She smiled meaningly.

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean?" Dorothy's eyes flashed and her fingers toyed nervously with the photographs.

"If I were an expert photographer I could show you what I mean instantly. Speech is so clumsy!"

Dorothy still looked at her blankly, though she felt her heart beating with accelerated speed.

"From what I saw at Schandau," the other went on coldly, "I should say it was time to announce the engagement."

Dorothy gripped the little table with a tight clasp. Bending over, as if to examine the pictures, she felt waves of heat and cold follow each other over her cheeks and forehead. Her breath seemed to choke. How warm the room was! She longed for a breath of fresh air. She would go and tell her mother that she wanted to have the carriage called at once.

But there was her mother talking busily with Mrs. Tremont. And there, beyond, was d.i.c.k.

Something very like tears came to the borders of her eyes, as Miss Dorothy Ware looked at, and thought of d.i.c.k. He had loved her, and she--Ah, well, that was all over now! Even had she been able to compound with her own conscience, Miss Tremont had effectually barred the way to--ah, to everything! There was Miss Tremont talking, now, to Mr.

Wreath and to d.i.c.k. Surely the girl would not dare--but no, that was absurd!

Fortunately, Miss Leigh, noticing Dorothy's solitude, decided, just then, that she would go and talk to the girl, which succeeded in diverting Dorothy's mind from unpleasant thoughts.

At the other end of the room the various groups were constantly changing. Above the chatter one could hear the strains of music that floated in from the music-room. Miss Tremont having finally succeeded in luring Mr. Wreath on to a discussion of his own peculiar theory of the art of fiction, d.i.c.k left them and strolled into the conservatory. He wanted to be alone. He had been suffering more than ever before from such accute pain as afflicts each individual soul that submits to drowning itself in the meaningless chatter of society. As he himself put it, with something like an oath of disgust, "I've been listening to people I don't care a pin about; hearing rubbish and talking rubbish!"

The real key to his feeling of disgust, however, was in the fact that his opportunities to a confidential talk with Miss Ware had all been ruthlessly killed.

"A nice way to contribute to the general entertainment!" It was Mrs.

Stewart herself. She was shaking her fan at him. "Don't get up!" she went on, "I want to talk to you." She scrutenized him. "You don't look cheerful!"

"I'm not," he said curtly.

"Remorse?"

"No. Remorse is the divine right of cowards and gourmands. Mine is merely a case of weariness."

"With your own sweet self to blame. I know the feeling. You've been thinking, or, rather, you think you have been thinking. And when one is in that state, everything goes against the grain. Even such a galaxy as that!" She waved her fan to the direction of the inner rooms, and a smile of mischief curled her mouth. "What do you think of this year's crop of lions?"

"Bah!" he scorned viciously, with all the bitterness of the man knocking at the closed portals. "Who was it that first gave your friend Clarence Miller the idea that he was a novelist? His wife, I suppose. When a man's single his follies are suggested by the devil; when he's married, by his wife. I suppose she wants her husband to equal the notoriety attained by her brother-in-law, the composer of 'Rip Van Winkle' and other comic operas that society flocks to listen to. It's a great pity that art and literature happen to be the thing this season."

"You're thinking of the real artists and writers, I presume. Well, it is rather hard on them."

"Hard? Why, its death! Think of the author that finds the market glutted with the free-gratis product of the society b.u.t.terfly's pen. Its enough to create suicides."

"But you can't very well include Mr. Wreath in the free-gratis cla.s.s?"

"No. But he is a charlatan, for revenue only. He has so many fads that they stud his conversation as barnacles cover a rock. He is a trumpeter of theories. Oh, I don't deny that he writes well! But he is not satisfied with that, unfortunately; he must needs preach, and the man who preaches about his art is a dispiriting spectacle."

"Dear, dear! What a change! It used to be that we others said all the cutting things, while you listened in awe and trembling; now it is you that uses the edge tools of language. You have beaten us at our own game." Mrs. Stewart dropped her voice a little, and sighed. "But you have lost as much as you have gained, have you not?"

He nodded silently. "The world is a usurer that lends us wisdom if we will but pay our youth as interest. And when we are bankrupt in youth, the wisdom turns to ashes."

"Don't be morbid. It's too fashionable. Cynicism is so cheap nowadays that the poorest Philistine of us all can afford it. The only virtue in optimism, it seems to me, is that it is suffering neglect today; for that reason I may espouse it, merely to avoid the charge of being commonplace. Come, be gay I Laugh! Forget!"

"To forget is to forego one of life's sweetest pains." He laughed mechanically, and got up, offering Mrs. Stewart his arm. "I'm a stupid, morbid fool. My only saving grace is that I know just how big a fool I am." They entered the inner rooms, and Mrs. Stewart, with a smile and a bow, left d.i.c.k to talk flatteringly to the musical lion of the town.

Some of the people were already leaving. d.i.c.k determined to slip away quietly. But, as he turned to the vestibule, he found himself face to face with Dorothy Ware.

All his gloom vanished. "I've been trying to talk to you all evening,"

he declared. "I've been wanting to ask you something. I asked you once before. But that seems a very long time ago." He found himself carried away in a whirl of eager enthusiasm and hope. "Dorothy," he said, looking down at her, "there is still hope for me, is there not?"

But in the girl's eyes there was nothing save pain, and shame. She looked away. She played nervously with the lace of her dress.

Blind, man-like, he took it all for shyness. "Only a little hope," he repeated, tenderly. He tried to take her hand.

She shrank away from him in a sort of horror. "No, no," she murmured, in a voice of torture. She did not look him in the face.

d.i.c.k stared at her dumbly. Now, at last, he understood her silence, her averted head. He saw the expression that told him she feared to wound him, even though she cared for him not at all.

"Forget me!" she said, and moved away quickly.

He stood, for an instant, looking after her, then he went, moving his lips in a queer, mumbling way, to the vestibule, and asked for his wraps.

As he was leaving the house Dorothy was sinking into a chair by her mother's side. She stared straight out in front of her. When her mother spoke to her she turned slowly around and said, "It's very cold in here." She shivered.

And her mother, knowing that it was as warm as an oven in those rooms, and watching the queer look on her daughter's face, decided the latter was not very well, and must be taken home at once.

CHAPTER XIII

He went down the steps with his hand clutching the rail with the fervor of a tooth biting on a lip. If it had been daylight the twitching of his eyes and lip-corners would have been peculiarly noticeable.

For some reason or no reason he scorned the sidewalk; the middle of the road presently felt his nervous footfall. Underneath him he could feel and hear the droning of the cable. Some hundred yards before him he saw the vivid glare that betokened the headlight of an approaching cable-car. For an instant or two he asked himself why he should not continue walking in that direction, in the path of the Juggernaut, and allow himself to be ground into fragments--into the everlasting Forget.

Gravely he pondered it: why not? Could the game be worth the candle that was snuffed? And yet, there was something so commonplace, so cheaply melodramatic in that manner of going out that he drew back; he stepped aside and let the dust of the pa.s.sing car brush him spatteringly. To commit suicide, to choose such a moment for it--a moment that, after all, was but the repet.i.tion of a million similar ones--had something so ordinary, so vulgar in it, that after he resisted the thought of it, he shuddered. His lips took on a semblance of smiling.

"What a play for the gallery it would have been!" he thought bitterly.

Presently, as he walked, sobs broke through his lips. The measure of what was lost to him seemed terribly great. All the light of the world was but darkness for him now. What did it all matter now, this world, this life, this aimless race? What was ambition worth, when ambition's cause was gone? Could he take up the dream again, now that waking had brought such pain? Incoherently his mind went back to the moments that had elapsed just before he had left the house, moments that lasted longer than lifetimes. He saw it all again, that scene so indelibly graven on his mental film; he heard those fateful words again and felt their blighting import. His arms went up wildly, with fists clenched, toward the stars, and down again toward the earth like falling hammers, driven with curses.

If anyone had met him at that moment, d.i.c.k Lancaster would have been called insane.

Suddenly he stood still, and began to laugh. It was not a pleasant sound, and he himself noticed that it had the discordance of the laugh bred by artifice. He had remembered a sentence that someone had addressed to him, "The thing to do is to laugh!"

So it was. Yes, that was the only armor, the armor of indifference. He walked on, evolving a philosophy of flippancy. Wounded sorely, as he was, he found himself sympathetically wondering whether that flippancy that he once had so despised in his fellow-men and women was not as often a growth of experience as a mask of fashion.

When he reached his room he flung himself on a couch. Outside everything was still. He sent his mind back to the time when he had first entered this town. How void of all suspicion, all cynicism, he was in those days! Experience after experience had left its impress on his wax-like mind and now, with the slipping away of beliefs, the vanishment of idols, the twinges of fate, he found himself at the other extreme, in the mood that laughs at all things, and believes that there is nothing potent save chance.

In that mood he resolved to remain. It was the only one that was no longer unbearable. To attempt the old beliefs were merely to give hostages to disenchantment. He was done now with disenchantment. He would expect nothing, care for nothing. Except to laugh.

But, in the meanwhile, he could no longer bear the scenes and sounds of the town. He cast about for plans. The thought that in one mind at least his flight would look like cowardice did not annoy him; that also was merely a thing to laugh at. The country was not what he wanted. It was not quiet he desired; it was struggle and strife with the dragons of memory and boredom; he wanted new battles to fight, new experiences to harvest--not sensitively, as of old, but coldly, cruelly--in other fields, as far away as possible.

He unlocked his desk and searched for his bank-book. The figures seemed to satisfy him.