You've seen how this one," Dolly tossed her head in disgust as she indicated Lottie Nelson, then pa.s.sing, "throws herself at him." With the last words Dolly rose to say she was going home. Imogene was ready to join her, and Lottie's protests were of no avail. Charles was upstairs conferring with Nelson and Imogene went up to get him.

Alice walked to the dining-room. Her husband, in an uncommonly good-humor, was drinking with their hostess. In the centre of the room, Hamilton, Guyot, Lambert, and Dora Morgan sat at the large table. Guyot offered Alice a chair. She sat down and found him entertaining. He took her after a time into the reception room where Lottie had hung a Degas that Guyot had brought over for her. Alice admired the fascinating swiftness and sureness of touch but did not agree with Guyot that the charm was due to the merit of color over line. When the two returned to the dining-room, Kimberly stood at a cellaret with Fritzie.

Lottie and MacBirney sat with the group at the big table. "Oh, Robert,"

Lottie called to Kimberly as Alice appeared in the doorway, "mix me a c.o.c.ktail."

Turning, Kimberly saw Alice: "I am out of practice, Lottie," he said.

"Give me some plain whiskey then."

Kimberly's shortness of manner indicated his annoyance. "You have that at your hand," he said sitting down.

"How rude, Robert," retorted Lottie, with a.s.sumed impatience. She glanced loftily around. "Walter," she exclaimed, looking across the table at Alice's husband and taking Alice's breath away with the appeal, "give me some whiskey."

"Certainly, Mrs. Nelson."

"No, stop; mix me a c.o.c.ktail."

"Is your husband an expert, Mrs. MacBirney?" asked Guyot as MacBirney rose.

"Not to my knowledge," answered Alice frankly. "I hope," she added, with a touch of asperity as her husband stepped to a sideboard, "that Mrs.

Nelson is not fastidious."

"It is disgusting the way my friends are behaving," complained Lottie turning to Lambert. "This is my birthday----"

"Your birthday!"

"That is why you are all here. And whoever refuses now to drink my health I cast off forever."

"Is this a regular birthday or are you springing an extra on us?"

demanded Fritzie.

"Go on, MacBirney, with your mixture," exclaimed Lambert, "I'll serve at the table. You are going to join us, of course, Mrs. MacBirney?"

Alice answered in trepidation: "It must be something very light for me."

"Try whiskey, Mrs. MacBirney," suggested Dora Morgan benevolently, "it is really the easiest of all."

Alice grew nervous. Kimberly, without speaking, pushed a half-filled gla.s.s toward her. She looked at him in distress. "That will not hurt you," he said curtly.

The men were talking Belgian politics. Lambert was explaining the antiquated customs of the reactionaries and the battle of the liberals for the laicizing of education. He dwelt on the stubbornness of the clericals and the difficulties met with in modernizing their following.

Kimberly either through natural dislike for Lambert or mere stubbornness objected to the specific instances of mediaevalism adduced and soon had the energetic chemist nettled. "What do you know about the subject?"

demanded Lambert at length. "Are you a Catholic?"

"I am not a Catholic," returned Kimberly amiably. "I am as far as possible, I suppose, from being one. The doors of the church are wide, but if we can believe even a small part of what is printed of us they would have to be broadened materially to take in American refiners."

"If you are not a Catholic, what are you?" persisted Lambert with heat.

"I have one serious religious conviction; that is, that there are just two perfectly managed human inst.i.tutions; one, the Standard Oil Company, the other the Catholic Church."

There was now a chance to drop the controversy and the women together tried to effect a diversion. But Lambert's lips parted over his white teeth in a smile. "I have noticed sometimes that what we know least about we talk best about." Kimberly stirred languidly. "I was born of Catholic parents," continued Lambert, "baptized in the Catholic Church, educated in it. I should know something about it, shouldn't I? You, Mr.

Kimberly, must admit you know nothing about it." Kimberly snorted a little. "All the same, I take priests' fables for what they are worth,"

added Lambert; "such, for example, as the Resurrection of Christ."

Lambert laughed heartily. Fritzie looked uneasily at Alice as the words fell. Her cheeks were crimsoned.

"Can a central fact of Christianity such as the Resurrection fairly be called a priests' fable?" asked Kimberly.

"Why not?" demanded Lambert with contemptuous brevity. "None but fossilized Catholics believe such nonsense!"

"There are still some Protestants left," suggested Kimberly mildly.

"No priest dictates to me," continued the chemist, aroused. "No superst.i.tion for me. I want Catholics educated, enlightened, made free.

I should know something about the church, should I not? You admit you know nothing----"

"No, I did not admit that," returned Kimberly. "You admitted it for me.

And you asked me a moment ago what I was. Lambert, what are you?"

"I am a Catholic--not a clerical!" Lambert emphasized the words by looking from one to another in the circle. Kimberly spread one of his strong hands on the table. Fritzie watching him shrank back a little.

"You a Catholic?" Kimberly echoed slowly. "Oh, no; this is a mistake."

His hand closed. "You say you were born a Catholic. And you ridicule the very corner-stone of your faith. The last time I met you, you were talking the same sort of stuff. I wonder if you have any idea what it has cost humanity to give you the faith you sneer at, Lambert? To give you Catholic parents, men nineteen hundred years ago allowed themselves to be nailed to crosses and torn by dogs. Boys hardly seven years old withstood starvation and scourging and boys of fifteen were burned in pagan amphitheatres that you might be born a Christian; female slaves were thrown into boiling oil to give you the privilege of faith; delicate women died in shameful agonies and Roman maidens suffered their bodies to be torn to pieces with red-hot irons to give you a Christian mother--and you sit here to-night and ridicule the Resurrection of Christ! Call yourself liberal, Lambert; call yourself enlightened; call yourself Modern; but for G.o.d's sake don't call yourself a Catholic."

"Stop a moment!" cried Lambert at white heat.

Lottie put out her arm. "Don't let's be cross," she said with deliberate but unmistakable authority. "I hate a row." She turned her languid eyes on MacBirney. "Walter, what are these people drinking that makes them act in this way? Do give Mr. Kimberly something else; he began it."

Kimberly made no effort to soothe any one's feelings. And when Fritzie and Alice found an excuse to leave the room he rose and walked leisurely into the hall after them.

The three talked a few moments. A sound of hilarity came from the music room. Alice looked uneasily down the hall.

"I never knew your husband could sing," said Fritzie.

CHAPTER XVI

It dawned only gradually on Alice that her husband was developing a surprising tendency. He walked into the life that went on at the Nelson home as if he had been born to it. From an existence absorbed in the pursuit of business he gave himself for the moment to one absorbed in pursuit of the frivolous. Alice wondered how he could find anything in Lottie Nelson and her following to interest him; but her husband had offered two or three unpleasant, even distressing, surprises within as few years and she took this new one with less consternation than if it had been the first.

Yet it was impossible not to feel annoyance. Lottie Nelson, in what she would have termed an innocent way, for she cared nothing for MacBirney, in effect appropriated him, and Alice began to imagine herself almost third in the situation.

Tact served to carry the humiliated wife over some of the more flagrant breaches of manners that Mrs. Nelson did not hesitate at, if they served her caprice. MacBirney became "Walter" to her everywhere. She would call him from the city in the morning or from his bed at night; no hour was too early to summon him and none too late. The invitations to the Nelsons' evenings were extended at first both to Alice and to him. Alice accepted them in the beginning with a hopeless sort of protest, knowing that her husband would go anyway and persuading herself that it was better to go with him. If she went, she could not enjoy herself.

Drinking was an essential feature of these occasions and Alice's efforts to avoid it made her the object of a ridicule on Lottie's part that she took no pains to conceal.

It was at these gatherings that Alice began to look with a degree of hope for a presence she would otherwise rather have avoided. Kimberly when he came, which was not often, brought to her a sense of relief because experience had shown that he would seek to shield her from embarra.s.sment rather than to expose her to it.

Lottie liked on every occasion to a.s.sume to manage Kimberly together with the other men of her acquaintance. But from being, at first, complaisant, or at least not unruly, Kimberly developed mulish tendencies. He would not, in fact, be managed. When Lottie attempted to force him there were outbreaks. One came about over Alice, she being a subject on which both were sensitive.