It was so horrid to have to pretend when each knew the other was pretending; and as they pretended to the world in general, what a relief and blessed lightening of tension it would have been to have said merely an honest: "We don't care about Mrs. Gorgeous Girl or any one else. We are quite content with each other. True, this is still platonic friendship--with one of us--but all tropical twilight is of short duration. It won't be platonic much longer. So let's talk about ourselves all we like!"

But being thoroughbred young persons they felt it was not the thing even to think frankly.

"She is well," Steve said, briefly.

"She came down here, she wrote me, when she wanted to find out about something or other. I've forgotten just what."

Steve smiled. "Yes, for nearly a week Mrs. O'Valley managed to create a furore among her own set. Before she came here she ordered an entire new outfit of clothes--business togs. There were queer hats and shirt waists and things." He laughed at the remembrance. "Then she had to practise getting up early; that took a lot of time. Meanwhile, Miss Sartwell did your work just as we planned. It was found necessary to postpone her business career still further because of an out-of-door pageant that required her services as a nymph. She caught cold at rehearsal and enjoyed a week of indoors.

"Then Gay turned up with a whole flock of new decorators for the d----for the villa thing, and I was left without aid from the _ennuied_ for another ten days. Jill Briggs had a wedding anniversary and relied on Beatrice's aid. Of course she could not refuse, and Trudy, who, by the way, has come on very rapidly, persuaded Beatrice to take a booth at a charity kettledrum.

"So after several weeks my wife appeared on my business horizon and hung that mirror up and had those other things moved in and then she discovered that the impudent girls were all copying her coats and hats and stuff and even used her sort of perfume, and she decided that her duty lay not in making me a competent secretary but in reforming these extravagant young persons so that she could wear a model gown in comfort and not see it copied within a month. It was quite an experience for her; she was here about five days. Miss Sartwell just moved her desk out there and we managed nicely. Beatrice also had a private teacher for typewriting and so on, but she gave it all up because she felt the confinement and long hours made her head ache and she gained weight. She fled in haste. Sorry she had to do so, but under the circ.u.mstances it was better to jeopardize my business career than her own figure!"

"Aren't you a little unfair?" Mary said, seriously.

"Am I? I never thought so. Wait--I must finish the tale. For a whole week after being my business partner she tried what she called holiness as a cosmetic, and became high-church and quite trying. At the end of that time she felt a veritable dynamo of nerves and scandal and proceeded to become a liberated and advanced woman. You'll soon enough see what I mean. She doesn't run to short-haired ladies with theories so much as to hollow-eyed gentlemen embroidering cantos in the drawing room and trying to make the world safe for poetry.

De-luxe adventuresses strike her as harmonious just now. You'll hear about one Sezanne del Monte who is staying in town and living off of Bea and her set."

"The woman who is divorced every season--and stars in musical comedy?"

"The same. Sezanne is now writing the intimate story of her life; sort of heart throbs instead of punctuation marks--lots of asterisks, you know, separating the paragraphs. Beatrice is going to finance the publication of it and Gay is going to be the sales manager. Yes, it's funny, but a blamed nuisance when you come home and you find yourself wandering through a crowd of Sezanne del Montes and Gays and Trudys, all bent on playing parlour steeplechase, and you can't find a plain chair to sit down or eat a plain meal or read a newspaper. It's more than a blamed nuisance--it's cause for a trial by jury," he added, whimsically. "Now what's wrong?"--watching Mary's face.

"It isn't cricket to tell all this."

Somehow the old struggle began with renewed energy in Mary's heart, the puritanical part saying: "Forget you ever thought twice of this man"; and the dreamer part urging: "You have earned the right to love him. She has not. Just be fair--merely fair. You have the right; don't let your opportunity slip by."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "It was with a charming timidity that she tip-toed into the office"]

"Why can't I tell you? I have no one else to whom I can tell things--and I'm so everlastingly tired. Goat tending and living off dried buffalo meat never f.a.gged me like trying to dance with Trudy and living on truffles and champagne. First you are mentally bewildered and physically f.a.gged, then you become defiant; then you realize that that is no use, you've brought this on your own self--it is quite the common fate of men like myself--and so you keep on with the steady grind; and by and by you find yourself longing to play in your own way with your own sort. The other sort have no use for you so long as you pay their bills; you are hardly missed, if the truth were told.

"Well, you must keep on with the grind. And you want your sort of playmates and fun, and it's such decent, upright fun in comparison--oh, pshaw!" He stood up, kicking the edge of the rug with his foot in almost boyish, shamed fashion.

"Business isn't quite so good," he began anew in an impersonal, even voice. "Mr. Constantine thinks that the abnormal prosperity is on the wane for keeps--we must prepare for it--but Mr. Constantine has practically retired since you have been away. He's not well. To-morrow morning, if you don't mind, I'll take you over there and we can straighten out some things for him. He is selling the greater share of stock to men from the West. And he's saved out some pretty nice sugar plums to hand over to me. I haven't been asked whether or not I want them."

"I'm sorry."

"I knew you would be, Miss Iconoclast."

"Why do you accept them?"

"How can I refuse?"

"By saying you are not prepared to be a mental wreck at forty--which you will be if you try such a gigantic scheme with so little preparation. I've an idea that when Mr. Constantine is known to have withdrawn from the business world there will be a change in many things. And when you are known to be alone in the fort--" She paused.

"Go on," he demanded, irritably. "Can I never make you understand how much I want your advice, your opinions, your scoldings?"

"I think you will have new enemies with whom to deal--enemies you never thought existed. I don't believe you can deal with them because you have always been so cotton-woolled, so to speak, by being Constantine's special project----"

"I've done what I've done myself," he interrupted, "and I'm afraid of no one."

"You think you have," she corrected. "You have done what you have because Constantine was back of you--and now he is an old, tired man, and very soon he will think more of his days with Hannah than of the present. Which is perfectly safe for him to do. Because Mr.

Constantine reckoned on his enemies he knew to a man who hated him and who was afraid of him, who admired him and who would be indifferent; and that is just as essential to success as to reckon on your friends.

You never did that--you hadn't the time--it was all so dazzling and sudden with the war helping things along at breakneck speed. You will find that if you have an Achilles' heel it will be because you did not reckon on your enemies and are somewhat like a blindfolded man with money in your purse set down in a strange locality.... There. How does that sound for a welcome?"

Steve was pacing up and down the floor. "I'd like enemies," he said.

"I'd like to see them try jumping at my throat. I'd make them cry quits. You don't frighten me; you stimulate me."

"That was my intention"--picking up her purse.

"Don't go--or let me come to supper," he begged.

She shook her head. Someone came in just then to whom she spoke of the pleasure it was to be back at the office; the word spread that Miss Faithful was back and girls came in groups to smile and say some pretty thing, and the men nodded with a pleased expression. Watching the procedure Steve realized that Mary was as dominant a personality in his office as he was himself, and instead of feeling a vague disapproval of the fact he was genuinely elated that it was so.

After the last of the visitors had gone and the clock pointed to five he said: "Of course I'm going to be dragged some place this evening, so I wouldn't have much time--but may I come to supper? I'm going out of town next week. There, isn't that a good reason to come to-night?"

"Suppose the world knew this--our little business world?"

"Hang the world!"

"You never did. You flattered it, and were delighted when the world patted you on the head and said, 'Nice Stevens, come in and bring your bags of gold--the living's fine.'"

"Are you starting in to tell me that people would misunderstand my motives? Sezanne del Monte has chapters along those lines. And Beatrice has quite a fad of slumming and taking a notebook along to write down new slang phrases or oaths or bits of heart-broken philosophy spilled in a drunken moment.... I've grown careless to everything presumably orderly and conventional. I'm ready to walk the plank for my indifference if need be--but I do want to come home with you for supper!"

Mary did not answer for a moment. Then she said, in a quick breathless tone, as if she did not want to hear her own words: "I wonder if it would do any good to try explaining--really explaining and not fibbing or pretending----"

"It has always done me good when you have explained--and I can't imagine you telling cheap untruths."

"Then I will try it." The gray eyes grew stormy. "For if we are to continue as employer and secretary--and you must have such a person and I must earn my living--it would be much easier if you really understood and it was all settled. You've talked about early hardships, misunderstood childhood, goat tending, and what not; and the world gives you credit for your achievements. Then surely you must understand the woman's end of the game--the American woman's part in business, for it's not easy to be errand girl or to fill endless underpaid clerical positions. It's not easy to pile out every morning at such and such an hour and stand at a desk and work as if you had neither heart nor eye for the other things in life until gradually the woman part of yourself is changed and it is often too late to enjoy anything but desk drudgery--and a bonus!

"Now the man in the business game forgoes nothing; he has the world's applause if he succeeds and the kisses of the woman he loves for his recreation, and all is complete and as it should be. But we commercial women of to-day do a man's work and earn a man's wage. We do stay starved women, even if that fact doesn't appear on the surface. We cannot have the things of romance as well as our livelihood. And by the very nature of the average business woman's life she is often in love with someone in her office--from propinquity if for no other reason. She must. Don't you see? They're practically the only men she really comes to know or who come to know her, and she just can't stab her heart into sudden death.

"So she wears her prettiest frock for this man--a wooden-faced bookkeeper perhaps; or a preoccupied president--and she dreams of him and is jealous of him and very likely gossips about him. And the years pa.s.s and she stays just as shut away and misunderstood and starved.

And sometimes a woman, originally the most honest in the world, under these circ.u.mstances will deliberately steal another woman's husband if she has the chance. Yes, she will--she does."

"What do you mean, Mary?" He was almost unconscious of using the name.

"That I am no different from the others. I came here with the same starved heart and woman's hopes, and I put into your career the devotion and service and very prayers that I should have put into a home and a family--your joys were my joys, your problems mine. It has not been my clever brain that has made me worth so much to you. That is what the superficial public says, but I know better. It's been the love--yes, the love for you that has made me indispensable! The unreturned and unsuspected and I presume wicked love I felt for you.

And now I've told you--broken precedent and told the truth. And as you don't love me you'll feel very uncomfortable with me about. And you won't want to play off pal; you'll fight shy of me except for everyday work. So it has been the only square thing to do--humiliate myself into telling.

"I love you, I always have, and I always will--but I'm no home-wrecking, emotional being and I expect that you will resume our old relationships and I shall go on serving you and knowing my recompense will be a handsome farewell gift and a pension.

"Oh, the business woman's life isn't all beer and skittles. We're expected to lie about our hearts, yet be as reliable as an adding machine about our columns of figures; to be shut away from the social world, thrown with men more hours a day than their wives see them and yet remain immovable, aloof, disinterested! Just good fellows, you know. Isn't it hideous to think I've really told the truth?"

At this identical moment their platonic friendship, alias tropical twilight, ended, and Mary's evening star of romance rose to stay. But such being the case Steve was the last person in the world to try to convince her that it was so.

All he said was: "I never appreciated you before. Please don't feel that telling me this will make any difference save that I'll stay aloof--as you suggest. I can forget it, somewhat, if that will make you feel any better about it. It is all quite true and equally hopeless--true things usually are--and if you like I'll send you home in the car, because you must be a trifle tired."

"Thank you," she remembered answering as she told Steve's chauffeur where to drive.