After a moment's hesitation his ardour flashed out to meet her own. "Oh, yes, I adore her work and her!" he said.

CHAPTER VI

SHOWS THAT MR. WORLDLY-WISE-MAN MAY BELONG TO EITHER s.e.x

Several afternoons later Trent was to have further light thrown on the character of Christina Coles by a chance remark of Roger Adams, into whose office he had dropped for a moment as he was on his way to make his first call upon Mrs. Bridewell.

After a few friendly enquiries about the young man's own work, and the report of a promising word from the great Benson, Adams took up a letter lying loose among the papers on his big littered desk.

"Half the tragedy in New York is contained in a letter like this," he observed. "Do you know, by the way, that the ma.s.s of outside literary workers drawn in at last by the whirlpool const.i.tutes almost a population? Take this girl, now, she is so consumed by her ambition, for heaven knows what, that she comes here and starves in an attic rather than keep away in comfort. That reminds me," he added, with a sudden recollection, "she's from your part of the country."

"Indeed!" An intuition shot like a conviction into Trent's mind. "Could her name, I wonder, by any chance be Coles?"

"You know her then?"

"I've met her, but do you mean to say that ability is what she hasn't got?"

"For some things I've no doubt she has an amazing amount, only she's mistaken its probable natural bent. She strikes me as a woman who was born for the domestic hearth, or failing that she'd do admirably, I dare say, in a hospital."

"It's the literary instinct, then, that's missing in her?"

"Not the instinct so much as the literary stuff, and in that she's not different from a million others. She is evidently on fire with the impulse to create, but the power--the creative matter--isn't in her. Let her keep up, and she'll probably go on doing 'hack' work until her death."

"But she's so pretty," urged Trent with a chivalric qualm--and he remembered her smooth brown hair parted over her rosy ears, her blue eyes, fresh as flowers, and the peculiar steadfastness that possessed her face.

"The more's the pity," said Adams, while the muscles about his mouth twitched slightly, as they always did when he was deeply moved, "it's a bigger waste. I wrote to her as a father might have done and begged her to give it up," he went on, "and in return," he tapped the open sheet, "she sends me this fierce, pathetic little letter and informs me grandly that her life is dedicated. Dedicated, good Lord!" he exclaimed compa.s.sionately, "dedicated to syndicated stories in the Sunday press and an occasional verse in the cheaper magazines."

"And there's absolutely nothing to be done?" asked Trent.

Adams met the question with a frown.

"Oh, if it would make it all come right in the end, I'd go on publishing her empty, trite little articles until Gabriel blows his trumpet."

"It wouldn't help, though, after all."

"Well, hardly--the quick way is sure to be the most merciful," he laughed softly with the quality of kindly humour which never failed him, "we'll starve her out as soon as possible," he declared.

As if to dismiss the subject, he refolded the letter, slipped it in its envelope, and placed it in one of his crammed pigeon-holes. "Thank G.o.d, your own case isn't of the hopeless kind!" he exclaimed fervently.

"Somehow success looks like selfishness," returned Trent, showing by his tone the momentary depression which settled so easily upon his variable moods.

At the speech Adams turned upon him the full sympathy of his smile, while he enclosed in a warm grasp the hand which the young man held out.

"It's what we're made for," he responded cheerily, "success in one way or another."

His words, and even more his look, remained with Trent long afterwards, blowing, like a fresh strong wind, through the hours of despondency which followed for him upon any temporary exaltation. The young man had a trick of remembering faces, not as wearing their accustomed daily look, but as he had seen them animated and transfigured by any vivid moment of experience, and he found later that when he thought of Adams it was to recall the instant's kindly lighting of the eyes, the flicker of courageous humour about the mouth and the dauntless ring in the usually quiet voice. He realised now, as he walked through the humming streets, that success or failure is not an abstract quant.i.ty but a relative value--that a man may be a shining success in the world's eyes and a comparative failure in his own. To Trent, Adams had for years represented the cultured and scholarly critic--the writer who, in his limited individual field, had incontestably "arrived." Now, for the first time, he saw that the editor looked upon himself as a man of small achievements, and that, inasmuch as his idea had been vastly more than his execution, he felt himself to belong to the unfulfilled ones of the earth.

When, a little later, he reached Mrs. Bridewell's house in Sixty-ninth Street the servant invited him, after a moment's wait below, into her sitting-room upstairs, and, following the man's lead, he was finally ushered into a charming apartment upon the second floor. A light cloud of cigarette smoke trailed toward him as he entered, and when he paused, confused by broken little peals of laughter, he made out a group of ladies gathered about a tiny Oriental table upon which stood a tray of Turkish coffee. Gerty rose from the circle as he advanced, and moved a single step forward, while the pale green flounces of her train rippled prettily about her feet. Her hair was loosely arranged, and she gave him an odd impression of wearing what in his provincial mind he called a "wrapper"--his homely name for the exquisite garment which flowed, straight and unconfined, from her slender shoulders. His mother, he remembered, not without a saving humour, had always insisted that a lady should appear before the opposite s.e.x only in the entire armour of her "stays" and close-fitting bodice.

Gerty, as she mentioned the names of her callers, subsided with her ebbing green waves into the chair from which she had risen, and held her cigarette toward Trent with a pretty inviting gesture. Her delicate grace gave the pose a piquant attraction, and he found himself watching with delight the tiny rings of smoke which curled presently from her parted lips. As she smoked she held her chin slightly lifted, and regarded him from beneath lowered lids with an arch and careless humour.

"If you'd been the Pope himself," she remarked, as an indifferent apology, "I'd hardly have done more than fling the table-cover over my head. Even you, after you'd spent a morning trying on a velvet gown, would require a lounge and a good smoke."

He admitted that he thought it probable, and then turned to one of the callers who had spoken--a handsome woman with gray hair, which produced an odd effect of being artificial.

"I wish I'd done nothing worse than try on clothes," she observed, "but I've been to lunch with an old lover."

"Poor dear," murmured Gerty, compa.s.sionately, as she pa.s.sed Trent a cup of coffee, "was he so cruel as to tell you you'd retained your youth?"

"He did worse," sighed the handsome woman, "he a.s.sured me I hadn't."

"Well, he couldn't have done more if he'd married you," declared Gerty, with her gleeful cynicism.

"He was too brutally frank for a husband," remarked a second caller as she sipped her coffee. "You showed more discretion, Susie, than I gave you credit for."

"Oh, you needn't compliment me," protested Susie; "in those days he hadn't a penny."

"Indeed! and now?"

"Now he has a great many, but he has attached to himself a wife, and I a husband. Well, I can't say honestly that I regret him," she laughed, "for if he has lived down his poverty he hasn't his pa.s.sion for red--he wore a red necktie. Why is it," she lamented generally to the group, "that the male mind leans inevitably toward violent colours?"

"Perhaps they appeal to the barbaric part of us," suggested Trent, becoming suddenly at ease amid the battle of inanities.

"Have you a weakness for red, too, Mr. Trent?" enquired Gerty.

The sparkle in his eyes leaped out at her challenge.

"Only in the matter of hair," he retorted boldly.

She regarded him intently for a moment, while he felt again as he had felt at Laura Wilde's, not only her fascination--her personal radiance--but the conviction that she carried at heart a deep disgust, a heavy disenchantment, which her ostentatious gayety could not conceal.

Even her beauty gave back to him a suggestion of insincerity, and he wondered if the brightness of her hair and of her mouth was as artificial as her brilliant manner. It was magnificent, but, after all, it was not nature.

"Because I warn you now," she pursued, after the brief pause, "that if you bind your first play in red I shall refuse to read it."

"You can't escape on that ground," rejoined Trent, "I'll make it green."

"Well, you're more civilised than Perry," declared Gerty, with one of her relapses into defiant ridicule, which caused Trent to wonder if she were not acting upon an intuition which taught her that a slight shock is pleasantly stimulating to the fancy, "and I suppose it's my a.s.sociation with him that convinces me if we'd leave your s.e.x alone it would finally revert to the savage state and to skin girdles."

"Now don't you think Perry would look rather nice in skins?" enquired the handsome woman. "I can quite see him with his club like the man in--which one of Wagner's?"

"It isn't the club of the savage I object to," coolly protested Gerty, "it's the taste. Perry has been married to me five years," she continued, reflectively, "a long enough period you would think to teach even a Red Indian that my hair positively shrieks at anything remotely resembling pink. Yet when I went to the Hot Springs last autumn he actually had this room hung for me in terra-cotta."

Trent cast a blank stare about the tapestried walls.