"One hundred dollars for a story, Susan. It looked a little fortune!"

"And were you married then?"

"Married?" He smiled. "My dear child, Mrs. Bocqueraz is worth almost a million dollars in her own right. No--we have never faced poverty together!" There was almost a wistful look in his eyes.

"And to whom is this book going to be dedicated?" asked Susan.

"Well, I don't know. Lillian has two, and Julie has one or two, and various men, here and in London. Perhaps I'll dedicate this one to a bold baggage of an Irish girl. Would you like that?"

"Oh, you couldn't!" Susan said, frightened.

"Why couldn't I?"

"Because,--I'd rather you wouldn't! I--and it would look odd!"

stammered Susan.

"Would you care, if it did?" he asked, with that treacherous sudden drop in his voice that always stirred her heart so painfully.

"No-o---" Susan answered, scarcely above a whisper.

"What are you afraid of, little girl?" he asked, putting his hand over hers on the desk.

Susan moved her hand away.

"Because, your wife---" she began awkwardly, turning a fiery red.

Bocqueraz abruptly left his seat, and walked to a window.

"Susan," he said, coming back, after a moment, "have I ever done anything to warrant--to make you distrust me?"

"No,--never!" said Susan heartily, ashamed of herself.

"Friends?" he asked, gravely. And with his sudden smile he put his two hands out, across the desk.

It was like playing with fire; she knew it. But Susan felt herself quite equal to anyone at playing with fire.

"Friends!" she laughed, gripping his hands with hers. "And now," she stood up, "really I mustn't interrupt you any longer!"

"But wait a moment," he said. "Come see what a pretty vista I get--right across the j.a.panese garden to the woods!"

"The same as we do upstairs," Susan said. But she went to stand beside him at the window.

"No," said Stephen Bocqueraz presently, quietly taking up the thread of the interrupted conversation, "I won't dedicate my book to you, Susan, but some day I'll write you a book of your own! I have been wishing,"

he added soberly, his eyes on the little curved bridge and the dwarfed shrubs, the pond and the stepping-stones across the garden, "I have been wishing that I never had met you, my dear. I knew, years ago, in those hard, early days of which I've been telling you, that you were somewhere, but--but I didn't wait for you, Susan, and now I can do no more than wish you G.o.d-speed, and perhaps give you a helping hand upon your way! That's all I wanted to say."

"I'm--I'm not going to answer you," said Susan, steadily, composedly.

Side by side they looked out of the window, for another moment or two, then Bocqueraz turned suddenly and catching her hands in his, asked almost gaily:

"Well, this is something, at least, isn't it--to be good friends, and to have had this much of each other?"

"Surely! A lot!" Susan answered, in smiling relief. And a moment later she had delivered her message, and was gone, and he had seated himself at his work again.

How much was pretense and how much serious earnest, on his part, she wondered. How much was real on her own? Not one bit of it, said Susan, fresh from her bath, in the bracing cool winter morning, and walking briskly into town for the mail. Not--not much of it, anyway, she decided when tea-time brought warmth and relaxation, the leaping of fire-light against the library walls, the sound of the clear and cultivated voice.

But what was the verdict later, when Susan, bare-armed and bare-shouldered, with softened light striking bra.s.sy gleams from her hair, and the perfumed dimness and silence of the great house impressing every sense, paused for a message from Stephen Bocqueraz at the foot of the stairs, or warmed her shining little slipper at the fire, while he watched her from the chair not four feet away?

When she said "I--I'm not going to answer you," in the clear, bright morning light, Susan was enjoyably aware of the dramatic value of the moment; when she evaded Bocqueraz's eye throughout an entire luncheon she did it deliberately; it was a part of the cheerful, delightful game it pleased them both to be playing.

But not all was posing, not all was pretense. Nature, now and then, treacherously slipped in a real thrill, where only play-acting was expected. Susan, laughing at the memory of some sentimental fencing, was sometimes caught unaware by a little pang of regret; how blank and dull life would be when this casual game was over! After all, he WAS the great writer; before the eyes of all the world, even this pretense at an intimate friendship was a feather in her cap!

And he did not attempt to keep their rapidly developing friendship a secret; Susan was alternately gratified and terrified by the reality of his allusions to her before outsiders. No playing here! Everybody knew, in their little circle, that, in the nicest and most elder-brotherly way possible, Stephen Bocqueraz thought Susan Brown the greatest fun in the world, and quoted her, and presented her with his autographed books. This side of the affair, being real, had a tendency to make it all seem real, and sometimes confused, and sometimes a little frightened Susan.

"That a woman of Emily's mental caliber can hire a woman of yours, for a matter of dollars and cents," he said to Susan whimsically, "is proof that something is radically wrong somewhere! Well, some day we'll put you where values are a little different. Anybody can be rich. Mighty few can be Susan!"

She did not believe everything he said, of course, or take all his chivalrous speeches quite seriously. But obviously, some of it was said in all honesty, she thought, or why should he take the trouble to say it? And the nearness of his bracing personality blew across the artificial atmosphere in which she lived like the cool breath of great moors or of virgin forests. Genius and work and success became the real things of life; money but a mere accident. A horrible sense of the unreality of everything that surrounded her began to oppress Susan. She saw the poisoned undercurrent of this glittering and exquisite existence, the selfishness, the cruelties, the narrowness. She saw its fundamental insincerity. In a world where wrongs were to be righted, and ignorance enlightened, and childhood sheltered and trained, she began to think it strange that strong, and young, and wealthy men and women should be content to waste enormous sums of money upon food to which they scarcely ever brought a normal appet.i.te, upon bridge-prizes for guests whose interest in them scarcely survived the moment of unwrapping the dainty beribboned boxes in which they came, upon costly toys for children whose nurseries were already crowded with toys. She wondered that they should think it worth while to spend hours and days in hara.s.sing dressmakers and milliners, to make a brief appearance in the gowns they were so quickly ready to discard, that they should gratify every pa.s.sing whim so instantly that all wishes died together, like little plants torn up too soon.

The whole seemed wonderful and beautiful still. But the parts of this life, seriously a.n.a.lyzed, seemed to turn to dust and ashes. Of course, a hundred little shop-girls might ache with envy at reading that Mrs.

Harvey Brock was to give her debutante daughter a fancy-dress ball, costing ten thousand dollars, and might hang wistfully over the pictures of Miss Peggy Brock in her Dresden gown with her ribbon-tied crook; but Susan knew that Peggy cried and scolded the whole afternoon, before the dance, because Teddy Russell was not coming, that young Martin Brock drank too much on that evening and embarra.s.sed his entire family before he could be gotten upstairs, and that Mrs. Brock considered the whole event a failure because some favors, for which she had cabled to Paris, did not come, and the effect of the german was lost. Somehow, the "lovely and gifted heiress" of the newspapers never seemed to Susan at all reconcilable with Dolly Ripley, vapid, overdressed, with diamonds sparkling about her sallow throat, and the "jolly impromptu" trip of the St. Johns to New York lost its point when one knew it was planned because the name of young Florence St. John had been pointedly omitted from Ella Saunders dance list.

Boasting, lying, pretending--how weary Susan got of it all! She was too well schooled to smile when Ella, meeting the Honorable Mary Saunders and Sir Charles Saunders, of London, said magnificently, "We bear the same arms, Sir Charles, but of course ours is the colonial branch of the family!" and she nodded admiringly at Dolly Ripley's boyish and blunt fashion of saying occasionally "We Ripleys,--oh, we drink and gamble and do other things, I admit; we're not saints! But we can't lie, you know!"

"I hate to take the kiddies to New York, Mike," perhaps some young matron would say simply. "Percy's family is one of the old, old families there, you know, shamelessly rich, and terribly exclusive! And one doesn't want the children to take themselves seriously yet awhile!"

"Bluffers!" the smiling and interested Miss Brown would say to herself, as she listened. She listened a great deal; everyone was willing to talk, and she was often amused at the very slight knowledge that could carry a society girl through a conversation. In Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's offices there would be instant challenges, even at auntie's table affectation met its just punishment, and inaccuracy was promptly detected. But there was no such censorship here.

"Looks like a decent little cob!" some girl would say, staring at rider pa.s.sing the hotel window, at teatime.

"Yes," another voice would agree, "good points. Looks thoroughbred."

"Yes, he does! Looks like a Kentucky mount."

"Louisa! Not with that neck!"

"Oh, I don't know. My grandfather raised fancy stock, you know. Just for his own pleasure, of course, So I DO know a good horse!"

"Well, but he steps more like a racer," somebody else would contribute.

"That's what I thought! Loose-built for a racer, though."

"And what a fool riding him--the man has no seat!"

"Oh, absolutely not! Probably a groom, but it's a shame to allow it!"

"Groom, of course. But you'll never see a groom riding a horse of mine that way!"

"Rather NOT!"

And, an ordinary rider, on a stable hack, having by this time pa.s.sed from view, the subject, would be changed.