"My head's never been touched with dye," Mrs. Condon shrilly answered.

"You lying little ape. And well does that young woman know it. She complimented me herself on a true blonde." The girl had, too, right before Linda.

"You ought to be thrashed out of the city."

"Your money will be given back to you," M. Joseph told her.

Outside they found a taxi, and sped back to their hotel. Above, Mrs.

Condon removed her hat; and, before the uncompromising mirror, studied her wrecked hair--a frizzled vacancy was directly over her left brow--and haggard face. When she finally turned to Linda, her manner, her words, were solemn.

"I'm middle-aged," she said.

A dreary silence enveloped them sitting in the dark reception-room while Mrs. Condon restlessly shredded unlighted cigarettes on the floor. She had made no effort to repair the damages to her appearance, and when the telephone bell sharply sounded, she reached out in a slovenly negligence of manner. Linda could hear a blurred articulation and her mother answering listlessly. The latter at last said: "Very well, at seven then; you'll stop for us." She hung up the receiver, stared blankly at Linda, and then went off into a harsh mirth. "Oh, my G.o.d!" she cried; "the old ladies' home!"

XI

With her mother away on a wedding-trip with Mr. Moses Feldt, Linda was suddenly projected into the companionship of his two daughters. One, as he had said, was light, but a different fairness from Mrs.

Condon's--richly thick, like honey; while Judith, the elder, who must have been twenty, was dark in skin, in everything but her eyes, which were a contrasting ashen-violet. She spoke at once of Linda's flawless whiteness:

"A magnolia," she said, in a deliberate dark voice; "you are quite a gorgeous child. Do you mind my saying that your clothes are rather quaint? They aren't inevitable, and yours ought to be that."

They were at lunch in the Feldt dining-room, an interior of heavy ornately carved black wood, panels of Chinese embroidery in imperial yellow, and a neutral mauve carpet. The effect, with glittering iridescent pyramids of gla.s.s, ma.s.sive frosted repousse silver, burnished gold-plate and a wide table decoration of orchids and fern, was tropical and intense. It was evident to Linda that the Feldts were very rich indeed.

The entire apartment resembled the dining-room, while the building itself filled a whole city block, with a garden and fountains like an elaborate public square. Linda, however, wasn't particularly impressed by such show; she saw that Judith and Pansy had expected that of her; but she was determined not to exhibit a surprise that would imply any changes in her mother's and her condition. In addition, Linda calmly took such surroundings for granted. Her primary conception of possible existence was elegance; its necessity had so entered into her being that it had departed from her consciousness.

"I must take you to Lorice," Judith continued; "she will know better than any one else what you ought to have. You seem terribly pure--at first. But you're not a snowdrop; oh, no--something very rare in a conservatory. Much better style than your mother."

"I hope you won't mind Judith," Pansy put in; "she's always like that."

A silence followed in which they industriously dipped the leaves of mammoth artichokes into a b.u.t.tery sauce. Linda, as customary, said very little, she listened with patient care to the others and endeavored to arrive at conclusions. She liked Pansy, who was as warm and simple as her father. Judith was harder to understand. She was absorbed in color and music, and declared that ugliness gave her a headache at once.

Altogether, Linda decided, she was rather silly, especially about men; and at times her emotions would rise beyond control until she wept in a thin hysterical gasping.

The room where, mostly, they sat was small, but with a high ceiling, and hung in black, with paG.o.da-like vermilion chairs. The light, in the evening, was subdued; and Pansy and Judith, in extremely clinging vivid dresses, the former's hair piled high in an amber ma.s.s and Judith's drawn severely across her ears, were lovely. Linda thought of the tropical b.u.t.terflies of the river Amazon, of orchids like those always on the dining-room table. A miniature grand piano stood against the drapery, and Judith often played. Linda learned to recognize some of the composers. Pansy liked best the modern waltzes; Judith insisted that Richard Strauss was incomparable; but Linda developed an overwhelming preference for Gluck. The older girl insisted that this was an affectation; for a while she tried to confuse Linda's knowledge; but finally, playing the airs of "Orpheus and Eurydice," she admitted that the latter was sincere.

"They sound so cool," Linda said in a clear and decided manner.

There was a man with them, and he shook his head in a mock sadness.

"So young and yet so formal. If, with the rest, you had Judith's temperament, you would be the most irresistible creature alive. For see, my dear child, as it is you stir neither tenderness nor desire; you are remote and perfect, and faintly wistful. I can't imagine being human or even comfortable with you about. Then, too, you have too much wisdom."

"She is frightful," Pansy agreed; "she's never upset nor her hair a sight; and, above all else, Linda won't tell you a thing."

"Some day," Judith informed them from the rippling whisper of the piano, "she will be magnificently loved."

"Certainly," the man continued; "but what will Linda, Linda Condon, give in return?"

"It's a mistake to give much," Linda said evenly.

"No, no, no!" Judith cried. "Give everything; spend every feeling, every nerve."

"You are remarkable, of course; almost no women have the courage of their emotions." His name was Reynold Chase, a long thin grave young man in a dinner coat, who wrote brilliant and successful comedies. "Yet Linda isn't parsimonious." He turned to her. "Just what are you? What do you think of love?"

"I haven't thought about it much," she replied slowly. "I'm not sure that I know what it means. At least it hasn't anything to do with marriage--"

"Ah!" he interrupted her.

Her usually orderly mind grew confused; it eddied as though with the sound of the piano. "It is not marriage," she vaguely repeated her mother's instruction. Reynold Chase supported her.

"That destroys it," he a.s.serted. "This love is as different as possible from the ignominious impulse eternally tying the young into knots. It's anti-social."

"How stupid you are, Reynold," Pansy protested. "If you want to use those complicated words take Judith into the drawing-room. I'm sure Linda is dizzy, too."

The latter's mental confusion lingered; she had a strong sense of having heard Reynold Chase say these strange things long before. Judith left the piano, sat beside him, and he lightly kissed her. A new dislike of Judith Feldt deepened in Linda's being. She had no reason for it, but suddenly she felt absolutely opposed to her. The manner in which Judith rested against the man by her was very distasteful. It offended Linda inexplicably; she wanted to draw into an infinity of distance from all contact with men and life.

She didn't even want to make one of those marriages that had nothing to do with love, but was only a sensible arrangement for the securing of gowns and velvet hangings and the luxury of enclosed automobiles.

Suddenly she felt lonely, and hoped that her mother would come back soon.

XII

But when her mother, now Mrs. Moses Feldt, did return, Linda was conscious of a keen disappointment. Somehow she never actually came back. It wasn't only that, after so many years together, she occupied a room with another than Linda, but her manner was changed; it had lost all freedom of heart and speech. The new Mrs. Feldt was heavily polite to her husband's daughters; Linda saw that she liked Pansy, but Judith made her uncomfortable. She expressed this in an isolated return of the old confidences:

"That girl," she said sharply, "likes petting. She can talk all night about her soul and beauty, and play the piano till her fingers drop off, but I--I--know. You can't fool me where they are concerned. I can recognize an unhealthy sign. I never believed in going to all those concerts and kidding yourself into a fever. I may have shown myself a time, but you mark my word--I was honest compared to Judith Feldt. Don't you be impressed with all her art talk and the books she reads. I was looking into one yesterday, and it made me blush; you can believe it or not, it takes some book for that!"

At the same time she treated Judith with a studious sweetness. Mr. Moses Feldt--Linda always thought of him as that--was a miracle of kindly cheerfulness. He made his wife and her daughter, and his own girls, an unbroken succession of elaborate and costly presents. "What's it for if not to spend on those you love?" he would remark, bringing a small jeweler's box wrapped in creamy-pink paper from his pocket. "You can't take it with you. I wasn't born with it--mama and I were as poor as any--you'll forgive me, Stella, I know, for speaking of her. I got enough heart to love you both. 'Oh, mama!' I said, and she dying, 'if you only won't go, I'll give you gold to eat.'"

Curiously, as Linda grew older, the consciousness of her stepfather as an absurd fat little man dwindled; she lost all sense of his actual person; and, as the influence of her mother slipped from her life, the mental conception of Mr. Moses Feldt deepened. She thought about him a great deal and very seriously; the things he said, the warm impact of his being, vibrated in her memory. He had the effect on her of the music of Christopher Gluck--the effect of a pure fine chord.

Pansy she now thought of with a faint contempt: she was rapidly growing thick-waisted and heavy, and she was engaged to a dull young man not rich enough to be interesting. They sat about in frank embraces and indulged in a sentimental speech that united Judith and Linda in common oppression.

There were, not infrequently, gatherings of the Feldts at dinner, a noisy good-tempered uproar of a great many voices speaking at once; extraordinary quant.i.ties of superlative jewels and dresses of superfine textures; but the latter, Linda thought, were too vivid in pattern or color for the short full maternal figures they often adorned. But no one, it seemed, considered himself ageing or even, in spite of the most positive indications, aged. The wives with faded but fashionable hair and animated eyes in spent faces talked with vigorous raillery about the "boys," who, it might have happened, had gone in a small masculine company to a fervid musical show the evening before. While they, in their turn, thick like their brother or cousin Moses, with time-wasted hair and countenances marked with the shrewdness in the service of which the greater part of their lives had vanished, had their little jokes about the "girls" and the younger and handsomer beaux who threatened their happiness.

At times the topic of business crept into the lighter discussion, and, in an instant, the gaiety evaporated and left expressionless men and quick sharp sentences steely with decision, or indirect and imperturbably blank. A memorandum book and a gold pencil would appear for an enigmatic note, after which the cheerfulness slowly revived.

The daughters resembled Judith or the slower placidity of Pansy; while there was still another sort, more vigorous in being, who consciously discussed riding academies, the bridle-paths of Central Park, and the international tennis. Their dress held a greater restraint than the elders; though Linda recognized that it was no less lavish; and their feminine trifles, the morocco beauty-cases and powder-boxes, the shoulder-pins, their slipper and garter buckles were extravagant in exquisite metals and workings.

They arrived in limousines with dove-colored upholstery and crystal vases of maidenhair fern and moss-roses; and often, in such a car, Linda went to the theatre with Judith or Pansy and some cousins. Usually it was a matinee, where their seats were the best procurable, directly at the stage; and they sat in a sleek expensive row eating black chocolates from painted boxes ruffled in rose silk. The audience, composed mostly of their own world, followed the exotic fortunes of the plays with a complete discrimination in every possible emotional display and crisis.

Lithe actresses in a revealing severity of attire, like spoiled nuns with carmine lips, suffering in ingenuous problems of the pa.s.sions, agonized in shuddering tones; or else they went to concerts to hear young violinists, slender, with intense faces and dramatic hair, play concertos that irritated Linda with little shivers of delight.

Sometimes they had lunch in a restaurant of Circa.s.sian walnut and velvet carpets, with c.o.c.ktails, and eggs elaborate with truffles and French pastry. Then, afterward, they would stop at a confectioner's, or at a cafe where there was dancing, for tea. They all danced in a perfection of slow graceful abandon, with youths who, it seemed to Linda, did nothing else.

She accepted her part in this existence as inevitable, yet she was persistently aware of a feeling of strangeness, of essential difference from it. She was unable to lose a sense of looking on, as if morning, noon and night she were at another long play. Linda regarded it--as she did so much else--with neither enthusiasm nor marked annoyance. Probably it would continue without change through her entire life. All that was necessary, and easily obtained, was a sufficient amount of money.