The Lovely Lady

By Mary Austin

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Title: The Lovely Lady

Author: Mary Austin

Illustrator: Gordon Grant

Release Date: January 14, 2007 [EBook #20359]

Language: English


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Transcriber's notes:

Four typographical errors have been corrected:
  Page  88, "seemes" changed to "seems" (it seems such a wasteful way
                                         to live somehow,)
  Page 162, "Ellen" changed to "Ellen," ("I'm very glad you feel that way
                                         about it, Ellen,")
  Page 199, "accomodating" changed to "accommodating" (He felt his mind
                                                       accommodating to)
  Page 252, "Weatherall" changed to "Weatheral" (Mr. Weatheral had some
                                                 papers)





THE LOVELY LADY




_By the same author_

A WOMAN OF GENIUS

THE ARROW MAKER

THE GREEN BOUGH

CHRIST IN ITALY




[Illustration: _"It was one thin web of rose and gold over lakes of
burnished light...."_]




THE LOVELY LADY

BY MARY AUSTIN

[Illustration: ]

_Frontispiece by Gordon Grant_

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1913




_Copyright, 1913, by_

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

_All rights reserved, including that of
translation into Foreign Languages,
including the Scandinavian._




To

J. AND E.

THE COMPANIONS OF THE GONDOLA




CONTENTS


                                                      PAGE

PART ONE

In which Peter meets a Dragon, and the Lovely
Lady makes her appearance.                               3

PART TWO

In which Peter becomes invisible on the way to
growing rich.                                           37

PART THREE

In which Peter becomes a bachelor.                      59

PART FOUR

In which the Lovely Lady makes a final appearance.     107




ILLUSTRATIONS


"It was one thin web of rose and gold over lakes of
burnished light...."




PART ONE

IN WHICH PETER
MEETS A DRAGON, AND
THE LOVELY LADY
MAKES HER APPEARANCE




PART ONE

IN WHICH PETER MEETS A DRAGON, AND THE
LOVELY LADY MAKES HER APPEARANCE




I


The walls of the Wonderful House rose up straight and shining, pale
greenish gold as the slant sunlight on the orchard grass under the apple
trees; the windows that sprang arching to the summer blueness let in the
scent of the cluster rose at the turn of the fence, beginning to rise
above the dusty smell of the country roads, and the evening clamour of
the birds in Bloombury wood. As it dimmed and withdrew, the shining of
the walls came out more clearly. Peter saw then that they were all of
coloured pictures wrought flat upon the gold, and as the glow of it
increased they began to swell and stir like a wood waking. They leaned
out from the walls, looking all one way toward the increasing light and
tap-tap of the Princess' feet along the halls.

"Peter, oh, Peter!"

The tap-tapping grew sharp and nearer like the sound of a crutch on a
wooden veranda, and the voice was Ellen's.

"Oh, Peter, you are always a-reading and a-reading!"

Peter rolled off the long settle where he had been stretched and put the
book in his pocket apologetically.

"I was just going to quit," he said; "did you want anything, Ellen?"

"The picnic is coming back; I thought we could go down to the turn to
meet them. Mrs. Sibley said she would save me some things from the
luncheon."

If there was a little sting to Peter in Ellen's eagerness, it was
evidence at least, how completely he and his mother had kept her from
realizing that it was chiefly because of their not being able to afford
the well-filled basket demanded by a Bloombury picnic that they had not
accepted the invitation. Ellen had thought it was because Bet, the mare,
could not be spared all day from the ploughing nor Peter from hoeing
the garden, and her mother was too busy with the plaid gingham dress she
was making for the minister's wife, to do any baking. It meant to Ellen,
the broken fragments of the luncheon, just so much of what a picnic
should mean: the ride in the dusty morning, swings under the trees, easy
games that she could play, lemonade, pails and pails of it, pink ham
sandwiches and frosted cake; and if Ellen could have any of these, she
was having a little piece of the picnic. What it would have meant
particularly to Peter over and above a day let loose, the arching elms,
the deep fern of Bloombury wood, might have been some passages, perhaps,
which could be taken home and made over into the groundwork of new and
interesting adventures in the House from which Ellen had recalled him.
There was a girl with June apple cheeks and bright brown eyes at that
picnic, who could have given points to princesses.

He followed the tapping of his sister's crutch along the thick, bitter
smelling dust of the road, rising more and more heavily as the dew
gathered, until they came to the turn by the cluster rose and heard
below them on the bridge, the din of the wheels and the gay laughter of
the picnickers.

"Hi, Peter!"

"Hello, Ellen!"

"Awful sorry you couldn't come ... had a bully time.... Killed a
copperhead and two water snakes."

"Here, Ellen, catch ahold of this!"

And while she was about it the June apple girl leaned over the end-board
of the wagon, and spoke softly to Peter.

"We're going over to Harvey's pasture next Wednesday afternoon,
berrying, in the Democrat wagon with our team; Jim Harvey's going to
drive. We made it up to-day. Surely you can get away for an afternoon?"
That was what the voice said. "To be with me," the eyes added.

"I don't know.... I'd like it...."

It was not altogether the calculation as to how much earlier he would
have to get up that morning to be able to take an hour off in the
afternoon, that made Peter hesitate, but the sudden swimming of his
senses about the point of meeting eyes. "I'll tell you what," he said,
"you come by for Ellen, and I'll walk over about four and ride home with
you."

"Oh," said the girl; she did not know quite whether to triumph at having
gained so much or to be disappointed at so little. "I'll be expecting
you."

The horses creaked forward in the harness, the dust puffed up from under
the wheels and drowned the smell of the wilding rose, it fell thick on
the petals and a little on Peter's spirit, too, as he followed Ellen
back to the house, though it never occurred to him to think any more of
it than that he had been working too long in the hot sun and was very
tired. It did not, however, prevent his eating his share of the picnic
dainties as he sat with his mother and Ellen on the veranda. Then as the
soft flitter of the bats' wings began in the dusk, he kissed them both
and went early up to bed.

Peter's room was close under the roof and that was close under the elm
boughs; all hours he could hear them finger it with soft rustling
touches. The bed was pulled to the window that gave upon the downslope
of the hill; at the foot of it one saw the white bloom-faces of the
alders lift and bow above the folded leaves, and the rising of the river
damp across the pastures. All the light reflected from the sky above
Bloombury wood was no more than enough to make a glimmer on the glass of
a picture that hung at the foot of Peter's bed. It served to show the
gilt of the narrow frame and the soft black of the print upon which
Peter had looked so many times that he thought now he was still seeing
it as he lay staring in the dusk--a picture of a young man in bright
armour with loosened hair, riding down a particularly lumpy and swollen
dragon. Flames came out of the creature's mouth in the immemorial
fashion of dragons, but the young man was not hurt by them. He sat there
lightly, his horse curvetting, his lance thrust down the dragon's throat
and coming out of the back of his head, doing a great deed easily, the
way people like to think of great things being done. It was a very
narrow picture, so narrow that you might think that it had something to
do with the dragon's doubling on himself and the charger's forefeet
being up in the air to keep within the limits of the frame, and the
exclusion from it of the Princess whom, as his father had told him the
story, the young knight George had rescued from those devouring jaws. It
came out now, quite clearly, that she must have had cheeks as red as
June apples and eyes like the pools of spring rain in Bloombury wood,
and her not being there in the picture was only a greater security for
her awaiting him at this moment in the House with the Shining Walls.

There was, for the boy still staring at it through the dusk, something
particularly personal in the picture, for ever since his father had
died, three years ago, Peter had had a dragon of his own to fight. Its
name was Mortgage. It had its lair in Lawyer Keplinger's office, from
which it threatened twice yearly to come out and eat up his mother and
Ellen and the little house and farm, and required to have its mouth
stopped with great wads of interest which took all Peter's laborious
days to scrape together. This year, however, he had hopes, if the garden
turned out well, of lopping off a limb or a claw of the dragon by way
of a payment on the principal, which somehow seemed to bring the
Princess so much nearer, that as Peter lay quite comfortably staring up
at the glimmer on the wall, the four gold lines of the frame began to
stretch up and out and the dark block of the picture to recede until it
became the great hall of a palace again, and there was the Princess
coming toward him in a golden shimmer.

There was just such another glow on the afternoon when Peter walked over
to the berrying and came up with the apple-cheeked girl whose name was
Ada, a good half mile from the others. As they climbed together over
uneven ground she gave him her hand to hold, and there was very little
to say and no need of saying it until they came to the hill overlooking
the pasture, yellowing toward the end of summer, full of late bloom and
misty colour passing insensibly into light. Threads of gossamer caught
on the ends of the scrub or floated free, glinting as they turned and
bellied in the windless air, to trick the imagination with the hint of
robed, invisible presences.

"Oh, Peter, don't you wish it would stay like this always?"

"Like this," Peter gave her hand the tiniest squeeze to show what there
was about this that he would like to keep. "It's just as good to look at
any season though," he insisted. "I was here hunting rabbits last
winter, in February, and you could find all sorts of things in the
runways where the brambles bent over and kept off the snow; bunches of
berries and coloured leaves, and little green fern, and birds hopping in
and out."

Ada spread her skirts as she sat on a flat boulder and began sticking
leaves into Peter's hat.

"Peter, what are you going to do this winter?"

"I don't know, I should like to go over to the high school at Harmony,
but I suppose I'll try to get a place to work near home."

"We've been getting up a dancing and singing school, to begin in
October. The teacher is coming from Dassonville. It will be once a week;
we sing for an hour and then have dancing. It will be cheap as
cheap--only two dollars a month. I hope you can come."

"I don't know; I'll think about it." He was thinking then that two
dollars did not sound much, but when you come to subtract it from the
interest it was a great deal, and then there would be Ellen to pay for,
and perhaps a dress for her, and dancing shoes for himself and singing
books. And no doubt at the dances there would be basket suppers.

"I should think you could come if you wanted to. Jim Harvey's getting it
up.... He wants to keep company with me this winter." Ada was a little
nervous about this, but as she stole a glance at Peter's face as he lay
biting at a stem of grass, she grew quite comfortable again. "But I
don't know as I will," she said. "I don't care very much for Jim
Harvey."

Peter picked up a stone and shied it joyously at a thrush in the bushes.

"And I don't know as I want you to," he declared boldly. "I'll come to
that dancing school if I possibly can, Ada, and if I can't you'll know
it isn't because I don't wish to."

"You must want to with all your might and that'll make it come true. You
can wish it on my amethyst ring."

"You won't take it off until October, Ada?"

"I truly won't." And it took Peter such a long time to get the ring on
and held in place while the wish was properly made, that it was
practically no time at all until the others found them on the way home
as they came laughing up the hill.

As it happened, however, Peter did not get to the dancing school once
that winter. The first of the cold spell Ellen had slipped on the ice,
to the further trying of her lame back, and there were things to be done
to it which the doctor said could not possibly be put off, so it
happened that the mortgage dragon did not get his payment and Peter gave
up the high school to get a place in Greenslet's grocery at Bloombury.
And since there were the books to be made up after supper, and as Bet,
the mare, after being driven in the delivery wagon all day, could not be
let stand half the night in the cold at the schoolhouse door, it turned
out that Peter had not been once to the dancing school. In the beginning
he had done something for himself in the way of a hall for dancing,
thrown out from the House of the Shining Walls, in which he and the
Princess Ada, to lovely, soundless strains, had whirled away, and found
occasion to say things to each other such as no ballroom could
afford;--bright star pointed occasions which broke and scattered before
the little hints of sound that crept up the stair to advise him that
Ellen was stifling back the pain for fear of waking him. They had moved
Ellen's bed downstairs as a way of getting on better with the
possibility of her being bedridden all that winter, and the tiny
whispered moan recalled him to the dread that as the half yearly term
came around, what with doctor's bills and delicacies, the mortgage
dragon would have not even his sop of interest, and remain whole and
threatening as before.

When Ellen was able to sit up in bed the mother moved her sewing in
beside it. Then Peter would sit on the other side of the lamp with a
book, and the walls of the House rose up from its pages gilded finely,
and the lights would come out and the dancing begin, but before he could
get more than a word with the Princess, he would hear Ellen:

"Peter, oh, Peter! I wish you wouldn't be always with your nose in a
book. I wish you would talk sometimes."

"What about, Ellen?"

"Oh, Peter, you are the _worst_. I should think you would take some
interest in things."

"What sort of things?" Peter wished to know.

"Why, who comes in the store, and what they say, and everything."

"Mrs. Sleason wanted us to open a kit of mackerel to see if she'd like
it," began Peter literally, "and we persuaded her to take two cans of
sardines instead. Does that interest you?"

"Have you sold any of the blue tartan yet?"

"Ada Brown bought seven yards of it."

"Oh, Peter! And trimmings?"

"Six yards of black velvet ribbon--yes, I forgot--Mrs. Blackman is to
make it up for her. I heard Mrs. Brown say she would call for the
linings."

"She's having it made up for Jim Harvey's birthday," Ellen guessed
shrewdly. "He's twenty-one, you know.... People say she's engaged to
him."

Peter felt the walls of the House which had stood out waiting for him
during this interlude, fall inward into the gulf of blackness. Nobody
said anything for two or three ticks of the large kitchen clock, and
then Ellen burst out:

"I think she's a nasty, flirty, stuck-up _thing_; that's what I think!"

"Shs--hss! Ellen," said her mother.

"Peter," demanded Ellen, "are you reading again?"

"I beg your pardon, Ellen." Peter did not know that he had turned a
page.

"Don't you ever wish for anything for yourself, Peter? Don't you wish
you were rich?"

"No, Ellen, I don't know that I ever do."

But as the winter got on and the news of Ada Brown's engagement was
confirmed, he must have wished it a great many times.

One evening late in January he was sitting with his mother very quietly
by the kitchen stove, the front of which was opened to throw out the
heat; there was the good smell of the supper in the room, for though he
had a meal with the Greenslets at six, his mother always made a point of
having something hot for him when he came in from bedding down the
mare, and the steam of it on the window-panes made dull smears of the
reflected light. The shade of the lamp was drawn down until the ceiling
of the room was all in shadow save for the bright escape from the
chimney which shone directly overhead, round and yellow as twenty
dollars, and as Peter leaned back in his chair, looking up, it might
have been that resemblance which gave a turn to his thoughts and led him
to say to his mother:

"Why did my father never get rich?"

"I hardly know, Peter. He used to say that he couldn't afford it. There
were so many other things he wished to do; and I wished them, too. When
we were young we did them together. Then your father was the sort of man
who always gave too much and took too little. I remember his saying once
that no one who loved his fellowman very much, _could_ get rich."

"Do you wish he had?"

"I don't know that either. No, not if he was happier the way he was. And
we _were_ happy. Things would have come out all right if it hadn't been
for the accident when the thresher broke, and his being ill so long
afterward. And my people weren't so kind as they might have been. You
see, they always thought him a little queer. Before we were married,
before we were even engaged, he had had a little money. It had been left
him, and instead of investing it as anybody in Bloombury would, he spent
it in travel. I remember his saying that his memories of Italy were the
best investment he could have made. But afterward, when he was in
trouble, they threw it up to him. We had never got in debt before ...
and then just as he was getting round, he took bronchitis and died."

She wiped her eyes quietly for a while, and the kettle on the stove
began to sing soothingly, and presently Peter ventured:

"Do you wish I would get rich?"

"Yes, Peter, I do. We are all like that, I suppose, we grown-ups. Things
we manage to get along without ourselves, we want for our children. I
hope you will be a rich man some day; but, Peter, I don't want you to
think it a reflection on your father that he wasn't. He had what he
thought was best. He might have left me with more money and fewer happy
memories--and that is what women value most, Peter;--the right sort of
women. There are some who can't get along without _things_: clothes, and
furniture, and carriages. Ada Brown is that kind; sometimes I'm afraid
Ellen is a little. She takes after my family."

"It is partly on account of Ellen that I want to get rich."

"You mustn't take it too hard, Peter; we've always got along somehow,
and nobody in Bloombury is very rich."

Peter turned that over in his mind the whole of a raw and sleety
February. And one day when nobody came into the store from ten till
four, and loose winds went in a pack about the village streets, casting
up dry, icy dust where now and then some sharp muzzle reared out of the
press as they turned the corners, he spoke to Mr. Greenslet about it. It
was so cold that day that neither the red apples in the barrels nor the
crimson cranberries nor the yellowing hams on the rafters could
contribute any appearance of warmth to the interior of the grocery. A
kind of icy varnish of cold overlaid the gay lables of the canned
goods; the remnants of red and blue tartan exposed for sale looked
coarse-grained with the cold, and cold slips of ribbons clung to the
glass of the cases like the tongues of children tipped to the frosted
panes. Even the super-heated stove took on a purplish tinge of
chilblains, roughed by the wind.

A kind of arctic stillness pervaded the place, out of which the two men
hailed each other at intervals as from immeasurable deeps of space.

"Mr. Greenslet," ventured Peter at last, "are you a rich man?"

"Not by a long sight."

"Why?" questioned Peter.

"Not built that way."

The grocer lapsed back into the silence and seemed to lean against it
meditatively. The wolf wind howled about the corners and cast snow like
powdered glass upon the windows contemptuously, and time went by with a
large deliberate movement like a fat man turning over, before Peter
hailed again.

"Did you ever want to be?"

Mr. Greenslet reached out for the damper of the stove ostensibly to
shake down the ashes, but really to pull himself up out of the soundless
spaces of thought.

"When I was your age, yes. Thought I was going to be." The shaking of
the damper seemed to loosen the springs of speech in him. "I was up in
the city working for Siegel Brothers; began as a bundle boy and meant to
be one of the partners. But by the time I worked up to fancy goods I
realized that I would have to be as old as Methuselah to make it at that
rate. And Mrs. Greenslet didn't like the city; she was a Bloombury girl.
It wasn't any place for the children."

"So you came back?"

"We had saved a little. I bought out this place and put in a few notions
I'd got from Siegel's. I'm comfortably off, but I'm not rich."

"Would you like to be?"

"I don' know, I don' know. I'd like to give the boys a better start than
I had, but I'm my own boss here and one of the leading men. That's
always something."

Peter went and looked out of the smudged windows while he considered
this. The long scrapes of the wind in the loose snow were like the
scratches of great claws. It was now about mail time and a few people
began to stir in the street; the clear light and the cold gave them a
poverty-bitten look.

"Does anybody ever get rich in Bloombury?"

"Not that I know of. There's Mr. Dassonville in Harmony--Dave
Dassonville, the richest man in these parts."

"I suppose he could tell me how to go about it?"

"I suppose he would if he knows. Mostly these things just happen."

Peter did not say anything more just then; he was watching a man and a
girl of about his own age who had come out of a frame house farther down
the street. The young man was walking so as to shield her from the wind,
her rosy cheek was at his shoulder, and she smiled up at him over her
muff, from dark, bright eyes.

"What's set you on to talk about riches? Thinking of doing something in
that line yourself?"

"Yes," said Peter, kicking at the baseboard with his toes. "I don't know
how it is to be done, but I've got to be rich. I've just simply got to."




II


It was along in the beginning of spring on a day full of wet cloud and
clearing wind, that Peter walked over to Harmony to inquire of Mr. David
Dassonville the way to grow rich. It was Sunday afternoon and the air
sweet with the sap adrip from the orchards lately pruned and the smell
of the country road dried to elasticity by the winds of March.

Between timidity and the conviction that a week day would have been
better suited to his business, he drew on to the place of his errand
very slowly, for he was sore with the raking of the dragon's claws, and
unrested. It had been a terrible scrape to get together the last
instalment of interest, and since Ellen had shattered it with the gossip
about Ada Brown's engagement, there had been no House with Shining Walls
for Peter to withdraw into out of the dragon's breath of poverty; above
all, no Princess.

He did not know where the House had come from any more than he knew now
where it had gone. It was a gift out of his childhood to his shy,
unfriended youth, but he understood that if ever its walls should waver
and rise again to enclose his dreams, there would be no Princess. Never
any more. Princesses were for fairy tales; girls wanted Things. There
was his mother too--he had wished so to get her a new dress this winter.
It was an ache to him to cut off yards and yards of handsome stuffs at
Mr. Greenslet's, and all the longing in the world had not availed to get
one of them for his mother. Plainly the mastery of Things was
accomplished by being rich; he was on his way to Mr. Dassonville to find
out how it was done.

It was quite four of the clock when he paused at the bottom of the
Dassonville lawn to look up at the lace curtains at the tall French
windows. Nobody in Bloombury was rich enough to have lace curtains at
all the windows, and the boy's spirit rose at the substantial evidence
of being at last fairly in the track of his desire.

He found Mr. Dassonville willing to receive him in quite a friendly way,
sitting in his library, keeping the place with his finger in the book he
had been reading to his wife. Peter also found himself a little at a
loss to know how to begin in the presence of this lady, for he
considered it a matter quite between men, but suddenly she looked up and
smiled. It came out on her face fresh and delicately as an apple orchard
breaking to bloom, and besides making it quite spring in the room,
discovered in herself a new evidence of the competency of Mr. David
Dassonville to advise the way of riches. She looked fragile and
expensive as she sat in her silken shawl, her dark hair lifted up in a
half moon from her brow, her hands lying in her lap half-covered with
the lace of her sleeves, white and perfect like twin flowers. He saw
rings flashing on the one she lifted to motion to the maid to bring a
chair.

"If you have walked over from Bloombury you must be tired," she said,
"and chilled, perhaps. Come nearer the fire."

"No, thank you," Peter had managed, "I am quite warm," as in fact he
was, and a little flushed. He sat down provisionally on the edge of the
chair and looked at Mr. Dassonville.

"I came on business. I don't know if you will mind its being Sunday, but
I couldn't get away from the store on other days."

"Quite right, quite right." Mr. Dassonville had lost his place in the
book and laid it on his knee. "Private business? My dear, perhaps----"

"Oh, no--no," protested Peter handsomely. "I'd rather she stayed. It
isn't. At least ... I don't know if you will consider it private or
not."

"Go on," urged Mr. Dassonville.

"I just came to ask you," Peter explained, "if you don't mind telling
me, how you got rich?"

"But bless you, young man," exclaimed Mr. Dassonville, "I'm not rich."

This for a beginning, was, on the face of it, disconcerting. Peter
looked about at the rows of books, at the thick, soft carpet and the
leather-covered furniture, and at the rings on Mrs. Dassonville's hand.
If Mr. Dassonville were not rich, how then--unless----

"I beg your pardon, sir, but I thought--that is, everybody says you are
the richest man in these parts."

"As to that, well, perhaps, I have a little more money than my
neighbours."

Peter breathed relief. The beautiful Mrs. Dassonville's rings were paid
for, then.

"But as to being _rich_, why, when you come to a really rich man all
I've got wouldn't be a pinch to him." Mr. Dassonville illustrated with
his own thumb and fingers how little that would be. "We don't have
really rich men in a place like Harmony," he concluded. "You have to go
to the city for that."

"You've got everything you want, haven't you?"

Mr. Dassonville looked over at his wife, and the smile bloomed again; he
smiled quietly to himself as he admitted it. "Yes, I've got everything I
want."

They were quiet, all of them, for a little while, with Peter turning his
hat over in his hands and Mr. Dassonville laying the tips of his fingers
together before him, resting his elbows on the arms of the chair.

"I wish," said Peter at last, "you would tell me how you did it."

"How I got more money than my neighbours? Well, I wasn't born with it."

This was distinctly encouraging. Neither was Peter.

"No two men, I suppose, make money in the same way," went on the man who
had, "but there are three or four things to be observed by all of them.
In the first place one must be very hard-working."

"Yes," said Peter.

"And one must never lose sight of the object worked for. Not"--as if he
had followed the boy's inward drop of dismay--"that a man should think
of nothing but getting money. On the contrary, I consider it very
essential for a man to have some escape from his business, some change
of pasture to run his mind in. He comes fresher to his work so. What I
mean is that _when_ he works he must make every stroke count toward the
end he has in view. Do you understand?"

"I think so." The House and the Shining Walls were safe, at any rate.

"And then," Mr. Dassonville checked off the points on his fingers, "he
must always save something from his income, no matter how small it is."

"I try to do that," confessed Peter, "but what with Ellen's back being
bad, and the interest on the mortgage, it's not so easy."

"Is there a mortgage? I am sorry for that, for the next thing I was
going to say is that he must never go into debt, never on any account."

"My father was sick; it was an accident," Peter protested loyally.

"So! I think I remember. Well, it is unfortunate, but where there is a
debt the only thing is to reduce it as steadily as possible, and if this
mortgage teaches you the trick of saving it may not be such a bad thing
for you. But when a man works and saves for a long time without getting
any sensible benefit, he sometimes thinks that saving and working are
not worth while. You must never make that mistake."

"Oh, no," said Peter. It seemed to him that they were getting on very
well indeed.

"There is another thing I should like to say," Mr. Dassonville went on,
"but I am not sure I can put it plainly. It is that you must not try to
be too wise." He smiled a little to Peter's blankness. "I believe in
Harmony it is called looking on all sides of a thing, but there is
always one side of everything like the moon which is turned from us. You
must just start from where you are and keep moving."

"I see," said Peter, looking thoughtfully into the fire, in imitation of
Mr. Dassonville. And there being no more advice forthcoming he began to
wonder if he ought to sit a while from politeness, as people did in
Bloombury, or go at once. Mrs. Dassonville got up and came behind her
husband's chair.

"Don't you think you ought to tell him, David, that there are other
things worth having besides money; better worth?"

"You, perhaps." Mr. Dassonville took the hand of his wife laid on his
shoulder and held it against his cheek; it brought out for Peter
suddenly, how many years younger she was, and what he had heard of Mr.
Dassonville having married her from among the summer folk who came to
Harmony for the pine woods and the sea air. "Ah, but I'm not sure I'd
have you without a great deal of it. It takes money to raise rare plants
like you. But I ought to say," still holding his wife's hand to his
cheek and watching Peter across it, "that I think it is a very good sign
that you are willing to ask. The most of poor men will sit about and
rail and envy the rich, but hardly one would think to ask how it is
done, or believe if he were told. They've a notion it's all gouging and
luck, and you couldn't beat that out of them if you tried. Very few of
them understand how simple success is; it isn't easy often, but it is
always simple."

Peter supposed that he really ought to go after that, though he did not
know how to manage it until Mrs. Dassonville smiled at him over her
husband's shoulder and asked him what sort of work he did. "Oh, if you
know about gardens," she interrupted him, "you can help a little. There
are such a lot of things coming up in mine that I don't know the names
of."

It flashed out to Peter long afterward that she had simply provided an
easy way for him to get out of the house now that his visit was
terminated. She held the white fold of her shawl over her head with one
hand and gathered the trailing skirts with the other. They rustled as
she moved like the leaves of the elms at night above the roof, as she
led him along the walk where little straight spears of green and blunt
flower crowns faintly tinged with colour came up thickly in the borders.
So by degrees she got him down past the hyacinth beds and the nodding
buds of the daffodils to the gate and on the road again, walking home in
the chill early twilight with the pricking of a pleasant excitement in
his veins.

It was that, perhaps, and the sense of having got so much more out of it
than any account of his visit would justify, that kept Peter from saying
much to his mother that night about his talk with the rich man; he asked
her instead if she had ever seen Mrs. Dassonville.

"Yes," she assured him. "Mr. Dassonville drove her over to Mrs.
Tillinghurst's funeral in October. They had only been married a little
while then; she is the second Mrs. Dassonville, you know; the first died
years ago. I thought her a very lovely lady."

"A lovely lady," Peter said the phrase under his breath. The sound of it
was like the soft drawing of silken skirts.

His mother looked at him across the supper table and was pleased to see
the renewal of cheerfulness, and then, motherlike, sighed to think that
Peter was getting so old now that if he didn't choose to tell her things
she had no right to ask him. "Your walk has done you good," was all she
said, and it must have been the case, for that very night as soon as his
head had touched the pillow he was off again, as he hadn't been since
Ellen fell ill, to the House of the Shining Walls. It rose stately
against a blur of leafless woods and crocus-coloured sky. The garden
before it was all full of spring bulbs and the scent of daffodils. The
Princess came walking in it as before, but she was no Princess now,
merely a woman with her dark hair brushed up in a half moon from her
brow and her skirts drawing after her with a silken rustle; her face was
dim and sweet, with only a faint, a very faint, reminder of Ada, and her
name was the Lovely Lady.




PART TWO


IN WHICH PETER
BECOMES INVISIBLE ON THE
WAY TO GROWING RICH




PART TWO

IN WHICH PETER BECOMES INVISIBLE ON
THE WAY TO GROWING RICH


In the late summer of that year Peter went up to the city with Mr.
Greenslet to lay in his winter stock and remained in canned goods with
Siegel Brothers' Household Emporium. That his mother had rented the
farming land for cash was the immediate occasion of his setting out, but
there were several other reasons and a great many opinions. Mr.
Greenslet had a boy of his own coming on for Peter's place; Bet, the
mare, had died, and the farm implements wanted renewing; in spite of
which Mrs. Weatheral could hardly have made up her mind to spare him
except for the opportune appearance of the cash renter. With that and
the chickens and the sewing, she and Ellen could take care of themselves
and the interest, which would leave all that Peter could make to count
against the mortgage.

They put it hopefully to one another so, as they sat about the kitchen
stove, all three of them holding hands, on the evening before his
departure. But the opinions, which were rather thicker at Bloombury than
opportunities, were by no means so confident as Peter could have wished
if he had known them. Mr. Greenslet thought it couldn't be much worse
than Peter's present situation, and the neighbours were sure it wasn't
much better. The minister had a great deal to say of the temptations of
a young man in the city, which was afterward invalidated by the city's
turning out quite another place than he described it.

It was left for Ellen and Mrs. Jim Harvey to make the happy
prognostication. "You can trust Peter," Ada was confident.

"But you got to be mighty cute to get in with those city fellows," her
husband warned her, "and Peter's so dashed simple; never sees anything
except what's right in front of him. Now a man"--Jim assumed this estate
for himself in the right of being three months married--"has got to look
on all sides of a thing."

As for Ellen, she hadn't the slightest doubt that Peter was shortly to
become immensely wealthy and she was to go up and keep house for him.

"There'll be gold chairs in the parlour and real Brussels," she
anticipated. Peter affected to think it unlikely that she could be
spared by the highly mythical person who was to carry her off to keep
house for himself. Somehow Peter could never fall into the normal
Bloombury attitude of thinking that if you had hip disease, your life
was bound to be different from everybody's and you might as well say so
right out, flat-footed, and be done with it.

With all this, finally he was got off to the city in the wake of Mr.
Greenslet, and the first discovery he made there was that outside of
Siegel Brothers, and a collarless man with a discouraged moustache who
appeared in the hall of his lodging-house when the rent was due, he was
practically invisible. As he went up and down the stairs sodden with
scrub water which never by any possible chance left them scrubbed,
nobody spoke to him. Nobody in the street saw him walking to and fro in
his young loneliness. There were men passing there with faces like Mr.
Dassonville's, keen and competent, and lovely ladies in soft becoming
wraps and bright winged hats--such hats! Peter would like to have hailed
some of these as one immeasurably behind but still in the way, seized of
that precious inward quality which manifests itself in competency and
brightness. He would have liked to feel them looking on friendlily at
his business of becoming rich; but he remained, as far as any word from
them was concerned, completely invisible. He came after a while to the
conclusion that most of those who went up and down with him were in the
same unregarded condition.

The city appeared quite habituated to this state of affairs; hordes of
them came and went unconfronted between banked windows of warmth and
loveliness, past doors from which light and music overflowed into the
dim street in splashes of colour and sound, where people equally under
the prohibition lapped them up hungrily like dogs at puddles. Sometimes
in the street cars or subways he brushed against fair girls from whom
the delicate aroma of personality was like a waft out of that country
of which his preferences and appreciations acknowledged him a native,
but no smallest flutter of kinship ever put forth from them to Peter.
The place was crammed full of everything that anybody could want and
nobody could get at it, at least not Peter, nor anybody he knew at
Siegel Brothers. And at the lodging house they seemed never to have
heard of the undiminished heaps of splendour that lay piled behind plate
glass and polished counters. It was extraordinary, incredible, that he
wasn't to have the least of them.

As the winter closed in on him, the restrictions of daily living rose so
thick upon him that they began to prevent him from his dreams. He could
no longer get through them to the House with the Shining Walls. Often as
he lay in his bed trying to believe he was warm enough, he would set off
for it down the lanes of blinding city light through which the scream of
the trolley pursued him, only to see it glimmer palely on him through
impenetrable plate glass, or defended from him by huge trespass signs
that appeared to have some relation to the fact that he was not yet so
rich as he expected to be. Times when he would wake out of his sleep,
it would be to a strange sense of severances and loss, and though he did
not know exactly what ailed him, it was the loss of all his dreams.
After a while the whole city seemed to ache with that loss. He would lie
in his narrow bed and think that if he did not see his mother and
Bloombury again he would probably die of it.

Then along in the beginning of April somebody saw him. It was in the
dusk between supper and bed time, walking on the viaduct where he had
the park below him. There was a wash of blue still in the sky and a thin
blade of a moon tinging it with citron; here and there the light
glittered on the trickle of sap on the chafed boughs. It was just here
that he met her. She was about his own age, and she was walking oddly,
as though unconscious of the city all about her, with short picked
steps, and her hat with the tilt to it of a girl who knows herself
admired. She had a rose at her breast which she straightened now and
then, or smoothed a fold of her dress and hummed as she walked. Her
cheeks were bright even in the dusk, and some strange, quick fear kept
pace with her glancing. Peter was walking heavily himself, as the young
do when the dreams have gone out of them, and as they passed in the
light of the arc that danced delicately to the wandering air, the girl's
look skimmed him like a swallow. She must have turned just behind him,
for in a moment she drifted past his shoulder.

"Hello!" she said.

"Hello!" said Peter, but, in the moment it had taken to drag that up
from under his astonishment, she had passed him; her laugh as she went
brushed the tip of his youth like a swallow's wing. It remained with him
as a little, far spark; it seemed as if a dream was about to spin itself
out from it. He went around that way several times on his evening walks
in hopes that he might meet her again.

As though the spark had lightened a little of the blank unrecognition
with which the city met him, he was seen that day and in no unfriendly
aspect by "our Mr. Croker" of Siegel Brothers. The running gear of a
great concern like the Household Emporium pressed, in the days of
Peter's apprenticeship, unequally at times on its employees, and the
galled spot of the canned goods department was Blinders the bundle boy.
His other name was Horace and he was chiefly remarkable for pimples
which he seemed to think interesting, and for a state of active
resentment against anybody who gave him anything to do. The world for
Horace was a dark jungle full of grouches and pulls and privilege and
devious guile.

That the propensity which Peter had developed for inquiring every half
hour or so if he hadn't got that done yet, could be nothing else but a
cabal directed against Blinders' four dollars and a half a week, he was
convinced. In all the time that he could spare from his pimples, Horace
rehearsed a martyr's air designed to convey to Mr. Croker that though he
would suffer in silence he was none the less suffering. It being
precisely Mr. Croker's business to rap out grouches as an expert
mechanician taps defective cogs, it happened the day after Peter's
meeting with the girl that the worst hopes of Horace were realized.

"Aw, they're always a pickin' on me, Mr. Croker, that's what they are,
Mr. Croker," Horace defended himself, preparing to snivel if the
occasion seemed to demand it, by taking out his gum and sticking it on
the inside of his sleeve. "I can't handle 'em no faster, Mr. Croker."

"Not the way you go at it," Peter assured him. Anybody could have told
by the way he included Mr. Croker in his cheerfulness that there was
something between them. "You turn 'em over too many times and you use
too much paper and too much string." Suddenly Peter reddened with
embarrassment. "Not that that makes any difference to a big firm like
this," he apologized, "but in a small place every little counts." He
turned the package deftly and began to illustrate his method. "When
you're tying up calico with one hand and taking in eggs and butter with
the other and telling three people the price of things at the same
time," he explained, "you have to notice things like this."

"I see," said Mr. Croker. "You try it, Blinders."

"Aw, what's the matter with the way I was doin' it?" wailed Horace.

"If you don't feel quite up to it----" Mr. Croker hinted. Horace did, he
wrapped with alacrity and Peter showed him how to hold the string.

"You come along with me, Weatheral," Mr. Croker commanded. Horace took
his gum out of his cuff and made dark prognostication as to what was
probably to be done to Peter.

What Peter thought was that he should probably become very unpopular
with his fellow clerks. Croker took him across to dry goods, where girls
were tying bundles in little cages over the sales ladies' heads, and had
him repeat the method of handling string. Except that he thought he
should get to like Mr. Croker, the incident made no particular
impression on Peter--so dulled were all his senses for want of
dreams,--and passed wholly out of mind.

It was two or three days after that he saw the girl again, nearer the
end of the viaduct, where four or five streets poured light and
confusion into Venable Square. She was going on ahead, hurrying and
pretending not to hurry to overtake a man to whom she wished to speak.
She was quite close to him, she was speaking, and suddenly he gave a
little outward jerk with his elbow which caught hers unexpectedly and
whirled her back against the parapet. The little purse she was carrying
fell from her hand. The man gave a quick laugh over his shoulder and
ploughed his way across the street.

"The skunk!" Peter's list of expletives was not extensive. He picked up
the flat little purse and handed it back to her. "Shall I go after him?
Did you know him?"

The girl was holding on to the parapet with a little choky laugh. "Oh,
yes, I know that kind. No, I don't want him!"

"He ought to have a good thrashing," Peter was convinced. The girl
looked up at him with a sudden curiosity.

"You're from the country, ain't you? I thought so the other night. I can
always tell."

"I guess you're from the country yourself," Peter hazarded. She was
prettier even than he had thought. Her glance had left his, however, and
was roving up and down the hurrying crowd as though testing it for some
plunge she was about to make.

"If you wanted me to see you home----" Peter hinted; he did not know
quite what was expected of him. She answered with a little sharp noise
which ended in a cough.

"I guess you're real kind," she admitted, "but I ain't goin' home just
yet. I got a date." She moved off then, and since it was in the
direction he was going, there was nothing for Peter to do but move with
her, on the other side of the wide pavement. At the turn she drifted
back to his side again; it seemed to Peter there was amusement in her
tone.

"You got anything to do Saturday about this time?" Peter hadn't. "Well,
I'll be here--savvy?" But before he could make her any assurance she
laughed again and slipped into the crowd.

Peter knew a great many facts about life. There were human failings even
in Bloombury, and what Peter didn't know about the city had been largely
made up to him by the choice conversation of J. Wilkinson Cohn, in
staples, at the next counter to him. Anybody who listened long enough
to J. Wilkinson's personal reminiscences would have found himself fully
instructed for every possible contingency likely to arise between a
gentleman of undoubted attractions and the ladies, but there are forces
in youth that are stronger than experience. It is a very old, old way of
the world for young things to walk abroad in the spring and meet one
another.

Peter strolled along the viaduct Saturday and felt his youth beat in him
pleasantly when he saw her come. She had on a different hat, and the
earlier hour showed him the shining of her eyes above the raddled
cheeks.

"We could go down in the park a piece," he suggested as they turned in
together along the parapet. There was a delicate damp smell coming up
from it on the night, like the Bloombury lanes.

"You're regular country, aren't you?" There was an accent of impatience
in her tone, "I haven't had my supper yet."

"Well, what do you say to a piece of roast beef and a cup of coffee?"
Peter had planned this magnificence as he came along fingering his pay
envelope. He knew just the place, he told her. The feeling of his proper
male ascendency as he drew her through the crowd was a tonic to him; the
man tossing pancakes in the window where he hesitated looking for the
ladies' entrance seemed quite to enjoy doing it, as though he had known
all along there was to be company.

"Oh, I don't care for any of these places." Peter felt her pull at his
elbow. "I'll show you." They went along then, brushing lightly shoulder
to shoulder until they came to one of those revolving doors from which
gusts of music issued. There was a girl standing up to sing as they sat
down and the whole air of the place was beyond even the retailed
splendour of J. Wilkinson. The girl threw back her wraps and began to
order freely. Peter, who had a glimpse of the card, stiffened.

"I--I guess I'm not so very hungry," he cautioned. She looked up from
the menu sharply and her face softened; she made one or two deft changes
in it.

"This is Dutch, you know," she threw out. "Oh, I know you invited me,
but you didn't think I was one of the kind that let a strange gentleman
pay for my dinner, did you?" Peter denied it, stricken with
embarrassment. She seemed in the light, to take him in more completely.

"Say, would you have licked that fellow the other night, honest?"

"Well, if he was disrespectful to a lady----" Peter began.

"Oh, _excuse_ me!" She turned her head aside for a moment in her long
gloves. "You _are_ country!" she said again, but it seemed not to
displease her. "I don't care so much for her voice, do you?" She turned
on the singer. They discussed the entertainment and the dinner. They
were a long time about it. The orchestra played a waltz at last, and
Ethel--she had told him to call her that--put her arms on the table and
leaned across to him, and though Peter knew by this time that her cheeks
were painted, he didn't somehow mind it.

"What's it like up in the country where you lived?" she wished to know.

"Hills mostly, little wooded ones, and high pastures, and the apple
orchards going right up over them...."

"I know," she nodded. "I guess it's them I been smelling ... or
laylocks."

"Things coming up in the garden," Peter contributed: "peonies, and long
rows of daffodils...." He did not realize it, but he had described to
her no place that he had known but the way to the House. The girl cut
him off.

"Don't!" she said sharply. "You know," she half apologized, "you kind of
remind me of somebody ... a boy I knew up country. It was him that got
me here----" She made her little admission quietly, the horror of it
long worn down to daily habit. "That first time I saw you, it seemed
almost as if it was him ... I ain't never blamed him--much. He didn't
mean to be bad, but when the trouble came he couldn't help none.... I
guess real help is about the hardest thing to find there is."

"I guess it is."

"Oh, well, we gotta make the best of it." She glanced at Peter with her
head on one side as she twiddled her fingers across the cloth to the
tune of the orchestra.

They went out at last and walked in the least frequented streets, and
Peter held her hand; the warmth of it ran with a pleasant tingling in
his veins. He seemed to have touched in her palm the point at which the
city came alive to him. They walked and walked and yet it seemed that
something lacked to bring the evening to a finish; it was incredible to
Peter that after all his loneliness he should have to let her go.

"We could go up to my place," Ethel suggested. "It's up here." He hadn't
suspected that she had been guiding him.

"I guess not to-night." Peter's blood was singing in his ears. In the
dark of the unfrequented street he could feel her young body leaning
toward his.

"Say, you know I ain't after the money the way some girls are; I like
you ... honest----"

"I guess I'd better go home." But they went on up the side street a
little farther. "Good-bye," he said, but he did not let her go.

She shook her hand free at last.

"Oh, well, of course, if you don't want to...." He felt her soft hands
fumbling at his face; she drew him down to a kiss. Suddenly she sprang
away, laughing. "Go, you silly!"

"Ethel!" he cried, but he lost her in the dark. He should have let her
go at that; he knew he should. In spite of her paying half, his dinner
had cost him more than two ordinary dinners ... and besides.... He
couldn't help, however, walking around by the viaduct for several
evenings the next week, and at last he saw her. She was going by without
speaking, but he got squarely in front of her.

"Ethel!"

She pretended just to have recognized him.

"Oh, you here? I thought you'd gone back to the country!"

"You aren't mad with me about ... the other night?" He did not quite
know how to express the quality of his desertion.

"Who? Me?" airily. "Oh, I guess there's just as good fish in the
sea----" She changed all at once under his young hunger for
companionship. "You're good," she said; "you're the real thing."

"You're good, too," he was certain, "when you're with me."

"Oh, it rubs off. Say, kid, I guess you got folks at home you're sending
money to and all that, and you got to get ahead in the world. Well, you
don't want to have nothing to do with my kind, and that's straight." The
deviltry she put on toward him failed pitifully. "Chase yourself, kid; I
just ain't good for you any more." Nevertheless they moved along the
parapet to the dark interval between the lights and there they kissed
again, this time with no undercurrent.

"Good-bye, Ethel."

"Good-bye, boy." The little spark was out.




PART THREE

IN WHICH PETER
BECOMES A BACHELOR




PART THREE

IN WHICH PETER BECOMES A BACHELOR




I


The day before leaving for his summer vacation Peter was notified that
he was wanted in his private office by the younger Siegel Brother.
Though he couldn't quite fall in with the dark prognostications of
Blinders that he was about to be mulcted of his salary by a plot which
had been plainly indicated by the marked partiality of our Mr. Croker,
the incident gave him some uneasiness. The young Siegel Brother must
have been younger than somebody of course, though it couldn't have been
by more than a scratch, and he might have been any age without betraying
it, so deeply was he sunk in the evidence of the surpassing quality of
the grocery department. However, there was something surprisingly young
looking out at Peter from the junior brother's red and white rotundity,
at which he took heart immensely.

"Weatheral, Peter, canned goods, recommended by Mr. Greenslet," Siegel
Brother ticked him off from a manilla envelope. "Just a little
honorarium, Mr. Weatheral, we are in the habit of distributing to such
of our employees as make practical suggestions to the advantage of the
business." Contriving to make his hands meet in front of him by clasping
them very high up on his chest, Siegel Brother assumed that he had
folded his arms, and waited to see what Peter would do about it.

"We have also a little savings bank for the benefit of our employees
which pays 3 per cent., yet I believe we have you not among our
depositors." There was the slightest possible burr to his speech as
though it were blunted by so much fatness.

"Well, you see, sir--there's a mortgage." Peter was afraid he should
damage himself by the admission, but the firm heard him out.

"How much?"

"It was a thousand, but we've got it down to seven hundred--six hundred
and sixty," Peter corrected himself with a glance at his honorarium.

"And the farm, it is worth----" Siegel Brother parted his hands slightly
to admit of any valuation.

"Two thousand."

"So! Well, Mr. Weatheral, that is not so bad, and if I were you, when I
had occasion to speak of it I would say, not 'I am paying a mortgage,'
that is dead work, Mr. Weatheral, but 'I am buying a farm.' It goes
easier so."

"Thank you, sir, I'll remember." He supposed his employer was done with
him, but as he turned to go he heard his name again.

"You will report to our Mr. Croker when you return, Mr. Weatheral; he
thinks he can use you."

Two weeks later when he came back rested from Bloombury, Peter found
himself visible to at least ten persons, all of whom pertained to the
boarding-house of the exclusive Mrs. Blodgett, where, by the advice of
J. Wilkinson Cohn, he engaged a small room on the third floor with a
window opening some six feet from the rear wall of a wholesale
stationery, and one electric light discreetly placed to discourage the
habit of reading in bed.

From this time on he was visible to Mrs. Blodgett and Aggie and Miss
Thatcher, whom he already knew as the pure food demonstrator in dairy
products, to two inconsiderable young women from the wholesale
stationer's, and a gentleman from a shoe store, the whole of whose
physiognomy appeared to be occupied with the effort to express an
engaging youthfulness which the crown of his head explicitly denied. He
was occasionally visible to the representative of gentlemen's outfitters
who was engaged to Aggie and took Sunday dinners with them, and he was
particularly and pleasingly visible to J. Wilkinson Cohn and Miss Minnie
Havens. The rest of his fellow boarders were so much of a likeness, a
kind of family likeness that spread all over Siegel Brothers and such
parts of the city as Peter had been admitted to, that it was a relief to
Peter to realize from his profile that J. Wilkinson's last name probably
ought to have been spelled Cohen. The determinedly young gentleman
explained to him that J. Wilkinson's intrusion into the exclusiveness of
Blodgett's was largely a concession to Aggie's being as good as married
and not liable to social contamination, and to the fact that the little
Jew was amusing and pretty near white, anyway.

Miss Minnie Havens did typewriting and stenography in a downtown office
and was understood to be in search of economic independence, rather than
under the necessity of making a living. She had a high fluffy pompadour
and a half discoverable smile which could be brought to a very agreeable
laugh if one spent a little pains at it. J. Wilkinson Cohn appeared to
find it worth the pains.

The particular advantage of Blodgett's, besides the fact that you could
have two helps of everything without paying extra for it, was that it
was exclusive and social. Mrs. Blodgett had collected her family of
boarders on the principle of not having anybody who wasn't a suitable
companion for Aggie. There was also a pianola which gave the place a
tone.

There was fire and light in the dining-room at Blodgett's from seven to
nine always, and in the parlour with the pianola on Saturday evening
and all day Sunday. Sometimes, even on week days after supper, J.
Wilkinson would open the door into the darkened room, push away the
pianola and sing topical songs to his own accompaniment until his
stiffened fingers clattered on the keys. Other times he would give
imitations of popular stage celebrities until Blodgett's shouted with
laughter. At all times they appeared to have a great many engagements.
Peter was advised to join this or that organization, and to enter upon
social occasions that unfortunately presented themselves in the light of
occasions to spend money. Apparently there were no dragons tracking the
path of Blodgett's boarders. Miss Havens did better than any of them for
him. She explained to him how to get books from the circulating library,
and let him read hers until he could arrange for a card. She said it was
a pleasure to think there was going to be somebody in the house who was
congenial. It wasn't that she had anything against Miss Thatcher and the
rest of them--they just didn't have the same tastes. She thought a
person ought to spend some of the time improving their minds. Although
the expression was ambiguous, it served as a sort of sedative to the
aching vacuity of the hours which Peter spent away from Siegel Brothers.
He found himself spending as many as possible of them with Miss Havens.
She had a way of making the frivolling talk of the supper table appear a
warrantable substitute for the things that Peter knew, even while he
echoed her phrases, that he wasn't getting. He found himself skidding on
the paths of self-improvement and the obligations of seeing life, along
the edges of desolation. He immersed himself as far as possible in the
atmosphere of Blodgett's in order that he needn't have any time left in
which to consider how far it fell short of what he had come to find. For
this reason he was usually the last at the supper table, but there were
occasions when he found it discreet to slip away as early and quietly as
possible.

It was one evening about two months after his instalment at Blodgett's.
Peter was sitting in his room when he heard them yammering at his door
with so much hilarious insistence that he found himself getting up to
open it, without giving himself time to put down the book he was reading
or to take off the overcoat he had put on for want of a fire, and
finding himself in some embarrassment because of the misapprehension
which this fact involved.

"Ready, Peter?"

"Come along, Peter!"

"I ... I'm not going," said Peter.

"What? Not going to the rink with us to-night? Why, you said----" The
bright group of his fellow boarders hung upon the narrow landing like
bees at the threshold of a hive.

"I said I'd go if I could--" protested Peter, "and I can't."

"Gee! What's the matter with you?"

"Don't be a beastly stiff!"

"Come on, fellows, we'll miss the car. Let him be a stiff if he wants
to."

Peter heard their feet retreating on the stairs, and then he saw that
Minnie Havens still hesitated at the landing. She had on her best silk
waist and her blond pompadour was brushed higher than ever. Her eyes,
which were blue, were fixed directly on him with something in the
meeting that gave him the impression, gaspingly, of being about to step
off into space. He seemed suddenly to see a path opening directly
through the skating rink and the Saturday Social Club to the House of
the Shining Walls, and Minnie Havens walking in it beside him. He
wrenched his mind away forcibly from that and fixed it on the figure of
his weekly salary.

"Couldn't you?" she persuaded.

"No," said Peter. "I'm much obliged to you, but I really couldn't."

But before he had time to take up his reading, which somehow he was not
able to do immediately, he heard Mrs. Blodgett, who made a point of
being as kind to her boarders as she could afford to be, tapping at his
door.

"I thought you'd be going to the rink to-night."

"No," said Peter.

"You don't think it's wrong, or anything?"

"Oh, no, not in the least."

"Well, Mr. Weatheral, I've seen a power of young folks, comin' and
goin', in my business and it don't pay for 'em to get too stodgy like.
They need livenin' up." She hung upon the door as Peter waited for her
to go. "Miss Havens is a nice girl," she ventured.

Peter admitted it. "I've my mother and sister to think of," he told her,
and presently he found he had told her a great deal more.

"Well," commented Mrs. Blodgett, "you do have a lot to carry.... Was you
readin' now, Mr. Weatheral? ... because it's warmer down in my sittin'
room, and there's only Aggie and me sewin'.... Besides," she argued
triumphantly, "it's savin' light."

First and last he heard a great deal about saving at Blodgett's. Aggie,
who was making up her white things, had something to tell every evening
almost, about the price of insertion. But it was saving for a purpose;
they were in the way, most of them, of being investors. J. Wilkinson had
sixty dollars in his brother's cigar stand on Fifty-fourth street. He
used to let his brother off for Sunday afternoons with quite a
proprietary air. The shoe gentleman, whose very juvenile name was Wally
Whitaker, didn't believe in such a mincing at prosperity. He talked
freely about tips and corners and margins and had been known to make
twenty-seven dollars in copper once. He offered Peter some exclusive
inside information in B and C's before he had been in the house a month.

"Well, you see," Peter explained himself, "I'm buying a farm up our
way!" His fellow boarders laid down their forks to look at him; he could
see reflected from their several angles how he had placed himself by the
mere statement of his situation. He felt at once the resistance it gave
him, the sense of something to pull against, of having got his feet
under him. It was the point at which the conquest of the mortgage dragon
began to present itself to him as a thing accomplished rather than a
thing escaped.

It must have been this feeling of release which opened up for him, from
pictures that he saw occasionally with Miss Havens on Sundays, from
books he read and discussed with her, avenues that appeared to lead more
or less directly to the House. There were times when he found himself
walking in them with Miss Minnie Havens, and yet always curiously
expecting the Lovely Lady when they found her there, to be quite another
person. He came within an inch of telling her about it on the occasion
on which she presented him with an embroidered hat marker for Christmas,
and when he took her to the theatre with tickets the floor walker had
presented to him on account of Mrs. Floor Walker not feeling up to it.
It appeared, further, that Miss Havens had a way of falling into
profound psychological difficulties which required a vast amount of
talking over, and a great many appeals to Peter's disinterested judgment
to extract her, not without some subtle intimations of dizzying escapes
for himself. Peter supposed that was always the way with girls. It came
to a crisis later where Miss Havens' whole destiny hung upon the point
as to whether she could accept a situation offered her in her own town,
or should stay on in the city and see what came of it.

"You'd get more salary there, and be able to live cheaper?" Peter wished
to know.

"Oh, yes." The implication of her tone was that she didn't see what
that had to do with it. It was toward the end of June, and she was
looking very pretty in a white dress and a hat that set off her
pompadour to advantage, and there was no special reason, as they had the
afternoon before them, why they should not have taken some of the
by-paths that the girl perceived to lead out from the subject into
breathless wonder. She had ways, which were maidenly and good, of
opening up to Peter comfortable little garden plots of existence which,
though they lay far this side of the House and the Lovely Lady, had in
the monotony of the long climb up the scale of Siegel Brothers, moments
of importunate invitation.

"And you came up to the city," Peter went on in the gravelled walk of
fact, "just to improve yourself in shorthand so you could get such a
situation? I don't see why you hesitate."

Miss Havens could hardly say why herself.

"There were so many ways of bettering one's self in the city. I've a
great many friends here," she hinted.

"Not so many," Peter reminded her, "as you'd have where you were brought
up."

"You are staying in the city?" Miss Havens suggested.

"That's different. I have to." He had already told her about Ellen and
also about his mother.

"And are you always going to stay on here like this, working and working
and never taking any time for yourself? Aren't you ever going to ...
marry?"

"I know too much what poverty is like to ask any woman to share it,"
Peter protested.

"Suppose she should ask you?"

"They don't do that; the right sort."

"I don't see why ... if some girl ... cared ... and if she saw ...
anybody struggling along under burdens she would be glad to share, and
she knew because of that he didn't mean to ask her ... You think she
ought not to let him know?"

"I think it wouldn't be best," said Peter.

"You think the man would despise her?"

"Not that; but if he liked her a little ... he might consent to it ...
just because he liked her and was tired maybe ... and that wouldn't be
good for either of them."

"Well, anyway, it doesn't concern either of us," said Miss Havens.

The next evening as Peter was letting himself in at his own door--he had
moved to the second floor front by this time--Mrs. Blodgett stopped him.

"Miss Havens left her regards for you," she explained. "She went
to-day."

"Oh," said Peter, "wasn't it sudden?"

"Sort of. She'd been considerin' of it for some time, and last night she
made up her mind. But I did think," said Mrs. Blodgett, "that she'd have
said good-bye to _you_." And not eliciting anything by way of a reply,
she added: "Miss Havens is a nice girl. I hate to think of her slavin'
her life out in an office. She'd ought to get married."

"A girl has ever so many more chances in her home town," Peter offered
hopefully.

"Yes, I suppose so." Mrs. Blodgett sighed. "Is there anything I can do
for you, Mr. Weatheral?"

"Nothing, thank you." He was lingering still on the landing on Mrs.
Blodgett's account, but he found his finger slipping between the leaves
of the volume he had brought from the library.

"Ah," she warned him, "readin' is an improvin' occupation, but there's a
book we hadn't any of us ought to miss, and that's the Book of Life, Mr.
Weatheral." And somehow with that ringing in his ears, Peter spent
several minutes walking up and down in his room before he could settle
to his book again.




II


It was a week or ten days after Miss Havens left, before Peter went down
to Bloombury for his midsummer vacation, a week in which he had the
greatest difficulty in getting back to the House of the Shining Walls.
He set out for it almost immediately with a feeling akin to the release
with which one returns to daily habit after the departure of an
unexpected guest. But his thought would no sooner strike into the
accustomed paths than Miss Minnie Havens would meet him there
unaccountably, to begin again those long intimate conversations which
led toward and about the House, but never quite to it. Peter found
himself looking out for those meetings with some notion of dodging them,
and yet once they were fairly off, he owned them a great relief from
Blodgett's. Now that it was withdrawn, he realized in the girl's bright
companionship the effect of the rose-red glow of the shade that Aggie
drew down over the front parlour lamp on the evenings when the
Gentlemen's Outfitter called. It had prevented his seeing until now,
that the chief difference between himself and his fellow boarders, was
that for most of them, this was a place where they had come to stay.
Having let Miss Havens go on alone to the place she was bound for, he
had moments of dreadful sinking, as it occurred to him to wonder if he
hadn't made a mistake in the nature of his own destination. Suppose,
after all, he should find himself castaway in some oasis of determined
sprightliness with Wally Whitaker in whose pocket pretenses of tips and
margins he began to discern a poorer sort of substitute for the House.
He was as much bored by the permanently young shoe-salesman after this
discovery as before it, but obliged to set a watch on himself lest in a
moment of finding himself too much in the same case, he should make the
mistake of inviting Wally to Bloombury for his vacation.

He was relieved, when at last he had got away without it, to be saved
from such a misadventure, for he found his mother not standing the heat
well, and Ellen anxious. He had never definitely shaped to himself the
idea that there could anything happen to his mother; she was as much a
part of his life as the aging apple trees and the hills that climbed,
with low, gnarled pines to the sky's edge beyond the marshes, a point
from which to take distance and direction. He began to note now the
graying hair, the shrunken breast and the worn hands, so blue veined for
all their brownness, and he could not sleep of nights because of the
sweat that was on his soul, for fear of what might come to her. He would
lie in the little room under the roof and hear the elms moving like the
riffle of silence into sound, thinking of his mother until at last he
would be obliged to rise and move softly about the place, as if by the
mere assertion of himself he could make her safer in it. He wished
nothing so much as not to disturb her, but she must have been lying
awake often herself, for the second or third time this happened, she
called to him. He came, half dressed as he was and drew the covers up
close about her shoulders, and was exceedingly gay and tender with her.

"There's nothing troubling you, son?"

"Nothing--except to be sure there's nothing troubling _you_."

She gave a little, low laugh like a girl.

"That's so like your father. I remember he would get up in the night
when you were little, and go prowling about ... he used to say he was
afraid the roof tree would fall in and kill you. And yet here you
are...." She reached out to give him a little pat, as if somehow to
reassure him. The low dropping moon made a square block of light on
the uncarpeted floor; outside, the orchard waited for the dawn, and
the fields brimmed life up to their very doors.

"You're like him in other ways," she went on. "Somehow it's brought him
back wonderfully the last two or three days, and especially at night
when I'd hear you creaking down the stair. There's a board there which
always does creak, and I'd hear you trying to remember which it was, the
same as _he_ used to----"

"I haven't meant to keep you awake, mother."

"I've been awake. When you're getting along like, you don't sleep much,
Peter. Sleep is for dreaming, some of it, and the old don't dream."

"You're not to go calling yourself old, mother!"

"And me with a son going twenty-three! We weren't so young either when
we were married, your father and I ... but I want you should sleep,
Peter, and dream when you can. You have pleasant dreams, son?"

"Any amount of them." He was going off into one of those bright
fantasies of what he should do when he was rich as he meant to be, with
which he had so often beguiled Ellen's pain, but she kissed him and sent
him to bed again lest Ellen should hear them.

It was not more than a day or two after that the minister's wife caught
young Mr. Weatheral walking with his mother in the back pasture with his
arm about her, and was slightly shocked by it, for though it was thought
highly commendable in him to have paid off the mortgage and managed a
silk dress for her and Ellen besides, Bloombury was not habituated to a
lively expression of family affection. Peter had consented to gather the
huckleberries which Ellen insisted were of a superior flavour in the
back pasture, on the sole condition that his mother should come with
him, and the minister's wife had just stepped aside on her way to the
Tillinghurst's to gather the southerwood which grew there, for the
minister's winter cough, when she caught sight of them.

"She couldn't have stared more if she'd caught me with a girl." Peter
protested.

"It's only that she'd have thought it more likely," his mother
extenuated. "I hope you aren't going to be a girl-hater, Peter. I want
you should marry some time, and if I haven't seemed anxious about it
before now, you mustn't think it's because I want to keep you for Ellen
and me. What I don't want is that you should take to it just _because_
there's a girl. Not but what that's natural, but there's more to it than
that, Peter. For you," she supplemented. She sat down on a gray, round
stone while Peter stripped the bushes at her feet, and watched to see if
his colour rose while she talked, or his gaze failed to meet hers at any
point.

"I'd have liked to have Ellen marry," said Ellen's mother, "she's that
kind. Having a man of her own, most any kind of a man so as he would be
good to her, would mean such a lot. If Ellen can have a little of what
everybody's having, she's satisfied. But there are some who can get a
great deal more out of it than that ... and if they don't the rest of it
is a drag and a weariness." He left off stripping the bushes and turned
contentedly against her knees.

"You're my home, Mumsey."

"And not even," she gently insisted, "when I'm not here to make it for
you. There's a kind of life goes with loving; it's like--like the
lovely inside colour of a shell, and somehow, this winter I've wondered
if you'd got to the place where you knew what that would be like if you
should find it." She turned his face up to her with a tender anxiety and
yet with a little timidity; they did not talk much of such things in
Bloombury.

"I know, mother."

"Yes...." after a long look, "you would; you're so like your father. But
if you know, you mustn't ever be led by dullness or loneliness into
anything less, Peter. Not that I'm afraid you'll be led into anything
wrong ... but there are things that are almost more wrong than downright
wickedness....

"I've been thinking a great deal lately about when I was your age, and
there didn't seem anything for me but to marry one of the neighbour's
boys that I'd known always, or a long plain piece of school teaching. It
wasn't easy with everybody egging me on--but I stuck it out, and at the
last along came your father ... I'd like you to have something like
that, Peter,--and your son coming to you the way you came to me, like
it was through a cloud of glory...." He looked up presently on her
silence, silver tipped now with the hope of renewal, and he saw her as a
man sometimes when he is young and clean, sees his mother, the Sacred
Door ... and he did not observe at all that her hands were berry stained
and the nails broken, nor that her cheek had fallen in and her hair gray
and wispy. But being a young man and never good at talking, it made no
difference with him except that as they walked home across the pastures
he was more than ever careful of her and teased her more whimsically.

He forgot, after he had settled in his room again at Blodgett's, that
Miss Minnie Havens had ever walked with him in the purlieus of the
House, for he was quite taken up with a new set of rooms he had thrown
out from it for his mother. She was always there with him now until the
day of her death and long after, made a part of all his dreaming by the
touch with which she had limned in herself for him, the feature of all
Lovely Ladies.

He would write her long letters into which crept much that had been
uttered only in the House, which that winter became an estate in
Florida, moved there because of Mrs. Weatheral's need of mild climate.
They went abroad after the Christmas Holidays in which she had coughed
more than usual and consented to have her breakfast brought up to bed,
setting out every evening from Peter's reading-lamp and arriving very
shortly at Italian Cathedrals and old Roman seaport towns that smelled
of history.

Dreaming of lovely ladies who have no face or form other than they
borrow from the passing incident is a very pleasant way of passing the
time, and does not necessarily lead to anything; but when a man goes
about afraid lest his mother should die for lack of something he might
have got for her, he dreams closer at home. More than ever since the
revelation of his mother's frailness, Peter dreamed of being rich, and
since there was nothing nearer to him than the way Siegel Brothers had
managed it, he devoted so much time to the scrutiny of their methods
that he passed in a very short time from being head of the delivery
department to the right hand of Mr. Croker. Even Blinders could not
recall, in the three years he had been bundle boy, so marked an example
of favouritism.

"They don't make partners any more out of underlings," Croker let him
know confidentially. "What do you think you're headed for?" Peter
explained himself.

"I wanted to find out how they did it."

"And when you find out," Croker wagged at him, "you won't be able to do
anything with it. You have to have capital. Look at the time I've been
with them!"

"How long is that?" Peter was interested.

"Twenty years." Croker told him.

"In twenty years," Peter was confident, "a man ought to be able to find
some capital." After that he began to observe Mr. Croker.

It is probable at this time that if he had not been concerned for his
mother's health, he might have grown as dry and uninteresting as at
Blodgett's they began to think him.

He was a thin young man with hair of no particular colour, and eyes
that were good and rather shy about women. He went out very little and
had not, Miss Thatcher who sat opposite him was sure, a mind above his
business. Aggie had married her Outfitter, and J. Wilkinson Cohn, who
had become a full partner in his brother's cigar stand, had moved out to
Fifty-fourth Street, so that there was nobody who could have
contradicted her. But lying awake planning how he might piece out life
for his mother with comforts, and hearing in every knock the precursor
of what might have happened to her, his heart was exercised as it is
good for the heart to be even with pain and anxiety. And beyond the
heart stretching there was always the House. He could seldom get away to
it in his waking hours, but he knew it was there for him, and visiting
it in dreams he kept in spite of the anxiety and Mr. Croker, his young
resiliency. Along in December, about two weeks before his midwinter
holiday, Ellen sent for him.

"It's not as if there hadn't been time for everything. You must think of
that, Peter. And your being able to come down every Saturday since the
first stroke. There's plenty that are hurried away without a good-bye or
anything."

"I know, Ellen."

"And it isn't as if there hadn't been plenty to say, either. Six weeks
would have been too long for anybody less loving than mother. They
wouldn't have known how to go through your life and say just the things
you'll be glad to remember when the time comes for them. You've got to
keep your mind on those things, Peter."

"Yes, Ellen."

The front room had been well rid up after the funeral and everybody at
Ellen's earnest entreaty had left them quite alone. Although there was
fire in the base burner, they were sitting together by the kitchen
stove, the front of which was thrown open for the sake of the warm glow
of the coals. By and by the kettle began to sing and the bare tips of
the lilac scratched on the pane like a live thing waiting to be let in.
The little familiar sounds refilled for them the empty room.

Outside it was every way such a day as a well-spent life might slip
away in; the tracks in the deep-rutted February snow might have been
worn there by the habit of sixty years. There was no hint of the spring
yet, but here and there in the bare patches on the hills and the frayed
icy edges of the drifts, the sign that the weight of the winter was
behind them. There would be a little quiet time yet and then the
resurrection. The brother and sister had taken it all very quietly.
Nobody had ever taken anything in any other way in the presence of Mrs.
Weatheral, and that she was there still for them, that she would always
be present in their lives, a warm determining influence, was witnessed
by that absence of violence which empties too soon the cup of grief. The
loss of their mother had at least brought them no sense of leaving her
behind. They were going on with their life so soon because she was going
with them.

"That was why I wanted them all to go away," Ellen took up the thought
again. "I've been thinking all day about mother being with father and
how glad he'll be to see her, and yet it seems as if I can feel her
here. I thought if we kept still a while she'd make us understand what
she wanted us to do."

"About what, Ellen?"

"About my going up to the city with you to board--it seems such a
wasteful way to live somehow, just sitting around!"

"It isn't as expensive as keeping house," Peter told her, "and I want
you to sit around, Ellen; women in Bloombury don't get enough of that
I'm afraid."

"They don't. Did you see Ada Harvey to-day? Four children and two teeth
out, and her not thirty. I guess you'd take better care of me than that,
Peter,--only----"

"You think _she_ wouldn't like it for you?"

"She thought such a lot of keeping up a home, Peter. It was like--like
those Catholics burning candles. It seemed as if she thought you'd get
something out of it if it was just going on, even if you didn't visit it
more than two or three times a year. Lots of women feel that way, Peter,
and I guess there must be something in it."

"There _is_ something in it," Peter assured her.

"And if I go and board with you we'd have to break up everything----"
She looked about on all the familiar mould of daily habit that was her
world, and tears started afresh. "And we've got all this furniture." She
moved her head toward the door of the front room and the parlour set
that had been Peter's Christmas gift to them two years ago. "For all it
was such a comfort to her to have it, it's as good as new. It seemed as
if she thought you were the only one good enough to sit in it."

"Don't, Ellen."

"I know, Peter." They were silent a while until the deep wells of grief
had stilled in the sense of that sustaining presence. "I only wanted to
be sure I wouldn't be going against her, breaking up the home. It seems
like anything she set such store by oughtn't to stop just because she
isn't here to take care of it." They had to come back to that the next
day and the next.

"I only want to do what is best for you, Ellen."

"I'd be best off if I was making you happy, Peter--and I'd feel such a
burden somehow, just boarding."

"The rents _are_ cheaper in the suburbs," Peter went so far as to admit.
It was all so inarticulate in him; how could he explain to Ellen the
feeling that he had, that settling down to a home with her would somehow
put an end to any dreams he had had of a home of his own, persistent but
unshaped visions that vanished before the sudden brightening of Ellen's
face at his least concession.

"We could have somebody in to clean," she reminded him, "and I hardly
ever have to be in bed now."

The fact was that Peter had the very place in mind; he had often walked
out there on Sundays from Blodgett's; he thought the neighbourhood had a
clean and healthy look. He went up on Tuesday to see what could be done
about it.

Lessing, who rented him the apartment, made the natural mistake about it
that Peter's age and his inexperience as a householder invited. He said
the neighbours were all a most desirable class of people, and Peter
could see for himself that the city was bound to build out that way in a
few years. As for what Pleasanton could do in the way of climate, well,
Lessing told him, with the air of being only a little less interested
than he credited Peter with being, look at the perambulators.

They were as fine a lot of wellfilled vehicles as could be produced by
any suburb anywhere, and Ellen for one was never tired of looking at
them. But Peter couldn't understand why Ellen insisted on walking home
from church Sunday morning the wrong way of the pavement.

"I suppose we do get in the way," she admitted after he had explained to
her that they wouldn't be crowded off so frequently if they moved with
the nurse-maid's parade and not against it, "but if we go this way we
can see all the little faces."

"I didn't know you cared so much for babies."

"Well, you see it isn't as if I was to have any of my own----" Something
in the tone with which she admitted the restraining fact of her
affliction brought out for Peter how she had fitted her life to it, like
a plant growing hardily out of a rock, climbing over and around it
without rancour or rebellion. As he turned now to look at her long,
plain face in the light of what had been going on in himself lately, he
recalled that the determining influence which had drawn her thick hair
into that unbecoming knot at the back of her neck had been the pain it
had given her when she first began to put up her hair, to do it higher.

She was watching the bright little bonneted heads go by with the same
detachment that he had learned to look at the shop windows, without
thinking of appropriating any of their splendour for himself, and when
she spoke again it was without any sensible connection with the present
occasion.

"Peter, do you remember Willy Shakeley?"

"Shakey Willy, we used to call him. I remember his freckles; they were
the biggest thing about him." He waited for the communicating thread,
but nothing came except what presently reached him out of his own young
recollections. "He wasn't good enough for you, Ellen," he said at last
for all comment.

"He was kind, and he wouldn't have minded about my being lame, but a man
has to have a healthy wife if he's a farmer." How completely she had
accepted the deprivation for herself, he saw by her not wasting a sigh
over it; she had schooled herself so long to go no further in her
thought than she went on the crutch which tapped now on the pavement
beside him. As if to stop his going any further on her account she
smiled up at him. "Peter, if you were to meet any of the things you
thought you'd grow up to be, do you suppose you'd know them?"

At least he could have told her that he didn't meet any of them on his
way between Siegel Brothers and the flat in Pleasanton.

There are many things which if a young man goes without until he is
twenty-five he can very well do without, but the one thing he cannot
leave off without hurting him is the expectation of some time doing
them. The obligation of the mortgage and Ellen's lameness had been a
sort of bridge for Peter, a high airy structure which engaged the best
of him and so carried him safely over Blodgett's without once letting
him fall into the unlovely vein of life there, its narrowness, its
commonness. He had known, even when he had known it most inaccessible,
that there was another life which answered to every instinct of his for
beauty and fitness. He waited only for the release from strain for his
entry with it. Now by the shock of his mother's death he found himself
precipitated in a frame of living where a parlour set out of Siegel
Brothers' Household Emporium was the limit of taste and understanding.
The worst thing about Siegel Brothers' parlour sets was that he sold
them. He knew it was his particular value to Siegel Brothers that he had
always known what sort of things were acceptable to the out-of-town
trade. He had selected this one distinctly with an eye to the pleasure
his mother and Ellen would get out of what Bloombury would think of it.
He hadn't expected it would turn and rend him. That it was distinctly
better than anything he had had at Blodgett's was inconsiderable beside
the fact that Blodgett's hadn't owned him. That he was owned now by his
sister and the furniture, was plain to him the first time he sat down to
figure out the difference between his salary and what it would cost him
to let Ellen be a burden to him in the way that made her happiest. Not
that he thought of Ellen in that way; he was glad when he thought of it
at all articulately, to be able to make life so little of a burden to
her. But though he saw quite clearly how, without some fortunate
accident, the rest of his life would be taken up with making a home for
Ellen and making it secure for her in case anything happened to him, he
saw too, that there was no room in it for the Lovely Lady. The worst of
all this was that he did not see how he was to go on without her.

He had fled to her from the inadequacy of all substitutes for her that
his life afforded, and she had ended by making him over into the sort of
man who could never be satisfied with anything less. Something he owed,
no doubt, to that trait of his father's which made his memories of Italy
more to him than his inheritance, but there it was, a world Peter had
built up out of books and pictures and music, more real and habitable
than that in which he went about in a gray business suit and a pleasant
ready manner; a world from which, every time he fitted his key in the
latch of the little flat in Pleasanton, he felt himself suddenly
dispossessed.

It was not that he failed to get a proper pleasure out of being a
householder, in being able to take a certain tone with the butcher and
discuss water rates and rents with other householders going to and fro
on his train. Ellen's cooking tasted good to him and it was very
pleasant to see the pleasure it gave her to have Burnell of the
hardware, out to supper occasionally. He made friends with Lessing,
whose natty and determinedly architectural office with its air of being
somehow akin to Wally Whitaker, occupied the corner where Peter waited
every morning for his car. Lessing began it by coming out on the very
first occasion to ask him how his sister did, in an effort to correct
any impression of a want of perspicuity in his first estimate of Peter's
situation. He kept it up for the reason perhaps that men friends are
meant for each other from the beginning of time quite as much as we are
accustomed to thinking of them as being meant for the lovely ladies whom
they so frequently miss. Lessing was about Peter's own age and had large
and cheerful notions of the probable increase of real-estate values in
Pleasanton, combined with a just appreciation of the simple shrewdness
which had so recommended Peter to his employers.

"You'd be a crackerjack to talk to the old ladies," Lessing generously
praised him. "I scare 'em; they think I'm too hopeful." That he didn't,
however, have the same effect on young ladies was apparent from the very
pretty one whom Peter used to see about, especially on early closing
Saturday afternoons, helping him to shut up the office and get off to
the ball game. He couldn't have told why, but those were the days when
Peter allowed the car to carry him on to the next block, before
alighting, after which he would make a point of being particularly kind
to Ellen. It would never do for her to get a notion that the tapping of
her crutch beside him had scared anything out of Peter's life which he
might think worth having in it.

Along toward Thanksgiving time, on an occasion when Peter had just
missed his car and had to wait for another one, Lessing--J. B. on the
door sign, though he was the sort that everybody who knew him called
Julian--came quite out to the pavement and stood there with his hands
in his pockets and his hair beginning to curl boyishly in the dampness,
quite brimming over with good fortune. Singularly he didn't mention it
at once, but began to complain about the low state of the market in real
estate.

"Not but that the values are all right," he was careful to explain;
"it's just that they _are_ all right makes it so trying. If a fellow had
a little capital now, he could do wonders. The deuce of a chap like me
is that he hasn't any capital unless there's some buying."

"You think it's a good time then to lay out a little money?"

"Good! _Good!_ Oh, Lord, it's so good that if a fellow had a few
thousands just put around judiciously, he wouldn't be able to sleep
nights for hearing it turn over." He kicked the gravel in sheer
impatience. "How's your sister?"

It was a formula that he had kept on with because to have dropped it
immediately might have betrayed the extenuating nature of its inception,
and besides there were so many directions in which one might start
conversationally off from it. He made use of it now without waiting for
Peter's habitual "Very well, thank you," by a burst into confidence.

"You see I'm engaged to be married--yes, I guess you've seen me with
her. Fact is, I haven't cared how much people have seen so long as she's
seen it, too; and now we've got it all fixed up, naturally I'm on the
make. I'm dashed if I don't think I'll have to take a partner."

"I've been wanting to speak to you about some property of mine," Peter
ventured. "It's a farm up country."

"What's it worth?"

"Well, I've added to it some the last ten years and made considerable
improvement. I ought to get three thousand."

"That's for farming? For summer residence it ought to bring more than
that. Any scenery?"

"Plenty," Peter satisfied him on that score. "I've been thinking," he
let out shyly, "that if I could put the price of it in some place where
I could watch it, the money would do me more good...."

Lessing turned on him a suddenly brightening eye.

"That's the talk--say, you know I think I could get you forty-five
hundred for that farm of yours anyway." They looked at one another on
the verge of things hopeful and considerable. As Peter's car swung
around the curve, suddenly they blushed, both of them, and reached out
and shook hands.

That evening as Peter came home he saw Lessing buying chrysanthemums at
the florist's with a happy countenance, and to master the queer pang it
gave him, Peter got off the car and walked a long way out on the dim wet
pavement. He was looking at the bright picture of Lessing and the
girl--she was really very pretty--and seeing instead, himself, quite the
bachelor, and his lame sister taking their blameless dull way in the
world. He couldn't any more for the life of him, get a picture of
himself without Ellen in it; the tapping of her crutch sounded even in
the House when he visited it in his dreams. It was well on this occasion
that he had Ellen beside him, for she showed him the way presently to
take it, as he knew she would take it as soon as he went home and told
her--as another door by which they could enter sympathetically in the
joyousness they were denied. She would be so pleased for Julian's sake,
in whom, by Peter's account of him, she took the greatest interest, and
so pleased for the girl to have such a handsome, capable lover. It made,
for Ellen, a better thing of life if somebody could have him.

Peter went back after a while with that thought to the florist's and
bought chrysanthemums, taking care to ask for the same kind Mr. Lessing
had just ordered. He was feeling quite cheerful even, as he ran up the
steps with them a few minutes later, and saw the square of light under
the half-drawn curtain, and heard the tap of Ellen's crutch coming to
meet him.

That night after he had gone to bed a very singular thing happened. The
Princess out of the picture visited him. It was there at the foot of his
bed in a new frame where Ellen had hung it--the young knight riding down
the old, lumpy dragon, but with an air that Peter hadn't for a long time
been able to manage for himself, doing a great thing easily the way one
knew perfectly great things couldn't. The assistant sales manager of
Siegel Brothers had been lying staring up at it for some time when the
Princess spoke to him. He knew it was she, though there was no face nor
form that he could remember in his waking hours, except that it was
familiar.

"Ellen is right," she told him; "it doesn't really matter so long as
somebody finds me."

"But what have _I_ done?" Peter was sore with a sense of personal
slight. "It wasn't in the story that there should be a whole crop of
dragons."

"All dragons are made so that where one head comes off there are seven
in its place; and you must remember if somebody didn't go about slaying
them, I couldn't be at all." This as she said it had a deep meaning for
Peter that afterward escaped him. "And you can hold the dream. It takes
a lot of dreaming to bring one like me to pass."

"I'm sick of dreams," said Peter. "A man dies after a little who is fed
on nothing else."

"They die quicker if they stop dreaming; on those that have the gift for
it the business of dreaming falls. Listen! How many that you know have
found me?"

"A great many think they have; it comes to the same thing."

"The same for them; but you must see that I can never really _be_ until
I am for those outside the dream. The trouble with you is that you'd
wake up after a while and you would _know_."

"Yes," Peter admitted, "I should know."

"Well, then," she was oh, so gentle about it, "yours is the better part.
If you can't have me, at least you're not stopping me by leaving off for
something else. In the dream I can live and grow, and you can grow to
me. Do you remember what happened to Ada Harvey? I've saved you from
that at any rate."

"No," said Peter, "it was the dragon saved me. I thought you were she.
It's saved me from lots of things, now that I think of it."

"Ah, that's what we have to do between us, Peter, we have to save you.
You're worth saving."

"Save me for what?" Peter cried out to her and so strongly in his
loneliness that he found himself starting up from his bed with it. He
could see the dragon spitting flames as before, and the pale light from
the swinging street lamp gilding the frame of the picture. Though he
did not understand all that had happened to him, as he lay down again he
was more comforted than he had been at any time since he had made up his
mind that he was to be a bachelor.




PART FOUR

IN WHICH THE LOVELY
LADY MAKES A
FINAL APPEARANCE




PART FOUR

IN WHICH THE LOVELY LADY MAKES A
FINAL APPEARANCE




I


On the day that the silver-laced maple, then in fullest leaf, had passed
by the space of three delicate palm-shaped banners the sill of the
third-story office window, Lessing, of Weatheral, Lessing & Co., Brokers
in Real Estate, crossed over to his partner's desk before sitting down
at his own, and remained quietly leaning against it and looking out of
the window without a word. He remained there staring out over the new,
orderly growth of the suburb, toward the river, until the stenographer
from the outer room had come in with the vase which she had been filling
with great golden roses, and gone out again, after placing it carefully
in the exact middle of the top of the junior partner's desk. By that
time Lessing's rather plump, practical hand had crept out along the rim
of the desk until it was covered by Peter's lean one, and still neither
of them had said a word. The roses had come in from Lessing's country
place that morning in Lessing's car, and Lessing's wife had gathered
them. There were exactly seventeen, full-blown and fragrant, and one
small bud of promise which Peter presently removed from its vase to his
button hole. The act had almost the significance of a ritual, a thing
done many times with particular meaning.

"Somehow," Peter said as he fastened it with a pin underneath his lapel,
"seventeen years seems a shorter time to look back on than to look
forward to."

"Well, when we've put twenty-five years of work into it--and that's
nothing to what we'll get into the next seventeen." Lessing's tone keyed
admirably with the bright ample day outside, the rapid glint of the
river and the tips of the maple all a-tremble with the urgency of new
growth. The senior partner's eye roved from that to the restrained
richness of the office furniture from which the new was not yet worn,
and returned to the contemplation of the towering white cumuli beginning
to pile up beyond the farther bank of the river. "There's no end to what
a man can lift," he asserted confidently, "once he's got his feet under
him."

"We've carried a lot," Peter assented cheerfully, "and sometimes it was
rather steep going, but now it's carrying us. The question is"--and here
his voice fell off a shade and a slight gathering appeared between his
eyes--"the real question is, I suppose, what it is carrying us _to_."

"Where's the good of that?" Julian protested. "It's only a limitation to
set out for a particular place. The fun is in the going. You keep right
along with the procession until old age gets you. The thing is just to
keep it up as long as you can." He swung himself into a sitting posture
on the edge of the desk and noted that the slight pucker had not left
his partner's eyes. "What's the idea?" he wished affectionately to know.

"Oh, nothing much, but I sort of grew up with the idea of
Duty--something you had to do because there was nobody else to do it.
You had not only to do it but you had to like it, not because it was
likable, but because it was your duty. It was always right in front of
me: I couldn't see over or around it; I just had to do it."

"Well, you did it," Lessing corroborated. "Clarice says the way you've
taken care of Ellen----"

"And the way Ellen has taken care of me--but then Ellen was all the
woman I had." He caught himself up swiftly after that; it was seldom
even to his partner that anything escaped him in reference to the
interior life of dreams which had gone on in him, quite happily behind
his undistinguished exterior. "But somehow it hasn't seemed to come out
anywhere. I've done my duty ... and when I'm dead and Ellen's dead,
where is it? After all, what have I done?"

"Ah, look at Pleasanton," Julian reminded him; "do you call that
nothing?" They looked together toward the esplanade along the river,
beginning at this hour to be flecked with the white aprons of
nurse-maids and their charges. "We've given them clean water to drink
and clean streets, and a safe place for the children to play in. The
fight we had with the city council for _that_...!" He waved his arm
again toward the well-parked river front. "Ever since I sold your farm
for you and you began putting your money into the business, we've walked
right along with it. Even before you left Siegel Brothers and we used to
sit up nights with the map, planning where to put our money like a
checker-board, we saw things like this for the town, and now we've made
'em true. And you say we've done nothing!" The senior partner was
touched a little in his tenderest susceptibilities.

"Oh, well," Peter admitted with a shamed laugh, "I suppose man is an
incurable egotist. I was thinking of something more personal, something
_mine_, the way a book or a picture belongs to the man who makes it."

"The game isn't over yet," Lessing reminded him, with a glance at the
unfolding bud which Clarice had sent as a symbol of the opening year;
"you're only forty. And, anyway, the money's yours; you made it."
Something in the word recalled him to a thought that had been earlier
in his mind. "Clarice wanted me to ask you to-day if you had any idea
how much you are worth."

Peter's attention came back from the window with a start. "Does that
mean the Fresh Air Fund or the Association for the Protection of
Ownerless Pups?"

Julian grinned. "Ownerless bachelors rather. Clarice has an idea you are
well enough off to marry."

"If it were a proposition of my being married to Clarice I should
consider myself well enough off without anything else----" Peter dropped
the light, accustomed banter for a sober tone. "How well off does your
wife think I ought to be?"

"She's got it figured out that all you've spent on making Ellen
comfortable for life isn't a patch on what she and the boys cost me, so
it's high time you set about your natural destiny of making some woman
happy."

"Look here, Julian, _is_ it an object for a man to live for, making some
woman happy?"

"Well, it keeps you on the jump all right," Lessing assured him. "What
else is there? It's a way of making yourself happy when you come to
look at it; keeping her and the kids so that you leave the world better
off than you found it. It suits _me_." He was looking, indeed,
particularly well suited, in spite of a disposition to portliness and a
suspicion of thinning hair, with what the seventeen years just past had
brought him. A warm appreciation of what those things were touched his
regard for his companion with a sober affectionateness. "I reckon
Clarice is right: a wife and a couple of kids is the prescription for
your case. That's why she wanted me to remind you that you could afford
'em."

"And has she named the day?" Peter wished to know whimsically.

"Oh, I say, Weatheral----"

"My dear Julian, if I hadn't been able to see what Clarice has been up
to for the last six months, at least I could have depended on Ellen to
see it for me."

"She doesn't object, does she?"

"Oh, if you think the privilege of being aunt to your children has made
up to her for not being aunt to mine----"

"The privilege is on the other side. But anyway, I'm glad you got on to
it. I didn't want to be a spoil sport. I suppose women's instincts can
be trusted in these things, but I hated to see Clarice coming it over
you blind."

Peter wondered to himself a little, which of the charming ladies to whom
he had been introduced lately, Clarice had selected for him. He wasn't,
however, concerned about her coming it blind over anybody but the senior
partner who got down now from the desk, whistling softly and walking
with a wide step as a man will in June when affairs go well with him,
and he feels that if there are still some things which he desires he is
able to get them for himself.

"Don't forget you're coming to us on Saturday; and we dine together
to-night as usual."

"As usual." Always on the anniversary of their beginning business
together Weatheral and Lessing, who were still, in spite of seeing one
another daily for seventeen years, able to be interested in one another,
dined apart from their families, savouring pleasantly that essential
essence of maleness, the mutual power of work well accomplished. It was
the best tribute that Clarice and Ellen could pay to the occasion that
they understood that, much as their several lives had profited by the
partnership, they were still and naturally outside of it.

On this occasion, however, it was impossible for Peter to keep Mrs.
Lessing out of the background of his consciousness, because of the part
her suggestion of the morning played in new realization of himself as
the rich Mr. Weatheral of Pleasanton. He credited her with sufficient
knowledge of his character to have egged Julian on to the reminder as a
part of the game she had played with him for the past two or three
years, by which Peter was to be instated in a life more in keeping with
his opportunities.

It was a game Clarice played with life everywhere, coaxing it to yield
its choicest bloom to her. She had an instinct for choiceness like a
hummingbird, darting here and there for sweetness. Her flutterings were
never of uncertainty but such as kept her in the perfect airy poise. If
she wanted marriage for Peter it was because she could imagine nothing
better for anybody than a marriage like hers, and if she chose this
time for letting him know that she was thinking of it, it was because in
those terms she could bring closest to him his new-found possibilities.
If she could have reached Peter with the personal certainty of riches by
explaining to him how far his dollars would stretch end to end, or how
many acres of postage stamps he could buy with them, she might have
thought less of him on that account, but she would have helped him to
understanding even on those terms. You couldn't have made Clarice
Lessing believe that whatever their limitations, people weren't entitled
to help simply because they needed it.

It had come upon Peter by leaps and bounds during the last two or three
years, both the wealth and the necessity of putting it to himself in
terms of personal expression. During the first ten years of the
partnership, the only use for money the simple needs of Ellen and
himself had established was to put it back into the business; a use
which had become almost an obligation during the time when both children
and opportunity were coming to Julian faster than the cash to meet them.
It was due to the high ground that Clarice had made for them all out of
what she and the children stood for, that Peter's superior cash
contribution to the firm had become a privilege. They had had, he and
Ellen, their stringent occasions; it had been Clarice's part to see that
since they endured the pinch of poverty they should at least get
something human out of it. It came out for Peter pleasantly as he walked
home through the mild June evening, just how much they had had. Much,
much more than they would have been able to buy with the money they
might in strict equity have withdrawn from the business. Nothing, he had
long admitted, that he could have purchased for his sister would have
been so satisfying as what Clarice contributed, pressing the full cup of
her motherhood to Ellen's thirsty lips. They might have grown sleek, he
and Ellen, without exceeding a proper ratio of expenditure, and if in
the end they had been a little less rich, they would still have had
enough to go on being sleek and comfortable to the end. That he was
still fit, as Mrs. Lessing's transparent efforts to marry him to her
friends guaranteed him to be, he felt was owing greatly to the terms on
which Clarice had admitted him to the adventure of bringing up a family.
That a special fitness was required for admission to Mrs. Lessing's
circle he would have guessed even without the aid of print which
consistently described it as Our Best Society, for it was a Best
attested to by all the marks by which Clarice herself expressed the
essential fineness of things.

One couldn't have told, from anything that appeared on the surface of
the Lessing's social environment, that life did not proceed there as it
did between Clarice and the Weatherals, by means of its subtler
sympathies, and proceed, at least so far as the women were concerned, on
a still higher plane of grace and harmony. It moved about her table and
across the lawns of Lessing's handsome country place, with such
soundless ease and perfection as it had glided for Peter through the
House with the Shining Walls. Or at least so it had seemed on those
occasions during the last few years when he had found himself wondrously
inside it.

It had been accepted by Ellen on the mere certainty of Clarice's mother
having been one of the Thatcher Inwoods, that Clarice should enlarge
her social borders with Lessing's increasing means until they included
people among whom Ellen would have been miserably shy and out of tune.
But not Ellen herself guessed how much of Peter's admission to its
inaccessibility was owing to the returns from hardly snatched options
and long-nursed opportunities, coming in in checks of six figures.
Perhaps Clarice herself never knew. It was one of the things that went
with being a Thatcher Inwood, wherever an occasion presented a handle of
nobility, to seize by that and maintain it in the face of any contingent
smallness. Clarice wouldn't have introduced Peter to her friends if he
hadn't been fit, and it was part of the social creed of women like
Clarice Lessing, which takes almost the authority of religion, that he
wouldn't have been in a position to be introduced if he hadn't been fit.
So it had happened for the past two years that Peter had found himself
skirting the fringe of Best Society, and identifying it with the life he
had lived so long, sitting with his book open on his knees in their
little flat, with Ellen across the fire from him knitting white things
for Julian's children. But the idea that having come into this
neighbourhood of fine appreciations he was to take up his home and live
there, opened more slowly. It required more than one of Clarice's swift
hummingbird darts, more than the flutter of suggestion to brush its
petals awake for him.

It lay so deep under all the years, the power of loving. He knew almost
nothing about it except that he had had it once, and that marriage
without it would be unthinkable, even such a marriage as Mrs. Lessing
had let him see was now possible to him. She had called with all her
delicate friendly skill, on something which only now under that summons
he began to miss. It was like a lost word in every sentence in which the
ordinary hopes of men are to be read, and he felt that until he found it
again all the help Mrs. Lessing could afford him would not enable him to
think of marriage as a thing desirable in itself. It was missing in him
still, when he came that night rather late to the apartment where only
the Japanese houseboy awaited him. One of the first things he had done
for Ellen with his increasing means, had been to buy back for her the
house at Bloombury with the garden and a bit of the orchard. She had
been there now since Decoration Day, retiring more and more into the
kindly village life as a point of vantage from which to mark with pride
the social distance that Peter travelled from her. It had been
understood from the beginning that she wasn't to go with him. The
tapping of her crutch was no more to be heard in the new gracious
existence than in the House where she had never followed him. Life for
Ellen was lived close at hand. There were hollyhocks and currant bushes
in her garden and Julian's children overran it.

It was not Ellen then that Peter missed as he sat alone in the house
that night with his back to the lowered light and his gaze seeking the
river and the flitting shapes of boats that went up and down on it,
freighted with young voices and laughter. He missed the Lovely Lady. He
knew now why he had not been able to think of marriage in the way
Clarice held it out to him, as a happy contingency of his now being as
rich as he had intended to be. It was because he had not thought of her
clearly for a long time.

There had been a period in the beginning of his life with Ellen, when
the lady of his dreams had been so near the surface of all his thinking
that she took on form and likeness from anything that was lovely and
young in his neighbourhood, but as things lovely and young drifted from
him with the years; and as the business took deeper and deeper hold on
his attention, she had become a mere floating figment, a live fluttering
spark in the very core of all his imaginings.

She had been beside him, a pleasant, indeterminate presence in the long
journey she travelled from the printed page to the accompanying click of
Ellen's needles. Sometimes at the opera she took on a gossamer tint from
the singer's face, and longer ago than he could afford operas, he had
understood that all the beauty of the world, bursting apple buds, the
great curve of the surf that set the beaches trembling, derived somehow
its pertinence from her. Now at the age of forty he had ceased to think
very much about the Lovely Lady.

It occurred to him that this might have something to do with his failure
to get a new relation to life out of his new wealth.

It had struck Peter rather forlornly during the past few years that
there was little use he could put money to, except to make more money.
He could see by turning his head to the room behind him how little there
was there of what he had fancied once riches would bring him. The lines
of the room were good, the amount of the annual rent assured that to
him, the furniture was good and the rugs expensive. Ellen believed that
money in rugs was a good investment, particularly if the colours were
strong and would stand fading. There were some choice things here and
there, a vase and pictures which Peter had chosen for himself, though he
was aware, as he took them in under the dull glow, that Ellen had
arranged them in strict reference to the size of the frames, and that
the whole effect failed of satisfaction. He thought his life might be
somewhat like that room, full of good things but lacking the touch that
should set them in fruitful order. It stole over him as persuasively as
the warm growing smell of the park below him that the something missed
might be the touch and presence of the Lovely Lady.




II


It was the late end of the afternoon when Peter stepped off the train at
the Lessing's station and into the trap that was waiting for him. He
learned from Lessing's man that the family had been kept by the tennis
match at Maplemont and he was to come on to the house at his leisure.
That being the case, Peter took the reins himself and made a long detour
through the dust-smelling country roads, so that it was quite six when
he reached the house, and everybody dressing for the early dinner.

He made so hasty a change himself in his fear of being late, that when
he came down to the living-room in a quarter of an hour there was no one
there to meet him. Absorbed particles of the bright day gave off in the
dusk and made it golden. There were honeysuckles on the pergola outside,
and in the room beyond a girl singing a quiet air, half-trilled and
half-forgotten. He heard the singer moving toward him through the vacant
house, of which the doors stood open to the evening coolness, and the
click of the electric button as she passed, and saw the rooms burst one
by one into the bloom of shaded lights. So she came, busy with the
hummed fragments of her songs, and turned the lamp full on Peter before
she was aware of him, but she was not half so much disconcerted.

"You must be Mr. Weatheral," she said. "Mrs. Lessing sent me to say she
expected you. I am Miss Goodward."

She gave him her hand for a gracious moment before she turned to what
had brought her so early down, the arrangement of two great bowls of
wild ferns and vines which a servant had just placed on either end of
the low mantlepiece.

"We brought them in from Archer's Glen on the way home," she told him
over her shoulder, her hands busy with deft, quick touches. She was all
in white, which took a pearly lustre from the lamps, and for the moment
she was as beautiful as Peter believed her. A tiny unfinished phrase of
the song floated half consciously from her lips as a bubble. "They look
better so, don't you think?" As she stood off to measure the effect, it
seemed to Peter that the Spirit of the House had received him; it was so
men dream of home-coming, without sensible displacement of a life going
on in it, lovely and secure, as a bark slips into some still pool to its
moorings. He yielded himself naturally to the impersonal intimacy of her
welcome and all the sordid ways of his life led up to her.

It was not all at once he saw it so. He kept watching her all that
evening as one watches a perfect thing, a bird or a dancer, sensing in
the slim turn of her ankle, the lithe throat, the delicate perfume that
she shook from her summer draperies, so many strokes of a master hand.
She was evidently on terms with the Lessings which permitted her
acceptance of him at the family valuation, but the perfection of her
method was such that it never quite sunk his identity as the junior
partner in his character of Uncle Peter.

This was a nuance, if Peter had but known it, which Eunice Goodward
could have no more missed than she could have eaten with her knife. She
had been trained to the finer social adjustments as to a cult: Clarice's
game of persuading life to present itself with a smiling countenance,
played all in the key of personal relations. It was as if Nature, having
tried her hand at a great many ordinary persons, each with one gift of
sympathy or graciousness, had culled and compacted the best of them into
Eunice Goodward; which was precisely the case except that Peter through
his unfamiliarity with the Best Society couldn't be expected to know
that the intelligence which had put together so much perfectness was no
less calculating than that which goes to the matching of a string of
pearls. All that he got from it was precisely all that he was meant to
receive--namely, the conviction that she couldn't have charmed him so
had she not been altogether charming.

And as yet he did not know what had happened to him. He thought, when he
awoke in the morning to a new realization of the satisfactoriness of
living, that the fresh air had done it, the breath of the nearby
untrimmed forest, the loose-leaved roses pressed against the pane
beginning to give off warm odours in the sun. Then he came out on the
terrace and saw Eunice Goodward, looking like a thin slip of the morning
herself, in a blue dress buttoned close to her figure with wide white
buttons and a tiny froth of white at the short sleeves and open throat.
Across her bosom it was caught with a blue stone set in dull silver,
which served also to hold in place a rose that matched the morning tint
of her skin. She was talking with the Lessings' chauffeur as Peter came
up with her and all her accents were of dismay. They were to have driven
over to Maplemont that afternoon, she explained to Peter, for the last
of the tennis sets, and now Gilmore had just told her that the car must
go to the shop for two or three days. She was so much more charming in
the way she forgave Gilmore for her evident disappointment that he,
being a young man and troubled by a sense of moral responsibility, was
quite overcome by it.

"But, nonsense"; Peter was certain "there is always something can be
done to cars." There was, Gilmore assured him, but it took time to do
it, and to-morrow would be Sunday. "If you'd only thought to come down
in the motor yourself, sir----" the chauffeur reproached him. The truth
was that Peter hadn't a car of his own and Gilmore knew it. There was an
electric runabout which had gone down to Bloombury with Ellen, and a
serviceable roadster which was part of the office equipment, but the
rich Mr. Weatheral had never taken the pains to own a private car. Now,
as he hastily drew out his watch, it occurred to him that Lessing's
chauffeur was a fellow of more perspicuity than he had given him credit
for. The two men communicated wordlessly across the cool width of the
terrace steps.

"At what hour," Peter wished to know, "would we have to leave here to
reach Maplemont in good time? Then if you can be ready to leave the
moment my car gets here...." He excused himself to go to the telephone;
half an hour later when he joined the family at breakfast he had
discovered some of the things that, besides making more money with it,
can be done with money.

The knowledge suited him like his own garment, as if it had been lying
ready for him to put on when the occasion required it, and now became
him admirably. He perceived it to be a proper male function to produce
easily and with precision whatever utterly charming young ladies might
reasonably require. He appreciated Miss Goodward's acceptance of it as
she came down from the house bewilderingly tied into soft veils for the
afternoon's drive, as a part of her hall-marked fineness. If she
couldn't help knowing, taking in the car's glittering newness from point
to point, that its magnificence had materialized out of her simple wish
for it, she at least didn't allow him to think it was any more than she
would have expected of him. So completely did he yield himself to this
new sense of the fitness of things that it came as a shock to have her,
as soon as they had joined themselves to the holiday-coloured crowd that
streamed and shifted under the bright boughs of Maplemont, reft from him
by friendly, compelling voices, and particularly by Burton Henderson,
who played singles and went about bareheaded and singularly
self-possessed. It was unthinkable to Peter that, in view of her
recently discovered importance in putting him at rights with himself,
that he hadn't arranged with her that they were to be more together. For
the moment it was almost a derogation of her charm that she shouldn't
herself have recognized by some overt act her extraordinary opportunity.
And then in a moment more he perceived that she had recognized it. He
had only to wait, as he saw, and he would find himself pleasantly beside
her, and at each renewal of the excluding companionship, he was more
subtly aware that it was accorded not to anything he was but to what she
had it in her power so beautifully to make of him.

So perfectly did she strike the key with him, when, in the intervals of
the afternoon's entertainment they found themselves sitting or walking
together, that he could not have imagined her to have been out of it,
not even in a rather long session after tea with Burton Henderson among
the rhododendrons, in which it was apparent from the young man's manner
that she hadn't at least been in tune with him. It occurred just as they
were leaving and served in the flutter of delay it occasioned to fix
the attention of all their party on Eunice coming out of the shrubbery
with young Henderson in her wake, batting aimlessly at the grass-tops
with the racquet which he still carried. There was an air of sulkiness
about him which caused Mrs. Lessing enigmatically to say that Eunice was
altogether too good to that young man. To which Lessing's "Well, if she
is, he doesn't seem to appreciate," served also to confirm Peter in the
rôle which the effect she produced on himself had created for him. He at
least appreciated the way in which she had made him feel himself the
Distributer of Benefits, to a degree which made it almost obligatory of
her to go on with it.

Successfully as Miss Goodward had kept for Peter during the day his new
relation to his wealth on the one hand and society on the other, she
seemed that evening quite to have abandoned him. While the family was
having coffee on the terrace after dinner, she slipped away from them to
reappear lower down among the rose trees, her white dress gathering all
that was left of the lingering glow. The junior partner, feeling himself
never so much junior, though he knew it was but a scant year or two,
sat on through Lessing's inconsequential comment on business and the
day's adventures, hearing not a word; now and then his chair creaked
with the intensity of his preoccupation. It grew dusk and the lamps
blossomed in the house behind them; presently Clarice slipped away to
the children and the evening damp fell over the rose garden. Peter could
endure it no longer. He believed as he rose suddenly with a stretching
movement that he meant merely to relieve the tension of sitting by
pacing up and down; it was unaccountable therefore that he should find
himself at the edge of the terrace. He wondered why on earth Clarice
couldn't have helped him a little, and then as if in response to his
deep instinctive demand upon her, he heard her call softly to her
husband from the door of the house. At the scrape of Julian's chair on
the terrace tiling, Peter cast away his cigar and hurried into the dusk
of the garden.

He found her at last by the herbacious border, keeping touch with the
flight of a sphinx-head moth along the tall white rockets of phlox.
Peter whipped out his handkerchief and dropped it deftly over the
fluttering wings. In a moment he had stilled them in his hand. Miss
Goodward cried out to him:

"You've spoiled his happy evening!"

"He's not hurt...." Peter laid the moth gently on a feathery flower
head, and the tiny whispering whirr began again. "I thought you wanted
him."

"I did--but not to catch him," Miss Goodward explained. "I wanted just
to want him."

"Ah, I'm afraid I'm one of those people with whom to want a thing is to
go after it," Peter justified himself.

"So one gathers from what one hears." She brushed him as lightly with
the compliment as with the wings of a moth. "I wasn't really wanting him
so much as I was wanting to _be_ him for a while. Just to pass from one
lovely hour to another and nothing to pay! But we humans have always to
pay something."

"Or some one pays for us."

"Well, isn't that worse ... taking it out of somebody else?"

"I'm not so sure; some people enjoy paying. It's not a bad feeling, I
assure you: being able to pay. Haven't you found that out yet?"

"Not in Trethgarten Square." Mrs. Lessing had managed to let him know
during the day that her guest had been reared within the sacred pale of
those first families in whom the choice stock of humanness is refined by
being maintained at precisely the same level for at least three
generations.

"In Trethgarten Square," Peter reminded her, "we are told that you
settle your account just by _being_; that you manage somehow to become
something so superior and delectable that the rest of us are willing to
pay for the privilege of having you about." He would have liked to add
that recently, no later in fact than the evening before, he had come to
think that this was so, but as she hesitated in her walk beside him, he
saw that she was concerned in putting the case to herself quite as much
as to him.

"It's not that exactly; more perhaps that our whole thought about life
is to live it so that there won't be anything to pay. We have to manage
to add things up like a column of figures with nothing to carry.
Perhaps that's why we get so little out of it."

"Don't you?"--he was genuinely surprised, "get anything out of it, I
mean."

"Oh, but I'm a selfish beast, I suppose! I want more--more!" They swung
as she spoke into a broad beam of yellow light raying out from the
library window, and he saw by it that with the word she flung out her
arms with a lovely upward motion that lifted his mood to the crest of
audacity.

"If you keep on looking like that," Peter assured her, "you'll get it."
He was struck dumb immediately after with apprehension. It sounded
daring, like a thing said in a book; but she took it as it came lightly
off the tip of his impulse, laughing. "Yes ... the great difficulty is
choosing which of so many things one really wants." They walked on then
in silence, the air darkling after the sudden shaft of illumination, the
light folds of her scarf brushing his sleeve. Peter was considering how
he might say, without precipitation, how suddenly she had limited and
defined all the things that he wanted by expressing them so perfectly
in herself, when she interrupted him.

"There's our moth again," she pointed; "he settles it by taking all of
them. It's a possibility denied to us."

"Even he," Peter insisted, "has to reckon with such incidents as my
dropping on him just now. I might have wanted him for a collection."

"Oh, if he takes us into account it must be as men used to think of the
gods walking." Suddenly the familiar beds and hedges widened for Peter;
they stretched warm and tender to the borders of youth and the unmatched
Wonder.... It was so they had talked when they walked together in the
Garden which was about the House....

For some time after Miss Goodward left him Peter remained walking up and
down, thinking of many things and unable to think of them clearly
because of a pleasant blur of excitement in his brain. As he came
finally back to the house he heard the Lessings talking from behind one
of the open windows.

"My word, that car was never out of the shop before," Julian was saying.
"He's a _goner!_"

"And that lovely, dusty, brown colour that goes so well with her hair!
Who would have thought Peter would be so noticing."

"It couldn't have cost him a cent under seven thousand." Julian was
certain, "and carrying it off with me the way he did--bought the six
cylinder after all, he had.... I'll bet old Peter don't know a cylinder
from a stomach pump."

Clarice was evidently going on with her own line of thought. "It will be
the best thing that ever happened to Eunice if she can only be got to
see it."

"Well, if she don't her mother will see it for her." Lessing's voice
died into a subdued chuckle as Peter passed under it on the dew-damp
lawn, but there was no revelation in it for the junior partner. He had
already found out what was the matter with him and what he meant to do
about it.




III


Whatever the process of becoming engaged to Eunice Goodward lacked of
dramatic interest, it made up to Peter by being such a tremendous
adventure for him to become engaged to anybody.

He had gone through life much as his unfriended youth had strayed
through the city streets, aching for the walled-up splendour--all the
world's chivalries, tendernesses, passions--known to him only by
glimmers and reflections on the plain glass of duty. Now at a word the
glass dissolved and he was free to wander through the rooms crammed with
imperishable poets' wares. He walked there not only as one who has the
price to buy, but himself made one of the splendid things of earth by
this same word which her mere being pronounced to him.

He paid himself for years of denials and repressions by the discovery of
being able to love in such a key. For he meant quite simply to marry
Eunice Goodward if she would have him, and it was no vanity which gave
him hope, but a tribute to her fineness as being able to see herself so
absolutely the one thing his life waited for. He knew himself, modestly,
no prize for her except as he was added to by inestimable passion.
Whatever she saw in him as a man, for her not to recognize the immortal
worth of what he was able to become under her hand, was to subtract
something from her perfections. In her acceptance would lie the Queen's
touch, redeeming him from all commonness.

He made his first venture within a week after their first meeting, in a
call on Miss Goodward and her mother in Trethgarten Square, where he
found their red brick, vine-masked front distinguishable among half a
hundred others by being kept open as late as the middle of June. To
their being marooned thus in a desert of boarded-up doors and shuttered
windows, due, as Eunice had frankly and charmingly let him know, to
their being poor among their kind, he doubtless owed it that no other
callers came to disturb the languid afternoon. Seen against her proper
background of things precious but worn, and in the style of a preceding
generation, the girl showed even lovelier than before, with the rich,
perfumed quality of a flower held in a chipped porcelain vase, a flower
moreover secure in its own perfectness, waiting only to be worn,
disdaining alike to offer or resist. Her very quietness--she left him,
in fact, almost wholly to her mother--had the air of condoning his
state, of understanding what he was there for and of finding it somehow
an accentuation of the interest they let him see that he had for them.
He found them, mother and daughter, more alike, in spite of their
natural and evident difference of years, more of a degree than he was
accustomed to find mother and daughters in the few houses where the
business of growing rich had admitted him, as though they had been
carved out of the same material, by the same distinguished artist, at
different times in his career.

It contributed to the effect of his having found, not by accident, but
by seeking, a frame of life kept waiting for him, kept warm and
conscious. Presently Eunice poured tea for them, and the intimacy of her
remembering as she did, how he took it, had its part in the freedom
which he presently found for offering hospitality on his own account,
not at his home, as he explained to them, his sister being away, but say
a dinner at Briar Crest to which they might motor out pleasantly
Saturday afternoon, returning by moonlight. He offered Briar Crest
tentatively on the strength of the Lessings having once given a dinner
there, and was relieved to find that he had made no mistake.

"A great many of your friends go there," Mrs. Goodward allowed; "the Van
Stitarts, Eunice, you remember."

"The Gherberdings are there now, mamma; I'm sure we shall enjoy it."

Having crossed thus at one fortunate stroke the frontiers of social
observance, to which Clarice had but edged her way in the right of being
a Thatcher Inwood, Peter ventured on Friday to suggest by telephone that
since dinner must be late, the ladies should meet him at what he had
taken pains to ascertain was the correct one of huge uptown hotels, for
tea before starting. It was Mrs. Goodward who answered him and she whom
he met in the white, marble tessellated tea-room, explaining that Eunice
had had some shopping to do--they were really leaving on Saturday--and
Mr. Weatheral was to order tea without waiting. They had time, however,
for the tea to be drunk and for Mrs. Goodward to become anxious in a
gentle, ladylike way, before it occurred to Peter to suggest that Miss
Goodward might be lurking anywhere in the potted palm and marble
pillared labyrinth, waiting for _them_, suffering equal anxieties, and
dreadful to think of in their present replete condition, languishing for
tea. His proposal to go and look for her was accepted with just the
shade of deprecation which admitted him to an amused tolerance of the
girl's delinquencies, as if somehow Eunice wouldn't have dared to be
late with him had she not had reason more than ordinary for counting on
his indulgence.

"You'll find," Mrs. Goodward let him know, "that we require a deal of
looking after, Eunice and I."

"Ah, I only hope you'll find that I'm equal to it." Peter had answered
her with so little indirection that it drew from the older woman a
quick, mute flush of sympathy. For a moment the homeliness of his lean
countenance was relieved with so redeeming a touch of what all women
most wish for in all men that she met it with an equal simplicity. "For
myself I am sure of it," but lifted next moment to a lighter key, with
a smile very like her daughter's dragged a little awry by the use of
years, "as for Eunice, you'll first have to lay hands on her."

With this permission he rose and made the circuit of the semi-divided
rooms, coming out at last into the dim rotunda, forested with clustered
porphyry columns, and there at last he caught sight of her. She had but
just stepped into its shaded coolness out of the hot, bright day, and
hung for a moment, in the act of furling her parasol, in which he was
about to hail her, until he discovered by his stepping into range from
behind one of the green pillars, that she was also in the act of saying
good-bye to Burton Henderson. There was a certain finality in the way
she held out her hand to him which checked Peter in the hospitable
impulse to include the younger man in the afternoon's diversion. He
stepped back the moment he saw that she was having trouble with her
escort, defending herself by her manner from something accusing in his.
Not to seem to spy upon her, Weatheral made his way back though the
coatroom without disclosing himself. From the door of it he timed his
return so as to meet her face to face as she came up with Mrs. Goodward
and was rewarded for it by the gayety of her greeting and the
unaffectedness of her attack of the fresh relay of toasted muffins and
tea.

"Absolutely famished," she told them, "and the shops are _so_
fascinating! You'd forgive me, Mr. Weatheral, if you could see the heaps
and heaps of lovely things simply begging to be bought; it seemed
positively unkind to come away and leave any of them." As she said
nothing whatever about the young man, it seemed unlikely that she could
have him much on her mind. She had a new way, very charming to Peter, of
surrendering the afternoon into his hands; let him ask nothing of her
she seemed to say, but to enjoy herself. She built out of their being
there before her, a very delightful supposition of her mother and Mr.
Weatheral, between them having made a little space for her to be gay in
and simple and lovely after her own kind. If she took any account of
them it was such as a dancer might who, practising a few steps for the
mere joy and pride of it, finds herself unexpectedly surrounded by an
interested and smiling audience.

If, however, with the memory of that afternoon upon him, Peter had gone
down to Fairport in the latter part of July with the expectation of
resuming the part of impresario to her charm, he suffered a sharp
disappointment. He found the Goodwards, not in the expensive caravansary
in which he installed himself, but in a smaller tributary house set back
from the main hotel though not quite disconnected with it; for quiet,
Mrs. Goodward told him, though he guessed quite as much from economy.

"It's wonderful, really, what they do with so little," Clarice, with her
fine discriminations in the obligations of friendship, had generously
let him know. "Eunice hasn't anything, positively not _any_thing in
comparison with what people of her class usually have. And with her
taste, you know, there must be things she's just aching for, that
somehow you can't give her." You couldn't, indeed. Though Peter made
excuses enough for giving her the use of his car, and giving it to her
shorn even of the implication of his society, there were few occasions
when he could do even so much as that. He couldn't even give her his
appreciations.

For at Fairport the Goodwards were quite in the heart of all that Peter
himself failed to understand that he couldn't possibly be. It was not
that he wasn't to the extent at least of sundry invitations given and
accepted, "in" as much of the Best Society as Fairport afforded. Mrs.
Goodward saw to that, and there were two or three whom he had met at the
Lessings' as well as men to whom the figure of his income was the cachet
of eligibility. It wasn't indeed that he wasn't liked, and that quite at
his proper worth, but that he couldn't somehow manage it so that the
Best Society cared in the least whether he liked it. He could see, in a
way, where Clarice had been at work for him; but the poison that was
dropped in his cup was the certainty that the way for him had to be
"worked." The discovery that he couldn't just find his way to Eunice
Goodward's side by the same qualities that had placed him beside the
males of her circle in point of property and power, that he couldn't
without admission to that circle, properly court her, hemmed him in
bewilderingly.

Her method of eluding him, if there were method in it, left him feeling
not so much avoided as prevented by the moves of a game he hadn't meant
to play. So greatly it irked his natural simplicity to be banded about
by the social observances of the place, that it might have led him to
irrecoverable mistakes had it not been for the hand held out to him by
Mrs. Goodward.

He perceived on closer acquaintance, that this lady's fine serenity of
manner was due largely to her never admitting to her mind the upsetting
possibility. She thought her world into acceptable shape and held it
there by the simple process of ignoring the eccentricities of its axis.

Peter would have admired, if his unsophistication had allowed him, the
facility with which she made it revolve now about their mutual pursuit
of Eunice through the rattle and cheapness of what was known as "the
Burton Henderson set." As it was against just such social inconsequence
that Peter felt himself strong to defend her, he fell easily into the
key of crediting the girl's sudden, bewildering flight to it as a mere
midsummer madness.

"It's the way with girls, I fancy," Mrs. Goodward had said to him,
strolling up and down the hotel veranda where through the wide French
windows they had glimpses of Eunice whirling away on the ice polished
floor of the ballroom within; "they cling the more to gayety as they see
the graver things of life bearing down upon them."

"You think she sees that?"

"Ah, there's much a mother sees, Mr. Weatheral----"

"You would, of course," he accepted.

"It's a woman's part, seeing; there's an instinct in us not to see too
soon." She gave him the benefit of her sweet weighted smile.

Peter lived greatly on these things. He was so sure of himself, of the
reality and strength of his passion; he had a feeling of its being quite
enough for them to go on, an inexhaustible, fairy capital out of which
almost anything that Eunice Goodward desired might be drawn. It was
fortunate that he found his passion so self-sufficing, for there was
little enough that Eunice afforded it by way of sustenance. For a week
he no more than kept in sight of her in the inevitable summer round; he
did not dance and the game of cards he could play was gauged to what
Ellen could manage in an occasional quiet evening at the Lessings'.

"I suppose," Eunice had said to him on an occasion when he had known
enough to decline an invitation for an afternoon's play to which Burton
Henderson was carrying her away, "that the stakes we play for aren't any
temptation to _you_."

"I think that they're out of proportion to the trouble you have to be at
to win them."

"Oh, if you don't care for the game----"

"I don't." And then casting about for a phrase that explained him more
happily, "Put it that I like to cut out my job and go to it." She gave
him a quick, condoning flash of laughter; the phrase was Lessing's and
out of her recognition of it he drew, loverlike, that assurance of
common understanding so dear to lovers. "Put it," he ventured further,
"that I don't like to see myself balked of the prize by the way the
cards are dealt."

"Ah, but that's what makes it a game. I'd no idea you were such
a--revolutionist."

"Evolutionist," he corrected, happy in having touched the subtler note
behind their persiflage. "I've all science on my side for the most
direct method." After all, why should he let even the Best Society deal
the cards for him? Should not a man sweep the boards of whatever kept
him from his natural mate?

That was on Tuesday, and the Thursday following he had asked the
Goodwards to motor over to Lighthouse Reef with him. He did not know
quite what he meant to bring about on this occasion; he had so much the
feeling of its being an occasion, the invitation had been so pointedly
given and accepted, it was with difficulty he adjusted himself to the
discovery on arriving at their hotel with the car, that Eunice had gone
to play tennis instead.

"The time is so short," Mrs. Goodward apologized; "she felt she must
make the most of it." She had to leave it there, not being able to make
a game of tennis in the hot sun seem more of a diversion than the steady
pacing of the luxurious car along the road which laced the forest to
the singing beaches. She had to let her sidewise smile do what it could
toward making the girl's bald evasion of her engagement seem the mere
flutter and hesitancy of besieged femininity. For the moment she was as
much "outside" so far as her daughter was concerned as Peter was of the
select bright circle in which she moved.

The way opened before them, beautiful in late bloom and heavy fern,
above which the sea wind kept a perpetual movement of aliveness.

"Eunice _will_ miss it," Mrs. Goodward rallied; "such a perfect
afternoon!" She gave him the oblique smile again, weighted this time
with the knowledge of all that Peter hadn't been able or hadn't tried to
keep from her. "It isn't easy, is it," she went on addressing her speech
to whatever, at the mention of her daughter's name, hung in the air
between them, "to stand by and see other people's great moments hover
over them. One would like so to lend a hand. And one is sure of nothing
so much as that if they are really to _be_ big, one mustn't."

"If you feel that," Peter snatched at encouragement, "that it is really
the big thing for her--what I'm sure you can't help knowing what I
mean--what I hope."

"What _I_ feel----? After all, it's _her_ feeling, my dear Mr.
Weatheral, that we have to take into account. It wouldn't be fair for me
to attempt to answer to you for that!"

"And of course if I can't _make_ her feel...." He did not trust himself
to a conclusion.

They found, however, when the road issued on the coast opposite the
great bursting bulks of spray, that Eunice's desertion and the
extenuation of it to which they had lent themselves, had put them out of
the mood for the high wind and warring surf of the Reef. Accordingly
they turned aside at Peter's suggestion to have tea at a little country
inn farther back in the hills, where the pound of the sea was reduced to
a soft, organ-booming bass to which the shrill note of the needles
countered in perfect tune. The tea garden, the favourite port of call
for afternoon drives from the resorts hereabouts, lay back of the
hostelry in a narrow, ferny glen from which springs issued. As Peter led
the way up its rocky stair, they could hear the light laughter of a
party just rising from one of the round rustic tables. The group
descending poured past them a summer-coloured runnel down the little
glen, and left them face to face with Eunice, who had lingered, her
dress caught on a point of the rustic chair.

"Mamma--you!" She looked trapped, accused, though sheer astonishment
held the others dumb. "We finished the game----" she began and stopped
short; after all, her manner seemed to say, why shouldn't she have tea
there with her friends? She made as if to sweep past after them but Mrs.
Goodward never moved from the narrow path. She was more embarrassed,
Peter saw, than her daughter, and as plainly at bay.

"Now that we are here----" she began in her turn.

"Now that you have followed me here," the girl rang out, "what is it
that you have to say to me?" She was white and a bright flame spot
showed on either cheek.

"I--oh," the elder woman by an effort drew the remnant of the grand
manner about her; "it is Mr. Weatheral, I think, who might have
something to say." She caught the occasion as it were on the wing. Peter
heard the quick breath behind him with which she grasped it. "Now that
you are here, however, I'll tell your party that you will be driving
home with us." She gathered up her draperies and was gone down the path
she had come before either of the others thought to stop her. Eunice had
not made a move to do so. She stood clasping the back of the chair from
which she had freed her dress, and looked across it mutinously at Peter.

"And what," she quivered, "has Mr. Weatheral to say to me?"

"There is nothing," he told her, "that I would say to you, Miss
Goodward, unless you wished to hear it." His magnanimity shamed her a
little.

"I broke my engagement to you," she admitted, "broke it to come here
with--the others. I haven't any excuse to offer you."

"And when," Peter demanded of her, "have I asked any other excuse of you
for anything that you chose to do except that you chose it. There _was_
something I wished to say to you, that I hoped for a more auspicious
occasion...." He hurried on with it suddenly as a thing to be got over
with at all hazards. "It was to say that I hoped you might not find it
utterly beyond you to think of marrying me." He saw her sway a little,
holding still to her chair, and moved toward her a step, dizzy himself
with the sudden onset of emotion. "But now that it is said, if it
distresses you we will say no more about it." She waved him back for a
moment without altering her strained, trapped attitude.

"Have you said this to mamma? And has she--has she said anything to you?
About me, I mean; how I might take it, or anything?"

"She said that she couldn't answer for you; that it was your feeling
that must be taken into account. She put me, so to speak, on my own feet
in so far as _that_ was concerned." He waited for her answer to that,
and none coming, though he saw that she grew a little easier, he went on
presently. "There is, however, much that I feel ought to be said about
my feeling for you, what it means to me, what I hoped----" She stopped
him with a gesture; he could see her lovely manner coming back to her as
quiet comes to the surface of a smitten pool.

"That--one may take for granted, may one not? Since you _have_ asked me,
that the feeling that goes to it is all I have a right to ask?"

"Quite, quite," he assured her. "It may be," he managed to smile upon
her here for the easing of her sweet discomposure, "it may very easily
be that I was thinking too much of my pleasure in saying it."

"It would, then, be a pleasure?" She had the air of snatching at that as
something concrete, graspable.

"It would, and it wouldn't. I mean if you were bothered by it. You could
take everything for granted, everything."

"Even," she insisted, "to the point of taking it for granted that you
would take things for granted from me: that you wouldn't expect
anything--any expression, anything more than just accepting you?"

"Ah!" he cried, the wonder, the amazement of success breaking upon him.
"If you accepted me what more _could_ I expect." He had clasped the hand
which she held out to check him and held it against his heart firmly
that she shouldn't see how he trembled.

"I haven't, you know," she reminded him, "but if I was sure--very sure
that you wouldn't ask any more of me than thinking, I ... might think
about it." She was trembling now, though her hand was so cold, and
suddenly a tear gathered and dropped, splashing her fine wrist.

"Oh, my dear, my dear!" he cried, moved more than he had thought it
possible to be; "you can be perfectly sure that there will never be
anything between you and me that shall not be exactly as you wish." He
suited his action to the word, kissing the wet splash and letting her
go.

"Why, then," she recovered herself with the smile that was now strangely
like her mother's, sweeter for being smiled a little awry, "the best
thing you can do is to find poor mamma and let us give her a cup of
tea."




IV


"Peter, have you any idea what I am thinking about?"

"Not in the least, Ellen," which was not strictly the truth. He
supposed she must be thinking naturally of the news he had told her not
an hour since, of his engagement to Eunice Goodward. It lay so close to
the surface of his own mind at all times that the slightest stir of
conversation, like the wind above a secret rose, seemed always about to
disclose it. They were sitting on the porch at Bloombury and the pointed
swallows pitched and darted about the eaves.

"It was the smell of the dust that reminded me," said Ellen, "and the
wild rose at the turn of the road; you can smell it as plain as plain
when the air lifts a little. Do you remember a picnic that we were
invited to and couldn't go? It was on account of being poor ... and I
was just finding it out. I found out a good many things that summer;
about my always going to be lame and what it would mean to us. It was
dreadful to me that I couldn't be lame just by myself, but I had to mix
up you and mother in it."

"We were glad, Ellen, to be mixed up in it if it made things easier for
you."

"I know ... times I felt that way about it too, but that was when I was
older ... as if it sort of held us all together; like somebody who had
belonged to us all and had died. Only it was me that died, the me that
would have been if I hadn't been lame.... Well, I hadn't thought it out
so far that first summer; I just hated it because it kept us from doing
things like other people. You were fond of Ada Brown, I remember, and it
was because I was lame and we were so poor and all, that you couldn't go
with her and she got engaged to Jim Harvey. I hope you don't think I
have a bad heart, Peter, but I was always glad that Ada didn't turn out
very well. Every time I saw her getting homelier and kind of bedraggled
like, I said to myself, well, I've saved Peter from that at any rate. I
couldn't have borne it if she had turned out the kind of a person you
ought to have married."

"You shouldn't have worried, Ellen; very few men marry the first woman
they are interested in."

"There was a girl you used to write home about--at that boarding-house.
I used to get you to write. I daresay you thought I was just curious.
But I was trying to find out something that would make me perfectly sure
she wasn't good enough for you. She was a typewriter, wasn't she?"

"Something of that sort."

"Well!" Ellen took him up triumphantly, "you wouldn't have wanted to be
married to a typewriter _now!"_

"I never really thought of marrying one, Ellen. I'm sure everything has
turned out for the best."

"That's what I'm trying to tell you. You see I was determined it should
turn out that way. I said, what was the use of being lame and being a
burden to you unless there was something _meant_ by it. I'd have fretted
dreadfully if I hadn't felt that there was something to come out of it.
And it has come.... Peter, you'd rather I'd saved you for this than
anything that might have happened?"

"Much rather, Ellen."

It had surprised him in the telling, to see how accurately his sister
had gauged the worldly advantage of his marriage. If Eunice Goodward had
been a piece of furniture, Ellen couldn't have appraised her better at
her obvious worth: beauty and character and family and the mysterious
cachet of society. Clarice had been at work there, too, he suspected.
Miss Goodward fitted in Ellen's mind's eye into her brother's life and
fortune as a picture into its frame.

"I'm very glad you feel that way about it, Ellen," he said again; he was
on the point of telling her about the House of Shining Walls. The
material from which he had drawn its earliest furnishings lay all about
them, the receding blue of the summer sky, the aged, arching apple
boughs. The scent of the wilding rose came faintly in from the country
road--suddenly his sister surprised him with a flash of rare insight.

"I guess there can't anything keep us from the best except ourselves,"
she said. "Being willing to put up with the second best gives us more
trouble than the Lord ever meant for us. Think of the way I've always
wanted children--but if they'd been my real own, they'd have been
sickly, likely, or even lame like me, or just ordinary like the only
kind of man who would have married me. As it is, I've had Clarice's and
now----" She broke off with a quick, old-maidish colour.

Ellen had gone so far as to name all of Peter's children in the days
when nothing seemed so unlikely; now in the face of his recent
engagement she would have thought it indelicate.

"_She_ would have liked you marrying so well, Peter," she finished with
a backward motion of her head toward the room where the parlour set,
banished long ago from the town house, symbolized for Ellen the brooding
maternal presence.

"Yes, she would have liked it." There came back to him with deep
satisfaction his mother's appraisement of young Mrs. Dassonville, who
must, as he recalled her, have been shaped by much the same frame of
life as Eunice Goodward--the Lovely Lady. The long unused phrase had
risen unconsciously to his lips on the day that he had brought Eunice
her ring. He had spent a whole week in the city choosing it; three
little flawless, oblong emeralds set with diamonds, almost encircling
her finger with the mystic number seven. He had discovered on the day
that she had accepted him, that it had to be emeralds to match the
green lights that her eyes took on in the glen from the deep fern, the
mossy bank and the green boughs overhead. On the terrace at Lessings'
under a wide June sky he had supposed them to be blue; but there was no
blue stone of that sky colour of sufficient preciousness for Eunice
Goodward.

She had been very sweet about the ring, touched with grateful surprise
for its beauty and its taste. Something he could see of relief, of
assurance, flashed and fell between the two women as she showed it to
her mother. They had taken him so beautifully on trust, they couldn't
have known, he reflected, whether he would rise at all to the delicate,
balanced observation of life among them; it was evidence, the emerald
circlet, of how satisfyingly he had risen. The look that passed between
mother and daughter was like a spark that lighted as it fell, an
unsuspected need of him as man merely, the male element, security,
dependability, care. His first response to it was that of a swimmer who
has struck earth under him; he knew in that flash where he was, by what
familiar shores; and the whole effect, in spite of him was of the
sudden shrinkage of that lustrous sea in which his soul and sense had
floated. It steadied him, but it also for the moment narrowed a little
the horizon of adventure. It was the occasion that Eunice took to define
for him his status as an engaged man.

He kept as far as he was able his compact of expecting nothing of her,
except of course that he couldn't avoid expecting that their arrangement
would lead in the natural course to marriage. She had met him more than
halfway in that, agreeing to an earlier date than he had thought
compatible with the ritual of engagements in the Best Society. She had
managed, however, that Peter should present her with her summer freedom:
the engagement was not even to be announced until their return to town.
And in the meantime Peter was to find a house. He had offered her travel
for that first year. Europe, which he had scarcely glimpsed, glittered
and allured. But travel, Eunice let him know, went much better when you
had a place to come back to. He saw at once how right was everything she
did. Well, then, a house on Fillmore Avenue?

"Oh--shall we be so rich as that, Peter?" He divined some embarrassment
in her as to the scale in which they were to live. "We'll want something
in the country, too," she reminded him.

"I've a couple of options at Maplemont----"

"Oh, Maplemont----" She liked that also, he perceived.

"And a place in Florida. Lessing and I bought it the winter the children
had the diphtheria. They've a very pretty bungalow; we could put up
something like it for ourselves--if you wouldn't mind my sister
occasionally. Ellen isn't happy at hotels."

"Mind! with all you're giving me! You won't think it's just the money,
Peter;" she had a very charming hesitancy about it. "It's what money
stands for, beauty, and suitability--and--everything." He was very
tender with her.

"It's not that I have such a pile of it either," he assured her, "though
I turn over a great deal in the course of a year. It's easier making
money than people think."

"Easier for everybody?" There was a certain eagerness in the look and
voice.

"Easier for those who know how. I'm only forty, and I've learned;
there's not much I couldn't get if I set about it. It's a kind of a
gift, perhaps, like painting or music, but there's a great deal to be
learned, too."

"And some haven't the gift to learn, perhaps." For some reason she
sighed.... He was turning all this over in his mind when suddenly Ellen
recalled him.

"Have you told Clarice yet?"

"I mean to, Sunday, if you don't mind my not coming down to you. Miss
Goodward is spending the week end at Maplemont, and by staying at
Julian's----"

"Of _course_." Ellen sympathized. "I shall want to know what Clarice
says." She never did know exactly, for when Clarice gave Peter her
congratulations in the terrace garden after dinner, she missed,
extraordinarily for her, the felicitous note.

"I'm so happy for Eunice, you can't imagine," she insisted. "I've always
said we've none of us known what Eunice can do until she's had her
opportunity. And now with all the background you can give her---- You'll
see!"

He didn't quite know what he was to see except that if Eunice were to be
in the picture it was bound to be satisfying. But Mrs. Lessing was not
done with him. "For all her being so beautiful and so well placed," she
went on, "Eunice has never had any life at all, not what you might call
a life. And she might so easily have missed this. It is hard for girls
to realize sometimes that the success of marriage depends on real
qualities in the man, in mastery over things and not just over her
susceptibilities. It is quite the most sensible thing I've known Eunice
to do."

"Only," Peter reminded her for his part, "I'm not just exactly doing it
because it is sensible." Her "of course not" was convinced enough to
have stilled the vague ruffling of his mind, without doing it. He didn't
object to having his qualifications as Eunice Goodward's husband taken
solidly, but why dwell upon them when it was just the particular
distinction of his engagement that it had the intensity, the spiritual
extension which was supposed to put it out of reach of material
considerations. Even Ellen had done better by him than this.

He was forced, however, to come back to the substance of Mrs. Lessing's
comment a few days later when he was being dined at the club by a
twice-removed cousin of the Goodward's, the upright, elderly symbol of
the male sanction which was the most that his fiancée's fatherless
condition could furnish forth. The man was cordial enough; he was even
prepared to find Peter likable; but even more on that account to measure
his relation to Miss Goodward in terms of its being a "good thing."

"It's not, you know," his host couldn't forebear to remind him, "exactly
the sort of a marriage we expected of Eunice; but if the girl is
satisfied----"

"If I hadn't satisfied myself on that point----" Peter reminded him in
his turn.

"Quite so, quite so ... girls have notions sometimes; one never quite
knows ... You'll keep on with your--just _what_ is it you do such
tremendous things with; one hears of course that you _do_ do them----"

"Real estate, brokerage," Peter enlightened him. "I shall certainly keep
on with it. Isn't one supposed to have all the more need of it when
there's an establishment to keep up?"

The symbol waved a deprecating hand. "You'll find it rather an
occupation to keep up with Eunice, I'm thinking. I've a notion she'll go
it, once she has the chance."

"If by going it, you mean going out a great deal, seeing the world and
having it in to see her, well, why shouldn't she, so long as I have the
price?" He could only take it good-naturedly. It was amusing when you
came to think of it, that a man who would contribute to the sum of his
wife's future perhaps, the price of a silver tea salver, should so hold
him to account for it. Nevertheless the talk left a faint savour of
dryness. It was part of his new pride in himself as a possession of hers
that he should in all things come up to the measure of men, but the one
thing which should justify his being so ticketed and set aside by them
as the Provider, the Footer-up of Accounts, was the assurance which only
she could give, of his being the one thing, good or bad, which could be
made to answer for her happiness.

Walking home by the river to avoid as far as possible the baked,
oven-smelling streets, he was aware how strangely the whole earth ached
for her. He was here walking, as he had been since his first seeing her,
at the core of a great light and harmony, and walking alone in it. If
just loving her had been sufficient occupation for his brief courtship,
for the present it failed him. For he was not only alone but lonely. He
saw her swept aside by the calculating crowd--strange that Ellen and
Clarice should be a part of it--not only out of reach of his live
passion, but beyond all speech. Alone in his room he felt suddenly faint
for the want of her. He turned off the light with which he had first
flooded it, for the flare of the street came feebly in through the
summer leafage, and sat sensing the need of her as a thing to be handled
and measured, a benumbing, suffocating presence. As he sat, a sound of
music floated by, and a thin pencil of light from a pleasure barge on
the river flitted from window to window, travelling the gilt line of a
picture-frame and the dark block of a picture that hung over his bed.
And as it touched in passing the high ramping figure of a knight in
armour, the old magic worked. He felt himself flung as it were across
great distances, and dizzy with the turn, to her side. He was there to
maintain in the face of all worldly reckoning, the excluding, spiritual
quality of their relation. The more his engagement to Eunice Goodward
failed of being the usual, the expected thing, the more authority it
derived for its supernal sources. It took the colour of true romance
from its unlikelihood. Peter turned on the light, and drawing paper to
him, began to write.

"Lovely Lady," the letter began, and as if the words had been an
incantation, the room was full and palpitating with his stored-up
dreams. They came waking and crowding to fill out the measure of his
unconsummated passion, and they had all one face and one likeness. Late,
late he was still going on with it....

"And so," he wrote, "I have come to the part of the story that was not
in the picture, that I never knew. The dragon is slain and the knight
has just begun to understand that the Princess for whom it was done is
still a Princess; and though you have fought and bled for them,
princesses must be approached humbly. And he did not know in the least
how to go about it for in all his life the knight could never have
spoken to one before. You have to think of that when you think of him at
all, and of how he must stand even with his heart at her feet, hardly
daring to so much as call her attention to it. For though he knows very
well that it is quite enough to hope for and more than he deserves, to
be able to spend his whole life serving her, love, great love such as
one may have for princesses, aches, aches, my dear, and needs a
comforting touch sometimes and a word of recognition to make it beat
more steadily and more serviceably for every day."

He went out that night to post his letter when it was done, for though
there was not time for an answer to it, he was going down to her on
Saturday, he liked to think of it running before him as a torch to light
the way which, even while he slept, he was so happily traversing. He was
quite trembling with the journey he had come, when on Saturday she met
him, floating in summer draperies and holding out a slim ringed hand,
and a cool cheek to glance past his lips like a swallow.

"You had my letter, dear?"

"Such a lovely letter, Peter, I couldn't think of trying to answer it."

"Oh, it wasn't to be answered--at least not by another----" He released
her lest she should be troubled by his trembling.

"I should think not!" She was more than gracious to him. "It's a wonder
to me, Peter, you never thought of writing. You have such a beautiful
vocabulary." But even that did not daunt him, for he knew as soon as he
had looked on her again, that loving Eunice Goodward was enough of an
occupation.




V


The senior partner of Weatheral, Lessing & Co., was exactly the sort of
man, when his physicians ordered him abroad for two years, with the
intimation that there might even worse happen to him, to make so little
fuss about it that he got four inches of type in a leading paper the
morning of his departure and very little more. Lessing would certainly
have been at the steamer to see him off, except for being so much taken
up with adjustments of the business made necessary by Peter's going out
of it; and his sister Ellen never went out in foggy weather, seldom so
far from the house in any case. Besides, she declared that if she once
saw Peter disappearing down the widening water she should never be able
to rid herself of the notion of his being quite overwhelmed by it,
whereas if he sent on his trunks the day before, and walked quietly out
in the morning with his suitcase, she could persuade herself that he had
merely run down to Bloombury for a few days and would be back on Monday.
And having managed his leave-taking as he did most personal matters, to
please Ellen, who though she had never been credited with an
imagination, seemed likely to develop one in the exigencies of getting
along without Peter, he had no sense of having done anything other than
to please himself. He found a man to carry his suitcase as soon as he
was out of the house, and walked the whole way to the steamer; for if
one has been ordered out of all activity there is still a certain
satisfaction in going out on your own feet.

It was an extremely ill-considered day, wet fog drawn up to the high
shouldering roofs and shrugged off, like a nervous woman's shawl. But
whether it sulked over his departure or smiled on him for remembrance,
would not have made any difference to Peter, who, whatever the papers
said of the reason for his going abroad, knew that there would be
neither shade nor shine for him, nor principalities nor powers until he
had found again the House of the Shining Walls. As soon as he had
bestowed his belongings in his stateroom, he went out on the side of the
deck farthest from the groups of leave-taking, and stood staring down,
as if he considered whether the straightest route might not lie in that
direction, into the greasy, shallow hollows of the harbour water, at the
very moment when the Burton Hendersons, over their very late coffee, had
discovered the item of his departure.

Mrs. Henderson balanced her spoon on the edge of her cup while her
husband read the paragraph aloud to her.

"You don't suppose," she said, as if it might be an interesting even if
regrettable possibility, "that _I_--that our affair--had anything to do
with it?"

"If it did," admitted her husband, with the air of not thinking it
likely, but probably served him right, "it has taken a long time to get
at him. Two years, isn't it, since you threw him over for a better man?"

"Oh, I'm not so sure of your being a better man, Bertie; I liked you
better----"

Mr. Burton Henderson accepted his wife's amendment with complacency.

"I don't believe Weatheral appreciated the distinction. Men like that
have a sort of money crust that prevents the ordinary perceptions from
getting through to them." This illustration appeared on second thoughts
so illuminating that it carried him a little further. "Perhaps that's
the reason it has taken him so long to tumble after he has been hit; it
has just got through to him. It would be interesting to know, though, if
he is still a little in love with you."

There was a fair amount of speculation in Mr. Burton Henderson's tone
that did not appear to have its seat in any apprehension.

"Just as if you rather hoped it," his wife protested.

"Well, I was only wondering if his health is so bad as the papers
say--it seldom is, you know--but if he were to go off all of a sudden
one of these days, whether he mightn't take it into his head now to
leave you a legacy."

"I don't believe it was personal enough with Peter for that. It wasn't
me he wanted so much as just to be married. And, besides, I did come
down on him rather hard." Mrs. Burton Henderson smiled a little
reminiscently as if she still saw herself in the process of coming down
on Peter and thought rather well of it.

"Well, anyway," her husband finished, "we could have managed with a
legacy."

"Yes, we do need money dreadfully, don't we, Bertie?" she sighed. "But I
don't believe I had anything to do with it."

That was all very well for Mrs. Burton Henderson, but Peter's sister
Ellen had a different opinion. "Peter," she had said the evening after
Peter had sent his trunk out of the house and locked up his suitcase to
keep her from putting anything more into it, "you're not thinking of
_her_, are you? You're not going to take that abroad with you."

"No, Ellen, I haven't thought of her for a long time except to wish her
happiness. You mustn't let that worry you."

"Just the same," said Ellen, "if anything happens to you over there--if
you never come back to me, I shall never forgive her."

"I shall come back. I am sorry you should feel so bitter about it."

He could not, especially now that it was gone, very well explain to
Ellen about the House; for all the years that it had stood there just
beyond the edge of dreams with the garden spread around it and a lovely
wood before, she had never heard of it. There had been so many ways to
it once, paths to it began in pictures, great towered gates of music
gave upon its avenues, and if he had not spoken of it, it was because as
he had made himself believe when she did come, that Eunice Goodward
would come into it of first right. He could not have blamed her for not
wishing to live in it--from the first he had never blamed her. He might
have managed even had she pulled it about his ears to rebuild it in
some fashion, but this was the bitterest, that he knew now for a
certainty there had never been any House and the certainty made him
ridiculous.

It had been rather the worse that, with all the suddenness of this
discovery, he had not been able to avoid the habit of setting out for
it, seeking in dreams the relief of desolation in knowing that no dreams
could come. As often as he heard music or saw in the soft turn of a
cheek or the slender line of a wrist, what had moved him so in hers he
felt himself urged forward on old trails, only to be scared from them by
the apparition of himself as Eunice had evoked it from her bright
surpassing surfaces, as a man unaccomplished in passion, unprovocative.
All the gates to the House opened upon dreadful hollows of
self-despising into which Peter fell and floundered, so that he took to
going that way as little as possible, taking wide circuits about it
continually in the way of business, being rather pleased with himself
when at the end of two years he could no longer feel any pang of loss
nor any remembering thrill of what the House had been--until he
discovered that also he could not feel some other things, the pen
between his fingers and the rise of the stairs under him. He forgot
Eunice Goodward, and then one day he forgot to go home after office
hours, and they found him sitting still at his desk in the dark, trying
to remember whether he ought to put down the blotting-pad and the paper
weight on top of that, or if, on the whole, it were not better to put
the paper weight, as being the heavier article, first.

It was after that the doctor told him to go as far away from his
business as possible and keep on staying away.

"But if I am going to die, doctor," Peter carefully explained, "I would
much rather do it in my own country."

"Ah," the doctor warned him, "that's just the difficulty. You won't
die."

And that was how Peter happened to be leaning over the forward rail of
an Atlantic steamer on his way to Italy, which he had chosen because the
date of sailing happened to be convenient. But he knew, as he stood
looking down at the surface of the water, rough-hewn by the wind, that
whatever the doctor said to Lessing, or Ellen surmised, he would get no
good there except as it showed him the way to the House of the Shining
Walls.

He did not remember where in the blind pointless ring through which the
steamer chugged and wallowed as though it were a superior sort of water
beetle and the horizon a circle of its own making, he began to get
sufficiently acquainted with his fellow passengers, to understand that
they were most of them going abroad in the interest of unrealized
estates, and abounded in confidence. To see them forever forward and
agaze at the lit shores of Spain and the Islands of Desire, roused in
him the faint savour of expectation. Which, however, did not prevent him
from finding Naples squalid, and Rome, where he arrived in the middle of
the tourist season, too modern in a cheap, second-rate sort of way. He
could remember when Rome had furnished some excellent company for the
House, and suffered in the places of renown an indeterminable pang like
the ache of an amputated stump. It seemed, on occasion, as if the old
trails might lie down the hollow of the Forum, under the arch of that
broken aqueduct, beside the dark Volsinian mere; but when Peter arrived
at any of these places he found them prepossessed by Germans gabbling
out of _Baedekers_. The Sistine Chapel made the back of his neck ache
and he came no nearer than seven tourists to the noble quietude of the
Vatican can marbles.

"I must remember," said Peter to himself, "that I am a very sick man,
and crowds annoy me."

Then he went into the country and saw the gray of the olives above the
springing grass, like the silver bloom on a green plum, and began to
experience the pangs of recovery. He found Hadrian's Villa and the
garden of the Villa d'Este, and remembered other things. He remembered
the flat malachite-coloured pools, the definite, pointed cypresses and
the fountain's soft incessant rain--as it had been in the House. As it
_was_ in the House. For he understood in Italy what was still the most
bitter to know, that though it might yet be somewhere in the world, he
was never to find it any more. Toward all that once had led him thither,
his sense was locked and sealed. He remembered Eunice Goodward--the
fact of her--how tall she was as she walked beside him--but not how at
the soft brushing of her hair as she turned, his blood had sung to her;
nor all the weeks of their engagement like a morning full of wings. And
he could not yet recall so much as the bare reasons for her break with
him except that they had been unhappy ones.

It had been a part of a long plan that he and Eunice should have seen
Italy together, but for the moment he did not wish her there. He was
sure she would have been in the way of his getting something that
glimmered at him from the coign of castellated walls all awash about
their base with purpled shadow, that strove to say itself in intricate
fine tracery of tower and shrine, and failed and fell away before the
sodden quality of his mind.

So he drifted northward with the spring, and saw the anemones blowing
and the bloomy violet wonder the world, suffering incredible aching
intimations of the recrudescence of desire. Afterward he came to
Florence, where he had heard there were pictures, and hoped to have some
peace; but at Florence they were all too busy being painted or prayed
to, the remote Madonnas, the wounded Saints, the comfortable plump
Venuses; the lean Christs too stupefied with candle smoke to take any
account of an American gentleman in a plain business suit, who looked
homely and ill and competent. Sometimes in Santa Croce or in the long
gallery over the bridge, the noise of the city would remove from him and
the faces would waver and lean out of their frames, as if, had the
occasion allowed, they would have said the word to set him on his way.
But there was always a guard about or a tourist stalking some
uncatalogued prey and it never came to anything.

"What you really want," said a man at his hotel to whom he had half
whimsically complained of their inarticulateness--one of those
remarkable individuals who had done nothing so successfully in so many
cities of Europe that he was supposed to know the exact month for doing
it most delightfully in any one of them--"what you really want is
Venice. It's an off season there; you'll meet nobody but Germans, and if
you go about in your own gondola you needn't mind them."

So Peter went to Venice, and on the way there he met the Girl from Home.




VI


He knew at once that she was from Home, though as she sat opposite him
with the fingers of her mended gloves laced under her chin and her face
turned away to miss no point of the cypresses and warm, illumined walls,
there was nothing to prove that any one of a hundred towns might not
have produced her. Peter remembered what sort of people wore gloves like
that in Bloombury--the minister's wife, the school teacher, his mother
and Ellen--and was instantly sure she would not have been travelling
through Italy first-class except at the instigation of the large,
widowed and distrustful woman with whom she got on at Padua. This lady,
also, Peter understood very well. He thought it likely she sat in
rocking chairs a great deal at home and travelled to improve her mind.
She had, moreover, a general air of proclaiming the unwarrantableness of
railway acquaintances, which alone would have prevented Peter from
asking the girl, as he absurdly wanted to, if they had painted the new
school-house yet, and if there had been much water that year in Miller's
pond.

As she sat so with her round hat pushed askew by the window-glass, there
was some delicate reminder about her that streaked the rich Italian
landscape with vestiges of Bloombury.

He looked out of the window where she looked and saw the white
straight-sided villas change to green-shuttered farmhouses, and fine old
Roman roads lead on to Harmony. It was all there for him in its
unexpectedness, as freshly touching as those reminders of his mother
which he came upon occasionally where Ellen kept them laid by in
lavender; as if the girl had shaken from the folds of her jacket of
unmistakable Bloombury cut, Youth for him--his own--anybody's Youth--no
limp and yellowed keepsake, but all crisply done up and ready for
putting on. So sharp for the moment was his sense of accepting the
invitation to put it on with her as the best possible traveller's guise,
especially for seeing Venice in, that catching the speculative eye of
the large lady turned upon him, he quailed sensibly. She had the air of
having detected him in an attempt to establish a relation with her
companion on the ground of their common youngness, and finding herself
much more a match for him both in years and in respect to their common
origin. Whatever passed between the two women, and something did pass
wordlessly, with hardly so much substance as a look, remained there, not
intrusively, but as proof that what he had been seeking was still going
on in some far but attainable place. It was the first movement of an
accomplished recovery, for Peter to find himself resisting the
implication of his appearance in favour of what was coming to him out of
the retouched, sensitive surfaces of his past.

He knew so well as he looked at the girl, what had produced her. She was
leaning a little from the window in a way that brought more of her face
into view, and though from where he sat Peter could have very little
notion of the points of the nearing landscape, he knew by what he saw of
her, that somewhere across the low runnels in the windy reeds she had
caught sight of the "sea birds' nest."

He did not on that account change his position so that he might have a
glimpse of the dark hills of Arqua or the towers of Venice repeating
themselves in the lustrous, spacious sea. Sitting opposite the girl, he
saw in her following eyes the silver trails of water and the dim
procession down them of old loves, old wars, old splendours, much better
than the thin line of the landscape presented them to his weary sense.
He leaned back as far as the stiff seat allowed, watching the Old World
shine on her face, where the low light, striking obliquely on the water,
turned it white above black shoals of weed. For the first time since his
illness his mind slipped the leash of maimed desire, and as if it parted
for him there beyond the window of the railway carriage, struck into the
trail to the House. The walls of it rose up straight and shining, gilded
purely; the windows arching to summer blueness, let in with them the
smell of the wilding rose at the turn of the road and the evening
clamour of the birds in Bloombury wood.

All this time Peter had been sitting in an Italian railway carriage,
knee to knee with a pirate bearded Austrian Jew who gave him the
greatest possible occasion for wishing the window opened, and when the
jar of the checked train drew him into consciousness again, he was at a
loss to know what had set him off so far until he caught sight of the
girl. She was buttoning on her jacket with fingers that trembled with
excitement as she constrained herself to the recapitulation of the two
suitcases, the hat box and three parcels which her companion in order to
have well in hand, had been alternately picking up and dropping ever
since they sighted the tower of San Georgio dark against the sea
streaked west.

"Two and one is three and three is six and the _'Baedeker'_ and the
umbrellas," said the girl. "No, I don't have to look in the address
book. I have it by heart. Casa Frolli, the Zattera." Then the roar of
the train split into the sharp cries of the _facchinos_ that carried
them forward like an explosion into Venice as it rose statelily from the
rippling lustre. Around it wove the black riders with still,
communicating prows, so buoyant, so mysteriously alive and peering, like
some superior sea creatures risen magically from below the frayed
reflection of the station lights. Much as Peter felt that he owed to the
vivid presence of the girl, his new capacity to see and feel it so as it
burst upon them, he hadn't found the courage to address her. So it was
with a distinct sense of deprivation that he saw her with her companion
grasping the side of the gondola as if by that method to keep it afloat,
disappearing down the dim water lanes in the direction of the Zattera.




VII


It was the evidence of how far he had come on the road to recovery that
he was able, when he woke in his bed at the _Britania_, to allow full
play to the suggestion that he had experienced nothing more than the
natural reversion of age to the bright vividness of the past. "Though I
didn't expect," he admitted as he lay fronting in the wide old mirrors,
interminable reflections of a pillow dinted by his too-early whitened
head, "I really did not expect to have it begin at forty-two." Having
made this concession to his acceptance of himself as a man done with
youngness of any sort, he lay listening to the lip-lapping of the water
and the sounds that came up from the garden just below him, the clink of
cups and the women's easy laughter, and wondered what it could have been
about that girl to set him dreaming of all the women who had ever
interested him.

It did not occur to him then, nor in the interval in which the tang of
his dream intervened between him and the full flavour of Venice, that he
had not thought once of Eunice Goodward, but only of those who had
touched his life without hurting it. He was so far indeed from thinking
of women again as beings from whom hurts were expected to come, that he
blamed himself for not having made an occasion out of their enforced
companionship, for speaking to the girl in the train if he should meet
her again.

"I must be twice her age," he told himself determinedly, "and no doubt
she has been brought up to be respectful to her elders."

He looked out very carefully, therefore, as he drifted about the canals,
for a large, widowed lady and a girl in a round hat who might have come
from Bloombury, but he did not find her that day nor the next, nor the
day after, and in the meantime Venice took him.

The ineffable consolation of its beauty stole upon him like the breath
of its gardens, as it rose delicately from its sea station, murmurous
like a shell with the whisper of joyous adventure. It was, as he told
himself, a part of the sense of renewal which the girl had afforded him,
that he was able to accept its incomparable charm as the evidence of the
continuity of the world of youth and passion. His being able to see it
so was a sort of consolation for having, by the illusive quality of his
dreams, missed them both on his own account.

It was not, however, until the morning of the fourth day that it drew
him as he had known in the beginning it inevitably must, to the core of
Venice, where in the wide piazza full of sleepy light, the great banners
dropped from their staves broad splashes of colour between the slaty
droves of doves. High over the door the gold horses of Lysippus
breasted the gold air made shadowless by the approaching _temporale_. He
was so far then from anything that had to do with his dream that it was
not for some moments after he had turned into St. Mark's, obsessed of
the sense of life unconquerable and pervading, that he began to take
notice of what he saw there in the dim wonder. It was first of all the
smell of stale incense and the mutter of the mass, and then as he bowed
instinctively to the elevated Host, the snare of the intricate mosaic
pavement; so by degrees appreciation cleared to the seductive polish of
the pillars, the rows of starred candles, and beyond that to the clear
gold of the walls, with all the pictures wrought flatly upon them ... as
it had been in the House!

It was some time before he was able to draw up out of his boyhood
memories, so newly made a gift to him, the stray, elucidating fact of
his father's early visit to this spot and the possibility of his dream
having shaped itself about some unremembered account of it. He climbed
up to the galleries to give himself room to that wonder of memory which
had failed to preserve to him any image of how his father looked, and
yet had so furnished all his imagination. Which didn't make any less of
a wonder of his knowing as he stood there, Peter Weatheral, of the firm
of Weatheral, Lessing & Co., Real Estate Brokers, what it was all about.

"It's a picture-book of the heart of man," he concluded, and no sooner
had he shaped this thought in his mind than he heard it uttered for him
on the opposite side of the pillar in a voice made soft by indulgent
tenderness, "Just a great picture-book." He leaned forward at the sound
far enough to have a glimpse of the Girl from Home, and smiled at her.

"So you've found that out, have you?" It was not strange to find himself
addressing her friendlily nor to hear her answer him.

"Just a picture-book," she repeated. "It explains so much. What the
saints were to them, and the Holy Personages. Monkish tales to prey upon
their superstition, we were taught. But you can see here what they
really were, the wonder tales of a people, the fairy wonder and the
blessed happenings come true as they do in dreams. Oh, it must have been
a good time when the saints were on the earth."

"You believe in them, then?"

"Here in San Marco, yes. But not when I am in Bloombury."

"Oh!" cried Peter, "are you really from Bloombury? I knew you were from
up country but I hardly dared to hope--if you will permit me----" He
searched for his card which she accepted without looking at it.

"You are Mr. Peter Weatheral, aren't you? Mrs. Merrithew thought she
recognized you yesterday."

"Is that why she glared at me so? But anyway I am obliged to her, though
I haven't vestige of a recollection of her."

"She didn't suppose you had. Her husband sold you some land once. But of
course everybody in Bloombury knows the Mr. Weatheral who went from
there to the city and made his fortune."

"A sorry one," said Peter. "But if you are really from Bloombury why
don't I remember you? I go there with Ellen every summer, and _she_
knows everybody."

"Yes; she is so kind. Everybody says that. But I'm really from Harmony.
I taught the Bloombury school last year. I am Savilla Dassonville."

"Oh, I knew your father then! Now that I come to think of it, it was he
who laid the foundation of my greatness," Peter smiled whimsically. "And
I knew your mother; she was a very lovely lady."

He realized as the girl's eyes filled with tears, that this must have
been the child at whose birth, he had heard, the mother had died. "But I
suppose we mustn't talk about Bloombury in San Marco," he blamed his
inadvertence, "though that doesn't seem to want talking about either.
When you said that just now about its being a picture-book, I was
thinking how like it was to one of those places I used to go to in my
youth--you know where you go in your mind when you don't like the place
where you are. So like. I used to call it the House of the Shining
Walls."

"I know," she nodded, "mine is a garden."

"_Is?_" said Peter. "There's where you have the advantage of me."

"Oh!" she exclaimed, spreading her hands toward the pictured wall and
the springing domes, "isn't this the evidence that it _is_ always. Let
us look."

The mass was over and the crowd departing; they moved from page to page
to the storied wall and identified in it the springs of a common
experience.

"It's like nothing so much," said Miss Dassonville, "as the things I've
seen the children make at school, with bits of coloured stone and broken
china and rags of tinsel or whatever treasures, laid out in a pattern on
the ground."

"Something like that," admitted Peter.

"And that's why," said Miss Dassonville, "it doesn't make me feel at
_all_ religious. Just--just--maternal."

It appeared by this time they had become well enough acquainted for
Peter to remark that she didn't seem to feel under any obligation to
experience the prescribed and traditional thrill.

"Well, I'm divided in my mind. I don't want to overlook any of the
facts, and I want to give the poor imprisoned things a chance, if they
have anything to say that the guide books have missed, to get it off
their minds. I've always heard that celebrities grow tired of being
forever taken at their public valuation. I've got a _Baedeker_ and a
_Hare_ and _The Stones of Venice_ but I neglect them quite as much as I
read them, don't you?"

They had come down into the nave and she went about stroking the fair
marbles delicately as though there sprang a conscious communication from
the touch. He felt his mind accommodating to the ease of hers with a
movement of release. They spent so much time in the church that when
they issued on the Piazza at last it was with amazement to discern that
the cloud mass which an hour before had piled ethereal tones of blueness
above Frauli, lit cavernously by soundless flashes, had dissolved in
rain.

"And I haven't even an umbrella," explained Miss Dassonville with a real
dismay.

"But I'll take you home in my gondola," it appeared to him
providentially provided for this contingency; "it is here at the
Piazzetta."

"Oh, have you a gondola, and is it as much of a help as people say? Mrs.
Merrithew hates walking, but we didn't know if we should like it."

They whisked around the corner under the arcade of the ducal palace,
and almost before they reached the _traghetto_ the shower was stayed and
the sun came out on the lucent water. Peter allowed Miss Dassonville to
give the direction lest she should think it a liberty of him to have
noticed and remembered it, but he added something to it that caused her,
as they swung out into the canal, to enter an expostulation.

"But this is not the way to the Casa Frolli!"

"It's one way; besides, it isn't raining any more, and if you are
thinking of taking a gondola you ought to make a trial trip or two, and
it's worth seeing how the palace looks from the canal."

The rain began again in a little while, whitening the water; the depth
of it blackened to the cloud but the surface frothed like quicksilver
under the steady patter. The awning was up and they were safe against a
wetting, but Peter saw the girl shiver in the slight chill, and looking
at her more attentively he perceived that she might recently have been
ill. The likeness to her mother came out then in spite of her plainness,
the hands, the eyes, the pleasant way of smiling; it was that no doubt
which had set him on the trail of his old dreams. He tried, more for the
purpose of avoiding it than for any curiosity, to remember what he had
ever heard of David Dassonville that would account for his daughter's
teaching school when she evidently wasn't able for it, but he talked of
Mrs. Merrithew.

"I must call on her," he said, "as soon as she will permit me. But tell
me, what business did I do with her husband?"

"It was a mortgage--those poor McGuires, you know, were in such trouble,
and you----"

"Yes, I was always nervous about mortgages. I was bitten by one once.
But dear me, I did not expect to have my youthful indiscretions coming
out like this. What else did she tell you?"

The girl laughed delightedly. "Well, we did rather talk you over. She
said you were such a good son. Even when you were a young man on a
salary your mother had a best black silk and a second best."

"Women are the queerest!" Peter commented at large. "It was always such
a comfort to Ellen that mother had a good silk to be buried in. Now
what is there talismanic about silk?"

"It's evidence," she smiled, "and that's what women require most."

"Well, I hope Mrs. Merrithew will accept it as evidence that I am a
suitable person to take you out in a gondola this evening. You haven't
seen Venice by night?"

"Only as we came from the station. I'm sure she would like you to call,
and I hope she will like the gondola."

"Oh, she will like it," Peter assured Miss Dassonville as he helped her
out in front of the Casa Frolli; "it will remind her of a rocking
chair."

Mrs. Merrithew did like the gondola; she liked everything:--the spacious
dark, the scudding forms like frightened swans, the sound of singing on
the water, the soft bulks of foliage that overhung them in the narrow
_calle_, the soundless hatchet-faced prows that rounded on them from
behind dim palaces; and she liked the gondola so much that she asked
Peter "right out" what it cost him.

"We would have taken one ourselves," she explained without waiting,
"only we didn't feel able to afford it. Fifty francs a week they wanted
to charge us, but maybe that was because we were Americans; they think
Americans can do everything over here. But I suppose you get yours cheap
at the hotel?"

"Oh, much cheaper."

"How much?"

"Forty francs," hazarded Peter. "I'm sure I could get you one for that.
Unless ... if you don't mind...." He made what he hadn't done yet under
any circumstances, a case out of his broken health to explain how by not
getting up very early and by taking some prescribed exercise, Giuseppe
and the gondola had to lie unused half the mornings, which was very bad
for them.... "So," he persuaded them, "if you would be satisfied with it
for half a day, I would be very much obliged to you if you would take
it ... share and share alike." There was as much hesitation in Peter's
speech as if it had really been the favour he seemed to make it, though
in fact it grew out of his attempt to fashion his offer by what he saw
in the dusk of Miss Dassonville's face. "In the evenings," he finished,
"we could take it turn about. There are a great many evenings when I
don't go out at all."

"Me, too," consented Mrs. Merrithew cheerfully. "I get tired easy, but
you and Savilla could go." The proposal appealed to her as neighbourly,
and it was quite in keeping with the character of a successful business
man, as he was projected on the understanding of Bloombury, to wish not
to keep paying for a thing of which he had no use. "I think we might as
well close with it at once, don't you, Savilla?"

"If you are sure it's only forty francs----" Miss Dassonville was
doubtful.

"Quite sure," Peter was very prompt. "You see they keep them so
constantly employed at the hotel"--which seemed satisfactorily to make
way for the arrangement that the gondola was to call for the two ladies
the next morning.

"Giuseppe," Weatheral demanded as he stepped out of the gondola at the
hotel landing, "how much do I pay you?"

"Sixty francs, _Signore_."

Peter had no doubt the extra ten was divided between his own man and the
gondolier, but he was not thinking of that.

"I have a very short memory," he said, "and I have told the _Signora_
and the _Signorina_ forty francs. If they ask you, you are to tell them
forty francs; and listen, Beppe, every franc over that you tell them, I
shall deduct from your _pourboire_ when I leave, do you understand?"

"_Si, Signore_."




VIII


A morning or two after the arrangement about the gondola Peter was
leaning over the bridge of San Moise watching the sun on the copper
vessels the women brought to the fountain, when his man came to him.
This Luigi he had picked up at Naples for the chief excellence of his
English and a certain seraphic bearing that led Peter to say to him that
he would cheerfully pay a much larger wage if he could only be certain
Luigi would not cheat him.

"Oh _Signore!_ In Italy? _Impossible!_"

"In that case," said Peter, "if you can't be honest with me, be as
honest as you can"--but he had to accept the lifted shoulders and the
Raphael smile as his only security. However, Luigi had made him
comfortable and as he approached him now it was without any misgiving.

"I have just seen Giuseppe and the gondola," he announced. "They are at
the Palazza Rezzonico, and after that they go to San Georgio degli
Sclavoni. There are pictures there."

"Oh!" said Peter.

"It is a very little way to the San Georgio," volunteered Luigi as they
remained, master and man, looking down into the water in the leisurely
Venetian fashion. "Across the Piazza," said Luigi, "a couple of turns, a
bridge or two and there you are;" and after a long pause, "_The signore_
is looking very well this morning. Exercise in the sea air is excellent
for the health."

"Very," said Peter. "I shall go for a walk, I think. I shall not need
you, Luigi."

Nevertheless Luigi did not lose sight of him until he was well on his
way to Saint George of the Sclavoni which announced itself by the
ramping fat dragon over the door. There was the young knight riding him
down as of old, and still no Princess.

"She must be somewhere on the premises," said Peter to himself. "No
doubt she has preserved the traditions of her race by remaining
indoors." He had not, however, accustomed his eyes to the dusk of the
little room when he heard at the landing the scrape of the gondola and
the voices of the women disembarking.

"If we'd known you wanted to come," explained Mrs. Merrithew heartily,
"we could have brought you in the boat." That was the way she oftenest
spoke of it, and other times it was the gon_do_la.

Peter explained his old acquaintance with the charging saint and his
curiosity about the lady, but when the custodian had brought a silver
paper screen to gather the little light there was upon the mellow old
Carpaccio, he looked upon her with a vague dissatisfaction.

"It's the same dragon and the same young man," he admitted. "I know him
by the hair and by the determined expression. But I'm not sure about the
young lady."

"You are looking for a fairy-tale Princess," Miss Dassonville declared,
"but you have to remember that the knight didn't marry this one; he only
made a Christian of her."

They came back to it again when they had looked at all the others and
speculated as to whether Carpaccio knew how funny he was when he painted
Saint Jerome among the brethren, and whether in the last picture he was
really in heaven as Ruskin reported.

"So you think," said Peter, "she'd have been more satisfactory if the
painter had thought Saint George meant to marry her?"

"More personal and convincing," the girl maintained.

"There's one in the Belle Arti that's a lot better looking to my
notion," contributed Mrs. Merrithew.

"Oh, but that Princess is running away," the girl protested.

"It's what any well brought up young female would be expected to do
under the circumstances," declared the elder lady; "just look at them
fragments. It's enough to turn the strongest."

"It does look a sort of 'After the Battle,'" Peter admitted. "But I
should like to see the other one," and he fell in very readily with Mrs.
Merrithew's suggestion that he should come in the gondola with them and
drop into the Academy on the way home. They found the Saint George with
very little trouble and sat down on one of the red velvet divans,
looking a long time at the fleeing lady.

"And you think," said Peter, "she would not have run away?"

"I think she shouldn't; when it's done for her."

"But isn't that--the running away I mean--the evidence of her being
worth doing it for, of her fineness, of her superior delicacy?"

"Well," Miss Dassonville was not disposed to take it lightly, "if a
woman has a right to a fineness that's bought at another's expense. They
can't all run away, you know, and I can't think it right for a woman to
evade the disagreeable things just because some man makes it possible."

"I believe," laughed Peter, "if you had been the Princess you would have
killed the dragon yourself. You'd have taken a little bomb up your
sleeve and thrown it at him." He had to take that note to cover a
confused sense he had of the conversation being more pertinent than he
could at that moment remember a reason for its being.

"Oh, I've been delivered to the dragons before now," she said. "It's
going on all the time." She moved a little away from the picture as if
to avoid the personal issue.

"What beats me," commented Mrs. Merrithew, "is that there has to be a
young lady. You'd think a likely young man, if he met one of them
things, would just kill it on general principles, the same as a snake or
a spider."

"Oh," said Peter, "it's chiefly because they are terrifying to young
ladies that we kill them at all. Yes, there has to be a young lady." He
was aware of an accession of dreariness in the certainty that in his
case there never could be a young lady. But Miss Dassonville as she
began to walk toward the entrance gave it another turn.

"There _is_ always a young lady. The difficulty is that it must be a
particular one. No one takes any account of those who were eaten up
before the Princess appeared."

"But you must grant," said Peter, with an odd sense of defending his own
position, "that when one got done with a fight like that, one would be
entitled to something particular."

"Oh, if it came as a reward," she laughed. "But nowadays we've reversed
the process. One makes sure of the Princess first, lest when the dragon
is killed she should prove to have gone away with one of the
bystanders."

Something that clicked in Peter's mind led him to look sharply from one
to the other of the two women. In Bloombury they had a way, he knew, of
not missing any point of their neighbours' affairs, but their faces
expressed no trace of an appreciation of anything in the subject being
applicable to his. The flick of memory passed and left him wondering why
it should be.

He caught himself looking covertly at the girl as the gondola swung into
open water, to discover in her the springs of an experience such as lay
at the source of his own desolation. He perceived instead under her
slight appearance a certain warmth and colour like a light behind a
breathed-on window-pane. Illness, overwork, whatever dragon's breath had
dimmed her surfaces, she gave the impression of being inwardly
inexhaustibly alight and alive. Something in her leaped to the day, to
the steady pacing of the gondola on the smooth water tessellated by the
sun in blue and bronze and amber, to the arched and airy palaces that
rose above it.

The awning was up; there was strong sun and pleasant wind: from hidden
gardens they smelled the oleanders. Peter felt the faint stir of
rehabilitation like the breath of passing presences.

The mood augmented in him as he drifted late that evening on the lagoon
beyond the Guidecca, after the sun was gone down and the sea and the sky
reflected each to each, one roseate glow like a hollow shell of pearl.
Lit peaks of the Alps ranged in the upper heaven, and nearer the great
dome of the Saluti signalled whitely; below them, all the islands near
and far floated in twilit blueness on the flat lagoon. There was by
times, a long sea swell, and no sound but the tread of the oar behind
like a woman's silken motion. It drew with it films of recollection in
which his mood suspended like gossamer, a mood capable of going on
independently of his idea of himself as a man cut off from those
experiences, intimations of which pressed upon him everywhere by line
and form and colour.

It had come back, the precious intimacy of beauty, with that fullness
sitting there in the gondola, he realized with the intake of the breath
to express it and the curious throbbing of the palms to grasp. He was
able to identify in his bodily response to all that charged the decaying
wonder of Venice with opulent personality, the source of his boyish
dreams. It was no woman, he told himself, who had gone off with the
bystanders while he had been engaged with the dragons of poverty and
obligation, but merely the appreciations of beauty. There had never been
any woman, there was never going to be. He began to plan how he should
explain his discovery and the bearing of it, to Miss Dassonville. It
would be a pity if she were making the same mistake about it. He leaned
back in the cushioned seat and watched the silver shine of the prow
delicately peering out its way among the shadowy islands; lay so still
and absorbed that he did not know which way they went nor what his
gondolier inquired of him, and presently realized without surprise that
the Princess was speaking to him.

He felt her first, warm and friendlily, and then he heard her laughing.
He knew she was the Princess though she had no form or likeness.

"But which are you?" he whispered to the laughter.

"The right one."

"The one who stayed or the one who ran away?"

"Oh, if you don't know by this time! I have come to take you to the
House."

"Are you the one who was always there?"

"The Lovely Lady; there was never any other."

"And shall I go there as I used?" asked Peter, "and be happy there?"

"You are free to go; do you not feel it?"

"Oh, here--I feel many things. I am just beginning to understand how I
came to lose the way to it."

"Are you so sure?"

"Quite." Peter's new-found certainty was strong in him. "I made the
mistake of thinking that the House was the House of Love, and it is
really the House of Beauty. I thought if I found the one to love, I
should live in it forever. But now that I have found the way back to it
I see that was a mistake."

"How did you find it?"

"Well, there is a girl here----"

"Ah!" said the Princess.

"She is young," Peter explained; "she looks at things the way I used to,
and that somehow brought me around to the starting-point again."

"I see," said the Princess; the look she turned on him was full of a
strange, secret intelligence which as he returned it without knowing
what it was about, afforded Peter the greatest satisfaction. "Do you
know me now," she said at last, "which one I am?"

"The right one, I am sure of that."

"But which?"

"I know now," Peter answered, "but I am certain that in the morning I
shall not be able to remember."

It was true as Peter had said that the next morning he was in as much
doubt as ever about the princesses. He thought he would go and have a
look at them but forgot what he had come for once he had entered the
spacious quiet of the Academy. Warmed still from his contact of the
night before he found the pictures sentient and friendly. He found
trails in them that led he knew now where, and painted waters that
lapped the fore-shore of remembrance.

After an hour in which he had seen the meaning of the pictures emerge
from the frontier of mysticism which he knew now for the reflection of
his own unstable state, and proceed toward him by way of his
intelligence, he heard the Princess say at his shoulder, at least he
thought it might have been the Princess for the first word or two, until
he turned and saw Miss Dassonville. She was staring at the dim old
canvases patched with saints, and her eyes were tender.

"They are not really saints, you know, they are only a sort of
hieroglyphics that spell devotion. It isn't as though they had the
breath of life breathed into them and could come down from their
canvases as some of them do."

"Oh," he protested, "did you think of that for yourself? It was the
Princess who said it to me."

"The Princess of the Dragon?"

"She came to me last night on the lagoon. It was wonderful,--the water
shine and the rosy glow. I was wishing I had insisted on your coming,
and all at once there was the Princess."

"The one who stayed or the one who ran away?"

"She declined to commit herself. I suppose it's one of the things a man
has to find out." He experienced a great lift of his spirit in the
girl's light acceptance of his whimsicality, it was the sort of thing
that Eunice Goodward used to be afraid to have any one hear him say lest
they should think it odd. It occurred to him as he turned and walked
beside Miss Dassonville that if he had come to Italy with Eunice there
might have been a great deal that she would not have liked to hear. He
could think things of that sort of her now with a queer lightness as of
ease after strain, and yet not think it a merit of Miss Dassonville's so
to ease him. They walked through the rooms full of the morning coolness,
and let the pictures say what they would to them.

"It is strange to me," said the girl, "the reality of pictures; as if
they had reached a point under the artist's hand where they became
suddenly independent of him and went about saying a great deal more than
he meant and perhaps more than he could understand. I am sure they must
have a world of their own of picture rock and tree and stone, where they
go when they are not being looked at on their canvases."

"Oh, haven't you found them, then?"

"In dreams you mean? Not in Bloombury; they don't get so far from home.
One of these little islands I suspect, that lie so low and look so blue
and airy."

"Will you go with me in the gondola to discover it?"

"To-night?"

"To-morrow." He was full of a plan to take her and Mrs. Merrithew to the
Lido that same evening to have dinner, and to come home after moonrise,
to discover Venice. She agreed to that, subject to Mrs. Merrithew's
consent, and they went out to find that lady at a bead shop where she
spent a great many hours in a state of delightful indecision.

Mrs. Merrithew proving quite in the mood for it, they went to the Lido
with an extra gondolier--Miss Dassonville had stipulated for one who
could sing--and came home in time to see Venice all a-flower, with the
continual slither of the gondolas about it like some slim sort of moth.
They explored Saint George of the Sea Weed after that, took tea in the
public gardens and had a day at Torcello. On such occasions when Peter
and Mrs. Merrithew talked apart, the good lady who got on excellently
with the rich Mr. Weatheral grew more than communicative on the subject
of Savilla Dassonville. It was not that she talked of the girl so much
nor so freely, but that she left him with the sense of her own
exasperation at the whole performance. It was a thin little waif of a
story as it came from Mrs. Merrithew, needing to be taken in and
comforted before it would yield even to Peter, who as a rich man had
come to have a fair discernment in pitiable cases, the faint hope of a
rescue. There had been, to begin with, the death of the girl's mother at
her birth, followed by long years of neglect growing out of just that
likeness to the beloved wife which first excited her father's aversion
and afterward became the object of a jealous, insistent tenderness.

After his wife's death, Dave Dassonville had lost his grip on his
property as he had on all the means of living. Later he was visited by a
stringency which Mrs. Merrithew was inclined to impute to a Providence,
which, however prompt it had been in the repayment of the slight to the
motherless infant, had somehow failed to protect her from its
consequences. Savilla's girlhood had been devoted to nursing her father
to his grave, to which he had gone down panting for release; after that
she had taught the village school.

The winter before, tramping through the heavy snow, she had contracted a
bronchitis that had developed so alarmingly as to demand, by the
authority of the local doctor, "a trip somewhere"--"and nobody," said
Mrs. Merrithew, "but me to go with her."

"Not," she added, "that I'm complainin'. Merrithew left me well off, and
there's no denyin' travellin's improvin' to the mind, though at my age
it's some wearin' to the body. I'm glad," she further confided to Peter
at Torcello, "she takes so to Venice. It's a lot more comfortable goin'
about in a gondola. At Rome, now, I nearly run my legs off."

It was later when Savilla had been kept at home by a slight
indisposition from a shower that caught them unprepared, she expressed
her doubt of a winter in Italy being anything more than a longer stick
with which to beat a dog.

"She will have spent all her money on it, and the snow will be just as
deep in Bloombury next year. There isn't anything _really_ the matter
with her, but she's just too fine for it. It's like seeing a clumsy
person handlin' one of them spun glass things, the way I have to sit
still and see Providence dealing with Savilla Dassonville. It may be
sort of sacrilegious to say so, but I declare it gives me the fidgets."

It ought of course to have given Peter, seeing the interest he took in
her, a like uneasiness; but there was something in the unmitigated
hardness of her situation that afforded him the sort of easement he had,
inexplicably, in the plainness of her dress. His memory was not working
well enough yet for him to realize that it was relief from the strain of
the secondary feminity that had fluttered and allured in Eunice
Goodward.

It was even more unclearly that he recognized that it had been a strain.
All this time he had been forgetting her--and how completely he had
forgotten her this new faculty for comparison was proof--he had still
been enslaved by her appearance. It was an appearance, that of Eunice's,
which he admired still in the young American women at the expensive
hotels where he had put up, and admitted as the natural, the inevitable
sign of an inward preciousness. But if he allowed to himself that he
would never have spoken to Savilla Dassonville that day at San Marco, if
she had been to the eye anything that Eunice Goodward was, he told
himself it was because he was not sure from behind which of those
charming ambuscades the arrows of desolation might be shot. If he gave
himself up now to the play of the girl's live fancy he did so in the
security of her plainness, out of which no disturbing surprises might
come. And she left him, in respect to her hard conditions, without even
the excuse for an attitude. Eunice had been poor in her world, and had
carried it with just that admixture of bright frankness and proud
reserve which, in her world, supported such a situation with most charm.
She made as much use of her difficulties as a Spanish dancer of her
shawl; but Savilla Dassonville was just poor, and that was the end of
it. That he got on with her so well by the simple process of talking out
whatever he was most interested in, occurred to Peter as her natural
limitation. It was not until they had been going out together for a week
or more, in such fashion as his mending health allowed, that he had
moments of realizing, in her swift appropriations of Venice, rich
possibilities of the personal relations with which he believed himself
forever done. Oddly it provoked in him the wish to protect, when the
practical situation had left him dry and bare.

It was the evening of the _Serenata_. They were all there in the
gondola, Mrs. Merrithew and the girl, with Luigi squatting by Giuseppe,
not too far from the music float that sprang mysteriously from the black
water in arching boughs of red and gold and pearly Aladdin's fruit.
Behind them the lurking prows rustled and rocked drunkenly with the
swell to which they seemed at times attentively to lean. They could make
out heads crowded in the gondolas, and silver gleams of the prows as
they drifted past palaces lit intermittently by a red flare that wiped
out for the moment, the seastain and disfiguring patches of restoration.

They had passed the palace of Camerleigh. The jewel-fruited arbour
folded and furled upon itself to pass the slow curve of the Rialto, and
suddenly, Peter's attention, drawn momentarily from the music, was
caught by that other bright company leaning from deserted balconies,
swarming like the summer drift between the pillars of dark loggias. They
were all there, knights and saints and ladies, out of print and paint
and marble, and presently he made out the Princess. She was leaning out
of one of the high, floriated windows, looking down on him with pleased,
secret understanding as she might have smiled from her palace walls on
the festival that brought the young knight George home with the
conquered dragon. It was the compressed and pregnant meaning of her gaze
that drew his own upward, and it was then when the Lovely Lady turned
and waved her hand at him that he felt the girl stir strangely beside
him.

"How full the night is of the sense of presences," she said, "as if all
the loved marbles came to life and the adored had left their canvases. I
cannot think but it is so."

"Oh, I am sure of it."

She moved again with the vague restlessness of one stared upon by
innumerable eyes. "How one would like to speak," she said. "They seem so
near us."

There was a warm tide of that nearness rising in Peter's blood. As the
music flowed out again in summer fullness, he put out his arm along the
back of the seat instinctively in answer to the girl's shy turning, the
natural movement of their common equity in the night's unrealized
wonder.




IX


"Peter! oh, Peter!"

It was dark in the room when Peter awoke, but he knew it was morning by
the salt smell which he thought came into the room from the cove beyond
Bloombury pastures, until he roused in his bed and knew it for the smell
of the lagoons. He looked out to see the beginning of rose light on the
world and understood that he was called. He did not hear the voice again
but out there in the shimmering space the call awaited him. It might be
the Princess.

He dressed and got down quietly into the shadowed city and waked a
frowsy gondolier asleep in his gondola. They spoke softly, both of them,
before the morning hush, as they swung out into the open water between
the towers of San Georgio fairily dim, and the pillars of the saints;
the city floated in a mist of blueness, the dome of the Saluti faintly
pearled.

"_Dove, Signore?_" The gondolier feathered his oar.

"_Un giro_"--Peter waved his arm seaward; the dip of the oar had a
stealthy sound in the deserted dawning. They passed the public gardens
and saw the sea widen and the morning quicken. Islands swam up out of
silver space, took form and colour, and there between the islands he saw
the girl. She had gotten another oar from Giuseppe and stood delighting
in the free motion; her sleeves were rolled up, her hat was off, her
hair blew out; alive and pliant she bent to the long sweep of it, and
her eyes were on the morning wonder. But when she caught sight of Peter
she looked only at him and he knew that her seeing him appearing thus on
the shining water was its chief and exquisite wonder, and that she did
not know what he saw. The gondolier steered straight for the girl
without advice; he had thought privately that the _Signore Americano_
was a little mad, but he knew now with what manner of madness.

They drew close and drifted alongside. Peter did not take his eyes from
the girl's eyes lest for her to look away ever so slightly from there
to his face would be to discover that he knew; and he did not know how
he stood with himself toward that knowledge.

"Oh," she said breathlessly, "I wanted you--I called you--and you came!
You did not know where I was and yet you came?"

"I heard you calling."

She left her oar and sat down; Peter laid his hand on the edge of her
gondola and they drifted side by side.

"May I come with you?" he asked presently.

She made a little gesture, past all speech. Peter held up a hand full of
silver toward his gondolier and laid it on the seat as he stepped
lightly over. The man slid away from them without word or motion, and
together they faced the morning. It was one thin web of rose and gold
over lakes of burnished light; islands lifted in mirage, floated
miraculously upon the verge of space. Behind them the mainland banked
like a new created world over which waited the Hosts of the ranked Alps.
Winged boats from Murano slid through the flat lagoons.

There was very little to say. Peter was aware chiefly, in what came from
her to him, of the wish to be very tender toward it, of having it in
hand to support her securely above the abyss into which he felt at the
least rude touch of his, she must immeasurably fall. At the best he
could but keep with her there at the point of her unconsciousness by
knowing the truth himself, as he felt amazingly that he did know it with
all the completeness of his stripped and beggared past.

They drifted and saw the morning widen into the working-day. Market
boats piled with fruit, fish in shining heaps, wood boats of Istria,
went by with Madonna painted sails. Among the crowded goods the women
sat Madonna-wise and nursed their bambini, or cherishing the recurrent
hope, knitted interminably. If he wanted any evidence of what he
admitted between the girl and himself it flashed out for him in the
faces of the market wives, on whom labour and maternity sat not too
heavily to cloud the primal radiance. It was there in their soft _Buon
giorno_ in the way they did not, as the gondola drew beside them, cover
their fruitful breasts from her tender eyes, in the way most fall, they
grasped in the high mood of the _forestieri_ a sublimity untouched by
the niceties of bargaining. A man in the state of mind to which the
girl's visible shine confessed, could hardly be expected to stickle at
the price of the few figs and roses which served as an easy passage from
the wonder of their meeting to the ground of their accustomed gay
pretences. They made of Peter's purchases of fruit and flowers a market
garden of their own from which they had but just come on hopeful
errands. They made believe again as boats thickened like winged things
in a summer garden, to be bent upon discovery, and slid with pretended
caution under the great ships stationed by the Giudecca, from which they
heard sailors singing. They shot with exaggerated shivers past a slim
cruiser and suddenly Miss Dassonville clutched Peter by the arm.

"Oh!" she cried: "Do you see it? That little dark, impudent-looking one,
and _the_ flag?"

Peter saw; he was not quite, he reminded her, even in the intoxication
of a morning on the lagoons with her, quite in that state where he
couldn't see his country's flag when it was pointed out to him. They
came alongside with long strokes, and sniffed deliciously.

"Ah--um--um----" said Miss Dassonville. "I know what that is. It's ham
and eggs. How long since you've had a real American breakfast?"

"Not since I left the steamer," Peter confessed. "Now if I were to smell
hot cakes I shouldn't be able to stand it. I should go aboard her."

Miss Dassonville saluted softly as they went under the bright banner.

"'Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light,'" she began to sing and
immediately a large, blooming face rose through a mist of faded whisker
at the prow and they saw all the coast of Maine looking down on them
from the rail of the _Merrythought_.

"United States, ahoy?" it said.

They came close under and Miss Dassonville hailed in return; as soon as
the captain saw her face smiling up at him he beamed on it as the women
in the boats had done.

"We smelled your breakfast," she explained, and the man laughed
delightedly.

"I know what kind these Dagoes give ye. Come up and have some."

Peter and the girl consulted with their eyes.

"Are you going to have hot cakes?" she demanded.

"I will if you come; darned if I don't."

"We're coming, then."

It was part of the task that Peter had set himself, to persevere for
Savilla Dassonville the film of unconsciousness that lay delicately like
the bloom of a rare fruit over all that was at that moment going on in
her, that made him hasten as soon as Captain Dunham had announced
himself, to introduce her particularly by name. To forestall in the
jolly sailor the natural interpretation of their appearance together at
this hour and occasion, he had to lend himself to the only other
reasonable surmise. If they were not, as he saw it on the tip of the
good captain's tongue to propose, newly married, they were in a hopeful
way to be. The consciousness of himself as accessory to so delightful an
arrangement passed from the captain to Peter with almost the
obviousness of a wink, as he surrendered himself to the charm of the
girl's ethereal excitement.

He understood perfectly that his not being able to feel more of a drop
from the pregnant mystery of her call and his high response to it, to
the homely incident of breakfast, was due to Miss Dassonville's
obliviousness of its being one. It was for her, in fact, no drop at all
but rather as if they had pulled out for a moment into this little shoal
of neighbourly interest and comfortable food, the better to look back at
the perfect wonder of it, as from the deck of the _Merrythought_ toward
the fair front of the ducal palace and the blue domes of St. Mark's
behind the rearing lion.

Although he had parted from her that morning with no hint of an
arrangement for a next meeting, it had become a part of the day's
performance for Peter to call for the two ladies in the afternoon, so
much so that his own sense of the unusualness of finally letting the
gondola go off without him, and his particular wish at this juncture not
to mark his intercourse with any unusualness, led him to send off with
it as many roses as Luigi could find at that season on the Piazza.
Afterward, as he recalled that he had never sent flowers to Miss
Dassonville before, and as he had that morning furnished her from the
market boats past her protesting limitation, it was perhaps a greater
emphasis to his desertion.

However, it seemed that the roses and nothing but the roses might serve
as a bridge, delicate and dizzying, to support them from the realization
of their situation, into which he had no intention of letting Miss
Dassonville fall. He stayed in his room most of that afternoon, knowing
that he was shut up with a very great matter, not able to feel it so
because of the dryness of his heart, nor to think what was to be done
about it because of the lightness of his brain.

It occurred to him at last that at St. Mark's there might be reflective
silences and perhaps resolution. He felt it warm from the stored-up
veneration of the world, and though he said to himself, as he climbed to
the galleries, that it was to give himself the more room to think, he
knew that it must have been in his mind all the time that the girl was
there, as it was natural she should have come to the place where they
had met. Even before he caught the outline of her dress against the
pillar he found himself crossing over to the organ loft the better to
observe her. Knowledge reached him incredibly across the empty space, as
to what, over and above the pictured saints, she faced there in the
vault, lit so faintly by the shining of its golden walls. The service of
the benediction going on in the church below furnished him with the
figure of what came to him from her as she laid up her thoughts on an
altar before that mysterious intimation of maternity which presages in
right women the movement of passion. He felt himself caught up in it
purely above all sense of his personal insufficiency.

Back in his hotel after dinner he found he had still to let the roses
answer for him as he sat out on his balcony and realized oddly that
though he had no right to go to Miss Dassonville again until he had
thought out to its furthermost his relation to her, he could,
incontinently, think better in her company.

It was not wholly then with surprise, since he felt himself so much in
need of some compelling touch, that he heard, after an hour of futile
battling, the Princess speak to him.

She stood just beyond him in the shadow of the wistaria that went up all
the front of the balcony, and called him by his name.

"Ah," said Peter "I know now who you are. You are the one who stayed."

"How did you find out?"

"Because the one who ran away was the one he would have married."

He did not look at the Princess, but he saw the shadow of her that the
moon made, mixed with the lace of the wistaria leaves, tremble.

"Well," said she, "and what are you going to do about it?"

"You know then...?"

"I was there on the water with you this morning.... It was I that showed
you the way, but you had no eyes for anything."

It was the swift recurrent start of what he _had_ had eyes for that kept
Peter silent long enough for the Princess to have asked him again what
he was going to do about it, and then----

"The other night--with the music--she knew that I was there?"

"Oh--she!" He was taken all at once with the completeness with which in
his intimate attitude to things, Savilla did know. "She knows
everything."

"What was there so different about the other one?"

"Everything ... she was beautiful ... she was air and fire ... she made
the earth rock under me."

"And did you go to her calling?"

"I would have risen out of death and dust at her slightest word ... I
would have followed where her feet went over all the world."

"And why did you never?"

"I suppose," said Peter, "it was because she never called."

"This one," suggested the Princess, "would be prettier if she were not
so thin; and she wouldn't have to wear shirtwaists if you married her.
She makes them herself, you know. Why did the other one run away?"

"That's just the difficulty. I can't remember." He wished sincerely
within himself that he might; it seemed it would have served him somehow
with Miss Dassonville. "I've been very ill," he apologized.

"Anyway, you'd be getting what everybody wants."

"And that is----"

"A woman of your own ... understanding and care ... and children. I was
in the church with you ... you saw----"

"But I don't want to talk about it."

"What do you want then?"

"To be the prince in a fairy tale, I suppose," Peter sighed.

"Oh, you're all of that to _her_. The half god--the unmatched wonder.
When she watched your coming across the water this morning--_I_ know the
look that should go to a slayer of dragons. It seems to me," said the
Princess severely, "it is you who are running away."

She was wise enough to leave him with that view of it though it was not
by any means leaving him more comfortable. He tried for relief to
figure himself as by the Princess' suggestion, he must seem to Savilla
Dassonville. But if he was really such to her why could he not then play
the Deliverer in fact, rescue her from untended illness, from meagreness
and waste? Why not, in short, marry her, except for a reason--oh, there
was reason enough if he could only remember it!

He heard Luigi moving softly in the room behind, and presently when the
door clicked he rose and went in and taking the lamp held it high over
him, turning with it fronting the huge mirror in its gilded frame. If
there were a good reason why he couldn't marry Savilla Dassonville, he
ought to have found it in his own lean frame, the face more drawn than
was justified by his years, lined about the eyes, the hand that held the
accusing lamp broadened by labours that no scrupulosity of care denied.
Weatheral, of Weatheral, Lessing & Co., unaccomplished, unaccustomed. He
put down the lamp heavily, leaning forward in his chair as he covered
his face with his hands and groaned in them, fully remembering.




X


He had been sitting just so in his library with the lamp behind him and
the hollow flare of the coals making an excellent starting place for the
House which was now so near him that the mere exhibition in shop windows
of the stuffs with which it was being modernly renewed, was enough to
set him off for it. It was so near now, that since the announcement of
their engagement in September, he had moved through all its obligations
benumbed by the white, blinding flash thrown backward from its
consummating moment, the moment of her cry to him, of their welding at
the core of light and harmony, bounded inevitably by the approaching
date of marriage. It had been, he recalled on some one of those
occasions of social approval by which it appeared engagements in the
Best Society proceeded, that he had sat thus, waiting until the clock
ticked on the moment when he might properly join her, sat so full of the
sense of her that for the instant he accepted her unannounced appearance
at the darkened doorway as the mere extension of his white-heated
fancy. The next moment as she charged into the circle of the lamp he saw
that the umbra of some strange electrical excitement hung about her. It
fairly crackled between them as he rose hurriedly to his feet.

"You have come, Eunice! You have come----"

But he saw well enough what she had come for. She laid the case on the
table, but as she tugged impatiently at her glove, the fringe of her
wrap caught the clasp of it and scattered the jewels on the cloth. She
tried then to put the ring beside them, but her hand shook so that it
fell and rolled upon the floor behind them. Peter picked it up quietly,
but he did not offer it to her hand again.

"I have come," said Eunice, "to say what in my mother's house I was
afraid of being interrupted in saying; what you must see, what my mother
won't see."

"I see you are greatly excited about something!"

"I'm not, I'm not.... That is ... I am, but not in the way you think,"
she was sharp with insistence; "that is what you and mother always say,
that I'm nervous or excited, and all the time you don't _see_."

"What is it I don't see, Eunice?"

"That I can't stand it, that I can't go on with it, that it is dreadful
to me,--_dreadful!_"

"What is dreadful?"

"Everything, being engaged--being married and giving up...." It was
fairly racked out of her by some inward torture to which he had not the
key.

"Of course, Eunice, if you don't wish to be married so soon----" Peter
was all at sea. He brought a chair for her, and perceiving that he would
go on standing as long as she did, she sat upon the edge of it but kept
both the arms as a measure of defence. The slight act of doing something
for her restored him for the moment to reality; he bent over her. "I've
never wanted to hurry you, dearest---- It shall be when you say." She
put up her hands suddenly with a shivering movement.

"Oh, never, never at all; never to you!"

Peter could feel that working its track of desolation inward, but the
first instinctive movement of his surface was to close over the wound.
He took it as he knew he could only take it: as the explosive crisis of
the virginal resistance which he remembered he had heard came to girls
when marriage loomed upon them. He took a turn down the room to steady
himself, praying dumbly for the right word.

"It isn't as if I didn't respect you"--she was eager in explanation,
hurried and stumbling--"as if I didn't know how good you are ... it is
only, because we are so different."

"How different, Eunice?"

"Oh ... older, I suppose." She grew quieter; it appeared on the whole
they were getting on. "I care for so many things, you know--dancing--and
bridge--_young_ things--and you are always reading and reading. Oh! I
couldn't stand it."

So it was out now. She was jealous of his books, a little. Well, he had
been self-absorbed. It occurred to him dimly that the thing to have done
if he had known a little more about women, had practised with them, was
to have provoked her at this point to the tears which should have sealed
the renewal of his claim to her. What he said was, very quietly:

"Of course I never meant, Eunice, that you shouldn't have everything you
want."

"Oh," she seemed to have found a suffocating quality in his gentleness,
against which she struck out with drowning gestures, "if you could only
understand what it would mean to me never to have anybody I liked to
talk to about things,--anybody I liked to be with all the time!" She was
choked and aghast at the enormity of it.


"But I thought...." Peter was not able to go on with that. "Isn't there
anybody you like to be with, Eunice?"

"Yes," said Eunice. "Burton Henderson."

Mutinous and bright she looked at him out of the chair with a hand on
either arm of it poised for flight or defence. After an interval Peter
heard his own voice out of a fog rising to the conventional utterance.

"Of course, if you have learned to love him----"

"I've loved him all the time." She was so bent on making this clear to
him that she was careless what went down before her. "From the very
beginning," she said, "but he had so little money, and mother ... I
promised you, I know, but it's not as if I ever said I loved you."

She should have spared him that! He had not put out a hand to hold her
that he should be so pierced through with needless cruelty. But she was
bent on clearing her skirts of him.

"Do you think," she expostulated to his stricken silence, "that if I'd
cared in the least I'd have made it so easy for you? Can't you see that
it was all arranged, that we _jumped_ at you?" All the time she sat
opposite him, thrusting swift and hard, there was no diminution of her
appealing beauty, the flaming rose of her cheeks and the soft, dark
flare of her hair. As if she felt how it belied at every turn the
quality of her unyielding intention, her voice railed against him
feverishly. "I suppose you think I'm mercenary, and I thought I was,
too. You don't know how people like us _need_ money sometimes. All the
things we like _cost_ so--all the real things. And poor mamma, she
needed things; she'd never had them, and I thought that I could stand
being married to you if I could get them that way.... Maybe I could,
you know, if you'd been different, more like us I mean. But there was
such a lot you didn't understand ... things you hadn't even heard about.
I found that out as soon as we were engaged. There wasn't a thing
between us; not a _thing_."

It poured scalding hot on Peter's sensitive surfaces: made sensitive by
the way in which even in this hour her beauty moved him. He felt tears
starting in his heart and prayed they might not come to his face. "So
you see as we hadn't anything in common it would be better for us not to
go on with it even"--she broke a little at this--"even if there hadn't
been anybody else. You see that, don't you?" She dared him to deny it
rather than begged the concession of him as she gathered herself for
departure.

"I see that."

"You never really belonged to our set, you know----" She rose now and he
rose blindly with her; he hoped that she was done, but there was
something still. "It hasn't been easy to go through with it.... Mother
isn't going to make it any easier. It's natural for her to want me to
have everything that money would mean, and I thought that if you would
just keep away from her ... you owe something to Burton and me for what
we've been through, I think ... just leave it to me to manage in my own
way...."

"I shall never trouble you, Eunice."

He came close to her then to open the door, seeing that she was to leave
him, and he saw too that she had suffered, was at the very ebb and stony
bottom of emotion as she hung for the moment in the doorway searching
for some winged shaft of separation that should cut her off from the
remotest implication of the situation. She found at last the barbedest.
All the succeeding time after he closed the door on her was marked for
Peter, not by the ticked moments but by successive waves of anguish as
that poisoned arrow worked its way to his secret places.

"It isn't as if I had ever loved you; I owe it to Mr. Henderson to
remind you that I never said I did.... You know I never liked to have
you kiss me."

He had in the months that succeeded to that last sight of Eunice
Goodward, moments of unbearably wanting to go to her to try for a little
to ease his torment in a more tender recognition of it--days when he
would have taken from her, gratefully even if she had fooled him and he
had seen her do it, whatever would have saved him from the certainty
that never even in those first exquisite moments had she been his. The
sharp edge of her young sufficiency had lopped off the right limb of his
manhood. Never, even in his dreams, if life had allowed him to dream
again, should he be able to see himself in any other guise than the
meagre, austere front which his obligation to his mother and Ellen had
obliged him to present to destiny. She had beggared him of all those
aptitudes for passionate relations, by the faith in which he had kept
himself inwardly alive. The capacity for loving died in him with the
knowledge of not being able to be loved.

Out of the anæsthesia of exhaustion from which Italy had revived him, it
rolled back upon him that by just the walled imperviousness that shut
Eunice Goodward from the appreciation of his passion, he was prevented
now from Savilla Dassonville.




XI


It was odd, then, having come to this conclusion in the middle of the
night, that when he joined the ladies in the morning he should have
experienced a sinking pang in not being able any longer to be sure what
Miss Dassonville thought of him. There was in her manner, as she thanked
him for the flowers, nothing to ruffle the surface of the bright,
impersonal companionship which she had afforded him for weeks past.

The occasion which brought them together was an agreement entered into
some days earlier, to go and look at palaces, and as they turned past
the Saluti to the Grand Canal, he found himself wondering if there had
not been a touch of fatuity in his reading of the incident of the
morning before. He had gone so far in the night as to think even of
leaving Venice, and saw himself now forlornly wishing for some renewal
of yesterday's mood to excuse him from the caddishness that such a
flight implied.

It came out a little later, perhaps, when after traversing many high and
resounding marble halls, with a great many rooms opening into one
another in a way that suggested rather the avoidance of privacy than its
security, they found themselves in one of those gardens of shut delight
of which the exteriors of Venetian houses give so little intimation.

As she went about from bough to bough of the neglected roses, turned all
inward as if they took their florescence from that still lighted human
passion which had found its release and centre there, her face glowed
for the moment with the colour of her quick sympathies. She turned it on
him with an unconscious, tender confidence, which not to meet seemed to
Peter, in that gentle enclosure full of warmth and fragrance, to assume
the proportions of a betrayal.

He did meet it there as she came back to him for the last look from the
marble balustrade by which they had descended, covering her hand, there
resting, lingeringly with his own. He was awakened only to the
implication of this movement by the discovery that she had deeply and
exquisitely blushed.

It was a further singularity in view of the conviction with which Peter
had come through the night, that the mood of protectingness which the
girl provoked in him should have multiplied itself in pointing out to
him how many ways, if he had not made up his mind not to marry her at
all, such a marriage could be made to serve its primal uses. She had
turned up her cuff to trail her hand overside as they slid through the
lucent water, and the pretty feminine curve of it had brought to mind
what the Princess had told him of the shirt-waists she made herself. He
decided that she made them very well. But she was too thin for their
severity--and if he married her he would have insisted on her wearing
them now and then as a tender way to prevent her suspecting that it was
on their account he had thought of not marrying her. The revealed
whiteness of her wrist, the intimacy of her relaxed posture, for though
her mind had played into his as freely as a child in a meadow, she had
been always, as regards her person, a little prim with him, had lent to
their errand of house visiting a personal note in which it was absurdly
apt for them to have run across Captain Dunham of the _Merrythought_ at
the door of the Consulate. Mr. Weatheral had some papers which Lessing
had sent him to acknowledge there, and it was a piece of the morning's
performance, when he had come back from that business, to find that the
meeting had taken on--from some mutual discovery of the captain's and
Mrs. Merrithew's of a cousin's wife's sister who had married one of the
Applegates who was a Dunham on the mother's side--quite the aspect of a
family party. It came in the end to the four of them going off at
Peter's invitation to have lunch together in a café overhanging the
_calle_. He told himself afterward that he would not have done it if he
had recalled in time the friendly seaman's romantic appreciation of the
situation between himself and Miss Dassonville. He saw himself so
intrigued by it that, by the time lunch was over, he felt himself in a
position which to his own sensitiveness, demanded that he must
immediately leave Venice or propose to Miss Dassonville. To see the way
he was going and to go on in it, had for him the fascination of the
abyss. He caught himself in the act even of trying to fix Miss
Dassonville's eye to include her by complicity in the beguilement of the
captain, a business which she seemed to have undertaken on her own
account on quite other grounds. He perceived with a kind of pride for
her that she had the ways of elderly sea-going gentlemen by heart. It
was something even if she had failed to charm Peter, that she shouldn't
be found quite wanting in it by other men.

When they had put him back aboard of the _Merrythought_ they had come to
such a pitch among them all, that as the captain leaned above the rail
to launch an invitation, he addressed it to Miss Dassonville, as, if not
quite the giver of the feast, the mistress of the situation.

"When are you coming to lunch with me?" demanded the captain.

"Never!" declared Miss Dassonville. "It would be quite out of the
question to have hot cakes for luncheon, and I absolutely refuse to
come for anything less."

"There's something quite as good," asserted the captain, "that I'll bet
you haven't had in as long."

"Better than hot cakes?" Miss Dassonville was skeptical.

"Pie," said the captain.

"Oh, _Pie!_" in mock ecstasy. "Well, I'd come for pie," and with that
they parted.

Peter had plenty of time for considering where he found himself that
afternoon, for the ladies were bent on a shopping expedition on which
they had rather pointedly given him to understand he was not expected to
attend. He had tried that once, and had hit upon the excellent device,
in face of the outrageous prices proposed by the dealers, of having them
settle upon what they would like and sending Luigi back to bargain for
it. All of which would have gone very well if Mrs. Merrithew, in the
delight of his amazing success, had not gone back to the shop the next
day to duplicate his purchases. Peter had never heard what occurred on
that occasion, but he had noticed that they never talked in his
presence of buying anything again. Bloombury people, he should have
remembered, had perfectly definite notions about having things done for
them.

He walked, therefore, on this afternoon in the Public Gardens and tried
to reconstruct in their original force the reasons for his not marrying
Savilla Dassonville. They had come upon him overwhelmingly in the
recrudescence of memory, reasons rooted very simply in his man's hunger
for the lift, the dizzying eminence of desire. He liked the girl well
enough but he did not want her as he had wanted Eunice Goodward, as he
wanted expansively at this moment to want something, somebody--who was
not Eunice--he was perfectly clear on this point--but should be in a
measure all she stood for to him. He had renewed in the night, though in
so short a time, not less acutely, all the wounded misery of what Eunice
had forced upon him. He was there between the dark and dawn, and here
again in the cool of the garden, to taste the full bitterness of the
conviction that he was not good enough to be loved. He was not to be
helped from that by the thought, which came hurrying on the heels of
the other, that Savilla Dassonville loved him. He had a moment of almost
hating her as she seemed to plead with him, by no motion of her own he
was obliged to confess for those raptures, leaping fires, winged rushes,
which should have been his portion of their situation.

He hated her for the certainty that if he went away now quietly without
saying anything, it would be to visit on her undeservedly all that had
come to him from Eunice. For she would know; she would not, as he had
been, be blind to the point of requiring the spoken word. If he left her
now it would be to the unavoidable knowledge that, as the Princess had
said of him, he would be running away. He would be running from the
evidences of a moneyless, self-abnegating youth, from the plain surfaces
of efficiency and womanliness, not hedged about and enfolded, but pushed
to the extremity of its use. He had, however, when he had taken that in
from every side, the grace to be ashamed of it.

He was ashamed, too, of finding himself at their next meeting involved
in a wordless appeal to be helped from his state to some larger grounds.
If the girl had but appealed to him he could have done with a fine
generosity what he felt was beyond him to invite. He could have married
Savilla Dassonville to be kind to her; what he didn't enjoy was putting
it on a basis of her being kind to him.

Miss Dassonville, however, afforded him no help beyond the negative one
of not talking too much and taking perhaps a shade less interest in
Venice. They had two quiet days together in which it was evident,
whatever Peter settled with himself as to his relation to the girl, it
had taken on for Mrs. Merrithew the pointedness known in Bloombury as
"attentions." She paid in to the possibilities of the situation the
tribute of her absence for long sessions in which, so far as Peter could
discover, the situation rather fell to the ground. It began to appear
that he had missed as he was doomed with women, the crucial instant, and
was to come out of this as of other encounters, empty. And then quite
suddenly the girl put out a hand to him.

It was along about the end of the afternoon they had come out of the
church of Saint George the Greater, which as being most accessible had
been left to the latter end of their explorations. Mrs. Merrithew had
just sent Giuseppe back for a shawl which she had dropped in the
cloister. They sat rocking in the gondola looking toward the fairy
arcade of the ducal palace and the pillars of the saints, and suddenly
Miss Dassonville spoke to excuse her quietness.

"I must look all I can," she said; "we are leaving the day after
to-morrow."

If she had retired behind Mrs. Merrithew's comfortable breadth in order
to deliver her shot the more effectively, she missed seeing how plumply
it landed in the midst of Peter's defences and scattered them.

"Leaving Venice?" he said. "Leaving me?" It took a moment for that fact,
dropping the depth of his indecision, to show him where he stood. "But I
thought you understood," he protested, "that I wanted you to stay ... to
stay with me...." He leaned across Mrs. Merrithew's broad lap in a great
fear of not being sufficiently plain. "Make her understand," he said,
"that I want her to stay always."

"I guess," said Mrs. Merrithew, a dry smile twinkling in the placidity
of her countenance, "you'd better take me right home first, and then you
can explain to her yourself."




XII


"And you are sure," asked Peter, "that you are not going to mind my
being so much older?"

"Oh, I'm going to mind it: There will be times when I shall be afraid of
not living up to it. But the most part of my minding will be, since you
are so much better acquainted with life than I am, that in any matter in
which we shouldn't agree I shall be so much the more sure of your being
right. It's going to be a great help to us, having something like that
to go by."

"Oh," said Peter, "you put it very prettily, my dear."

He was aware as soon as he had said it, that she would have a way always
of putting things prettily, and that not for the sake of any
prettiness, but because it was so intrinsically she saw them. It would
make everything much simpler that she was always sufficiently to be
believed.

"It isn't, you know," she went on, "as if I should have continually to
prop up my confidence with my affection as I might with a man of less
experience. Oh!" she threw out her arms with a beautiful upward motion,
"you give me so much room, Peter."

"Well, more than I would give you at this moment if we were not in a
gondola on a public highway!"

He amazed himself at the felicity with which during the three days of
their engagement he had been able to take that note with her, still more
at the entertainment of her shy response. It gave him a new and enlarged
perception of himself as a man acquainted with passion. All that had
been withheld from him, by the mere experience of missing, he was able
to bestow with largesse. The witchery and charm that had been done on
him, he worked--if he were but to put his arm about her now, to draw
her so that her head rested on his shoulder, with a certain pressure,
he could feel all her being flower delicately to that beguilement. He
had promised himself, when he had her promise, that she should never
miss anything, and he had a certain male satisfaction in being able to
make good. What he did now, in deference to their being as they were in
the full light of day and the plying traffic, was to say:

"Then if I were to put it to you in the light of my superior experience,
that I considered it best for us to be married right away, I shouldn't
expect you to contradict me."

"Oh, Peter!"

"We can't keep Mrs. Merrithew on forever, you know," he suggested, "and
we've such a lot to do--there's Greece and Egypt and the Holy Land----"

"But can we--be married in Venice, I mean?"

"That," said Peter, "is what I'm waiting your permission to find out."

He spent the greater part of the afternoon at that business without,
however, getting satisfaction. "Marriage in Italy," the consul told
him, "is a sort of world-without-end affair. Even if you cable for the
necessary papers it will be a matter of a month or six weeks before the
ceremony could be accomplished. You'll do better to go to Switzerland
with the young lady."

For the present he went back to her with a list of the required
certificates, and another item which he brought out later as a
corrective for the disappointment for the first.

"My birth and baptismal certificates? I haven't any," said Miss
Dassonville, "and I don't believe you have either; and I don't want to
go to Switzerland."

"No," said Peter, "even that takes three weeks."

"Why can't he marry us himself--the consul, I mean? I thought wherever
the flag went up was territory of the United States."

"If you will come along with me in the morning we can ask him," Peter
suggested, and on the way there he loosed for her benefit the second
item of his yesterday's discovery. They slid past the façade of a
certain palace and she kissed the tip of her finger to it lightly. "It's
as if we had a secret between us," she explained, "the secret of the
garden. Besides, I shall always love it because it was there I first
suspected that you--cared. When did you begin to care, Peter?"

"Since before I can remember. Would you like to live in it?"

"In this palace? Here in Venice?"

"It's for rent," he told her; "the consul has it."

"But could we afford it?"

"Well," said Peter, "if you like it so much, at the rate things are
here, we can pull it up by the roots and take it back to Bloombury."

They lost themselves in absurd speculations as to the probable effect on
the villagers of that, and so failed to take note as their gondola nosed
into the green shadow under the consulate, of the _Merrythought's_
launch athwart the landing, until the captain himself hailed them.

"This port," he declared, "is under embargo. I have been waiting here
since half tide and there's nothing doing. Somebody's in there chewing
red tape, but I don't calculate to let anybody else have a turn at it
until I get my bit wound up an' tied in a knot. Now don't tell me you've
got business in there?"

"We want to find out something."

"Well, when ye find it, it won't be what ye want," asserted the captain
gloomily. "It never is in these Dago countries." He motioned his own
boat aside from the landing. "If ye want to go inside and set on a
chair," he suggested, "I'll not hender ye. I like the water best myself.
I hope your business will stand waiting."

"To everybody but ourselves," said Peter. "You see," he caught the
permission lightly from Miss Dassonville's eyes, "we want to get
married."

"Ho!" said the captain, chirking up. "I could 'a' told ye that the fust
time I laid eyes on ye. But I'll tell ye this: ye can't do nothing in a
hurry in this country. The only place where a man can do things up as
soon as he thinks of 'em is on the blue water. We don't have red tape on
shipboard, I can tell you. The skipper's the law and the government."

"Could you marry people?"

"Well, I ain't to say in the habit of it, but it's the law that I
could."

"Then if we get tangled up with the consul," said Peter, "we'll have to
fall back on you," and they took it as an excellent piece of fooling
which they were later to come back to as a matter of serious resort.

"Of course," said the consul, "I could marry you and it would be legal
if you chose to count it so at home, but if you are thinking of taking a
house here and of making an extended residence I shouldn't advise it. As
to Captain Dunham's suggestion, it's not wholly a bad one. Not being in
Italy, the Italians can't take exception to it, and if it is properly
witnessed and recorded at home it ought to stand."

They couldn't of course take it in all at once that they were simply to
sail out there into the ethereal blueness and to come back from it with
the right to live together. However, it made for a great unanimity of
opinion as they talked it over on the way home, that, since so much was
lacking from Peter's marriage that he had dreamed went to it, and so
much more had come into Savilla's than she had dared to imagine, it
mattered very little what else was added or left out.

"I suppose," suggested Miss Dassonville, "Mrs. Merrithew will think it
dreadful." But as it turned out Mrs. Merrithew thought very well of it.

"On a United States boat with a United States minister--there is one
here I've found out--it seems a lot safer than to trust to these foreign
ways. If you was to be married in Italian I should never be certain you
wouldn't wake up some morning and find yourself not married. And then
how should I feel!" As to the palace plan, she threw herself into it
with heavy alacrity. "I s'pose I've got to see you through," she said,
"and it will give me something to think about. I don't suppose you have
any intention that way, but an engaged couple isn't very good company."

It transpired that the _Merrythought_ would put out to the high seas on
the twenty-second, and it was in the flutter of their practical
adjustments to meet this date that Peter found the ten days of his
engagement move so swiftly; to engage servants, to interview
tradespeople, to prune the neglected garden--it was Savilla's notion
that they should do this themselves--all the stir of domestic life made
so many points of advantage to support him above that dryness of despair
from which he had moments of feeling himself all too hardly rescued. He
had come up out of it sufficiently by the help that Italy afforded, to
glimpse once more the country of his dreams, only by this act of his
marriage to turn his back on it forever. Savilla Dassonville was a dear
little thing; if it came to that, a revered and valued thing, but she
was not, he had never pretended it, the Lovely Lady, and the door that
shut them in as man and wife was to shut _her_ forever out of his life.
And yet though this was his accepted, his official position, it was
remarkable even to himself how much less frequently as the preparations
for his marriage went forward, he found himself obliged to fall back
upon it; how much more he projected himself into his future as the
adored and protecting male. He recalled in this connection that the
Princess had said to him that he should visit his House no more, and it
was part of the proof of the notion he entertained toward himself as a
man done with the imaginative life, that he accepted it with no more
fuss about it. He had in fact his mind's eye on a piece of ground which
Lessing could buy for him, on the river, an hour from the city, where he
could manage for Savilla at least, a generous substitute for dreams, and
a situation for himself for which he began to discover more appetite
than he would have believed. It was likely, he thought, that he would
himself take a turn at planning the garden.

It was very early in the morning when the wedding party which had been
reinforced by the consul, the mistress of Casa Frolli, and the minister,
who had turned out to be exactly of Mrs. Merrithew's persuasion, went
aboard the _Merrythought_, blooming out amazingly in bunting and roses
for the occasion. The morning blueness had drained out from the city and
stained the waters eastward as they put out between the red and yellow
sails of the fishing fleet. They saw the cypress-towered islands of
romance melt in the morning haze. The steam launch which was to take
them ashore again ploughed alongside, and there was a pleasant sort of
home smell from the cook's quarters.

Peter sat forward with the bride's hand tucked under his arm and
presently he heard her laughing softly, delightedly.

"Peter, do you know what that is, that good smell I mean?"

"What do you think it is?"

"It's pie baking. Truly, don't you think I'm enough of a housewife to
know that?"

"I know you're everything you ought to be."

"It is pie, there's no doubt about it, but we must pretend to be awfully
surprised when the captain brings it out. But Peter, don't you like it?"

"Pie, my dear?"

"No, but like having everything so homey and--and--so genuine at our
wedding?"

"I hope," said Peter, "it's genuine pie, but I see what you mean, my
dear."

"It's an omen, almost, that we'll always have the good, comfortable,
common things to fall back upon, if our marriage should not prove quite
all we've dreamed it. It's been so perfect up to now; it must drop down
out of the clouds some time."

It seemed rather to have taken a sweep upward when, with sails swelling
over them and the beat of the sea under the bows, they stood up to be
married, and to exhibit capacities of sustaining itself at a level from
which not the very soggy and sallow complexioned pie with the cook
grinning behind it, could dislodge the two most concerned in it. It wore
through the day to a contained and quiet gayety at a dinner which took
place in the _ristoranta_ over the water where they had once lunched
with the captain, and lasted until Peter had brought his wife home again
to the refurnished palace. It had gone, as he told himself, remarkably
well, with every intimation, as he had time to tell himself in his last
hours in the garden with his cigar, of going much better, of becoming as
the place gave him occasion to indulge the figure, an enclosed and
fragrant garden, in which if no flaming angel of desire kept the gate
for him, he had at least the promise of refreshment.

That old passion for Eunice Goodward, all his feelings for all the women
he had known, served to show him what Savilla had meant when she said he
"gave her so much room"--the renewed sense of the spaciousness of life.

It would be there for his wife at the completest, and if she had, as it
seemed, turned him out of the Wonderful House in order to live in it
herself, he at least kept the gates. And was not this the proper
business for a man? He recalled what the Princess had said to him so
long ago when he had first begun to think of himself as a bachelor. "It
takes a lot of dreaming to bring one like me to pass." Well, he had
dreamed and he had slain some dragons. Later there would be children
playing in the House, daughters perhaps ... Lovely Ladies. The world
would be a better place for them to walk about in because of all that he
had lost and been.

When he went into the garden he had half expected that the Princess
would speak to him; the place was full of hints of her, faint and
persuasive as the scent of the flowers in the dark, little riffles of
his pulse, flushed surfaces, the tingling of his palms which announced
her, but she did not speak. He said to himself that he was now a well
man and had seen the last of her. Never before had he felt so very
well.

He saw the light moving in the palace behind him as his wife moved to
complete some of her arrangements; he heard her then pacing along the
marble floor of the great hall which went quite through the middle of
it--she must be going to her room, and in a little while he would go in
to her--he heard the light tapping of her feet and then he saw her come,
the lit lamp in her hand.

She had on still the white dress in which she had been married, and over
it she had thrown the silver-woven scarf which had been one of his first
gifts to her, and as she came the light glittered on it; it drew from
the polished walls bright reflections in which, amid the gilded frames,
he saw the dim old pictures start and waver--and as he saw her coming
so, Peter threw away his cigar and gripped suddenly at the balustrade to
steady him where he stood, against what out of some far spring of his
youth rushed upon him, as he saw her come--as he had always seen her, as
he knew now he was to see her always--his wife and the Lovely Lady.


THE END




[Illustration]

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N.Y.





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