It was the night after Justin's charge to her that Lois nerved herself to broach the subject of Lawson to Dosia, who was copying some music by the table. Both her hair and her dress were arranged with a little new touch of elegance, but there was a droop to the corners of her mouth that had not been there before-a suggestion of hardness or melancholy or defiance, it would have been difficult to say which.

Justin was getting ready to go out, and Lois could hear his footsteps as he walked up and down above. She hated to begin, and her very reluctance gave a chill tone to her voice as she said temporizingly, "Dosia, please don't keep Reginald out so late again as you did this afternoon. It is too cold."

"We only went to the post-office; he said he was warm."

Dosia, who had generously curtailed her practicing to take the mother's place, felt ill-used.

"I know; but it was too late for him. His feet were as cold as ice. I am _so_ afraid of croup."

"I'm sorry," said Dosia, in a low voice. "I won't do it again."

"Well, never mind that now." Lois hesitated, and then took the plunge: "I want to speak to you about Lawson Barr, Dosia."

Dosia's color, which came and went so prettily when she spoke, always left her when she was really moved, or at the times when girls ordinarily blush. She turned pale now and her eyes became defiant, but she did not answer.

The other stumbled along, sorry and ashamed, as if she were the culprit:

"People have been commenting-I hear that he has been with you a great deal lately."

"Where?" The girl's voice was hard.

"On the train."

"He went in to town with me twice last week, and twice the week before-yes, and yesterday. And he came out with me once." She counted out the times as if they were a contravention. "I don't see how I am going to help it if people speak to me, I can't _tell_ them to go away.

_I_ don't want him to do it! Mr. Sutton took me over the ferry one day; was that commented on, too?"

There was a pa.s.sion of tears in her voice, called forth by outraged modesty-and there is no modesty that feels itself more outraged than that of the girl who knows she has given some slight cause for reproof.

"Dosia, be reasonable," said Lois, annoyed that her talk was being made so hard for her. "I know it's horrid to be 'spoken to,' but Justin is very particular, and he feels that we are responsible for you. And, besides, you wouldn't want it thought that you liked Lawson's society. I am to go in to town with you to-morrow, and we will get the hour for your lesson changed." She paused for some answer, but none came, and she went on: "I told Justin that he need not worry, there was no danger of your caring too much for _Lawson_! That's nonsense. Why, you know all _about_ him, and just what he amounts to. But, of course, if you are seen with him--"

"You need not say any more. I never want to speak to him again!" said Dosia, strangling. She swept her things from the table and rushed up to her own room in a whirlwind of indignation and shame, scathed by the imputation in Lois' tone. The bubble of her imagining of Lawson was p.r.i.c.ked for the moment by it; it is hard to idealize what another despises. She felt herself as false to her own estimate of him as she had hitherto been to the public one.

She threw herself upon the bed face downward. Something that she had been unconsciously dreading had come upon her-the notice of her little world. Before it had been voiced to her by Lois she had persistently considered herself unseen. She cried out now that there was no occasion for her being "spoken to," yet she knew with a deep acknowledgment that she had not been quite true to her highest instincts.

The exquisitely sensitive perception which is an inherent part of innocence was hers. The Dosia who at twelve could not be induced to enter a room when a certain man was in it, because she "did not like the way he _looked_ at her," had as unerring an instinct now as then; it was an instinct so deep, so interwoven with every pulse of her nature, that to deny it ever so little was a spiritual hurt. She could not have told why certain subjects, certain joking expressions even, revolted her so that she shrank from them involuntarily. She could not have told why she knew there was something about Lawson different from the other men she had been accustomed to. Dosia not only knew nothing of the practice of evil, she knew nothing of life nor the laws of it; but it could never be said of her that she did not know when right bordered on wrong. She knew-and it would have been impossible for her not to have known-her slightest deviation from that shining road which can only be followed by white feet. Her first quick idea of Lawson as not the kind of man that she would ever want to marry still held good. Back of all this was the image of the true prince.

There are people whose natures we always feel electrically, a sensation which depends neither on liking nor on disliking, and which often partakes of both. When we meet them there is always a slight shock, a psychic tingling, a displacement of values, that makes us uncertain of our pathway; the colors seen in this artificial light are different from those seen by day. Barr affected Dosia thus. If he came into a room, she knew it at once; dancing or walking or talking with others, she felt his eyes upon her, disquieting her and making her conscious of his presence, so that she could not get up or sit down naturally. When he was not there, everything was flat and uninteresting in the withdrawal of this exciting disquietude. If she met his remarks cleverly, it gave her a delighted occupation for hours in recalling them; if she failed in repartee, and was "thick" and school-girlish, her cheeks would burn and the taste for life would leave her; she could hardly wait to see him again to retrieve herself. She was not in love with Barr, she was not even in love with love,-a fairly healthful process,-but she was in love with the excitement of his presence.

She had been shy of him at first, waiting for him to seek her. After the night of the bazaar and that wondrous waltz, she had felt that he must fly to speak to her at the nearest opportunity, and tell her that he had played for her, and her alone; and in return she had longed to a.s.sure him of her divining sympathy. But he did not come. She invented many excuses for this, but it gave her a sharp disappointment of which he was necessarily unconscious. As she met him casually at different places,-with the old quizzical gleam in his eye, and that peculiar manner,-his lightest word became fraught with deep meaning, over which she pondered, refusing to believe that the world she lived in was entirely of her own creation. In these last two months she had always an undercurrent of thought for him, whether she was practicing or sewing, or chaffing with Billy, or receiving the gallant but somewhat heavy attentions of Mr. Sutton. With Lawson's avoidance of her had come a childish, uncalculating' impulse to attract. Dosia had not told the truth when she said that she could not help his speaking to her; she knew very well the morning he would have pa.s.sed her by in the train, as usual, if her eyes had not met his. Barr never presumed,-he knew the place allotted to him,-but he accepted permission. When he sat down by her, she swiftly wished him away again; yet her heart beat under his cool glance-a glance which seemed to read her every thought. These interviews, in which the conversations were of the lightest, yet in which she felt subtle intimations, were a delicious and stinging pleasure, like eating ice.

There had been a fitful burst of suburban gayety about Christmas-time and after-a delightful flare that burned up red and glowing, only to sink back gradually into the darkness of monotony. There was that fall into a hum-drum condition of living, instigated by bad weather, which shuts up each household into itself; the men were kept later down-town, and the women had the usual influx of winter colds and minor maladies which interfere with planned festivities. The younger sort had engagements, individually and collectively, for "things in town," either coming out on the last train or staying comfortably overnight with friends. An a.s.sembly dance planned for Shrove Tuesday had fallen through.

The fairy glamour was already gone for Dosia. The personal note which she had missed at first was everything, and she found it nowhere but in Lawson. If she could have poured out her thoughts and feelings to Lois,-"talked things over," girl-fashion,-if Lois had been her friend and lover-But Lois had no room for her; Dosia had learned to feel all the bitterness of the alien. And she was shy with the pleasant but self-sufficient women whom she met socially, and who were so intimate with one another; Dosia merely sat on the edge of conversations, so to speak, and smiled. She could not learn this a.s.sured fluency. The very children were hedged in from her by restrictions. To give up those little incidental meetings with Lawson was to give up the one silver string on which hung happiness, and yet-and yet-Dosia felt the sting of Lois' matter-of-fact contempt for him; it lowered him indescribably.

All women look down upon a man who will allow himself to be despised.

She had cherished an ideal of him as a man lonely, misunderstood, terribly handicapped by opinion, by his own nature even, and yet capable of good and n.o.ble things. She had thought--

"Dosia?"

"Well?"

"Will you shut your door? The light streams down here and keeps Reginald from going to sleep. He waked when you went up-stairs."

Dosia rose and closed the door noiselessly; she would have liked to shut it with a bang. It was a climax. There seemed to be nothing that she could do in this house that was right! Her att.i.tude had ceased to be only that of an alien, it was that of an antagonist; but it was also that of a lonely and unguarded child.

CHAPTER NINE

The closed door did not keep out the sounds below. Dosia could hear Justin's voice upraised toward his only son, and Lois' pleading "_Please_, Justin!"

"Be quiet, Lois; I'll settle this. Go down-stairs."

"I want d.i.n.ky orter." The child's voice was high.

"You have just had a drink of water; lie still."

"Redge 'ants 'noder d.i.n.ky orter."

"Do you hear me? Lie still."

"Let me take him, Justin; I'm sure he isn't well. I--"

Dosia could hear her step getting fainter in the distance, and could imagine the look from Justin that had commanded her obedience. There was a definite masculine authority about him before which, on those rare occasions when he chose to exert it, every woman-soul in the house bowed down with the curious submission inherited from barbaric ages. Only the son and heir rebelled openly, with a firmness caught from the same blood.

It took a hard tussle to conquer Redge. The mother down-stairs, vibrating with sympathy for her child, could not understand Justin's att.i.tude, or why he was so much more severe with the boy than he had ever been with Zaidee.

Zaidee was his little, gentle girl, his dainty, delicate princess, toward whom his att.i.tude must be always that of tenderness and chivalry.

But the boy was different. Civilized man still usually lives in the outward semblance of a harem, in a household with a large predominance of women. Justin had a fierce pride in the boy, the one human creature in the house of the same nature as himself. They two, they two! And he knew the nature; there was no need of any pretense or fooling about it.

His "Lie still, you rascal, or I'll make you," voiced in its sternness an even deeper sentiment than he had for Zaidee.

Something of this hardness was still in his manner when he came down once more, after reducing the child to quiet, and leaned over his wife to kiss her good-by.

"Are you going out again?" Her voice had a dull patience in it and her eyes refused to meet his.

"Yes; did you want me for anything special?"

He stood, half irresolute, hat in hand. His clear, fair skin and blue eyes showed off to advantage, in the estimation of his wife, set off by his luxuriously lined overcoat. It was a new one; he had lately, at Lois' insistence, gone to a more expensive tailor, and the richness of the cloth and its very cut and finish exhaled an air of prosperity.

Nothing so betrays the status of the inner man as that outer garment.

Justin's discarded one had pa.s.sed through every stage of decent finesse-the turned-up coat-collar, the reversed closing, the relined sleeves, the b.u.t.tons sewed on daily at the breakfast-table by his wife in the places from which the ineffectual threads of her workmanship still dangled. This perfect and ample covering seemed in its plenitude to make a new and opulent person of him.

"No, of course I don't want you for anything special"-she spoke in a monotone. "I only thought you were going to stay home."

"I've got to go to Leverich's, and I want to speak to Selden about the house first. I promised him I'd stop there."

They had decided to take one of the houses that were building on the hill, and Selden was the architect.