"Not invite her!" Mrs. Noxon snorted. "I'll invite her twice. In the first place, I don't believe it of Charity Coe. I knew her mother. In the second, if it's true, what of it? Charity Coe has done so much good that she has a right to do no end of bad to balance her books."

To emphasize her support, Mrs. Noxon insisted on Charity Coe's coming to her as a house-guest for a week before the fete. This got into all the papers and redeemed Charity's good name amazingly. Perhaps Jim Dyckman saw it in the papers. At least he and his yacht drifted into the harbor the day of the affair. Of course he had an invitation.

The Noxon affair was the usual thing, only a little more so. People dressed themselves as costlily as they could, for hours beforehand--then spent a half-hour or more fuming in a carriage-and-motor tangle waiting to arrive at the entrance, while the heat sweat all the starch out of themselves and their clothes.

A constant flood poured in upon Mrs. Noxon, or tried to find her at the receiving-post. She was usually not there. She was like a general running a big battle. She had to gallop to odd spots now and then.

The tradition of her selectness received a severe strain in the presence of such hordes of guests. They trod on one another's toes, tripped on one another's parasols, beg-pardoned with ill-restrained wrath, failed to get near enough to see the sights, stood on tiptoe or bent down to peer through elbows like children outside a ball-park.

The entertainment was vaudeville disguised by expense. It was not easy to hold the attention of those surfeited eyes and ears. Actors and actresses of note almost perished with wrath and humiliation at the indifference to their arts. Loud laughter from the back rows broke in at the wrong time, and appalling silences greeted the times to laugh.

The fame, or notoriety, of the Silsby dancers attracted a part of the throng to the marble swimming-pool and the terraced fountain with its deluged statuary. Jim Dyckman and Charity Coe suddenly found themselves together. They hated it, but they could not easily escape. Jim felt that all eyes were bulging out at them. He had murder in his heart.

There was the usual delay, the frank impatience and leg-f.a.g of people unused to standing about except at receptions and dressmakers'. Finally the sn.o.bbish string-orchestra from Boston, which played only the most exclusive music, began to tune up, and at length, after much mysterious wigwagging of signals to play, it played a hunting-piece.

Suddenly from the foliage came what was supposed to be a startled nymph.

The spectators were startled, too, for a moment, for her costume was amazing. Even on Bailey's Beach it would have attracted attention.

Kedzie was the nymph. She was making her debut into great society. What would her mother have said if she could have seen her there? Her father would have said nothing. He would have fainted un.o.btrusively, for the first time in his life.

Kedzie was scared. She had stage-fright of all these great people so overdressed when she was not even underclothed.

"Poor little thing!" said Charity, and began to applaud to cheer her up.

She nudged Jim. "Come on, help her out. Isn't she beautiful?"

"Is she?" said Jim, applauding.

It did not seem right to praise one woman's beauty to another. It was like praising one author's work to another, or praising another preacher's sermon to a preacher's face.

Still, Jim had to admit that Kedzie was pretty. Suddenly he wanted to torment Charity, and so he exclaimed:

"You're right, she is a little corker, a very pleasant dream!" Anger at Charity s.n.a.t.c.hed away the blindfold which is another name for fidelity.

Scales fell from his eyes, and he saw truth in nakedness. He saw beauty everywhere. All about him were beautiful women in rich costume. He saw that beauty is not a matter of opinion, a decision of love's, but a happening to be regular or curvilinear or warm of color or hospitable in expression.

Particularly he saw the beauty of Kedzie. There was more of her to see than of those other women behind their screens of silk and lace and linen. His infatuation for Charity Coe had befuddled him, wrapped him in a fog through which all other women pa.s.sed like swaddled figures. He felt free now.

Over Charity's shoulder and through the spray of the goura on her hat he saw Kedzie sharp and stark, her suavities of line and the milk-smooth fabric of her envelope. He studied Kedzie with emanc.i.p.ation, not seeing Charity at all any more--nor she him.

For Charity studied Kedzie, too. She felt academically the delight of the girl's beauty, a statue coming to life, or a living being going back into statue--Galatea in one phase or the other. She felt the delight of the girl's successful drawing. She smiled to behold it. Then her smile drooped, for the words of the old song came back crooning the ancient regret:

How small a part of time they share--

There was elegy now in Kedzie's graces. Youth was of their essence, and youth shakes off like the dust on the moth's wing. Youth is gone at a touch.

In her sorrow she turned to look up at Jim. She was shocked to see how attentively he regarded Kedzie. He startled her by the fascination in his mien. She looked again at Kedzie.

Somehow the girl immediately grew ugly--or what beauty she had was that of a poisonous snake. And she looked common, too. Who else but a common creature would come out on a lawn thus unclothed for a few dollars?

She looked again at Jim Dyckman, and he was not what he had been. He was as changed as the visions in Lewis Carroll's poem. She saw that he had his common streak, too: he was mere man, animal, temptable. But she forgave him. Curiously, he grew more valuable since she felt that she was losing him.

There was an impatient shaking at her breast. In anybody else she would have called it jealousy. This astounded her, made her afraid of herself and of him. What right had she to be jealous of anybody but Peter Cheever? She felt that she was more indecent than Kedzie. She bowed her head and blushed. Scales fell from her eyes also. She was like Eve after the apple had taught her what she was. She wanted to hide. But she could not break through the crowd. She must stand and watch the dance through.

All this brief while Kedzie had stood wavering. There had been a hitch somewhere. The other nymphs were delayed in their entrance. One of them had stepped on a th.o.r.n.y rose and another had ripped her tunic--she came in at last with a safety-pin to protect her from the law; but then, safety-pins are among the primeval inventions.

According to the libretto, the wood-nymphs, terrified by a hunting-party, ran to take refuge with the water-nymphs. The water-nymphs were late likewise. The dryads came suddenly through Mrs.

Noxon's imported shrubs, puncturing them with rhythmic att.i.tudes. These lost something of their poetry from being held so long that equilibria were lost foolishly.

Finally, the water-sprites came forth from cleverly managed concealment in a bower and stood mid-thigh in the water about the fountain. They att.i.tudinized also, with a kind of childish poetry that did not quite convince, for the fountain rained on them, and some of them shivered as cold gouts of water smote their shoulder-blades. One little Yiddish nymph gasped, "Oi, oi!" which was perfect Greek, though she didn't know it. Neither did anybody else. Several people snickered.

The hunting-music died away, and the wood-nymphs decided not to go into the water home; instead, they implored the water-nymphs to come forth from their liquid residence. But the water-nymphs refused. The dryads tried to lure them with gestures and dances. It was all dreadfully puerile, and yet somehow worth while.

The wood-nymphs wreathed a human chain about the marge of the pool.

Unfortunately the marble had been splashed in spots by the fountain spray, and it was on the slipperiest of the spots that Kedzie had to execute a pirouette.

Her pivotal foot slid; the other stabbed down in a wild effort to restore her balance. It slipped. She knew that she was gone. She made frenzied clutches at the air, but it would not sustain her. She was strangely sincere now in her gestures. The crowd laughed--then stopped short.

It was funny till it looked as if the nymph might be hurt. Jim Dyckman darted forward to save her. He knocked Charity aside roughly and did not know it. He arrived too late to catch Kedzie.

Kedzie sat into the pool with great violence. The spray she cast up fatally spotted several delicate robes. That would have been of some consolation to Kedzie if she had known it. But all she knew was that she went backward into the wrong element. Her wrath was greater than her sorrow.

Her head went down: she swallowed a lot of water, and when she kicked herself erect at last she was half strangled, entirely drenched, and quite blinded. The other nymphs, wood and water, giggled and shook with sisterly affection.

Kedzie was the wettest dryad that ever was. She stumbled forward, groping. Jim Dyckman bent, slipped his hands under her arms, and hoisted her to land. He felt ludicrous, but his chivalry was automatic.

Kedzie was so angry at herself and everybody else that she flung off his hands and snapped, "Quit it, dog on it!"

Jim Dyckman quit it. He had for his pains an insult and a suit of clothes so drenched that he had to go back to his yacht, running the gantlet of a hundred ridicules.

When he vanished Kedzie found herself in garments doubly clinging from being soaked. She was ashamed now, and hid her face in her arm.

Charity Coe took pity on her, and before the jealous Charity could check the generous Charity she had stepped forward and thrown about the girl's shoulders a light wrap she carried. She led the child to the other wood-nymphs, and they took her back into the shrubbery.

"Wait till you hear what Miss Silsby's gotta say!" said one dryad, and another added:

"Woisse than that is this: you know who that was you flang out at so regardless?"

"I don't know, and I don't care," sobbed Kedzie.

"You would care if you was wise to who His Nibs was!"

"Who was it?" Kedzie gasped.

"Jim Dyckman--no less! You was right in his arms, and you hadda go an'

biff him."

"Oh, Lord!" sighed Kedzie. "I'll never do." She was thinking that destiny had tossed her into the very arms of the aristocracy and she had been fool enough to fight her way out.

Jim Dyckman, meanwhile, was clambering into his car with clothes and ardor dampened. He was swearing to cut out the whole herd of women.