"Dad cut him off rather short on that. He said that from a legal or business point of view, which was all that could possibly concern LaChaise, his consent wasn't necessary. If his wife signed a contract he would put no obstacles in the way of her fulfilling it. Beyond that he had obviously nothing to say.

"Well, that was about all. They both put on all the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs saying good night to each other and LaChaise thanked me very handsomely for interpreting. I chucked him into his overcoat and let him out the front door.--And bolted it after him, you bet! Lord, but I hated to go back to dad after that.

"I needn't have worried though. When we sat down for our smoke in the library, it was exactly as if nothing had happened. I'd have been tearing my hair but old dad.... He certainly is a peach."

Rush paused there for some comment from her and when she made none, looked around at her. Her hands were lightly clasped across her breast, her eyelids nearly closed. Save for her barely perceptible breathing, she lay dead still.

"Have I talked you to sleep?" he asked.

"No," she said, "I was thinking what a mixed-up thing life is. The way you can't help liking and admiring the people you wish you could hate and hating and hurting the ones you love." Then her eyes came open with a smile and she held out a hand toward him. "You don't have to answer that.

It's the sort of silly thing people say when they have been drinking gin.

What I was really wondering was whether there will be anything about Mr.

March's opera in that contract Paula signs with LaChaise?"

This startled him. "I never thought of that," he answered. "Do you suppose that's it? Oh, it can't be! She wouldn't chuck dad for that doughboy piano tuner. Not Paula!"

"Oh, no," said Mary. "She wouldn't do that. It wouldn't look to her like that, anyhow. She's got enough, don't you see, for everybody; for dad and--and the doughboy as well. Father wouldn't have any less, if he could just make up his mind that he didn't have to have it all. And as for the other, why, it might be the greatest thing that could possibly happen to him;--being in love with Paula and writing operas for her and having her sing them the way she sang those songs to-night. I suppose that's what a genius needs. And you couldn't blame her exactly. At least there always have been people like that and the world hasn't blamed them--no matter how moral it pretends to be. It's the other sort of people, the ones who won't take anything unless they can have it all and who can't give anything unless they can give it all--those that haven't but one thing to give--that are--no good."

He didn't more than half understand her, which was fortunate, since he was rather horrified as it was. He put it down broadly as the same sort of nervous crisis that he had encountered in New York, a sort of hypersensitiveness due to the strain of war work--the thing he had amused her by speaking of as sh.e.l.l-shock.

"I think perhaps I know what has upset you to-night," he said uncomfortably. "At least Graham told me about it."

She looked at him with a puzzled frown. It was the third time that he had brought up the Stannard boy's name. What in the world...?

"He's terribly distressed about it," Rush went on. In his embarra.s.sment he wasn't looking at her and she composed her face. "He didn't mean to shock you or--or offend you. He says he gave you reason enough to be offended, but only because you didn't understand. He says he has always--cared for you a lot. He said he thought you were the most--well, about the most perfect thing in the world. Only to-night he said he got carried off his feet and went further than he had any right to. And he simply can't bear to have you think that he meant anything--disrespectful. He felt he had to apologize to you before he went home, but you didn't come down so finally he told me about it and made me promise that I'd tell you to-night. Of course, I don't know what he did," Rush concluded, "but I can tell you this. Graham Stannard's a white man; they don't make them whiter than that."

Her reply, although it was unequivocally to the effect that it was all right--Graham needn't worry--failed, altogether, to rea.s.sure him. Was this, after all, he wondered, what she had exploded about? She prevented further inquiry, however, by an abrupt change of the subject, demanding to be told what it was that he and his father, all these hours, had been talking about.

He took up the topic with unforced enthusiasm. He had been surprised and deeply touched over the discovery that his father did not require to be argued out of the project either to send him back to Harvard or to start him in at the bottom in Martin Whitney's bank. "If he'd just been through it all himself, he couldn't have understood any better how I feel about it."

"Did you tell him about the farm?" Mary asked.

This was an idea of Graham's which she and Rush had been developing with him during the half hour in the drawing-room before they had gone down to dinner. Young Stannard, during his two years on a destroyer, had conceived an extraordinary longing for Mother Earth, and had filled in his dream in tolerably complete detail. What he wanted was an out-of-door life which should not altogether deprive him of the pleasures of an urban existence; and he accomplished this paradox by premising a farm within convenient motoring distance of Chicago, on one of the hard roads.

Somewhere in the dairy belt, out Elgin way perhaps. You could have wonderful week-end house parties in a place like that, even in winter, with skiing and skating for amus.e.m.e.nts, and in summer it would be simply gorgeous. And, of course, one could always run into town for the night if there was anything particular to come for.

Mary had volunteered to keep house for them and they had talked a lot of amusing nonsense as to what her duties should be. Graham, too, had a kid sister, only seventeen, who fitted admirably into the picture. She loved the country, simply lived in riding breeches and rode like a man--a sight better than most men--and drove a car like a young devil. There was nothing, in fact, she couldn't do.

Graham was altogether serious about it. He had been scouting around during the fortnight since his return and had his eyes on two or three places that might do. There was one four-hundred-acre property that was altogether desirable, ideal in fact, except for the one painful particular that the cost of it was just about twice as much as Graham's father was willing to run to. But if Rush would go in with him they need seek no further. The thing was as good as settled.

"I did talk to father about it," Rush now told Mary. "The thing is a real idea. Graham and I talked seriously about it while we were smoking before we went up-stairs. The scheme is to run a dairy, hog and poultry combination on a manufacturing basis and then sell our whole product direct to two or three customers in town, one or two of the clubs--perhaps a hotel. Deliver by motor truck every day, you see, and leave the middleman out entirely. It's the only way to beat the game.

Father saw it like a shot. He said it would take a lot of money, of course, but he thought he could manage my share."

Mary relaxed just perceptibly deeper in the pillows and her eyelids drooped again. "It's getting awfully late," Rush said; "don't you want to go to sleep?" But he needed no urging to go on when she asked him to tell her all about it, and for another half hour he elaborated the plan.

He was still breezing along on the full tide of the idea, when, happening to glance at her little traveling clock, he pulled himself up short, took away her extra pillows, switched off her night lamp and ordered her to go to sleep at once. Her apparent docility did not altogether satisfy him and two or three times during the hour before he himself fell asleep, he sat up to look under the door and see whether she had turned the light on again.

He was right about that, of course. The enforced calm Mary had imposed upon herself as a penance for the tempest of emotion she had indulged--she had lain without moving, hardly a finger, from the time she remade that bed and crept back into it until hearing Rush coming she switched on the light--had had a sort of hypnotic effect upon her. So long as her body did not move, it ceased to exist altogether and set her spirit free, like a pale-winged luna moth from its chrysalis to adventure into the night. The light it kept fluttering back to was that blinding experience with March while the music of his song had surged through her and her hand had been crushed in his.

Rush's coming in had brought her back to that tired still body of hers again; his voice soothed, his presence comforted her; at his occasional touch she was able to relax. (If only there were some one who loved her, who would hold her tight--tight--) She hoped he would go on talking to her; on and on. Because while he talked she could manage to stop thinking--by the squirrel-like process of storing away all the ideas he was suggesting to her for consideration later.

But when the respite was over and she lay back in the dark again, she made no effort to deny admission to the thoughts that came crowding so thickly. She must think; she must, before the ordeal of the next breakfast table, have taken thought. She must have decided if not what she should do, at least what she could hope for. She was much clearer and saner for the little interlude with Rush.

Suppose in the first place;--suppose that Paula's rebellion was serious.

Suppose the Tower of Bra.s.s violated and the Princess carried away by the _jinn_ or upon the magic carpet--whichever it was--to a world where none of them could follow her. Suppose John Wollaston bereft again. Would not Mary's old place be hers once more? Would not everything be just as it had been during those two years before her father went to Vienna?

But some instinct in her revolted utterly at that. It was an instinct that she could not completely reason out. But she knew that if such a calamity befell, her old place would not exist or would be intolerable if it did.

Suppose again:--suppose that Paula's rebellion could be somehow frustrated. Would it be possible to save Paula for her father by saving March from Paula? In plain words, by diverting him from Paula to herself.

That was a disgustingly vulgar way of putting it. But wasn't it what she meant? And if she couldn't be honest with her own thoughts.... Well then, were her powers of attraction great enough, even if they were consciously exerted to the utmost, to outpull Paula's with a musician, with a man whose songs she could sing as she had sung to-night?

That moment in Annie's old bedroom off the nursery supplied concretely enough the answer to her question. They had been soul to soul in there, they two. There was no language to describe the intimacy of it, except perhaps the hackneyed phrases of the wedding service which had lost all their meaning. And while they had stood together in the half dark, Paula had opened the door, bringing the light in with her. She had taken him confidently in her strong hands and kissed him and led him away without one hesitating backward thought.

And the truth seemed clear enough, incandescent, now she looked back at it, that it was Paula who had possessed him all along. That moment which she had called her own had been Paula's. Mary had got it because she had happened to come in and sit down beside him. She had, as it were, picked his pocket. She stood convicted the moment the rightful owner appeared.

That was how much her chance of "saving" March from Paula amounted to.

What a hypocrite she had been to use that phrase even in her thoughts.

Save him from Paula, indeed! Paula could give him, even if she gave only the half loaf, all he needed. She could inspire his genius, float it along on the broad current of her own energy. Compared to that, what could Mary give? What would it, her one possible gift, amount to?

She pulled herself up short. Wallowing again! No more of that. She'd leave March alone, and on that resolution she'd stop thinking about him.

She'd think about Rush and Graham and the farm.

Graham! They didn't come, Rush had said, any whiter than that. Probably he was right about it. It was a wonderful quality, that sort of whiteness. What was it he had done (she didn't even remember!) that had caused him such bitter self-reproach? You couldn't help liking him. It ought not to be hard to fall sufficiently in love with him. And out on a farm... A farmer's wife certainly had enough to do to keep her from growing restless. With a lot of children, four to half a dozen,--no one could call that a worthless life.

And it was practicable. With an even break in the luck, she could accomplish the whole of it. A man like Graham she could make happy. Her one gift would be enough for him; all he'd want. What was it he had told Rush to-night? That he had always thought her the most perfect...

At that, appallingly, she was seized in the cold grip of an unforeseen realization. She couldn't marry a boy like that--she couldn't marry any man who regarded her like that--without first telling him what she was; what she was not! She would have to make clear to him--there was simply no escape from that--the nature of the thing that had happened in that tiny flat in New York where she had lived alone so long.

It was possible, of course, oh, more than that, probable even, that after hearing the story he would still want to marry her. That he might regard her, no matter what she said, as having been wronged; her innocence, though once taken advantage of by a scoundrel, intact. His love would be reenforced by pity. He'd think of nothing, in the stress of that moment, but the desire to protect her, to provide a fortress for her.

But would she dare, on these terms, marry him, or any other man for that matter, no matter how ardently he professed forgiveness? It wouldn't be until after the marriage was an accomplished thing, its first desires satisfied, its first tension relaxed, that the story of her adventure would begin to loom black and thunderous over the horizon of his mind.

(Who was the man? How could it have happened? In what mood of madness could she have done such a thing? Might it ever,--when might it not--happen again?) No! Marriage was difficult enough without being handicapped additionally by a perennial misgiving like that. No thoroughfare again!

She started once more around the circle, but one can not keep at that sort of thing forever. About sunrise she fell asleep.

CHAPTER VIII

THE DUMB PRINCESS

None of his own family knew quite what to make of Anthony March. All of them but his mother disapproved of him, on more or less mutually contradictory grounds. Disapproved of him more than they did of one another, though he occupied a sort of middle ground between them. It is a possible explanation to the paradox that each of them regarded him as a potential ally and so spent more time trying to change his ways, scolding at him, pointing out his derelictions and lost opportunities, than it was worth while spending on the others who were hopeless.

I shall be a little more intelligible, perhaps, if I tell you briefly who they were. The father, David March, and Eveline, his wife, were New Englanders. They both came, as a matter of fact, from within ten miles of Glas...o...b..ry, Connecticut, though they didn't discover this fact until after they'd met a number of times in the social and religious activities of the Moody Inst.i.tute. The lives of both had been woven in the somber colors of Evangelical religion. With him this ran close to fanaticism and served as an outlet for a very intense emotional life.

She was not highly energized enough to go to extremes in anything, but she acquiesced in all his beliefs and practises, made him in short, a perfectly dutiful wife according to the Miltonian precept, "He for G.o.d only, she for G.o.d in him."