"I see," Steve said, meekly.

"I think it is the duty of rich women to know all about frying things as well as eating them," she said, as she took a third caramel.

"Quite true. Having money isn't always keeping it"

"Oh, papa has loads of money--enough for all of us," she remarked, easily. "It isn't that. I'd never cook if I were poor, anyway; that would be the last thing I'd ever dream of doing. It's fun to go to the domestic-science cla.s.s as long as all my set go. Well--will you be a nice angel-man and stay home to amuse your fractious wife?"

"I'll call Miss Faithful on the phone and say I'm going to play hooky," he consented. "By the way, you must come down to the office and say h.e.l.lo to her when you get the time."

Beatrice kissed him. "Must I? I hate offices. Besides, g.a.y.l.o.r.d has married your prettiest clerk, and there will be no one to play with me except my husband."

"Funny thing--that marriage," Steve commented. "If it was any one but Gay I'd send condolences for loading the office nuisance onto him."

"Wasn't she any use at all?" she asked, curiously.

"None--always having a headache and being excused for the day. That was the only thing I ever questioned in Mary Faithful--why she engaged Trudy and took her into her own home as a boarder."

"Oh, so Mary isn't perfection? Don't be too hard on the other girl.

I'd be quite as useless if I ever had to work. I'd do just the same--have as many headaches as the firm would stand for, and marry the first man who asked me."

"But think of marrying Gay!"

"Poor old Gay--his father was a dear, and he is terribly well behaved.

Besides, see how obliging he is. Your Miss Faithful refused to help me out, and Gay ran his legs off to get everything I wanted. I'll never be rude to Gay as long as he amuses me."

"That's the thing that leads them all, isn't it, princess?"

CHAPTER VI

After the first round of excessively formal entertainments for Mr. and Mrs. O'Valley, Steve found a mental hunger suddenly a.s.serting itself.

It was as if a farm hand were asked to subsist upon a diet of weak tea and wafers.

In the first place, no masculine mind can quite admit the superiority of a feminine mind when it concerns handling said masculine mind's business affairs. Though Steve insisted that Mary had done quite as well as he would have done, he told himself secretly that he must get down to hard work and go over the letters and memoranda which had developed during his absence.

With quiet amus.e.m.e.nt Mary had agreed to the investigation, watching him prowl among the files with the same tolerant att.i.tude she would have entertained toward Luke had he insisted that he could run the household more efficiently than a mere sister.

"Poor tired boy," she used to think when Steve would come into the office with a f.a.gged look on his handsome face and new lines steadily growing across his forehead. "You don't realize yet--you haven't begun to realize."

And Steve, trying to catch up with work and plan for the future, to respond graciously to every civic call made upon him, would find himself enmeshed in a desperate combination of Beatrice's dismay over the cut of her new coat, her delight at the latest scandal, her headaches, the special order for glace chestnuts he must not forget, the demand that he come home for luncheon just because she wanted him to talk to, the New York trip looming ahead with Bea coaxing him to stay the entire time and let business slide along as it would. All the while the anaesthesia of unreality was lessening in its effect now that he had attained his goal.

The rapt adoration he felt for his wife was in a sense a rather subtle form of egotism he felt for himself. The Gorgeous Girl or rather any Gorgeous Girl personified his starved dreams and frantic ambitions. He had turned his face toward such a goal for so many tense years, goading himself on and breathing in the anaesthesia of indifference and unreality to all else about him that having obtained it he now paused exhausted and about to make many disconcerting discoveries. Had the Gorgeous Girl had hair as black as his own or a nose such as Mary Faithful's she would have still been his goal, symbol of his aims.

Having finished the long battle Steve now felt an urge to begin to battle for something else besides wealth and social position. He felt ill at ease in Beatrice's salon and among her friends, who all seemed particularly inane and ridiculous, who were all just as busy and tired and nervous as Beatrice was for some strange reason, and who considered it middle cla.s.s not to smoke and common to show any natural sentiment or emotion. He soon found it was quite the thing to display the temperament of an oyster when any vital issue was discussed or any play, for example, had a scene of deep and inspiring words. A queer little smirk or t.i.tter was the proper applause, but one must wax enthusiastic and superlative over a clever burglary, a new-style dance, a chafing-dish concoction, or, a risque story retold in drawing-room language.

Before his marriage Beatrice had always been terribly rushed and he had had more time in which to work and glow with pride at the nearing of his goal. She kept him at arm's length very cleverly anch.o.r.ed with the two-carat engagement ring and Steve had to fight for time and plead for an audience. It fired his imagination, making him twice as keen for the final capture.

But when two persons live in the same apartment, notwithstanding the eleven rooms and so on, a monotony of existence pervades even the grandeur of velvet-panelled walls. There are the inevitable three meals a day to be gone through with--five meals if tea and a supper party are counted. There are the same ever-rising questions as to the cook's honesty and the chauffeur's graft in the matter of buying, new tires. There are just so many persons who have to be wined and dined and who revenge themselves by doing likewise to their former host; the everlasting exchanging of courtesies and pleasantries--all the dull, decent habits of ultra living.

Steve found his small store of possessions huddled into a corner, his pet slippers and gown graciously bestowed upon a pa.s.sing panhandler, and he was obliged to don a very correct gray "shroud," as he named it in thankless terms, and to put his cigar and cigar ashes into something having the earmarks of an Etruscan coal scuttle, though Beatrice said it was a priceless antique Gay had bought for a song!

There were many times when Steve would have liked to roam about his house in plebeian shirt sleeves, eat a plain steak and French-fried potatoes with a hunk of homemade pie as a finish, and spend the evening in that harmless, disorderly fashion known to men of doing nothing but stroll about smoking, playing semi-popular records, reading the papers, and very likely having another hunk of pie at bedtime.

Besides all this there were the topics of the day to discuss. During his courtship love was an all-absorbing topic. There were many questions that Beatrice asked that required intricate and tiring answers. During the first six weeks of living at the apartment Steve realized a telling difference between men and women is that a woman demands a specific case--you must rush special incidents to back up any theory you may advance--whereas men, for the most part, are content with abstract reasoning and supply their own incidents if they feel inclined. Also that a finely bred fragile type of woman such as Beatrice inspires both fear and a maudlin sort of sympathy, and that man is prevented from crossing such a one to any great extent since men are as easily conquered by maudlin sympathy as by fear.

When a yellow-haired child with dove-coloured eyes manages to squeeze out a tear and at the same moment depart in wrath to her room and lock the doors, refusing to answer--the trouble being why in heaven's name must a pound-and-a-half spaniel called Monster, nothing but a flea-bearing dust mop, do nothing but sit and yap for chocolates?--what man is going to dare do otherwise than suppress a little profanity and then go and whisper apologies at the keyhole?

After several uncomfortable weeks of this sort of mental chaos Steve determined to do what many business men do--particularly the sort starting life in an orphan asylum and ending by having residence pipe organs and Russian wolfhounds frolicking at their heels--to bury himself in his work and defend his seclusion by never refusing to write a check for his wife. When he finally reached this decision he was conscious of a strange joy.

Everything was a trifle too perfect to suit Steve. The entire effect was that of the well-set stage of a society drama. Beatrice was too correctly gowned and coiffured, always upstage if any one was about, her high-pitched, thin voice saying superlative nothings upon the slightest provocation; or else she was dissolving into tears and tantrums if no one was about.

Steve could not grasp the wherefore of having such stress laid upon the exact position of a floor cushion or the colour scheme for a bridge luncheon--he would have so rejoiced in really mediocre table service, in less precision as to the various angles of the shades or the unrumpled condition of the rugs. He had not the oasis Mark Constantine had provided for himself when he kept his room of old-fashioned trappings apart from the rest of the mansion.

Steve needed such a room. He planned almost guiltily upon building a shack in the woods whither he could run when things became too impossible for his peace of mind. If he could convince his wife that a thing was smart or different from everything else its success and welcome in their house were a.s.sured. But an apple pie, a smelly pipe, a maidless dinner table, or a disorderly den had never been considered smart in Beatrice's estimation, and Steve never attempted trying to change her point of view.

Beatrice wondered, during moments of seriousness, how it was that this handsome cave man of hers rebelled so constantly against the beauty and correctness of the apartment and yet never really disgraced her as her own father would have done. It gave her added admiration for Steve though she felt it would be a mistake to tell him so. She did not believe in letting her husband see that she was too much in love with him.

Despite his growls and protests about this and that, and his ignorance as to the things in life Beatrice counted paramount, Steve adapted himself to the new environment with a certain poise that astonished everyone. The old saying "Every Basque a n.o.ble" rang true in this descendant of a dark-haired, romantic young woman whom his grandfather had married. There was blood in Steve which Beatrice might have envied had she been aware of it. But Steve was in ignorance, and very willingly so, regarding his ancestors. There had merely been "my folks"--which began and ended the matter.

Still it was the thoroughbred strain which the Basque woman had given her grandson that enabled Steve to be master of his house even if he knew very little of what it was all about. It was fortunate for his peace of mind--and pocketbook--that Beatrice had accepted the general rumour of a goat-tending ancestry and pried no further. Had she ever glimpsed the genealogy tables of the Benefacio family, from which Steve descended, she would have had the best time of all; coats of arms and family crests and mottoes would have been the vogue; a trip to the Pyrenees would have followed; mantillas and rebozos would have crowded her wardrobe, and Steve would have been forced to learn Spanish and cultivate a troubadourish air.

Moreover, the Gorgeous Girl was not willing that her husband be buried in business. She could not have so good a time without him--besides, it was meet that he acquired polish. Her father was a different matter; everyone knew his ways and would be as likely to try to change the gruff, harsh-featured man as to try surveying Gibraltar with a penny ruler. Now Beatrice had married Steve because cave men were rather the mode, cave men who were wonderfully successful and had no hampering relatives. Besides, her father favoured Steve and he would not have been amiable had he been forced to accept a son-in-law of whom he did not approve. Mark Constantine had never learned graciousness of the heart, nor had his child.

So Beatrice proceeded to badger Steve whenever he pleaded business, with the result that she kept dropping in at his office, sometimes bringing friends, coaxing him to close his desk and come and play for the rest of the day. Sometimes she would peek in at Mary Faithful's office and baby talk--for Steve's edification--something like this:

"Ise a naughty dirl--I is--want somebody to play wif me--want to be amoosed. Do oo care? Nice, busy lady--big brain."

Often she would bring a gift for Mary in her surface generous fashion--a box of candy or a little silk handkerchief. She pitied Mary as all b.u.t.terflies pity all ants, and she little knew that as soon as she had departed Mary would open the window to let fresh air drive out distracting perfume, and would look at the useless trifle on her desk with scornful amus.e.m.e.nt.

Before the New York trip Steve took refuge in his first deliberate lie to his wife. He had lied to himself throughout his courtship but was most innocent of the offence.

"If Mrs. O'Valley telephones or calls please say I have gone out to the stockyards," he told Mary. "And will you lend me your office for the afternoon? I'm so rushed I must be alone where I can work without interruption."

Mary gathered up her papers. "I'll keep you under cover." She was smiling.

"What's the joke?"

"I was thinking of how very busy idle people always are and of how much time busy people always manage to make for the idle people's demands."

He did not answer until he had collected his work materials. Then he said: "I should like to know just what these idle people do with themselves but I shall never have the time to find out." He vanished into Mary's office, banging the door.

Beatrice telephoned that afternoon, only to be given her husband's message.

"I'll drive out to the stockyards and get him," she proposed.

"He went with some men and I don't believe I'd try it if I were you,"

Mary floundered.