He engineered her unwillingly onto a knee. "How's papa?" he demanded. "I suppose he will be here Sat.u.r.day to take his family through the stores?"

She replied with dignity, "There is only my mother and me."

At this information he exclaimed "Ah!" and touched his mustache with a diminutive gold-backed brush from a leather case. "That's more than I have," he confided to her; "there is only myself. Isn't that sad? You must be sorry for the lonely old boy."

She wasn't. Probably he, too, had a wife somewhere; men were beastly. "I guess your mother wants a little company at times herself?"

Linda, straining away from him, replied, "Oh, dear, no; there are just packs of gentlemen whenever she likes. But she is tired of them all."

She escaped and he settled his waistcoat.

"You mustn't run away," he admonished her; "nice children don't. Your mother didn't bring you up like that, I'm sure. She wouldn't like it."

Linda hesitated, plainly conveying the fact that, if she were to wait, he would have to say something really important.

"Just you two," he deliberated; "Miss and Mrs. Jones."

"Not at all," Linda a.s.serted shortly; "our name is Condon."

"I wonder if you'd tell her this," he went on: "a gentleman's here by himself named Bardwell, who has seen her and admires her a whole lot.

Tell her he's no young sprig but he likes a good time all the better.

Dependable, too. Remember that, cutie. And he wouldn't presume if he had a short pocket. He knows cla.s.s when he sees it."

"It won't do any good," Linda a.s.sured him in her gravest manner. "She said only this morning she was sick of them."

"That was before dinner," he replied cheerfully. "Things look different later in the day. You do what I tell you."

All this Linda dutifully repeated. Her mother was at the dressing-table, rubbing cream into her cheeks, and she paused, surveying her reflection in the mirror. "He was smoking a big cigar," Linda added. The other laughed. "What a sharp little thing you are!" she exclaimed. "A body ought to be careful what they tell you." She wiped off the cream and rubbed a soft pinkish powder into her skin.

"He saw me, did he?" she apparently addressed the gla.s.s. "Admired me a whole lot. Was he nice, Linda?" she turned. "Were his clothes right? You must point him out to me to-night. But do it carefully, darling. No one should notice. Your mother isn't on the shelf yet; she can hold her own, even in the Bos...o...b.., against the whole barnyard."

Linda, at the entrance to the dining-room, whispered, "There he is." But immediately Mr. Bardwell was smiling and speaking to them.

"I had a delightful conversation with your little girl to-day," he told Mrs. Condon; "such a pretty child and well brought up."

"And good, too," her mother replied; "not a minute's trouble. The common sense of the grown; you'd never believe it."

"Why shouldn't I?" he protested gallantly. "Every reason to." Mrs.

Condon blushed becomingly.

"She had to make up for a lot," she sighed.

An hour or more after dinner Mrs. Randall stopped Linda in the hall beyond the music. "Mama out?" she inquired brightly. "I thought Mr.

Jasper left this morning?"

Linda told her that Mr. Jasper had gone; she added nothing else.

"I must look at the register," Mrs. Randall continued; "I really must."

Obeying an uncontrollable impulse Linda half cried, "I'd like to see you riding on a leopard!" A flood of misery enveloped her, and she hurried up to the silence of her mother's deserted room.

V

It was on her fourteenth birthday that Linda noticed a decided change in her mother; a change, unfortunately, that most of all affected the celebrated good humors. In the first place Mrs. Condon spent an increasingly large part of the day before the mirror of her dressing-table, but without any proportionate pleasure; or, if there was a proportion kept, it exhibited the negative result of a growing annoyance. "G.o.d knows why they all show at once," she exclaimed discontentedly, seated--as customary--before the eminently truthful reflection of a newly discovered set of lines. "I'm not old enough to begin to look like a hag."

"Oh, mother," Linda protested, shocked, "you mustn't say such horrid things about yourself. Why, you're perfectly lovely, and you don't seem a speck older than you did years ago."

The other, biting her full underlip at the unwelcome fact in turn biting a full lower lip back at her, made no reply. Linda lingered for a moment at her mother's ruffled pink shoulders; then, with a sigh, she turned to the reception-room of their small suite at the Hotel Gontram. It was a somber chamber furnished in red plush, with a complication of shades and gray-white net curtains at long windows and a deep green carpet. There was a fireplace, with a grate, supported by varnished oak pillars and elaborate mantel and gla.s.s, a glittering reddish center-table with a great many small odd shelves below, a desk with sheaves of hotel writing paper and the telephone.

The Gontram was entirely different from the hotels at the lakes or seash.o.r.e or in the South. It was a solid part of a short block west of Fifth Avenue in the middle of the city. Sherry's filled a corner with its ma.s.sive stone bulk and glimpses of dining-rooms with glittering chandeliers and solemn gaiety, then impressive clubs and wide entrances under heavy gla.s.s and metal, tall porters in splendid livery, succeeded each other to the Hotel Gontram and the dull thunder of the elevated trains beyond.

The revolving door, through which Linda sedately permitted herself to be moved, opened into a high s.p.a.ce of numerous columns and benches, writing-desks and palms. At the back was the white room where, usually alone, she had breakfast, while the dining-room, discreetly lighted, was at the left. It was more interesting here than, for example, at the Bos...o...b..; people were always coming in or going, and there were quant.i.ties of men. She watched them arriving with shoals of leather bags in the brisk care of the bellboys, disappear into the elevator, and, if it was evening, come down in dinner coats with vivid silk scarfs folded over their white shirts.

The women were perpetually in street clothes or m.u.f.fled in satin wraps; Linda only regarded them when they were exceptional. Usually she was intent on the men. It often happened that they returned her frank gaze with a smile, or stopped to converse with her. Sometimes it was an actor with a face dryly pink like a woman's from make-up; they were familiar and pinched her cheeks, calling her endearing names in conscious echoing voices as if they were quite hollow within. Then there were simply business men, who never appeared to take off their derby hats, and spoke to her of their little girls at home. She was entirely at ease with the latter--so many of her mother's friends were similar--and critically valued the details of their dress, the cigar-cases with or without gold corners, the watch-chains with jeweled insignia, the cuff-links and embroidered handkerchiefs.

If her mother approached while Linda was so engaged the elder would linger with a faint smile, at which, now, the girl was conscious of a growing impatience. She'd rise with dignity and, if possible, escape with her parent from florid courtesies. This sense of annoyance oppressed her, too, in the dining-room, where her mother, a c.o.c.ktail in her hand, would engage in long cheerful discussions with the captains or waiters. Other women, Linda observed, spoke with complete indifference and their attention on the _carte de jour_. Of course it was much more friendly to be interested in the servants' affairs--they told her mother about their wives and the number of their children, the difficulties of bringing both ends together, and served her with the promptest care; but instinctively Linda avoided any but the most formal contact.

She had to insist, as well, on paying the tips; for Mrs. Condon, her sympathies engaged, was quite apt to leave on the table a five-dollar bill or an indiscriminate heap of silver. "You are a regular little Jew," she would reply lightly to Linda's protests. This, the latter thought, was unfair; for the only Jew she knew, Mr. Moses Feldt, an acquaintance of their present period in New York, was quite the most generous person she knew. "Certainly you don't take after your mama."

After she said this she always paused with tight lips. It was charged with the a.s.sumption that, while Linda didn't resemble her, she did very much a mysterious and unfavorably regarded personage. Her father, probably. More and more Linda wondered about him. He was dead, she knew, but that, she began to see, was no reason for the positive prohibition to mention him at all. Perhaps he had done something dreadful, with money, and had disgraced them all. Yet she was convinced that this was not so.

She had heard a great many uncomplimentary words applied to husbands, most of which she had been unable to comprehend; and she speculated blankly on them in her mother's connection. On the whole the women agreed that they were remarkably stupid and transparent, they protested that they understood and guided every move husbands made; and this surely gave her father no opportunity for independent crime. She was held from questioning not so much by her mother's command--at times she calmly and successfully ignored that--as from its unfortunate effect on the elder.

Mrs. Condon would burn with a generalized anger that sank to a despondency fortified by the brandy flask. Straining embraces and tears, painful to support, would follow, or more unbearable silliness. The old difficulties with giggling or sympathetic chambermaid;--Linda couldn't decide which was worse--then confronted her with the necessity for rigid lies, misery, and the procuring of sums of money from the bag in the top drawer. Altogether, and specially with the fresh difficulties of her mother's unaccountable irritation and apprehensions, things were frightfully complicated.

It was late afternoon in November, and the electric lights were on; however, they were lighted when they rose, whenever they were in the rooms, for it was always gloomy if not positively dark; the bedroom looked into a deep exterior well and the windows of the other chamber opened on an uncompromising blank wall. Yet Linda, now widely learned in such settings, rather liked her present situation. They had occupied the same suite before, for one thing; and going back into it had given her a sense of familiarity in so much that always shifted.

Linda, personally, had changed very little; she was taller than four years before, but not a great deal; she was, perhaps, more graceful--her movements had become less sudden--more a.s.sured, the rapidly maturing qualities of her mind made visible; and she had gained a surprising repose.

Now, for example, she sat in a huge chair cushioned with black leather and thought, with a frowning brow, of her mother. It was clear that the latter was obviously worried about--to put it frankly--her face. Her figure, she repeatedly a.s.serted, could be reasoned with; she had always been reconciled to a certain jolly stoutness, but her face, the lines that appeared about her eyes overnight, fairly drove her to hot indiscreet tears. She had been to see about it, Linda knew; and returned from numerous beauty-parlors marvelously rejuvenated--for the evening.

She had been painted, enameled, vibrated, ma.s.saged; she had had electric treatment, rays and tissue builders; and once she had been baked. To-day the toilet table would be loaded with milkweed, cerates and vanishing cream; tomorrow they would all be swept away, given to delighted chambermaids, while Mrs. Condon declared that, when all was said, cold water and a rough towel was nature's way.

This afternoon, apparently everything, including hope, had failed. She was as cross as cross. From the manner in which she spoke it might have been Linda's fault. The worst of it was that even the latter saw that nothing could be done. Her mother was growing--well, a little tired in appearance. Swift tears gathered in Linda's eyes. She hadn't been quite truthful in that rea.s.suring speech of hers. She set herself to the examination of various older women with whom she had more or less lately come in contact. How had they regarded and met the loss of whatever good looks they had possessed?

It was terribly mixed up, but, as she thought about it, it seemed to her that the world of women was divided into two entirely different groups, the ones men liked, and who had such splendid parties; and the ones who sat together and gossiped in sharp lowered voices. She hoped pa.s.sionately that her mother would not become one of the latter for a long long while. But eventually it seemed that there was no escape from the circle of brilliantly dressed creatures with ruined faces who congregated in the hotels and whispered and nodded in company until they went severally to bed.

The great difference between one and the other, of course, was the favor of men. Their world revolved about that overwhelming fact. Her mother had informed her of this on a hundred occasions and in countless ways; but more by her actions, her present wretchedness, than by speech. It was perfectly clear to Linda that nothing else mattered. She was even beginning, in a vague way, to think of it in connection with herself; but still most of her preoccupation was in her mother. She decided gravely that a great deal, yet, could be done. For instance, lunch to-day:

Her mother had given her a birthday celebration at Henri's, the famous confectioner but a door or two from their hotel, and at the end, when a plate of the most amazing and delightful little cakes had been set on the table, the elder had eaten more than half. Afterwards she had sworn ruefully at her lack of character, begging Linda--in a momentary return of former happy companionship--never to let her make such a silly pig of herself again. Then she got so tired, Linda continued her mental deliberations; if she could only rest, go away from cities and resorts for a number of months, the lines in turn would soon vanish.

The elder moved impatiently, with a fretful exclamation, in the inner room; from outside came the subdued dull ceaseless clamor of New York.

Formerly it had frightened Linda; but her dread had become a wordless excitement at the thought of so much just beyond the windows; her hands grew cold and her heart suddenly pounded, destroying the vicarious image of her mother.