Half loaves

CHAPTER XXVII

Luckily she had plenty of money, and she had availed herself of every possible letter of introduction before she left Carrington. There were people in Carrington who knew the people whose names she had studied in the Washington papers and she had managed, not seeming too eager, to have a letter written here and one there, and to see that the letters were followed up. Her first two weeks had been spent in house-hunting, during which she had had occasion to bless Matthew a thousand times for his affluence and generosity. She found at last what she wanted in the proper part of town—a conventional, not too large city house, tenanted by a Senator’s family last year. The Senator had gone to a club when his family went to Europe, and the house was available at an enormous rental. It had the advantage of having been decorated the year before by the Senator’s wife and done in admirable taste. Fliss sought an interior decorator, and with an uncanny shrewdness furnished it. There was enough of the solid to keep it from appearing faddish or nouveau; there was enough of the ugly to set off the beautiful. There was, last and most of all, quite enough of the beautiful to prove her taste.

The first weeks in Washington reminded Fliss somewhat grimly of her early encounters in Carrington. She went through the ordeal of the social column again—the ordeal of those who read about the functions to which they aspire and at which they were not attendant. Society columns are easy reading only for those who are quite indifferent to personal mention or omission, and they, of course, are the people who do not make a business of reading them. But Fliss had the comfort of never becoming despondent as she had in the old Carrington days. She had tools ready to her hand now and she meant to forge her way with them. More than that, she had found a work which was going to need all her wits and all her energies.

Matthew was busy constantly. He had been chosen for a good deal of routine committee work to break him in, and he had little time for Fliss and the observation of her labors. They went out together more than they had in Carrington, but it was to more formal affairs.

“Washington doesn’t tend to make you chummy,” she said, one night, leaning up against Matthew in the car as they were being whirled homeward after a rather colorless dinner.

“Finding it hard work?” he asked.

“I love it,” she said lazily. “I love the sense of social intrigue. There’s something to get your teeth into here. A lot to fight for. Out in Carrington, if you do get to the top, what is there at the top except Mrs. Silverton’s dinners? It’s fun, I mean, but it stops. You can see the top. Here it’s so much more tangled, but so much more interesting.”

“You’re doing it very well,” answered Matthew. “You quite charmed Senator Gates to-night. How did you do it?”

“Listened to him. Isn’t it queer how simple it is, as well as being so difficult? All I did was to flatter him a little—most of that by looking at him. But I had to be careful not to do it too much, because I mustn’t get the reputation of being a Western vamp. It’s just drawing that line.”

“Clever girl!”

“I wish you were susceptible to flattery,” she said irrelevantly, “and I’d tell you I thought you could give the bunch of them cards and spades.”

He patted her hand and then, apparently feeling that insufficient, turned her face up to his and kissed her. She flushed a little at the casual caress, and then turned to look out of the window. The street lamps showed on her face that little wistful, half appealing expression which was making her piquancy so much more mysterious.

“Do you like it all, Matthew?”

“I’m interested, Fliss. I’m finding out about lots of things I wondered about. Some are true and some aren’t. Of course, you mustn’t expect me to do much for years. I’m pretty crude. I’ve got to learn.”

“Crude! You should have heard the enlightened and important Senator Gates! He couldn’t be much cruder.”

“He has other assets. Don’t expect too much, Fliss.”

It was shortly after that that the Allenbys dined with Senator and Mrs. Gates, and from that dinner several important invitations fell the way of Fliss. It was, of course, not only on her own account. There were many people who felt that it was very much worth while to cultivate young Senator Allenby, and tipped their wives off to that effect.

Fliss began her campaign in December shortly after the opening of the session. She was quite as busy weeding out undesirable invitations and discouraging worthless acquaintances as she was angling for the right ones. The thing that surprised her was to find out that the worthless acquaintances included among their number so many people of superficial distinction, but distinction, as she came to find out, that impressed no one except the people on the street. One couldn’t go on the basis of clothes. The smart dressers too often didn’t belong and some one whose suit might be last season’s and whose hair was gray and worn without a Marcel might be a powerful or a charming person—one to cultivate. Her old training in being “nice” to the mothers of her high school friends stood her in good stead here. She knew how to treat older women, what sort of flattery they preferred and what sort of deference they exacted.

Always she watched for Matthew’s approval. She was interested in seeing the way so many Washington women followed every step of their husbands’ progress, and knew how to talk about it and how not to talk about it. She was not informed enough to get much of a grasp of big happenings, but she had an uncanny gift for getting at the pet phrases of people and never blundered as she repeated them. Then, too, she did not talk much and she read the newspapers for an hour every morning.

She was flowering, growing up, out of the little social climber she had been into the woman of social strength that she meant to be. Brilliant, colorful, utilitarian in every phase of her philosophy, except in that weakness which showed again and again in her efforts to reach Matthew.

In February she gave her first dinner. It was a small dinner, the dozen guests chosen with the utmost care and good taste. No one was there whom she did not have the right to ask, no one who would not feel in easy company with the rest of the guests, no one who was not a person of distinction either personally or by connection. She had appealed quite frankly to Mrs. Gates for advice, on the score of youth and not wishing to appear presumptuous, and Mrs. Gates had given her exceptionally good advice.

“Don’t try to do much, my dear. It’s apt to irritate people, especially at the height of the season when people are crowded. All you have to do here this year is to let people know that you are here. If you want to give a small dinner, let’s see (she looked at her calendar), try the third week in February.”

“It’s awfully good of you, Mrs. Gates, to help me. I feel so young and sometimes rather stranded because, you see, I never had to go ahead alone before. And after mother died, less than a year ago, I haven’t felt much like going out or being gay. I miss her, sadly.”

What was the perfect intonation which gave Mrs. Gates the idea that Fliss’s mother had been her social guidance until the hour of death? She smiled at Fliss kindly, pretty Fliss who had modified her mourning so that most people did not guess it was mourning and who stood before her now, swathed in soft black furs. Her references to Fliss after that were of the kind which helped immensely.

On the night of the little dinner Matthew looked at his wife in unmixed admiration. She had come into the pretty drawing-room a little before him and he found her there. To-night, too, she was dressed in black, black velvet which clung gently to her hips and emphasized her girlishness, yet giving her an air of dignity which he had never seen before. Her hair was changed from its Carrington arrangement. The black bang which she had clung to so long, because it was so becoming, had been sacrificed and her hair drawn straight back, showing the perfect white forehead and making her face seem more oval than before. The softest moon-white earrings and no other jewels at all.

“You’re lovely, Fliss.”

“I’m right,” answered Fliss, with assurance. “At least I’m right as far as looks go. And the table is right. Come see it.”

She led him into the paneled dining-room, where the mahogany caught the light from tall, unshaded wax tapers in their silver holders and the electric candles on the wall. The center of the table was bright with marigolds forced to a hothouse blossoming, setting off the silver and white and crystal of the whole.

“Is it right? Does it look splendid? No, not splendid, but as if we’d been giving dinners like this for years—as if our grandfathers had been doing it, too? No Peachtree or Carrington flats in the background?”

He laughed at her.

“It’s so stunning, Fliss, that it almost makes me feel a bit guilty. We mustn’t get so greedy for this sort of thing that we forget what I came down here for.”

“You remember all that,” broke in Fliss, returning to the drawing-room. “I’ll remember this part.”

Matthew listened to her as she stood greeting her guests with that little air of dignified deference and again as she sat opposite him, but rather far distant, listening, watching, always at work.

“Not many of your colleagues bring such young and beautiful women to Washington as you did,” commented his neighbor on the left.

Matthew smiled appreciatively.

“My wife may be my greatest contribution to Washington.”

“We hear good things of you already,” said the lady, who was elderly and kindly and had a fine Philadelphia manner. “But one of the best things we can hear is to hear of such devotion. It is good to see a man in love with his wife these days, Mr. Allenby.”

“Do you think it’s so rare?”

“I think we are creating an atmosphere in which it is harder to preserve simple emotions. I want to know your wife better and find out how she manages to be so skillful in so many things at such an early age.”

“Perhaps she won’t betray her secrets. But I will tell you a little. She does it because she is untiring and loves fine and beautiful things so much that she will do anything to obtain them.”

“You mustn’t make her seem so unscrupulous.”

“Aren’t charming women supposed to be unscrupulous?” asked Matthew, generalizing quickly.

“Women aren’t anything they are supposed to be. Less than ever just now. They are an agglomerate mass of individuals, no one of whom and no group of whom is strong enough to set the fashion for the rest of us. But now that we vote and move more acceptedly in general circles we may develop a new feminine type. Perhaps. We’ve tried to in the last fifty years. We tried the bicycle riding type and the masculinized college woman and the clubwoman type and the suffragist crusader and the newer college woman who goes in for sociology and the job-holding woman who was a war growth largely—I mean the woman who holds a job because she likes work and not because she couldn’t marry out of it. Well, all those types are experiments. They aren’t perfected types. The genuine old-fashioned housewife—domestic, motherly——”

“Not all of the old-fashioned women were like that,” Matthew checked her up amusedly.

“Put in your dash of courtesan, if you like, young man. That’s what you mean. It didn’t alter the general type. Women were women, then. Now, aside from physical similarities women are not women. You used to be able to group them by something else than physical qualities. But you can’t any more.”

“And what’s the answer?”

“Where did I start, and why did I start? My squab will be wrested from me in a minute. Wait until I have a bite.”

“You started from unscrupulous women. I think your first remark was that women aren’t anything they’re supposed to be.”

“Yes. Where I meant to end—and I can do it quickly—is to say that nothing any one can say applies to women as a class, for women no longer accept or believe in standards for themselves as a sex. They are creatures of shifting standards—unhappy or happy as the mood may strike them. They have no permanent standards.”

“No standards at all?”

“Oh, some of them cling to monogamy and some to fidelity, but is it from belief and real vivifying faith or is it, as Mrs. Gerould says, because they’ve been passed on the ethic? Is it because it’s more convenient to cling to the old fashions in morality and marriage laws? I ask it as a question. Do you know any women who would make a real sacrifice for the traditions of marriage and wifehood? Who hold those states in really reverential regard?”

Matthew was listening attentively.

“I know one woman who would,” he answered, “who would make sacrifices for the old ideal. Who holds marriage in such high regard that she can offer herself on its altar if she has to.”

His hearer looked down the length of the table at Fliss and smiled.

“You say that because you are in love with her,” she answered. “Well, maybe you’re right. But it’s a queer age. I sometimes think we need a new dictionary. My grandchildren—the youngest is ten and extremely sophisticated—talk a different language from mine. It doesn’t matter particularly.”

A queer look had come into Matthew’s eyes as the lady had assumed that his remark was a tribute to his wife.

“I can’t make out whether you’re a feminist or not.”

“Neither can I,” she returned, laughingly.

It was a perfect dinner. For so young a hostess it was marvelously well done. Matthew heard them compliment his wife, saw the elder ladies pet her and the men give her those glances of admiration which she had been used to for years. More than one man told him with unusual enthusiasm of his delightful wife, and it was not the men alone who thought so. And afterwards, as the last motor could be heard speeding away, Fliss turned to her husband.

“I’ve got a lot to do—a lot to learn,” she said, “but I like it.”

“You’re a great success.”

“There’s such big stuff ahead,” she mused. “And I’m going after it, Matthew. It gives me something to do. It’s the sort of thing I can do. There’s a reason for all this society. I’m going to go up to the top and find out the reason.”

“That’s the deepest thing you ever said,” said Matthew, lighting a final cigarette. “It was a great success,” he repeated, and went on to his library to work for a few hours. Fliss sat still, her eyes in the future as they had been long ago on the night of the High School dance. Work, heights, a future—still ahead.

CHAPTER XXVIII

He had found the position very difficult. He was taking no one’s place, so the organizations of the mines did not know quite what to do with him. The attitude of the superintendents at first had been to treat him as a visitor, to “show” him things. When it came to them fully that he proposed making an extended stay among them, there was suspicion of his purposes. The undercurrent idea was at once that he was on some secret investigation, that some one was “going to be fired.” They didn’t like it. The simple statement which he made to them that the company had felt that a man on the ground might help the unsatisfactory situation met great skepticism. For a couple of weeks the relations were strained. But Dick made friends quickly, and what was more, he made himself useful. All of every day he was busy, going from one thing to another; talking to superintendents, foremen, men; sizing things up; listening to complaints when he must, but never encouraging them. He made no trouble, usurped no authority, did no meddling, with the result that he very soon found things brought to him for consultation and decision. Several grievances, small things in themselves, but which had been moot and bitter points between the miners and their superiors, were adjusted before they had developed so far that they made real trouble. And other things happened. Dick had consultations with some of the grocers and dealers in fuel in the towns and a certain amount of exploitation ceased as Dick pointed out that rival stores which could easily be started might put them out of business. He found out no more than the skilled investigator would have found out after a few days’ survey. But the difference between Dick’s work and that of a professional investigator was that Dick did something about it. He was not only investigating and observing, but he had, in a large measure, power to act and the brains to proceed.

These small successes gave him no illusions any more than his small failures confused his mind. He knew that the great dissatisfactions would not be solved by even model conditions, and model conditions were impossible to get. But he worked along and even garnered unexpected praise from that hard-thinking group of men who had allowed him permission to try his experiment.

It was a very simple life. All day at the mines, absorbed in study of practical things, varied perhaps in some way by a discussion with some of the foremen or some of the men themselves. He was amazed to find how hard every one was thinking. Nearly every man he met had some idea that changes were needed in mind, state or nation. He heard wise comments often as well as ridiculous ones, but he found no common basis for all the comments—nothing to build upon—no standard which they all would follow. He puzzled about it somewhat. At the end of the day, in the short evenings, he thought of these things, sometimes sitting in the unkempt lobby of the hotel, sometimes walking swiftly in the cold night. And as he walked he would see lights come out from the windows of the little houses and shadows pass the windows, and he would be very lonely. More lonely than he had been in Carrington, for he felt closer to these houses and yet shut out from them. He had the sense of men behind the windows, with their families—men basically like himself, women fundamentally like Cecily. And as he walked he often wondered, too, what it was that had parted him and Cecily again on that Christmas morning, why they could not have been happy together. Sometimes it seemed so cruelly abnormal to him that he was tempted to go to her again. Things looked simpler here in this little streetcarless, snow covered, hard driven town. Men were husbands and women were wives, and mental quibbles were of such little consequence. In these clear moments of normality it was amazing to him that he and Cecily had ever quarreled. She, the beautiful, loyal mother of his children; he, her husband, devoted to his children and loving Cecily so deeply. And yet there it was. In some way they had torn their marriage into shreds. Because she did not want him to like the things, the people, the amusements which she did not like; because she had rated him cheap and held herself dear; because she had insisted on her standards for both of them.

Trivialities, no doubt of it. They had thrown away vital things for trivialities. They’d won their points. He might go where he liked, amuse himself as he liked, live by his own standards. And where was he? A man without a home, without a family; and yet always with the precious sense of that family, his even though he was not with it. And she—he could imagine her sitting quietly in that long living-room of hers, with her book—alone. Or was she? Matthew had said it could not go on that way; that some man was bound to disturb Cecily. Cecily’s husband put that thought from his mind with distaste.

He came to the conclusion that they must have been living in a queer atmosphere, to let themselves be ruined by such mental abnormalities. No standards. Or was that the root of the trouble—Cecily’s standards? Cecily’s standards which had seemed when he married her to be so wonderfully beautiful and which had become so irritating, so inflexible, so rigid. They had set her apart from so many people. She had preserved them at such great cost.

Now, with the jazz fever out of his blood, with the cold air on his cheeks, Dick could see how he might have taught Cecily tolerance. She had learned many other things. But it was too late now for that. They had hurt each other too cruelly. Humiliated each other; and he had added a cruel touch of further humiliation on Christmas. At the thought of Christmas Dick always stopped thinking. He couldn’t bear to go on with the picture of himself that he imagined Cecily saw of him, sneaking home on a holiday, a sentimental, desirous, quarrelsome brute.

In a kind of debauch of lonesomeness, he used to think of other things about Cecily—of the way she used to tuck the little baby under her chin like a fiddle—of the way she looked with her hair spread out on her pillow. But it rested him. He would look back and remember little things which had seemed of no consequence, but now were comforting and sweet. She had loved him. He must persuade her to let him do something for the boys—settle something on her.

Then he would go to bed and get up to an immense day’s work.

In late February he ran in to Carrington for a week to straighten out things at the office and fight out some matters which weren’t being given the attention he wanted them to have. He was going back to the mines for another couple of months.

“I want to see the situation through the winter. Next winter I’ll know better how to go about things up there, even if it must be done at longer range.”

“Going to establish the millennium?” asked one of the directors, trying to “kid” Dick a bit.

Dick gave him a queer look.

“There’s no millennium coming for a damned long time yet,” he answered. “But we may save a lot of money and, what’s more, a lot of skins by finding out just what is going on up there.”

They praised his work in giving him greater leeway and full power to do what he thought best in dismissals and appointments.

He met Walter at lunch and asked after Della.

“Not too well,” said Walter, “but that’s part of it, I suppose.”

“Hurrah for you,” said Dick, “I didn’t know about it.”

“It makes a man feel helpless, doesn’t it?” asked Walter.

Dick nodded.

“Cecily has been a wonder to Della. She’s seen a lot of her and sort of bolstered her up.”

“Cecily?”

“Della turned to her more than to any one else. She was a little panicky, you know.”

“Cecily could help her out a lot,” said Dick shortly, and was on his way.

He had one other encounter. He had come in to Carrington just at this time because he had known that Matthew was on for three days from Washington. He had not known that seeing Matthew meant dining with Fliss at the hotel. But it did.

She was looking as pretty as ever, even somehow prettier, and she had a better manner. Still in apparent mourning, she would not dance, but she regaled Dick with tales of Washington which kept them all amused, and Dick enjoyed her as he had not enjoyed anybody since his break with Cecily. She spoke of that when Matthew had gone to find her coat and get a taxi. She was going to pay some calls while Dick and Matthew talked business.

“How is Cecily?” she asked Dick, the corner of her eyes lifted toward him.

“I don’t know.”

“You aren’t living there?”

“No.”

“Don’t stiffen, Dick. I don’t mean to pry. I’m really sorry.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re a fool, Dick.”

“Which way?”

“Trying to get along without her. You can’t. Nobody seems to be able to. Here’s your little sister-in-law adoring her. Here’s Matthew much the same. Here’s you, the same, though she irritates you a little just as she does me. I confess I’m exempt. I don’t adore. But I never did fall for the good wife and mother type.”

“Change the subject, Fliss.”

“No, I won’t, Dick. I’ll say my say. I’ll say that you and your good wife ought to get together—if only for that blessed Dorothea’s sake. I suppose Cecily wouldn’t let me have Dorothea? I helped bring her into the world. Well, maybe I can send her an anonymous present once in a while. Dick, did you ever like me?”

“I wonder just how much,” teased Dick.

“Cecily and I have always been jealous of each other, you know. I suppose that when we are old and gray and wear caps (only I mean to Marcel mine to the end), that we will still be jealous of the parts of our husbands’ minds we haven’t got. Cecily has a lot of Matthew’s (the best part of it, too) and I have a tiny scrap of yours which she begrudges me. But she can’t have it, Dick. I cling to it. She can have most of you, but I want the tiny scrap of you that wants brighter color than Cecily will give you. So there!”

She finished with her old impudent smile.

“Foolish woman!” he said.

“Foolish nothing. I’m a working woman these days with no time for foolishness. I’m storming Washington society. And as Matthew goes up and up I shall trail along after him. Just talking of you, darling,” she finished as Matthew came in sight.

Dick spent a few dutiful days with his mother, repressing her efforts to repeat to him the gossip about his affairs and just as definitely refusing to hear or talk ill of Cecily. Mrs. Harrison wanted him to make some effort to get Dorothea for her. But he refused.

“Dorothea is better with her mother.”

“You never know. Cecily will probably get some notion to put the child into a convent.”

“Nonsense, mother.”

But he had to hold himself rather sternly in check as he found himself trying to keep away from his old house. He had a very definite ache for the children. He wanted just to see them, but he really couldn’t hang around street corners, he told himself. Finally, on the day he left, he telephoned the house. It was relief when Ellen answered. He had decided to hang up if it was Cecily’s voice.

“It’s Mr. Harrison, Ellen. No, I didn’t want to speak to Mrs. Harrison. It’s all right that she’s out. I’m leaving town in a few minutes and I was wondering if you could bring Dorothea down to the train. And Leslie? It isn’t far. Mrs. Harrison has the baby with her? Then, if you could—fine, fine, fine. I’ll send you home in a taxi. Can’t I send a taxi for you? All right, in half an hour, then.”

He was trembling when he saw the children come down the platform, Dorothea so competent now, Leslie tumbling along like a small brown bear. Such wonderful children! He had not had time for toys, but he had raided a confectioner’s.

“Are you going away again, daddy?”

“I must, dear. I have work to do. You must be a good girl and mind mother.”

“I do.”

“Mrs. Harrison well, Ellen?”

“Yes, Mr. Harrison. I’m sure she’ll be sorry you can’t come for dinner.”

“Trying to keep us respectable, Ellen?” Dick chuckled, but his laughter was a little husky.

“Better come out with us,” urged Ellen with unusual boldness.

Dick shrank instinctively.

“Wouldn’t do—wouldn’t do at all. Too bad, Ellen, but it’s too late for that. Remember what you promised; let me know if Mrs. Harrison ever needs me. Good-by, Leslie, old chunk; good-by, Dorothea, my darling.”

Ellen took them off reluctantly and Dick jumped on his train—a train of daycoaches, perambulated by boys with “popcorn, chewing gum and candy.” He felt like a tramp, and sitting slouched up beside his window, pulled his cap over his eyes. Homeless. What did it matter if he was rich and equipped with power? He was homeless. A wave of bitterness towards his wife swept over him. There were Walter and his Della, waiting for their child; Fliss with her Matthew; Cecily and he—separated.

“I must work,” he told himself. “I must work like hell.”

That was what he did, what he had to do. He was hardly back in Allenby before trouble broke out. The long winter had worn on every one. Nerves which could not be sent to Florida for rehabilitation were none the less shattered in dirty-faced miners and their stolid seeming wives. Professional agitators; a long list of impossible demands; poor whiskey obtained from the blind pigs; an official firing an unwary shot; other angry shots; the old story of the strike and its outcome. Dick toiled night and day now, using every ounce of influence he had gained, doing the things which must be done in every strike; trying to keep sparks from the inflammable bitterness, fighting, losing, winning a little, seeing privation and trouble face to face as he had never seen it.

It took him out of his own trouble, but while the men in Carrington congratulated themselves on their foresight in having “Harrison on the job up there,” Dick changed rather visibly. His step did not have so much spring and the youth which he had carried so blithely in his face until this age of thirty-seven seemed quite gone.

CHAPTER XXIX

She had come to see the difficulties of continuing in her present relations with Dick. It could hardly go on. Some arrangement would have to be made to clear up the vagueness of the situation. She was disagreeably conscious of the lurking feeling among her relatives that Dick and she would “make it up,” and that, she felt angrily, made her position intolerably cheap. It wasn’t a thing which could be “made up.” In those moments when she did toss over in her restless mind the possibilities of living with Dick again, the thought of the smiles of people over the “reconciliation” was intensely irritating. Della had tried to urge her to take some step to see Dick, but gentle as she was with Della these days, Cecily would not allow her to go on.

Yet she was learning from Della. Learning the strangest things from Della’s pragmatic little soul. Walter was always asking her to come to see them, to join them here and there and it was so good to be wanted that Cecily saw the young Warners often. At first the demonstrations of affection she used to witness bothered her, shamed her delicacies. But she grew used to them and quite tolerant. One couldn’t do away with Dellas. Why shouldn’t she kiss her husband in public if she liked? What difference did it make? They cared for each other and when Della would pout and grow angry and Walter get angry in return, Cecily grew used to seeing them, for no reason at all, give up the quarrel in favor of a caress. No long silences, no quiet bitternesses. No one made his point in these little quarrels, but what did that matter either? They weren’t points worth making.

Cecily had noted through the papers the return of Fliss for those few days. It had been evidently quite a social triumph. The entertaining for her had been very quiet in deference to Fliss’s mourning. Cecily heard that with a quick, ironic memory of the day she had visited Fliss’s mother.

Once she spoke of Fliss to Ellen.

“Your cousin has become very important.”

“She was always a hard worker,” returned Ellen.

Cecily looked at her skeptically.

“Oh, yes, in her way. She’s really a very hard worker. Of course she likes things pretty and gay, but I will say this for her. She was always willing to work for what she got. And she knew what she wanted from the time she was a little thing.”

But Cecily felt no tolerance there—no tolerance towards Fliss. Fliss was to her the waste of the world—the corruption of the times—with whom there must be no truce.

Her money affairs were still in a bad way. There had been expensive house repairing; there had been clothes for the children and Cecily could not bear to put them into cheaper things than they had been accustomed to wear. The fact that money which she would not use had been put to her credit made the situation half-ridiculous. She was conscious of looking a little ridiculous. As the standards for marriage which she had held so sacredly grew a little less rigid because of her friendliness with Della, she used to wonder more and more why she had let things matter so much between herself and Dick. So many things might have been passed over. “But I wouldn’t like to live like Della,” she’d tell herself. “It’s all right for Della to squabble and caress; our marriage was different.” And back again she would come to the old point that Dick had preferred casual amusements to her, that he had not been willing to concede that hers was the highest way. Though she might concede some things she was still sure of one fact: that hers was the highest way. It wasn’t, she would tell herself in these intense mental discussions, that she wanted Dick to stay in every night, that she didn’t want him to dance—to play. She only wanted him to stand with her mentally on a height of marriage to which they had attained at least in those early days; she didn’t want their union to mix on a common basis with these haphazard marriages of passion, of convenience, marriages of deliberate childlessness—which she saw around her. How he was to express his mental agreement with her she didn’t know; how he could have expressed it she could dream; but she knew that he never could feel or express it now. For they had put themselves in the quarreling class. Even if they lived together again they could not get the perfection they had missed. Resentment would be casting shadows between them for a while and, when resentment died at last, with it would die some delicacies, some memories. When the memories of these months of bitterness and separation faded, were they together or apart, some capacities for feeling would have faded, too.

And yet the bond remained between them. After she had proved to herself that living with Dick now would be an admission of failure, her mental house of cards always tumbled. During the night she would waken and be looking into blackness, clearly conscious that her marriage was as alluring and commanding as ever, facing simple, elemental lonelinesses and desires. Rightness and wrongness of the issues did not matter much in these moments; in so far as they did it occurred to her that her little unbending scrupulosities about standards cut shabby figures besides unscrupulous, unprejudiced love. Even if he had been faithless—even if there had been another woman whom he loved—even then the bond would have remained. It was cemented in her soul by her memories—in her outer life by her children.

She was almost ready for her half-loaf.

Matthew wrote to her in March. He had not seen her when he was in Carrington and wrote to tell her why—a dangerously frank letter for a Senator.

“I thought it best not to come because I did not want to mix issues. What I wanted to say to you as I thought of going to you was to urge you to return to Dick—to have him return to you. But perhaps what I might say if I came into your presence would not be that. So I write instead, for as I write I can think of you simply. I have thought often of you and Dick. You are both very dear to me. In the curious quadrangle of our lives there have been strange attractions. But accidents of place have almost destroyed the quadrangle and I think it should end in a real understanding between you and Dick. You can’t love anybody but Dick, Cecily, and you can love him much more if you watch him more, if you see that under a certain natural mannishness there is a spirit that probes into things as does yours. I don’t think you will ever regret going back to Dick—I speak of it as going back, but I mean going to him—but I know that you will shrivel and waste your life if you do not.

“You have made heights real to us. Don’t make it hard for Dick because he can’t live on them. Live on the plains where most of the work of the world is done, live with the people who do it—and watch the heights from your window.

“I am sending you my love and I am proud as I do it.”

Cecily read his letter on a windy day in early March. She put it into the pocket of her coat and went out for a walk. As she passed the convent the open gates seemed to beckon to her. She went in and stealing down the corridor to the chapel door, sat as she had sat years ago on the ledge of the window opposite the statue of the Virgin. She remembered how frightened and allured she had been by the talk about marriage. “An institution for the establishment of a home and the bringing up of children.” That, her heart cried out; yes, that, but so much more, so infinitely much more. A shrine for the love of man and woman—a shrine which she had somehow desecrated!

Her thoughts tormented her. Hither and thither they tossed her. She turned towards the door of the convent and asked for Mother Fénelon. Mother Fénelon took her hands from under her black robe and placed them on Cecily’s shoulders.

“Still in trouble, Cecily?”

Cecily nodded.

“Are you living with your husband?”

She shook her head.

“Go to him, my dear——”

“Don’t,” cried Cecily. “Don’t, please.”

It was late afternoon but she did not go home. She walked to the park and sat on a bench and felt like an outcast as the evening shadows fell around her. It grew darker and people went past her going home—carrying bundles, hurrying. Motors slipped by carrying other people home. What was home? She didn’t have one. She and Dick didn’t have one. They were kept apart by shadows, kept apart because they couldn’t get close enough. It grew colder. She looked at her watch. The children would have had their supper. She should go home. But she felt as if she must do something definite first. Still she was not quite sure what it was that she must do.

At last she rose unsteadily and made her way to a corner drugstore. It was deserted at the supper hour. Cecily saw her face as she looked across the counter into the glass, reddened with wind, streaked with tears (she hadn’t been conscious of crying) and her hat was askew. She asked the clerk for change and went into the telephone booth.

“I shan’t be home for supper, Ellen—nor all night. I’m going to Allenby. Can you manage?”

The other call was to get Dick’s exact address.

It was eleven o’clock when she toiled up from the station to the hotel, and it took more courage than she had known she had left to face the clerk and ask for Mr. Allenby’s room.

The clerk looked very dubious.

“I’m Mrs. Allenby,” said Cecily, pushing a card across at him. “I’ll go right up. Evidently,” she lied, “he didn’t get my telegram.”

“Very well, Mrs. Allenby,” said the clerk, still with a trace of dubiousness in his manner.

What had Cecily the immaculate, the fastidious, come to, to be toiling up these noisy stairs at eleven o’clock at night in search of her husband? Baggageless, shrinking from the curious looks of the few lounge loafers.

If she could only have crept in in the darkness. But she must knock and a woman at the other end of the hall was turning to look. Dick was hard to rouse.

“Let me in,” said Cecily, hoarsely. She did not know her own voice.

Nor did he. She could hear him lighting the gas, coming to the door, opening it.

She fairly pushed him aside so that she could get in.

“Cecily! For God’s sake, what’s the matter?”

She looked at him gravely, her eyes flaring in her white face.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what was the matter. I must have been right. Don’t you see I must have been right. All I wanted was right things. But that doesn’t make any difference. I want you home. I came up—I came up—because I’m your wife.” And she tumbled over in a desolate worn-out little heap at his feet.

CHAPTER XXX

Another wedding trip, he had said. So he meant it. He was rapidly getting over the sense of difficulty between them. His wife was more pliable and he was starvedly grateful for her affection. He would have said that “they both had learned a lesson.” But, as Cecily looked quietly out of the window, she knew it was not another wedding trip. Not because the mysteries were gone, but because her belief—or was it illusion—that life between them would be all love, all fine devotion, all delicate tenderness, was gone.

It could not be that now. Something—the raucous spirit of the times, the noisy unbelief of the age, or perhaps her own cloistral spirit—had ruined that first belief. But her marriage would go on and she was going on with it. Not passively, but actively.

Going on with marriage. Because it was her business to go on with her husband, with her children—even if she must make concessions.

Idly, to still her thoughts, she opened the magazine lying on her lap. From the page before her a full length picture of Fliss stared up at her and the caption seemed to leap at Cecily in capital letters.

“The beautiful Mrs. Allenby, wife of Senator Allenby, who has been such a success in Washington this season, relies for her success not only on her beauty but on her intellect. Mrs. Allenby has studied the modern woman’s problems deeply. She says that the modern marriage——”

Cecily closed the book with disgust. The old spirit was aflame again—resentment that this sort of thing should be tolerated, that marriage should be made so cheap. She half pushed the magazine out of the window to drop it to the tracks below.

Then she pulled it back and, looking at it thoughtfully for a moment, laid it down beside her to show to Dick.

THE END