She laid the letter from her prospective employers on his desk, in almost nave fashion. It was as if she wanted to show this was no woman's threat but a bona-fide and businesslike proposition. And if she blushed from sheer foolish joy at the disappointed and protesting expression that came into his face it was small solace after the struggle she had undergone before she made herself take this step.

"You are not going," he began, angrily. "I'm d.a.m.ned if you do!"

"Oh, my dear, my own dear," she murmured within. Outwardly she shook her head briskly and added, "Yes, I am. The hours--the salary----"

"The deuce take that stuff! How much more money do you want me to pay you? How few hours a day will you consent to work? You know so well it has been you who have done your own slave driving. Besides, I can't get on without you."

"You must; I haven't the right to stay."

Steve stood up, crumpling the letter in his hand. "You mean because of what I said--that time?"

"Partly; partly because I find myself disapproving of your transactions."

"They are a safe gamble," he began, vehemently.

"Are they? I doubt it. Don't ask me to stay. I want to remain poised and content. If I cannot be radiantly happy I can be content, the sort of old-lavender-and-star-dust peace that used to be mine."

"Have I ever said things, made you feel or do----"

"Oh, no." As she looked at him the gray eyes turned wistful purple.

"But it is what we may say or do, Mister Penny Wise."

Steve looked at the crumpled letter. "So you are going over to staid graybeards who deal in cotton and woollens, and play commercial nun to the end--is that it?"

"Yes."

"And you do care?" he persisted, brutally.

"Yes," she answered, defiantly.

"Well, I don't care about fool laws--they are mighty thin stuff. I love you," he told her with quiet emphasis.

Mary did not answer but the purple of the eyes changed back to stormy gray.

"Why don't you say something? Abuse me, claim me----"

"I haven't the courage even if I have the right," she said, presently.

"Besides, the last year I have been loving an ideal--the Steve O'Valley who existed one time and might still exist if other things were equal. But in reality you are a prematurely nerve-shattered, blundering pirate; not my Steve." She spoke his name softly. "The failure of my ideal--and it's a little hard to live with and work with such a failure. My hands are tied, yet my eyes see. Besides, there is Luke to think about and care for until some other woman does it. I cannot endure this tangle; neither can I get you out of it.

So I am going away. And I'll keep on loving my ideal and find the old-lavender-and-star-dust sort of peace."

"You are not going!" he repeated, sharply, taking her hand. "Do you hear? I love you. I have loved you enough to keep silent about it ever since that day. Does it mean nothing to you?"

"Don't say it again--it is so hopeless, part of the tangle. You haven't the faintest idea how hopeless it is; you are so involved you cannot judge. My boy, don't you see that the whole trouble lies in getting things you have never earned? The sort of joy you people indulge in and try to hold as your own is a state of mind and emotion from which no lessons may be learned--calm, stagnant pools of superlative surface pleasure. No one learns things worth while when he is too happy or too successful. That is why success is a wiser and more enduring thing when it comes at middle age. The young man or woman has not been tried out, has not had to struggle and discover personal limitations. It's the struggle that brings the wisdom.

"But when you have a ready-made stock-market fortune handed to you, and a Gorgeous Girl wife, and the world comes to fawn upon you--you soon become intoxicated with a false sense of your own achievements and values. It does not last--nor does it pay. Such joy periods are merely recuperative periods. By and by something comes along and b.u.mps into you and you are shoved out into the struggling seas--the learning and conquering game. It is not a sad state of affairs--but a mighty wise one. Then how can you, who have never earned, expect a joy to be yours forever?"

"You have struggled and earned. You have the right to love me!"

"Perhaps--but you cannot hide behind my skirts and claim the same right. I shall give you up. Why, this is no tragedy--it is the way many commercial nuns find their lives are cast. Commercial nuns, like their religious sisters, serve a novitiate--their vocation being tested out. We who find that the things of our fancy are husks leave them behind and go on in our abilities. We are needed women to-day; we must have recognition and respect. We possess a certain unwomanly honesty according to old standards, which makes us say such things as I have said to you. I love you, the ideal of you; yet I am hopeless to realize it. I refuse to keep on making my petty moan for sympathy when all the time the bigger part of me demands work and contentment--and things just like Gorgeous Girls."

"But there must be a way out. I can't lose you. Do you know what it will mean?"

"I fancy I do." The gray eyes were so maternal that Steve felt comforted.

"Are you pushing me out of a stagnant joy pool?" he tried saying lightly.

"Perhaps I'm heading that way when I stop serving you before all else."

"Mary, Mary, quite contrary"--he gave her a gentle little shake--"say it all again. Then tell me if this is a mood and you'll change your mind and stay. You must stay--or else you don't love me."

"Eternal masculine! That we love to be beaten, cry loudly, tell our neighbours, but we must prove our affections by crawling back to have you kiss the bruises." She shook her head. "You cannot believe that the world recognizes a difference between women with sentiments and sentimental women! Why, my boy, do you know that convictions, real convictions, do make a convict of a man, put a mental ball and chain on him which he can never deny? I have told you my convictions--I am convinced I should be doing wrong to both of us to stay. I shall go--and love my ideal and spend my salary in soothing things."

"I'm not afraid of a divorce," he found himself insisting.

"Nor I. But should you get one I would not marry you."

"Not ever?" he asked.

Unconsciously they both looked at the photograph of the Gorgeous Girl smiling down on them in serene and frivolous fashion.

"Not ever," she told him, turning away.

There was a directors' meeting, which Steve was obliged to attend. He knew he sat about a table smoking innumerable cigars without a coherent idea in his head as to what was being said or considered.

When he rushed back to the office Mary had gone home and left a note tucked in his blotter. He did not know that Beatrice had dropped in and discovered it, reading it with great satisfaction and carefully replacing it so as to have the appearance of never having been disturbed. All it said was:

"I shall go to the Meldrum Brothers on the fifteenth.--M. F."

He tore the note up in a despairing kind of rage and wrote Mary as impetuous a love letter as the Gorgeous Girl had ever received. Five minutes after writing it he tore that up, too. Then he called himself several kinds of a fool and dashed out to order an armful of flowers sent to her apartment. He had his supper in a grill room, to give him a necessary interlude before he went home. He walked round and round a city square watching the queer, shuffling old men with their trays of needles and pins, wrinkled-faced women with fortune-telling parrots, and silly young things prancing up and down, bent on mischief.

Something about human beings bored him; he regretted exceedingly that he was one himself; and at the same tune he wished he might countermand the florist's order. He took a taxi home and wondered what apology he should make for being late. He had forgotten that there was a dinner party!

In silver gauze with an impressive square train Beatrice greeted him, to say he might as well remain invisible the rest of the evening, it would look too absurd to have him appear an hour late with some clumsy excuse--and as there was an interesting Englishman who made an acceptable partner for her everything was taken care of. Papa, minus the professional reader, was lonesome. He had discovered an intricate complaint of his circulation and would welcome an audience.

With relief Steve stole away to Constantine's room and amid medicine bottles and boxes, air cushions, hot-water bags, and detective stories, he listened with half an ear to the reasons why his blood count must be taken again and what horse thieves the best of doctors were anyhow!

CHAPTER XIX

The fifteenth of December Mary Faithful left the office of the O'Valley Leather Company, carrying the thing off as successfully as Beatrice O'Valley carried off her wildest flirtation. As Mary had often said: "When you can fool the letter man and the charwoman you have nothing to fear from the secret service."

And no employee of the office suspected that anything lay beneath the surface reasons given for changing firms. She accepted the handsome farewell gift with as much apparent pleasure as if she were to be married and it were a start toward her silver chest. Mary, too, had learned how to pretend. Nor did she permit Steve to come snarling--masculine fashion of sobbing--at her in vain protests trying to shake her from her resolve.

During the last days of rushed work to help her successor find the way comparatively easy Mary kept Steve at arm's length. The same strange joy at having told him her secret and released the tension was being relived again in knowing that she was to leave the tangle with the Gorgeous Girl in command of it, and go live her commercial nun's existence in the offices of unromantic old graybeards who merely thought of her as a mighty clever woman who would not demand an a.s.sistant.

Mary felt that she had truly pa.s.sed her commercial novitiate; she made herself admit that a commercial life was hers for all time. She would leave a forbidden world of romance, watching Luke become a six-footer and an embryo inventor as her special pride and pleasure. It was good to have it settled, to have it a scar, pale and calm, throbbing only under extreme pressure. She even welcomed Beatrice's hurried visit to the office and met with gentle patience her half-veiled reproaches for leaving her husband's employ.

"I can't see why you go," Beatrice protested, undecided whether it was because Steve and Mary had come to some understanding, as Trudy hinted, and it would be wiser for Mary to be removed from the everyday scene of action; or whether Mary had never thought of Steve except as a man who would not pay her such and such a salary and therefore, being tailor-made of heart as well as dress, she coolly picked up her pad and pencil and was walking off the lot. With the complacent conceit of all Gorgeous Girls who fancy that clothes can always conquer, Beatrice really inclined toward the latter theory. But being a woman she could not resist having a few pangs of unrest and trying out her fancied detective ability upon Mary.