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Title:      Twilight Sleep (1927)
Author:     Edith Wharton
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Title:      Twilight Sleep (1927)
Author:     Edith Wharton





FAUST.  Und du, wer bist du?
SORGE.  Bin einmal da.
FAUST.  Entferne dich!
SORGE.  Ich bin am rechten Ort.

--Faust.  Teil II.  Akt V.




BOOK I



I


Miss Bruss, the perfect secretary, received Nona Manford at the
door of her mother's boudoir ("the office," Mrs. Manford's children
called it) with a gesture of the kindliest denial.

"She wants to, you know, dear--your mother always WANTS to see
you," pleaded Maisie Bruss, in a voice which seemed to be thinned
and sharpened by continuous telephoning.  Miss Bruss, attached to
Mrs. Manford's service since shortly after the latter's second
marriage, had known Nona from her childhood, and was privileged,
even now that she was "out," to treat her with a certain benevolent
familiarity--benevolence being the note of the Manford household.

"But look at her list--just for this morning!" the secretary
continued, handing over a tall morocco-framed tablet, on which was
inscribed, in the colourless secretarial hand:  "7.30  Mental
uplift.  7.45  Breakfast.  8.  Psycho-analysis.  8.15  See cook.
8.30  Silent Meditation.  8.45  Facial massage.  9.  Man with
Persian miniatures.  9.15  Correspondence.  9.30  Manicure.  9.45
Eurythmic exercises.  10.  Hair waved.  10.15  Sit for bust.  10.30
Receive Mothers' Day deputation.  11.  Dancing lesson.  11.30
Birth Control committee at Mrs.--"

"The manicure is there now, late as usual.  That's what martyrizes
your mother; everybody's being so unpunctual.  This New York life
is killing her."

"I'm not unpunctual," said Nona Manford, leaning in the doorway.

"No; and a miracle, too!  The way you girls keep up your dancing
all night.  You and Lita--what times you two do have!"  Miss Bruss
was becoming almost maternal.  "But just run your eye down that
list--.  You see your mother didn't EXPECT to see you before lunch;
now did she?"

Nona shook her head.  "No; but you might perhaps squeeze me in."

It was said in a friendly, a reasonable tone; on both sides the
matter was being examined with an evident desire for impartiality
and good-will.  Nona was used to her mother's engagements; used to
being squeezed in between faith-healers, art-dealers, social
service workers and manicures.  When Mrs. Manford did see her
children she was perfect to them; but in this killing New York
life, with its ever-multiplying duties and responsibilities, if her
family had been allowed to tumble in at all hours and devour her
time, her nervous system simply couldn't have stood it--and how
many duties would have been left undone!

Mrs. Manford's motto had always been:  "There's a time for
everything."  But there were moments when this optimistic view
failed her, and she began to think there wasn't.  This morning, for
instance, as Miss Bruss pointed out, she had had to tell the new
French sculptor who had been all the rage in New York for the last
month that she wouldn't be able to sit to him for more than fifteen
minutes, on account of the Birth Control committee meeting at 11.30
at Mrs.--

Nona seldom assisted at these meetings, her own time being--through
force of habit rather than real inclination--so fully taken up with
exercise, athletics and the ceaseless rush from thrill to thrill
which was supposed to be the happy privilege of youth.  But she had
had glimpses enough of the scene: of the audience of bright elderly
women, with snowy hair, eurythmic movements, and finely-wrinkled
over-massaged faces on which a smile of glassy benevolence sat like
their rimless pince-nez.  They were all inexorably earnest,
aimlessly kind and fathomlessly pure; and all rather too well-
dressed, except the "prominent woman" of the occasion, who usually
wore dowdy clothes, and had steel-rimmed spectacles and straggling
wisps of hair.  Whatever the question dealt with, these ladies
always seemed to be the same, and always advocated with equal zeal
Birth Control and unlimited maternity, free love or the return to
the traditions of the American home; and neither they nor Mrs.
Manford seemed aware that there was anything contradictory in these
doctrines.  All they knew was that they were determined to force
certain persons to do things that those persons preferred not to
do.  Nona, glancing down the serried list, recalled a saying of her
mother's former husband, Arthur Wyant:  "Your mother and her
friends would like to teach the whole world how to say its prayers
and brush its teeth."

The girl had laughed, as she could never help laughing at Wyant's
sallies; but in reality she admired her mother's zeal, though she
sometimes wondered if it were not a little too promiscuous.  Nona
was the daughter of Mrs. Manford's second marriage, and her own
father, Dexter Manford, who had had to make his way in the world,
had taught her to revere activity as a virtue in itself; his tone
in speaking of Pauline's zeal was very different from Wyant's.  He
had been brought up to think there was a virtue in work per se,
even if it served no more useful purpose than the revolving of a
squirrel in a wheel.  "Perhaps your mother tries to cover too much
ground; but it's very fine of her, you know--she never spares
herself."

"Nor us!" Nona sometimes felt tempted to add; but Manford's
admiration was contagious.  Yes; Nona did admire her mother's
altruistic energy; but she knew well enough that neither she nor
her brother's wife Lita would ever follow such an example--she no
more than Lita.  They belonged to another generation: to the
bewildered disenchanted young people who had grown up since the
Great War, whose energies were more spasmodic and less definitely
directed, and who, above all, wanted a more personal outlet for
them.  "Bother earthquakes in Bolivia!" Lita had once whispered to
Nona, when Mrs. Manford had convoked the bright elderly women to
deal with a seismic disaster at the other end of the world, the
repetition of which these ladies somehow felt could be avoided if
they sent out a commission immediately to teach the Bolivians to do
something they didn't want to do--not to BELIEVE in earthquakes,
for instance.

The young people certainly felt no corresponding desire to set the
houses of others in order.  Why shouldn't the Bolivians have
earthquakes if they chose to live in Bolivia?  And why must Pauline
Manford lie awake over it in New York, and have to learn a new set
of Mahatma exercises to dispel the resulting wrinkles?  "I suppose
if we feel like that it's really because we're too lazy to care,"
Nona reflected, with her incorrigible honesty.

She turned from Miss Bruss with a slight shrug.  "Oh, well," she
murmured.

"You know, pet," Miss Bruss volunteered, "things always get worse
as the season goes on; and the last fortnight in February is the
worst of all, especially with Easter coming as early as it does
this year.  I never COULD see why they picked out such an awkward
date for Easter: perhaps those Florida hotel people did it.  Why,
your poor mother wasn't even able to see your father this morning
before he went down town, though she thinks it's ALL WRONG to let
him go off to his office like that, without finding time for a
quiet little chat first. . .  Just a cheery word to put him in the
right mood for the day. . .  Oh, by the way, my dear, I wonder if
you happen to have heard him say if he's dining at home tonight?
Because you know he never DOES remember to leave word about his
plans, and if he hasn't, I'd better telephone to the office to
remind him that it's the night of the big dinner for the Marchesa--"

"Well, I don't think father's dining at home," said the girl
indifferently.

"Not--not--not?  Oh, my gracious!" clucked Miss Bruss, dashing
across the room to the telephone on her own private desk.

The engagement-list had slipped from her hands, and Nona Manford,
picking it up, ran her glance over it.  She read:  "4 P.M.  See A.--
4.30 P.M.  Musical:  Torfried Lobb."

"4 P.M.  See A."  Nona had been almost sure it was Mrs. Manford's
day for going to see her divorced husband, Arthur Wyant, the
effaced mysterious person always designated on Mrs. Manford's lists
as "A," and hence known to her children as "Exhibit A."  It was
rather a bore, for Nona had meant to go and see him herself at
about that hour, and she always timed her visits so that they
should not clash with Mrs. Manford's, not because the latter
disapproved of Nona's friendship with Arthur Wyant (she thought it
"beautiful" of the girl to show him so much kindness), but because
Wyant and Nona were agreed that on these occasions the presence of
the former Mrs. Wyant spoilt their fun.  But there was nothing to
do about it.  Mrs. Manford's plans were unchangeable.  Even illness
and death barely caused a ripple in them.  One might as well have
tried to bring down one of the Pyramids by poking it with a parasol
as attempt to disarrange the close mosaic of Mrs. Manford's
engagement-list.  Mrs. Manford herself couldn't have done it; not
with the best will in the world; and Mrs. Manford's will, as her
children and all her household knew, WAS the best in the world.

Nona Manford moved away with a final shrug.  She had wanted to
speak to her mother about something rather important; something she
had caught a startled glimpse of, the evening before, in the queer
little half-formed mind of her sister-in-law Lita, the wife of her
half-brother Jim Wyant--the Lita with whom, as Miss Bruss remarked,
she, Nona, danced away the nights.  There was nobody on earth as
dear to Nona as that same Jim, her elder by six or seven years, and
who had been brother, comrade, guardian, almost father to her--her
own father, Dexter Manford, who was so clever, capable and kind,
being almost always too busy at the office, or too firmly
requisitioned by Mrs. Manford, when he was at home, to be able to
spare much time for his daughter.

Jim, bless him, always had time; no doubt that was what his mother
meant when she called him lazy--as lazy as his father, she had once
added, with one of her rare flashes of impatience.  Nothing so
conduced to impatience in Mrs. Manford as the thought of anybody's
having the least fraction of unapportioned time and not immediately
planning to do something with it.  If only they could have given it
to HER!  And Jim, who loved and admired her (as all her family did)
was always conscientiously trying to fill his days, or to conceal
from her their occasional vacuity.  But he had a way of not being
in a hurry, and this had been all to the good for little Nona, who
could always count on him to ride or walk with her, to slip off
with her to a concert or a "movie," or, more pleasantly still, just
to BE THERE--idling in the big untenanted library of Cedarledge,
the place in the country, or in his untidy study on the third floor
of the town house, and ready to answer questions, help her to look
up hard words in dictionaries, mend her golf-sticks, or get a thorn
out of her Sealyham's paw.  Jim was wonderful with his hands: he
could repair clocks, start up mechanical toys, make fascinating
models of houses or gardens, apply a tourniquet, scramble eggs,
mimic his mother's visitors--preferably the "earnest" ones who held
forth about "causes" or "messages" in her gilded drawing-rooms--and
make delicious coloured maps of imaginary continents, concerning
which Nona wrote interminable stories.  And of all these gifts he
had, alas, made no particular use as yet--except to enchant his
little half-sister.

It had been just the same, Nona knew, with his father: poor useless
"Exhibit A"!  Mrs. Manford said it was their "old New York blood"--
she spoke of them with mingled contempt and pride, as if they were
the last of the Capetians, exhausted by a thousand years of
sovereignty.  Her own red corpuscles were tinged with a more
plebeian dye.  Her progenitors had mined in Pennsylvania and made
bicycles at Exploit, and now gave their name to one of the most
popular automobiles in the United States.  Not that other
ingredients were lacking in her hereditary make-up: her mother was
said to have contributed southern gentility by being a Pascal of
Tallahassee.  Mrs. Manford, in certain moods, spoke of "The Pascals
of Tallahassee" as if they accounted for all that was noblest in
her; but when she was exhorting Jim to action it was her father's
blood that she invoked.  "After all, in spite of the Pascal
tradition, there is no shame in being in trade.  My father's father
came over from Scotland with two sixpences in his pocket . . ." and
Mrs. Manford would glance with pardonable pride at the glorious
Gainsborough over the dining-room mantelpiece (which she sometimes
almost mistook for an ancestral portrait), and at her healthy
handsome family sitting about the dinner-table laden with Georgian
silver and orchids from her own hot-houses.

From the threshold, Nona called back to Miss Bruss:  "Please tell
mother I shall probably be lunching with Jim and Lita--" but Miss
Bruss was passionately saying to an unseen interlocutor:  "Oh, but
Mr. Rigley, but you MUST make Mr. Manford understand that Mrs.
Manford counts on him for dinner this evening. . .  The dinner-
dance for the Marchesa, you know. . ."



The marriage of her half-brother had been Nona Manford's first real
sorrow.  Not that she had disapproved of his choice: how could any
one take that funny irresponsible little Lita Cliffe seriously
enough to disapprove of her?  The sisters-in-law were soon the best
of friends; if Nona had a fault to find with Lita, it was that she
didn't worship the incomparable Jim as blindly as his sister did.
But then Lita was made to be worshipped, not to worship; that was
manifest in the calm gaze of her long narrow nut-coloured eyes, in
the hieratic fixity of her lovely smile, in the very shape of her
hands, so slim yet dimpled, hands which had never grown up, and
which drooped from her wrists as if listlessly waiting to be
kissed, or lay like rare shells or upcurved magnolia-petals on the
cushions luxuriously piled about her indolent body.

The Jim Wyants had been married for nearly two years now; the baby
was six months old; the pair were beginning to be regarded as one
of the "old couples" of their set, one of the settled landmarks in
the matrimonial quicksands of New York.  Nona's love for her
brother was too disinterested for her not to rejoice in this: above
all things she wanted her old Jim to be happy, and happy she was
sure he was--or had been until lately.  The mere getting away from
Mrs. Manford's iron rule had been a greater relief than he himself
perhaps guessed.  And then he was still the foremost of Lita's
worshippers; still enchanted by the childish whims, the
unpunctuality, the irresponsibility, which made life with her such
a thrillingly unsettled business after the clock-work routine of
his mother's perfect establishment.

All this Nona rejoiced in; but she ached at times with the
loneliness of the perfect establishment, now that Jim, its one
disturbing element, had left.  Jim guessed her loneliness, she was
sure: it was he who encouraged the growing intimacy between his
wife and his half-sister, and tried to make the latter feel that
his house was another home to her.

Lita had always been amiably disposed toward Nona.  The two, though
so fundamentally different, were nearly of an age, and united by
the prevailing passion for every form of sport.  Lita, in spite of
her soft curled-up attitudes, was not only a tireless dancer but a
brilliant if uncertain tennis-player, and an adventurous rider to
hounds.  Between her hours of lolling, and smoking amber-scented
cigarettes, every moment of her life was crammed with dancing,
riding or games.  During the two or three months before the baby's
birth, when Lita had been reduced to partial inactivity, Nona had
rather feared that her perpetual craving for new "thrills" might
lead to some insidious form of time-killing--some of the drinking
or drugging that went on among the young women of their set; but
Lita had sunk into a state of smiling animal patience, as if the
mysterious work going on in her tender young body had a sacred
significance for her, and it was enough to lie still and let it
happen.  All she asked was that nothing should "hurt" her: she had
the blind dread of physical pain common also to most of the young
women of her set.  But all that was so easily managed nowadays:
Mrs. Manford (who took charge of the business, Lita being an
orphan) of course knew the most perfect "Twilight Sleep"
establishment in the country, installed Lita in its most luxurious
suite, and filled her rooms with spring flowers, hot-house fruits,
new novels and all the latest picture-papers--and Lita drifted into
motherhood as lightly and unperceivingly as if the wax doll which
suddenly appeared in the cradle at her bedside had been brought
there in one of the big bunches of hot-house roses that she found
every morning on her pillow.

"Of course there ought to be no Pain . . . nothing but Beauty. . .
It ought to be one of the loveliest, most poetic things in the
world to have a baby," Mrs. Manford declared, in that bright
efficient voice which made loveliness and poetry sound like the
attributes of an advanced industrialism, and babies something to be
turned out in series like Fords.  And Jim's joy in his son had been
unbounded; and Lita really hadn't minded in the least.



II


The Marchesa was something which happened at irregular but
inevitable moments in Mrs. Manford's life.

Most people would have regarded the Marchesa as a disturbance; some
as a distinct inconvenience; the pessimistic as a misfortune.  It
was a matter of conscious pride to Mrs. Manford that, while
recognizing these elements in the case, she had always contrived to
make out of it something not only showy but even enviable.

For, after all, if your husband (even an ex-husband) has a first
cousin called Amalasuntha degli Duchi di Lucera, who has married
the Marchese Venturino di San Fedele, of one of the great
Neapolitan families, it seems stupid and wasteful not to make some
use of such a conjunction of names and situations, and to remember
only (as the Wyants did) that when Amalasuntha came to New York it
was always to get money, or to get her dreadful son out of a new
scrape, or to consult the family lawyers as to some new way of
guarding the remains of her fortune against Venturino's systematic
depredations.

Mrs. Manford knew in advance the hopelessness of these quests--all
of them, that is, except that which consisted in borrowing money
from herself.  She always lent Amalasuntha two or three thousand
dollars (and put it down to the profit-and-loss column of her
carefully-kept private accounts); she even gave the Marchesa her
own last year's clothes, cleverly retouched; and in return she
expected Amalasuntha to shed on the Manford entertainments that
exotic lustre which the near relative of a Duke who is also a
grandee of Spain and a great dignitary of the Papal Court trails
with her through the dustiest by-ways, even if her mother has been
a mere Mary Wyant of Albany.

Mrs. Manford had been successful.  The Marchesa, without taking
thought, fell naturally into the part assigned to her.  In her
stormy and uncertain life, New York, where her rich relations
lived, and from which she always came back with a few thousand
dollars, and clothes that could be made to last a year, and good
advice about putting the screws on Venturino, was like a foretaste
of heaven.  "Live there?  Carina, NO!  It is too--too uneventful.
As heaven must be.  But everybody is celestially kind . . . and
Venturino has learnt that there are certain things my American
relations will not tolerate. . ."  Such was Amalasuntha's version
of her visits to New York, when she recounted them in the drawing-
rooms of Rome, Naples or St. Moritz; whereas in New York, quite
carelessly and unthinkingly--for no one was simpler at heart than
Amalasuntha--she pronounced names, and raised suggestions, which
cast a romantic glow of unreality over a world bounded by Wall
Street on the south and Long Island in most other directions; and
in this glow Pauline Manford was always eager to sun her other
guests.

"My husband's cousin" (become, since the divorce from Wyant "my
son's cousin") was still, after twenty-seven years, a useful social
card.  The Marchesa di San Fedele, now a woman of fifty, was still,
in Pauline's set, a pretext for dinners, a means of paying off
social scores, a small but steady luminary in the uncertain New
York heavens.  Pauline could never see her rather forlorn wisp of a
figure, always clothed in careless unnoticeable black (even when
she wore Mrs. Manford's old dresses), without a vision of echoing
Roman staircases, of the torchlit arrival of Cardinals at the
Lucera receptions, of a great fresco-like background of Popes,
princes, dilapidated palaces, cypress-guarded villas, scandals,
tragedies, and interminable feuds about inheritances.

"It's all so dreadful--the wicked lives those great Roman families
lead.  After all, poor Amalasuntha has good American blood in her--
her mother was a Wyant; yes--Mary Wyant married Prince Ottaviano di
Lago Negro, the Duke of Lucera's son, who used to be at the Italian
Legation in Washington; but what is Amalasuntha to do, in a country
where there's no divorce, and a woman just has to put up with
EVERYTHING?  The Pope has been most kind; he sides entirely with
Amalasuntha.  But Venturino's people are very powerful too--a great
Neapolitan family--yes, Cardinal Ravello is Venturino's uncle . . .
so that altogether it's been dreadful for Amalasuntha . . . and
such an oasis to her, coming back to her own people. . ."

Pauline Manford was quite sincere in believing that it was dreadful
for Amalasuntha.  Pauline herself could conceive of nothing more
shocking than a social organization which did not recognize
divorce, and let all kinds of domestic evils fester undisturbed,
instead of having people's lives disinfected and whitewashed at
regular intervals, like the cellar.  But while Mrs. Manford thought
all this--in fact, in the very act of thinking it--she remembered
that Cardinal Ravello, Venturino's uncle, had been mentioned as one
of the probable delegates to the Roman Catholic Congress which was
to meet at Baltimore that winter, and wondered whether an evening
party for his Eminence could not be organized with Amalasuntha's
help; even got as far as considering the effect of torch-bearing
footmen (in silk stockings) lining the Manford staircase--which was
of marble, thank goodness!--and of Dexter Manford and Jim receiving
the Prince of the Church on the doorstep, and walking upstairs
backward carrying silver candelabra; though Pauline wasn't sure she
could persuade them to go as far as that.

Pauline felt no more inconsistency in this double train of thought
than she did in shuddering at the crimes of the Roman Church and
longing to receive one of its dignitaries with all the proper
ceremonial.  She was used to such rapid adjustments, and proud of
the fact that whole categories of contradictory opinions lay down
together in her mind as peacefully as the Happy Families exhibited
by strolling circuses.  And of course, if the Cardinal DID come to
her house, she would show her American independence by inviting
also the Bishop of New York--her own Episcopal Bishop--and possibly
the Chief Rabbi (also a friend of hers), and certainly that
wonderful much-slandered "Mahatma" in whom she still so thoroughly
believed. . .

But the word pulled her up short.  Yes; certainly she believed in
the "Mahatma."  She had every reason to.  Standing before the tall
threefold mirror in her dressing-room, she glanced into the huge
bathroom beyond--which looked like a biological laboratory, with
its white tiles, polished pipes, weighing machines, mysterious
appliances for douches, gymnastics and "physical culture"--and
recalled with gratitude that it was certainly those eurythmic
exercises of the Mahatma's ("holy ecstasy," he called them) which
had reduced her hips after everything else had failed.  And this
gratitude for the reduction of her hips was exactly on the same
plane, in her neat card-catalogued mind, with her enthusiastic
faith in his wonderful mystical teachings about Self-Annihilation,
Anterior Existence and Astral Affinities . . . all so
incomprehensible and so pure. . .  Yes; she would certainly ask the
Mahatma.  It would do the Cardinal good to have a talk with him.
She could almost hear his Eminence saying, in a voice shaken by
emotion:  "Mrs. Manford, I want to thank you for making me know
that Wonderful Man.  If it hadn't been for you--"

Ah, she did like people who said to her:  "If it hadn't been for
you--!"

The telephone on her dressing-table rang.  Miss Bruss had switched
on from the boudoir.  Mrs. Manford, as she unhooked the receiver,
cast a nervous glance at the clock.  She was already seven minutes
late for her Marcel-waving, and--

Ah: it was Dexter's voice!  Automatically she composed her face to
a wifely smile, and her voice to a corresponding intonation.  "Yes?
Pauline, dear.  Oh--about dinner tonight?  Why, you know,
Amalasuntha. . .  You say you're going to the theatre with Jim and
Lita?  But, Dexter, you can't!  They're dining here--Jim and Lita
are.  But OF COURSE. . .  Yes, it must have been a mistake; Lita's
so flighty. . .  I know. . ."  (The smile grew a little pinched;
the voice echoed it.  Then, patiently):  "Yes; what else? . . .
OH. . . oh, Dexter. . . what do you mean? . . .  The Mahatma?
WHAT?  I don't understand!"

But she did.  She was conscious of turning white under her discreet
cosmetics.  Somewhere in the depths of her there had lurked for the
last weeks an unexpressed fear of this very thing: a fear that the
people who were opposed to the teaching of the Hindu sage--New
York's great "spiritual uplift" of the last two years--were gaining
power and beginning to be a menace.  And here was Dexter Manford
actually saying something about having been asked to conduct an
investigation into the state of things at the Mahatma's "School of
Oriental Thought," in which all sorts of unpleasantness might be
involved.  Of course Dexter never said much about professional
matters on the telephone; he did not, to his wife's thinking, say
enough about them when he got home.  But what little she now
gathered made her feel positively ill.

"Oh, Dexter, but I must see you about this!  At once!  You couldn't
come back to lunch, I suppose?  Not possibly?  No--this evening
there'll be no chance.  Why, the dinner for Amalasuntha--oh, please
don't forget it AGAIN!"

With one hand on the receiver, she reached with the other for her
engagement-list (the duplicate of Miss Bruss's), and ran a nervous
unseeing eye over it.  A scandal--another scandal!  It mustn't be.
She loathed scandals.  And besides, she did believe in the Mahatma.
He had "vision."  From the moment when she had picked up that word
in a magazine article she had felt she had a complete answer about
him. . .

"But I must see you before this evening, Dexter.  Wait!  I'm
looking over my engagements."  She came to "4 p.m.  See A.  4.30
Musical--Torfried Lobb."  No; she couldn't give up Torfried Lobb:
she was one of the fifty or sixty ladies who had "discovered" him
the previous winter, and she knew he counted on her presence at his
recital.  Well, then--for once "A" must be sacrificed.

"Listen, Dexter; if I were to come to the office at 4?  Yes; sharp.
Is that right?  And don't do anything till I see you--promise!"

She hung up with a sigh of relief.  She would try to readjust
things so as to see "A" the next day; though readjusting her list
in the height of the season was as exhausting as a major operation.

In her momentary irritation she was almost inclined to feel as if
it were Arthur's fault for figuring on that day's list, and thus
unsettling all her arrangements.  Poor Arthur--from the first he
had been one of her failures.  She had a little cemetery of them--a
very small one--planted over with quick-growing things, so that you
might have walked all through her life and not noticed there were
any graves in it.  To the inexperienced Pauline of thirty years
ago, fresh from the factory-smoke of Exploit, Arthur Wyant had
symbolized the tempting contrast between a city absorbed in making
money and a society bent on enjoying it.  Such a brilliant figure--
and nothing to show for it!  She didn't know exactly what she had
expected, her own ideal of manly achievement being at that time
solely based on the power of getting rich faster than your
neighbours--which Arthur would certainly never do.  His father-in-
law at Exploit had seen at a glance that it was no use taking him
into the motor-business, and had remarked philosophically to
Pauline:  "Better just regard him as a piece of jewellery: I guess
we can afford it."

But jewellery must at least be brilliant; and Arthur had somehow--
faded.  At one time she had hoped he might play a part in state
politics--with Washington and its enticing diplomatic society at
the end of the vista--but he shrugged that away as contemptuously
as what he called "trade."  At Cedarledge he farmed a little,
fussed over the accounts, and muddled away her money till she
replaced him by a trained superintendent; and in town he spent
hours playing bridge at his club, took an intermittent interest in
racing, and went and sat every afternoon with his mother, old Mrs.
Wyant, in the dreary house near Stuyvesant Square which had never
been "done over," and was still lit by Carcel lamps.

An obstacle and a disappointment; that was what he had always been.
Still, she would have borne with his inadequacy, his resultless
planning, dreaming and dawdling, even his growing tendency to
drink, as the wives of her generation were taught to bear with such
failings, had it not been for the discovery that he was also
"immoral."  Immorality no high-minded woman could condone; and
when, on her return from a rest-cure in California, she found that
he had drifted into a furtive love affair with the dependent cousin
who lived with his mother, every law of self-respect known to
Pauline decreed his repudiation.  Old Mrs. Wyant, horror-struck,
banished the cousin and pleaded for her son: Pauline was adamant.
She addressed herself to the rising divorce-lawyer, Dexter Manford,
and in his capable hands the affair was settled rapidly,
discreetly, without scandal, wrangling or recrimination.  Wyant
withdrew to his mother's house, and Pauline went to Europe, a free
woman.

In the early days of the new century divorce had not become a
social institution in New York, and the blow to Wyant's pride was
deeper than Pauline had foreseen.  He lived in complete retirement
at his mother's, saw his boy at the dates prescribed by the court,
and sank into a sort of premature old age which contrasted
painfully--even to Pauline herself--with her own recovered youth
and elasticity.  The contrast caused her a retrospective pang, and
gradually, after her second marriage, and old Mrs. Wyant's death,
she came to regard poor Arthur not as a grievance but as a
responsibility.  She prided herself on never neglecting her
responsibilities, and therefore felt a not unnatural vexation with
Arthur for having figured among her engagements that day, and thus
obliged her to postpone him.

Moving back to the dressing-table she caught her reflection in the
tall triple glass.  Again those fine wrinkles about lids and lips,
those vertical lines between the eyes!  She would not permit it;
no, not for a moment.  She commanded herself:  "Now, Pauline, STOP
WORRYING.  You know perfectly well there's no such thing as worry;
it's only dyspepsia or want of exercise, and everything's really
all right--" in the insincere tone of a mother soothing a bruised
baby.

She looked again, and fancied the wrinkles were really fainter, the
vertical lines less deep.  Once more she saw before her an erect
athletic woman, with all her hair and all her teeth, and just a
hint of rouge (because "people did it") brightening a still fresh
complexion; saw her small symmetrical features, the black brows
drawn with a light stroke over handsome directly-gazing gray eyes,
the abundant whitening hair which still responded so crisply to the
waver's wand, the firmly planted feet with arched insteps rising to
slim ankles.

How absurd, how unlike herself, to be upset by that foolish news!
She would look in on Dexter and settle the Mahatma business in five
minutes.  If there was to be a scandal she wasn't going to have
Dexter mixed up in it--above all not against the Mahatma.  She
could never forget that it was the Mahatma who had first told her
she was psychic.

The maid opened an inner door an inch or two to say rebukingly:
"Madam, the hair-dresser; and Miss Bruss asked me to remind you--"

"Yes, yes, yes," Mrs. Manford responded hastily; repeating below
her breath, as she flung herself into her kimono and settled down
before her toilet-table:  "Now, I forbid you to let yourself feel
hurried!  You KNOW there's no such thing as hurry."

But her eye again turned anxiously to the little clock among her
scent-bottles, and she wondered if she might not save time by
dictating to Maisie Bruss while she was being waved and manicured.
She envied women who had no sense of responsibility--like Jim's
little Lita.  As for herself, the only world she knew rested on her
shoulders.



III


At a quarter past one, when Nona arrived at her half-brother's
house, she was told that Mrs. Wyant was not yet down.

"And Mr. Wyant not yet up, I suppose?  From his office, I mean,"
she added, as the young butler looked his surprise.

Pauline Manford had been very generous at the time of her son's
marriage.  She was relieved at his settling down, and at his
seeming to understand that marriage connoted the choice of a
profession, and the adoption of what people called regular habits.
Not that Jim's irregularities had ever been such as the phrase
habitually suggests.  They had chiefly consisted in his not being
able to make up his mind what to do with his life (so like his poor
father, that!), in his always forgetting what time it was, or what
engagements his mother had made for him, in his wanting a chemical
laboratory fitted up for him at Cedarledge, and then, when it was
all done, using it first as a kennel for breeding fox-terriers and
then as a quiet place to practise the violin.

Nona knew how sorely these vacillations had tried her mother, and
how reassured Mrs. Manford had been when the young man, in the heat
of his infatuation for Lita, had vowed that if she would have him
he would turn to and grind in an office like all the other
husbands.

LITA HAVE HIM!  Lita Cliffe, a portionless orphan, with no one to
guide her in the world but a harum-scarum and somewhat blown-upon
aunt, the "impossible" Mrs. Percy Landish!  Mrs. Manford smiled at
her son's modesty while she applauded his good resolutions.  "This
experience has made a man of dear Jim," she said, mildly triumphing
in the latest confirmation of her optimism.  "If only it lasts--!"
she added, relapsing into human uncertainty.

"Oh, it will, mother; you'll see; as long as Lita doesn't get tired
of him," Nona had assured her.

"As long--?  But, my dear child, why should Lita ever get tired of
him?  You seem to forget what a miracle it was that a girl like
Lita, with no one but poor Kitty Landish to look after her, should
ever have got such a husband!"

Nona held her ground.  "Well--just look about you, mother!  Don't
they almost all get tired of each other?  And when they do, will
anything ever stop their having another try?  Think of your big
dinners!  Doesn't Maisie always have to make out a list of previous
marriages as long as a cross-word puzzle, to prevent your calling
people by the wrong names?"

Mrs. Manford waved away the challenge.  "Jim and Lita are not like
that; and I don't like your way of speaking of divorce, Nona," she
had added, rather weakly for her--since, as Nona might have
reminded her, her own way of speaking of divorce varied
disconcertingly with the time, the place and the divorce.

The young girl had leisure to recall this discussion while she sat
and waited for her brother and his wife.  In the freshly decorated
and studiously empty house there seemed to be no one to welcome
her.  The baby (whom she had first enquired for) was asleep, his
mother hardly awake, and the head of the house still "at the
office."  Nona looked about the drawing-room and wondered--the
habit was growing on her.

The drawing-room (it suddenly occurred to her) was very expressive
of the modern marriage state.  It looked, for all its studied
effects, its rather nervous attention to "values," complementary
colours, and the things the modern decorator lies awake over, more
like the waiting-room of a glorified railway station than the
setting of an established way of life.  Nothing in it seemed at
home or at ease--from the early kakemono of a bearded sage, on
walls of pale buff silk, to the three mourning irises isolated in a
white Sung vase in the desert of an otherwise empty table.  The
only life in the room was contributed by the agitations of the
exotic goldfish in a huge spherical aquarium; and they too were but
transients, since Lita insisted on having the aquarium illuminated
night and day with electric bulbs, and the sleepless fish were
always dying off and having to be replaced.

Mrs. Manford had paid for the house and its decoration.  It was not
what she would have wished for herself--she had not yet quite
caught up with the new bareness and selectiveness.  But neither
would she have wished the young couple to live in the opulent
setting of tapestries and "period" furniture which she herself
preferred.  Above all she wanted them to keep up; to do what the
other young couples were doing; she had even digested--in one huge
terrified gulp--Lita's black boudoir, with its welter of ebony
velvet cushions overlooked by a statue as to which Mrs. Manford
could only minimize the indecency by saying that she understood it
was Cubist.  But she did think it unkind--after all she had done--
to have Nona suggest that Lita might get tired of Jim!

The idea had never really troubled Nona--at least not till lately.
Even now she had nothing definite in her mind.  Nothing beyond the
vague question: what would a woman like Lita be likely to do if she
suddenly grew tired of the life she was leading?  But that question
kept coming back so often that she had really wanted, that morning,
to consult her mother about it; for who else was there to consult?
Arthur Wyant?  Why, poor Arthur had never been able to manage his
own poor little concerns with any sort of common sense or
consistency; and at the suggestion that any one might tire of Jim
he would be as indignant as Mrs. Manford, and without her power of
controlling her emotions.

Dexter Manford?  Well--Dexter Manford's daughter had to admit that
it really wasn't his business if his step-son's marriage threatened
to be a failure; and besides, Nona knew how overwhelmed with work
her father always was, and hesitated to lay this extra burden on
him.  For it would be a burden.  Manford was very fond of Jim (as
indeed they all were), and had been extremely kind to him.  It was
entirely owing to Manford's influence that Jim, who was regarded as
vague and unreliable, had got such a good berth in the Amalgamated
Trust Co.; and Manford had been much pleased at the way in which
the boy had stuck to his job.  Just like Jim, Nona thought tenderly--
if ever you could induce him to do anything at all, he always did
it with such marvellous neatness and persistency.  And the
incentive of working for Lita and the boy was enough to anchor him
to his task for life.

A new scent--unrecognizable but exquisite.  In its wake came Lita
Wyant, half-dancing, half-drifting, fastening a necklace, humming a
tune, her little round head, with the goldfish-coloured hair, the
mother-of-pearl complexion and screwed-up auburn eyes, turning
sideways like a bird's on her long throat.  She was astonished but
delighted to see Nona, indifferent to her husband's non-arrival,
and utterly unaware that lunch had been waiting for half an hour.

"I had a sandwich and a cocktail after my exercises.  I don't
suppose it's time for me to be hungry again," she conjectured.
"But perhaps you are, you poor child.  Have you been waiting long?"

"Not much!  I know you too well to be punctual," Nona laughed.

Lita widened her eyes.  "Are you suggesting that I'm not?  Well,
then, how about your ideal brother?"

"He's down town working to keep a roof over your head and your
son's."

Lita shrugged.  "Oh, a roof--I don't care much for roofs, do you--
or is it ROOVES?  Not this one, at any rate."  She caught Nona by
the shoulders, held her at arm's-length, and with tilted head and
persuasively narrowed eyes, demanded:  "This room is AWFUL, isn't
it?  Now acknowledge that it is!  And Jim won't give me the money
to do it over."

"Do it over?  But, Lita, you did it exactly as you pleased two
years ago!"

"Two years ago?  Do you mean to say you like anything that you
liked two years ago?"

"Yes--you!" Nona retorted: adding rather helplessly:  "And,
besides, everybody admires the room so much--."  She stopped,
feeling that she was talking exactly like her mother.

Lita's little hands dropped in a gesture of despair.  "That's just
it!  EVERYBODY admires it.  Even Mrs. Manford does.  And when you
think what sort of things EVERYBODY admires!  What's the use of
pretending, Nona?  It's the typical cliché drawing-room.  Every one
of the couples who were married the year we were has one like it.
The first time Tommy Ardwin saw it--you know he's the new decorator--
he said:  'Gracious, how familiar all this seems!' and began to
whistle 'Home, Sweet Home'!"

"But of course he would, you simpleton!  When what he wants is to
be asked to do it over!"

Lita heaved a sigh.  "If he only could!  Perhaps he might reconcile
me to this house.  But I don't believe anybody could do that."  She
glanced about her with an air of ineffable disgust.  "I'd like to
throw everything in it into the street.  I've been so bored here."

Nona laughed.  "You'd be bored anywhere.  I wish another Tommy
Ardwin would come along and tell you what an old cliché being bored
is."

"An old cliché?  Why shouldn't it be?  When life itself is such a
bore?  You can't redecorate life!"

"If you could, what would you begin by throwing into the street?
The baby?"

Lita's eyes woke to fire.  "Don't be an idiot!  You know I adore my
baby."

"Well--then Jim?"

"You know I adore my Jim!" echoed the young wife, mimicking her own
emotion.

"Hullo--that sounds ominous!"  Jim Wyant came in, clearing the air
with his fresh good-humoured presence.  "I fear my bride when she
says she adores me," he said, taking Nona into a brotherly embrace.

As he stood there, sturdy and tawny, a trifle undersized, with his
bright blue eyes and short blunt-nosed face, in which everything
was so handsomely modelled and yet so safe and sober, Nona fell
again to her dangerous wondering.  Something had gone out of his
face--all the wild uncertain things, the violin, model-making,
inventing, dreaming, vacillating--everything she had best loved
except the twinkle in his sobered eyes.  Whatever else was left now
was all plain utility.  Well, better so, no doubt--when one looked
at Lita!  Her glance caught her sister-in-law's face in a mirror
between two panels, and the reflection of her own beside it; she
winced a little at the contrast.  At her best she had none of that
milky translucence, or of the long lines which made Lita seem in
perpetual motion, as a tremor of air lives in certain trees.
Though Nona was as tall and nearly as slim, she seemed to herself
to be built, while Lita was spun of spray and sunlight.  Perhaps it
was Nona's general brownness--she had Dexter Manford's brown
crinkled hair, his strong black lashes setting her rather usual-
looking gray eyes; and the texture of her dusky healthy skin,
compared to Lita's, seemed rough and opaque.  The comparison added
to her general vague sense of discouragement.  "It's not one of my
beauty days," she thought.

Jim was drawing her arm through his.  "Come along, my girl.  Is
there going to be any lunch?" he queried, turning toward the dining-
room.

"Oh, probably.  In this house the same things always happen every
day," Lita averred with a slight grimace.

"Well, I'm glad lunch does--on the days when I can make a dash up-
town for it."

"On others Lita eats goldfish food," Nona laughed.

"Luncheon is served, madam," the butler announced.

The meal, as usual under Lita's roof, was one in which delicacies
alternated with delays.  Mrs. Manford would have been driven out of
her mind by the uncertainties of the service and the incoherence of
the menu; but she would have admitted that no one did a pilaff
better than Lita's cook.  Gastronomic refinements were wasted on
Jim, whose indifference to the possession of the Wyant madeira was
one of his father's severest trials.  ("I shouldn't have been
surprised if YOU hadn't cared, Nona; after all, you're a Manford;
but that a Wyant shouldn't have a respect for old wine!" Arthur
Wyant often lamented to her.)  As for Lita, she either nibbled
languidly at new health foods, or made ravenous inroads into the
most indigestible dish presented to her.  To-day she leaned back,
dumb and indifferent, while Jim devoured what was put before him as
if unaware that it was anything but canned beef; and Nona watched
the two under guarded lids.

The telephone tinkled, and the butler announced:  "Mr. Manford,
madam."

Nona Manford looked up.  "For me?"

"No, miss; Mrs. Wyant."

Lita was on her feet, suddenly animated.  "Oh, all right. . .
Don't wait for me," she flung over her shoulder as she made for the
door.

"Have the receiver brought in here," Jim suggested; but she brushed
by without heeding.

"That's something new--Lita sprinting for the telephone!" Jim
laughed.

"And to talk to father!"  For the life of her, Nona could not have
told why she stopped short with a vague sense of embarrassment.
Dexter Manford had always been very kind to his stepson's wife; but
then everybody was kind to Lita.

Jim's head was bent over the pilaff; he took it down in quick
undiscerning mouthfuls.

"Well, I hope he's saying something that will amuse her: nothing
seems to, nowadays."

It was on the tip of Nona's tongue to rejoin:  "Oh, yes; it amuses
her to say that nothing amuses her."  But she looked at her
brother's face, faintly troubled under its surface serenity, and
refrained.

Instead, she remarked on the beauty of the two yellow arums in a
bronze jar reflected in the mahogany of the dining-table.  "Lita
has a genius for flowers."

"And for everything else--when she chooses!"

The door opened and Lita sauntered back and dropped into her seat.
She shook her head disdainfully at the proffered pilaff.  There was
a pause.

"Well--what's the news?" Jim asked.

His wife arched her exquisite brows.  "News?  I expect you to
provide that.  I'm only just awake."

"I mean--"  But he broke off, and signed to the butler to remove
his plate.  There was another pause; then Lita's little head turned
on its long interrogative neck toward Nona.  "It seems we're
banqueting tonight at the Palazzo Manford.  Did you know?"

"Did I know?  Why, Lita!  I've heard of nothing else for weeks.
It's the annual feast for the Marchesa."

"I was never told," said Lita calmly.  "I'm afraid I'm engaged."

Jim lifted his head with a jerk.  "You were told a fortnight ago."

"Oh, a fortnight!  That's too long to remember anything.  It's like
Nona's telling me that I ought to admire my drawing-room because I
admired it two years ago."

Her husband reddened to the roots of his tawny hair.  "Don't you
admire it?" he asked, with a sort of juvenile dismay.

"There; Lita'll be happy now--she's produced her effect!"  Nona
laughed a little nervously.

Lita joined in the laugh.  "Isn't he like his mother?" she
shrugged.

Jim was silent, and his sister guessed that he was afraid to insist
on the dinner engagement lest he should increase his wife's
determination to ignore it.  The same motive kept Nona from saying
anything more; and the lunch ended in a clatter of talk about other
things.  But what puzzled Nona was that her father's communication
to Lita should have concerned the fact that she was dining at his
house that night.  It was unlike Dexter Manford to remember the
fact himself (as Miss Bruss's frantic telephoning had testified),
and still more unlike him to remind his wife's guests, even if he
knew who they were to be--which he seldom did.  Nona pondered.
"They must have been going somewhere together--he told me he was
engaged tonight--and Lita's in a temper because they can't.  But
then she's in a temper about everything today."  Nona tried to make
that cover all her perplexities.  She wondered if it did as much
for Jim.



IV


It would have been hard, Nona Manford thought, to find a greater
contrast than between Lita Wyant's house and that at which, two
hours later, she descended from Lita Wyant's smart Brewster.

"You won't come, Lita?"  The girl paused, her hand on the motor
door.  "He'd like it awfully."

Lita shook off the suggestion.  "I'm not in the humour."

"But he's such fun--he can be better company than anybody."

"Oh, for you he's a fad--for me he's a duty; and I don't happen to
feel like duties."  Lita waved one of her flower-hands and was off.

Nona mounted the pock-marked brown steps.  The house was old Mrs.
Wyant's, a faded derelict habitation in a street past which fashion
and business had long since flowed.  After his mother's death
Wyant, from motives of economy, had divided it into small flats.
He kept one for himself, and in the one overhead lived his mother's
former companion, the dependent cousin who had been the cause of
his divorce.  Wyant had never married her; he had never deserted
her; that, to Nona's mind, gave one a fair notion of his character.
When he was ill--and he had developed, rather early, a queer sort
of nervous hypochondria--the cousin came downstairs and nursed him;
when he was well his visitors never saw her.  But she was reported
to attend to his mending, keep some sort of order in his accounts,
and prevent his falling a prey to the unscrupulous.  Pauline
Manford said it was probably for the best.  She herself would have
thought it natural, and in fact proper, that her former husband
should have married his cousin; as he had not, she preferred to
decide that since the divorce they had been "only friends."  The
Wyant code was always a puzzle to her.  She never met the cousin
when she called on her former husband; but Jim, two or three times
a year, made it a point to ring the bell of the upper flat, and at
Christmas sent its invisible tenant an azalea.

Nona ran up the stairs to Wyant's door.  On the threshold a thin
gray-haired lady with a shadowy face awaited her.

"Come in, do.  He's got the gout, and can't get up to open the
door, and I had to send the cook out to get something tempting for
his dinner."

"Oh, thank you, cousin Eleanor."  The girl looked sympathetically
into the other's dimly tragic eyes.  "Poor Exhibit A!  I'm sorry
he's ill again."

"He's been--imprudent.  But the worst of it's over.  It will
brighten him up to see you.  Your cousin Stanley's there."

"Is he?"  Nona half drew back, feeling herself faintly redden.

"He'll be going soon.  Mr. Wyant will be disappointed if you don't
go in."

"But of course I'm going in."

The older woman smiled a worn smile, and vanished upstairs while
Nona slipped off her furs.  The girl knew it would be useless to
urge cousin Eleanor to stay.  If one wished to see her one had to
ring at her own door.

Arthur Wyant's shabby sitting-room was full of February sunshine,
illustrated magazines, newspapers and cigar ashes.  There were some
books on shelves, shabby also: Wyant had apparently once cared for
them, and his talk was still coloured by traces of early
cultivation, especially when visitors like Nona or Stan Heuston
were with him.  But the range of his allusions suggested that he
must have stopped reading years ago.  Even novels were too great a
strain on his attention.  As far back as Nona could remember he had
fared only on the popular magazines, picture-papers and the weekly
purveyors of social scandal.  He took an intense interest in the
private affairs of the world he had ceased to frequent, though he
always ridiculed this interest in talking to Nona or Heuston.

While he sat there, deep in his armchair, with bent shoulders, sunk
head and clumsy bandaged foot, Nona saw him, as she always did, as
taller, slimmer, more handsomely upstanding than any man she had
ever known.  He stooped now, even when he was on his feet; he was
prematurely aged; and the fact perhaps helped to connect him with
vanished institutions to which only his first youth could have
belonged.

To Nona, at any rate, he would always be the Arthur Wyant of the
race-meeting group in the yellowing photograph on his mantelpiece:
clad in the gray frock-coat and topper of the early 'eighties, and
tallest in a tall line of the similarly garbed, behind ladies with
puffed sleeves and little hats tilting forward on elaborate hair.
How peaceful, smiling and unhurried they all seemed!  Nona never
looked at them without a pang of regret that she had not been born
in those spacious days of dogcarts, victorias, leisurely tennis and
afternoon calls. . .

Wyant's face, even more than his figure, related him to that past:
the small shapely head, the crisp hair grown thin on a narrow
slanting forehead, the eyes in which a twinkle still lingered, eyes
probably blue when the hair was brown, but now faded with the rest,
and the slight fair moustache above an uncertain ironic mouth.

A romantic figure; or rather the faded photograph of one.  Yes;
perhaps Arthur Wyant had always been faded--like a charming
reflection in a sallow mirror.  And all that length of limb and
beauty of port had been meant for some other man, a man to whom the
things had really happened which Wyant had only dreamed.

His visitor, though of the same stock, could never have inspired
such conjectures.  Stanley Heuston was much younger--in the middle
thirties--and most things about him were middling: height,
complexion, features.  But he had a strong forehead, his mouth was
curved for power and mockery, and only his small quick eyes
betrayed the uncertainty and lassitude inherited from a Wyant
mother.

Wyant, at Nona's approach, held out a dry feverish hand.  "Well,
this is luck!  Stan was just getting ready to fly at your mother's
approach, and you turn up instead!"

Heuston got to his feet, and greeted Nona somewhat ceremoniously.
"Perhaps I'd better fly all the same," he said in a singularly
agreeable voice.  His eyes were intent on the girl's.

She made a slight gesture, not so much to detain or dismiss as to
signify her complete indifference.  "Isn't mother coming
presently?" she said, addressing the question to Wyant.

"No; I'm moved on till tomorrow.  There must have been some big
upheaval to make her change her plans at the last minute.  Sit down
and tell us all about it."

"I don't know of any upheaval.  There's only the dinner-dance for
Amalasuntha this evening."

"Oh, but that sort of thing is in your mother's stride.  You
underrate her capacity.  Stan has been giving me a hint of
something a good deal more volcanic."

Nona felt an inward tremor; was she going to hear Lita's name?  She
turned her glance on Heuston with a certain hostility.

"Oh, Stan's hints--."

"You see what Nona thinks of my views on cities and men," Heuston
shrugged.  He had remained on his feet, as though about to take
leave; but once again the girl felt his eager eyes beseeching her.

"Are you waiting to walk home with me?  You needn't.  I'm going to
stay for hours," she said, smiling across him at Wyant as she
settled down into one of the chintz armchairs.

"Aren't you a little hard on him?" Wyant suggested, when the door
had closed on their visitor.  "It's not exactly a crime to want to
walk home with you."

Nona made an impatient gesture.  "Stan bores me."

"Ah, well, I suppose he's not enough of a novelty.  Or not up-to-
date enough; YOUR dates.  Some of his ideas seem to me pretty
subversive; but I suppose in your set and Lita's a young man who
doesn't jazz all day and drink all night--or vice versa--is a back
number."

The girl did not take this up, and after a moment Wyant continued,
in his half-mocking half-querulous voice:  "Or is it that he isn't
'psychic' enough?  That's the latest, isn't it?  When you're not
high-kicking you're all high-thinking; and that reminds me of
Stan's news--"

"Yes?"  Nona brought it out between parched lips.  Her gaze turned
from Wyant to the coals smouldering in the grate.  She did not want
to face any one just then.

"Well, it seems there's going to be a gigantic muck-raking--one of
the worst we've had yet.  Into this Mahatma business; you know, the
nigger chap your mother's always talking about.  There's a hint of
it in the last number of the 'Looker-on'; here . . . where is it?
Never mind, though.  What it says isn't a patch on the real facts,
Stan tells me.  It seems the goings-on in that School of Oriental
Thought--what does he call the place: Dawnside?--have reached such
a point that the Grant Lindons, whose girl has been making a
'retreat' there, or whatever they call it, are out to have a
thorough probing.  They say the police don't want to move because
so many people we know are mixed up in it; but Lindon's back is up,
and he swears he won't rest till he gets the case before the Grand
Jury. . ."

As Wyant talked, the weight lifted from Nona's breast.  Much she
cared for the Mahatma, or for the Grant Lindons!  Stuffy old-
fashioned people--she didn't wonder Bee Lindon had broken away from
such parents--though she was a silly fool, no doubt.  Besides, the
Mahatma certainly had reduced Mrs. Manford's hips--and made her
less nervous too: for Mrs. Manford sometimes WAS nervous, in spite
of her breathless pursuit of repose.  Not, of course, in the same
querulous uncontrolled way as poor Arthur Wyant, who had never been
taught poise, or mental uplift, or being in tune with the Infinite;
but rather as one agitated by the incessant effort to be calm.  And
in that respect the Mahatma's rhythmic exercises had without doubt
been helpful.  No; Nona didn't care a fig for scandals about the
School of Oriental Thought.  And the relief of finding that the
subject she had dreaded to hear broached had probably never even
come to Wyant's ears, gave her a reaction of light-heartedness.

There were moments when Nona felt oppressed by responsibilities and
anxieties not of her age, apprehensions that she could not shake
off and yet had not enough experience of life to know how to meet.
One or two of her girl friends--in the brief intervals between
whirls and thrills--had confessed to the same vague disquietude.
It was as if, in the beaming determination of the middle-aged, one
and all of them, to ignore sorrow and evil, "think them away" as
superannuated bogies, survivals of some obsolete European
superstition unworthy of enlightened Americans, to whom plumbing
and dentistry had given higher standards, and bi-focal glasses a
clearer view of the universe--as if the demons the elder generation
ignored, baulked of their natural prey, had cast their hungry
shadow over the young.  After all, somebody in every family had to
remember now and then that such things as wickedness, suffering and
death had not yet been banished from the earth; and with all those
bright-complexioned white-haired mothers mailed in massage and
optimism, and behaving as if they had never heard of anything but
the Good and the Beautiful, perhaps their children had to serve as
vicarious sacrifices.  There were hours when Nona Manford,
bewildered little Iphigenia, uneasily argued in this way: others
when youth and inexperience reasserted themselves, and the load
slipped from her, and she wondered why she didn't always believe,
like her elders, that one had only to be brisk, benevolent and fond
to prevail against the powers of darkness.

She felt this relief now; but a vague restlessness remained with
her, and to ease it, and prove to herself that she was not nervous,
she mentioned to Wyant that she had just been lunching with Jim and
Lita.

Wyant brightened, as he always did at his son's name.  "Poor old
Jim!  He dropped in yesterday, and I thought he looked overworked!
I sometimes wonder if that father of yours hasn't put more hustle
into him than a Wyant can assimilate."  Wyant spoke good-
humouredly; his first bitterness against the man who had supplanted
him (a sentiment regarded by Pauline as barbarous and mediæval) had
gradually been swallowed up in gratitude for Dexter Manford's
kindness to Jim.  The oddly-assorted trio, Wyant, Pauline and her
new husband, had been drawn into a kind of inarticulate
understanding by their mutual tenderness for the progeny of the two
marriages, and Manford loved Jim almost as much as Wyant loved
Nona.

"Oh, well," the girl said, "Jim always does everything with all his
might.  And now that he's doing it for Lita and the baby, he's got
to keep on, whether he wants to or not."

"I suppose so.  But why do you say 'whether'?" Wyant questioned
with one of his disconcerting flashes.  "Doesn't he want to?"

Nona was vexed at her slip.  "Of course.  I only meant that he used
to be rather changeable in his tastes, and that getting married has
given him an object."

"How very old-fashioned!  You ARE old-fashioned, you know, my
child; in spite of the jazz.  I suppose that's what I've done for
YOU, in exchange for Manford's modernizing Jim.  Not much of an
exchange, I'm afraid.  But how long do you suppose Lita will care
about being an object to Jim?"

"Why shouldn't she care?  She'd go on caring about the baby, even
if . . . not that I mean. . ."

"Oh, I know.  That's a great baby.  Queer, you know--I can see he's
going to have the Wyant nose and forehead.  It's about all we've
left to give.  But look here--haven't you really heard anything
more about the Mahatma?  I thought that Lindon girl was a pal of
yours.  Now listen--"

When Nona Manford emerged into the street she was not surprised to
meet Stanley Heuston strolling toward her across Stuyvesant Square.
Neither surprised, nor altogether sorry; do what she would, she
could never quite repress the sense of ease and well-being that his
nearness gave.  And yet half the time they were together she always
spent in being angry with him and wishing him away.  If only the
relation between them had been as simple as that between herself
and Jim!  And it might have been--ought to have been--seeing that
Heuston was Jim's cousin, and nearly twice her age; yes, and had
been married before she left the schoolroom.  Really, her
exasperation was justified.  Yet no one understood her as well as
Stanley; not even Jim, who was so much dearer and more lovable.
Life was a confusing business to Nona Manford.

"How absurd!  I asked you not to wait.  I suppose you think I'm not
old enough to be out alone after dark."

"That hadn't occurred to me; and I'm not waiting to walk home with
you," Heuston rejoined with some asperity.  "But I do want to say
two words," he added, his voice breaking into persuasion.

Nona stopped, her heels firmly set on the pavement.  "The same old
two?"

"No.  Besides, there are three of those.  You never COULD count."
He hesitated:  "This time it's only about Arthur--"

"Why; what's the matter?"  The sense of apprehension woke in her
again.  What if Wyant really had begun to suspect that there was
something, an imponderable something, wrong between Jim and Lita,
and had been too shrewd to let Nona detect his suspicion?

"Haven't you noticed?  He looks like the devil.  He's been drinking
again.  Eleanor spoke to me--"

"Oh, dear."  There it was--all the responsibilities and worries
always closed in on Nona!  But this one, after all, was relatively
bearable.

"What can I do, Stan?  I can't imagine why you come to ME!"

He smiled a little, in his queer derisive way.  "Doesn't everybody?
The fact is--I didn't want to bother Jim."

She was silent.  She understood; but she resented his knowing that
she understood.

"Jim has got to be bothered.  He's got to look after his father."

"Yes; but I--Oh, look here, Nona; won't you see?"

"See what?"

"Why--that if Jim is worried about his father now--Jim's a queer
chap; he's tried his hand at fifty things, and never stuck to one;
and if he gets a shock now, on top of everything else--"

Nona felt her lips grow hard: all her pride and tenderness for her
brother stiffened into ice about her heart.

"I don't know what you mean.  Jim's grown up--he's got to face
things."

"Yes; I know.  I've been told the same thing about myself.  But
there are things one doesn't ever have a chance to face in this
slippery sliding modern world, because they don't come out into the
open.  They just lurk and peep and mouth.  My case exactly.  What
on earth is there about Aggie that a fellow can FACE?"

Nona stopped short with a jerk.  "We don't happen to be talking
about you and Aggie," she said.

"Oh, well; I was merely using myself as an example.  But there are
plenty of others to choose from."

Her voice broke into anger.  "I don't imagine you're comparing your
married life to Jim's?"

"Lord, no.  God forbid!"  He burst into a dry laugh.  "When I think
of Aggie's life and Lita's--!"

"Never mind about Lita's life.  What do you know about it, anyhow?
Oh, Stan, why are we quarrelling again?"  She felt the tears in her
throat.  "What you wanted was only to tell me about poor Arthur.
And I'd guessed that myself--I know something ought to be done.
But WHAT?  How on earth can I tell?  I'm always being asked by
everybody what ought to be done . . . and sometimes I feel too
young to be always the one to judge, to decide. . ."

Heuston stood watching her in silence.  Suddenly he took her hand
and drew it through his arm.  She did not resist, and thus linked
they walked on slowly and without further speech through the cold
deserted streets.  As they approached more populous regions she
freed her arm from his, and signalled to a taxi.

"May I come?"

"No.  I'm going to meet Lita at the Cubist Cabaret.  I promised to
be there by four."

"Oh, all right."  He looked at her irresolutely as the taxi drew
up.  "I wish to God I could always be on hand to help you when
you're bothered!"

She shook her head.

"Never?"

"Not while Aggie--"

"That means never."

"Then never."  She held out her hand, but he had turned and was
already striding off in the opposite direction.  She threw the
address to the chauffeur and got in.

"Yes; I suppose it IS never," she said to herself.  After all,
instead of helping her with the Wyant problem, Stan had only
brought her another: his own--and hers.  As long as Aggie Heuston,
a sort of lay nun, absorbed in High Church practices and the
exercise of a bleak but efficient philanthropy, continued to set
her face against divorce, Nona would not admit that Heuston had any
right to force it upon her.  "It's her way of loving him," the girl
said to herself for the hundredth time.  "She wants to keep him for
herself too--though she doesn't know it; but she does above all
want to save him.  And she thinks that's the way to do it.  I
rather admire her for thinking that there IS a way to save
people. . ."  She pushed that problem once more into the back of
her mind, and turned her thoughts toward the other and far more
pressing one: that of poor Arthur Wyant's growing infirmity.
Stanley was probably right in not wanting to speak to Jim about it
at that particular moment--though how did Stanley know about Jim's
troubles, and what did he know?--and she herself, after all, was
perhaps the only person to deal with Arthur Wyant.  Another interval
of anxious consideration made her decide that the best way would be
to seek her father's advice.  After an hour's dancing she would feel
better, more alive and competent, and there would still be time to
dash down to Manford's office, the only place--as she knew by
experience--where Manford was ever likely to have time for her.



V


The door of his private office clicked on a withdrawing client, and
Dexter Manford, giving his vigorous shoulders a shake, rose from
his desk and stood irresolute.

"I must get out to Cedarledge for some golf on Saturday," he
thought.  He lived among people who regarded golf as a universal
panacea, and in a world which believed in panaceas.

As he stood there, his glance lit on the looking-glass above the
mantel and he mustered his image impatiently.  Queer thing, for a
man of his age to gape at himself in a looking-glass like a dago
dancing-master!  He saw a swarthy straight-nosed face, dark
crinkling hair with a dash of gray on the temples, dark eyes under
brows that were beginning to beetle across a deep vertical cleft.
Complexion turning from ruddy to sallow; eyes heavy--would he put
his tongue out next?  The matter with him was. . .

He dropped back into his desk-chair and unhooked the telephone
receiver.

"Mrs. James Wyant?  Yes. . .  Oh--OUT?  You're sure?  And you don't
know when she'll be back?  Who?  Yes; Mr. Manford.  I had a message
for Mrs. Wyant.  No matter."

He hung up and leaned back, stretching his legs under the table and
staring moodily at the heap of letters and legal papers in the
morocco-lined baskets set out before him.

"I look ten years older than my age," he thought.  Yet that last
new type-writer, Miss Vollard, or whatever her name was, really
behaved as if . . . was always looking at him when she thought he
wasn't looking. . .  "Oh, what rot!" he exclaimed.

His day had been as all his days were now: a starting in with a
great sense of pressure, importance and authority--and a drop at
the close into staleness and futility.

The evening before, he had stopped to see his doctor and been told
that he was over-working, and needed a nerve-tonic and a change of
scene.  "Cruise to the West Indies, or something of the sort.
Couldn't you get away for three or four weeks?  No?  Well, more
golf then, anyhow."

Getting away from things; the perpetual evasion, moral, mental,
physical, which he heard preached, and saw practised, everywhere
about him, except where money-making was concerned!  He, Dexter
Manford, who had been brought up on a Minnesota farm, paid his own
way through the State College at Delos, and his subsequent course
in the Harvard Law School; and who, ever since, had been working at
the top of his pitch with no more sense of strain, no more desire
for evasion (shirking, he called it) than a healthy able-bodied man
of fifty had a right to feel!  If his task had been mere money-
getting he might have known--and acknowledged--weariness.  But he
gloried in his profession, in its labours and difficulties as well
as its rewards, it satisfied him intellectually and gave him that
calm sense of mastery--mastery over himself and others--known only
to those who are doing what they were born to do.

Of course, at every stage of his career--and never more than now,
on its slippery pinnacle--he had suffered the thousand irritations
inseparable from a hard-working life: the trifles which waste one's
time, the fools who consume one's patience, the tricky failure of
the best-laid plans, the endless labour of rolling human stupidity
up the steep hill of understanding.  But until lately these things
had been a stimulus: it had amused him to shake off trifles, baffle
bores, circumvent failure, and exercise his mental muscles in
persuading stupid people to do intelligent things.  There was
pioneer blood in him: he was used to starting out every morning to
hack his way through a fresh growth of prejudices and obstacles;
and though he liked his big retaining fees he liked arguing a case
even better.

Professionally, he was used to intellectual loneliness, and no
longer minded it.  Outside of his profession he had a brain above
the average, but a general education hardly up to it; and the
discrepancy between what he would have been capable of enjoying had
his mind been prepared for it, and what it could actually take in,
made him modest and almost shy in what he considered cultivated
society.  He had long believed his wife to be cultivated because
she had fits of book-buying and there was an expensively bound
library in the New York house.  In his raw youth, in the old Delos
days, he had got together a little library of his own in which
Robert Ingersoll's lectures represented science, the sermons of the
Reverend Frank Gunsaulus of Chicago, theology, John Burroughs,
natural history, and Jared Sparks and Bancroft almost the whole of
history.  He had gradually discovered the inadequacy of these
guides, but without ever having done much to replace them.  Now and
then, when he was not too tired, and had the rare chance of a quiet
evening, he picked up a book from Pauline's table; but the works
she acquired were so heterogeneous, and of such unequal value, that
he rarely found one worth reading.  Mrs. Tallentyre's "Voltaire"
had been a revelation: he discovered, to his surprise, that he had
never really known who Voltaire was, or what sort of a world he had
lived in, and why his name had survived it.  After that, Manford
decided to start in on a course of European history, and got as far
as taking the first volume of Macaulay up to bed.  But he was tired
at night, and found Macaulay's periods too long (though their
eloquence appealed to his forensic instinct): and there had never
been time for that course of history.

In his early wedded days, before he knew much of his wife's world,
he had dreamed of quiet evenings at home, when Pauline would read
instructive books aloud while he sat by the fire and turned over
his briefs in some quiet inner chamber of his mind.  But Pauline
had never known any one who wanted to be read aloud to except
children getting over infantile complaints.  She regarded the
desire almost as a symptom of illness, and decided that Dexter
needed "rousing," and that she must do more to amuse him.  As soon
as she was able after Nona's birth she girt herself up for this new
duty; and from that day Manford's life, out of office hours, had
been one of almost incessant social activity.  At first the endless
going out had bewildered, then for a while amused and flattered
him, then gradually grown to be a soothing routine, a sort of mild
drug-taking after the high pressure of professional hours; but of
late it had become simply a bore, a duty to be persisted in because--
as he had at last discovered--Pauline could not live without it.
After twenty years of marriage he was only just beginning to
exercise his intellectual acumen on his wife.

The thought of Pauline made him glance at his clock: she would be
coming in a moment.  He unhooked the receiver again, and named,
impatiently, the same number as before.  "Out, you say?  Still?"
(The same stupid voice making the same stupid answer!)  "Oh, no; no
matter.  I say IT'S NO MATTER," he almost shouted, replacing the
receiver.  Of all idiotic servants--!

Miss Vollard, the susceptible type-writer, shot a shingled head
around the door, said "ALL right" with an envious sigh to some one
outside, and effaced herself before the brisk entrance of her
employer's wife.  Manford got to his feet.

"Well, my dear--"  He pushed an armchair near the fire, solicitous,
still a little awed by her presence--the beautiful Mrs. Wyant who
had deigned to marry him.  Pauline, throwing back her furs, cast a
quick house-keeping glance about her.  The scent she used always
reminded him of a superior disinfectant; and in another moment, he
knew, she would find some pretext for assuring herself, by the
application of a gloved finger-tip, that there was no dust on desk
or mantelpiece.  She had very nearly obliged him, when he moved
into his new office, to have concave surbases, as in a hospital
ward or a hygienic nursery.  She had adopted with enthusiasm the
idea of the concave tiling fitted to every cove and angle, so that
there were no corners anywhere to catch the dust.  People's lives
ought to be like that: with no corners in them.  She wanted to de-
microbe life.

But, in the case of his own office, Manford had resisted; and now,
he understood, the fad had gone to the scrap-heap--with how many
others!

"Not too near the fire."  Pauline pushed her armchair back and
glanced up to see if the ceiling ventilators were working.  "You DO
renew the air at regular intervals?  I'm sure everything depends on
that; that and thought-direction.  What the Mahatma calls mental
deep-breathing."  She smiled persuasively.  "You look tired,
Dexter . . . tired and drawn."

"Oh, rot!--A cigarette?"

She shook her small resolute head.  "You forget that he's cured me
of that too--the Mahatma.  Dexter," she exclaimed suddenly, "I'm
sure it's this silly business of the Grant Lindons' that's worrying
you.  I want to talk to you about it--to clear it up with you.
It's out of the question that you should be mixed up in it."

Manford had gone back to his desk-chair.  Habit made him feel more
at home there, in fuller possession of himself; Pauline, in the
seat facing him, the light full on her, seemed no more than a
client to be advised, or an opponent to be talked over.  He knew
she felt the difference too.  So far he had managed to preserve his
professional privacy and his professional authority.  What he did
"at the office" was clouded over, for his family, by the vague word
"business," which meant that a man didn't want to be bothered.
Pauline had never really distinguished between practising the law
and manufacturing motors; nor had Manford encouraged her to.  But
today he suspected that she meant her interference to go to the
extreme limit which her well-known "tact" would permit.

"You must not be mixed up in this investigation.  Why not hand it
over to somebody else?  Alfred Cosby, or that new Jew who's so
clever?  The Lindons would accept any one you recommended; unless,
of course," she continued, "you could persuade them to drop it,
which would be so much better.  I'm sure you could, Dexter; you
always know what to say--and your opinion carries such weight.
Besides, what is it they complain of?  Some nonsense of Bee's, I've
no doubt--she took a rest-cure at the School.  If they'd brought
the girl up properly there'd have been no trouble.  Look at Nona!"

"Oh--Nona!"  Manford gave a laugh of pride.  Nona was the one warm
rich spot in his life: the corner on which the sun always shone.
Fancy comparing that degenerate fool of a Bee Lindon to his Nona,
and imagining that "bringing-up" made the difference!  Still, he
had to admit that Pauline--always admirable--had been especially so
as a mother.  Yet she too was bitten with this theosophical virus!

He lounged back, hands in pockets, one leg swinging, instinctively
seeking an easier attitude as his moral ease diminished.

"My dear, it's always been understood, hasn't it, that what goes on
in this office is between me and my clients, and not--"

"Oh, nonsense, Dexter!"  She seldom took that tone: he saw that she
was losing her self-control.  "Look here: I make it a rule never to
interfere; you've just said so.  Well--if I interfere now, it's
because I've a right to--because it's a duty!  The Lindons are my
son's cousins: Fanny Lindon was a Wyant.  Isn't that reason
enough?"

"It was one of the Lindons' reasons.  They appealed to me on that
very ground."

Pauline gave an irritated laugh.  "How like Fanny!  Always pushing
in and claiming things.  I wonder such an argument took you in.  Do
consider, Dexter!  I won't for a minute admit that there CAN be
anything wrong about the Mahatma; but supposing there were. . ."
She drew herself up, her lips tightening.  "I hope I know how to
respect professional secrecy, and I don't ask you to repeat their
nasty insinuations; in fact, as you know, I always take particular
pains to avoid hearing anything painful or offensive.  But,
supposing there were any ground for what they say; do they realize
how the publicity is going to affect Bee's reputation?  And how
shall you feel if you set the police at work and find them
publishing the name of a girl who is Jim's cousin, and a friend of
your own daughter's?"

Manford moved restlessly in his chair, and in so doing caught his
reflexion in the mirror, and saw that his jaw had lost its stern
professional cast.  He made an attempt to recover it, but
unsuccessfully.

"But all this is too absurd," Pauline continued on a smoother note.
"The Mahatma and his friends have nothing to fear.  Whose judgment
would you sooner trust: mine, or poor Fanny's?  What really bothers
me is your allowing the Lindons to drag you into an affair which is
going to discredit them, and not the Mahatma."  She smiled her
bright frosty smile.  "You know how proud I am of your professional
prestige: I should hate to have you associated with a failure."
She paused, and he saw that she meant to rest on that.

"This is a pretty bad business.  The Lindons have got their proofs
all right," he said.

Pauline reddened, and her face lost its look of undaunted serenity.
"How can you believe such rubbish, Dexter?  If you're going to take
Fanny Lindon's word against mine--"

"It's not a question of your word or hers.  Lindon is fully
documented: he didn't come to me till he was.  I'm sorry, Pauline;
but you've been deceived.  This man has got to be shown up, and the
Lindons have had the pluck to do what everybody else has shirked."

Pauline's angry colour had faded.  She got up and stood before her
husband, distressed and uncertain; then, with a visible effort at
self-command, she seated herself again, and locked her hands about
her gold-mounted bag.

"Then you'd rather the scandal, if there is one, should be paraded
before the world?  Who will gain by that except the newspaper
reporters, and the people who want to drag down society?  And how
shall you feel if Nona is called as a witness--or Lita?"

"Oh, nonsense--"  He stopped abruptly, and got up too.  The
discussion was lasting longer than he had intended, and he could
not find the word to end it.  His mind felt suddenly empty--empty
of arguments and formulas.  "I don't know why you persist in
bringing in Nona--or Lita--"

"I don't; it's you.  You will, that is, if you take this case.  Bee
and Nona have been intimate since they were babies, and Bee is
always at Lita's.  Don't you suppose the Mahatma's lawyers will
make use of that if you OBLIGE him to fight?  You may say you're
prepared for it; and I admire your courage--but I can't share it.
The idea that our children may be involved simply sickens me."

"Neither Nona nor Lita has ever had anything to do with this
charlatan and his humbug, as far as I know," said Manford
irritably.

"Nona has attended his eurythmic classes at our house, and gone to
his lectures with me: at one time they interested her intensely."
Pauline paused.  "About Lita I don't know: I know so little about
Lita's life before her marriage."

"It was presumably that of any of Nona's other girl friends."

"Presumably.  Kitty Landish might enlighten us.  But of course, if
it WAS--" he noted her faintly sceptical emphasis--"I don't admit
that that would preclude Lita's having known the Mahatma, or
believed in him.  And you must remember, Dexter, that I should be
the most deeply involved of all!  I mean to take a rest-cure at
Dawnside in March."  She gave the little playful laugh with which
she had been used, in old times, to ridicule the naughtiness of her
children.

Manford drummed on his blotting-pad.  "Look here, suppose we drop
this for the present--"

She glanced at her wrist-watch.  "If you can spare the time--"

"Spare the time?"

She answered softly:  "I'm not going away till you've promised."

Manford could remember the day when that tone--so feminine under
its firmness--would have had the power to shake him.  Pauline, in
her wifely dealings, so seldom invoked the prerogative of her
grace, her competence, her persuasiveness, that when she did he had
once found it hard to resist.  But that day was past.  Under his
admiration for her brains, and his esteem for her character, he had
felt, of late, a stealing boredom.  She was too clever, too
efficient, too uniformly sagacious and serene.  Perhaps his own
growing sense of power--professional and social--had secretly
undermined his awe of hers, made him feel himself first her equal,
then ever so little her superior.  He began to detect something
obtuse in that unfaltering competence.  And as his professional
authority grew he had become more jealous of interference with it.
His wife ought at least to have understood that!  If her famous
tact were going to fail her, what would be left, he asked himself?

"Look here, Pauline, you know all this is useless.  In professional
matters no one else can judge for me.  I'm busy this afternoon; I'm
sure you are too--"

She settled more deeply into her armchair.  "Never too busy for
you, Dexter."

"Thank you, dear.  But the time I ask you to give me is outside of
business hours," he rejoined with a slight smile.

"Then I'm dismissed?"  She smiled back.  "I understand; you needn't
ring!"  She rose with recovered serenity and laid a light hand on
his shoulder.  "Sorry to have bothered you; I don't often, do I?
All I ask is that you should think over--"

He lifted the hand to his lips.  "Of course, of course."  Now that
she was going he could say it.

"I'm forgiven?"

He smiled:  "You're forgiven;" and from the threshold she called,
almost gaily:  "Don't forget tonight--Amalasuntha!"

His brow clouded as he returned to his chair; and oddly enough--he
was aware of the oddness--it was clouded not by the tiresome scene
he had been through, but by his wife's reminder.  "Damn that
dinner," he swore to himself.

He turned to the telephone, unhooked it for the third time, and
called for the same number.



That evening, as he slipped the key into his front-door, Dexter
Manford felt the oppression of all that lay behind it.  He never
entered his house without a slight consciousness of the importance
of the act--never completely took for granted the resounding
vestibule, the big hall with its marble staircase ascending to all
the light and warmth and luxury which skill could devise, money
buy, and Pauline's ingenuity combine in a harmonious whole.  He had
not yet forgotten the day when, after one of his first legal
successes, he had installed a bathroom in his mother's house at
Delos, and all the neighbours had driven in from miles around to
see it.

But luxury, and above all comfort, had never weighed on him; he was
too busy to think much about them, and sure enough of himself and
his powers to accept them as his right.  It was not the splendour
of his house that oppressed him but the sense of the corporative
bonds it imposed.  It seemed part of an elaborate social and
domestic structure, put together with the baffling ingenuity of
certain bird's-nests of which he had seen the pictures.  His own
career, Pauline's multiple activities, the problem of poor Arthur
Wyant, Nona, Jim, Lita Wyant, the Mahatma, the tiresome Grant
Lindons, the perennial and inevitable Amalasuntha, for whom the
house was being illuminated tonight--all were strands woven into
the very pile of the carpet he trod on his way up the stairs.  As
he passed the dining-room he saw, through half-open doors, the
glitter of glass and silver, a shirt-sleeved man placing bowls of
roses down the long table, and Maisie Bruss, wan but undaunted,
dealing out dinner cards to Powder, the English butler.



VI


Pauline Manford sent a satisfied glance down the table.

It was on such occasions that she visibly reaped her reward.  No
one else in New York had so accomplished a cook, such smoothly
running service, a dinner-table so softly yet brightly lit, or such
skill in grouping about it persons not only eminent in wealth or
fashion, but likely to find pleasure in each other's society.

The intimate reunion, of the not-more-than-the-Muses kind, was not
Pauline's affair.  She was aware of this, and seldom made the
attempt--though, when she did, she was never able to discover why
it was not a success.  But in the organizing and administering of a
big dinner she was conscious of mastery.  Not the stupid big dinner
of old days, when the "crowned heads" used to be treated like a
caste apart, and everlastingly invited to meet each other through a
whole monotonous season: Pauline was too modern for that.  She
excelled in a judicious blending of Wall Street and Bohemia, and
her particular art lay in her selection of the latter element.  Of
course there were Bohemians and Bohemians; as she had once remarked
to Nona, people weren't always amusing just because they were
clever, or dull just because they were rich--though at the last
clause Nona had screwed up her nose incredulously. . .  Well, even
Nona would be satisfied tonight, Pauline thought.  It wasn't
everybody who would have been bold enough to ask a social reformer
like Parker Greg with the very people least disposed to encourage
social reform, nor a young composer like Torfried Lobb (a disciple
of "The Six") with all those stolid opera-goers, nor that
disturbing Tommy Ardwin, the Cubist decorator, with the owners of
the most expensive "period houses" in Fifth Avenue.

Pauline was not a bit afraid of such combinations.  She knew in
advance that at one of her dinners everything would "go"--it always
did.  And her success amused and exhilarated her so much that, even
tonight, though she had come down oppressed with problems, they
slipped from her before she even had time to remind herself that
they were nonexistent.  She had only to look at the faces gathered
about that subdued radiance of old silver and scattered flowers to
be sure of it.  There, at the other end of the table, was her
husband's dark head, comely and resolute in its vigorous middle-
age; on his right the Marchesa di San Fedele, the famous San Fedele
pearls illuminating her inconspicuous black; on his left the
handsome Mrs. Herman Toy, magnanimously placed there by Pauline
because she knew that Manford was said to be "taken" by her, and
she wanted him to be in good-humour that evening.  To measure her
own competence she had only to take in this group, already settling
down to an evening's enjoyment, and then let her glance travel on
to the others, the young and handsome women, the well-dressed
confident-looking men.  Nona, grave yet eager, was talking to
Manford's legal rival, the brilliant Alfred Cosby, who was known to
have said she was the cleverest girl in New York.  Lita, cool and
aloof, drooped her head slightly to listen to Torfried Lobb, the
composer; Jim gazed across the table at Lita as if his adoration
made every intervening obstacle transparent; Aggie Heuston, whose
coldness certainly made her look distinguished, though people
complained that she was dull, dispensed occasional monosyllables to
the ponderous Herman Toy; and Stanley Heuston, leaning back with
that faint dry smile which Pauline found irritating because it was
so inscrutable, kept his eyes discreetly but steadily on Nona.
Dear good Stan, always like a brother to Nona!  People who knew him
well said he wasn't as sardonic as he looked.

It was a world after Pauline's heart--a world such as she believed
its Maker meant it to be.  She turned to the Bishop on her right,
wondering if he shared her satisfaction, and encountered a glance
of understanding.

"So refreshing to be among old friends. . .  This is one of the few
houses left. . .  Always such a pleasure to meet the dear Marchesa;
I hope she has better reports of her son?  Wretched business, I'm
afraid.  My dear Mrs. Manford, I wonder if you know how blessed you
are in your children?  That wise little Nona, who is going to make
some man so happy one of these days--not Cosby, no?  Too much
difference in age?  And your steady Jim and his idol . . . yes, I
know it doesn't become my cloth to speak indulgently of idolatry.
But happy marriages are so rare nowadays: where else could one find
such examples as there are about this table?  Your Jim and his
Lita, and my good friend Heuston with that saint of a wife--"
The Bishop paused, as if, even on so privileged an occasion, he
was put to it to prolong the list.  "Well, you've given them the
example. . ."  He stopped again, probably remembering that his
hostess's matrimonial bliss was built on the ruins of her first
husband's.  But in divorcing she had invoked a cause which even
the Church recognizes; and the Bishop proceeded serenely:  "Her
children shall rise up and call her blessed--yes, dear friend, you
must let me say it."

The words were balm to Pauline.  Every syllable carried conviction:
all was right with her world and the Bishop's!  Why did she ever
need any other spiritual guidance than that of her own creed?  She
felt a twinge of regret at having so involved herself with the
Mahatma.  Yet what did Episcopal Bishops know of "holy ecstasy"?
And could any number of Church services have reduced her hips?
After all, there was room for all the creeds in her easy rosy
world.  And the thought led her straight to her other preoccupation:
the reception for the Cardinal.  She resolved to secure the Bishop's
approval at once.  After that, of course the Chief Rabbi would have
to come.  And what a lesson in tolerance and good-will to the
discordant world she was trying to reform!



Nona, half-way down the table, viewed its guests from another
angle.  She had come back depressed rather than fortified from her
flying visit to her father.  There were days when Manford liked to
be "surprised" at the office; when he and his daughter had their
little jokes together over these clandestine visits.  But this one
had not come off in that spirit.  She had found Manford tired and
slightly irritable; Nona, before he had time to tell her of her
mother's visit, caught a lingering whiff of Pauline's cool hygienic
scent, and wondered nervously what could have happened to make Mrs.
Manford break through her tightly packed engagements, and dash down
to her husband's office.  It was of course to that emergency that
she had sacrificed poor Exhibit A--little guessing his relief at
the postponement.  But what could have obliged her to see Manford
so suddenly, when they were to meet at dinner that evening?

The girl had asked no questions: she knew that Manford, true to his
profession, preferred putting them.  And her chief object, of
course, had been to get him to help her about Arthur Wyant.  That,
she perceived, at first added to his irritation: was he Wyant's
keeper, he wanted to know?  But he broke off before the next
question:  "Why the devil can't his own son look after him?"  She
had seen that question on his very lips; but they shut down on it,
and he rose from his chair with a shrug.  "Poor devil--if you think
I can be of any use?  All right, then--I'll drop in on him
tomorrow."  He and Wyant, ever since the divorce, had met whenever
Jim's fate was to be discussed; Wyant felt a sort of humiliated
gratitude for Manford's generosity to his son.  "Not the money, you
know, Nona--damn the money!  But taking such an interest in him;
helping him to find himself: appreciating him, hang it!  He
understands Jim a hundred times better than your mother ever
did. . ."  On this basis the two men came together now and then
in a spirit of tolerant understanding. . .

Nona recalled her father's face as it had been when she left him:
worried, fagged, yet with that twinkle of gaiety his eyes always
had when he looked at her.  Now, smoothed out, smiling, slightly
replete, it was hard as stone.  "Like his own death-mask," the girl
thought; "as if he'd done with everything, once for all.--And the
way those two women bore him!  Mummy put Gladys Toy next to him as
a reward--for what?"  She smiled at her mother's simplicity in
imagining that he was having what Pauline called a "harmless
flirtation" with Mrs. Herman Toy.  That lady's obvious charms were
no more to him, Nona suspected, than those of the florid Bathsheba
in the tapestry behind his chair.  But Pauline had evidently had
some special reason--over and above her usual diffused benevolence--
for wanting to put Manford in a good humour.  "The Mahatma,
probably."  Nona knew how her mother hated a fuss: how vulgar and
unchristian she always thought it.  And it would certainly be
inconvenient to give up the rest-cure at Dawnside she had planned
for March, when Manford was to go off tarpon-fishing.

Nona's glance, in the intervals of talk with her neighbours,
travelled farther, lit on Jim's good-humoured wistful face--Jim was
always wistful at his mother's banquets--and flitted on to Aggie
Heuston's precise little mask, where everything was narrow and
perpendicular, like the head of a saint squeezed into a cathedral
niche.  But the girl's eyes did not linger, for as they rested on
Aggie they abruptly met the latter's gaze.  Aggie had been
furtively scrutinizing her, and the discovery gave Nona a faint
shock.  In another instant Mrs. Heuston turned to Parker Greg, the
interesting young social reformer whom Pauline had thoughtfully
placed next to her, with the optimistic idea that all persons
interested in improving the world must therefore be in the fullest
sympathy.  Nona, knowing Parker Greg's views, smiled at that too.
Aggie, she was sure, would feel much safer with her other
neighbour, Mr. Herman Toy, who thought, on all subjects, just what
all his fellow capitalists did.

Nona caught Stan Heuston's smile, and knew he had read her thought;
but from him too she turned.  The last thing she wanted was that he
should guess her real opinion of his wife.  Something deep down and
dogged in Nona always, when it came to the touch, made her avert
her feet from the line of least resistance.



Manford lent an absent ear first to one neighbour, then the other.
Mrs. Toy was saying, in her flat uncadenced voice, like tepid water
running into a bath:  "I don't see how people can LIVE without
lifts in their houses, do you?  But perhaps it's because I've never
had to.  Father's house had the first electric lift at Climax.
Once, in England, we went to stay with the Duke of Humber, at
Humber Castle--one of those huge parties, royalties and everything--
golf and polo all day, and a ball every night; and, will you
believe it, WE HAD TO WALK UP AND DOWN STAIRS!  I don't know what
English people are made of.  I suppose they've never been used to
what we call comfort.  The second day I told Herman I couldn't
stand those awful slippery stairs after two rounds of golf, and
dancing till four in the morning.  It was simply destroying my
heart--the doctor has warned me so often!  I wanted to leave right
away--but Herman said it would offend the Duke.  The Duke's such a
sweet old man.  But, any way, I made Herman promise me a sapphire
and emerald plaque from Carrier's before I'd agree to stick it
out. . ."

The Marchesa's little ferret face with sharp impassioned eyes
darted conversationally forward.  "The Duke of Humber?  I know him
so WELL.  Dear old man!  Ah, you also stayed at Humber?  So often
he invites me.  We are related . . . yes, through his first wife,
whose mother was a Venturini of the Calabrian branch: Donna
Ottaviana.  Yes.  Another sister, Donna Rosmunda, the beauty of the
family, married the Duke of Lepanto . . . a mediatized prince. . ."

She stopped, and Manford read in her eyes the hasty inward
interrogation:  "Will they think that expression queer?  I'm not
sure myself just what 'mediatized' means.  And these Americans!
They stick at nothing, but they're shocked at everything."  Aloud
she continued:  "A mediatized prince--but a man of the VERY HIGHEST
character."

"Oh--" murmured Mrs. Toy, puzzled but obviously relieved.

Manford's attention, tugging at its moorings, had broken loose
again and was off and away.

The how-many-eth dinner did that make this winter?  And no end in
sight!  How could Pauline stand it?  Why did she want to stand it?
All those rest-cures, massages, rhythmic exercises, devised to
restore the health of people who would have been as sound as bells
if only they had led normal lives!  Like that fool of a woman
spreading her blond splendours so uselessly at his side, who
couldn't walk upstairs because she had danced all night!  Pauline
was just like that--never walked upstairs, and then had to do
gymnastics, and have osteopathy, and call in Hindu sages, to
prevent her muscles from getting atrophied. . .  He had a vision of
his mother, out on the Minnesota farm, before they moved into Delos--
saw her sowing, digging potatoes, feeding chickens; saw her
kneading, baking, cooking, washing, mending, catching and
harnessing the half-broken colt to drive twelve miles in the snow
for the doctor, one day when all the men were away, and his little
sister had been so badly scalded. . .  And there the old lady sat
at Delos, in her nice little brick house, in her hale and hearty
old age, built to outlive them all.--Wasn't that perhaps the kind
of life Manford himself had been meant for?  Farming on a big
scale, with all the modern appliances his forbears had lacked,
outdoing everybody in the county, marketing his goods at the big
centres, and cutting a swathe in state politics like his elder
brother?  Using his brains, muscles, the whole of him, body and
soul, to do real things, bring about real results in the world,
instead of all this artificial activity, this spinning around
faster and faster in the void, and having to be continually rested
and doctored to make up for exertions that led to nothing, nothing,
nothing. . .

"Of course we all know YOU could tell us if you would.  Everybody
knows the Lindons have gone to you for advice."  Mrs. Toy's large
shallow eyes floated the question toward him on a sea-blue wave of
curiosity.  "Not a word of truth?  Oh, of course you have to say
that!  But everybody has been expecting there'd be trouble soon. . ."

And, in a whisper, from the Marchesa's side:  "Teasing you about
that mysterious Mahatma?  Foolish woman!  As long as dear Pauline
believes in him, I'm satisfied.  That was what I was saying to
Pauline before dinner:  'Whatever you and Dexter approve of, _I_
approve of.'  That's the reason why I'm so anxious to have my poor
boy come to New York . . . my Michelangelo!  If only you could see
him I know you'd grow as fond of him as you are of our dear Jim:
perhaps even take him into your office. . .  Ah, that, dear Dexter,
has always been my dream!"

. . . What sort of a life, after all, if not this one?  For of
course that dream of a Western farm was all rubbish.  What he
really wanted was a life in which professional interests as far-
reaching and absorbing as his own were somehow impossibly combined
with great stretches of country quiet, books, horses and children--
ah, children!  Boys of his own--teaching them all sorts of country
things; taking them for long trudges, telling them about trees and
plants and birds--watching the squirrels, feeding the robins and
thrushes in winter; and coming home in the dusk to firelight,
lamplight, a tea-table groaning with jolly things, all the boys and
girls (girls too, more little Nonas) grouped around, hungry and
tingling from their long tramp--and a woman lifting a calm face
from her book: a woman who looked so absurdly young to be their
mother; so--

"You're looking at Jim's wife?"  The Marchesa broke in.  "No
wonder!  Très en beauté, our Lita!--that dress, the very same
colour as her hair, and those Indian emeralds . . . how clever of
her!  But a little difficult to talk to?  Little too silent?  No?
Ah, not to YOU, perhaps--her dear father!  Father-in-law, I mean--"

Silent!  The word sent him off again.  For in that other world, so
ringing with children's laughter, children's wrangles, and all the
healthy blustering noises of country life in a big family, there
would somehow, underneath it all, be a great pool of silence, a
reservoir on which one could always draw and flood one's soul with
peace.  The vision was vague and contradictory, but it all seemed
to meet and mingle in the woman's eyes. . .

Pauline was signalling from her table-end.  He rose and offered his
arm to the Marchesa.

In the hall the strains of the famous Somaliland orchestra bumped
and tossed downstairs from the ball-room to meet them.  The ladies,
headed by Mrs. Toy, flocked to the mirror-lined lift dissembled
behind forced lilacs and Japanese plums; but Amalasuntha, on
Manford's arm, set her blunt black slipper on the marble tread.

"I'm used to Roman palaces!"



VII


"At least you'll take a turn?" Heuston said; and Nona, yielding,
joined the dancers balancing with slow steps about the shining
floor.

Dancing meant nothing; it was like breathing; what would one be
doing if one weren't dancing?  She could not refuse without seeming
singular; it was simpler to acquiesce, and lose one's self among
the couples absorbed in the same complicated ritual.

The floor was full, but not crowded: Pauline always saw to that.
It was easy to calculate in advance, for every one she asked always
accepted, and she and Maisie Bruss, in making out the list,
allotted the requisite space per couple as carefully as if they had
been counting cubic feet in a hospital.  The ventilation was
perfect too; neither draughts nor stuffiness.  One had almost the
sense of dancing out of doors, under some equable southern sky.
Nona, aware of what it cost to produce this illusion, marvelled
once more at her tireless mother.

"Isn't she wonderful?"

Mrs. Manford, fresh, erect, a faint line of diamonds in her hair,
stood in the doorway, her slim foot advanced toward the dancers.

"Perennially!  Ah--she's going to dance.  With Cosby."

"Yes.  I wish she wouldn't."

"Wouldn't with Cosby?"

"Dear, no.  In general."

Nona and Heuston had seated themselves, and were watching from
their corner the weaving of hallucinatory patterns by interjoined
revolving feet.

"I see.  You think she dances with a Purpose?"

The girl smiled.  "Awfully well--like everything else she does.
But as if it were something between going to church and drilling a
scout brigade.  Mother's too--too tidy to dance."

"Well--this is different," murmured Heuston.

The floor had cleared as if by magic before the advance of a long
slim pair: Lita Wyant and Tommy Ardwin.  The decorator, tall and
supple, had the conventional dancer's silhouette; but he was no
more than a silhouette, a shadow on the wall.  All the light and
music in the room had passed into the translucent creature in his
arms.  He seemed to Nona like some one who has gone into a spring
wood and come back carrying a long branch of silver blossom.

"Good heavens!  Quelle plastique!" piped the Marchesa over Nona's
shoulder.

The two had the floor to themselves: every one else had stopped
dancing.  But Lita and her partner seemed unaware of it.  Her sole
affair was to shower radiance, his to attune his lines to hers.
Her face was a small still flower on a swaying stalk; all her
expression was in her body, in that long legato movement like a
weaving of grasses under a breeze, a looping of little waves on the
shore.

"Look at Jim!" Heuston laughed.  Jim Wyant, from a doorway, drank
the vision thirstily.  "Surely," his eyes seemed to triumph, "this
justifies the Cubist Cabaret, and all the rest of her crazes."

Lita, swaying near him, dropped a smile, and floated off on the
bright ripples of her beauty.

Abruptly the music stopped.  Nona glanced across the room and saw
Mrs. Manford move away from the musicians' balcony, over which the
conductor had just leaned down to speak to her.

There was a short interval; then the orchestra broke into a fox-
trot and the floor filled again.  Mrs. Manford swept by with a set
smile--"the kind she snaps on with her tiara," Nona thought.  Well,
perhaps it WAS rather bad form of Lita to monopolize the floor at
her mother-in-law's ball; but was it the poor girl's fault if she
danced so well that all the others stopped to gaze?

Ardwin came up to Nona.  "Oh, no," Heuston protested under his
breath.  "I wanted--"

"There's Aggie signalling."

The girl's arm was already on Ardwin's shoulder.  As they circled
toward the middle of the room, Nona said:  "You show off Lita's
dancing marvellously."

He replied, in his high-pitched confident voice:  "Oh, it's only a
question of giving her her head and not butting in.  She and I each
have our own line of self-expression: it would be stupid to mix
them.  If only I could get her to dance just once for Serge
Klawhammer; he's scouring the globe to find somebody to do the new
'Herodias' they're going to turn at Hollywood.  People are fed up
with the odalisque style, and with my help Lita could evolve
something different.  She's half promised to come round to my place
tonight after supper and see Klawhammer.  Just six or seven of the
enlightened--wonder if you'd join us?  He's tearing back to
Hollywood tomorrow."

"Is Lita really coming?"

"Well, she said yes and no, and ended on yes."

"All right--I will."  Nona hated Ardwin, his sleekness, suppleness,
assurance, the group he ruled, the fashions he set, the doctrines
he professed--hated them so passionately and undiscerningly that it
seemed to her that at last she had her hand on her clue.  That was
it, of course!  Ardwin and his crew were trying to persuade Lita to
go into the movies; that accounted for her restlessness and
irritability, her growing distaste for her humdrum life.  Nona drew
a breath of relief.  After all, if it were only that--!

The dance over, she freed herself and slipped through the throng in
quest of Jim.  Should she ask him to take her to Ardwin's?  No:
simply tell him that she and Lita were off for a final spin at the
decorator's studio, where there would be more room and less fuss
than at Pauline's.  Jim would laugh and approve, provided she and
Lita went together; no use saying anything about Klawhammer and his
absurd "Herodias."

"Jim?  But, my dear, Jim went home long ago.  I don't blame the
poor boy," Mrs. Manford sighed, waylaid by her daughter, "because I
know he has to be at the office so early; and it must be awfully
boring, standing about all night and not dancing.  But, darling,
you must really help me to find your father.  Supper's ready, and I
can't imagine. . ."

The Marchesa's ferret face slipped between them as she trotted by
on Mr. Toy's commodious arm.

"Dear Dexter?  I saw him not five minutes ago, seeing off that
wonderful Lita--"

"Lita?  Lita gone too?"  Nona watched the struggle between her
mother's disciplined features and twitching nerves.  "What
impossible children I have!"  A smile triumphed over her
discomfiture.  "I do hope there's nothing wrong with the baby?
Nona, slip down and tell your father he must come up.  Oh, Stanley,
dear, all my men seem to have deserted me.  Do find Mrs. Toy and
take her in to supper. . ."

In the hall below there was no Dexter.  Nona cast about a glance
for Powder, the pale resigned butler, who had followed Mrs. Manford
through all her vicissitudes and triumphs, seemingly concerned
about nothing but the condition of his plate and the discipline of
his footmen.  Powder knew everything, and had an answer to
everything; but he was engaged at the moment in the vast operation
of making terrapin and champagne appear simultaneously on eighty-
five small tables, and was not to be found in the hall.  Nona ran
her eye along the line of footmen behind the piled-up furs, found
one who belonged to the house, and heard that Mr. Manford had left
a few minutes earlier.  His motor had been waiting for him, and was
now gone.  Mrs. James Wyant was with him, the man thought.  "He's
taken her to Ardwin's, of course.  Poor father!  After an evening
of Mrs. Toy and Amalasuntha--who can wonder?  If only mother would
see how her big parties bore him!"  But Nona's mother would never
see that.



"It's just my indestructible faith in my own genius--nothing else,"
Ardwin was proclaiming in his jumpy falsetto as Nona entered the
high-perched studio where he gathered his group of the enlightened.
These privileged persons, in the absence of chairs, had disposed
themselves on the cushions and mattresses scattered about a floor
painted to imitate a cunning perspective of black and white marble.
Tall lamps under black domes shed their light on bare shoulders,
heads sleek or tousled, and a lavish show of flesh-coloured legs
and sandalled feet.  Ardwin, unbosoming himself to a devotee, held
up a guttering church-candle to a canvas which simulated a window
open on a geometrical representation of brick walls, fire escapes
and back-yards.  "Sham?  Oh, of course.  I had the real window
blocked up.  It looked out on that stupid old 'night-piece' of
Brooklyn Bridge and the East River.  Everybody who came here said:
'A Whistler nocturne!' and I got so bored.  Besides, it was REALLY
THERE: and I hate things that are really where you think they are.
They're as tiresome as truthful people.  Everything in art should
be false.  Everything in life should be art.  Ergo, everything in
life should be false: complexions, teeth, hair, wives . . .
specially wives.  Oh, Miss Manford, that you?  Do come in.  Mislaid
Lita?"

"Isn't she here?"

"IS she?"  He pivoted about on the company.  When he was not
dancing he looked, with his small snaky head and too square
shoulders, like a cross between a Japanese waiter and a full-page
advertisement for silk underwear.  "IS Lita here?  Any of you
fellows got her dissembled about your persons?  Now, then, out with
her!  Jossie Keiler, YOU'RE not Mrs. James Wyant disguised as a
dryad, are you?"  There was a general guffaw as Miss Jossie Keiler,
the octoroon pianist, scrambled to her pudgy feet and assembled a
series of sausage arms and bolster legs in a provocative pose.
"Knew I'd get found out," she lisped.

A short man with a deceptively blond head, thick lips under a
stubby blond moustache, and eyes like needles behind tortoiseshell-
rimmed glasses, stood before the fire, bulging a glossy shirtfront
and solitaire pearl toward the company.  "Don't this lady dance?"
he enquired, in a voice like melted butter, a few drops of which
seemed to trickle down his lips and be licked back at intervals
behind a thickly ringed hand.

"Miss Manford?  Bet she does!  Come along, Nona; shed your togs and
let's show Mr. Klawhammer here present that Lita's not the only
peb--"

"Gracious!  Wait till I get into the saddle!" screamed Miss Keiler,
tiny hands like blueish mice darting out at the keyboard from the
end of her bludgeon arms.

Nona perched herself on the edge of a refectory table.  "Thanks.
I'm not a candidate for 'Herodias.'  My sister-in-law is sure to
turn up in a minute."



Even Mrs. Dexter Manford's perfectly run house was not a
particularly appetizing place to return to at four o'clock on the
morning after a dance.  The last motor was gone, the last overcoat
and opera cloak had vanished from hall and dressing-rooms, and only
one hanging lamp lit the dusky tapestries and the monumental
balustrade of the staircase.  But empty cocktail glasses and
ravaged cigar-boxes littered the hall tables, wisps of torn tulle
and trampled orchids strewed the stair-carpet, and the thicket of
forced lilacs and Japanese plums in front of the lift drooped
mournfully in the hot air.  Nona, letting herself in with her latch-
key, scanned the scene with a feeling of disgust.  What was it all
for, and what was left when it was over?  Only a huge clearing-up
for Maisie and the servants, and a new list to make out for the
next time. . .  She remembered mild spring nights at Cedarledge,
when she was a little girl, and she and Jim used to slip downstairs
in stocking feet, go to the lake, loose the canoe, and drift on a
silver path among islets fringed with budding dogwood.  She hurried
on past the desecrated shrubs.

Above, the house was dark but for a line of light under the library
door.  Funny--at that hour; her father must still be up.  Very
likely he too had just come in.  She was passing on when the door
opened and Manford called her.

"'Pon my soul, Nona!  That you?  I supposed you were in bed long
ago."

One of the green-shaded lamps lit the big writing-table.  Manford's
armchair was drawn up to it, an empty glass and half-consumed
cigarette near by, the evening paper sprawled on the floor.

"Was that you I heard coming in?  Do you know what time it is?"

"Yes; worse luck!  I've been scouring the town after Lita."

"LITA?"

"Waiting for her for hours at Tommy Ardwin's.  Such a crew!  He
told me she was going there to dance for Klawhammer, the Hollywood
man, and I didn't want her to go alone--"

Manford's face darkened.  He lit another cigarette and turned to
his daughter impatiently.

"What the devil made you believe such a yarn?  Klawhammer--!"

Nona stood facing him; their eyes met, and he turned away with a
shrug to reach for a match.

"I believed it because, just afterward, the servants told me that
Lita had left, and as they said you'd gone with her I supposed
you'd taken her to Ardwin's, not knowing that I meant to join her
there."

"Ah; I see."  He lit the cigarette and puffed at it for a moment or
two, deliberately.  "You're quite right to think she needs looking
after," he began again, in a changed tone.  "Somebody's got to take
on the job, since her husband seems to have washed his hands of
it."

"Father!  You know perfectly well that if Jim took on that job--
running after Lita all night from one cabaret to another--he'd lose
the other, the one that keeps them going.  Nobody could carry on
both."

"Hullo, spitfire!  Hands off our brother!"

"Rather."  She leaned against the table, her eyes still on him.
"And when Ardwin told me about this Klawhammer film--didn't Lita
mention it to you?"

He appeared to consider.  "She did say Ardwin was bothering her
about something of the kind; so when I found Jim had gone I took
her home myself."

"Ah--you took her home?"

Manford, settling himself back in his armchair, met the surprise in
her voice unconcernedly.  "Why, of course.  Did you really see me
letting her make a show of herself?  Sorry you think that's my way
of looking after her."

Nona, perched on the arm of his chair, enclosed him in a happy hug.
"You goose, you!" she sighed; but the epithet was not for her
father.

She poured herself a glass of cherry brandy, dropped a kiss on his
thinning hair, and ran up to her room humming Miss Jossie Keiler's
jazz-tune.  Perhaps after all it wasn't such a rotten world.



VIII


The morning after a party in her own house Pauline Manford always
accorded herself an extra half-hour's rest; but on this occasion
she employed it in lying awake and wearily reckoning up the next
day's tasks.  Disenchantment had succeeded to the night's glamour.
The glamour of balls never did last: they so quickly became a
matter for those domestic undertakers, the charwomen, housemaids
and electricians.  And in this case the taste of pleasure had
soured early.  When the doors were thrown open on the beflowered
supper tables not one of the hostess's family was left to marshal
the guests to their places!  Her husband, her daughter and son, her
son's wife--all had deserted her.  It needed, in that chill morning
vigil, all Pauline's self-control to banish the memory.  Not that
she wanted any of them to feel under any obligation--she was all
for personal freedom, self-expression, or whatever they called it
nowadays--but still, a ball was a ball, a host was a host.  It was
too bad of Dexter, really; and of Jim too.  On Lita of course no
one could count: that was part of the pose people found so
fascinating.  But Jim--Jim and Nona to forsake her!  What a
ridiculous position it had put her in--but no, she mustn't think of
that now, or those nasty little wrinkles would creep back about her
eyes.  The masseuse had warned her. . .  Gracious!  At what time
was the masseuse due?  She stretched out her hand, turned on the
light by the bed (for the windows were still closely darkened), and
reached for what Maisie Bruss called the night-list: an upright
porcelain tablet on which the secretary recorded, for nocturnal
study, the principal "fixtures" of the coming day.

Today they were so numerous that Miss Bruss's tight script had
hardly contrived to squeeze them in.  Foremost, of course, poor
Exhibit A, moved on from yesterday; then a mysterious appointment
with Amalasuntha, just before lunch: something urgent, she had
hinted.  Today of all days!  Amalasuntha was so tactless at times.
And then that Mahatma business: since Dexter was inflexible, his
wife had made up her mind to appeal to the Lindons.  It would be
awkward, undoubtedly--and she did so hate things that were awkward.
Any form of untidiness, moral or material, was unpleasant to her;
but something must be done, and at once.  She herself hardly knew
why she felt so apprehensive, so determined that the matter should
have no sequel; except that, if anything DID go wrong, it would
upset all her plans for a rest-cure, for new exercises, for all
sorts of promised ways of prolonging youth, activity and
slenderness, and would oblige her to find a new Messiah who would
tell her she was psychic.

But the most pressing item on her list was her address that very
afternoon to the National Mothers' Day Association--or, no; wasn't
it the Birth Control League?  Nonsense!  That was her speech at the
banquet next week: a big affair at the St. Regis for a group of
International Birth-controllers.  Wakeful as she felt, she must be
half asleep to have muddled up her engagements like that!  She
extinguished the lamp and sank hopefully to her pillow--perhaps now
sleep would really come.  But her bed-lamp seemed to have a double
switch, and putting it out in the room only turned it on in her
head.

Well, she would try reciting scraps of her Mothers' Day address:
she seldom spoke in public, but when she did she took the affair
seriously, and tried to be at once winning and impressive.  She and
Maisie had gone carefully over the typed copy; and she was sure it
was all right; but she liked getting the more effective passages by
heart--it brought her nearer to her audience to lean forward and
speak intimately, without having to revert every few minutes to the
text.

"Was there ever a hearth or a heart--a mother's heart--that wasn't
big enough for all the babies God wants it to hold?  Of course
there are days when the mother is so fagged out that she thinks
she'd give the world if there were nothing at all to do in the
nursery, and she could just sit still with folded hands.  But the
only time when there's nothing at all for a mother to do in the
nursery is when there's a little coffin there.  It's all quiet
enough THEN . . . as some of us here know. . ."  (Pause, and a few
tears in the audience.)  "Not that we want the modern mother to
wear herself out: no indeed!  The babies themselves haven't any use
for worn-out mothers!  And the first thing to be considered is what
the babies want, isn't it?"  (Pause--smiles in the audience). . .

What on earth was Amalasuntha coming to bother her about?  More
money, of course--but she really couldn't pay all that wretched
Michelangelo's debts.  There would soon be debts nearer home if
Lita went on dressing so extravagantly, and perpetually having her
jewellery reset.  It cost almost as much nowadays to reset jewels
as to buy new ones, and those emeralds. . .

At that hour of the morning things did tend to look ash-coloured;
and she felt that her optimism had never been so sorely strained
since the year when she had had to read Proust, learn a new dance-
step, master Oriental philosophy, and decide whether she should
really bob her hair, or only do it to look so.  She had come
victoriously through those ordeals; but what if worse lay ahead?



Amalasuntha, in one of Mrs. Manford's least successfully made-over
dresses, came in looking shabby and humble--always a bad sign.  And
of course it was Michelangelo's debts.  Racing, baccara, and a
woman . . . a Russian princess; oh, my dear, AUTHENTIC, quite!
Wouldn't Pauline like to see her picture from the "Prattler"?  She
and Michelangelo had been snapped together in bathing tights at the
Lido.

No--Pauline wouldn't.  She turned from the proffered effigy with a
disgust evidently surprising to the Marchesa, whose own prejudices
were different, and who could grasp other people's only piece-meal,
one at a time, like a lesson in mnemonics.

"Oh, my boy doesn't do things by halves," the Marchesa averred,
still feeling that the occasion was one for boasting.

Pauline leaned back wearily.  "I'm as sorry for you as I can be,
Amalasuntha; but Michelangelo is not a baby, and if he can't be
made to understand that a poor man who wants to spend money must
first earn it--"

"Oh, but he does, darling!  Venturino and I have always dinned it
into him.  And last year he tried his best to marry that one-eyed
Miss Oxbaum from Oregon, he really did."

"I said EARN," Pauline interposed.  "We don't consider that
marrying for money is earning it--"

"Oh, mercy--don't you?  Not sometimes?" breathed the Marchesa.

"What I mean by earning is going into an office--is--"

"Ah, just so!  It was what I said to Dexter last night.  It is what
Venturino and I most long for: that Dexter should take Michelangelo
into his office.  That would solve every difficulty.  And once
Michelangelo is here I'm sure he will succeed.  No one is more
clever, you know: only, in Rome, young men are in greater danger--
there are more temptations--"

Pauline pursed her lips.  "I suppose there are."  But, since
temptations are the privilege of metropolises, she thought it
rather impertinent of Amalasuntha to suggest that there were more
in a one-horse little place like Rome than in New York; though in a
different mood she would have been the first to pronounce the
Italian capital a sink of iniquity, and New York the model and
prototype