_ BOOK I CHAPTER IV
Mrs. Gardner Haviland, whirling home in her big car, after church, was hardly more pleased with life than was her beautiful sister- in-law, although she was not quite as conscious of dissatisfaction as was Rachael. Her position as a successful mother, wife, housekeeper, and member of society was theoretically so perfect that she derived from it, necessarily, an enormous amount of theoretical satisfaction. She could find no fault with herself or her environment; she was pleasantly ready with advice or with an opinion or with a verdict in every contingency that might arise in human affairs, as a Christian woman of unimpeachable moral standing. She knew her value in a hectic and reckless world. She did not approve of women smoking, or of suffrage, but she played a brilliant game of bridge, and did not object to an infinitesimal stake. She belonged to clubs and to their directorates, yet it was her boast that she knew every thought in her children's hearts, and the personal lives and hopes and ambitions of her maids were as an open book to her.
Still, she had her moments of weakness, and on this warm day of the spring she felt vaguely disappointed with life. Rachael's hints of divorce had filled her with a real apprehension; she felt a good aunt's concern at Billy's reckless course, and a good sister's disapproval of Clarence and his besetting sin.
But it was not these considerations that darkened her full handsome face as she went up the steps of her big, widespread country mansion; it was some vaguer, more subtle discontent. She had not dressed herself for the sudden warmth of the day, and her heavy flowered hat and trim veil had given her a headache. The blazing sunlight on white steps and blooming flowers blinded her, and when she stepped into the dark, cool hall she could hardly see.
The three girls were there, well-bred, homely girls, in their simple linens: Charlotte, a rather severe type, eyeglassed at eighteen, her thick, light-brown hair plainly brushed off her face and knotted on her neck, was obviously the opposite of everything Billy was; conscientious, intellectual, and conscious of her own righteousness, she could not compete with her cousin in Billy's field; she very sensibly made the best of her own field. Isabelle was a stout, clumsy girl of sixteen, with a metal bar across her large white teeth, red hair, and a creamy skin. Little Florence was only nine, a thin, freckled, sensitive child, with a shy, unsmiling passion for dogs and horses, and little in common with the rest of the world.
Their mother had expected sons in every case, and still felt a little baffled by the fact of her children's sex. Charlotte proving a girl, she had said gallantly that she must have a little brother "to play with Charlotte." Isabelle, duly arriving, probably played with Charlotte much more amiably than a brother would have done, and Mrs. Haviland blandly accepted her existence, but in her heart she was far from feeling satisfied. She was, of course, an absolutely competent mother to girls, but she felt that she would have been a more capable and wonderful mother to boys.
More than six years after Isabelle's birth Florence Haviland began to talk smilingly of "my boy." "Gardner worships the girls," she said, with wifely indulgence, "but I know he wants a son--and the girlies need a brother!" A resigned shrug ended the sentence with: "So I'm in for the whole thing again!"
It was said that Mrs. Haviland greeted the news that the third child was a daughter with a mechanically bright smile, as one puzzled beyond all words by perverse event, and that her spoken comment was the single mild ejaculation: "Extraordinary!"
Now the two older Haviland girls, following their mother into her bedroom, seated themselves there while she changed her dress. Florence junior, in passionate argument with the butler over the death of one of the drawing-room goldfish, remained downstairs. Mrs. Haviland, casting the hot, high-collared silk upon the bed, took a new embroidered pongee from a box, and busied herself with its unfamiliar hooks and straps. Charlotte and Isabelle were never quite spontaneous in their conversations with their mother, their attitude in talking with her being one of alert and cautious self- consciousness; they did not breathe quite naturally, and they laughed constantly. Yet they both loved this big, firm, omnipotent being, and believed in her utterly and completely.
"We met Doctor Gregory and Charlie near the club this morning, M'ma," volunteered Isabelle.
"And they asked about Mrs. Bowditch's dance," Charlotte added with a little innocent craft. "But I said that M'ma had been unable to decide. Of course I said that we would LIKE to go, and that you knew that, and would allow it if you possibly could."
"That was quite right, dear," Mrs. Haviland said to her oldest daughter, calmly ignoring the implied question, and to Isabelle she added kindly: "M'ma doesn't quite like to hear you calling a young man you hardly know by his first name, Isabelle. Of course, there's no harm in it, but it cheapens a girl just a LITTLE. While Charlotte might do it because she is older, and has seen Charlie Gregory at some of the little informal affairs last winter, you are younger, and haven't really seen much of him since he went to college. Don't let M'ma hear you do that again."
Isabelle turned a lively scarlet, and even Charlotte colored and was silent. The younger girl's shamed eyes met her mother's, and she nodded in quick embarrassment. But this tacit consent did not satisfy Mrs. Haviland.
"You understand M'ma, don't you, dear?" she asked. Isabelle murmured something indistinguishable.
"Yes, M'ma!" said that lady herself, encouragingly and briskly. Isabelle duly echoed a husky "Yes, M'ma!"
"Did you give my message to Miss Roper, Charlotte?" pursued the matron.
"She wasn't at church, M'ma," said Charlotte, taken unawares and instinctively uneasy. "Mrs. Roper said she had a heavy cold; she said she'd been sleeping on the sleeping porch."
"So M'ma's message was forgotten?" the mother asked pleasantly.
Charlotte perceived herself to be in an extremely dangerous position. Long ago both girls had lost, under this close surveillance and skilful system of cross-examination, their original regard for truth as truth. That they usually said what was true was because policy and self-protection suggested it. Charlotte had time now for a flying survey of the situation and its possibilities before she answered, somewhat uncertainly:
"I asked Mrs. Roper to deliver it, M'ma. Wasn't that--" Her voice faltered nervously. "Was it something you would have rather telephoned about?"
"Would rather have telephoned about?" Mrs. Haviland corrected automatically. "Well, M'ma would rather FEEL that when she sends a message it is given to JUST the person to whom she sent it, in JUST the way she sent it. However, in this case no harm was done. Don't hook your heel over the rung of your chair, dear! Ring the bell, Isabelle, I want Alice."
"I'll hook you, M'ma!" volunteered Charlotte.
"Thank you, dear, but I want to speak to Alice. And now you girls might run along. I'll be down directly."
A moment later she submitted herself patiently to the maid's hands. Florence was a conscientious woman, and she felt that she owed Alice as well as herself this little office. Charlotte might have hooked her gown for her; indeed, she might with a small effort have done it herself, but it was Alice's duty, and nothing could be worse for Alice, or any servant, than to have her duties erratically assumed by others on one day and left to her on the next. This was the quickest way to spoil servants, and Florence never spoiled her servants.
"They have a pleasant day for their picnic," she observed now, kindly. Alice was on her knees, her face puckered as she busied herself with the hooks of a girdle, but she smiled gratefully. Her two brothers had borrowed their employer's coal barge to-day, and with a score of cherished associates, several hundred sandwiches, sardines, camp-chairs, and bottles of root beer, with a smaller number of chaperoning mothers and concertinas, and the inevitable baby or two, were making a day of it on the river. Alice had timidly asked, a few days before, for a holiday to-day, that she might join them, but Mrs. Haviland had pointed out to her reasonably that she, Alice, had been at home, unexpectedly, because of her mother's illness, not only the previous Sunday, but the Saturday, too, and had got half-a-day's leave of absence for her cousin's wedding only the week before that. Alice was only eighteen, and her little spurt of bravery had been entirely exhausted long before her mistress's pleasant voice had stopped. Nothing more was said of the excursion until to-day.
"I guess they'll be eating their lunch, now, at Old Dock Point," said Alice, rising from her knees.
"Well, I hope they'll be careful; one hears of so many accidents among foolish young people there!" Mrs. Haviland answered, going downstairs to join her daughters in the hall, and, surrounded by them, proceeding to her own lunch.
For a while she was thoughtfully silent, and the conversation was maintained between the older girls and their governess. Charlotte and Isabelle chatted both German and French charmingly. Little Florence presently began to talk of her goldfish, meanwhile cutting a channel across her timbale through which the gravy ran in a stream.
Usually their mother listened to them with a quiet smile; they were well-educated girls, and any mother's heart must have been proud of them. But to-day she felt herself singularly dissatisfied with them. She said to herself that she hated Sundays, of all the days of the week. Other days had their duties: music, studies, riding, tennis, or walks, but on Sundays the girls were a dead weight upon her. Somehow, they were not in the current of good times that the other girls and boys of their ages were having. If she suggested brightly that they go over to the Parmalees' or the Morans' and see if the young people were playing tennis, she knew that Charlotte would delicately negative the idea: "They've got their sets all made up, M'ma, and one hates to, unless they specially ask one, don't you know?" They might go, of course, and greet their friends decorously, and watch the game smilingly for a while. Then they would come home with Fraulein, not forgetting to say good-bye to their hostess. But, although Charlotte played a better game than many of the other girls, and Isabelle played a good game, too, there were always gay little creatures in dashing costumes who monopolized the courts and the young men, and made the Haviland girls feel hopelessly heavy and dull. They would come home and tell their mother that Vivian Sartoris let two of the boys jump her over the net, and that Cousin Carol wore Kent Parmalee's panama all afternoon, and called out to him, right across the court, "Come on down to the boathouse, Kent, and let's have a smoke!"
"Poor Vivian--poor Billy!" Mrs. Haviland would say. "Men don't really admire girls who allow them such familiarities, although the silly girls may think they do! But when it comes to marrying, it is the sweet, womanly girls to whom the men turn!"
She did not believe this herself, nor did the girls believe it, but, if they discussed it when they were alone together, before Mamma, they were always decorously impressed.
"Any plans for the afternoon, girlies?" she asked now, when the forced strawberries were on the table, and little Florence was trying to eat the nuts out of her cake, and at the same time carefully avoid the cake itself and the frosting.
"What's Carol doing, M'ma?"
"When M'ma asks you a question, Isabelle, do not answer with another question, dear. I dropped Carol at the club, but I think Aunt Rachael means to pick her up there later, and go on to Mrs. Whittaker's for tea."
"We met Mrs. Whittaker in the Exchange yesterday, M'ma, and she very sweetly said that you were to--that is, that she hoped you would bring us in for a little while this afternoon. Didn't she, Isabelle?"
"I don't want to go!" Isabelle grumbled. But her mother ignored her.
"That was very sweet of Aunt Gertrude. I think I will go over to the club and see what Papa is planning and how his game is going, and then I could pick you girls up here."
"I'm going over to play with Georgie and Robbie Royce!" shrilled Florence. "They're mean to me, but I don't care! I hit George in the stomach---"
Mrs. Haviland looked as pained as if the reported blow had fallen upon her own person, but she was strangely indulgent to her youngest born, and now did no more than signal to the nurse, old Fanny, who stood grinning behind the child's chair, that Miss Florence might be excused. Florence was accordingly borne off, and the girls drifted idly upstairs, Isabelle confiding to her sister as she dutifully brushed her teeth that she wished "something" would happen! Alice muttered to Sally, another maid, over her strong hot tea, that you might as well be dead as never do a thing in God's world you wanted to do, but the rest of the large staff enjoyed a hearty meal, and when Percival brought the car around at three o'clock, Mrs. Haviland, magnificent in a change of costume, spent the entire trip to the club in the resentful reflection that the man had obviously had coffee and cream and mutton for his lunch--disgusting of him to come straight to his car and his mistress still redolent of his meal, but what could one do? In Mrs. Haviland's upper rear hall was a framed and typewritten list of rules for the maids, conspicuous upon which were those for daily baths and regular use of toothbrushes. But Percival never had seen this list, and he was a wonderful driver and a special favorite with her husband. She decided that there was nothing to be done, unless of course the thing recurred, although the moment's talk with Percival haunted and distressed her all day.
She duly returned to the house for her daughters a little after four o'clock, and in amicable conversation they went together to the tea, a crowded, informal affair, in another large house full of rugs and flowers, rooms dark and rich with expensive tapestries and mahogany, rooms bright and gay with white enamel and chintz and wicker furniture.
Everybody was here. Jeanette and Phyllis, as well as Elinor Vanderwall, Peter Pomeroy and George, the Buckneys and Parker Hoyt, the Emorys, the Chases, Mrs. Sartoris and old Mrs. Torrence and Jack, all jumbled a greeting to the Havilands. Of Carol they presently caught a glimpse standing on a sheltered little porch with Joe Pickering's sleek head beside her. They were apparently not talking, just staring quietly down at the green terraces of the garden. Rachael was pouring tea, her face radiant under a narrowbrimmed, close hat loaded with cherries, her gown of narrow green and white stripes the target for every pair of female eyes in the room.
Charlotte Haviland, in her mother's wake, chanced to encounter Kenneth Moran, a red-faced, well-dressed and blushing youth of her own age. Her complacent mother was witness to the blameless conversation between them.
"How do you do, Kenneth? I didn't know you were here!"
"Oh, how do you do, Charlotte? How do you do, Isabelle? I didn't know you were here!"
Isabelle grinned silently in horrible embarrassment but Charlotte said, quick-wittedly:
"How is your mother, Kenneth, and Dorothy?"
"She's well--they're well, thank you. They're here somewhere--at least Mother is. I think Dorothy's still over at the Clays', playing tennis!"
He laughed violently at this admission, and Charlotte laughed, too.
"It's lovely weather for tennis," she said encouragingly. "We--"
"You--" Mr. Moran began. "I beg your pardon!"
"No, I interrupted you!"
"No, that was my fault. I was only going to say that we ought to have a game some morning. Going to have your courts in order this year?"
"Yes, indeed," Charlotte said, with what was great vivacity for her. "Papa has had them all rolled; some men came down from town-- we had it all sodded, you know, last year."
"Is that right?" asked Mr. Moran, as one deeply impressed. "We must go to it--what?"
"We must!" Charlotte said happily. "Any morning, Kenneth!"
"Sure, I'll telephone!" agreed the youth enthusiastically. "I'm trying to find Kent Parmalee; his aunt wants him!" he added mumblingly, as he began to vaguely shoulder his way through the crowd again.
"You'd better take a microscope!" said Charlotte wittily. And Mr. Moran's burst of laughter and his "That's right, too!" came back to them as he went away.
"Dear fellow!" Mrs. Haviland said warmly.
"Isn't he nice!" Charlotte said, fluttered and glowing. She hoped in her heart that she would meet him again, but although the Havilands stayed until nearly six o'clock they did not do so; perhaps because shortly after this conversation Kenneth Moran met Miss Vivian Sartoris, and they took a plateful of rich, crushy little cakes and went and sat under the stairs, where they took alternate bites of each other's mocha and chocolate confections, and where Vivian told Kenneth all about a complicated and thrilling love affair between herself and one of the popular actors of the day. This narrative reflected more credit upon the young woman's imagination than upon her charms had the listener but suspected it, but Kenneth was not a brilliant boy, and they had a lovely time over their confidences.
Charlotte's romantic encounter with the gentleman, however, made her happy for several hours, and colored her cheeks rosily.
"You're getting pretty, Carlotta!" said her Aunt Rachael, observing this. "Don't drink tea, that's a good child! You can stuff on cakes and chocolate of course, Isabelle," she added, "but Charlotte's complexion ought to be her FIRST THOUGHT for the next five years!"
"I don't really want any," asserted Charlotte, feeling wonderfully grown-up and superior to the claims of a nursery appetite. "But can't I help you, Aunt Rachael?"
"No, my dear, you can't! I'm through the worst of it, and being bored slowly but firmly to death! Gertrude, I'm just saying that your party bores me."
"So sorry about you, Rachael!" said the slim, laceclad hostess calmly. "Here's Judy Moran! Nearly six, Judy, and we dine at seven on Sundays. But never mind, eat and drink your fill, my child."
"Billy's flirtin' her head off out there!" wheezed stout Mrs. Moran, dropping into a chair. "Joe and Kent and young Gregory and half a dozen others are out there with her."
Mrs. Breckenridge, who had begun to frown, relaxed in her chair.
"Ah, well, there's safety in numbers!" she said, reassured. "You take cream, Judy, and two lumps? Give Mrs. Moran some of those little damp, brown sandwiches, Isabelle. A minute ago she had some of the most heavenly hot toast here, but she's taken it away again! I wish I could get some tea myself, but I've tried three times and I can't!"
She busied herself resignedly with tongs and teapot, and as Mrs. Moran bit into her first sandwiches, and the Haviland girls moved away at a word from their mother, Rachael raised her eyes and met Warren Gregory's look.
He was standing, ten feet away, in a doorway, his eyelids half dropped over amused eyes, his hands sunk in his coat pockets. Rachael knew that he had been there for some moments, and her heart struggled and fluttered like a bird in a snare, and with a thrill as girlish as Charlotte's own she felt the color rise in her cheeks.
"Come have some tea, Greg," she said, indicating the empty chair beside her.
"Thank you, dear," he answered, his head close to hers for a moment as he sat down. The little word set Rachael's heart to hammering again. She glanced quickly to see if Mrs. Moran had overheard, but that lady had at last caught sight of the maid with the hot toast, and her ample back was turned toward the teatable.
Indeed, in the noisy, disordered room, which was beginning to be deserted by straggling groups of guests, they were quite unobserved. To both it was a delicious moment, this little domestic interlude of tea and talk in the curved window of the dining-room, lighted by the last light of a spring day, and sweet with the scent of wilting spring flowers.
"You make my heart behave in a manner not to be described in words!" said Rachael, her fingers touching his as she handed him his tea.
"It must be mine you feel," suggested Warren Gregory; "you haven't one--by all accounts!"
"I thought I hadn't, Greg, but, upon my word---" She puckered her lips and raised her eyebrows whimsically, and gave her head a little shake. Doctor Gregory gave her a shrewdly appraising look, sighed, and stirred his tea.
"If ever you discover yourself to be the possessor of such an organ, Rachael," said he dispassionately, "you won't joke about it over a tea-table! You'll wake up, my friend; we'll see something besides laughter in those eyes of yours, and hear something besides cool reason in your voice! I may not be the man to do it, but some man will, some day, and--when John Gilpin rides--"
The eyes to which he referred had been fixed in serene confidence upon his as he began to speak. But a second later Rachael dropped them, and they rested upon her own slender hand, lying idle upon the teatable, with its plain gold ring guarded by a dozen blazing stones. Had he really stirred her, Warren Gregory wondered, as he watched the thoughtful face under the bright, cherry-loaded hat.
"You know how often there is neither cool reason nor any cause for laughter in my life, Greg," she said, after a moment. "As for love--I don't think I know what love is! I am an absolutely calculating woman, and my first, last, and only view of anything is just how much it affects me and my comfort."
"I don't believe it!" said the doctor.
"It's true. And why shouldn't it be?" Rachael gave him a grave smile. "No one," said she seriously, "ever--ever--EVER suggested to me that there was anything amiss in that point of view! Why is there?"
"I don't understand you," said the doctor simply.
"One doesn't often talk this way, I suppose," she said slowly. "But there is a funny streak of--what shall I call it?-- conscience, or soul, or whatever you like, in me. Whether I get it from my mother's Irish father or my father's clergyman grandfather, I don't know, but I'm eternally defending myself. I have long sessions with myself, when I'm judge and jury, and invariably I find 'Not Guilty!'"
"Not guilty of what?" the man asked, stirring his untasted cup.
"Not guilty of anything!" she answered, with a child's puzzled laugh. "I stick to my bond, I dress and talk and eat and go about- -" Her voice dropped; she stared absently at the table.
"But--" the doctor prompted.
"But--that's just it--but I'm so UNHAPPY all the time!" Rachael confessed. "We all seem like a lot of puppets, to me--like Bander- log! What are we all going round and round in circles for, and who gets any fun out of it? What's YOUR answer, Greg--what makes the wheels go round?"
"'Tis love--'tis love--that makes--etcetera, etcetera," supplied the doctor, his tone less flippant than his words.
"Oh--love!" Rachael's voice was full of delicate scorn. "I've seen a great deal of all sorts and kinds of love," she went on, "and I must say that I consider love a very much overrated article! You're laughing at me, you bold gossoon, but I mean it. Clarence loved Paula madly, kidnapped her from a boarding-school and all that, but I don't know how much THEIR seven years together helped the world go round. He never loved me, never once said he did, but I've made him a better wife than she did. He loves Bill, now, and it's the worst thing in the world for her!"
"THERE'S some love for you," said Doctor Gregory, glancing across the room to the figures of Miss Leila Buckney and Mr. Parker Hoyt, who were laughing over a cabinet full of ivories.
"I wonder just what would happen there if Parker lost his money to-morrow--if Aunt Frothy died and left it all to Magsie Clay?" Rachael suggested, smiling.
The doctor answered only with a shrug.
"More than that," pursued Rachael, "suppose that Parker woke up to-morrow morning and found his engagement was all a dream, found that he really hadn't asked Leila to marry him, and that he was as free as air. Do you suppose that the minute he'd had his breakfast he would go straight over to Leila's house and make his dream a heavenly reality? Or would he decide that there was no hurry about it, and that he might as well rather keep away from the Buckney house until he'd made up his mind?"
"I suppose he might convince himself that an hour or two's delay wouldn't matter!" said the doctor, laughing.
"If you talk to me of clothes, or of jewelry, or of what one ought to send a bride, and what to say in a letter of condolence, I know where I am," said Rachael, "but love, I freely confess, is something else again!"
"I suppose my mother has known great love," said the man, after a pause. "She spends her days in that quiet old house dreaming about my father, and my brothers, looking at their pictures, and reading their letters--"
"But, Greg, she's so unhappy!" Rachael objected briskly. "And love--surely the contention is that love ought to make one happy?"
"Well, I think her memories DO make her happy, in a way. Although my mother is really too conscientious a woman to be happy, she worries about events that are dead issues these twenty years. She wonders if my brother George might have been saved if she had noticed his cough before she did; there was a child who died at birth, and then there are all the memories of my father's death-- the time he wanted ice water and the doctors forbade it, and he looked at her reproachfully. Poor Mother!"
"You're a joy to her anyway, Greg," Rachael said, as he paused.
"Charley is," he conceded thoughtfully, "and in a way I know I am! But not in every way, of course," Warren Gregory smiled a little ruefully.
"So the case for love is far from proved," Rachael summarized cheerfully. "There's no such thing!"
"On the contrary, there isn't anything else, REALLY, in the world," smiled the man. "I've seen it shining here and there; we get away from it here, somewhat, I'll admit"--his glance and gesture indicated the other occupants of the room--"and, like you, I don't quite know where we miss it, and what it's all about, but there have been cases in our wards, for instance: girls whose husbands have been brought in all smashed up--"
"Girls who saw themselves worried about rent and bread and butter!" suggested Rachael in delicate irony.
"No, I don't think so. And mothers--mothers hanging over sick children--"
The women nodded quickly.
"Yes, I know, Greg. There's something very appealing about a sick kiddie. Bill was ill once, just after we were married, such a little thing she looked, with her hair all cut! And that DID--now that I remember it--it really did bring Clarence and me tremendously close. We'd sit and wait for news, and slip out for little meals, and I'd make him coffee late at night. I remember thinking then that I never wanted a child, to make me suffer as we suffered then!"
"Mother love, then, we concede," Doctor Gregory said, smiling.
"Well, yes, I suppose so. Some mothers. I don't believe a mother like Florence ever was really made to suffer through loving. However, there IS mother love!"
"And married love."
"No, there I don't agree. While the novelty lasts, while the passion lasts--not more than a year or two. Then there's just civility--opening the city house, opening the country house, entertaining, going about, liking some things about each other, loathing others, keeping off the dangerous places until the crash comes, or, perhaps, for some lucky ones, doesn't come!"
"What a mushy little sentimentalist you are, Rachael!" Gregory said with a rather uncomfortable laugh. "You're too dear and sweet to talk that way! It's too bad--it's too bad to have you feel so! I wish that I could carry you away from all these people here-- just for a while! I'd like to prescribe that sea beach you spoke about last night! Wouldn't we love our desert island! Would you help me build a thatched hut, and a mud oven, and string shells in your hair, and swim way out in the green breakers with me?"
"And what makes you think that there would be some saving element in our relationship?" Rachael asked in a low voice. "What makes you think that our love would survive the--the dry-rot of life? People would send us silver and rugs, and there would be a lot of engraving, and barrels of champagne, and newspaper men trying to cross-examine the maids, and caterers all over the place, but a few years later, wouldn't it be the same old story? You talk of a desert island, and swimming, and seaweed, Greg! But my ideas of a desert island isn't Palm Beach with commercial photographers snapping at whoever sits down in the sand! Look about us, Greg-- who's happy? Who isn't watching the future for just this or just that to happen before she can really feel content? Young girls all want to be older and more experienced, older girls want to be young; this one is waiting for the new house to be ready, that one--like Florence--is worrying a little for fear the girls won't quite make a hit! Clarence worries about Billy, I worry about Clarence--"
"I worry about you!" said Doctor Gregory as she paused.
"Of course you do, bless your heart!" Rachael laughed. "So here we are, the rich and fashionable and fortunate people of the world, having a cloudless good time!"
"You know, it's a shame to eat this way--ruin our dinners!" said Mrs. Moran, suddenly entering the conversation. "Stop flirting with Greg, Rachael, and give me some more tea. One lump, and only about half a cup, dear. Tell me a good way to get thin, Greg! Agnes Chase says her doctor has a diet--you eat all you want, and you get thin. Agnes says Lou has a friend who has taken off forty- eight pounds. Do you believe it, Greg? I'm too fat, you know--"
"You carry it well, Judy," said Rachael, still a little shaken by the abruptly closed conversation, as the doctor, with a conscious thrill, perceived.
"Thank you, my dear, that's what they all say. But I'd just as soon somebody else should carry it for awhile!"
"Listen, Rachael," said their hostess, coming up suddenly, and speaking quickly and lightly, "Clarence is here. Where in the name of everything sensible is Billy?"
"Clarence!" said Rachael, uncomfortable premonition clutching at her heart.
"Yes; you come and talk to him, Rachael," Mrs. Whittaker said, in the same quick undertone. "He's all right, of course, but he's just a little fussy--"
"Oh, if he wouldn't DO these things!" Rachael said apprehensively as she rose. "I left him all comfortable--Joe Butler was coming in to see him! It does EXASPERATE me so! However!"
"Of course it does, but we all know Clarence!" Mrs. Whittaker said soothingly. "He seems to have got it into his head that Billy--You go talk to him, Rachael, and I'll send her in."
"Billy's doing no harm! What did he say?" Rachael asked impatiently.
"Oh, nothing definite, of course. But as soon as I said that Billy was here--he'd asked if she was--he said, 'Then I suppose Mr. Pickering is here, too!'"
"He's the one person in the world afraid of talk about Billy, yet if he starts it, he can blame no one but himself!" Rachael said, as she turned toward the adjoining room. An unexpected ordeal like this always annoyed her. She was equal to it, of course; she could smooth Clarence's ruffled feelings, keep a serene front to the world, and get her family safely home before the storm; she had done it many times before. But it was so unnecessary! It was so unnecessary to exhibit the Breckenridge weaknesses before the observant Emorys, before that unconscionable old gossip Peter Pomeroy, and to the cool, pitying gaze of all her world!
She found Clarence the centre of a small group in the long drawing-room. He and Frank Whittaker were drinking cocktails; the others--Jeanette Vanderwall, Vera Villalonga, a flushed, excitable woman older than Rachael, and Jimmy and Estelle Hoyt--had refused the drink, but were adding much noise and laughter to the newcomer's welcome.
"Hello, Clarence" Rachael said, appraising the situation rapidly as she came up. "I would have waited for you if I had thought you would come!"
"I just--just thought I would--look in," Clarence said slowly but steadily. "Didn't want to miss anything. You all seem to be having--having a pretty good time!"
"It's been a lovely tea," Rachael assured him enthusiastically. "But I'm just going. Billy's out here on the porch with a bunch of youngsters; I was just going after her. Don't let Frank give you any more of that stuff, Clancy. Stop it, Frank! It always gives him a splitting headache!"
The tone was irreproachably casual and cheerful, but Clarence scowled at his wife significantly. His dignity, as he answered, was tremendous.
"I can judge pretty well of what hurts me and what doesn't, thank you, Rachael," he said coldly, with a look ominous with warning.
"That's just what you can't, dear," Mrs. Whittaker, who had joined the group, said pleasantly. "Take that stuff away, Frank, and don't be so silly! If Frank," she added to the group, "hadn't been at it all afternoon himself he wouldn't be such an idiot."
"Greg says he'll take us home, Clarence," Rachael said, in a matter-of-fact tone. "It's a shame to carry you off when you've just got here, but I'm going."
"Where's Billy?" Clarence asked stubbornly.
"Right here!" his wife answered reassuringly. And to her great relief Billy substantiated the statement by coming up to them, a little uneasy, as her stepmother was, over her father's appearance, yet confident that there was no real cause for a scene. To get him home as fast as possible, and let the trouble, whatever it might be, break there, was the thought in both their minds.
"Had enough tea, Monkey?" said Rachael pleasantly, aware of her husband's sulphurous gaze, but carefully ignoring it. "Then say day-day to Aunt Gertrude!"
"If Greg takes you home, send Alfred back with the runabout for me," Billy suggested.
"So that you can stay a little longer, eh?" said Clarence, in so ugly a tone and with so leering a look for his daughter that Rachael's heart for a moment failed her. "That's a very nice little plan, my dear, but, as it happens, I came over in the runabout! I'm a fool, you know," said Clarence sullenly. "I can be hoodwinked and deceived and made a fool of--oh, sure! But there's a limit! There's a limit," he said in stupid anger to his wife. "And if I say that I don't like certain friendships for my daughter, it means that _I_ DON'T LIKE CERTAIN FRIENDSHIPS FOR MY DAUGHTER, do you get me? That's clear enough, isn't it, Gertrude?"
"It's perfectly clear that you're acting like an idiot, Clancy," Mrs. Whittaker said briskly. "Nobody's trying to hoodwink you; it isn't being done this year! You've got an awful katzenjammer from the Stokes' dinner, and all you men ought to be horsewhipped for letting yourselves in for such a party. Now if you and Rachael want to go home in the runabout, I'll send Billy straight after you with Kenneth or Kent--"
"I'll take Billy home," Clarence said heavily.
By this time Rachael was so exquisitely conscious of watching eyes and listening ears, so agonized over the realization that the fuss Clarence Breckenridge made at the Whittakers' over Joe Pickering would be handed down, a precious tradition, over every tea and dinner table for weeks to come, so miserably aware that a dozen persons, at least, among the audience were finding in this scene welcome confirmation of all the odds and ends of gossip that were floating about concerning Billy, that she would have consented blindly to any arrangement that might terminate the episode.
It was not the first time that Clarence had made himself ridiculous and his family conspicuous when not quite himself. At almost every tea party and at every dance and dinner at least one of the guests similarly distinguished himself. Rachael knew that there would be no blame in her friends' minds, but she hated their laughter.
"Do that, then," she agreed quickly. "Greg, will bring me!"
"By George," said Clarence darkly to his hostess, "I'd be a long time doing that to you, Gertrude! If you had a daughter--"
"My dear Clarence, your daughter is old enough to know her own mind!" Mrs. Whittaker said impatiently.
"And you're only making me conspicuous for something that's ENTIRELY in your own brain!" blazed Billy. As usual, her influence over her father was instantaneous.
"Because I love you, you know that," he said meekly. "I--I may be TOO careful, Billy. But--"
"Nonsense!" said Billy in a nervous undertone close to tears. "If you loved me you'd have some consideration for me!"
"When I say a thing, don't you say it's nonsense," Clarence said with heavy fatherly dignity. "I'll tell you why--because I won't stand for it!"
"Oh, aren't they hopeless!" Mrs. Whittaker asked with an indulgent laugh and a glance for Rachael.
"Well, I won't be taken home like a bad child!" flamed Billy.
"I'd like to bump both your silly heads together," Rachael exclaimed, steering them toward the porch. "Yes, you bring the car around, Kent," she added to one of the onlookers in an urgent aside. "Come on, Bill? get in. Get in, Clarence! Don't be an utter fool--"
In another moment it was settled. Billy, looking fretty and sulky, said: "Good-bye, Aunt Gertrude! I'm sorry for this, but it's not my fault!" Frank Whittaker almost bodily lifted his somewhat befuddled guest into the car, the door of the runabout went home with a bang. Billy snatched the wheel, and Clarence, with an attempt at a martyred expression, sank back in his seat. The car rocked out of sight, and was gone.
Rachael, in silent dignity, turned about on the wide brick steps to reenter the house. Where there had been a dozen interested faces a moment ago there was no one now except Gertrude Whittaker, whose expression betrayed her as tactfully divided between unconcern and sympathy, and Frank Whittaker, who was looking thoughtfully at the cloudless spring sky as one anticipating a change of weather.
Rachael caught Mrs. Whittaker's eye and shrugged her shoulders wearily. She began slowly to mount the steps.
"It was nothing at all!" said the hostess cheerfully, adding immediately, "You poor thing!"
"All in the day's work!" Rachael said, on a long sigh. And turning to the man who stood silently in the doorway she asked, with all the confidence of a weary child, "Will you take me home, Greg?"
Her glance and the doctor's met. In the last soft, brilliant light of the afternoon long shadows fell from the great trees nearby. Rachael's green and white gown was dappled with blots of golden light, her troubled, glowing eyes were of an almost unearthly beauty, and her slender figure, against the background of colonial white paint and red brick, had all the tremulous, reedy grace of a young girl's figure. In the long look the two exchanged there was some new element born of this wonderful hour of spring, and of the woman's need, and the man's nearness. Both knew it, although Rachael did not speak again, and, also in silence, the doctor nodded, and went past her down the steps for his car.
"Too bad!" Mrs. Whittaker said, coming back from a brief disappearance beyond the doorway. "But such things will happen! It's too bad, Rachael, but what can one do? Are you going to be warm enough? Sure? Don't give it another thought, dear, nobody noticed it, anyway. And listen--any chance of a game tonight? I could send over for you. Marian's with me, you know, and we could get Peter or Greg for a fourth."
"No chance at all," Rachael said bitterly. She had always loved to play bridge with Greg; under the circumstances it would be a delicious experience. She layed brilliantly, and Greg, when he was matched by partner and opponents, became absorbed in the game with absolutely fanatic fervor. Rachael had a vision of her own white hand spreading out the cards, of the nod and glance that said clearly: "Great bidding, Rachael; we're as safe as a church!"
Clarence did not play bridge, he did not care for music, for books, for pictures. He played poker, and sometimes tennis, and often golf; a selfish, solitary game of golf, in which he cared only for his own play and his own score, and paid no attention to anyone else.
Gregory's great car came round the drive. "Good-bye, Gertrude," said Rachael with an unsmiling nod of farewell, and Mrs. Whittaker thought, as Elinor Vanderwall had thought the night before, that she had never seen Rachael look so serious before, and that things in the Breckenridge family must be coming rapidly to a crisis.
Doctor Gregory, as the lovely Mrs. Breckenridge packed her striped green and white ruffles trimly beside him, turned upon her a quick and affectionate smile. It asked no confidence, it expressed no sympathy, it was simply the satisfied glance of a man pleased with the moment and with the company in which he found himself. To Rachael, overwrought, nervous, and ashamed, no mood could have been more delicately tuned. She sank back against the deep upholstery luxuriously, and drew a long breath, inhaling the delicious air of early summer twilight. What a sweet, clean, solid sort of friend Greg was, thought Rachael, noticing the clever, well-groomed hands on the wheel, the kindly earnestness of the handsome, sun-browned face, the little wrinkle between the dark eyes that meant that Doctor Gregory was thinking.
"Straight home?" said he, giving her a smiling glance.
"If you please, Greg," Rachael answered, a sudden vision of the probable state of affairs at home causing her to end the words with a quick sigh.
Silence. They were running smoothly along the lovely country roads that were bowered so generously in fresh green that great feathery boughs of maple and locust brushed against the car. The birds were still now, and the sunlight gone, although all the world was still flooded with a soft golden light. The first dew had fallen, bringing forth from the dust a sweet and pungent odor.
"Thinking about what I said to you last night?" asked the doctor suddenly.
"I am afraid I am--a little," Rachael answered, meeting his quick side glance with another as fleet.
"And what do you think about it?" he asked. For answer Rachael only sighed wearily, and for a while they went on in silence. But when they had almost reached the Breckenridge gateway Doctor Gregory spoke again.
"Do you often have a scene like that one just now to get through?"
The color rushed into Rachael's face at his friendly, not too sympathetic, tone. She was still shaken from the encounter with Clarence, and still thrilling to the memory of her talk with Warren Gregory last night, and it was with some new quality of hesitation, almost of bewilderment, that she said:
"That--that wasn't anything unusual, Greg."
Doctor Gregory stopped the car at the foot of her own steps, the noise of the engine suddenly ceased, and they faced each other, their heads close together.
"But since last night," Rachael added, smiling after a moment's thought, "I know I have a friend. I believe now, when the crash comes, and the whole world begins to talk, that one person will not misjudge me, and one person will not misunderstand."
"Only that?" he asked. She raised her glorious eyes quickly, trying to smile, and it brought his heart to a quick stop to see that they were brimming with tears.
"Only that?" she echoed. "My dear Greg, after seven such years as I have had as Clarence's wife, that is not a small thing!"
Their hands were together now, and he felt hers cling suddenly as she said:
"Don't--don't let me drag you into this, Greg!"
"This is what I want you to believe," Warren Gregory told her, "that you are not his wife, you are nothing to him any more. And some day, some day, you're going to be happy again!"
A wonderful color flooded her face; she gave him a look half- frightened, half-won. Then with an almost inaudible "Good-night," she was gone.
Warren Gregory stood watching the slender figure mount the steps. She did not turn to nod him a fare-well, but vanished like a shadow into the soft shadows of the doorway. Yet he was enough a lover to find consolation in that. Rachael Breckenridge was not flirting now, forces far greater than any she had ever known were threatening the shallow waters of her life, and she might well be troubled and afraid.
"She is not his wife any more," Warren Gregory said, half aloud, as he turned back to his car. "From now on she belongs to me! She SHALL be mine!" _