"Yes. Why not? She's a fine girl, and she worships the ground you walk on."

"You're joking."

"Not at all. I know what I'm talking about. Perhaps she doesn't realize it herself, but she's very much in love with you."

"The poor little girl!"

"Yes. Of course. You ought to be sorry for her. You don't deserve it.

But when it comes to that, did any man ever live who really deserved to have a woman love him? That's the tragedy of our s.e.x. We have nothing better to love than mere men."

There were no heroics over their separation. They went to town for supper. They were both sufficiently civilized to keep up the appearance of gayety.

Just before the train started she leaned out of the window of her compartment and tossed him a final challenge.

"Walter," she said, "I'm more fortunate than you. I know what I'm going to do next. Better not waste time deciding. You know what my advice is.

Go back to New York and get married."

But there was no agreement in his face as the train pulled out.

The next weeks were h.e.l.l for him. Left to himself, the bitter memories came back with a rush. The _Quatorze feuillet_ brought him the Legion of Honor. He had often thought that it was the one distinction he would enjoy most. The invest.i.ture seemed a farce. What good are honors, when there is no one at whose feet to lay them? Then came the offer of a professorship at Oxford. It was a life berth, the highest scholastic honor to which he could aspire. After all, if these people valued his knowledge of Hakt.i.te and no one else valued him at all, why not accept?

But he could not bring himself to a definite separation from Mabel. He decided to have one more try. He asked for a month to consider the Oxford offer and started home. He announced his coming by two cables--to Mabel and to Yetta.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE PALACE OF DREAMS

When the cablegram from Teheran had announced that Walter was starting homeward, it became necessary for Yetta to rearrange her att.i.tude towards him. As long as he had been an abstraction she had been perfectly free to love him according to her fancy. Evidently she would have to treat the real person differently.

Of course she was glad that he was coming back, but there was an undercurrent of sadness to the thought. It is very hard to give up habits which have become dear. And she was habituated to his absence. In a more tangible way his rooms had become dear to her. In this setting she had come into life. Almost every memory she valued, except those of her father, were connected with the place. She had read so many books in his great leather chair! She had learned to write at his desk. Even the two oil portraits, of his grandfather in a stiff stock and his grandmother in crinoline, had become in a way personal possessions. She must leave all this, must learn to live in new surroundings.

But this regret was only half conscious. There were more vivid sensations of expectancy. Above all she tremblingly hoped for his approbation. When the Great Jahwe had completed his six days' labor and was looking it over, the Earth must have had a palpitating moment of suspense while it waited His verdict. Yetta felt herself the work of Walter's hands. Would he say, "It is good"?

Her love had made her foolishly humble. An objective observer would have doubted if Walter was worthy to unlace her shoes. The fairies had been generous at his christening. They had given him health and wealth and brains. He himself would have admitted that most of his talents had lain idle, wrapped in a napkin. Yetta had not been so richly endowed. At fifteen, with hardly any education, the Fates had put her in a sweat-shop. But she had been given one priceless talent--a keen hunger for an ever larger life. No slightest opportunity for growth had she let slip. Walter was a pitiful example of wasted opportunities compared to this young woman of twenty-two.

There was a more subtle disparity between them.

Yetta's beliefs were pa.s.sionate faiths, Walter's were intellectual convictions. The dozen odd years' difference in age might have explained this, but it went deeper. Walter had never had the knack of being an intimate part of activity. He was an observer rather than a partic.i.p.ant in life. He never got closer to the stage than the wings. And more often he sat in a box. Between her ardent faith and his tired disillusionment lay a chasm which was more than a matter of years. But she, being in love with him, and hardly knowing him at all--at most she had had a dozen talks with him--could not see this.

Would he give her more than approbation? As long as she could, Yetta tried to avoid a definite answer to this question. But it became insistent. She knew he had been in love with Mabel. Eleanor Mead's gossip had supplemented her own conviction. At first it had seemed the inevitable that he should love the wonderful Miss Train. But the last year had seen almost a quarrel between Yetta and Mabel. There were constant disagreements as to the policy of the Woman's Trade Union League. Mabel did not want it to become avowedly Socialist and Yetta did. Mabel felt that she had a discoverer's right to Yetta and was provoked whenever her _protegee_ showed a will of her own. It is hard enough for men to keep friends in the face of serious and long-continued difference of opinion. Women, with lesser experience in the world of affairs, with a more personal tradition, find it harder. It had come to a climax over Yetta's resignation from _The Star_. Mabel had been very indignant and had called it a piece of stupid Quixotism. It had shown Yetta very clearly the fundamental gap between their points of view.

They still called each other by their first names and professed undying affection. But it was hard nowadays for Yetta to realize how the wonderful Walter had ever loved this rather narrow-minded woman. She knew where Mabel bought her false hair. Surely Walter would get over his infatuation. Vague hopes inevitably mingled with her thoughts of the future. But she was almost relieved by his unexpectedly long stay in Paris.

Walter had hardly seen the lights of Le Havre sink below the horizon before he began to regret his decision to go to New York. Once more hope had made a fool of him. What chance was there that Mabel would have changed her mind in these six months? Certainly she had not loved him when she had written that miserably cold note of welcome. His escapade with Beatrice would hardly help matters. What perversity was it that drove him home to receive a new humiliation?

Two days out they ran into a gale, and Walter, who was a good sailor, had the promenade deck almost to himself. Standing up forward, an arm round a stanchion for a brace, the spray in his face, it seemed as if the cobwebs which had been smothering him were blown away. He could look at himself calmly, objectively. One question after another posed itself, and he sought the answers, not as an infatuated fool, but as a man who has "suffered unto wisdom."

What was there for him to hope for from Mabel? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Even if she relented, it was a sorry prospect. If now, after six years, after her youth had pa.s.sed, she suddenly decided to pick up what she had so long despised, it would be in discouragement. He had more disillusions than enough of his own. And Mabel in slippers was a revolting idea. The romantic thing for him to do, now that romance was dead, was to kill himself on the lady's front doorstep. But the age of romance had pa.s.sed for him.

For the first time in six years he looked out upon a future in which Mabel played no part. Beatrice had said he must find some useful work.

There was the Oxford offer. Of course every acquisition to the museum of human knowledge is worth while. But it was very hard for him to apply this theory to his specialty. What good did it do any one to have him piece together the broken fragments of a semicivilization, so long dead?

He could think of no branch of study which more truly deserved Carlyle's jibe of "dry-as-dust." It was perhaps better than suicide, but was there no more human sort of utility for him? As Beatrice had said, the "social conscience" was keen in him. He wanted to serve the people of his day and generation.

The one activity he could think of was suggested by the news in Yetta's letters of the English Socialist newspaper which Isadore Braun was editing and to which she was occasionally contributing. His surplus money, quite a lot of it had piled up in the last three years, would help immensely. Even if they could not raise enough to maintain a daily, his income would suffice for a weekly. The three of them would be a strong editorial combination. More and more the idea attracted him. They could make a representative publication of it. Isadore with his faith in the political party, Yetta in close touch with the trade-unions, and he to furnish a broader, more philosophical expression of the movement of revolt. They were three able, intelligent people who were not afraid.

What better thing could he do with the remnant of his life than to weld them into an organized force? Gradually they would attract other brains to their group. Just such an intellectual centre was what the movement needed. The idea at least had the virtue of stirring a wave of true enthusiasm in him.

This line of thought brought Yetta to his mind--and Beatrice's advice.

He smiled at the idea. Intellectually he might admit that it would be well for him to marry. But the Yetta he remembered was a frightened little East Side girl, who had not enough sense to keep out of the clutches of a cadet. Of course she had grown up, her letters showed that. And she had been a pretty youngster. If, as Beatrice believed, she was in love with him, it might possibly work out that way in time. But he was in no mood for romance. Hunger for a life of activity kept his mind on his project of work. The few times his thoughts touched on Yetta, he wrenched them back to what the three of them might accomplish with the paper.

As the ship slipped into its berth, Walter leaned over the rail and eagerly scanned the upturned faces of the welcoming crowd on the dock.

When at last he convinced himself that there was no one there whom he knew, he suddenly realized that once more the hope had tripped him up.

He had been looking for Mabel. He went back to the smoking-room and tried to regain his self-respect by a gla.s.s of whiskey. As the cab took him through the familiar streets, he was grimly telling himself that it would never happen again; Mabel did not exist any more.

Yetta was waiting for him in his rooms. She had spent her last night there, and at eight in the morning had carried her valise--the trunk had gone before--to her new quarters on Waverly Place. She could not afford a place to herself and had gone in with another Socialist girl, Sadie Michelson, in joint control of a small flat. While she was waiting through the morning hours, she rearranged his business papers for the fiftieth time. There was a pile of receipts, year by year, each one numbered to correspond to its check. There were the check-books, each voucher pinned to its stub. The bank-book had just been balanced.

It was about eleven when the cab rattled up to the door. From her seat in the window she saw him get out. Casting a quick glance over the room to rea.s.sure herself that everything was exactly as he had left it, she opened the door and went out on the landing. "Welcome home," she called down to him.

It did not occur to her that what she was doing was dramatic. But the lonely hearted man who was struggling up the narrow stairs with his two grips was deeply moved by her words and the vision which greeted his upturned eyes. A flood of light came out through the door of his room and illumined her as she stood above him on the landing.

"h.e.l.lo," he said out loud. But to himself he said, "My G.o.d!"

Yetta's girlish promise of beauty had been richly fulfilled. Her figure had become more definite. There had been a sort of precociousness about the sweat-shop girl he remembered. The Yetta who greeted him now was a fully developed symmetrical woman. Her face, her arms, her neck had caught up with the rest of her body. There was nothing fragile about her any more. One no longer feared that she might be suddenly snuffed out and leave nothing but the haunting memory of her eyes. More striking, and at the same time more subtle, was the transformation from self-conscious awkwardness to the a.s.sured grace of a personage who has found a place in life. The Yetta he remembered had been impulsive--a creature of extremes--one moment lost in a childish abandon of enthusiasm, the next embarra.s.sed and _gauche_. This woman was calm, restrained, and while perfectly conscious of herself was not self-conscious.

He had remembered her as pretty. Good food and a healthy life had taken from her the exotic, orchid-like charm of her girlhood. Yet she had grown greatly in beauty. Her face had gained immensely in "range"--to borrow a musical term. It held the capacity of a whole gamut of expressions it had before lacked. Her eyes were as beautiful as ever, and they had looked on many things. Her mouth had always been well-proportioned. Now any one could see that it was a perfected instrument. There were thousands of things it could say. Her cheeks had flushed or paled with a myriad of emotions and had grown more beautiful.

And yet the ma.s.s of rich brown hair, which had always been the crown of her beauty, had not begun to lose its l.u.s.tre.

When Walter reached the head of the stairs and shook hands with her, she had changed from the dimmest of possibilities to a vivid desire.

"Did you have a good pa.s.sage?"

"Fine. A gale all the way over."

There were a few more ba.n.a.lities.

"Good Lord, Yetta," he exploded. "How you've grown up and changed!"

Yetta had hoped for his approbation of her works. He was admiring her person. He was looking her over with frank pleasure. The blush hurt her cheek. She turned away to hide it.

"Here's a note Mabel gave me for you," she said.

Walter took it mechanically. He ought to have tossed it into the waste-paper basket. But the hope, the fool, the idiot hope grabbed him by the throat. Once more. He tore it open. This would be positively the last concession to the Dream.--Eleanor Mead was decorating a country house out near Stamford, Mabel had gone out to pa.s.s the week-end with her. She was glad to hear that Walter was back and looked forward to hearing about his adventures. She judged from the papers that he had had a lot--So! Spending a few days with Eleanor, whom she saw all the time, was more important than staying in town to greet him, whom she had not seen for years. He stuck the letter in his pocket and turned to Yetta, who was watching him closely.

"How's 'Saph' coming on?" he asked lightly.

"I don't see much of her."