husky key and she knew with certainty that this was untrue.

"If you're sober you'll give me the money for the tickets."

But it was too late to talk to him that way.In his mind was but one idea—that Gloria was being selfish, that she was always being selfish and would continue to be unless here and now he asserted himself as her master.This was the occasion of all occasions, since for a whim she had deprived him of a pleasure.His determination solidified, approached momentarily a dull and sullen hate.

"I won't go in the train," he said, his voice trembling a little with anger."We're going to the Barneses."

"I'm not!"she cried."If you go I'm going home alone."

"Go on, then."

Without a word she turned toward the ticket office; simultaneously he remembered that she had some money with her and that this was not the sort of victory he wanted, the sort he must have.He took a step after her and seized her arm.

"See here!" he muttered, "you're not going alone!"

"I certainly am—why, Anthony!"This exclamation as she tried to pull away from him and he only tightened his grasp.

He looked at her with narrowed and malicious eyes.

"Let go!" Her cry had a quality of fierceness. "If you have any decency you'll let go."

"Why?"He knew why.But he took a confused and not quite confident pride in holding her there.

"I'm going home, do you understand?And you're going to let me go!"

"No, I'm not."

Her eyes were burning now.

"Are you going to make a scene here?"

"I say you're not going!I'm tired of your eternal selfishness!"

"I only want to go home."Two wrathful tears started from her eyes.

"This time you're going to do what I say."

Slowly her body straightened: her head went back in a gesture of infinite scorn.

"I hate you!" Her low words were expelled like venom through her clenched teeth. "Oh, let me go! Oh, I hate you!" She tried to jerk herself away but he only grasped the other arm. "I hate you! I hate you!"

At Gloria's fury his uncertainty returned, but he felt that now he had gone too far to give in.It seemed that he had always given in and that in her heart she had despised him for it.Ah, she might hate him now, but afterward she would admire him for his dominance.

The approaching train gave out a premonitory siren that tumbled melodramatically toward them down the glistening blue tracks.Gloria tugged and strained to free herself, and words older than the Book of Genesis came to her lips.

"Oh, you brute!"she sobbed."Oh, you brute!Oh, I hate you!Oh, you brute!Oh—"

On the station platform other prospective passengers were beginning to turn and stare; the drone of the train was audible, it increased to a clamor.Gloria's efforts redoubled, then ceased altogether, and she stood there trembling and hot-eyed at this helpless humiliation, as the engine roared and thundered into the station.

Low, below the flood of steam and the grinding of the brakes came her voice:

"Oh, if there was one man here you couldn't do this! You couldn't do this! You coward! You coward, oh, you coward!"

Anthony, silent, trembling himself, gripped her rigidly, aware that faces, dozens of them, curiously unmoved, shadows of a dream, were regarding him.Then the bells distilled metallic crashes that were like physical pain, the smoke-stacks volleyed in slow acceleration at the sky, and in a moment of noise and gray gaseous turbulence the line of faces ran by, moved off, became indistinct—until suddenly there was only the sun slanting east across the tracks and a volume of sound decreasing far off like a train made out of tin thunder.He dropped her arms. He had won.

Now, if he wished, he might laugh.The test was done and he had sustained his will with violence.Let leniency walk in the wake of victory.

"We'll hire a car here and drive back to Marietta," he said with fine reserve.

For answer Gloria seized his hand with both of hers and raising it to her mouth bit deeply into his thumb.He scarcely noticed the pain; seeing the blood spurt he absent-mindedly drew out his handkerchief and wrapped the wound.That too was part of the triumph he supposed—it was inevitable that defeat should thus be resented—and as such was beneath notice.

She was sobbing, almost without tears, profoundly and bitterly.

"I won't go! I won't go! You—can't—make—me—go! You've—you've killed any love I ever had for you, and any respect. But all that's left in me would die before I'd move from this place. Oh, if I'd thought you'd lay your hands on me—"

"You're going with me," he said brutally, "if I have to carry you."

He turned, beckoned to a taxicab, told the driver to go to Marietta.The man dismounted and swung the door open.Anthony faced his wife and said between his clenched teeth:

"Will you get in? —or will I put you in?"

With a subdued cry of infinite pain and despair she yielded herself up and got into the car.

 

All the long ride, through the increasing dark of twilight, she sat huddled in her side of the car, her silence broken by an occasional dry and solitary sob.Anthony stared out the window, his mind working dully on the slowly changing significance of what had occurred.Something was wrong—that last cry of Gloria's had struck a chord which echoed posthumously and with incongruous disquiet in his heart.He must be right—yet, she seemed such a pathetic little thing now, broken and dispirited, humiliated beyond the measure of her lot to bear.The sleeves of her dress were torn; her parasol was gone, forgotten on the platform.It was a new costume, he remembered, and she had been so proud of it that very morning when they had left the house....He began wondering if any one they knew had seen the incident.And persistently there recurred to him her cry:

"All that's left in me would die—"

This gave him a confused and increasing worry.It fitted so well with the Gloria who lay in the corner—no longer a proud Gloria, nor any Gloria he had known.He asked himself if it were possible.While he did not believe she would cease to love him—this, of course, was unthinkable—it was yet problematical whether Gloria without her arrogance, her independence, her virginal confidence and courage, would be the girl of his glory, the radiant woman who was precious and charming because she was ineffably, triumphantly herself.

He was very drunk even then, so drunk as not to realize his own drunkenness.When they reached the gray house he went to his own room and, his mind still wrestling helplessly and sombrely with what he had done, fell into a deep stupor on his bed.

 

It was after one o'clock and the hall seemed extraordinarily quiet when Gloria, wide-eyed and sleepless, traversed it and pushed open the door of his room.He had been too befuddled to open the windows and the air was stale and thick with whiskey.She stood for a moment by his bed, a slender, exquisitely graceful figure in her boyish silk pajamas—then with abandon she flung herself upon him, half waking him in the frantic emotion of her embrace, dropping her warm tears upon his throat.

"Oh, Anthony!"she cried passionately, "oh, my darling, you don't know what you did!"

Yet in the morning, coming early into her room, he knelt down by her bed and cried like a little boy, as though it was his heart that had been broken.

"It seemed, last night," she said gravely, her fingers playing in his hair, "that all the part of me you loved, the part that was worth knowing, all the pride and fire, was gone.I knew that what was left of me would always love you, but never in quite the same way."

Nevertheless, she was aware even then that she would forget in time and that it is the manner of life seldom to strike but always to wear away.After that morning the incident was never mentioned and its deep wound healed with Anthony's hand—and if there was triumph some darker force than theirs possessed it, possessed the knowledge and the victory.

NIETZSCHEAN INCIDENT

Gloria's independence, like all sincere and profound qualities, had begun unconsciously, but, once brought to her attention by Anthony's fascinated discovery of it, it assumed more nearly the proportions of a formal code.From her conversation it might be assumed that all her energy and vitality went into a violent affirmation of the negative principle "Never give a damn."

"Not for anything or anybody," she said, "except myself and, by implication, for Anthony.That's the rule of all life and if it weren't I'd be that way anyhow.Nobody'd do anything for me if it didn't gratify them to, and I'd do as little for them."

She was on the front porch of the nicest lady in Marietta when she said this, and as she finished she gave a curious little cry and sank in a dead faint to the porch floor.

The lady brought her to and drove her home in her car.It had occurred to the estimable Gloria that she was probably with child.

She lay upon the long lounge down-stairs.Day was slipping warmly out the window, touching the late roses on the porch pillars.

"All I think of ever is that I love you," she wailed."I value my body because you think it's beautiful.And this body of mine—of yours—to have it grow ugly and shapeless?It's simply intolerable.Oh, Anthony, I'm not afraid of the pain."

He consoled her desperately—but in vain.She continued:

"And then afterward I might have wide hips and be pale, with all my freshness gone and no radiance in my hair."

He paced the floor with his hands in his pockets, asking:

"Is it certain?"

"I don't know anything.I've always hated obstrics, or whatever you call them.I thought I'd have a child some time.But not now."

"Well, for God's sake don't lie there and go to pieces."

Her sobs lapsed.She drew down a merciful silence from the twilight which filled the room."Turn on the lights," she pleaded."These days seem so short—June seemed—to—have—longer days when I was a little girl."

The lights snapped on and it was as though blue drapes of softest silk had been dropped behind the windows and the door.Her pallor, her immobility, without grief now, or joy, awoke his sympathy.

"Do you want me to have it?"she asked listlessly.

"I'm indifferent.That is, I'm neutral.If you have it I'll probably be glad.If you don't—well, that's all right too."

"I wish you'd make up your mind one way or the other!"

"Suppose you make up your mind."

She looked at him contemptuously, scorning to answer.

"You'd think you'd been singled out of all the women in the world for this crowning indignity."

"What if I do!" she cried angrily. "It isn't an indignity for them. It's their one excuse for living. It's the one thing they're good for. It is an indignity for me.

"See here, Gloria, I'm with you whatever you do, but for God's sake be a sport about it."

"Oh, don't fuss at me!" she wailed.

They exchanged a mute look of no particular significance but of much stress.Then Anthony took a book from the shelf and dropped into a chair.

Half an hour later her voice came out of the intense stillness that pervaded the room and hung like incense on the air.

"I'll drive over and see Constance Merriam to-morrow."

"All right.And I'll go to Tarrytown and see Grampa."

"—You see," she added, "it isn't that I'm afraid—of this or anything else.I'm being true to me, you know."

"I know," he agreed.

THE PRACTICAL MEN

Adam Patch, in a pious rage against the Germans, subsisted on the war news.Pin maps plastered his walls; atlases were piled deep on tables convenient to his hand together with "Photographic Histories of the World War," official Explain-alls, and the "Personal Impressions" of war correspondents and of Privates X, Y, and Z.Several times during Anthony's visit his grandfather's secretary, Edward Shuttleworth, the one-time "Accomplished Gin-physician" of "Pat's Place" in Hoboken, now shod with righteous indignation, would appear with an extra.The old man attacked each paper with untiring fury, tearing out those columns which appeared to him of sufficient pregnancy for preservation and thrusting them into one of his already bulging files.

"Well, what have you been doing?"he asked Anthony blandly."Nothing?Well, I thought so.I've been intending to drive over and see you, all summer."

"I've been writing.Don't you remember the essay I sent you—the one I sold to The Florentine last winter?"

"Essay? You never sent me any essay."

"Oh, yes, I did.We talked about it."

Adam Patch shook his head mildly.

"Oh, no. You never sent me any essay. You may have thought you sent it but it never reached me."

"Why, you read it, Grampa," insisted Anthony, somewhat exasperated, "you read it and disagreed with it."

The old man suddenly remembered, but this was made apparent only by a partial falling open of his mouth, displaying rows of gray gums. Eying Anthony with a green and ancient stare he hesitated between confessing his error and covering it up.

"So you're writing," he said quickly."Well, why don't you go over and write about these Germans?Write something real, something about what's going on, something people can read."

"Anybody can't be a war correspondent," objected Anthony."You have to have some newspaper willing to buy your stuff.And I can't spare the money to go over as a free-lance."

"I'll send you over," suggested his grandfather surprisingly."I'll get you over as an authorized correspondent of any newspaper you pick out."

Anthony recoiled from the idea—almost simultaneously he bounded toward it.

"I—don't—know—"

He would have to leave Gloria, whose whole life yearned toward him and enfolded him.Gloria was in trouble.Oh, the thing wasn't feasible—yet—he saw himself in khaki, leaning, as all war correspondents lean, upon a heavy stick, portfolio at shoulder—trying to look like an Englishman."I'd like to think it over," he, confessed."It's certainly very kind of you.I'll think it over and I'll let you know."

Thinking it over absorbed him on the journey to New York.He had had one of those sudden flashes of illumination vouchsafed to all men who are dominated by a strong and beloved woman, which show them a world of harder men, more fiercely trained and grappling with the abstractions of thought and war.In that world the arms of Gloria would exist only as the hot embrace of a chance mistress, coolly sought and quickly forgotten....

These unfamiliar phantoms were crowding closely about him when he boarded his train for Marietta, in the Grand Central Station.The car was crowded; he secured the last vacant seat and it was only after several minutes that he gave even a casual glance to the man beside him.When he did he saw a heavy lay of jaw and nose, a curved chin and small, puffed-under eyes.In a moment he recognized Joseph Bloeckman.

Simultaneously they both half rose, were half embarrassed, and exchanged what amounted to a half handshake.Then, as though to complete the matter, they both half laughed.

"Well," remarked Anthony without inspiration, "I haven't seen you for a long time."Immediately he regretted his words and started to add: "I didn't know you lived out this way."But Bloeckman anticipated him by asking pleasantly:

"How's your wife? ..."

"She's very well.How've you been?"

"Excellent."His tone amplified the grandeur of the word.

It seemed to Anthony that during the last year Bloeckman had grown tremendously in dignity.The boiled look was gone, he seemed "done" at last.In addition he was no longer overdressed.The inappropriate facetiousness he had affected in ties had given way to a sturdy dark pattern, and his right hand, which had formerly displayed two heavy rings, was now innocent of ornament and even without the raw glow of a manicure.

This dignity appeared also in his personality.The last aura of the successful travelling-man had faded from him, that deliberate ingratiation of which the lowest form is the bawdy joke in the Pullman smoker.One imagined that, having been fawned upon financially, he had attained aloofness; having been snubbed socially, he had acquired reticence.But whatever had given him weight instead of bulk, Anthony no longer felt a correct superiority in his presence.

"D'you remember Caramel, Richard Caramel?I believe you met him one night."

"I remember.He was writing a book."

"Well, he sold it to the movies.Then they had some scenario man named Jordan work on it.Well, Dick subscribes to a clipping bureau and he's furious because about half the movie reviewers speak of the 'power and strength of William Jordan's "Demon Lover."' Didn't mention old Dick at all.You'd think this fellow Jordan had actually conceived and developed the thing."

Bloeckman nodded comprehensively.

"Most of the contracts state that the original writer's name goes into all the paid publicity.Is Caramel still writing?"

"Oh, yes.Writing hard.Short stories."

"Well, that's fine, that's fine....You on this train often?"

"About once a week.We live in Marietta."

"Is that so?Well, well!I live near Cos Cob myself.Bought a place there only recently.We're only five miles apart."

"You'll have to come and see us."Anthony was surprised at his own courtesy."I'm sure Gloria'd be delighted to see an old friend.Anybody'll tell you where the house is—it's our second season there."

"Thank you."Then, as though returning a complementary politeness: "How is your grandfather?"

"He's been well.I had lunch with him to-day."

"A great character," said Bloeckman severely."A fine example of an American."

THE TRIUMPH OF LETHARGY

Anthony found his wife deep in the porch hammock voluptuously engaged with a lemonade and a tomato sandwich and carrying on an apparently cheery conversation with Tana upon one of Tana's complicated themes.

"In my countree," Anthony recognized his invariable preface, "all time—peoples—eat rice—because haven't got.Cannot eat what no have got."Had his nationality not been desperately apparent one would have thought he had acquired his knowledge of his native land from American primary-school geographies.

When the Oriental had been squelched and dismissed to the kitchen, Anthony turned questioningly to Gloria:

"It's all right," she announced, smiling broadly."And it surprised me more than it does you."

"There's no doubt?"

"None!Couldn't be!"

They rejoiced happily, gay again with reborn irresponsibility.Then he told her of his opportunity to go abroad, and that he was almost ashamed to reject it.

"What do you think? Just tell me frankly."

"Why, Anthony!"Her eyes were startled."Do you want to go?Without me?"

His face fell—yet he knew, with his wife's question, that it was too late.Her arms, sweet and strangling, were around him, for he had made all such choices back in that room in the Plaza the year before.This was an anachronism from an age of such dreams.

"Gloria," he lied, in a great burst of comprehension, "of course I don't.I was thinking you might go as a nurse or something."He wondered dully if his grandfather would consider this.

As she smiled he realized again how beautiful she was, a gorgeous girl of miraculous freshness and sheerly honorable eyes.She embraced his suggestion with luxurious intensity, holding it aloft like a sun of her own making and basking in its beams. She strung together an amazing synopsis for an extravaganza of martial adventure.

After supper, surfeited with the subject, she yawned.She wanted not to talk but only to read "Penrod," stretched upon the lounge until at midnight she fell asleep.But Anthony, after he had carried her romantically up the stairs, stayed awake to brood upon the day, vaguely angry with her, vaguely dissatisfied.

"What am I going to do?"he began at breakfast."Here we've been married a year and we've just worried around without even being efficient people of leisure."

"Yes, you ought to do something," she admitted, being in an agreeable and loquacious humor.This was not the first of these discussions, but as they usually developed Anthony in the rôle of protagonist, she had come to avoid them.

"It's not that I have any moral compunctions about work," he continued, "but grampa may die to-morrow and he may live for ten years.Meanwhile we're living above our income and all we've got to show for it is a farmer's car and a few clothes.We keep an apartment that we've only lived in three months and a little old house way off in nowhere.We're frequently bored and yet we won't make any effort to know any one except the same crowd who drift around California all summer wearing sport clothes and waiting for their families to die."

"How you've changed!"remarked Gloria."Once you told me you didn't see why an American couldn't loaf gracefully."

"Well, damn it, I wasn't married. And the old mind was working at top speed and now it's going round and round like a cog-wheel with nothing to catch it. As a matter of fact I think that if I hadn't met you I would have done something. But you make leisure so subtly attractive—"

"Oh, it's all my fault—"

"I didn't mean that, and you know I didn't.But here I'm almost twenty-seven and—"

"Oh," she interrupted in vexation, "you make me tired!Talking as though I were objecting or hindering you!"

"I was just discussing it, Gloria.Can't I discuss—"

"I should think you'd be strong enough to settle—"

"—something with you without—"

"—your own problems without coming to me. You talk a lot about going to work. I could use more money very easily, but I'm not complaining. Whether you work or not I love you." Her last words were gentle as fine snow upon hard ground. But for the moment neither was attending to the other—they were each engaged in polishing and perfecting his own attitude.

"I have worked—some."This by Anthony was an imprudent bringing up of raw reserves.Gloria laughed, torn between delight and derision; she resented his sophistry as at the same time she admired his nonchalance.She would never blame him for being the ineffectual idler so long as he did it sincerely, from the attitude that nothing much was worth doing.

"Work!"she scoffed."Oh, you sad bird!You bluffer!Work—that means a great arranging of the desk and the lights, a great sharpening of pencils, and 'Gloria, don't sing!'and 'Please keep that damn Tana away from me,' and 'Let me read you my opening sentence,' and 'I won't be through for a long time, Gloria, so don't stay up for me,' and a tremendous consumption of tea or coffee.And that's all.In just about an hour I hear the old pencil stop scratching and look over.You've got out a book and you're 'looking up' something.Then you're reading.Then yawns—then bed and a great tossing about because you're all full of caffeine and can't sleep.Two weeks later the whole performance over again."

With much difficulty Anthony retained a scanty breech-clout of dignity.

"Now that's a slight exaggeration. You know darn well I sold an essay to The Florentine—and it attracted a lot of attention considering the circulation of The Florentine. And what's more, Gloria, you know I sat up till five o'clock in the morning finishing it."

She lapsed into silence, giving him rope.And if he had not hanged himself he had certainly come to the end of it.

"At least," he concluded feebly, "I'm perfectly willing to be a war correspondent."

But so was Gloria.They were both willing—anxious; they assured each other of it.The evening ended on a note of tremendous sentiment, the majesty of leisure, the ill health of Adam Patch, love at any cost.

"Anthony!"she called over the banister one afternoon a week later, "there's some one at the door."Anthony, who had been lolling in the hammock on the sun-speckled south porch, strolled around to the front of the house.A foreign car, large and impressive, crouched like an immense and saturnine bug at the foot of the path.A man in a soft pongee suit, with cap to match, hailed him.

"Hello there, Patch.Ran over to call on you."

It was Bloeckman; as always, infinitesimally improved, of subtler intonation, of more convincing ease.

"I'm awfully glad you did."Anthony raised his voice to a vine-covered window: "Glor-i-a!We've got a visitor!"

"I'm in the tub," wailed Gloria politely.

With a smile the two men acknowledged the triumph of her alibi.

"She'll be down.Come round here on the side-porch.Like a drink?Gloria's always in the tub—good third of every day."

"Pity she doesn't live on the Sound."

"Can't afford it."

As coming from Adam Patch's grandson, Bloeckman took this as a form of pleasantry.After fifteen minutes filled with estimable brilliancies, Gloria appeared, fresh in starched yellow, bringing atmosphere and an increase of vitality.

"I want to be a successful sensation in the movies," she announced."I hear that Mary Pickford makes a million dollars annually."

"You could, you know," said Bloeckman."I think you'd film very well."

"Would you let me, Anthony?If I only play unsophisticated rôles?"

As the conversation continued in stilted commas, Anthony wondered that to him and Bloeckman both this girl had once been the most stimulating, the most tonic personality they had ever known—and now the three sat like overoiled machines, without conflict, without fear, without elation, heavily enamelled little figures secure beyond enjoyment in a world where death and war, dull emotion and noble savagery were covering a continent with the smoke of terror.

In a moment he would call Tana and they would pour into themselves a gay and delicate poison which would restore them momentarily to the pleasurable excitement of childhood, when every face in a crowd had carried its suggestion of splendid and significant transactions taking place somewhere to some magnificent and illimitable purpose....Life was no more than this summer afternoon; a faint wind stirring the lace collar of Gloria's dress; the slow baking drowsiness of the veranda....Intolerably unmoved they all seemed, removed from any romantic imminency of action.Even Gloria's beauty needed wild emotions, needed poignancy, needed death....

"...Any day next week," Bloeckman was saying to Gloria."Here—take this card.What they do is to give you a test of about three hundred feet of film, and they can tell pretty accurately from that."

"How about Wednesday?"

"Wednesday's fine.Just phone me and I'll go around with you—"

He was on his feet, shaking hands briskly—then his car was a wraith of dust down the road.Anthony turned to his wife in bewilderment.

"Why, Gloria!"

"You don't mind if I have a trial, Anthony. Just a trial? I've got to go to town Wednesday, anyhow."

"But it's so silly!You don't want to go into the movies—moon around a studio all day with a lot of cheap chorus people."

"Lot of mooning around Mary Pickford does!"

"Everybody isn't a Mary Pickford."

"Well, I can't see how you'd object to my trying."

"I do, though.I hate actors."

"Oh, you make me tired.Do you imagine I have a very thrilling time dozing on this damn porch?"

"You wouldn't mind if you loved me."

"Of course I love you," she said impatiently, making out a quick case for herself. "It's just because I do that I hate to see you go to pieces by just lying around and saying you ought to work. Perhaps if I did go into this for a while it'd stir you up so you'd do something."

"It's just your craving for excitement, that's all it is."

"Maybe it is!It's a perfectly natural craving, isn't it?"

"Well, I'll tell you one thing.If you go to the movies I'm going to Europe."

"Well, go on then! I'm not stopping you!"

To show she was not stopping him she melted into melancholy tears.Together they marshalled the armies of sentiment—words, kisses, endearments, self-reproaches.They attained nothing.Inevitably they attained nothing.Finally, in a burst of gargantuan emotion each of them sat down and wrote a letter.Anthony's was to his grandfather; Gloria's was to Joseph Bloeckman.It was a triumph of lethargy.

One day early in July Anthony, returned from an afternoon in New York, called up-stairs to Gloria.Receiving no answer he guessed she was asleep and so went into the pantry for one of the little sandwiches that were always prepared for them.He found Tana seated at the kitchen table before a miscellaneous assortment of odds and ends—cigar-boxes, knives, pencils, the tops of cans, and some scraps of paper covered with elaborate figures and diagrams.

"What the devil you doing?"demanded Anthony curiously.

Tana politely grinned.

"I show you," he exclaimed enthusiastically."I tell—"

"You making a dog-house?"

"No, sa."Tana grinned again."Make typewutta."

"Typewriter?"

"Yes, sa.I think, oh all time I think, lie in bed think 'bout typewutta."

"So you thought you'd make one, eh?"

"Wait.I tell."

Anthony, munching a sandwich, leaned leisurely against the sink.Tana opened and closed his mouth several times as though testing its capacity for action.Then with a rush he began:

"I been think—typewutta—has, oh, many many many many thingOh many many many many.""Many keys.I see."

"No-o? Yes-key!Many many many many lettah.Like so a-b-c."

"Yes, you're right."

"Wait.I tell."He screwed his face up in a tremendous effort to express himself: "I been think—many words—end same.Like i-n-g."

"You bet.A whole raft of them."

"So—I make—typewutta—quick.Not so many lettah—"

"That's a great idea, Tana.Save time.You'll make a fortune.Press one key and there's 'ing.'Hope you work it out."

Tana laughed disparagingly."Wait.I tell—" "Where's Mrs. Patch?"

"She out.Wait, I tell—" Again he screwed up his face for action."My typewutta——"

"Where is she?"

"Here—I make."He pointed to the miscellany of junk on the table.

"I mean Mrs. Patch."

"She out."Tana reassured him."She be back five o'clock, she say."

"Down in the village?"

"No.Went off before lunch.She go Mr. Bloeckman."

Anthony started.

"Went out with Mr. Bloeckman?"

"She be back five."

Without a word Anthony left the kitchen with Tana's disconsolate "I tell" trailing after him.So this was Gloria's idea of excitement, by God!His fists were clenched; within a moment he had worked himself up to a tremendous pitch of indignation.He went to the door and looked out; there was no car in sight and his watch stood at four minutes of five.With furious energy he dashed down to the end of the path—as far as the bend of the road a mile off he could see no car—except—but it was a farmer's flivver.Then, in an undignified pursuit of dignity, he rushed back to the shelter of the house as quickly as he had rushed out.

Pacing up and down the living room he began an angry rehearsal of the speech he would make to her when she came in—

"So this is love!" he would begin—or no, it sounded too much like the popular phrase "So this is Paris!" He must be dignified, hurt, grieved. Anyhow—"So this is what you do when I have to go up and trot all day around the hot city on business. No wonder I can't write! No wonder I don't dare let you out of my sight!" He was expanding now, warming to his subject. "I'll tell you," he continued, "I'll tell you—" He paused, catching a familiar ring in the words—then he realized—it was Tana's "I tell."

Yet Anthony neither laughed nor seemed absurd to himself.To his frantic imagination it was already six—seven—eight, and she was never coming!Bloeckman finding her bored and unhappy had persuaded her to go to California with him....

—There was a great to-do out in front, a joyous "Yoho, Anthony!"and he rose trembling, weakly happy to see her fluttering up the path.Bloeckman was following, cap in hand.

"Dearest!"she cried.

"We've been for the best jaunt—all over New York State."

"I'll have to be starting home," said Bloeckman, almost immediately."Wish you'd both been here when I came."

"I'm sorry I wasn't," answered Anthony dryly.When he had departed Anthony hesitated.The fear was gone from his heart, yet he felt that some protest was ethically apropos.Gloria resolved his uncertainty.

"I knew you wouldn't mind.He came just before lunch and said he had to go to Garrison on business and wouldn't I go with him.He looked so lonesome, Anthony.And I drove his car all the way."

Listlessly Anthony dropped into a chair, his mind tired—tired with nothing, tired with everything, with the world's weight he had never chosen to bear.He was ineffectual and vaguely helpless here as he had always been.One of those personalities who, in spite of all their words, are inarticulate, he seemed to have inherited only the vast tradition of human failure—that, and the sense of death.

"I suppose I don't care," he answered.

One must be broad about these things, and Gloria being young, being beautiful, must have reasonable privileges.Yet it wearied him that he failed to understand.

WINTER

She rolled over on her back and lay still for a moment in the great bed watching the February sun suffer one last attenuated refinement in its passage through the leaded panes into the room.For a time she had no accurate sense of her whereabouts or of the events of the day before, or the day before that; then, like a suspended pendulum, memory began to beat out its story, releasing with each swing a burdened quota of time until her life was given back to her.

She could hear, now, Anthony's troubled breathing beside her; she could smell whiskey and cigarette smoke.She noticed that she lacked complete muscular control; when she moved it was not a sinuous motion with the resultant strain distributed easily over her body—it was a tremendous effort of her nervous system as though each time she were hypnotizing herself into performing an impossible action....

She was in the bathroom, brushing her teeth to get rid of that intolerable taste; then back by the bedside listening to the rattle of Bounds's key in the outer door.

"Wake up, Anthony!"she said sharply.

She climbed into bed beside him and closed her eyes.Almost the last thing she remembered was a conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Lacy.Mrs. Lacy had said, "Sure you don't want us to get you a taxi?"and Anthony had replied that he guessed they could walk over to Fifth all right.Then they had both attempted, imprudently, to bow—and collapsed absurdly into a battalion of empty milk bottles just outside the door.There must have been two dozen milk bottles standing open-mouthed in the dark.She could conceive of no plausible explanation of those milk bottles.Perhaps they had been attracted by the singing in the Lacy house and had hurried over agape with wonder to see the fun.Well, they'd had the worst of it—though it seemed that she and Anthony never would get up, the perverse things rolled so....

Still, they had found a taxi."My meter's broken and it'll cost you a dollar and a half to get home," said the taxi driver."Well," said Anthony, "I'm young Packy McFarland and if you'll come down here I'll beat you till you can't stand up."...At that point the man had driven off without them.They must have found another taxi, for they were in the apartment....

"What time is it?"Anthony was sitting up in bed, staring at her with owlish precision.

This was obviously a rhetorical question.Gloria could think of no reason why she should be expected to know the time.

"Golly, I feel like the devil!"muttered Anthony dispassionately.Relaxing, he tumbled back upon his pillow."Bring on your grim reaper!"

"Anthony, how'd we finally get home last night?"

"Taxi."

"Oh!"Then, after a pause: "Did you put me to bed?"

"I don't know. Seems to me you put me to bed. What day is it?"

"Tuesday."

"Tuesday?I hope so.If it's Wednesday, I've got to start work at that idiotic place.Supposed to be down at nine or some such ungodly hour."

"Ask Bounds," suggested Gloria feebly.

"Bounds!"he called.

Sprightly, sober—a voice from a world that it seemed in the past two days they had left forever, Bounds sprang in short steps down the hall and appeared in the half darkness of the door.

"What day, Bounds?"

"February the twenty-second, I think, sir."

"I mean day of the week."

"Tuesday, sir.""Thanks."After a pause: "Are you ready for breakfast, sir?"

"Yes, and Bounds, before you get it, will you make a pitcher of water, and set it here beside the bed?I'm a little thirsty."

"Yes, sir."

Bounds retreated in sober dignity down the hallway.

"Lincoln's birthday," affirmed Anthony without enthusiasm, "or St.Valentine's or somebody's.When did we start on this insane party?"

"Sunday night."

"After prayers?"he suggested sardonically.

"We raced all over town in those hansoms and Maury sat up with his driver, don't you remember?Then we came home and he tried to cook some bacon—came out of the pantry with a few blackened remains, insisting it was 'fried to the proverbial crisp.'"

Both of them laughed, spontaneously but with some difficulty, and lying there side by side reviewed the chain of events that had ended in this rusty and chaotic dawn.

They had been in New York for almost four months, since the country had grown too cool in late October.They had given up California this year, partly because of lack of funds, partly with the idea of going abroad should this interminable war, persisting now into its second year, end during the winter.Of late their income had lost elasticity; no longer did it stretch to cover gay whims and pleasant extravagances, and Anthony had spent many puzzled and unsatisfactory hours over a densely figured pad, making remarkable budgets that left huge margins for "amusements, trips, etc.," and trying to apportion, even approximately, their past expenditures.

He remembered a time when in going on a "party" with his two best friends, he and Maury had invariably paid more than their share of the expenses.They would buy the tickets for the theatre or squabble between themselves for the dinner check.It had seemed fitting; Dick, with his naïveté and his astonishing fund of information about himself, had been a diverting, almost juvenile, figure—court jester to their royalty.But this was no longer true.It was Dick who always had money; it was Anthony who entertained within limitations—always excepting occasional wild, wine-inspired, check-cashing parties—and it was Anthony who was solemn about it next morning and told the scornful and disgusted Gloria that they'd have to be "more careful next time."

In the two years since the publication of "The Demon Lover," Dick had made over twenty-five thousand dollars, most of it lately, when the reward of the author of fiction had begun to swell unprecedentedly as a result of the voracious hunger of the motion pictures for plots.He received seven hundred dollars for every story, at that time a large emolument for such a young man—he was not quite thirty—and for every one that contained enough "action" (kissing, shooting, and sacrificing) for the movies, he obtained an additional thousand.His stories varied; there was a measure of vitality and a sort of instinctive in all of them, but none attained the personality of "The Demon Lover," and there were several that Anthony considered downright cheap.These, Dick explained severely, were to widen his audience.Wasn't it true that men who had attained real permanence from Shakespeare to Mark Twain had appealed to the many as well as to the elect?