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Century Magazine/Volume 91/Issue 5/Ladies

HE won't want to come here,” said Mae Narne. “It stands to reason that she won't. I would n't either. Remember Doll? Does she ever see one of us when she 's motoring down the Avenue?”

“But that 's all Jerry Montfort,” remarked Jackie Dare. “He would n't let her, on his life. Maybe if Doll was left to herself she 'd like to come round once in a while.”

“I wish you could see the fish eye she handed me the other day I ran into her at Bengel's,” interposed Laure Lindsay. “It isn't Jerry. It's Doll herself. Jerry 's got her into that smart Long Island set, and she 's hanging on by the toe-nails.”

“You 've said something, Laure,” agreed Agnes Bailey. “So did Mae. Doll and Julia are both playing round with ladies now, and they got t' be ladies themselves.”

“I don't believe it about Julia,” said Jackie Dare. “Julia was some lady herself, now believe me, if she wanted to be.”

“Yes,” Mae Narne agreed calmly, “there was something different about Julia. She could give the best imitation of a lady and do it the quickest of any one of us.”

As far as appearance went,—color, contour, sartorial effect,—Mae Narne was herself so perfect an imitation of a lady that she might have been a duchess. Tall, slender, her figure showed only a buddingly rounded fullness in the bust, only a faintly defined salience at the hips. Golden-blonde, patricianly chiseled, her face showed only a soft pink in the cheek, a rose only slightly deeper in the lip. Her hair lay like a helmet of gold mesh close to her little head, but it revealed all of her classic brow. She was quite without expression, a smooth, lustrous museum piece of pampered female flesh, Her gown was of a heavy raw silk, oyster-white, with insertions of lace. It was a perfect combination of a studied simplicity and a tempered richness. She sat where she could see herself in the dresser glass, and at regular intervals her keen turquoise-blue eyes swept critically the reflection in the mirror. Then, not with the air of a woman of strong personal vanity, but more like a royalty who must be forever on parade, she adjusted a straying lock, smoothed an eyebrow, or pressed to a closer fullness her pink, voluptuous lips.

“I wonder how Julia took it when Vin came back to Broadway. “They say he cut a streak through the Tenderloin the last time that cost a thousand dollars a night, and there were three nights of it.”

Laure Lindsay contributed these data, but it was evident that they did not much interest her. She sat on the other side of the dresser, so that her reflection also appeared in the mirror. She gazed at herself languidly now and then. She, too, was a tall creature, slim to the point of attenuation, but lissome. The great masses of her shining, brown hair had been pressed flat to her head, then laid in wide, knife-sharp waves over her forehead and temples and down on her cheeks. Her eyes, like melted goldstone, were set between lashes of an extraordinary thickness and under brows that had been shaved to the merest penciling and shaped to the sweep of a bird's wing. She, also, was without expression, although she smiled always. That smile was a mere mechanical trick. It was only a pearly glimmer, and she had a way of making it seem to tremble into existence. Big mock pearls that matched her teeth in tint clung to her ear-lobes. A chain of mock pearls, which constantly engaged her long, brown fingers, hung about her neck. She wore a gown of creamy linen that nuns had embroidered, and a lustrous sweater of a dull green silk.

“What crowd 's Vin running with now?” asked Agnes Bailey.

“Guenn Nevers and the Spring Palace set,” Laure answered.

“I 'd like to see Julia,” Jackie Dare said, “and I bet she 'd like to see us. You can't tell me she 's happy living in the country, locked in with that bunch of fish eyes. She 'd eat us up if she got the chance.”

Jackie Dare was dark; indeed, she was several shades darker—blacker, rather—than Laure Lindsay. She was coarsely featured, swarthily thatched, sallow, but she showed a certain squaw-like picturesqueness. Her lips were heavy and thick, but as red as blood. She had the look of a suppressed volcano, as though a seething flood of experience was all the time trying to break through her thick skin, to burn itself upon her expression. And it was as though only constant mechanical care of that skin—creaming, massaging, vibratory treatment—held that flood at bay. Two gold flashes glittering from the large, white regularity of her smile accented this look of lava-suppression. She wore a long sport-coat of orange corduroy.

“Well, all you got t' do,” Agnes Bailey said impatiently, “is 'phone. She can't any more than throw us down. We 'll have t' stay four hours in this hole, a thousand miles from a drink, and we 've got t' do something or bu'st. I bet Vin would welcome us with screeches of joy. Is Vin home?”

“I should say not, little one,” answered Mae Narne. “Vin is in gay Paree, hitting it up. Where I wish I was this very minute.”

“How many are there in this Wrighterson push?” Laure Lindsay asked. “Do you know anything about them, Jackie?”

“Not much,” answered Jackie. “Only what I read in 'Talk.' There 's only old Mrs. Wrighterson, Mr. and Mrs. Edward Wrighterson, beside Julia. Old man Wrighterson 's in a nut-house somewhere, incurable; been there for years.”

“How 've they treated Julia?” Mae Narne asked.

“I don't know,” answered Jackie, “except that they put up a swell front of doing the right thing. Whether there was anything behind the front but hot air—well, by me. Just as soon as Vin married Julia, he notified his family by wire. They got a wire back from Mrs. Wrighterson in no time, saying she 's coming on to New York that night. She came, bringing Mrs. Edward Wrighterson with her. They stayed in New York a day or two, and then they all went back to Boston. I 've never seen Julia since. I got a letter or two from her, but it was n't any good our trying to write. Julia can't write letters, and I won't write them. All I know is that later they came to Medwin here, lugging Julia along with them. And she 's been here ever since.”

“She 's never left this hole since!” Agnes Bailey exclaimed incredulously. “Ring off, Jackie!”

“That 's what I 'm telling you,” asserted Jackie.

“Say,” said Mae Narne, covering the tip of an ear that threatened to lift a rose-pink arc through the unruffled smoothness of her golden hair, “was n't somebody telling me that Vin did a swell devoted husband impersonation for a while?”

“Sure,” answered Laure. “Only a bit, though, in the first act. He was all to the goody-goody, sweetie-cutie, mother's own darling boy, wifie's own devoted little hubby for about one year. Besides, they 'd lost a lot of money just then,—the Wrightersons,—and he had t' be good. Then some old gink of an uncle died and left Vin a fresh wad. He 's been scattering golden showers over the Tenderloin ever since, and, believe me, Broadway got the thickest coat of red paint it 's had in some moons when Vin hit the trail again. Take it from me, he 's some slick little spender when he gets started.”

“Edward Wrighterson,” Agnes Bailey repeated meditatively—“that has a kind of familiar holler. Who the devil is Edward Wrighterson? Did n't I read something?”

“Sure, you did,” answered Jackie. “Vin's only brother. He was thrown from his horse fox-hunting, all smashed up. Paralyzed now; lives in a wheel-chair.”

“Who 'd he marry?” Mae asked.

“There is a story about that,” Jackie explained. “Regular drama; ought to be filmed. They say that Edward Wrighterson had always been crazy about this girl, but she did n't care a rap for him. Her father had a lot of money,—made it in lumber out in the high timber,—but he got into some fierce deal, and it looked as if he not only was going to lose every red cent, but he 'd go to the pen, too. Wrighterson handed him everything he had. He saved the old guy, but they 've both been poorer than poverty ever since. The girl married Edward Wrighterson out o' gratitude, they say.”

“Fool!” commented Mae Narne. She reached for a gold cigarette-case on the dresser, lighted a cigarette, puffed meditatively. She kept her critical, turquoise-blue gaze on the mirror, and every movement of arm, wrist, and fingers was heavy with studied grace. She looked like some half-seen vision, her cool, blonde coloring gleaming, her frail, regular chiseling cutting through the soft smoke, “Any brats—I mean kiddies?”

“No,” Jackie answered.

“Let 's call Julia up!” Agnes suggested. “Muggie won't be back before dark. It 'll take all that time to get the machine repaired and, say, I can't stand this.” She went to the window and gazed out on the quiet street. “If there 's one thing I hate, it 's sitting in a hotel room. It gives me a blue bean quicker than anything. Let 's 'phone her now before she gets away somewhere. All she can do is throw us down.”

“She won't turn us down,” prophesied Jackie.

“Sure, she will,” contradicted Laure.

“Of course she will,” echoed Mae.

“Where 'd Julia come from?” Laure asked.

“God only knows,” Jackie answered, “and He won't tell. The first thing Julia knows about herself, she 's in a foundling-asylum, just left on somebody's door-step in a basket. That 's all she ever finds out. The next thing, she 's about fifteen, out o' the convent, pretty as she could stick, and got t' do for herself. She tries it in a shop for a while at six bones per, with a fat kike of a floor-man trying to get gay. Then, by accident, she gets into a lawyer's office at eight bones per. She can't do anything, of course, but old Sideburns, who runs the joint, don't expect her to do anything but go through the motions. He 's got her there for a different purpose. When she quits him,—it 's quit or give up,—she gets a chance to go in a musical comedy. I met her in 'The Girl from the Submarine' company. We were pals together until Vin married her.”

“She could have married lots of swells, could n't she?” Agnes asked.

“Sure, she could n't,” Mae answered with satisfaction.

“Not so 's you 'd notice it,” Laure reinforced her with an equal sense of satisfaction.

“Well, Julia was about like the rest of us,” Jackie said, “except maybe she was a little more like a lady, as you just said, Mae. But Julia was always a good fellow and a sport. Money never meant anything to her. I know that. In those days we were both washing our underwear overnight, hanging our handkerchiefs to dry on the window-panes, and cooking our breakfasts over the gas. Of course Glen Davenport was after her, and she was pretty sticked on Glen. Many 's the time I 've heard him beg her to marry him. But he was always pie-eyed, and Julia said she 'd never say yes until he asked her sober. He never did, though, and pretty soon he marries that rich Welborn girl from Chicago. He tried to come around after he was married, but, take it from me, there was nothing doing. Then there was Dan Whitman. And I believe that was all. Oh, Vin knew all about it. When he asked her to marry him, and he was sober all right, she calls me into the room and tells him all this in my presence. Vin was some sport, believe me; I 've always liked him since. He says: 'I 'd hate to have to tell you my past, Julia. This 'll be all to that.'” Jackie paused. “But Julia did n't leave anything out.”

“Fool!” Mae commented again. “Just think of deliberately giving your husband something on you!”

“Oh, let 's call her up!” entreated Agnes. Agnes was little and round and blonde and pretty. She was a creature of light, though also of flesh. Her soft, flaxen hair, fluttering in hundreds of tendrils all over her head, emitted glints of light whenever the sun touched it. Her china-blue eyes poured light through her curly lashes until it sparkled off their tips. Similarly, her little china-white teeth seemed to flash light. And at all times the network of dimples that played between eyes and lips seemed to catch the brilliance of the one and pass it on to the other. Her suit of navy-blue taffeta was a marvel of simplicity; the white blouse that topped it, a cobweb of fineness.

“You 'phone, Mae,” said Laure. “Your voice sounds so swell on the wire. I 've always noticed it.”

“All right,” Mae answered. She arose with her slow grace, sauntered to the telephone, took up the slim, country telephone book. She stood as tall and impassive as a lily, one hand holding her cigarette, the other turning the leaves. “Ain't it a riot?” she commented with what seemed for her the maximum of humorous appreciation. “A thousand little burgs with ten numbers to the burg. Medwin! Medwin! Here it is. Wrighterson, Wrighterson, Wrighterson. I 've got them.” She took up the telephone-receiver. “Hello!” she called stridently. “Give me Medwin 619, please. Yes, Medwin. Yes, 619. Thank you.” She dropped the receiver. “He says he 'll call me. Say,” she went on, still in the accent of her social undress, “I think that clerk 's just a shade too fresh. I guess I 'll have to hand him one before I leave this near-Waldorf.” The bell rang. She took the receiver again. Her voice, clear, quiet, exquisitely impersonal, poured like a flood of ice-water into the receiver.

“Is this Medwin 619?” It was evident that Miss Narne was addressing a social inferior. Her tone took the correct shade of command, alleviated with patronage. “Thank you. I would like to speak with Mrs. Wrighterson. No, Mrs. Vincent Wrighterson. Yes, thank you. Yes.” She turned to her companions, pressing the receiver against her shoulder. Her voice dropped again to an easy, slangy accent. “She 's in all right. A swell English accent with a butler attachment has just gone to get her. There she is! Hello!” Her voice became icily exquisite again. “Is this Mrs. Vincent Wrighterson? Good morning, and how do you do, Julia! This is Mae Narne. Yes, it is. It does seem strange, does n't it? That 's sweet of you. There 's a crowd of us over here, Julia: Jackie Dare, Laure Lindsay, and Agnes Bailey. We were motoring with Muggie Nichols. The machine broke down, and we 're stalled here for three or four hours. We wondered if you 'd like to come over here this afternoon.”

She listened.

“No, not for dinner. Yes, they 're right here. I 'll ask them. Girls,”—she turned about,—“Julia wants us to come over there for tea. She says she 'll send the motor for us in half an hour. Would you like to go?”

“Crazy to,” answered Agnes at once.

“I certainly would,” replied Laure.

“Let me talk with Julia.” Jackie snatched the receiver out of Mae's hands.

“, it was fierce Jackie 's not being able to come,” Agnes remarked three quarters of an hour later in the automobile. “Was n't it rotten about that headache? I 'm scared. Are n't you?”

“Not at all,” Mae answered coolly. “It would take something more than the Wrighterson family to feeze [sic] me.”

“Or me,” echoed Laure. “Just the same, I 'm going to do as good an impersonation of a lady as I can put over. Mary Moore in 'The Mollusk' will be my model.”

“Mae, you 'd better do that sketch you flashed day before yesterday with that farm-house bunch,” Agnes suggested, dimpling. “Don't you remember when we stopped to get some water? Southern stuff. Plantation crowded with slaves before the war. Remember, nobody in your family ever did a stroke of work or earned an honest penny. Remember, the bluest blood of Virginia flows in your veins. Your real name 's Lee or Carteret or something like that, ain't it? I think that 'll make a great splash.”

“Not a chance,” Mae answered contemptuously. “Too raw. That rough stuff will do with boobs, but you 've got to soft pedal with real swells. Don't say anything about anything.”

“And Laure can do her best monologue, the daughter of a clergyman, a graduate of Bryn Mawr?” Agnes suggested, with a twinkle.

“I should say not,” Laure answered with disgust. “That would n't get me anywhere with the Wrightersons. The thing to do is to keep shut up on family dope.”

“Well, that 's all right for me,” Agnes answered, “I can't be anything but myself. I 'd laugh my head off if I tried to pull any of that stuff. I was born in Brooklyn of poor, but disreputable, parents, and I don't care who knows it.”

“Well, if you can outgrow the Brooklyn,” said Mae, “the disreputable parents will take care of themselves.”

“Say, the side drops of this road are pretty good!” Agnes exclaimed suddenly. “I often think I belong in the nut-house. I like the country.”

Mae and Laure emitted twin groans ostentatiously crowded with disgust. They looked with lack-luster eyes on the passing scene. Agnes, however, turned and twisted in an effort to see both sides of the road at once. They were rolling through Medwin's principal street. They had just come to the village green, a big triangle of smooth grass, broken at its flat end by a pool covered with lily-pads, and accented at its point by a bronze statue erected to the men of Medwin that had fallen in the Revolution. The green was edged with a triangle of wine-glass elms, and about that triangle, inclosing the road, ran another bigger triangle, also of wine-glass elms. Opposite the pool was the white, beautifully proportioned, slender-spired colonial church. Opposite the monument was the colonial town hall, a little like a church with its green-shuttered windows and its chaste Corinthian pillars. The big, white houses that looked upon the green were of colonial cut, plus the additions that intervening generations had brought.

“Gee! How I hate those white buildings!” Mae said with a shudder. “They give me the willies.”

“One month in one of them, and it would be me to the nut-house,” admitted Laure.

“Say, do you know I kind o' like them,” Agnes admitted with shame.

About the green the houses sat in friendly fashion, close to the road, as though to invite the whole world to an ample colonial hospitality. But as the road drew away from the common, the houses drew farther and farther from it. Gradually the spaces between the houses grew wider. After a while only faint suggestions of cultivation here and there indicated that there were any houses at all.

“Say, they could improve this burg some by putting a trolley-line along here,” Mae remarked.

“And electric lights,” added Laure.

“Say, I kind o' like it just the way it is,” said Agnes.

“Think of living here!” Mae went on. “Little old Forty-second Street for mine!”

“Me!” said Laure. “Build me a cabin where Forty-second, Seventh Avenue, and Broadway crowd together, That 's all I want.”

Mae leaned forward slightly until across Agnes her eyes met Laure's.

“1912 model,” she whispered, sweeping an eloquent glance about the motor.

Laure's dexter finger, long, slim, olive, the nails manicured to the breaking-point, indicated spots in the upholstery where the leather had worn away. “You have to have all the class in the world to afford to look as fierce as this.”

“Say, if I lived here, I would n't climb into a machine once,” said Agnes. “I 'd hoof it everywhere.”

They turned into the wide roadway of an estate that appeared bounded by stone walls as far as the eye could reach. The road was as hard as a whetstone. Now and then came the gurgle of a brook, the ripple of a tiny cascade. The road wound, but always kept its ample width, always was as hard as though cut from the living rock, and as smooth as though sand-papered. Another turn, and they came in sight of the house.

It was a big house, yellow trimmed, with green shutters. Originally, perhaps, it had been a square building whose geometric lines were typical of the rigors of colonial architecture and whose doorway, a combination of fan-light, graceful leaded side panels, exquisite woodwork, ancient brass knocker, was typical of its decorative mitigations. Wings had been added to the original structure, but they were in perfect keeping and apparently not modern. At one side were gardens with summer-houses; at the others, orchards and grape arbors. In front was a huge crescent-shaped area of lawn, so closely shorn that the wind could not stir its nap. At irregular intervals across its golden-green, enormous copper beeches drooped their branches. Three women sat sewing about a table on the lawn. As the motor came in sight, one of them rose, and hastened to meet them at the edge of the lawn.

“That 's Julia,” said Mae. “She 's doing her hair differently.”

“She made the dress all right,” remarked Laure. “She 's thin.”

“Ain't she a pippin!” Agnes commented,

“O girls,” Julia called as she drew near, “you don't know how glad I am to see you!”

The motor stopped. The chauffeur alighted, opened the door, and the girls descended.

“Well, hello, Julia!” Mae called.

“You 're looking fine,” added Laure; “I never saw you so freckled.”

“You 're a sight for sore eyes,” contributed Agnes.

Julia Wrighterson was so tall that in actual inches she overtopped the tall Mae Narne and the taller Laure Lindsay, but about her shoulders there was a Clytie-like droop that considerably reduced her stature. She was a white-skinned girl—so white that the freckles to which Laure referred stood out like a dash of amber rain, At every point her features stopped just short of the classic, but made, nevertheless, a fascinating piquancy of this irregularity. She had a rich, warm mouth deep wine-crimson—which also seemed to droop, and eyes, rich and warm, too, of a thickly fringed, star-filled violet.

Her long, straight gown was made of a soft silk, with a figure which consisted of three flowers. Her parasol was of the same material. Reproductions of the three flowers trimmed her frail, deeply perforated lace hat.

“Now come to meet the others,” she said.

The others were presumably Mme. Wrighterson and Mrs. Edward Wrighterson.

“Mother,” Julia said when they reached the shade of the copper beech, “and Daphne, let me introduce my friends Miss Narne, Miss Lindsay, and Miss Bailey. My mother Mrs. Wrighterson and my sister Mrs. Edward Wrighterson.” She paused while a quintet of civil murmurs entangled, disentangled, and died away. Then “Oh!” Julia wailed suddenly, “where is Jackie?”

“Jackie had a severe headache,” Mae answered in accents that were a replica of the severe oral elegance with which she had inundated the telephone. “She wished me to present her apologies.”

“Oh!” Julia cried, “my heart was set on seeing Jackie! But perhaps I can go back with you.”

“Ah, here comes the tea,” said Mme. Wrighterson. “I hope you are all ready for it. I confess I have two vices, my coffee at seven in the morning and my tea at five in the afternoon.”

“We are companions in misery,” Laure admitted gracefully. “I confess to the same two weaknesses.”

“Tea!” exclaimed Agnes. “I love it! My sister always says, 'Why don't you bathe in it?' I got a license to like it all right. My grandmother was a' Irish woman from County Sligo. She always had a pot boiling on the stove from the moment she got up until she went to bed.”

Mme. Wrighterson's eyes, old and faded, but of a soft brown, had passed non-committally observant from Mae's cold, pale pink, golden blondness, like a rose in ice, and Laure's vivacious, glittering darkness, like a butterfly in amber, to Agnes's frank Celtic sparkle: There her gaze seemed to catch fire.

“I should agree with you on that,” she laughed. “My mother never left the house or came back into it without her cup of tea. I have traveled in County Sligo—a beautiful country.”

“Oh, granny was full of stories about it. I often thought I 'd go and see it some time,” Agnes said.

The tea-wagon, which, guided by an old white-haired man in shabby livery, had been approaching noiselessly over the thick turf, stopped in front of Mme. Wrighterson. The tea-set was Sheffield plate of an old luster; in places the copper had worn through the silver. The dishes were an old moss-rose pattern of porcelain; in spots the roses had washed away.

“Thank you, Broke,” said Mme. Wrighterson. “Did the honey come?”

“Yes, mem,” answered Broke; “a few moments ago, mem.”

“I don't know anything more difficult to eat or more malapropos at tea than honey,” Mme. Wrighterson exclaimed apologetically. “But Mrs. Blodgett—I always call her my 'bee-woman'—raises such wonderful honey! She sent word this morning that she had some for me. I thought you might like some of it.”

The girls murmured various forms of assent.

Her eyes on her guests, Mme. Wrighterson went on talking, but all the time her withered, old hands were moving among the china and silver—moving with deft, accustomed touches. She poured the tea into the thin cups. She scooped the honey out of the little glass jar in which it had come, and put it upon the thin plates. Broke handed these about. He passed thin little sandwiches of buttered bread and thin little cookies covered with sugar. “Don't get any of this honey on your pretty frocks,” she admonished the entire group, “or I shall never forgive myself for giving it to you.”

She was a large woman. Even sitting in her chair, her body had a notable dignity of carriage. Her hair was quite white, and her skin, old and mothy and yellow, was crisscrossed with scores of faint wrinkles, But the soul of her was young; it shone through her quiet smile in the true spirit of friendliness and through her brown eyes in the true spirit of understanding, She wore a gown of so old a style that it had almost an antique connotation—a light silk with green lines alternating with black lines on an ivory background. A long fichu of Maltese lace was pinned at the throat and waist with huge brooches of Scotch cairngorm. About her shoulders was a cape of ermine, thin and mothy and yellow like her skin.

“I shall never outgrow my enjoyment of honey,” she said after a while. “I love it.”

“So do I,” agreed Mrs. Edward Wrighterson. “You and I are twins, Mother, when it comes to honey. And this is the best I ever tasted. I should think the 'bee-woman' fed her bees on bar-le-duc, sugared violets, maple-syrup, and champagne.”

Daphne Wrighterson was a little older than Julia, but her figure was much more mature. It flowed from the round neck and square shoulders into warm, maternal-looking breasts and swelled from the round waist into a wide, maternal-looking lap. Her hair, bushy-coarse, like thick, crinkled gold thread, parted in the middle and arched across her ears, was drawn into a big wad at her neck. But what one really looked at was her eyes. Set under a forehead of a white broadness and over cheeks of a pink roundness, wide apart, wide open, gray, those eyes shone with a gentle sadness.

“I'm gobbling,” she went on. “I am so sorry that it 's happened the way it has, but I have invited the children from the poor-farm to come here this afternoon. I am expecting them any moment now. It means, of course, that I shall have to devote myself to them for the rest of the afternoon.”

“I 'm sorry, too, Daphne,” Julia said. “Perhaps we 'll get time to come round back and watch the children playing for awhile. Daphne gives them a wonderful party every summer,” she explained to her friends, “and they all look forward to it as the event of the whole year.”

Julia was seated, curved like a crescent moon, in one of the big chairs. The chair arm supported one elbow, and her long, slender hand supported her cheek. Drooping thus, it was to be seen that her face showed a certain wanness—shadows too heavily drawn under the violet eyes, hollows too deeply rutted in the white cheeks. Her eyes went from Mae to Laure to Agnes and clung wistfully to each of them.

“There, there they come now!” exclaimed Mme. Wrighterson.

A touring-car filled with children shot into sight on the drive. It was followed by another, filled also, but with grown people holding babies. The motors followed the drive up to the entrance of the house. Daphne jumped to her feet. She wore a gown which she might have made herself, of white organdie with pink roses on it. About her shoulders was a scarf of the same material. In the little V made by her modestly turned-away neck hung a fine gold chain suspending a small pendant of a delicate rose-pink coral.

“Oh, I 'm so sorry to go!” she said regretfully. “But if you can, come back and see what we 're doing. We do have such good times!”

She ran to meet the motor. The children had in the meantime alighted. The grown people alighted. They all crowded about Daphne.

Suddenly a wheeled chair, manned by Broke, appeared in the doorway, and descended by gentle gradations from the steps to the lawn. The man in it—even at that distance it could be seen that he was young, white-faced, weak—waved a hand in their direction.

“Oh,” Mme. Wrighterson exclaimed in a pleased voice, “I am so glad that Edward decided to come out. My son has been an invalid for some months,” she explained to her guests, “and sometimes we have a great deal of difficulty in persuading him to get out into the air. He 'll enjoy the children, though, Julia. He always does.”

The procession, the man in the wheeled chair at its head, the children capering in a group about him, Daphne following, the grown people chattering in a group about her, disappeared around the corner of the house. It had scarcely vanished when Daphne reappeared, carrying a little white bundle over each arm.

“She 's bringing us the twins,” Mme. Wrighterson explained, looking much amused. “They 're the pets of the poor-farm. They are about six months old, and the mother and father are both dead—poor little creatures!”

Drinking their tea, they watched Daphne's soft, slow, preoccupied approach over the velvet lawn.

“Are n't they lovely?” she said as soon as she was in their group again. “I had to show them to you at once.” She sat down, and offered the twins for their inspection. Her big eyes had filled with a tenderness that turned their deep, wide-irised grayness to wells of light. “O you little angels! How I wish you were mine!” Her voice had sunk to a mere breath, as though loudness of any kind might blast the little human buds on her lap.

The three girls surveyed the round, red-faced, blinky-eyed little creatures.

“Charming little things!” Mae said with delicate enthusiasm.

“Girls?” Laure asked in a tone prettily interrogative.

“No,” Daphne answered, “boys. As you would very soon discover if you had to take care of them for an afternoon.”

“Say, they 're corkers!” Agnes approved heartily. “I like a husky kid.”

“You little ducks,” Daphne continued her apostrophe, “how am I going to let you go home to-day?”

Mme. Wrighterson's eyes, resting on her daughter-in-law's illuminated face, turned somber.

“We shall have to move the poor-farm up here, Daphne,” was all she said. She spoke in a tone of gentle raillery.

“Now I must get back,” Daphne said blithely. “Edward 's flying some marvelous Chinese kites for the children. I 'm having a perfectly lovely time, Mother.” It was as though she deliberately packed her voice with sweet gaiety.

“Now for some more tea!” Mrs. Wrighterson exclaimed. “Julia, I 'm neglecting your friends shamefully.”

The girls repudiated this in various high-bred disclaimers.

“And,” continued Mme. Wrighterson, “I had forgotten all about the cheese. I 'm probably prouder of this cheese than anything that 's produced on the place. You see,” she went on, while with her deft touches she dug it from a little earthen jar and transferred it to their plates, “almost all the cooking receipts that I use were invented in the Wrighterson family. The Wrighterson women have all been famous housekeepers. My husband's great-grandmother wrote a cook-book. It was in the days when, whatever a woman wrote, she must start by turning out a cook-book. Sabrina Wrighterson stopped there; she had no literary ambitions. But all the Wrighterson women had the knack of inventing wonderful food combinations. And so we have a big, old book in the family filled not only with Sabrina Wrighterson's cooking rules, but with her daughters' and her granddaughters'. For generations. in the Wrighterson family the jellies, preserves, piccalillis, relishes, and, indeed, pies and cakes, jumbles and cookies, have all been made according to the receipts in this book. So, you see, I never had a chance to exercise any originality. I used to tell my husband that there was no knowing how inventive I might have been if I had n't felt it a point of honor to follow the family traditions. But I did do one thing: I invented a cheese. It 's a very simple, ordinary cheese made from cream. My invention is the seasoning. I put twelve different herbs in it. I raised them in my garden.”

“How very interesting!” said Mae. She nibbled the cracker which she had anointed delicately with the cheese. “It's very delicious.”

“Delightful flavor!” agreed Laure.

“I have n't tasted anything like this,” said Agnes, “since I was a little girl and living in the country. We had a cow then, and sometimes we had more milk than we knew what to do with. Granny always used to make cheese of what was left over. You 'd have liked my granny, Madam Wrighterson. She was a harp for fair.”

“I 'm sure I would,” Mme. Wrighterson said. Again that pleasant light filled her eyes as her gaze met Agnes's. “Julia is getting to be a famous cook. She helped me put up everything last year. She has a natural knack for such things. And you enjoyed it, did n't you, Julia?”

“I never had so much fun in my life,” Julia admitted.

“Oh, here comes Daphne again,” Mme. Wrighterson said indulgently, “with another baby.”

“Did you ever see anything so adorable in all your life?' Daphne demanded as she approached. This time she knelt among them on the lawn. Again her eyes filled with that soft loveliness that was half joy and half sorrow. Again her voice sank to that faint ripple, half awe, half soothing. She pulled her scarf away from its face.

It was a black baby, with eyes so bright that the spectators involuntarily smiled. The baby smiled, too, showing four tiny white teeth.

“He looked like the little black babies that Edward and I saw in Bermuda,” Daphne explained, “when we were on our honeymoon. I was so wild about them that Edward offered to buy me one, and when he found that no mother would sell her baby, to steal one.”

Again that somberness dulled Mme. Wrighterson's soft eyes as she looked at her daughter-in-law.

“Yes, we must move the poor-farm up here, Daphne,” was again all she said.

Daphne departed, still murmuring her little language.

Mae looked at her diamond-incrusted wrist-watch.

“I'm sorry, but I'm afraid we must be going,” she said in regretful accent.

“Yes,” Laure added, with no diminution of her breeding, “I think we ought to get back to poor, dear Jackie.”

“I hope you can come with us, Julia,” Agnes pleaded. “Jackie 'll be crazy to see you.”

“Oh, I'm so sorry!” Julia said. “I can't now. I had forgotten that I had promised Daphne to help later in the little play the children are giving. They 're depending on me, you see. But later I 'll call you up. If you 're not gone then, I 'll come over. Don't go early.” Again her eyes clung to her friends' faces. “Oh, don't go unless you have to.” She looked at them longingly.

Mae shook hands with Mme. Wrighterson in the elegant way that she had once made famous in a musical comedy; Laure followed with a manner only a degree less distinguished; Agnes shook hands vigorously, but with warmth. “I 've had a swell time,” she said.

“I am delighted to have met you all,” Mme. Wrighterson announced, “and I am so sorry that you could not have stayed to dinner. But perhaps you will come some other time.”

“We shall be charmed,” Mae answered for the trio.

Julia accompanied her friends across the lawn to the motor.

“, how do you like it, Julia?” Mae asked when they were out of ear-shot. Her tones had shed their high-bred elegance and had taken on an edge of keen inquiry. “Pretty slow—what?”

“Yes, it is pretty slow,” Julia admitted, “sometimes,”

“Where 's Vin?” Laure asked abruptly.

“At Monte Carlo,” Julia answered.

“Is n't he the rotter?” Agnes exclaimed, and then in a burst: “Say, Julia, for the love o' Mike, why don't you beat it? Not that it ain't pretty soft in some ways, but you 'll die here. You know you can always get a job and another swell husband, if that 's your lay. Friedenstein was saying only the other day there never was nobody like you. Come over to the hotel to-night, and we 'll take you back to New York in the car. Muggie 's a good sport; he 'll stake you if you need money. And you know my place or Jackie's is always open to you. If you pull it off that way, there won't be any trouble. They 'll send your clothes after you, and that 'll end it. Vin 'll let you get your divorce. He 'd be square about that all right.”

Julia did not speak for a moment, but in that pause the wanness of her coloring visibly accented itself.

“Take Mrs. Wrighterson,” she said presently, as though soliloquy had interrupted itself to become monologue. “She was very happy with Vin's father for the first fifteen years of their married life, then he went insane. He's in the asylum now, ten miles from here. Regularly once a week, as sure as the clock, she pays him a visit. She could have lived in New York or London or Paris—anywhere—and had a swell time,—they 'ye got friends all over the world,—she did n't, though. She stuck. Take Daphne. Because he stood by her father, she married a man that she really did n't care for. In the first year of their married life, just as she 's beginning to love him, he gets himself all twisted up in a hunting accident. He 'll never be any good again. He 's only the shell of a man. He 's a gentleman, though, and a dead-game sport. He gets wild spells, when he begs her to leave him and find some man that can give her the children she wants. But she 's stuck, too. When I married Vin, and he telegraphed his mother, she took the next train over to New York. I sat in the hotel room, dressed up like a—I can see those Tenderloin clothes now—frightened to death, white, trembling. When her knock came on the door, I could barely open it, my knees knocked together so. She just reached out her arms and said, 'Is this Vincent's wife?' and kissed me. That 's all there was to it then; that 's all there 's ever been to it. Never a question or a hint or a catty knock of any kind. Of course Vin 's acting like the devil; but in his heart he does n't want to lose me. I know that. He needs me. He knows that. And I know it, too. It's hell here sometimes—I mean the dullness. Some nights it seems that if I could just doll up once more and beat it down to Morgan's grill, I 'd— But I 'm going to stick, too.”

Jackie Dare sat in a little summer-house on the grounds of the hotel. Across the little rustic table from her lounged a young man whose appearance perfectly explained his sobriquet. His marked facial peculiarity was supplemented by a sartorial spectacularity, His expression of great good nature was not confined to his bulging eyes or his eccentric profile; it seemed to exude from his very figure.

“Muggie, give me some ski,” Jackie ordered. “I have n't had a drink in this temperance hole since you left.”

Muggie drew a generous flask from an inner pocket. He unscrewed the top, poured some of the contents into it, and handed it to his companion. She drank it with a single gulping intake.

“That deed of kindness will save your soul from the everlasting pit, Muggie, old boy,” she promised her companion, visibly cheered by his ministrations.

“Thanks,” replied Muggie. “Have another! Say, why are n't you taking in those swell works with the rest of the bunch? I thought you and Julia were pals. Was n't any split there, was there?”

“I should say not,” said Jackie. “Put that in your nut and remember it, Muggie. Anybody 'd better try splitting the earth in two before he tries to make trouble between me and Julia. But, Muggie, how could I go? I did n't want to gum Julia's game. The other three could put up a refined front for as long as an hour; but me—what would a truck horse like me do? I'd rather see Julia than my dead mother; but I love her too much to hurt her.”


text: Talk:Century Magazine/Volume 91/Issue 5/Ladies

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
May Eve; or, What You Must/Part 1

RS. ROBERT HENRY ILLINGTON—and she was born Doris Ianthe Wrexmere, if that interests you—was talking with her sister. Mrs. Illington's face was delicately oval in shape; it was delicately olive in color. Its only salience of tint was the red-lipped mouth that framed curvingly her delicious smile; its only brilliance of expression the friendly sparkle that played in her agate eyes. She was clever—she had written some exceptionally good verse; there had actually been one volume published. But what in her expression had threatened, before marriage, to hint unbecomingly of intellectuality, had toned itself down in her single year of wedlock; had disappeared entirely with her swift maternity. Her figure, which had been almost breakably slender, was beginning to round; there was a suggestion that it might be, in time, a little sumptuous. She lay on a broad couch that was covered with a white rug. Her slender shape would have been smothered in her negligee and the coquettish wrappings that softly supplemented it, if they had not all been filmy. Instead, the lines of her limbs outlined themselves with a delicate precision, as if under a fine fall of snow. Her baby snuggled at her breast. Every other instant she stroked its tiny head, drawing her taper fingers from brow to nape, ruffling the invisible down that softened with a golden shadow its egg-like nudity.

It was a big room, with some of its wide windows opening onto the Charles. They framed, in heavy mahogany, squares and rectangles of light that were part the golden river and part, separated dimly by a film of horizon, the orange-tawny sky. A slip of a moon—a thin scroll of silver—was limned against, was cut into, and inset in the rich sky. It was not moored—it drifted—drifted. A few black clouds floated in this suffusing sea, and from the end of one of them, like a gem at a slipper-tip, hung the brilliant evening star.

The light came in the window in long, slanting lines, arousing kindred and rival lights everywhere—purple lights in the big, old-fashioned things; the hulking mahoganies that sulked in dusky corners; green lights in the gilt frames of pool-like mirrors; golden lights in tall brass candlesticks; rainbow lights in the silver on the dressing-case, and the baby's blue bassinet.

“When are you going to marry, Silver-Rose?” Mrs. Illington was saying in her friendly, sweet tones.

Silver-Rose laughed. “Oh, I don't know—never, perhaps,” she was answering, as girls invariably have answered that question since the beginning of girls.

It was not necessary for her to pretend that she might not marry, at that very moment, if she cared. Everybody knew that she could. Everybody knew—and by everybody I mean the newspaper-reading public of the United States—about her memorable coming-out dance at seventeen, her immediate belle-ship, the steady progress of her triumphs abroad, the curious cachet given to her by the infatuation of an incipient royal personage.

When she steered clear of the complications of that pertinent international episode, society had smiled complacently, had called her discreet; but when, soon after her return to Boston, she had been entered regularly at Radcliffe College, it drew a long breath of consternation, and began to call her eccentric. But she had gone calmly on, acquiring her A. B. with one hand, while she drove the social four-in-hand with the other. Lately, the appearance on the scene of the Earl of Montfort, and his assiduous wooings, had dragged her again under the calcium-light. The Wrexmeres had been originally English; there were, in the family, many English affiliations; it was looked upon as a desirable alliance. All the newspapers told her so.

She did not look like her sister. She was tall and slight, a little willowy, if you like; a girlish combination of angles, that promised exquisite curves; and of curves that had emerged, wonderfully, from virginal angles. She carried herself proudly. She was a blonde—but such a blonde—delicate, diaphanous, ethereal. Snowflakes and rose-leaves, moonshine and honey, silver and gold, fire and dew—they had all been called upon for her coloring. And across her face there seemed to flit an endless variety of expressions—every expression, at least, that was elusive, evasive, evanescent. The line of her features was as pure as a silver profile cut from the crescent moon. And her face emerged, magically, from under hair that was always threatening to flood it—hair that was sheer, primitive, glittering gold; there was not in it anywhere a ghost of flaxen, not a suggestion of yellow, not a hint of red—hair that crisped into wires of spun light in the sunshine, and was like honey dropping from the comb in the shadow. Her eyes were a blue that was, I think, a little unusual—the limpid, dazzling blue of the depths of an iceberg; and yet, somehow, they were never cold; they were brilliant when she talked, and dreamy, perhaps a little heavy-lidded, when she meditated. For the rest—and I hope you are not bored—there were purple shadows hovering on her delicate eyelids; her cheeks were faintly pink, mayflowers growing under snow; her mouth was a dewy nest of rose-petals, curling from a wide center to tiny scooped corners. And the turn of her chin was nicked by a faint cleft.

It is interesting to me to conjecture what Silver-Rose might have been if she had lived at different periods of history. In medieval times, for instance, I picture her as a blonde—slender Marguerite of Valois, holding courts of love, queening them haply, delicately critical of poems that purled of love in the prim, restricted forms of old-time rhymes. In Elizabethan England I think she would have figured a shadowy prototype behind one of those enigmatic sonnet-sequences that were like twilight mists, trailing golden dramatic days. Later, in tea-drinking times, she must have appeared powdered and patched and poodled, an ombre-playing, China-hunting target for the gentle Spectator's quiet wit. And, last of all, early in the nineteenth century, I see her an album beauty, full of sensibility, with sloping shoulders and a pursed, prunes-and-prisms mouth, another L. E. L. adored of minor poets, and daintily, quaintly minor herself.

Her name was Sylvia Rosamund Wrexmere. When she was little, she bloomed on the family-tree simply as Rose. But a little later, when two English cousins, who were Rosalie and Rosabel, came to stay at their house, there was a confusion—almost, indeed, a war of the roses. Rosalie was the oldest daughter of the oldest Wrexmere sister; it was decided that she should remain Rose. Rosabel was the youngest child of the youngest Wrexmere sister—there was no other possible name for her but Rosebud, and Sylvia Rosamund, it was decided, should be Sylvia, and only Sylvia. But in the end this did not do. They were a family hotly Lancastrian in their sympathies. There had not been for generations a branch, however obscure, that did not wear and flaunt its rose. Finally it was agreed that. she should be Sylvia-Rose. But the children soon shortened this to Silver-Rose; and Silver-Rose it continued to be until the end of the chapter.

“Doesn't this, for instance, tempt you, Silver-Rose?” Doris asked. She made no gesture, but her fingers still caressed her baby's downy head.

Silver-Rose sighed. She looked fixedly at the little spot on the thin, pink skull where the skin throbbed up and down. “I don't think it does, Dor,” she said languidly; “although Bobs is a love—and I'm his slave.”

“You know, dear”—Doris smiled her affectionate smile—“it won't be like this—it can't be like this—always. I mean the supremacy, the newspaper talk, and the way people run after you. And, besides, there are loads of pretty girls growing up as fast as they can grow. We're bound to hear from them sooner or later, you know. Anyway, we'll see them.” She stared at her sister questioningly, but Silver-Rose, indifferent, made no response.

“I don't want you to be left to braid St. Catherine's tresses,” Doris continued to coax; “but you will, my dear, if you're not careful. A woman is not Tennyson's brook, you must remember. Men will come and men will go; and after awhile they won't come back. Mama and papa don't seem at all to realize. You simply hypnotize them, lovey; that's what it is. That's the danger of being a belle. You wait too long, and then, very often, in the end you don't do half so well for yourself. Now, isn't it so, dearest chuck?”

Her sister roused herself a little. “None of these arguments seem to appeal to me, Dor,” she said lightly.

Now how am I to describe her voice? I am tempted to use that quaint old word “dulcet.” I am tempted to say that it was honey-sweet and dew-clear. I am tempted to compare it to the ringing of lily-bells. Whatever it was, it went with her face, and just as inevitably as you longed, after once seeing her, to see her again, just so inevitably, after you had heard her speak, you listened avidly for the sound of her voice again.

Doris reflected for a moment. “Silver-Rose”—she pounced suddenly upon her sister—“have you any intention, up your sleeve, of going on the stage?”

Silver-Rose's surprised amusement burst out in a sudden spurt of laughter.

Oh, you should have heard her laugh! It was the rippling of a brook, gurgling over stones and pulling at long, purpling grasses. It was witchery. It was magic. It was music!

“You see,” her sister went on, half-apologetically, “I sowed my wild oats in 'The Wind on the Harp,' and I've always wondered what form yours would take. When you studied with Coquelin, that winter, that's when I had my first suspicion—I confess I was worried. I was relieved, you may fancy, when you decided to go to Radcliffe, although I thought it was a funny stunt. Indeed, I congratulated myself then that you were safe. But you've been acting there so much, and you act constantly more and more. My dear Silver-Rose, you're acting-mad. And last year, when there was so much talk—I mean when you were the young wife in 'The Land of Heart's Desire'” she broke off, and bent on her sister a look that was inquiry and apology in equal parts.

“Oh, no, my dear”—Silver-Rose hastened, laughingly, to lay her sister's fears at rest—“I love acting, but I haven't, as it happens, the ability, and I have as little the desire to be an actress. There's nothing—unlike most people—that I yearn to elevate—not even the masses, and certainly not the stage.”

“I pinned a great deal of my suspicion of you to your upper lip,” Doris volunteered.

“My upper lip?” her sister repeated, in a mystified way.

“Yes, your upper lip. It's the upper lip of the actor—haven't you ever noticed that? On each side of the center, it lifts, just naturally, into the little pink peaks that actresses either create or intensify in their make-ups.”

Silver-Rose was now biting viciously with her little white teeth at this same upper lip, pulling it out of shape, and pressing the color out of it. “What nonsense!” she commented.

“Will you tell me, then, if it isn't the acting, for what you went to college?” Doris demanded.

“Oh, did you think I went there for the chance to act?” Silver-Rose laughed a little. “No, that was not it. Incidentally, I enjoyed the acting very much, but I went there for a change.”

“A change?” Doris iterated, puzzled.

“Of course, a change. Did it ever occur to you, Doris, what a frightful bore our life has always been?”

“No. No, I confess I've never looked at it in that light,” Doris said slowly.

“Then look at it now in that light for a moment, Dor; from the point of view of its continuity in sameness, its inevitability in atmosphere. What has it always been ever since we can remember? Winters in Boston, alternating with winters in Egypt or on the Riviera; and summers in Newport. And the people, always the same people, or the same kind of people, no matter in what country we happened to be. People of the same birth, the same breeding, the same unoriginal social instincts; people always playing a game, and always playing the same game. People never who really live, who think, who work. When I went to college, for the first time in my life I met somebody different. I went into a different atmosphere, with different ideas and ideals. There prevailed a kind of socialism—a socialism in which only mind or character could dominate. There were girls there who were working their way through college—girls from little back-country towns, who, from our point of view, had never even lived. And they beat me fairly at the things I had been studying all my life. I had to work hard to be of the elect. Oh, it was a stunning experience. Ever since my babyhood, I have been playing with the same box of blocks—but I got a new set at Radcliffe. I don't think there's much romance in. life, Doris— anyway, not in our life. Radcliffe's been my romance.”

“Oh, my grief!” Doris said distressedly, a plexus of wrinkles coming to the surface on her smooth brow. “'People who live, who think, who work,'” she quoted her sister. “Oh, I hope you're not going to be high-minded, and mess round with the worthy poor. Oh, please don't take your Settlement work too seriously. I'd rather you'd go on the stage,” she ended magnanimously.

“You need not worry,” her sister reassured her. “I'm all kinds of a failure at Settlement work. I'm opposed to its very tenets. I think the bargain too one-sided. I've too profound a respect for the 'worthy poor' to suggest the exchange. I'll take all their half gives me with great pleasure, but I maintain that we haven't anything really worth while to bring to the exchange. And they're so indisputably happy. I wouldn't, for the world, inoculate them with the virus of our discontent. But I shan't go on the stage, either; don't let that alarm you.”

Doris sighed relievedly. “That's nice,” she said contentedly; “now I don't mind—after this the deluge. How did the tableaux come off this afternoon?” She was content; her change of subject indicated that.

“Oh, well enough,” Silver-Rose said indifferently. “There was a frightful mob, and it was unbearably hot.”

“And was the bridal-veil becoming?”

“People said so, of course. I was not so especially pleased myself. One thing I am determined, I shall not wear white if I'm ever married. I dislike myself in white—perhaps because it is always expected of me, and I'm unspeakably tired of it.”

“Then you do intend marriage?”

“I have been trained to intend it.”

“Oh, by the way,” Doris exclaimed suddenly, ignoring her sister's cynicism, “in the top drawer of my dresser there's a little bundle. The Hamptons brought it back; it's a gift from Elizabeth.”

“From Elizabeth?” her sister repeated electrically. She rushed to the dresser, tore open the drawer, and possessed herself of the small tissued and ribboned package there. Then she walked over to the window, sitting down there to its revelations.

“Oh, how lovely!” she said, after a pause.

It was a tiny copy of the Mona Lisa, painted in color on some thin metal, framed again in metal; a square of dulled green-golds, elaborately chaste in design. Over her crossed beautiful hands the delicate head poised itself lightly, and under her soft hair the alluring eyes gazed insolently and indifferently into those of Silver-Rose. All the passion of the south, all the calculation of the north, blended subtly in her look. The triumphant lips trembled on the verge of an inscrutable smile.

“Heavens, how beautiful!” Silver-Rose said, half to herself. “What a woman! What a woman!” She walked slowly over to one of the long mirrors, her eyes fixed on it. She watched her lilylike reflection grow proudly out from among its shadows, Then she looked at the picture again.

“And they call me beautiful,” she mused, in a kind of dispassionate disillusionment.

Doris laughed.

“But you must confess that I'm fearfully, outrageously, on the surface, Doris,” Silver-Rose said hotly—she, somehow, tacitly accepted her sister's laugh as a defense; “a pink and white obviosity.”

“You do very well,” Doris asserted patronizingly; “and, thank fortune! your eyelashes aren't white.”

“They might just as well be white,” Silver-Rose claimed morosely; “everybody thinks I darken them.”

“You're a rose in ice, dear,” Doris said tenderly; “but you'll melt—you'll melt. That's rather a pretty idea,” she reflected musingly; “the rose in ice. Get me paper and pencil, will you, dear?”

“I shall get you no such foolish thing. Of course you know the doctor said you were not to write for awhile.”

“So he did; dear old duck!” Doris resumed her dainty stroking of the baby's head.

“That summer before they were married,” Silver-Rose said dreamily, “I used to go with Elizabeth twice a week to the Louvre. "We always met Lewis at the Mona Lisa. Then they would leave me with my book and the pictures, and they would go for an hour's walk.”

“I am so glad that Lewis has made good; but, just the same, Elizabeth ran a fearful risk when she married him. Everybody distrusted him; and you can't wonder at the awful forms the hostility took. He always produced a curious effect on me—a kind of cold paralysis—that sneer in his eye, and that ironic twist to his voice. You can't tell me, moreover, there's no fire where there's so much smoke.”

“I was always on Lewis' side,” Silver-Rose asserted dreamily.

“Yes, Mrs. Whitfield has never forgiven you your part in it—although she's inconsistent enough to forgive Elizabeth. I must say that your faith was colossal. Didn't Elizabeth's ever waver?”

“Waver?” Silver-Rose laughed a short, quick laugh. “Waver? No—she loved him.”

“But suppose he had turned out”

“She would still have loved him. And with Elizabeth love means service, and service happiness.”

“Oh, Silver-Rose, you don't know; you don't know”

“Perhaps not, but I think I do. Oh, I know I do. Doris, the happy people are the people who love, not the ones who are loved. And Elizabeth loves Lewis. Loves him? She worships him. He might beat her, cast her down, trample on her—she would serve him on her bruised knees.”

“And does he love her that way?” Doris asked curiously. She had the look of one listening to some fabulous tale.

“Oh, he's only a man, Doris dear. And then he has his art. And men of genius—painters, sculptors, musicians, poets—they are all alike—they all love in the same way; short intervals of loving snatched from between longer intervals of working. But Lewis loves Elizabeth as much as he could love anybody; and that's better than most men's best. Oh, they are such a pair! He's a man—and she's a woman. They're glorious together. How I live, Doris, when I'm with them!”

“It must have been awfully hard for them at first;” Doris sighed compassionately.

“Hard! Oh, you don't know. And they simply wouldn't accept the kind of help one could offer. Elizabeth's hair is white, but she's magnificent—magnificent with her color, those gray eyes, her dark lashes, and her tragic brow. Her figure is glorious, and she carries herself—Doris, she would overtop any queen you've ever seen.”

“Take care,” Doris said. “I flatter myself that my collection of queens is an unusual one.”

“Wait until you see Elizabeth.”

“Things are going very smoothly now, aren't they?”

“Oh, beautifully! At first Elizabeth did some translating—that helped to tide things over. But now Lewis can't begin to fill the orders he gets—and even if he had the time, he wouldn't paint everybody. He's always been infernally fastidious, and now he can afford to be anything he wants. He keeps a studio in London. His portrait of the Duchess of Ux made his English reputation, and he'll undoubtedly have to come to New York next winter. He'll simply pluck fortunes there.”

“Did he ever finish the portrait he began of you?” Doris asked.

“No, he says he'll finish it this summer, if I'll go over.”

“And shall you go?”

“I haven't decided yet whether I shall sail on the Sappho or not.”

“When does the Sappho sail?”

“To-morrow.”

“To-morrow,” Doris laughed. “Oh, Silver-Rose, oh, Silver-Rose!” she murmured indulgently. “But then, anyway,” she continued contentedly, “you couldn't get a stateroom.”

“Oh, yes, the Somersets are going over. They'll take care of me. I can decide to go at the very last moment—they've been good enough to say—and share with Muriel.”

“What did you wear in the picture?” Doris reverted.

“White. White crape; an old thing I'd had a long time. That reminds me, I shall have to take it with me, I suppose. Lewis wouldn't let me wear anything else. There were some pearls, I think—oh, yes, a little cap that Elizabeth had. Lewis says if I wish to look well, I must always wear white—and crape, preferably.”

There was a little pause. “Then you do believe in love?” Doris flung at her sister what evidently was the core of her meditation.

Silver-Rose moved restlessly. “Oh, yes, I believe in love,” she affirmed; “who doesn't?”

“How much?” Doris continued relentlessly; “and what are you waiting for, Silver-Rose?”

Silver-Rose started to speak. Her eyes sparkled with sudden brilliance behind the softening sweep of her long lashes. Then she hesitated, and the blue flames died out of them. They grew dreamy, and the lids, heavy with purple stains, drooped. It was a long moment before she spoke again, and then she clasped her hands behind her head and gazed, unseeingly, at the silver curl of the moon, floating out of the afterglow.

“I'll tell you about it, Doris dear,” she said simply; and her voice began to seem less girlishly tinkling, to grow bell-like, as she proceeded; “because I think you'll understand—you're the only one, except Elizabeth, who will; and I have never, strangely enough—never told Elizabeth. But all my life I have been expecting something to happen to me—a something glorious and indescribable. I have had a feeling, ever since I can remember, that there would, some day, come into my experience a single big moment—a huge climax of some kind, a sudden chance at great happiness; a door, as it were, opening into a golden future. I don't know what it will be. I don't know when it will come. And it is possible, of course, that I utterly deceive myself, that it will never come at all. But I don't believe that. I never pay any attention to such doubts when they occur to me. I always put them quickly out of my mind. My belief in the past has been dim, vague, shadowy; but of late years it has grown into a conviction, a certainty, a surety that it would be impossible for anybody to shake or break. I feel that fate has a definite something in reserve for me—a something deeper and sweeter and richer than comes, ordinarily, into the lives of women. That I am sure of, but all I can do is wait for it, and wait in patience, to be forever keenly on the look-out. Three things I know. It will come, my chance of happiness; it will come. I shall know it when it does come, and I shall be ready for it—ready for it at any cost.” Her voice was very sweet when she stopped, but her words were almost inaudible.

“But—but”—Doris panted fiercely for words—“suppose—suppose he's ineligible,” she ended lamely.

“I don't care if he's a chimney-sweep,” Silver-Rose said softly.

“Oh, I understand now,” Doris accused her ardently; “you little dreamer of dreams! Chimney-sweeps are picturesque enough. They come into poetry and fairy-tales. 'Hans Andersen' is full of them. But suppose he's a motorman?”

But if her ridicule hit, it left invisible wounds. “It makes no difference who he is,” Silver-Rose pronounced inflexibly. But the dreams began to float out of her eyes.

“Couldn't he possibly, sisterkin, be an earl?” Doris insinuated softly.

Silver-Rose looked directly at her. “I am afraid not,” she said, sighing. “I had to tell one so this afternoon.”

“Well, let's hope he'll be a prince,” Doris suggested fondly; “a Prince Hal in the flesh,” she added, smiling. “Come here and kiss me, Silver-Rose.”

Silver-Rose went and kissed her.

“I suppose I ought to be going,” she said vaguely, after awhile; “there's that errand in Allston. I must do that. I wouldn't disappoint Pepi for the world; and I want to talk with her about it. It's a good chance, and she's the brightest girl I've ever met at the Settlement.”

“You can't go alone. Is Beau coming?”

“No, he's not even going to be at the dance to-night; mother's in despair.”

“Wait for Rob, won't you, dear? He'll be delighted.”

“I can't.

“I'll send Delia with you.”

“Heavens, no! My dear, I can take care of myself. If college has done anything for me—and for it I'm devoutly grateful—it's emancipated me from ridiculous forms and ceremonies. I've decided that a woman ought to be able to take care of herself. And, besides, it's only the fringes of night.”

“But, Silver-Rose, don't you think”

“You might as well understand now as ever,” Silver-Rose maintained with languid obstinacy, “that I won't have Delia.”

“Let me telephone for the brougham.”

“No, dear.”

“Or the runabout. You can chauffeuse yourself, and you will.”

“No, I'm going in an electric.”

“'And when she was bad she was horrid,'” Doris quoted mechanically.

“But when she was good, you remember, she was very good indeed,” Silver-Rose excused herself; “there are compensations, Dor, for everything.”

Silver-Rose was putting on before the glass a broad, green hat wreathed with tiny rose-buds. She was adjusting the trim jacket of her green walking-suit. Her hands fluttered for a second with a globe of chiffon, that bunched fluffily under her chin. She pulled into place a long, foreign-looking chain—cut-gold, with tiny gods of green jade strung on it at irregular intervals. She drew on, last of all, her heavy walking-gloves,

“Come over and kiss me, Silver-Rose,” Doris commanded imperiously, “again, dear,” she added; “there's no prophesying about you, you know. You may sail to-morrow. If it were a week before the Sappho went I'd have no fears of losing you, but as there are only a few hours, you're as likely as not to run away—with a good-by over the telephone.”

Silver-Rose kissed her sister, not twice but many times. She kissed the tiny segment of the baby's head that his position permitted her lips to touch. “Good-by, dear,” she said again. And her slender figure flitted through the open doorway,into the dark beyond.

Doris lay quiet for a moment, her eyelids down. Suddenly something flickered silver under the fringes of her lashes. A delicate diamond of a tear trailed over her olive cheek. It moved slowly there, cutting a shining swath through its smooth down. Several followed its wake. One splashed on the baby's head. Another came, and another, and another. The baby waked and cried. Doris sat up.

Out in the street, the air was suffused with the amethystine rain of the stars. The little new moon was rocking toward the horizon. The streets were quiet, twinkling with lights, hollow tunnels packed with sweetness, distilled by the young trees. Silver-Rose strolled up Beacon Street to Massachusetts Avenue. There she waited for a car. Many open cars, crowded with people, she permitted to go by. Finally a closed one came. She looked a little disappointed, but she signaled to the conductor.

Her entrance made the sensation that she had come to expect, that she had trained herself calmly to face, and, perhaps, as she had undoubtedly made herself believe, to scorn. The listlessness of the half-dozen women sitting there in the various positions of preoccupation, passed off as if they had had an electric shock. They all eyed her more or less furtively. The effect of her exquisite blondness was to make them look ten years older. A slender, middle-aged woman in the corner watched with fluttering, weak eyes her every movement. A stout, jaded woman, who had been leaning back with closed eyes, sat upright and smoothed her hair, in instinctive answer to the challenge of so much beauty. But the sallow woman opposite, with the stringy black hair and prominent teeth, scrutinized her openly for a moment, and then turning to her companion, a waxy little creature with a gentle expression, whispered hissingly: “Paint!”

The beautiful, cleanly lengths of the boulevard spun by. The car stopped and a man entered. If the attention of any in the car was, by chance, still furtively spent on Silver-Rose, it was immediately deflected in the direction of the newcomer. Apparently, they recognized him universally to be the governor of the Commonwealth. His glance fell on Silver-Rose, and as he bowed his face lighted up with his wonderful smile. Then he found a seat in the corner, on the same side with her.

He was an extraordinarily handsome man, then in his vigorous prime. His six feet of height, his perfect proportions, his noble shoulders, would have distinguished him anywhere. But, in addition, his head was really beautiful. His hair and mustache had silvered prematurely, deepening the tone of his complexion, which halted, in consequence, just short of floridity; and they were, in turn, italicized by his piercing dark eyes and his darker brows and lashes. His features were patrician, even a little ascetic, his expression gracious. That night, perhaps because of the excessive, untimely heat, perhaps because of arduous gubernatorial labors, he looked tired and worn. After awhile he leaned back weariedly and closed his eyes. Silver-Rose had always admired him, his distinction of look and manner, his air of physical and moral cleanliness. He stood, moreover, for the higher order of citizenship, and she would have adored him, if only for that. She was as much tempted as any of her car-associates to examine him slyly, as he leaned back with his tired lids closed. And occasionally she yielded to the temptation.

The car stopped again and another man, a younger man, entered. He stood in the doorway a second, glancing perfunctorily up the length of the car before he sat down in the farther corner of the opposite seat. Silver-Rose looked at him indifferently and then away. The car stopped, and other people got in and others got out. Then, idly, she looked at him again and again. And suddenly her pulses stirred a little. She had discovered that he was wearing a false mustache and imperial. She examined him furtively with more and more interest.

He was a tall man and rather slender, but muscular in a graceful way. He wore a slouch hat and a long coat. He looked like an Italian. This fact was hinted by his hair that, while close-cropped, was yet like ebon velvet. It was iterated in his brown eyes—eyes, curiously enough, full of light but sleepy looking. It was reiterated in his brown skin, where glowed almost imperceptibly a furtive Southern copper. And it was repeated again and again in the look of his features, their soft emergence the one from the other.

Silver-Rose had played men's parts many times at Radcliffe. She had had occasion to apply to her rose-leaf skin most of the combinations of hirsute falsity. She had several times worn a smudge of mustache and a peak of imperial exactly like the ones the young man in the corner was wearing. She knew just how jauntily, if turgidly, they went on, and just how irksomely they came off. For a second she could almost smell the sickly odor of spirit-gum and, in imagination, her upper lip began to smart. She wondered why so personable a youth should have to go disguised. She wondered if it were merely a freak, or if there were some grim necessity and, if so, what it was. But her vague conjectures were suddenly swept away, and as completely as a bubble by a cloudburst.

In the meantime the roving glance of the newcomer had fallen on the man in the corner, diagonally opposite to him. He had undoubtedly recognized him to be the governor of the State. Then it had alighted carelessly on Silver-Rose, and he had started imperceptibly. Immediately it began to play feverishly up and down the car, embracing each of its occupants in turn. Finally he slouched back in his corner, pulled his hat over his eyes, and appeared to meditate. After a pause his right arm, which had been hanging by his side, came to rest on his crossed knees. The hand slipped out of the sleeve; it was bandaged—and curiously bandaged—in an awkward, muffling roll of cloth that made it twice the size of the other. It shot through Silver-Rose's mind that she had seen somewhere such an arm before, and with kinetoscopic quickness there flashed before her mental vision a picture of the deranged degenerate whose fanatical act had stripped the country the year before of its great and gracious head. Suddenly, in spite of herself, she trembled a little. She turned her head away for a minute until her mind regained control of her body. Then she looked again. And this time her hair began electrically to lift away from her prickling scalp, her heart melted to water, and her blood froze to ice.

The bandaged hand was slowly raising itself, and very deliberately it pointed in the direction of the sleeping governor.

For a moment, convinced in the conclusion to which she had jumped, and caught full in the swirl of her terrors, Silver-Rose tried to scream. But as in bad dreams, in which sometimes she had been tied and throttled by similar malign conditions, she could no more have commanded her paralyzed limbs or her atrophied voice than she could have compelled time itself to roll away into eternity. A sudden hope, like a liberating knife, cut cleanly through her strangling thoughts; perhaps this, too, was a bad dream.

A heroic impulse arose to the surface out of the torrent of her terrors; and still mute, her eyes fixed on the arm in the corner, she leaned forward until she was sure that her slender body protected the heart of the sleeping governor.

And then—adding thereby a hundredfold to her numb sense of expectancy, a thousandfold to her blind consciousness of tragedy lurking hideously close—the man in the corner arose and came steadily down the car.

Surely now he would

In hopeless, muscle-bound stupor she watched his approach. He stopped just in front of her cowering self. He bent over her. He spoke.

“Miss Wrexmere?” he interrogated. His voice was a trained one, a little deep; a little, at the moment, imperious, a little, strangely enough, whimsical. And his use of it, his hold on accent was perfect, although there was the silken impediment of something foreign, almost, not quite, submerged in it. Miss Wrexmere bowed automatically.

He dropped very unconstrainedly into the vacant seat beside her. His voice fell a little.

“Miss Wrexmere,” he began again quietly and evenly, “I don't know exactly how I am to tell you what I have to tell you, how to appeal to you in the way I must. But I am at this moment in great peril, and it looks very much as if I should be in dire distress before long unless you will be good enough to aid me. Those men who entered the car a few minutes ago—the ones who were sitting just opposite me—will arrest me when I leave it, unless you will be good enough to put them off the scent, to talk with me as if you knew me well, or, if you prefer, to let me talk to you as if I knew you well. They know who you are, but they are not quite sure of me. The fact of your recognition will turn their suspicions away. You will think that I am taking a fearful risk with you. I can only beg you to forgive that, and to believe, if you can, that I would be the last man in the world to do so, if I were not fairly desperate; and I am that. I ask you, I implore you, to save me.” He stopped for an instant and gazed entreatingly at her.

Silver-Rose could not have spoken at that moment if .her very life had depended on it. But she could listen, and she heard his words coming to her, as if from a great distance. And as she listened, her runaway mind eased itself of its gallop; it slowed up gradually; at length it stood still. And her hair no longer stirred like some unnatural separate member, the machinery of her body started again, her blood thawed and warmed, her heart burst the shackles that bound it. But she was as weak as a rag.

“I will be honest with you,” the young man went on, as she was still silent; “I will acknowledge that there is reason for this surveillance, but it is not a criminal matter, and, moreover, it is all a mistake. I am absolutely innocent. I can only, of course, give you my word of honor in regard to that. But I can't tell you how much I hope that you will accept it, how much depends on your accepting it.” Again he stopped, and looked entreatingly at her.

Still Silver-Rose did not speak. But she was beginning to examine the evidence that her companion submitted to her, was preparing to sit in judgment upon him. Her eyes fell keenly on the bandaged arm. Ah, thank God she was mistaken! There was, there could be, no weapon there. And he was very handsome, very interesting. Moreover, his look, his carriage, his manner, his voice were those of the gentleman. And the feeling that was finding torrentlike expression now, whatever its origin, was undoubtedly sincere. She recalled the recent visit to the United States of a prince of a reigning European house. She wondered vaguely if he had been in any way connected with that.

“It won't be a fair struggle,” he went on again, and still very quietly. “I am handicapped, you see.” He moved slightly his bandaged arm. “And it's two to one, in addition. But it will be a struggle; I shan't be taken alive if strength of arm or speed of foot counts in the matter. But I'm afraid that they won't count. It's not for myself that I am so willing to seem a coward” He stopped abruptly, and, for a second, his eyes again begged of her what no man's eyes had ever before begged—protection.

Silver-Rose met his glance squarely. She was a girl, it happened, who lived by her impulses, who had much faith in that old-fashioned feminine dower of intuition, whose decisions were swift and inflexible. Moreover—and perhaps this counted for more with her than she would have acknowledged—she was beginning to feel that the situation was a romantic one. She began to make up her mind that she trusted this interesting young man and his interesting situation. From the realization of that to the decision to help him was a single leap. “You may talk to me, if you wish,” she permitted quietly.

He breathed a long sigh of relief. “I can tell you this much,” he said, “and in all honor. My business in America is in connection with affairs of state. I am at present in a sort of diplomatic tangle. It is most necessary for me to be at liberty for the time being. After a few days”—he shrugged his shoulders.

“But how do you know—how can you tell that those men are after you?” Silver-Rose asked shrewdly.

“Oh, the suspect always knows; but they are beginning not to want me, thanks to you.”

Silver-Rose did not look in their direction. “What is your country—is that permitted?” she asked.

“I was born in Italy,” he apprised her briefly.

“How do you happen to know who I am?” she continued.

“Oh, I have seen you many times,” he informed her; “to be exact,” he corrected himself scrupulously, “four times, if that interests you.”

“Do you call four many?”

“Not actually many, perhaps; but when you make a gallery of your mind in order to carry in it the four definite pictures—when you oust everything else from it to dedicate it to that purpose—and when in order to study them you betake yourself there at every opportunity, four becomes an indefinite many.”

Silver-Rose's face was impassive. “Where did you see me?” she went on examiningly.

“Once in the Louvre, once in a room in the Latin Quarter, once at a dance in Washington, once—but I prefer not to tell you about that—if you'll indulge me.”

“How am I to know that you are telling me the truth?” she turned inquiring eyes directly into his.

He did not reply for a second. “Four years ago, one day in August,” he said quietly, “you were standing near the Mona Lisa. You wore a summer affair of white linen—the skirt swept on the ground. Where you stood, at the psychological instant of my first sight of you, it was coiled about your feet in front. You wore with it a long coat, also of white. And your hat was—frankly, enormous. It, too, was white, and it was trimmed with white, a fluffy kind of stuff. By the way, you should al-always [sic] wear white. Afterward I followed you for an hour or more about the Louvre. Occasionally you would open the book you carried and read for a moment.” He stopped abruptly.

“What was I reading?” Silver-Rose pursued him relentlessly.

“It took all my ingenuity to find that out without attracting your attention. At one time I nearly gave it up. I particularly wanted you not to notice me, of course. I'm very glad now that I didn't do that. It was 'The Land of Heart's Desire.' Afterward I bought it and read it, and I should thank you, I think, for that pleasure,” he ended perfunctorily.

“When did you see me next?” she asked, coolly ignoring his gratitudes and platitudes.

“Oh, the next time you were posing for Mr. Langwall. Previously, I had had you followed there from your hotel, somewhere near the Arc. You went to the Langwalls', I found out, a great deal. I had what seems to me a very reasonable desire to see what your hair was like—to see you without your hat or veil on. One day I bribed the concierge to let me bring some bundles up to the studio while you were there posing. You wore white that time, too—a long thing that clung. After all, I did not see your head bared—there was a heart-shaped net of pearls on your hair. I don't blame you,” he interpolated excusingly; “I fancy it isn't safe to go even among friends with so much gold frankly in sight. Yes, you should always wear white,” he concluded meditatively.

Silver-Rose grew softly pink. For an instant she had the look of one casting about for subjects meet for conversation. “Apropos of the Louvre,” she interrupted her own gropings at length, and in the hurried manner of one a little at odds with herself, “I have here a picture of the Mona Lisa.” She opened the package, and held it out to him.

He examined it curiously. “I have never seen the Mona Lisa—really,” he said absently.

“Ah,” she laughed triumphantly, “now I've caught you. I thought it would be only a question of time. However, you were lucky in your guesses. You said—I can't forbear rubbing it in—when you first saw me I was in the room with the Mona Lisa. And now you say that you have never seen it.”

He did not seem at all cast down. He looked at her reflectively. “I said also, did I not,” he asseverated quietly, “that you stood near it?”

They were both silent for a moment, but if there be degrees of silence, Silver-Rose was the more silent.

“Ah,” he said at length, “mine enemies have left the car. You have saved me. I suppose now that I should leave you. Do you expect me to do so? I am at your mercy?” He made a motion as if to rise, but his eyes, fixed on hers, were centers- of whimsical storm and stress, so ardently did they implore and command.

“You need not go,” she accorded him briefly; “at least not at present,” she qualified.

“Where are you going?” he asked abruptly.

Silver-Rose stared at him a little. Then she smiled deliciously. “Almost to the end of the world,” she admitted. “I have, in other words, an engagement in Allston.”

“Is it” he examined her costume carefully. “No—of course—no—there would be even more splendor. Surely it isn't a formal affair.”

“Oh, no,” she laughed lightly; “that comes later. I want to see one of my Settlement girls. I return to Brookline immediately.”

“Oh, I see. And will there be somebody later to take care of you?”

“No,” Silver-Rose admitted composedly, “not through plan of mine. I emancipated myself for the first time to-night.”

“Then,” he asserted comfortably, “you simply must let me take care of you until you reach your own door.”

“I thought I was taking care of you,” she reminded him.

“Put it that way, if you wish. Take care of me, then, until you reach your own door.”

“But what,” she queried in amused inflexibility, brushing aside his sophistries—“what becomes of my emancipation? And what, moreover, excuses your protection? What could possibly happen to a woman in Boston?”

“I pray everything,” he vowed fervently, “cloudburst, earthquake, attack by Indians, sluggers, footpads, Mafia—anything to insure your need of my company. And then, let me point out to you, the circus is in town. What's to prevent a stray lion or tiger from pouncing out upon you from some sheltered bit of road? I now recall that beasts invariably escape from circuses. It has been settled, indisputably, that they prefer, to all other victims, blond young women, especially if they be reasonably, comely—and I have no scruples in telling you that I think the 'reasonably' lets you in.”

Silver-Rose pondered this with an appearance of seriousness. “You speak wonderfully idiomatic English for an Italian,” she commented.

“Oh,” he said, “I am in no sense an Italian. My father was an American, and I have lived much of my life in England. My mother only was an Italian. Come,” he wheedled, “repeal the emancipation-act.”

“I will put it off,” Silver-Rose decided; “but remember you raise my hopes very high. Indeed, I shall think meanly of you if you don't satisfy them. Let's bargain about it. I demand an adventure from you; and, in return, I give you the pleasure of my company.”

“We'll see what can be done,” he promised gravely. His dark eyes studied her face a second. “I feel that I have known you for a hundred years now,” he said abruptly.

She laughed. “I can never quite make up my mind, when people say that—and people often do, you know—whether it is a compliment or the reverse. Now, do tell me,” she begged in her turn; “please tell me why you say it.”

“It will embarrass me no end to tell you,” he rejoined, “because I don't myself quite know why I say that. But, you see, the truth is exactly this: Although I've seen you very seldom, I've thought of you a great deal. I've had ideas about you. I've had theories about you. And, wonderfully enough, you don't disappoint me. You're not the faintest atom in the world what I expected. At least, it's my impression you're not. I've forgotten all about what I expected. You're so much better; you're the—you're a—oh, you're you. You must pardon this incoherence,” he suddenly pulled himself up. “I don't know what you'll think of me. I have a very effervescent appearance to myself.”

“When was the third time you saw me?” she asked composedly.

“Oh, the third time—at a dance in Washington.” A far-away look came into his eyes. It was evident he was describing one of the pictures stowed away in his mind. “There was afterward a lot of talk about the gown you wore. It was white; shiny—satin, should one say? I'm a little helpless here. And there was about the corsage, and running over your bare arms, a broad band of dark fur—bear, the papers said. It made your hair very dazzling; I saw it this time. There were no pearls in it or anywhere. But there were diamonds—like fireflies—sprinkled at intervals in the fur; and you carried a fan. A big fan, a wonder of a fan, a perfect epic of a fan, of scarlet feathers and carved ivory sticks. Oh, yes, the papers had enough to say, and one of them a picture; I wanted to call the editor out.”

“Yes, I remember”—her eyes glinted with fun; “mama scolded me about that gown. Doris, my sister, wrote a rhyme about me. She said I was a cross between Maggie Cline and Yvette Guilbert. I haven't forgiven her that yet; and anonymous people kept sending me the picture for weeks after. And the fourth time?” she inquired with elaborate casualness.

“You mustn't ask me about that.”

“I hope you didn't catch me in the act of powdering my nose, or—oh, heavens! much worse, of darkening my brows.”

He looked at her quickly. “You had done both when I saw you.”

“Here we are,” Silver-Rose interrupted him bruskly. “We must get out, now.”

title: May Eve; or, What You Must/Part 1


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 this time the government power in Russia has been, in fact, and still is, in the hands of the bourgeoisie, which is obliged only to make private concessions (and taking them back the very next day), to issue promise after promise, to fool the people with the semblance of an "honest coalition," etc. In words, the government is popular, democratic, revolutionary; in deeds it is against the people, anti-democratic, counter-revolutionary, bourgeois. This is the contradiction prevailing in the government, and which is the source of the complete instability and vacillation of power, the source of the "ministerial leap-frog game" which Messrs. the Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki played, with, for the people, such an unfortunate zeal.

Either the dissolution of the Soviets and their inglorious death, or all power to the Soviets,—that is what I said before the All-Russian Congress of Soviets early in June and the history of July and August unqualifiedly confirm the accuracy of my contention.

"Power to the Soviets" alone can make power stable, permanent, because based consciously on the majority of the people, in spite of how the lackeys of the bourgeoisie, Potresof, Plekhanov, etc., may lie and declaim that an actual handing over of power to an insignificant minority of the people, the bourgeoisie, the exploiters, is really a "broadening of the basis" of power. Only the Soviet power can be a stable power, it alone could not be overthrown even in the most stormy period of our stormy revolution, only this power could assure a constant and broad development of the Revolution and the peaceful party struggles within the Soviets. Until all power is in the Soviet, indecision, instability and hesitation are inevitaible, never-ceasing "crises of power," the inescapable comedy of the "ministerial leap-frog game," explosions from the right and the left, etc.

But the slogan, "Power to the Soviets" is, very often, if not in the most cases, absolutely misunderstood in the sense of "a ministry of the parties of the Soviet majority." This profoundly erroneous view requires consideration in detail.

A "ministry of the parties of the Soviet majority" means simply a change in the personnel of the ministry, with the retention and inviolability of the old apparatus of government power, an apparatus thoroughly bureaucratic and unable to carry out serious reforms which are of importance even in the programs of the Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki.

"Power to the Soviets" means a radical and complete change in the old government apparatus, a bureaucratic apparatus choking the expression of democracy. This apparatus must be abolished


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 and one truly democratic must be substituted,—the popular apparatus of the Soviet, an organized and armed majority of the people, workers, soldiers and peasants. The Soviet state would assure and deepen the initiative and independence of the people; the people would actually express their initiative, not only in the election of delegates, but in the management of the government and in the work of re-organization and reform.

To make this point of difference clearly evident, let us remind you of a very valuable confession made some time ago by Dyelo Naroda, the organ of the government party, the Social-Revolutionary Party. Even in those ministries, wrote that paper, which contain Socialist ministers, the whole apparatus of government remains antiquated and hinders all work. Quite right. The whole history of bourgeois parliamentary, and in more significant measure of bourgeois constitutional countries, proves that a change of ministers means very little, as the actual work of government is in the hands of a gigantic army of bureaucrats. And this, army is permeated through and through with an anti-democratic spirit, bound up by thousands and millions of threads with landowners and capitalists, and dependent upon them in all ways. This army is in an atmosphere of bourgeois relations and breathes this atmosphere; it has become rigid and has not the power to escape—it is unable to think, feel and act other than in the old manner. This bureaucratic army is enslaved by considerations of rank and precedence, of respect for the well-known privileges of "government" service. The upper layers of this army, by means of stocks and banks, are completely subservient to financial capital, and, moreover, themselves furnish to a certain extent agents and promoters of the interests and influence of financial capital.

To attempt, by means of this government apparatus, to introduce such reorganization as the abolition of private ownership of land, without re-purchase, or a state monopoly of bread, etc., is the greatest illusion, the greatest self-deception and deception of the masses. This apparatus can serve the republican bourgeoisie to create a republic in the sense of "a monarchy without a monarch," as the Third Republic of France; but it is absolutely unfit to introduce reforms, not to abolish, but simply to seriously repress and limit the rights of capital, the rights of "sacred private property."

The inevitable outcome of "coalition" ministries, therefore, participated in by Socialists, is that these Socialists, even under absolutely conscientious agreement of individual members of their class, become in fact empty ornaments or screens of the bourgeois


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 government, buffers against the indignation of the masses against the government, instruments of deception of the masses. It was so with Louis Blanc in 1848; so it has been dozens of times since then, in England and France, when Socialists participated in the ministry; so it has been with Chernov and Tseretelli; so it has been and so it will be as long as the bourgeois system remains and the old bureaucratic apparatus of government is preserved intact.

The Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Delegates are especially valuable in that they represent a new, immeasurably higher and incomparably more democratic type of government. Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki have done all that was possible and impossible to turn the Soviets (especially the Petrograd Soviet and the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviets,) into empty talking machines, occupied under the guise of "control" in the promulgation of impotent resolutions and desires, which the government postpones until doomsday with a most courteous and polite smile.

But there was quite enough of the "fresh wind" of Kornilovism, promising a good storm, to blow away everything musty in the Soviet. The initiative of the revolutionary masses began to proclaim itself as something great, mighty and invincible. Let those of little faith learn from this historical example. Let those be ashamed who say: "We have not the means to change the old, oppressive government apparatus, which necessarily inclines to defend the bourgeoisie." The means exist—the Soviets. Don't be afraid of the initiative and independence of the masses. Trust yourself to the revolutionary organization of the masses, and you will behold in all fields of government activity an expression of the imposing power and invincible will of the workers and peasants. Distrust of the masses, fear of their initiative and independence, is directly counter-revolutionary.

"Power to the Soviets" alone can break the opposition of the landowners and capitalists; an opposition that also realizes itself in the government of Kerensky (a government, in fact, absolutely bourgeois and Bonapartist), and in the direct and indirect pressure of Russian and "allied" financial capital.

Audacity and resolution were lacking in our government through all its changes of personnel. Revolutionary democracy ought not to wait; it should itself take the initiative and act efficiently to end the economic chaos. If they are necessary anywhere, then firmness of course, audacity and decisive power are necessary here. The truth is the truth—these are golden words. But the question of