Part 4

"No? Can it be you are not such a clever girl as teacher always thought?"

"I thought you were spending the night at Elbridge."

"So did I when I arrived, but my plans changed. I found that it would be better for me to take the three-o'clock to town and go back on Sunday afternoon, by the--what is the train that we take back on Sunday?"

It was almost too serious for jests, and Lita said in a voice that just didn't tremble that she took the 4:08.

Life is not often just right, not only in the present, but promising in forty-eight hours to be just as good or better. Lita spent two wonderful hours. First they talked about Aurelia--her courage, her loneliness, her parents, divorce in general--and then Lita found herself telling him the whole story of her own position in regard to her parents. Even to Aurelia, with whom she talked so frankly, she had never told the whole story--her own deep emotional reactions. She found to her surprise that it was easier to tell a story of an intimate nature to this stranger of an opposite sex than to her lifelong friend. He understood so perfectly. He did not blame them; if he had she would have felt called on to defend them; and he did not blame her; if he had she would have been forced into attacking them. He just listened, and seemed to think it was a normal and deeply interesting bit of life.

He interrupted her once to say, "But you must remember that they are people as well as parents."

It seemed to her an inspired utterance. She did not always remember that. She offered the excuse: "Yes, but I don't mind their being divorced. Only why do they hate each other so?"

"How do you know they hate each other?"

Lita thought this was a queer thing to say after all that she had told him--almost stupid. She explained again: They were always abusing each other; nothing the other did was right; neither could bear her to speak well of--

"They sound to me," said Dacer, "as if they were still fond of each other." Then, as Lita just stared at him, he went on: "Didn't you know that? The only people it's any fun to quarrel with are the people you love."

"Oh, no."

"Well, I'm glad you haven't found it out as yet, but it's true."

"I never quarrel," said Lita.

"You will some day. I expect to quarrel a lot with my wife."

"I shall never quarrel with my husband."

"No? Well, perhaps I'm wrong then."

She was angry at herself for glancing up so quickly to see what he could possibly mean by that except--he was looking at her gravely.

"Look here!" he said. "That's a mistake about Italy. You don't want to go to Italy next summer."

She was aware of two contradictory impressions during the entire journey--one that this was the most extraordinary and dramatic event, and that no heroine in fiction had ever such an adventure; and the other that it was absolutely inevitable, and that she was now for the first time a normal member of the human species.

Nothing in the whole experience thrilled her more than the calm, almost martial way in which he said as they were getting off the train at the Grand Central, "Now we'll get a taxi."

She was obliged to explain to him that they couldn't; her mother would be at the gate waiting for her--she always was.

Only this time she wasn't.

Meeting trains in the Grand Central, though it has not the phrenetic difficulty of meeting trains in the Pennsylvania Station, where you must watch two crowded stairways and a disgorging elevator in three different directions, is not made too easy. To meet a train in the Grand Central you must be in two widely separated spots at the same time.

Mrs. Hazlitt, approaching the bulletin board through devious subterranean routes, was caught in a stampede of those hurrying to meet a belated Boston express; and when at last she wormed her way to the front she saw that the impressive official with the glasses well down on his nose and the extraordinary ability for making neat figures had written down Track 12 for Lita's train. She turned liked a hunted animal; and at the moment when Lita and Dacer were emerging from the gate Mrs. Hazlitt was running from a point far to the west of Vanderbilt Avenue to a track almost at Lexington. It was five o'clock, and many heavier and more determined people were running for their trains, so that she had a good many collisions and apologies before she reached the gate where her daughter ought to have been.

The last passenger, carrying a bunch of flowers and a cardboard box tied up with two different kinds of string, was just staggering through on oddly shaped flat feet. Everyone else had disappeared. Mrs. Hazlitt questioned the gateman. Had he seen a small young lady all alone who seemed to be looking for someone? The gateman said that he could not say he had, but would not care to say he had not. He possessed to perfection the railroad man's art of not telling a passenger anything he doesn't have to tell. His manner irritated Mrs. Hazlitt.

"I suppose you know," she said, "that you have horrible arrangements for meeting trains."

"If some of us had our way we wouldn't have any arrangements at all," answered the gateman.

This shocked Mrs. Hazlitt; it seemed so autocratic. She opened her eyes to their widest and felt she must argue the matter out with him.

"Do you mean," she asked, "that you would not let people meet trains?"

"I would not," said the gateman calmly, and having locked his gate he went his way.

This had taken a few minutes, and by the time Mrs. Hazlitt had gone back to the Vanderbilt Avenue entrance and found her car and driven home, Lita was already in the library--alone.

One of the disadvantages experienced by people who express themselves quickly is that while they are explaining how everything happened the silent people of the world are making up their minds how much they will tell. Mrs. Hazlitt was talking as she entered the room.

"I'm so sorry, my dear," she was saying. "Don't let's ever tell Miss Barton. I wasn't really late--at least I would not have been if I had not had to run miles and miles, knocking down commuters as I went. And do you know what a gateman said to me, Lita, when I found I had missed you? That people oughtn't to meet trains. I could have killed him. I don't suppose you were frightened though. I suppose you took a taxi?"

"Yes," said Lita.

She had had every intention of telling her mother everything--well, certainly that she had met Doctor Dacer on the train and that he had been kind enough to see her home; but the words did not come instantly, and as she paused, her mother rushed on to something else--clothes, and what Lita wanted to see if they went to the theater the next day. The moment for telling slipped away from her in the most unexpected way; it was getting farther and farther; in fact it was nothing but a speck on the horizon.

They had an amusing dinner together. One of the pleasantest features in her parents' divorce was that Mrs. Hazlitt felt not the least restraint about discussing the Hazlitt family.

"My dear," she would say, with her eyes dancing, "don't tell me you never heard about why your Uncle Elbert was driven out of Portland."

Lita enjoyed these anecdotes extremely. Sometimes they contained illuminating phrases: "Of course, your father and I preferred to be alone." "Naturally I knew just how Jim--your father--felt about it, but--"

When her mother was like this Lita was content that her father and the whole world should remain outsiders. Her mother was a sufficient companion.

When they were back in the library after dinner her father telephoned to her. It was about Italy. She took up the receiver with a sinking heart. Now she wished she had written to him. Her mother was holding the paper as if she were reading it, but Lita knew that she couldn't help hearing the faltering sentences she was murmuring into the mouthpiece:

"Yes, Pat, I spoke to her, and I'm afraid we can't. I mean that, under the circumstances--" She heard the paper rustling to the floor, and her mother standing beside her whispered to her: "Don't be so timid; don't say you're afraid."

Then both parents were talking to her at once, one over the wire and one in her ear. Now, it is possible to listen while you talk yourself, but it is not possible to listen to two people at once.

Her father was saying: "Of course, if you don't want to go say so, but if you do, and will put the matter as I suggested--"

And her mother was whispering sibilantly, "You're giving the idea you wish to go--so unjust to me. Say straight out you won't leave me."

It was one of those minutes that epitomized her life, and her nerves were distinctly on edge as she hung up the receiver, to find that her mother was only waiting for this, to go over the whole matter more at length.

"There are times, my dear," she was saying, "when it is really necessary to speak out, even at the risk of hurting a person's feelings. I do hope you are not one of those weak natures who can never tell a disagreeable truth. It will save your father future suffering if you can make him understand once and for all he cannot come in between us--not because I forbid it, but because you won't have it."

The evening never regained its gayety.

The next morning--Saturday--was devoted entirely to clothes, and Lita now discovered a curious fact. She found she knew exactly how Dacer liked her to dress. In their few interviews they had never mentioned clothes, and yet she did not buy a hat or reject a model without a sure conviction that she was following his taste. Heretofore her main interest in the subject had been a desire to knock her schoolmates in the eye.

She thought of an epigram: "Women dress for all women--and one man."

The morning saw a triumph of her diplomacy too. She and her mother were going to the theater together that afternoon. Coming down in the train, she had learned that Dacer was taking Effie and some of her friends to the matinée to see Eugene Valentine's new play, The Winged Victory. It had not been easy to steer Mrs. Hazlitt toward this popular success; she was displeased with anything that fell short of the Comédie Française. Lita was obliged to stoop to tactics suggested by Aurelia. She intimated very gently that when her father took her to the play he never cared what it was so long as she was amused, and so she wouldn't bore her mother with the Valentine play: she'd wait until she and Pat were going on a spree--that very evening, perhaps--

Mrs. Hazlitt came to terms at once and sent for the tickets.

They came in a little late. The play had already begun, but Lita's first glance was not at the stage. Yes, he was there--three nice little girls in a row in the front of the box, and he in the back--but not alone. A woman was whispering in his ear. Who was she? His fiancée? His wife? Had he said anything which actually precluded the idea of his being married? "I expect to quarrel a great deal with my wife." That did not say more than that he had not quarreled with her so far. These two were certainly not quarreling. She sat in great agony; not of spirit only, for gradually a distinct physical ache developed in her left side. She tried to glue her eyes to the stage, and did not hear a word, except an occasional murmur from her mother: "What a silly play!"

The lights went up at the end of the act. Lita saw that the woman was rather fat and not at all young--thirty at least--and yet she knew that these sophisticated older women-- There was something sleek and sumptuous about this one, all in black velvet and diamonds and fur. A slight respite came to her when Dacer went out to smoke a cigarette. Did this indicate indifference or merely intimacy? The white-skinned woman moved to the front of the box and began making herself agreeable to the children, particularly to the girl Lita had picked out as Effie--a regular sister-in-law-to-be manner. She had looked forward to the theater as a good time to tell her mother all about it, with a casual "Oh, do you see that man over there--" She was suffering too much to permit it. She became aware that her mother felt something tense and portentous in the air; and she said suddenly, with a sound instinct for red herrings, that she thought Valentine the handsomest creature that she had ever seen. Her mother's reaction to this took up most of the entr'acte.

Doctor Dacer never saw them at all. Mrs. Hazlitt was an adept at getting out of a theater and finding her car before anyone else. She and Lita were on their way uptown before the little girls in the box had sorted out their coats and hats. A good many people, mostly men, came in to tea; and when they had gone it was time for Lita to dress to go and dine with her father. Dine! She felt she would never be able to eat again--a very curious feeling.

When Mrs. Hazlitt went to her room Margaret was as usual waiting to help her dress, but it was not usual for Margaret to wear such a long face. She had entered the family as Lita's nurse, but was now Mrs. Hazlitt's maid and the pivot on which all domestic machinery revolved.

As she unhooked Mrs. Hazlitt's dress her solemn voice came from the middle of Mrs. Hazlitt's back: "I think you ought to know, mum, that when I was brushing that heavy coat of Miss Lita's this afternoon I found something in the pocket."

"Goodness, Margaret! What?"

Margaret fumbled under her apron and produced a folded, typewritten sheet a little grimy about the edges. Mrs. Hazlitt seized it and read:

_Dear Eugene Valentine:_ May I not tell you what an inspiration your art is to me in my daily life? I think I have every photograph of you that was ever published, and one I bought at a fair with your signature. Only this is not my favorite. I like best the one as a miner from The Emerald Light. It is so strong and virile. Oh, Mr. Valentine, you cannot guess how happy it would make me if you would autograph one of these for me! I am not at present living in New York, but I am often there for week-ends, and could easily bring one of these pictures to the theater after a matinée, if that would be easiest for you.

I shall not attempt to tell you what your art means to me, and how you make other men seem, and I fear they always will seem like they was pigmies beside you.

I take the great liberty of inclosing my own picture in case it would interest you to see what a great admirer of yours looks like.

Being merely a rough draft, it was unsigned.

Of all the possibilities that crossed Mrs. Hazlitt's mind on reading this document, the possibility that her daughter had not written it was not one. Several suspicious circumstances at once popped into her head--Lita's insistence on going to Valentine's play; her admiration of him; her tentative suggestion about marriage; her alternate high spirits and abstraction.

"And who was he?" Margaret went on. "That young fellar brought her home yesterday?"

"A man brought her home yesterday?"

"Yes--the two of them in a taxi."

"What did he look like?"

"I couldn't see him very good; but I heard him say 'Until Sunday' as he got back into the taxi; and when I opened the door for Miss Lita you could see she was smiling all over her face, but not letting it out."

Ah, how well, in other days, Mrs. Hazlitt had known that beatific state!

She walked to her door and called, "Lita! Lita!"

Probably if one read the memoirs of Napoleon, the dispatches of Wellington and the commentaries of Cæsar one would find a place where the author asserts that the best general is he who takes quickest advantage of chance. Lita, entering her mother's room with her head bent over a fastening of her dress, was wondering what made some fasteners cling like leeches and others droop apart like limp handshakes. For the first few minutes she had no idea what her mother was talking about. She was prepared to feel guilty--she was guilty, but she had written no letter.

"Writing a letter like that--a vulgar letter--and making me take you to his play--and coming home with him, when I was actually waiting at the gate for you. Perhaps you were not even on that train at all--so terribly deceitful--as if I were your enemy instead of your mother. I felt there was something queer about you at the play! An actor! I wish you knew something about actors in private life. And Valentine of all people! A man--"

Mrs. Hazlitt paused. She knew nothing about Valentine's private life; but she thought it was pretty safe to make that pause as if it were all too awful to discuss.

"Your father must be told of this. It will shock him very much."

That was the phrase that gave Lita her great idea. Not since she was four years old had she heard the words "your father" spoken in that tone. Perhaps after all, it was not necessary to die in order to reconcile your parents; perhaps it was enough to let them think you were undesirably in love. She had a moment to consider this notion while her mother, in a short frilled petticoat, with her blond hair about her shoulders, was running on about what Mr. Hazlitt would say to this man.

Lita said at a venture, "Mr. Valentine doesn't even know my name. He won't have any idea what father is talking about."

"Indeed?" cried Mrs. Hazlitt. "Your father is not a man who talks without contriving to make himself understood. And as to Valentine's not knowing your name, you'll find he knows it--and the amount of your fortune, too, probably. Little schoolgirls have very little interest for older men, I can tell you, unless-- And such a letter too. 'Like they was pigmies.' If you must be vulgar, at least try to be grammatical."

"Shall you see my father when he comes for me?"

"Of course I shall not see him; but I shall take care that he knows the facts." At the same time, Lita could not help noticing that Mrs. Hazlitt refused to wear the garment Margaret had left out for her, and put on, with apparent unconsciousness, a new French tea gown in mauve and silver. "He will tell you better than I can what sort of a man this Valentine is."

"But, mother, is father's judgment of men to be depended on? You said about his lawyers that he had the faculty of collecting about him the most inefficient--"

"I never said any such thing--or rather, it was entirely different. How can you speak like that of your father? But it's my own fault, treating you as if you were a companion instead of a silly child."

This was war. Lita withdrew into herself. Parents, she reflected, did not really quite play the game; they couldn't belittle a fellow parent one day, and the next, when they needed to use force, rush away into the wings and dress him up as an ogre. After all the things her mother had said about her father, how could she expect him to inspire fear? And yet Lita knew that she was a little afraid.

Then Freebody the butler came up to say that Mr. Hazlitt was waiting in his car for Miss Hazlitt. Freebody had been with the Hazlitts before their divorce, and when the split came had preferred to remain with Mrs. Hazlitt, although he had been offered inducements by the other side. In her bitterness of spirit she had felt it a triumph that Freebody had chosen her household. She had particularly valued his reason for staying with her. He had said he did not care to work for stage people. This was wonderful to quote. It let people know that her husband's second wife had been an actress, and moreover a kind of actress that Freebody did not care to work for; and it could be told so good-temperedly, as if it were a joke on Freebody. She had always felt grateful to him.

Now she sealed the incriminating note in another envelope and gave it to Freebody.

"Give this to Mr. Hazlitt," she said, "and tell him it was found in the pocket of Miss Lita's coat"; and she added, when he had gone down again, "You can explain the rest yourself."

"No, mother," said Lita; "if you want any explaining done you must do it yourself."

Mrs. Hazlitt was still protesting against this suggestion when Freebody came back and said that Mr. Hazlitt was in the drawing-room, and would be very much obliged to Mrs. Hazlitt if she could arrange to see him for just five minutes. There was a pause; Mrs. Hazlitt and Lita looked at each other; and Freebody, just as much interested as anyone, looked at no one. Then Mrs. Hazlitt said they would both go down.

And so for the first time since she was five years old Lita stood in the room with both her parents--her mother trembling so that the silk lining of her tea gown rustled with a soft, continuous whispering like the wind in dead leaves, and her father, white and impressive, with his crush hat under one arm and the open letter held at arm's length so that he could read it without his glasses. Something hurt and twisted came to rest in Lita by the mere fact that the three of them were together.

Her father spoke first, and his voice was not quite natural, as he said, "It was kind of you to come down, Alita. I know it is exceedingly painful to you--"

"I've done a good many painful things in my life for Lita."

"I know, I know," he answered gently; "and this not the least. But this letter--I don't exactly understand it."

"Have you read it?"

"Not entirely."

"Well, read it--read it," said Mrs. Hazlitt, as if he ought to see that he couldn't understand anything until he had read it; but every time he began to read it she began to explain all the hideousness of Lita's conduct; and when he looked up to listen to her she said, with a sort of weary patience, "Won't you please read the letter? Then we can discuss it."

At last he said quietly, "Alita, I cannot read it while you talk to me."

She did not answer. She moved her neck back like an offended swan, and glanced at Lita as much as to say, "You see the sort of man he is?" She did, however, remain silent until he had finished, and looking had said, "But this isn't even good grammar--'Like they was pigmies.' Don't they teach her grammar at this school?"

Alita Hazlitt was one of those people who, when blame is going about, assume it is intended for them and consider the accusation most unjust.

"Well, really," she said now, "it wasn't my wish that she should go to boarding school. It has turned out exactly as I prophesied it would. Common girls have taught her to run after actors, and inefficient teachers have failed--"

"I don't remember your prophesying that, Alita."

"You mean to say I did not?"

"I mean to say I have no recollection of it. I do remember that you said it would make it easier for me to kidnap her. I shall never forget that."

"You cannot deny that I was opposed to school. I only yielded to your wishes--such a mistake."

"You have not many of that kind to reproach yourself with."

Lita, who had felt a profound filial emotion at seeing her parents together, was now distressingly conscious that they had never seemed less her parents than at this moment. They seemed in fact rather dreadful people--childish, unjust, lacking in essential self-control. The last remnant of her childhood seemed to perish with this scene, and she became hard, matured and to a certain degree orphaned.

"What I am trying to say," Mr. Hazlitt went on, "is that we can hardly attribute this unfortunate episode entirely to the influence of the school. I mean that if there had not been some inherent silliness in the child herself--"

This was too good a point for Mrs. Hazlitt to let slip.

"It was not from me," she said, "that Lita inherited a tendency to run after people of the stage."

"We need not discuss inherited tendencies, I think."

Mrs. Hazlitt laughed.

"Ah, that is so like you! We may criticize the child or the school or my bringing up, but the instant we begin to talk about your shortcomings it is discovered that we are going too far."

"Alita," he said, "I came here in the most coöperative spirit--"

"And do you make it a favor that you should be willing to try to save your child?"