Half loaves

CHAPTER XVI

“She couldn’t. She’s young and I suppose her husband needs her.”

Fliss had indeed offered to do everything except give personal care to her mother. Matthew was the only person to whom she could give personal service, and even for him there was not too much, but she had arranged for specialists to examine and recommend; she had tried to make her mother have a trained nurse; tried everything that money could buy. That she shrank from the sight and thought of the corruption of the body was only that she was Fliss.

Matthew had been told of the identity of Ellen as her cousin, with one slight change in the facts. It was Ellen’s proud request that the relationship be kept from the Harrisons, according to Fliss. So he was not surprised to see Ellen take up her place in the Horton household. Matthew was far more appreciative of and able to understand Fliss’s parents than she was herself. Ordinary people with cramped minds and petty satisfactions were not out of the range of his philosophy as they were with her. He did not see the Hortons often, but once in a while he and Fliss went there for an evening or Fliss invited them to her house and undoubtedly the event, mostly taken up with small gossip and cribbage playing, did not irritate him as it did his wife.

Now that Mrs. Horton had taken to her bed, or at least to her tawdry kimonos, driven by fear and indigestible patent medicines as well as by the progress of the disease, the flat she called home had become an even more unattractive place. Ellen found unwashed dishes in every corner of the cupboard, under the gas stove, in the icebox; dirty linen; everything neglected, everything uncomfortable and in the midst of it the whining, terrified women and the unquestioning, drearily patient man. She tried to cheer them up and managed at least to make them comfortable. But it was far from easy or satisfying.

Coming in the day after Ellen had taken charge, Fliss praised her extravagantly.

“I don’t see what we could have done if you hadn’t come; she wouldn’t have a nurse though I begged and begged.”

“Well, that’s natural,” said Ellen. “Nurses frighten people who aren’t used to them. I don’t know as I blame her, but she ought to do as the doctor says.”

“The doctor says that things are already pretty far advanced. He can’t be sure that even an operation——” Fliss shuddered miserably. “Oh, Ellen, why don’t they find a way to cure it?”

Ellen patted her on the shoulder. “Trust in the Lord, my dear,” was all she said.

Fliss went in from the kitchen to see her mother who looked at her with the apathetic misery that had characterized her of late.

“Feeling better, mother?”

“I’ll never be better. They as much as tell me that. I’m going to die, especially if they get their knives on me.”

“Don’t be silly, mother. You know they just want to help. Matthew got the best doctors. If you’d just let them operate.”

“That’s it! Every one after me wanting to see them cut into me. I’ve heard of those doctors before, thank you. Mrs. Todd came in to see me yesterday and she said to me: ‘Mrs. Horton, don’t you let those doctors experiment on you.’ She told me some things that were terrible. And she told me, too, about a new thing they’re getting out that has helped lots of women—just a kind of tonic that they say makes the trouble disappear in two months.”

“That’s just quack stuff. You know that. If there were any such thing the good doctors would be using it.”

Mrs. Horton laughed, the high querulous laugh of the invalid who has already become suspicious and opinionated.

“I know what I know, Flissy. All those high-toned doctors want to do is to experiment on me and get Matthew’s money. I know them. You don’t let yourself get taken in by them.”

Fliss sat still watching her mother as she lay on the couch, a sodden heap of misery that would make no constructive effort. She looked baffled. Then she rose and unpacked the luxuries which she had brought with her: choice food, invalid comforts, a black satin negligee.

“Black!” shrilled the mother. “I’m not dead yet, thank you! Take it away, Flissy. It gives me the creeps.”

Fliss went back to the kitchen.

“It’s such a comfort to think that you are here, Ellen,” she said, drawing on her gloves. “There’s not a thing I can do to please her. She’s so changed. All that she used to want was a movie and a bridge game. Now the only thing she wants is to talk over her symptoms with some old hag who recommends patent medicines and tells her not to let any one knife her. But it’s rotten for you here, I suppose.”

“It’s only temporary. I told the doctor to send a nurse and I’d try to train her in—one of those practical nurses who can do housework and is sort of companionable. I have to get back to Mrs. Harrison, of course.”

“Going back there? Why do you, Ellen? Please stick by us now.”

“I will, as long as I can, but I promised Mrs. Harrison and she really couldn’t get along without me.”

“Let her get some one else.”

“I promised her, Fliss. I’ll fix your mother up, but I’ve got to go back to my own place.”

Fliss stood up, passing her slim hands over her well-tailored hips, lifting her hand bag delicately from the crowded table. Her face was perplexed.

“I’m no good at nursing, you know,” she commented.

“No; but we must find some one who is just the right person.”

“Do. And I’ll come just as often as I possibly can.”

“I would. She’s your mother, Fliss.”

Fliss frowned a little and went out into the sunlight. There her step quickened and her face grew gradually brighter. She seemed to be tossing the misery from her at every step.

She made some calls, told her hostesses a little plaintively about her worry for her mother, and after having exposed her trouble in several charming and handsome rooms, felt it vastly easier to bear. She succeeded in making it a little more remote, somehow putting it in a better setting.

By the time she reached home she could smile without effort, and even tell Matthew, whom she found dressing for dinner, that her mother would probably improve under Ellen’s handling and consent to an operation.

“Good.”

“If Ellen only stays. She wants to go back to Cecily.”

“Wonderful what loyalty Cecily does inspire, isn’t it?” said Matthew ruminatively.

“She probably pays Ellen well.”

At Matthew’s little laugh, which seemed so perfectly comprehending of all the jealousies in Fliss’s mind, she flushed angrily. For a moment she seemed about to say something, but she did not. It was Matthew who spoke.

“Not worthy of you, Fliss.”

“I know. It was stupid and jealous, but I get so tired of the eternal virtuousness of Cecily. Those with the servant mind may like it, but it bores me to death. She’s so always right.”

“She’s always so right,” corrected Matthew, teasingly.

“Have it your own way. I’d personally sooner be a cheerful sinner than such an unsmiling saint.” She turned at the door. “And if you ask me I think poor Dick feels that way sometimes too.”

CHAPTER XVII

“And have her leave! No, that would be the last word. I’m through now. Wait until I hang these up and let’s go upstairs.”

“Let’s—by all means.”

Mrs. Warner led the way upstairs and gazed around the house. It was very orderly, but Cecily looked very tired.

“What does Dick say to all this?”

“Dick protests, but that doesn’t solve the servant problem.” There was a little edge in Cecily’s tone. “Dick doesn’t like domesticity anyhow if it interferes with his amusements.”

“I wouldn’t talk like that. It’s not like you.”

Cecily flushed. “Lots of things that didn’t use to be like me are becoming normal. A little more Billingsgate in my manner is only natural after doing the washing, isn’t it?”

Her mother did not smile. She looked worried.

“You are tired.”

“Please don’t say that, mother. Of course I’m tired. Why shouldn’t I be tired? But it isn’t lack of sleep or work that tires me as much as—other things.”

“What things?” Mrs. Warner’s questions came not curiously, but reluctantly as if she did not want confidences and was forcing herself to ask for them.

“People’s point of view.” By people she meant Dick, and Mrs. Warner knew it. She did not go on.

“Dear Cecily, I’m so sorry to overburden you with another worry just now, but some one else will tell you if I don’t. You are bound to hear it about town in a day or so. And Leslie and I wanted to know what you thought about it before we decided finally what our attitude should be.”

“What has happened?”

“I had a letter yesterday from Walter. It seems he is married.”

“Walter—at college—married? But he’s only twenty.”

“Twenty-one to-morrow.” Such sorrow in poor Mrs. Warner’s voice as she reflected on that birthday.

“But are you sure? To whom?”

“To a girl he met in the town there. He wrote me simply that he was married and that he hoped we’d like Della. She is very pretty.”

“But why marry her this way, mother? Why——” She stopped with a possible answer flashing through her own mind.

“He wrote your father, too. I didn’t see that letter. Leslie said it was confidential, but he seemed to think Walter had done the only thing. He compromised the girl in some way. It seems they were out all night in an automobile—and there was talk.” Neither woman spoke for a moment. Delicacy, fine distaste put an end to the conversation. Cecily’s face grew harder than her mother’s.

“Poor mother, poor mother.”

“But I’m glad he married her, Cecily. It’s not so bad for him as the other thing would have been. I couldn’t have borne the other thing. I saw enough of that once. This shows at least that he has—conscience.”

Cecily stood, meditating harshly on a probable Della.

“Where did he meet her?”

“At some dance in the town. She seems to be just an ordinary girl. And of course I don’t know anything against her. We must think nothing. Probably she was only as foolish as many girls are nowadays. Your father thinks we must accept it and bring Walter and his wife home.”

“Walter didn’t say anything about this at Christmas time.”

“No. I don’t believe he contemplated anything of the sort then. It was sudden—as much so to him as to us, perhaps.”

“Mother, you seem so excusing, so tolerant! Do we just have to accept a situation like this? Can the girl expect to be treated like the wife of your son? This girl who let herself be compromised.”

Mrs. Warner gave again that queer impression of treating her trouble as if it had happened to some one else. In contrast to Cecily’s protest she drew back a little.

“She is your brother’s wife, Cecily.”

“She has no right to such a title!”

“I was afraid you’d take it like this. You mustn’t be so hard, Cecily. You must be tolerant.”

“I’m tired of tolerance for laxity. I’m tired of moral laxity, of cheapness of ideals. Why should those of us who are decent do the work for the ones who aren’t decent?”

“Work?”

“Work. Have the children and try to keep them clean and healthy and fine, while the women who won’t have children, who won’t work, won’t do anything but play, get the real interest of every one?”

“They don’t; they don’t get the real respect of people. There may be a kind of attraction, but it’s hardly skin-deep.”

“You’re wrong, mother. You’re wrong. It’s the so-called respect that’s skin-deep. Men will tell you that the ideal woman is the good wife and mother, but you try being a good wife and mother and you’re pretty soon a deadly bore; while the little half moral Dellas and Flisses are the women men give up things for and like to be with.”

Mrs. Warner forced herself to a question. She did not answer Cecily’s tirade, but struck at the root of it.

“Is anything seriously wrong between you and Dick?”

“No. Nothing seriously wrong, I suppose. I suppose I wanted marriage to get deeper and better. It’s getting thinner and almost tawdry. I wanted Dick to be content with it and me. And he’s restless. He likes all this excitement and all these noisy people that I don’t like. He doesn’t want to stay home with me and the children.”

“Surely he doesn’t neglect you, dear.”

“Ah, it’s not so tangible. It’s simply that I don’t satisfy.”

“Cecily, darling, aren’t you imagining all this?”

“I thought so, mother. Then I didn’t think so, but I tried to think so. Then I knew that I wasn’t. You see, mother, I’m growing up. I’m trying to live by the ideals I was taught were the ones to live by, but I can’t find any one else living by them. At first I thought Dick thought as I did—wanted to live as I do. He doesn’t. Secretly he thinks I’m stupid.”

Her mother tried to laugh reassuringly. “That’s so foolish. You know better than that, Cecily. I can’t see that you’ve any real grievance. You’re going through a hard period now. But the babies will grow older and all this——”

“Suppose I have more babies.”

Mrs. Warner hesitated. “Are you quite strong enough now, I wonder?”

“Oh,” cried Cecily, “you are evading me, too. Are there no rights and wrongs? Why was I brought up to believe in right and wrong? Is everything compromise? Babies, marriage, Dellas?”

Fine lines stood out in Mrs. Warner’s face. “I never had your fundamental courage or strength,” she said, “but there was a time when I did believe in very black wrong and very white right. That was when I married your father. He was a brilliant man and I loved him, not as I love your dear stepfather, but differently. I don’t let myself remember that first part of my love. I can’t, even yet. But your father was a poor husband; he was a poor father; he was not honest with me; he was not even faithful. When I found that out—he told me—I said that I would not let it kill me, but it nearly did. The first had seemed so beautiful that to find it was not even real——” Her voice dragged, weighted even now with the horrible discovery. Cecily, her eyes half closed in imagining the pain, listened. “Since then I have believed that most things are compromise. All the happiness in my life, the real happiness, has come through compromise. All the pain through the lack of it. You have so much more than I had with your father. Dick is good. I know he loves you. I know he is faithful to you.”

“Oh, yes, mother—faithful,” Cecily shuddered at the words, “of course. I didn’t mean——”

“My husband wasn’t,” said Mrs. Warner simply, and went on: “You have much to learn about men and much tolerance to acquire.”

But the softening in Cecily was lost at that word.

“Don’t you see that I think all this trouble comes because we are so tolerant? Tolerant of ideals! Why should I be tolerant of Walter’s wife? Of Fliss?”

“Why do you bring in Florence Allenby?”

“Because she typifies all the things I’m struggling against. She seems to invade this whole house with her ideas. I suppose she’s no worse than lots of others, but she’s the specific example. Dick admires her.”

“Likes her, you mean.”

“Well——”

“Men are bound to like her. She’s the kind of woman that satisfies a need of men, for flattery, for play.”

“She’s fun,” said Cecily, bitterly.

Her mother agreed.

“And because she’s fun and because Della is fun, Matthew is tied to her for the rest of his life and poor Walter at twenty-one is tied to his Della.”

“But Matthew and Walter are happy.”

“They shouldn’t be happy like that! It’s unworthy!”

Mrs. Warner stood up. “We’ve talked a lot and I’m not convincing you. Perhaps I won’t ever convince you that I’m right. You’re strong, Cecily. You don’t know yet how strong. But when you were a little thing I could see the will in you, underneath the dreaming and the softness. I think now that your father’s laxities have turned in you to rigors. Just now you’re tired and upset by your problems and your household and inclined to group all your troubles into a very destructive point of view. You mustn’t. Walter is married. Gerald writes that he thinks it is all right. He likes Della, too. His father and I want to bring Walter home and to make the most of the situation. If Della is possible material to form into the sort of woman we would like to see Walter have for a wife, it is our privilege to do it. Your example will be necessary and helpful. You’re young, and you’re a happy, married woman.”

She smiled at Cecily and Cecily smiled back through a mist of tears.

“Please help me with Della by being tolerant of her. Think what it will mean to Walter to have his mistake, if it is a mistake, turned to good account—to have us receive his wife instead of being hard on her.”

“You’re so fine and wise and beautiful,” sighed Cecily. “I am foolish; haunted by chimeras. But I feel so glad, mother, to have said it all.”

“It isn’t ended in the saying. But it has helped us both to have talked a little. Shall we go to see the babies before I go?”

They were themselves again—the beautiful, passive woman and the lovely, eager girl, hiding again their depths and the disturbances in them. Mrs. Warner smoothed over the surface as well as the depths. She sent her housemaid to stay with the children and insisted that Cecily and Dick come to her house for dinner, where the case of Walter and Della was discussed and so much the best made of it that the tragic part was fairly smothered in hopes.

Three weeks later, after a wedding trip financed by his father, Walter brought Della home. The family in Carrington were thoroughly adjusted to the blow by that time and a few newspaper notices and careful statements of Mrs. Warner and Cecily had made it clear to their friends and acquaintances that Walter was not to return as a prodigal, but to a very genuine welcome. Yet at the first glance at Della, Cecily felt her heart sink.

It would have been so much easier if Della had been flagrantly impossible, if she had been chewing gum or wearing lace veils and jockey perfume, but showing a diffidence and teachability that they could work with. Cecily had seen so many Dellas, she thought as she looked at her. Della was small and pretty and stylish. Stylish without imagination, wearing the “latest” in everything; a kind of fashion book model with fashion book curves and a manner that was reminiscent of the stories in the fashion books. She came into the Warners’ big drawing-room behind Walter, a kind of pertness and determination to demonstrate that she was as “good as anybody else” most apparent in her greetings. Mrs. Warner’s kindness and Cecily’s welcome excited no gratitude. She was going to deal with Walter’s family without making any concessions. Walter’s slight evident excitement and sensitiveness, his response to what his people were offering him were lost on her. She giggled a little and talked about how cold it had been in the sleeper and how she guessed everybody on the train knew they were “newly-weds” and how funny it was getting used to another name. There was a trace of petulance in her manner towards Walter, too.

“I told him he just better hurry with his suit-case, that I wasn’t going to pack it for him—break him in wrong,” she said.

Cecily, the memory of her own wedding trip coming back to her, with its wonder of service, felt herself helpless.

“We’ve got to find a place to live now, I suppose,” was Della’s next comment.

“But there’s no hurry surely. We want you to stay with us for a while until we get acquainted,” said Mrs. Warner.

“That’s nice of you, but we’ll want a place of our own as soon as we can find one and Walter goes to work. I suppose you people didn’t like his leaving college.”

“A college degree is sometimes valuable,” said Mr. Warner, rather grimly.

“Well, I don’t know. I wonder sometimes what good it does them. I’ve always lived in a college town, you know, and been used to college men; been used to lots of fun, haven’t I, Walter? Well, as I was saying, I don’t know that finishing your course gets you any place especially. Sometimes those who don’t, get ahead the fastest.”

They all refrained from comment. Walter had grown a little flushed.

“Can I take Della upstairs? She’s tired, I know, mother.”

“Isn’t he bossy?” from Della.

“Yes, dear, take her up to your own room. It’s ready for you.”

A little-boy, lonesome look came into Walter’s face for a moment. Then he turned to Della and took her out of the room. Mrs. Warner looked at her husband and then at Cecily.

“Did you say I was to be a model for her?” asked Cecily, with her new grimness. “For her? Why, the girl scorns me.”

“She’s certainly going to make Walter stand around,” said Mr. Warner, with a feeble attempt at jocularity. Then, at the sight of the tears in his wife’s eyes he was beside her in an instant. “She’s not so bad,” he declared. “Lots of energy and nerve in that small person.”

Lots of energy and lots of nerve there were. In the succeeding weeks they all found out how much. Della, twirling on her finger the platinum and diamond symbol that she was a Warner, knew how to have a good time and how to get what she wanted. She was fond of Walter in her under-bred little way. Though she scolded at him, she was always willing to have him exhibit his affection in public, and in automobiles and theatres would curl into his arms in a way that was unceasingly embarrassing to the people with her.

Cecily, who had planned on winning her confidence, soon found that confidence a thing to dread. Della’s easy, careless tongue ran away with itself on most occasions. She wanted to tell Cecily intimate things that Cecily could not bring herself to listen to. And when Cecily, trying to impart an ideal or a vision, half opened her mind to Della, she found her visions ignored or criticized.

“Cute kids, aren’t they?” commented Della. “But whatever do you do with so many? It’s wonderful how you’ve kept your figure, though.”

That ended that lesson.

Dick was amused. He laughed above Cecily’s constant dismay.

“It’s a damned shame Walter married that chicken. But then, if he’s satisfied! Did you see her try to vamp me?” And he was off in a gale of chuckles.

Gradually, after a few weeks, they stopped trying to do things with Della. She had her little apartment with its expensive furnishings paid for by Mr. Warner and she and Walter kept an unceasing succession of exploiting maids and dined out at public places at least half the time. Cecily simply made the best of her. She was unceasingly busy at home. Ellen’s vacation had lengthened. She had written most contritely that she could not come back at once. “As soon as I can, but my cousin won’t have a nurse. We are trying to find one that will do her.”

Cecily made determined efforts not to let her household weigh on her. She told herself again and again that there must be ways to manage. She interviewed nurses and cooks, bribed employment agencies, but even with all her effort her mind could never escape from her house and her babies. The little grudge against Dick that he could escape, that he could want, as he so often did want, gayety and people, wore deeper in her.

CHAPTER XVIII

If Cecily felt that Dick only half knew the difficulties she had in her house, it did not occur to Dick to counter that she knew little of the press of things that weighed on him through his business day—interests, worries, decisions, definite things. Little wonder that the intangible “something” which troubled Cecily could not impress him as serious. Serious things were the next tax on the mines, the threatened difficulties with labor agitators, the money tightness in the country. The business of the world, the business that kept food in people’s mouths, provided homes and motors and jewels and luxuries—that was real. He was becoming a little prone to dismiss Cecily’s tendencies to be easily “hurt,” to object to his desire for amusement of one kind and another, on the general premise that “women are queer.”

So he said to Matthew as they sat in his office one day after disposing of a host of details.

“Women are queer.”

“Original, aren’t you?”

“Well, I’m just beginning to find out that it’s true.”

“That remark,” commented Matthew, “always seemed to me not to be far from the vaudeville stuff about women—husband and wife fight stuff. It’s cheap cant. Women queer! Every one’s queer!”

“So, why pick on women, eh?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, I’ll tell you why. With a man you know where you are. You size him up and you know how to deal with him. With women you can size up again and again; you think you’ve got it and then you find that just the thing you’ve done to please them is the thing that doesn’t please them.”

“More and more like George Cohan. Why have you such a sudden discouraged interest in women, Dick?”

“I haven’t an interest in women. I was just thinking that I’d like to know how to make things a bit easier for Cecily.”

He sounded quite serious and anxious for confidence. Matthew dropped his air of banter and stood at the window staring down over the miles of commercial roofs below him. It was immensely difficult for them both to go on and yet they both wanted to. Matthew began at the beginning.

“Are things hard for Cecily?”

Dick looked at him squarely. “I rather thought you guessed she was a bit blue when you took her away from the dance that night during Christmas week.”

“I thought she was tired out, if that’s what you’re driving at. I should think you’d expect that. A woman who has three children——”

“For God’s sake, don’t begin that. I can’t have them myself, can I? And it isn’t just babies and servants.”

“No, but you have to understand that the strain——”

“I know all about that. I haven’t had it off my mind for three years. I am trying to get it off Cecily’s mind. That’s the reason I think she ought to get about a bit—judging from the way I feel myself.”

“That’s it, Dick.”

“What’s it?”

“Judging from the way you feel yourself, you think Cecily ought to want the things you want. Instead, she wants something else.”

“I wish I knew what it was. I’d do anything on God’s earth if I could find out what it is.”

“She wants what you can’t give her, I think.”

A glimmer of proprietary jealousy came into Dick’s eyes. “How in hell do you know so much about it?”

“Now, look here, Dick; you began this conversation, you know——”

“I know I did. And I want to go on with it. What is it Cecily wants that she hasn’t got and that I can’t give her?”

Matthew looked a little nonplussed and embarrassed.

“This is a fool of a conversation.”

“But I want to know.”

“Well, I should say that Cecily wants love.”

“What!” cried Dick, getting up. “Who?”

“Oh, as far as that goes, you; unfortunately, you alone.”

“And you have the damned nerve to say I can’t give her that.”

Matthew seemed imperturbable. “Not her kind.”

“Maybe you think that you could.”

“Don’t be so primitive, Dick. I don’t think any such rotten thing. If you will chain your spirited desires to do murder for a moment I’ll finish what I was about to say—what you urged me to say after having dragged me into this conversation. I think that Cecily is so attuned to delicacy and to fine things—so in love with her love of you—that any suggestion of coarseness or let down, any slight deterioration of quality in feeling, any fear that you are becoming cheapened by the wrong kind of people or the wrong kind of amusement (and most of the amusement she sees is tawdry in her eyes), hurts her—more than hurts her.”

“It’s very highbrow,” said Dick, “but I suppose you mean she wants a perpetual honeymoon.”

Matthew threw up his hands. “There you go—vaudeville stuff again.”

Dick flushed angrily. “Well, I’ll be damned if I think you’ve said one definite tangible thing—one thing a man can tie to.”

“I didn’t mean to. Cecily’s troubles are quite mental—quite intangible—partly the result of an education which is totally out of accord with the times. It leaves women too sensitive for these days. Fliss’s High School was better for her.”

“So you think I can’t appreciate my wife.”

“There are precious few people who can appreciate Cecily.”

“And what do you advise me to do about it?”

“Why, I don’t know that there’s much to be done. You might try to please her in little things; give up the things that seem silly to her—dancing with a lot of silly idiots——”

Dick let his fists drop on his desk with a kind of angry decision.

“That’s what it gets down to, after all, isn’t it? Because Cecily doesn’t care for a certain kind of thing I am to give it up absolutely; without any assurance that I’ll get anywhere if I do. And what happens to me? You say I can’t play up to Cecily anyway. Am I to sit at home and twirl my thumbs and be sighed over?”

“You’re becoming absurd.”

“I’m not absurd. I’m working hard. You know I’m working hard and I’ve got to have a little fun. I’m going to be old in five years. I’ve only a few years of even the end of youth left. Isn’t the absurd thing that Cecily and I can’t enjoy things together? But I catch myself wondering all the time if she isn’t disapproving, if she doesn’t think I’m coarse. I get so tired of playing up to her instead of being easy and natural.”

“And the coarse streak in you aches for a bit of ribaldry.”

Dick smiled sheepishly. “Perhaps.”

The twilight had fallen now. Matthew, pacing by the window again, looked down on the streets, dark and soft through a sudden fall of snow. He turned and laid his hand on Dick’s shoulder.

“Well, anyway, life’s a queer mess,” he said.

Dick looked at him curiously, somewhat abashed at this personal, tangled conversation.

“We’re a pair of nuts,” he said, “and I’ll be late to dinner, and there’s a new cook.”

They took their hats.

“They’re still talking of you for the Senate, Matthew.”

“It’s rot. I’ve never had a political office outside of Carrington.”

“Lots of people like that idea, and of course the reason the old birds who’ve been in at the game have their eye on you is because you’ve got a strangle hold on so many votes. You’re a greater hero around here than Pershing since all that draft board and home guard stuff.”

“Heavy military service, that was.”

“Heavy military acquaintance. General acquaintance and a clean name. They’ll get you yet.”

“We’ll see,” answered Matthew. “Maybe some day I would like to have an inside glimpse of Washington, but not for a while yet, even if I could get in, which is very unlikely. About that man Martin at the Everett mine——”

They clamped their thoughts to that man Martin with some relief. In Matthew’s car, as they slid and skidded along through the streets, “It seems such rot—this fuss about moods—when there are people around here by the thousands with actual troubles, hunger, cold and sickness.” That was Dick. It expressed his feeling for reality.

“Some people live by moods—by the spirit,” answered Matthew.

Matthew went home. Fliss was dining out and had expressly excluded him from the party, characterizing it as a “bunch that would bore you to death. Eat at the club and I’ll let the maids go out. Come and pick me up if you like. I’ll say you’re working.” So Matthew went through the silent house, so perfectly in order, so dimly lit, up to the third floor. In his own rooms a sense of ease and security seemed to envelop him. He lit the small fire that was always laid in readiness for him and settled himself before it comfortably with his pipe. He had forgotten or refused to consider dinner. The room became very quiet, the crackle of the fire only bringing out the stillness and mystery of thought.

He had been there a couple of hours when there was a knock on the door, and before he could rise to open it, his wife pushed it open and stood on the threshold, her golden evening cloak wrapped around her, a few snowflakes clinging to her uncovered hair.

“Where did you drop from? I was going to come for you later.”

“I left after dinner, and, finding you were home, I took liberties with your solitude. Can I sit down in the holy place?”

Her gayety did not ring true. Matthew pushed a chair up to the fire and she sat down in it. Matthew watched her, sparkling even in the firelight.

“Such a fool bunch,” sighed Fliss.

“Not yearning for intellectual heights are you, Fliss?” asked her husband lightly.

She flushed a little and moved back out of the ring of firelight. “It would be absurd, wouldn’t it?”

“Your going in for the intellectual heights? I wouldn’t say absurd, but a bit out of your line, perhaps.”

“Out of my line.”

“Feeling a little down?”

“Bored.”

“We’ll have to get up some excitement,” said Matthew kindly.

She winced. “Don’t treat me as if I were a three-year-old.”

“I couldn’t. I treat you as if you were what you are—a charming woman.”

“You think I’m an awful fool, don’t you?”

He went over to her and leaned over the back of her chair, pushing her hair back from her forehead. “Pretty Fliss!”

She jumped up, away from his touch. “That’s it! That’s all of it. Pretty Fliss! I might be a puppy; I might be an idiot.”

Matthew waited for her to go on, and after a minute she did.

“I get so tired of—of being a jazzer—of having you think I’m just a jazzer. I think a lot of things, truly I do, Matthew,” she added, naïvely.

“Of course you do.”

“Don’t say it like that—soothingly. Say it as if you meant it.”

“Of course you do,” said Matthew in heavy, mock seriousness.

She made a futile little gesture and turned away, wrapping her cloak around her desolately.

“I’d better go.”

“No; stay, and talk to me.”

“Amuse you?”

“Amuse me.”

“I don’t want to amuse you.” She was very pathetic now. “I want to do other things for you, with you. Couldn’t I stimulate you, maybe?”

He laughed. “You do, angel; you do, immensely.”

Then all in a minute she lost control. The primitive instincts in her, so untrained by social or intellectual discipline, so thinly overlaid with “manners,” came through. She was by his side, sobbing, her arms thrown around him like a child’s.

“I want you to love me, to respect me, admire me—like—like you do Cecily!”

Matthew’s face grew really stern. He held her, but without a touch of emotion. Then, when her anger seemed to have spent itself, he drew her to the big chair, down on his knees, patting her hand. After a little she looked up at him as if she sought for a trace of the thing she wanted. His glance met hers gravely.

“When we agreed to be married, do you remember what we talked about and decided? Haven’t I given you everything I promised?”

“Everything.”

That softened him. “And you’ve given me more than I ever hoped for—youth and happiness and comfort and the sight of you. Aren’t we happy enough, Fliss, without mixing ourselves up in a hunt after emotions that probably can’t naturally develop in us?”

“Can’t they—can’t I be more; couldn’t I learn?”

He put his hand over her mouth. “Don’t spoil your own quality, Fliss. And remember that I’m getting older and the capacity for certain kinds of emotion is passing me by.”

“But you feel it for Cecily.”

He set her on her feet like a naughty child and stood facing her. “Fliss, there is nothing in any feeling which I may or may not have for Cecily which concerns you remotely.”

She had probed too deep with her awkward weapons. At the rebuff she stood looking at him wide-eyed, hurt, pathetic.

“I’ve broken our bargain, haven’t I?” she said at length, stumblingly.

“It doesn’t matter. We’ll just forget all this. You’ve made me so happy in so many ways, Fliss. A home and you——”

“But I can’t reach down in you; I never get down.”

“It’s all right, Fliss dear. You get down far enough. Don’t let’s wreck things by asking too much of the fates.”

She played her last card. “If, perhaps we had a baby?”

He smiled at her with great tenderness.

“I’d love to have a baby, Fliss dear, but you mustn’t give up or try to give up everything for me.”

She must have seen, as she looked, that no sentimentality would ever break him down, ever penetrate those depths which she had come to revere and to covet so much.

“Let’s go downstairs now, and you can get me some supper, if there’s anything in the house,” he suggested, trying to get back to solid ground again. She shook her head.

“Let me go alone for a little while. Come down later.”

She went downstairs, through the beautiful rooms which she had planned so carefully and which meant so much to her, her head hanging a little as if she had been a rebuffed child. The front door was open, blown open by a gust of wind after her careless closing. Moved by some impulse, she went out on the veranda. The street was quiet. It was a street of affluence, the entrance and door lights on the houses glowing softly, the red lights of motors quietly signaling through the snow. Wealth, luxury, comfort. Perhaps Fliss knew dimly that her only step towards acquiring the strength which might win Matthew’s complete respect was to go away from him now, now that their bargain was broken and she loved him as he did not love her. She might go away.

Glancing up and down the street, she shuddered a little. Then went in, and closing the door, carefully this time, proceeded to the kitchen and set about finding the most delicious possible supper for Matthew.

CHAPTER XIX

THERE were many times when Cecily felt the absurdity of allowing her life to be affected by her domestic machinery and the servants who operated it. It wasn’t, she felt, dignified. She somehow could not find a place in her philosophy of marriage for the cooks, the housemaids and the nurses. They had to be if she wanted to escape the physical work in a house spacious enough for her needs, but to have to regulate her life by them bothered her. The cheap comedy of the whole servant problem affronted her and to have to play a rôle in it herself was increasingly irritating. Her mother helped her as much as she could by sending her servants, but the presence of three babies was anathema to most of them and they would stay a little while and drift off to a place with “two in the family and the highest wages.” And now her mother had gone to California to avoid the wintry spring of Carrington. Della and Walter were keeping that house open, and coöperation was not in Delia’s line. It did not occur to her to help Cecily out by lending her servants, as Mrs. Warner had sometimes done. Cecily paid high wages, higher and higher, utterly disproportionate to the service she was getting, but money of course inspired no loyalty. There were quarrels in the kitchen between the maids—unpleasant hiatuses when Cecily washed her own Wedgwood china and beautiful hand-made silver dishes. It was all very absurd, but there it was; because there was an actual undersupply of servants in Carrington and because so many women wanted servants and were unable or unwilling to get their own meals and make their own beds at any price, there was a situation which actually affected many a woman’s health and had its influence on married happiness and undoubtedly on the birth rate. What began as a joke had been treated as a joke too long, long after it had become a really sinister influence.

With Ellen in her house it was unnecessary to count and to watch; unnecessary to fear that the children’s food might be insufficiently or badly cooked if she were out. Ellen liked to work, had a conscience about her work and a respect for it that was unusual, and she managed the other servants. Just as Cecily felt pride in her home and her children—felt instinctively that, even if domesticity were out of fashion, it was not rightly or permanently so—so Ellen felt her own pride in oiling the machinery of Cecily’s house. They liked each other and understood each other. And as Ellen watched the development of the children, saw Dorothea take her first steps and graduate from cream of wheat to scraped beef, helped little Leslie through the same formula of growth and watched and aided Cecily through their illnesses—a real friendship, more fundamental than many a one between so-called social equals, grew between the two women.

It was the day after Dick had talked to Matthew with such unusual revelation. Cecily’s latest cook had proved herself in two days both insolent and incompetent and, hunting up the forwarding address for Ellen’s letters, Cecily decided to go to Ellen herself and see if in conversation they could not find a way to take care of the unwieldy relative and let Ellen come back to her. It struck her as she entered the apartment house that she had been here before and yet the cracked, painted walls of the hall were not familiar. She stood before the row of black tin mail boxes looking for Ellen’s name and saw it at last written in lead pencil on a printed card stuck crookedly in the name place. Ellen Forrest—and the card, Mr. Wm. H. Horton.

Cecily pondered the familiarity of the name for a minute before its connection flashed upon her. Then she remembered. She had brought Fliss to the door of this apartment house several times; this was where Fliss lived before she had married. She hesitated, then rang the bell, and mounted the stairs to the third floor. A voice called to her to come in, a high-pitched, quite unpleasant voice and, entering, she saw a woman lying on a leather sofa pushed up to a small library table. She recognized her in spite of the disorderly hair and red bathrobe. It was Fliss’s mother. She had met her two or three times at Fliss’s own house.

Mrs. Horton knew her also. She was a little embarrassed, but not excessively so, being very simple in her ways in spite of Fliss.

“It’s Mrs. Harrison, isn’t it? Well, won’t you sit down? I’m real embarrassed to have you find me looking so, but I’m not able to get about much any more, you know.”

“I didn’t know you were ill, Mrs. Horton? Isn’t it a shame? Is it anything serious?”

Mrs. Horton winced, although at the same time a glad consciousness of the new visitor, to whom she could expound her ills, showed in her face.

“I don’t know. You know how doctors are. They say I’ve got a growth. Now they want to operate on me, but I’m afraid of that and I don’t doubt but that it’s all foolishness. I’m trying a new cure now—perhaps you’ve read about it——” She droned on in the unceasing manner of the patent medicine addict. Cecily listened. She had not yet had a chance to explain her visit, and she was full of crowding thoughts. So this was where Fliss had lived. No wonder it had been an escape to marry Matthew. This mother—but the poor woman was very ill. There were terrible pain ravages on her face. Hadn’t Ellen said cancer? But where was Ellen? And was it possible that Fliss had bribed her to get her there? Or was there really a relationship?

Just at that moment Ellen came in. She looked astonished, but, like Mrs. Horton, was too simple to be much disturbed.

“Why, Mrs. Harrison!”

Cecily shook hands with her. “I didn’t know that Mrs. Horton was your cousin, Ellen.”

“No; I guess I didn’t happen to mention it,” said Ellen.

Not a word of Fliss. There was no need.

“I do hope you haven’t come to try to get Ellen back,” said Mrs. Horton. “I don’t see how I could get along at all without her.”

“We all need Ellen,” Cecily answered.

“Well, of course, being a relative and all, I’d sooner have her with me than a nurse. Those trained nurses are awful high and mighty. And of course Ellen don’t really need to work out at all now. Now that Fliss is married, I tell her she could always have Fliss’s room.”

“You must miss your daughter.”

“Well, Fliss always was a great one to go. I don’t know as I saw much more of her than I do now, when she was living at home. Of course she don’t have much time to come here with her social doings and all.”

They talked for a few minutes and then Ellen took things into her own hands.

“I’ve got to go to the market now,” she said, “if I’m to get anything fresh for dinner. I’ll walk down with you, Mrs. Harrison.”

Cecily rose in spite of Mrs. Horton’s protest.

“I know you’ll beg Ellen away from me. I don’t want to be mean about it, but being as I’m her own cousin, it seems as if I couldn’t get along. If I could get my friend Mrs. Ellis, who’s a widow, I might.”

“Now don’t you fret, Carrie, and get your fever up. No one’s going to leave you. There’s just a few things that Mrs. Harrison and me would like to discuss private.”

She wore her neat blue suit and as they came out of the apartment house together no trace of servility or embarrassment clung to Ellen.

“You see,” she said, “with Mrs. Allenby—Fliss—being at your house so much and all, I thought it was just as well not to tell you we was related. I asked her not to mention it, too.”

“So foolish. I wish she had insisted. But you aren’t the least bit like one another. I never would have guessed.”

“No; there’s no noticeable resemblance. How’s little Leslie, and Dorothea, and the baby?”

“They miss you and they don’t get along as fast as they should with so many strange people taking care of them. Can’t you come back, Ellen? I’d like you to come back as housekeeper—take general charge. Couldn’t you do that?”

“You mustn’t think I was the least bit dissatisfied, Mrs. Harrison. I liked working for you. It was true every word I said. You see Mrs. Horton don’t want a nurse. She’s terrible fussy just now.”

“Is she very ill?”

“She’s going to die, I’m afraid. It’s going awfully fast. We’ve been sort of letting up on the operation question because the doctors don’t hold out much hope for her anyhow. Of course she don’t know how bad she is.”

“Does her daughter know?”

“Yes, Fliss knows.”

“Poor thing.”

“I would like to come back to you, Mrs. Harrison. I’ve been thinking that if that Mrs. Ellis comes I could. I’d really have to, since they haven’t room for more than one of us. And this Mrs. Ellis is closer to Carrie than I am myself; she knew her when she was a bride. I tell you what I’ll do. I’ll find out and let you know on Sunday. Is that all right with you?”

“Yes, indeed. I don’t want you to leave your poor cousin, but if this other friend of hers is coming and you aren’t really needed——”

“I know. We’ll try to do the best by all,” answered Ellen, following the line of thought of John Stuart Mill instinctively.

They shook hands gravely. Cecily went away with a sense of outrage and justification. So that was Fliss!

There was a small dinner at the Garden House Club, for Mrs. Walter Warner, the next week. Della was taking rather well on the whole. Mrs. Longstreet, who liked to “bring out” young people, was the hostess. The Walter Warners, the Richard Harrisons, the Matthew Allenbys, the Frederick Craigs, Madeline Ensign and her husband, Gordon Ames, the boy who had so vainly pursued Fliss and who, with college back of him and a start in his profession, was no longer a boy but a much sought after man, Helen Jefferson, because every one hoped that Gordon would marry her, and a half-dozen other couples—all young, all extremely well acquainted with each other. Della was quite at her best. With nothing to do except be nominal mistress of her mother-in-law’s home and plenty of service at her disposal, Della was keeping in excellent form. It was easy to see to-night why Walter had fallen so very much in love with her. Her pale yellow hair was like a mist around her head and the green of her gown was either a stroke of luck or a stroke of genius, thought Cecily. She looked curiously at Fliss in the light of the revelations of her call on her mother the day before. Fliss evidently did not know about that yet or if she did she made no reference. She greeted Cecily casually and turned back to the glass.

“Just below your cheek-bones, my dear. Most people put it on too high up. It gives much more the look of youth, not that you need that, but you know.”

Della experimented. Cecily looked over their heads at her own hair, combed heavily back in dark waves, at her own cheeks faintly pink with cold. She had it in mind to disdain rouge, but Fliss’s professionalism was tantalizing. She opened her little gold case and gave her cheeks a touch of red below the cheek bone.

“You don’t need it, Cecily. You’re better without,” said Fliss, observing.

“Cecily’s always better looking than anybody else,” contributed Madeline. “You really are, Cecily.”

Della gave Cecily a critical glance. “It’s much easier for a brunette,” she sighed.

That brought her the anticipated compliments from the rest. Cecily did not join them. She was watching Fliss and Della, suddenly mindful that it had not been so long ago when Fliss was more or less outside of all this easy fun. She looked back over the obvious steps of the progress Fliss had made. Funny! And that queer-looking woman in the soiled kimono dying of cancer; and out there Matthew waiting for his wife to take her to their hostess, to pay her honor. She wasn’t worth it. Walter waiting for his wife, for the girl who had pulled him out of college into marriage, who had probably tricked him, who had no respect for marriage. She wasn’t worth it, either! Worth what? She caught her mind back and began to talk to Madeline as they strolled out into the little reception room to meet their husbands.

At dinner she sat between Freddy Craig and Howard Ensign—rather on the dull side of the table. Fliss above and across from her had Dick and Gordon Ames, and Della on the right of her host was dividing her attentions between him and Matthew. Cecily talked at random, intermittent, necessary conversation, her mind and eyes straying to the brightness of Fliss. She seemed so eager and Dick seemed so pleased by her eagerness and so alert. She couldn’t make it out. No right—no wrong. Why can’t I be like the rest of them, she thought, immediately conscious that to be like the rest of them was just what she did not want.

Fliss was telling Dick something sotto voce. He listened closely and then broke into irrepressible laughter. Fliss looked at him provocatively and his eyes were slanting down at her in that amused, liking way.

Howard Ensign was following Cecily’s eyes.

“Isn’t Mrs. Allenby a lot of fun?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” answered Cecily, mechanically, “lots of fun.”

“She gives everybody such a good time.”

Fun. That was it. Fun, that god whom they all worshiped. Like a heathen god, like a great bright image, casting great shadows. Queer thought. She sat in the shadow while they worshiped the brightness. An impulse came to Cecily to call to Fliss to stop. She was pinning a flower in Dick’s buttonhole. It was a wager or a joke. Everybody was laughing. She had no right to touch Dick like that. Dick didn’t care. Dick had no pride, no self-respect, no respect for love,—or he wouldn’t let her touch him like that. She was caressing him.

Fliss caught her glance. “Mustn’t, Dick,” she said, laughingly. “Your wife’s looking at me. She has her till-death-do-us-part look on.”

Her voice carried and they turned to look at Cecily—all the people at the end of the table—merrily, jocularly. Cecily tried to smile, tortured by the glances that seemed to be penetrating her thoughts. Dick looked a little annoyed.

“Don’t be worried, Cecily.” Fliss wouldn’t leave her alone.

“I wasn’t worried.” Now they were laughing. That wasn’t what she should have said. She should have been light, gay, debonair, flippant. Why? Because that was what they expected.

Like a match to a gathered pile of brush were the comments to Cecily’s resentment. She was suddenly angry as she had never been angry before in her life—cruelly angry. She wanted to hurt them all—Fliss, Della most. But her opportunity did not come till later.

Howard found her better company. She talked to him now, seeming to insist on talking. He told her about how he thought game should be cooked, about the new club rules for membership, about the things he was interested in. She answered him, played up to him, her mind alert, her eyes casually now on that other end of the table.

“We’ll get up a party and go,” she heard Dick say. They were drinking coffee. Fliss was devoting herself more to Gordon. There was a smoldering look in Gordon’s eyes that Cecily read and that it shamed her to read. He looked as if the presence of people, of Matthew himself, hardly interested him. He wanted to slip his arm down close around her, bend his head lower. Dick was competing for her favor, actually competing.

“We’ll get up a party,” he repeated. “There’s a tiled floor and the funniest nigger band you ever heard. You’ll love it, Fliss.”

“All right,” said Fliss. “Will you come along, Cecily?”

That was to demonstrate her power, thought Cecily. Fliss was asking her to a party with her own husband.

“If I can,” she answered coldly. “If I get a cook and can manage to get out.”

A little smile of pitying superiority to one so tied down by domestic affairs showed on Fliss’s face.

“Miserable luck, Cecily.” Then to Dick, “Do you starve without a cook, poor Dick?”

Like a flash Cecily struck back. Cool and icy and penetrating her voice carried down the table length.

“I think I’ll have my old cook back shortly. She is nursing your mother now, you know, Fliss.” And to her neighbor quite clearly, “She had to go to Mrs. Horton, of course, because she is her cousin.”

There was the faintest little smile, the smallest hush. Mrs. Longstreet’s eyebrows went up and then down,—her only signal of lack of equilibrium. Then she rose and the company followed. Only in that instant Cecily had seen Dick’s angry glance and the cruel flush that had risen on the face of Fliss. It delighted her to see that the blow had gone home. Then an acute sense of degradation swallowed up her delight.

Dick did not claim her for the first dance. It was Fliss he danced with. When he did come to his wife, he looked at her with his eyes still angry. “Dance this, Cecily?”

“Where did you learn that raw stuff?” he asked after they had been around the floor silently.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. That was a pretty raw attack on Fliss.”

“Attack?”

“Attack was what I said.”

“You mean when I mentioned to Fliss that her cousin couldn’t come to cook. I hadn’t told you, had I, that Ellen was a cousin of the Hortons’.”

“I can’t see that it is of much consequence whether she is or not, but you knew how a lot of those people at dinner would make capital of it. It was a deliberate attempt to hurt her. I can’t see why you should do such a thing.”

“You ought to know why,” said Cecily. “You ought to know why. Because that woman is dangerous. Because she’s unworthy. She was flirting with you and with Gordon Ames—she was acting like a bad woman—leaning on you.”

“Don’t be so cheaply jealous.”

“I’m going home,” declared Cecily. “I won’t stay here in this place.”

“Very well. You’ve ruined a delightful party anyhow. Will you say good-night?”

He did not speak to her on the way home, unlocked the door for her and then when she was in the little vestibule said coolly, “I’m going to the club for a couple of hours. Good-night, Cecily.”

The door closed and Cecily went upstairs, her throat choking her. Anger, resentment, but most of all the terrible agony of thought that they had quarreled again and that Dick could not see what she saw nor feel what she felt! Softly she stole through the nurseries so that the children might not be wakened. The sight of them gave her no joy to-night. Only deeper pain and deeper sense of failure! Yet it was some comfort to touch the baby hand lying on Dorothea’s little coverlet, so warm, so confiding even in her sleep. She thought as she stood there of the people who say that they could absorb themselves in their children. Surely even children did not fill up all the spaces in life; not for her anyway could they suffice.

At first she thought Dick would be gone only an hour. She undressed slowly, planning what she would say to him. It became clearer to her that she had been shabby and unworthy. She would tell Dick she was sorry, make it up somehow. The hour passed. She crept into bed and waited. But he did not come. One o’clock—half past one; Cecily got up, tormented by the waiting and all the possibilities it suggested. Where was Dick? Wasn’t he coming back at all? Was it possible that he had left the city? Had there been an accident?

The children slept on. The house was terribly still. She tried to read, tried to think, wrote a note to Dick and placed it on his bureau, only to go in and destroy it after another half hour’s waiting. She thought she would go mad with anxiety. She determined to be quite indifferent. She would not care if he did not. Again she slipped into her bed and this time fell asleep.