"All right. Good-by."

"Goot-py, Marie Louise."

CHAPTER II

While Mamise was talking her telephone ear had suffered several sharp and painful rasps, as if angry rattlesnakes had wakened in the receiver.

The moment she put it up the bell rang. Supposing that Nicky had some postscript to add, she lifted the receiver again. Her ear was as bewildered as your tongue when it expects to taste one thing and tastes another, for it was Davidge's voice that spoke, asking for her.

She called him by name, and he growled:

"Good Lord! is that you? Who was the fascinating stranger who kept me waiting so long?"

"Don't you wish you knew?" she laughed. "Where are you now? At the shipyard?"

"No, I'm in Washington--ran up on business. Can I see you to-night?"

"I hope so--unless we're going out--as I believe we are. Hold the wire, won't you, while I ask." She came back in due season to say, "Polly says you are to come to dinner and go to a dance with us afterward."

"A dance? I'm not invited."

"It's a kind of club affair at a hotel. Polly has the right to take you--no end of big bugs will be there."

"I'm rusty on dancing, but with you--"

"Thanks. We'll expect you, then. Dinner is at eight. Wrap up well.

It's cold, isn't it?"

He thought it divine of her to think of his comfort. The thought of her in his arms dancing set his heart to rioting. He was singing as he dressed, and as he rode put to Grinden Hall, singing a specimen of the new musical insanity known as "jazz"--so pestilential a music that even the fiddlers capered and writhed.

The Potomac was full of tumultuous ice, and the old Rosslyn bridge squealed with cold under the motor. It was good to see the lights of the Hall at last, and to thaw himself out at the huge fireplace.

"Lucky to get a little wood," said Major Widdicombe. "Don't know what we'll do when it's gone. Coal is next to impossible."

Then the women came down, Polly and Mamise and two or three other house guests, and some wives of important people. They laid off their wraps and then decided to keep them on.

Davidge had been so used to seeing Mamise as a plainly clad, discouraged office-hack that when she descended the stairs and paused on the landing a few steps from the floor, to lift her eyebrows and her lip-corners at him, he was glad of the pause.

"Break it to me gently," he called across the bal.u.s.trade.

She descended the rest of the way and advanced, revealed in her complete height and all her radiant vesture. He was dazed by her unimagined splendor.

As she gave him her hand and collected with her eyes the tribute in his, she said:

"Break what to you gently?"

"You!" he groaned. "Good Lord! Talk about 'the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome'!"

With amiable reciprocity she returned him a compliment on his evening finery.

"The same to you and many of them. You are quite stunning in decollete. For a pair of common laborers, we are certainly gaudy."

Polly came up and greeted Davidge with, "So you're the fascinating brute that keeps Marie Louise down in the penitentiary of that awful ship-factory."

Davidge indicated her brilliance and answered: "Never again. She's fired! We can't afford her."

"Bully for you," said Polly. "I suppose I'm an old-fashioned, grandmotherly sort of person, but I'll be d.a.m.ned if I can see why a woman that can look as gorgeous as Marie Louise here should be pounding typewriter keys in an office. Of course, if she had to-- But even then, I should say that it would be her solemn religious duty to sell her soul for a lot of glad-rags.

"A lot of people are predicting that women will never go back to the foolish frills and furbelows of before the war; but--well, I'm no prophetess, but all I can say is that if this war puts an end to the dressmaker's art, it will certainly put civilization on the blink.

Now, honestly, what could a woman accomplish in the world if she worked in overalls twenty-four hours a day for twenty-four years--what could she make that would be more worth while than getting herself all dressed up and looking her best?"

Davidge said: "You're talking like a French aristocrat before the Revolution; but I wish you could convince her of it."

Mamise was trying to take her triumph casually, but she was thrilled, thrilled with the supreme pride of a woman in her best clothes--in and out of her best clothes, and liberally illuminated with jewelry. She was now something like a great singer singing the highest note of her master-aria in her best role--herself at once the perfect instrument and the perfect artist.

Marie Louise went in on Davidge's arm. The dining-room was in gala attire, the best silver and all of it out--flowers and candles. But the big vault was cold; the men shivered and marveled at the women, who left their wraps on the backs of their chairs and sat up in no apparent discomfort with shoulders, backs, chests, and arms naked to the chill.

Polly was moved to explain to the great folk present just who Mamise was. She celebrated Mamise in her own way.

"To look at Miss Webling, would you take her for a perfect nut? She is, though--the worst ever. Do you know what she has done? Taken up stenography and gone into the office of a ship-building gang!"

The other squaws exclaimed upon her with various out-cries of amazement.

"What's more," said Mamise, "I live on my salary."

This was considered incredible in the Washington of then. Mamise admitted that it took management.

Mamise said: "Polly, can you see me living in a shanty cooking my own breakfast and dinner and waiting on myself and washing my own dishes?

And for lunch going to a big mess-hall, waiting on myself, too, and eating on the swollen arm of a big chair?"

Polly shook her head in despair of her. "Let those do it that have to. n.o.body's going to get me to live like a Belgian refugee without giving me the same excuse."

Mamise suddenly felt that her heroism was hardly more than a silly affectation, a patriotic pose. In these surroundings the memory of her daily life was disgusting, plain stupidity. Here she was in her element, at her superlative. She breathed deeply of the atmosphere of luxury, the incense of rich food served ceremoniously to resplendent people.

"I'm beginning to agree with you, Polly. I don't think I'll ever go back to honest work again."

She thought she saw in Davidge's eyes a gleam of approval. It occurred to her that he was renewing his invitation to her to become his wife and live as a lady. She was not insulted by the surmise.

When the women departed for the drawing-room, the men sat for a while, talking of the coal famine, the appalling debts the country was heaping into mountains--the blood-sweating taxes, the business end of the war, the prospect for the spring campaign on the Western Front, the avalanche of Russia, the rise of the Bolsheviki, the story that they were in German pay, the terrible toll of American lives it would take to replace the Russian armies, and the humiliating delay in getting men into uniform, equipped, and ferried across the sea. The astounding order had just been promulgated, shutting down all industry and business for four days and for the ten succeeding Mondays in order to eke out coal; this was regarded as worse than the loss of a great battle. Every aspect of the war was so depressing that the coroner's inquest broke up at once when Major Widdicombe said:

"I get enough of this in the shop, and I'm frozen through. Let's go in and jaw the women."

Concealing their loneliness, the men entered the drawing-room with the majestic languor of lions well fed.

Davidge paused to study Mamise from behind a smokescreen that concealed his stare. She was listening politely to the wife of Holman, of the War Trade Board. Mrs. Holman's stories were always long, and people were always interrupting them because they had to or stay mute all night. Davidge was glad of her clatter, because it gave him a chance to revel in Mamise. She was presented to his eyes in a kind of mitigated silhouette against a bright-hued lamp-shade. She was seated sidewise on a black Chinese chair. On the back of it her upraised arm rested. Davidge's eyes followed the strange and marvelous outline described by the lines of that arm, running into the sharp rise of a shoulder, like an apple against the throat, the bizarre shape of the head in its whimsical coiffure, the slope of the other shoulder carrying the caressing glance down that arm to the hand clasping a sheaf of outspread plumes against her knee, and on along to where one quaint impossible slipper with a fantastic high heel emerged from a stream of fabric that flowed on out to the train.