"Ah!--you women!" he temporized.

There was a glance from eyes whose l.u.s.ter time and irregular living had conspired to dim.

"Ah!--you men!" Mrs. Pendomer retorted. "And there we have the tragedy of life in a nutsh.e.l.l!"

Silence lasted for a while. The colonel was finding this matutinal talk discomfortably opulent in pauses.

"Rudolph, and has it never occurred to you that in marrying Patricia you swindled her?"

And naturally his eyebrows lifted.

"Because a woman wants love."

"Well, well! and don't I love Patricia?"

"I dare say that you think you do. Only you have played at loving so long you are really unable to love anybody as a girl has every right to be loved in her twenties. Yes, Rudolph, you are being rather subtly punished for the good times you have had. And, after all, the saddest punishment is something that happens in us, not something which happens to us."

"I wish you wouldn't laugh, Clarice----"

"I wish I didn't have to. For I would get far more comfort out of crying, and I don't dare to, because of my complexion. It comes in a round pasteboard box nowadays, you know, Rudolph, with French mendacities all over the top--and my eyebrows come in a fat crayon, and the healthful glow of my lips comes in a little porcelain tub."

Mrs. Pendomer was playing with a teaspoon now, and a smile hovered about the aforementioned lips.

"And yet, do you remember, Rudolph," said she, "that evening at a.s.sequin, when I wore a blue gown, and they were playing _Fleurs d'Amour_, and--you said--?"

"Yes"--there was an effective little catch in his voice--"you were a wonderful girl, Clarice--'my sunshine girl,' I used to call you. And blue was always your color; it went with your eyes so exactly. And those big sleeves they wore then--those tell-tale, crushable sleeves!--they suited your slender youthfulness so perfectly! Ah, I remember it as though it were yesterday!"

Mrs. Pendomer majestically rose to her feet.

"It was pink! And it was at the Whitebrier you said--what you said!

And--and you don't deserve anything but what you are getting," she concluded, grimly.

"I--it was so long ago," Rudolph Musgrave apologized, with mingled discomfort and vagueness.

"Yes," she conceded, rather sadly; "it was so long--oh, very long ago!

For we were young then, and we believed in things, and--and Jack Charteris had not taken a fancy to me--" She sighed and drummed her fingers on the table. "But women have always helped and shielded you, haven't they, Rudolph? And now I am going to help you too, for you have shown me the way. You don't deserve it in the least, but I'll do it."

II

Thus it shortly came about that Mrs. Pendomer mounted, in meditative mood, to Mrs. Musgrave's rooms; and that Mrs. Pendomer, recovering her breath, entered, without knocking, into a gloom where cologne and menthol and the odor of warm rubber contended for mastery. For Patricia had decided that she was very ill indeed, and was sobbing softly in bed.

Very calmly, Mrs. Pendomer opened a window, letting in a flood of fresh air and sunshine; very calmly, she drew a chair--a substantial arm-chair--to the bedside, and, very calmly, she began:

"My dear, Rudolph has told me of this ridiculous affair, and--oh, you equally ridiculous girl!"

She removed, with deft fingers, a damp and clinging bandage from about Patricia's head, and patted the back of Patricia's hand, placidly.

Patricia was by this time sitting erect in bed, and her coppery hair was thick about her face, which was colorless; and, altogether, she was very rigid and very indignant and very pretty, and very, very young.

"How dare he tell you--or anybody else!" she cried.

"We are such old friends, remember," Mrs. Pendomer pleaded, and rearranged the pillows, soothingly, about her hostess; "and I want to talk to you quietly and sensibly."

Patricia sank back among the pillows, and inhaled the fresh air, which, in spite of herself, she found agreeable. "I--somehow, I don't feel very sensible," she murmured, half sulky and half shame-faced.

Mrs. Pendomer hesitated for a moment, and then plunged into the heart of things. "You are a woman, dear," she said, gently, "though heaven knows it must have been only yesterday you were playing about the nursery--and one of the facts we women must face, eventually, is that man is a polygamous animal. It is unfortunate, perhaps, but it is true.

Civilization may veneer the fact, but nothing will ever override it, not even in these new horseless carriages. A man may give his wife the best that is in him--his love, his trust, his life's work--but it is only the best there is left. We give our hearts; men dole out theirs, as people feed bread to birds, with a crumb for everyone. His wife has the remnant. And the best we women can do is to remember we are credibly informed that half a loaf is preferable to no bread at all."

Her face sobered, and she added, pensively: "We might contrive a better universe, we sister women, but this is not permitted us. So we must take it as it is."

Patricia stirred, as talking died away. "I don't believe it," said she; and she added, with emphasis: "And, anyhow, I hate that nasty trollop!"

"Ah, but you do believe it." Mrs. Pendomer's voice was insistent. "You knew it years before you went into long frocks. That knowledge is, I suppose, a legacy from our mothers."

Patricia frowned, petulantly, and then burst into choking sobs. "Oh!"

she cried, "it's d.a.m.nable! Some other woman has had what I can never have. And I wanted it so!--that first love that means everything--the love he gave her when I was only a messy little girl, with pig-tails and too many hands and feet! Oh, that--that h.e.l.l-cat! She's had everything!"

There was an interval, during which Mrs. Pendomer smiled crookedly, and Patricia continued to sob, although at lengthening intervals. Then, Mrs.

Pendomer lifted the packet of letters lying on the bed, and cleared her throat.

"H'm!" said she; "so this is what caused all the trouble? You don't mind?"

And, considering silence as equivalent to acquiescence, she drew out a letter at hazard, and read aloud:

"'Just a line, woman of all the world, to tell you ... but what have I to tell you, after all? Only the old, old message, so often told that it seems scarcely worth while to bother the postman about it. Just three words that innumerable dead lips have whispered, while life was yet good and old people were unreasonable and skies were blue--three words that our unborn children's children will whisper to one another when we too have gone to help the gra.s.ses in their growing or to nourish the victorious, swaying hosts of some field of daffodils. Just three words--that is my message to you, my lady.... Ah, it is weary waiting for a sight of your dear face through these long days that are so much alike and all so empty and colorless! My heart grows hungry as I think of your great, green eyes and of the mouth that is like a little wound.

I want you so, O dearest girl in all the world! I want you.... Ah, time travels very slowly that brings you back to me, and, meanwhile, I can but dream of you and send you impotent scrawls that only vex me with their futility. For my desire of you--'

"The remainder," said Mrs. Pendomer, clearing her throat once more, "appears to consist of insanity and heretical sentiments, in about equal proportions, all written at the top of a boy's breaking voice. It isn't Colonel Musgrave's voice--quite--is it?"

During the reading, Patricia, leaning on one elbow, had regarded her companion with wide eyes and flushed cheeks. "Now, you see!" she cried indignantly; "he loved her! He was simply crazy about her."

"Why, yes." Mrs. Pendomer replaced the letter, carefully, almost caressingly, among its companions. "My dear, it was years ago. I think time has by this wreaked a vengeance far more bitter than you could ever plan on the woman who, after all, never thought to wrong you. For the bitterest of all bitter things to a woman--to some women, at least--is to grow old."

She sighed, and her well-manicured fingers fretted for a moment with the counterpane.

"Ah, who will write the tragedy of us women who were 'famous Southern beauties' once? We were queens of men while our youth lasted, and diarists still prattle charmingly concerning us. But nothing was expected of us save to be beautiful and to condescend to be made much of, and that is our tragedy. For very few things, my dear, are more pitiable than the middle-age of the pitiful b.u.t.terfly woman, whose mind cannot--cannot, because of its very nature--reach to anything higher!

Middle-age strips her of everything--the admiration, the flattery, the shallow merriment--all the little things that her little mind longs for--and other women take her place, in spite of her futile, pitiful efforts to remain young. And the world goes on as before, and there is a whispering in the moonlit garden, and young people steal off for wholly superfluous gla.s.ses of water, and the men give her duty dances, and she is old--ah, so old!--under the rouge and inane smiles and dainty fripperies that caricature her lost youth! No, my dear, you needn't envy this woman! Pity her, my dear!" pleaded Clarice Pendomer, and with a note of earnestness in her voice.

"Such a woman," said Patricia, with distinctness, "deserves no pity."

"Well," Mrs. Pendomer conceded, drily, "she doesn't get it. Probably, because she always grows fat, from sheer lack of will-power to resist sloth and gluttony--the only agreeable vices left her; and by no stretch of the imagination can a fat woman be converted into either a pleasing or heroic figure."

Mrs. Pendomer paused for a breathing-s.p.a.ce, and smiled, though not very pleasantly.

"It is, doubtless," said she, "a sight for G.o.ds--and quite certainly for men--to laugh at, this silly woman striving to regain a vanished frugality of waist. Yes, I suppose it is amusing--but it is also pitiful. And it is more pitiful still if she has ever loved a man in the unreasoning way these shallow women sometimes do. Men age so slowly; the men a girl first knows are young long after she has reached middle-age--yes, they go on dancing cotillions and talking nonsense in the garden, long after she has taken to common-sense shoes. And the man is still young--and he cares for some other woman, who is young and has all that she has lost--and it seems so unfair!" said Mrs. Pendomer.