Chapter 2

monotony? He was a man of many moods himself. What had saved him from early matrimony was a certain monotony in women, the cleverest of them.

But there must be something beyond, some subtle spiritual demand, developed throughout nearly twice as many years as he had dwelt on earth; born not only of an aspiring soul and terrible disenchantments, but of a wisdom that only years of deep and living experience, no mere intelligence, however brilliant, could hope to assemble. He was thirty-four. There was no possible question that at fifty-eight, if he lived sanely, and his intellectual faculties had progressed unimpaired, he would look back upon thirty-four as the nonage of life--when the future was a misty abyss of wisdom whose brink he had barely trod. She herself was an abyss of wisdom. How in God's name could he ever cross it? Her body might be young again, but never her mind. Never her mind! And then he had a flash of insight. Perhaps he alone could rejuvenate that mind.

Certainly he could make her forget. Men and women would be aged at thirty, but for this beneficent gift of forgetting. . . . He could make the present vivid enough.

He explored every nook of those personalities of his, determined to discover if he felt any sense of inferiority to this woman who knew so much more, had lived and thought and felt so much more, than himself--whom he still visioned on a plane above and apart. No woman was ever more erudite in the most brilliant and informing declensions of life, whatever the disenchantments, and for thirty years she had known in varying degrees of intimacy the ablest and most distinguished men in Europe. She had been at no pains to conceal her opinion of their intellectual superiority over American men. . . .

He concluded dispassionately that he never could feel inferior to any woman. Women might arrest the attention of the world with their talents, change laws and wring a better deal out of life than man had accorded them in the past, but whatever their gifts and whatever their achievements they always had been and always would be, through their physical disabilities, their lack of ratiocination, of constructive ability on the grand scale, the inferiors of men. The rare exceptions but proved the rule, and no doubt they had been cast in one mould and finished in another.

In sheer masculine arrogance he was more than her match. Moreover, there were other ways of keeping a woman subject.

Did he love her? Comprehensively and utterly? Clear thinking fled with the last of his doubts. . . . And when a man detaches himself from the gross material surface of life and wings to the realm of the imagination, where he glimpses immortality, what matter the penalty? Any penalty? Few had the thrice blessed opportunity. If he were one of the chosen, the very demi-gods, jeering at mortals, would hate him.

And then abruptly he fell asleep.

XXXI

He went direct from the office that evening to Mrs. Oglethorpe's house in Gramercy Park. During the morning he had received the following note from her, and he had puzzled over it at intervals ever since.

"Dear Lee:

"Will you dine alone with an old woman tonight--a rather bewildered and upset old woman? I suppose to the young nothing is too new and strange for readjustment, but I have hardly known where I am these last few days. You are the only friend I care to talk to on the subject, for you always understand. I am probably older than your mother and I look old enough to be your grandmother, but you are the only person living with whom I ever feel inclined to lay aside all reserve. Old men are fossils and young men regard me as an ancient wreck preserved by family traditions. As for women I hate them and always did. Do come and dine with a lonely puzzled old woman unless you have an engagement impossible to break. Don't bother to dress.

"Your affectionate old friend, "JANE OGLETHORPE."

"What's up?" Clavering had thought as he finished it. "Mary or Janet?"

It was an extraordinary letter to receive from Mrs. Oglethorpe, the most fearsome old woman in New York. To Clavering she had always shown the softer side of her nature and he knew her perhaps better, or at all events more intimately, than any of her old friends, for she had not treated him as a negligible junior even when he arrived in New York at the tender age of twenty-two. His ingenuous precocity had amused her and she had discovered a keen interest in the newspaper world of whose existence she had hardly been aware; no interviewer had ever dared approach her; and as he grew older, developing rapidly and more and more unlike her sons and her sons' friends, they had fallen into an easy pallish intimacy, were frank to rudeness, quarrelled furiously, but fed each other's wisdom and were deeply attached. During the war she had knitted him enough socks and sweaters to supply half his regiment; and when he had left the hospital after a serious attack of influenza it had been for the house in Gramercy Park, where he could have remained indefinitely had he wished.

But in all the years of their intimacy never before had she "broken," given a hint that she felt the long generation between them. He found her more interesting in talk than any girl, except when he was briefly in love, and her absence of vanity, her contempt for sentiment in any of its forms, filled him with a blessed sense of security as he spent hours stretched out on the sofa in her upstairs sitting-room, smoking and discussing the universe. She was not an intellectual woman, but she was sharp and shrewd, a monument of common sense and worldly wisdom. It would be as easy to hoodwink her as the disembodied Minerva, and it was doubtful if any one made even a tentative attempt. Clavering wondered which of those inner secret personalities was to be revealed tonight.

As he stood in the drawing-room waiting for her to come down he examined for the first time in many years the full-length picture of her painted shortly before her marriage to James Oglethorpe. She was even taller than Mary Zattiany and in the portrait her waist was round and disconcertingly small to the modern therapeutic eye. But the whole effect of the figure was superb and dashing, the poise of the head was almost defiant, and the hands were long, slender, and very white against the crimson satin of her gown. She looked as if about to lead a charge of cavalry, although, oddly enough, her full sensuous mouth with its slightly protruding lower lip was pouting. Beautiful she had never been; the large bony structure of her face was too uncoverable, her eyes too sharp and sardonic; but handsome certainly, and, no doubt, for many years after she had stood for this portrait in the full insolence of her young womanhood. She retained not a trace of that handsomeness today. Her hands were skinny, large-veined, discolored by moth patches, and her large aquiline nose rose from her sunken cheeks like the beak of an old eagle--an indomitable old eagle. Many women of sixty-eight had worn far better, but looks need care, spurred by vanity, and she had a profound contempt for both. No doubt if she had made a few of the well-known feminine concessions would have looked at least ten years younger than her age, for she had never had a day's illness: eight lyings-in were not, in her case, to be counted as exceptions. No doubt, thought Clavering, as he turned to greet her, she had thought it quite enough to be imposing.

She certainly looked imposing tonight in spite of her old-fashioned corsets and her iron-gray hair arranged in flat rolls and puffs on the precise top of her head, for although flesh had accumulated lumpily on her back, her shoulders were still unbowed, her head as haughtily poised as in her youth, and the long black velvet gown with yellow old point about the square neck (the neck itself covered, like the throat, with net), and falling over her hands, became her style if not the times.

"Well, Lee!" she said drily. "I suppose when you got my note you thought I had gone bug-house, as my fastidious granddaughter Janet would express it. But that is the way I felt and that is the way I feel at the present moment."

"Dear Lady Jane! Whatever it is, here I am to command, as you see. There is no engagement I wouldn't have broken----"

"You are a perfect dear, and if I were forty years younger I should marry you. However, we'll come to that later. I want to talk to you about that damnable little Janet first--we'll have to go in now."

When they were seated at a small table at one end of the immense dining-room she turned to the butler and said sharply:

"Get out, Hawkins, and stay out except when we can't get on without you." And Hawkins, whom a cataclysm would not have ruffled after forty-five years in Mrs. Oglethorpe's service, vanished.

"Jim said he had a talk with you about Janet, and that you advised him to spank her," she said. "Well, he did."

"What?" Clavering gave a delighted grin. "I never believed he'd do it."

"Nor I. Thought his will had grown as flabby as his body. But when she stood up to him and with a cool insolence, which she may or may not have inherited from me, or which may be merely part and parcel of the new manner, and flung in his face a good deal more than he knew already, and asked him what he was going to do about it, he turned her over his knee and took a hair-brush to her."

"It must have been a tussle. I suppose she kicked and scratched?"

"She was so astonished that at first she merely ejaculated: 'Oh, by Jimminy!' Then she fought to get away and when she found she couldn't she began to blubber, exactly as she did when she was not so very much younger and was spanked about once a day. That hurt his feelings, for he's as soft as mush, and he let her go; but he locked her up in her room and there she stays until she promises to behave herself as girls did in his time. I'm afraid it won't work. She hasn't promised yet, but merely hisses at him through the keyhole. D'you understand this new breed? I'm afraid none of the rest of us do."

"I can't say I've been interested enough to try. Janet informed me that they were going the pace because they couldn't hold the men any other way. But I fancy it's merely a part of the general unrest which is the usual aftermath of war. This was a very long war, and the young seem to have made up their minds that the old who permitted it are bunglers and criminals and idiots and that it is up to them to demonstrate their contempt."

"And what good do they think that will do them?" Mrs. Oglethorpe's face and inflection betrayed no sympathy with the Younger Generation.

"You don't suppose they worry their little heads with analysis, do you? Somebody started the idea and the rest followed like sheep. No doubt it had its real origin in the young men who did the fighting and saw their comrades do the dying, and all the kudus carried off by the old men who ran no risks. They are very bitter. And women generally take their cues from men, little as they suspect it. However, whatever the cause, here it is, and what to do about it I've no more idea than you; but I should think it would be a good idea for Jim to take her abroad for a year."

"I don't see Jim giving up his clubs and sports, and tagging round the world after a flapper. He never took himself very seriously as a parent . . . still, he is really alarmed. . . . Are you going to marry Marian Lawrence?"

"Do you think I'd engage myself to any one without telling you first of all?"

"Better not. Are you in love with her?"

"No."

"I'm told you were devoted to her at one time. That was one of the times when I saw little or nothing of you."

"I've been devoted to quite a number of girls, first and last, but there's really been nothing in it on either side. I know what you're driving at. Shoot."

"Yes, Jim said he told you. Well, I've changed my mind. Janet's a little fool, perhaps worse. Not half good enough for you and would devil the life out of you before you got rid of her in self-defence. Let her hoe her own row. How about that writing person, Gora Dwight, you and Din are always talking about?"

"Never been the ghost of a flirtation. She's all intellect and ambition. I enjoy going there for I'm almost as much at home with her as I am with you."

"Ha! Harmless. I hope she's as flattered as I am. There remains Anne Goodrich. She's handsome, true to her traditions in every way--Marian Lawrence is a hussy unless I'm mistaken and I usually am not--she has talent and she has cultivated her mind. She will have a fortune and would make an admirable wife in every way for an ambitious and gifted man. More pliable than Marian, too. You're as tyrannical and conceited as all your sex and would never get along with any woman who wasn't clever enough to pretend to be submissive while twisting you round her little finger. I rather favor Anne."

Clavering was beginning to feel uneasy. What was she leading up to? Who next? But he replied with a humorous smile:

"Dearest Lady Jane! Why are you suddenly determined to marry me off? Are you anxious to get rid of me? Marriage plays the very devil with friendships."

"Only for a year or so. And I really think it is time you were settling yourself. To tell you the truth I worry about you a good deal. You're a sentimental boy at heart and chivalrous and impressionable, although I know you think you're a seasoned old rounder. Men are children, the cleverest of them, in a scheming woman's hands."

"But I don't know any scheming women and I'm really not as irresistible as you seem to think. Besides, I assure you, I have fairly keen intuitions and should run from any unprincipled female who thought it worth while to cast her nets in my direction."

"Intuitions be damned. They haven't a chance against beauty and finesse. Don't men as clever as yourself make fools of themselves over the wrong woman every day in the week? The cleverer a man is the less chance he has, for there's that much more to play on by a cleverer woman. It would be just like you to fall in love with a woman older than yourself and marry her----"

"For God's sake, Jane, cut out my fascinating self! It's a subject that bores me to tears. Fire away about Janet. How long's she been shut up? What will Jim do next? I'll do my best to persuade him to take her round the world. He'd enjoy it himself for there are clubs in every port and some kind of sport. I'll look him up tomorrow."

Mrs. Oglethorpe gave him a sharp look but surrendered. When he shouted "Jane" at her in precisely the same tone as he often exploded "Jim" to her son, she found herself suddenly in a mood to deny him nothing.

XXXII

They went up to her sitting-room to spend the rest of the evening. It was a large high room overlooking the park and furnished in massive walnut and blood-red brocade: a room as old-fashioned and ugly as its mistress but comfortable withal. On a table in one corner was an immense family Bible, very old, and recording the births, marriages, and deaths of the Van den Poeles from the time they began their American adventures in the seventeenth century. On another small table in another corner was a pile of albums, the lowest containing the first presentments of Mrs. Oglethorpe's family after the invention of calotype photography. These albums recorded fashion in all its stages from 1841 down to the sport suit, exposed legs and rolled stockings of Janet Oglethorpe; a photograph her grandmother had sworn at but admitted as a curiosity.

One of the albums was devoted to the friends of Mrs. Oglethorpe's youth, and Mary Ogden occupied the place of honor. Clavering had once derived much amusement looking over these old albums and listening to Mrs. Oglethorpe's running and often sarcastic comment; but although he had recalled to mind this photograph the night Mr. Dinwiddie had been so perturbed by the stranger's resemblance to the flame of his youth, he had, himself, been so little interested in Mary Ogden that it had not occurred to him to disinter that old photograph of the eighties and examine it in detail. He turned his back squarely on it tonight, although he had a misgiving that it was not Janet who had inspired Mrs. Oglethorpe's singular note.

On one wall was a group of daguerreotypes, hideous but rare and valuable. An oil painting of James Oglethorpe, long dead, hung over the fireplace; an amiable looking gentleman with long side-whiskers sprouting out of plump cheeks, a florid complexion, and the expression of a New Yorker who never shirked his civic obligations, his chairmanships of benevolent institutions, nor his port. Opposite was another oil painting of young James taken at the age of twelve, wearing a sailor suit and the surly expression of an active boy detained within walls while other boys were shouting in the park. Beside it was a water color of Janet at the age of two, even then startlingly like her grandmother. She had been Mrs. Oglethorpe's favorite descendant until the resemblance had become too accentuated by modern divagations.

Clavering did not extend himself on the sofa tonight but drew a leather chair (built for Mr. Oglethorpe) to the small coal grate, which inadequately warmed the large room. Mrs. Oglethorpe, like many women of her generation, never indulged her backbone save in bed, and she seated herself in her own massive upright chair not too close to the fire. She had made a concession to time in the rest of the house, which was lighted by electricity, but the gas remained in her own suite, and the room was lit by faint yellow flames struggling through the ground-glass globes of four-side brackets. The light from the coals was stronger, and as it fell on her bony austere old face with its projecting beak, Clavering reflected that she needed only a broomstick. He really loved her, but a trained faculty works as impersonally as a camera.

He smoked in silence and Mrs. Oglethorpe stared into the fire. She, too, was fond of her cigar, but tonight she had shaken her head as Hawkins had offered the box, after passing the coffee. Her face no longer looked sardonic, but relaxed and sad. Clavering regarded her with uneasy sympathy. Would it be possible to divert her mind?

"Lady Jane," he began.

"I wish you would call me Jane tonight. I wouldn't feel so intolerably old."

"Of course I'll call you Jane, but you'll never be old. What skeleton have you been exhuming?" He was in for it and might as well give her a lead.

"It's Mary Ogden," she said abruptly and harshly.

"Oh--I wondered how you felt about it. You certainly have been splendid----"

"What else could I do? She was the most intimate friend of my youth, the only woman I ever had any real affection for. I had already seen her and recognized her. I suppose she has told you that I went there and that she treated me like an intruding stranger. But I knew she must have some good reason for it--possibly that she was here on some secret political mission and had sworn to preserve her incognito. I knew she had been mixed up in politics more than once. I thought I was going mad when I saw her, but I never suspected the truth. The light was dim and I took for granted that some one of those beauty experts had made a mask for her, or ripped her skin off--I hardly knew what to think, so I concluded not to think about it at all, and succeeded fairly well in dismissing it from my mind. I was deeply hurt at her lack of confidence in me, but I dismissed that, too. After all it was her right. I do as I choose, why shouldn't she? And I remembered that she always did."

Here Clavering stirred uneasily.

"When she came to me here last Tuesday and told me the whole truth I felt as if I were listening to a new chapter out of the Bible, but on the whole I was rather pleased than otherwise. I had never been jealous of her when we were young, for I was married before she came out, and she was so lovely to look at that I was rather grateful to her than otherwise. After her marriage I used to meet her every few years in Europe up to some three or four years before the outbreak of the war, and it often made me feel melancholy as I saw her beauty going . . . until there was nothing left but her style and her hair. But nothing else was to be expected. Time is a brute to all women. . . . So, while she sat here in this room so radiantly beautiful and so exquisitely and becomingly dressed, and leaning toward me with that old pleading expression I remembered so well; when she wanted something and knew exactly how to go to work to get it; and looking not a day over thirty--well, while she was here I felt young again myself and I loved her as much as ever and felt it a privilege to look at her. I arranged a luncheon promptly to meet several of her old friends and put a stop to the clacking that was going on--I had been called up eight times that morning. . . . I could have boxed your ears, but of course it was a natural enough thing to do, and you had no suspicion. . . . Well, as soon as she had gone I wrote to twelve women, giving them a bare sketch of the truth, and sent the notes off in the motor. And then--I went and looked at myself in the glass."

She paused, and Clavering rose involuntarily and put his hand on her shoulder.

"Never mind, Jane," he said awkwardly. "What does it matter? You are you and there's only one of the kind. After all it's only one more miracle of Science. You could do it yourself if you liked."

"I? Ha! With twenty-three grandchildren. I may be a fool but I'm not a damn fool, as James used to say. What good would it do me to look forty? I had some looks left at that age but with no use for them as women go. I'd have less now. But Mary was always lucky--a daughter of the gods. It's just like her damned luck to have that discovery made in her time and while she is still young enough to profit by it, besides being as free as when she was Mary Ogden. Now, God knows what devilment she'll be up to. What she wants she'll have and the devil take the consequences." She patted his hand. "Go and sit down, Lee. I've a good deal more to say."

Clavering returned to his seat with no sense of the old chair's comfort, and she went on in a moment.

"The unfairness of it as I looked at that old witch in the glass that had reflected my magnificent youth, seemed to me unendurable. I had lived a virtuous and upright life. I knew damned well she hadn't. I had done my duty by the race and my own and my husband's people, and I had brought up my sons to be honorable and self-respecting men, whatever their failings, and my daughters in the best traditions of American womanhood. They are model wives and mothers, and they have made no weak-kneed concessions to these degenerate times. They bore me but I'd rather they did that than disgrace me. Mary never had even one child, although her husband must have wanted an heir. I have lived a life of duty--duty to my family traditions, my husband, my children, my country, and to Society: she one of self-indulgence and pleasure and excitement, although I'm not belittling the work she did during the war. But noblesse oblige. What else could she do? And now, she'll be at it again. She'll have the pick of our young men--I don't know whether it's all tragic or grotesque. She'll waste no time on those men who loved her in her youth--small blame to her. Who wants to coddle old men? They've all got something the matter with 'em. . . . But she'll have love--love--if not here--and thank God, she's not remaining long--then elsewhere and wherever she chooses. Love! I too once took a fierce delight in making men love me. It seems a thousand years ago. What if I should try to make a man fall in love with me today? I'd be rushed off by my terrified family to a padded cell."

"Well--Jane----"

"Don't 'well Jane' me! You'd jump out of the window if I suddenly began to make eyes at you. I could rely on your manners. You wouldn't laugh until you struck the grass and then you'd be arrested for disturbing the peace. Well--don't worry. I'm not an old ass. But I'm a terribly bewildered old woman. It seems to me there has been a crashing in the air ever since she sat in that chair. . . . Growing old always seemed to me a natural process that no arts or dodges could interrupt, and any attempt to arrest the processes of nature was an irreverent gesture in the face of Almighty God. It was immoral and irreverent, and above all it showed a lack of humor and of sound common sense. The world, my candid grandchild tells me, laughs at the women of my generation for their old-fashioned 'cut.' But we have our code and we have the courage to live up to it. That is one reason, perhaps, why growing old has never meant anything to me but reading-spectacles, two false teeth, and weak ankles. It had seemed to me that my life had been pretty full--I never had much imagination--what with being as good a wife as ever lived--although James was a pompous bore if there ever was one--bringing eight children into the world and not making a failure of one of them, never neglecting my charities or my social duties or my establishments. As I have grown older I have often reflected upon a life well-spent, and looked forward to dying when my time came with no qualms whatever, particularly as there was precious little left for me to do except give parties for my grandchildren and blow them up occasionally. I never labored under the delusion that I had an angelic disposition or a perfect character, but I had always had, and maintained, certain standards; and, according to my lights, it seemed to me that when I arrived at the foot of the throne the Lord would say to me 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant.' The only thing I ever regretted was that I wasn't a man."

She paused and then went on in a voice that grew more raucous every moment. "That was later. It's a long time since I've admitted even to myself that there was a period--after my husband's death--when I hated growing old with the best of them. I was fifty and I found myself with complete liberty for the first time in my life; for the elder children were all married, and the younger in Europe at school. I had already begun to look upon myself as an old woman. . . . But I soon made the terrible discovery that the heart never grows old. I fell in love four times. They were all years younger than myself and I'd have opened one of my veins before I'd have let them find it out. Even then I had as little use for old men as old men have for old women. Whatever it may be in men, it's the young heart in women. I had no illusions. Fifty is fifty. My complexion was gone, my stomach high, and I had the face of an old war horse. But--and here is the damned trick that nature plays on us--I hoped--hoped--I dreamed--and as ardently as I ever had dreamed in my youth, when I was on the look-out for the perfect knight and before I compromised on James Oglethorpe, who was handsome before he grew those whiskers and got fat--yes, as ardently as in my youth I dreamed that these clever intelligent men would look through the old husk and see only the young heart and the wise brain--I knew that I could give them more than many a younger woman. But if beauty is only skin deep the skin is all any man wants, the best of 'em. They treated me with the most impeccable respect--for the first time in my life I hated the word--and liked my society because I was an amusing caustic old woman. Of course they drifted off, either to marry, or because I terrified them with my sharp tongue: when I loved them most and felt as if I had poison in my veins. Well, I saved my pride, at all events.

"By the time you came along I had sworn at myself once for all as an old fool, and, in any case, I would hardly have been equal to falling in love with a brat of twenty-two."

She seized the stick that always rested against her chair and thumped the floor with it. "Nevertheless," she exclaimed with savage contempt, "my heart is as young today as Mary Ogden's. That is the appalling discovery I have made this week. I'd give my immortal soul to be thirty again--or look it. Why in heaven's name did nature play us this appalling dirty trick?"

"But Jane!" He felt like tearing his hair. What was Mary Zattiany's tragedy to this? Banalities were the only refuge. "Remember that at thirty you were in love with your husband and bent on having a family----"

"I meant thirty and all I know now. . . . I'm not so damn sure I'd have tried to make myself think I was in love with James--who had about as much imagination as a grasshopper and the most infernal mannerisms. I'd have found out what love and life meant, that's what! And when I did I'd have sent codes and traditions to the devil."

"Oh, no, you would not. If you'd had it in you you'd have done it, anyhow. All women of your day were not virtuous--not by a long sight. I'll admit that your best possibilities have been wasted; I've always thought that. You have a terrific personality and if you were at your maturity in this traditionless era you'd be a great national figure, not a mere social power. But nature in a fit of spite launched you too soon and the cast-iron traditions were too strong for you. It was the epoch of the submerged woman."

"Mary Ogden was brought up in those same cast-iron traditions."

"Yes, but Madame Zattiany belongs to a class of women that derive less from immediate ancestors than from a legendary race of sirens--not so merely legendary, perhaps, as we think. Convention is only a flexible harness for such women and plays no part whatever in their secret lives."

"You're in love with Mary."

"_Don't_ come back to me. I won't have it. For the moment I don't feel as if I had an atom of personality left, I'm so utterly absorbed in you; and I'd give my immortal soul to help you."

"Yes, I know that. I wouldn't be turning myself inside out if I didn't. I've never talked to a living soul as I've talked to you tonight and I never shall again."

She stared at him for a moment, and then she burst into a loud laugh. It was awe-inspiring, that laugh. Lucifer in hell, holding his sides at the futilities of mankind, could not have surpassed it. "What a mess! What a mess! Life! Begins nowhere, ends nowhere." She went on muttering to herself, and then, abruptly, she broke into the sarcastic speech which her friends knew best.

"Lord, Lee, I wish you could have been behind a screen at that luncheon. Thirteen old tombstones in feathers and net collars--seven or eight of 'em, anyhow--colonial profiles and lorgnettes, and all looking as if they'd been hit in the stomach. I at one end of the table looking like the Witch of Endor, Mary at the other looking like one of our granddaughters and trying to be animated and intimate. I forgot my own tragedy and haw-hawed three times. She looked almost apologetic when she called us by our first names, especially when she used the diminutive. Polly Vane, who's got a head like a billiard ball and has to wear a wig for decency's sake, drew herself up twice and then relaxed with a sickly grin. . . . All the same I don't think Mary felt any more comfortable or liked it much better than the rest of us. Too much like reading your own epitaph on a tombstone. I thought I saw her squirm."

"How did they take it individually?" Clavering hoped she was finally diverted. "Were they jealous and resentful?"

"Some. Elinor Goodrich had always been too besottedly fond of her to mind. Others, who had been merely admirers and liked her, were--well, it's too much to say they were enchanted to see Mary looking not a day over thirty, but they were able to endure it. Isabel Lawrence thought it downright immoral, and Polly Vane looked as if she had fallen into a stinking morass and only refrained from holding her nose out of consideration for her hostess. I think she feels that Mary's return is an insult to New York. Lily Tracy was painfully excited. No doubt she'll begin collecting for the Vienna poor at once and finding it necessary to go over and distribute the funds in person. Mary lost no time getting in her fine work for Vienna relief."

"But they'll all stand by her?"

"Oh, yes, she's Mary Ogden. We'd be as likely to desert New York itself because we didn't like the mayor. And she'll need us. It's the young women she'll have to look out for. My God! How they'll hate her. As for Anne Goodrich and Marian Lawrence----"

Clavering sprang to his feet. "Who's that? Jim?"

A man was running up the stairs.

"Janet," said Mrs. Oglethorpe grimly. "She's out."

XXXIII

"Don't be a flat tyre, Don't be a dumb-bell; Run from the dumb ducks, Run from the plumbers. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

Oglethorpe pounded on the door with his stick. There was a sudden hush in the room, then a wild scurry and a slamming door. He rattled the knob and, to his surprise, for he had assumed that these wild parties of his young friends were soundly barricaded, the door opened.

There were only four young men standing about a table covered with the remains of a chafing dish supper and many champagne bottles, but an excited whispering came through the partition. Young Farren was leaning against the table, his large moon-face pallid with fright. As he recognized Oglethorpe and Clavering fright was wiped out by astonishment and relief.

"Thought you were the police," he muttered. "Though they've got no business here----"

"I've come for Janet. Go into that room and bring her out at once."

"Janet ain't here. Haven't seen Janet for a week. Tried to get her on the 'phone early this afternoon and couldn't----"

"If you don't go into that room and fetch her, I will." As he started for the inner door, Farren with drunken dignity opposed his broad bulk.

"Now, Mr. Oglethorpe, you wouldn't do that. Ladies in there. Chorus girls----"

"That's a lie. Stand aside."

Farren, who was very young and very drunk, but who had a rudimentary sense of responsibility where girls of his own class were concerned, burst into tears. "You wouldn't, Mr. Oglethorpe! I swear to God Janet's not there. But--but--some of her friends are. They wouldn't want you to see them." His mood changed to righteous indignation. "What right you got breaking into a gentleman's rooms like a damned policeman? It's an outrage and if I had a gun I'd shoot you. I'd--I'd----" And then he collapsed on a chair and was very sick.

Oglethorpe turned to Clavering, who had thought it best to remain in the hall and watch other exits. "Just stay there, will you?" He turned to the three gaping youngsters. "You dare make a move and I'll knock your heads together. Just remember that you're drunk and I'm sober."

He went into the next room, and immediately saw several forms under the bed. He reached down and jerked them out by their legs. They rolled over, covering their faces and sobbing with fright. Emancipated as they were and disdainful of pre-war parents, when it came to late parties in a bachelor's rooms they exercised strategy to slip out, not defiance.

"Oh, Mr. Oglethorpe," gasped one convulsively. "Don't tell on us, p-l-e-a-s-e."

"I've no intention of telling on you. You can go to the devil in your own way for all I care. I'm after Janet----"

"She's not here----"

"That's what I'm going to find out." He opened the door of a wardrobe and another girl tumbled into his arms, shrieked, and flung herself face downward on the bed. But it was not Janet. He investigated every corner of the apartment and then returned to Clavering, slamming the door behind him.

"She's not there, Lee," he said, leaning heavily against the wall. "Where in God's name is she? I don't know where to look next. This is her particular gang. She has no other intimates that I know of. But what do I know about her, anyway?"

"You're sure she isn't hiding anywhere at home?"

"Searched the house from top to bottom."

"I suppose it isn't likely that she's gone to any of her aunts."

"Good Lord, no. She'd take a chance on mother, but never with any of the rest of the family, and she's got no money. I saw to that. D'you suppose she's roaming the streets?"

"Well, she can't roam long; legs will give out. Perhaps she's home by now or at Mrs. Oglethorpe's. Better telephone."

They went out and found a public telephone. Janet had not been seen nor heard from.

"You don't think it's going to be another Dorothy Arnold case?" gasped Oglethorpe, who seemed completely unnerved.

"Good Heavens no, Jim! And she's able to take care of herself. Nobody better. She'll give you a scare and then turn up--with her thumb at her nose, likely. Better come up to my rooms and have a drink."

"Orright. I can't go home and I don't want to be alone anywhere. I'd go out of my senses. Anything might happen to her, and I shan't call in the police until the last minute. Filthy scandal."

"Police? Certainly not. And as Janet is cold sober, be sure she'll come to no harm."

A few moments later they were in the lift ascending to Clavering's rooms. "Hullo!" he said, as he opened the door of his little hall. "The fool maid has left the light on," and, as they entered the living-room, "what the devil--" Cigarette smoke hung in the air.

There was a wild shriek from a corner of the room, a slim girl leapt across the intervening space like a panther, and flinging herself upon Oglethorpe, beat his chest with her fists.

"You damned old plumber, you old dumb-duck!" shrieked his little daughter. "What did you come here and spoil everything for? He'd have had to marry me tomorrow if you'd minded your own business. I'll claw your eyes out." But her hands were imprisoned in her father's hard fists, and she turned and spat at the petrified Clavering. "I hate you! I hate you! But I'm going to marry you all the same. One way or another I'll get you. I meant to wait awhile; for I hadn't had fun enough yet, and I'd have precious little with you, you old flat tyre. But when I heard that old Zattiany woman'd got hold of you--and then locked up and not able to do a thing--I thought I'd go mad. I dropped my diamond bracelet out of the window and one of the servants let me out--I won't tell which. You've been seen coming out of her house at all hours, but she's a thousand years old and nobody cares what she does, but I intended to rouse this whole house and I'd have been so compromised you'd have had to marry me. You're a gentleman if you are a damned old left-over, and you're a friend of granny's and dad's. I'd have had you tied up so tight you'd have toddled straight down to the City Hall."

Clavering stared at her, wondering how women felt when they were going to have hysterics. What a night! And this girl's resemblance to her grandmother was uncanny. He could see the Jane Oglethorpe of the portrait in just such a tantrum. And he had thought he knew both of them. He wanted to burst into wild laughter, but the girl was tragic in spite of her silly plot and he merely continued to regard her stonily.

"How did you get in?" he asked. "That's not easy in this house."

"I just got in the lift and told the boy I was your sister just arrived from the South and he let me in with the pass key. He took me for sixteen and said that as you weren't one for chickens he'd chance it."

"He'll get the sack in the morning."

"I don't care what happens to him." Suddenly she burst into tears, her face working like a baby's, and flung herself into her father's arms.

"Make him marry me, daddy. Make him! I want him. I want him."

Oglethorpe put his arms about her, but his sympathies were equally divided, and he understood men far better than he did young girls. "You wouldn't want to marry a man who doesn't love you," he said soothingly. "Where's your pride?"

"Who cares a damn about pride? I want him and that's all there is to it." She whirled round again. "Do you think you're in love with that rejuvenated old dame who's granny's age if she's a day? She's hypnotized you, that's what. It isn't natural. It isn't. It isn't."

"I certainly shall marry Madame Zattiany if she will have me."

"O-h-h." Tears dried. She showed her teeth like a treed cat. Her eyes blazed again and she would have precipitated herself upon him, but her father held her fast. "Oh! Oh! Oh! It can't be. It can't be. It's as unnatural as if you married granny. It isn't fair. How dare she come here with her whitewash and sneak young girls' lovers away from them?"

"Really, Janet."

"Oh, I know, you thought you didn't care for me, but you always did, and I'd have got you in time. I knew there was no chance for Marian and Anne; they're old maids, and I'm young--_young_. If I'd cut out the fun and concentrated on you I'd have got you. I wish I had! I wish I had! But you were such an old flat tyre I thought you were safe."

"What in heaven's name makes you think you're in love with me?" exploded Clavering. "Your opinion of me is anything but complimentary, and I'm everything your chosen companions are not. You don't want me any more than I want you. You've simply been playing some fool game with yourself----"

"It's not! It's not! It's the real thing. I've been in love with you since I was six. Ask daddy. Daddy, didn't I always say I was going to marry him?"

"Yes, when you were little more of a baby than you are now. Can't you imagine how ashamed you'll be of such an undignified performance as this?"

"I ashamed? Not much. I always intend to do just as I please and damn the consequences."

"A fine wife you'd make for Lee or any other man."

"I'd make him the best wife in the world. I'd do everything he told me. No, I wouldn't. Yes, I would." Sheer femaleness and the spirit of the age seesawed inconclusively. "Anyhow, I'd make you happy, because I'd be happy myself," she added naïvely. "Much happier than your grand-mother----"

"Perhaps you will oblige me by making no further allusion to Madame Zattiany."

"No, I won't. And the first time I see her when there's a lot of people round I'll tell her just what she is to her face."

"If you dare!" Clavering advanced threateningly and she swung herself behind her father, who, however, took her firmly by the arm and marched her to the door.

"Enough of this," he said. "You come home and pack your trunk and tomorrow we take the first steamer out of New York. If there isn't one, we'll take the train for Canada----"

"I won't go."

"It's either that or a sanitarium for neurotics. I'll have you strapped down and carried there in an ambulance. You may take your choice. Good night, Lee. Forget it, if you can."

As Clavering slammed the door behind them he envied men who could tear their hair. He had wanted to spend a long evening alone thinking of Mary Zattiany, dreaming of those vital hours before him, and he had been treated to a double nightmare. For the moment he hated everything in petticoats that walked, and he felt like taking a steamer to the ends of the earth himself. But he was more worn out than he knew and was sound asleep fifteen minutes later.

XXXIV

Janet had her revenge. Words have a terrible power. And Janet's vocabulary might be as primitive as lightning, but unlike lightning it never failed to strike.

"That old Zattiany woman." "She's a thousand years old and nobody cares what she does." "That rejuvenated old dame who's granny's age if she's a day." "Much happier than your grandmother." The phrases flashed into his mind when he awoke and echoed in his ears all day. No doubt similar phrases, less crude, but equally scorching, were being tossed from one end of New York Society to the other. If Janet knew of his devotion to Madame Zattiany others must, for it could only have come to her on the wings of gossip. He was being ridiculed by people who grasped nothing beyond the fact that the woman was fifty-eight and the man thirty-four. Of course it would be but a nine days' wonder and like all other social phenomena grow too stale for comment, but meanwhile he should feel as if he were frying on a gridiron. Anne Goodrich would merely exclaim: "Abominable." Marian Lawrence would draw in her nostrils and purr: "Lee was always an erratic and impressionable boy. Just like him to fall in love with an old woman. And she's really a beautiful blonde--once more. Poor Lee." As for Gora and Suzan Forbes--well, Gora would understand, and impale them sympathetically in her next novel, and Suzan would read up on endocrines, blend them adroitly with psychology, and write an article for the _Yale Review_.

He avoided the office and wrote his column at home. Luckily a favorite old comedian had died recently. He could fill up with reminiscence and anecdote. But it was soon done and he was back in his chair with his thoughts again.

It had been his intention when he awakened on Sunday after a few hours of unrefreshing sleep to dispatch his work as quickly as possible, take a long walk, and then return to his rooms and keep the hours that must intervene until Monday afternoon, sacred to Mary Zattiany. But if man wishes to regulate his life, and more particularly his meditations, to suit himself he would be wise to retire to a mountain top. Civilized life is a vast woof and the shuttle pursues its weaving and counter-weaving with no regard for the plans of men. It was impossible to ignore Mrs. Oglethorpe's appeal, and it was equally impossible to refuse to aid in the hunt for that damnable Janet when her distracted father and his own intimate friend took his coöperation as a matter of course. And even if he had remained at home, no doubt she would have wiggled her way in before he could shut the door in her face. Then there _would_ have been the devil to pay, for she would have seen to it that he was hopelessly compromised. No doubt she would have run out on the balcony and screamed for help. Her failure was the one saving grace in the whole wretched night.

But she had planted her stings.

He was in a fine frame of mind to make love to a woman. He had pictured that scene as one of the great moments of life, so subtly beautiful and dramatic, so exalted and exulting, so perfect in its very incompleteness, that not a lifetime of suffering and disappointment could blur it. And he felt exactly like the flat tyre of Janet's distinguished vernacular. Even his body was worn out, for he had had but nine hours' sleep in two nights. What a dead cinch the playwrights had. A man might as well try to breathe without oxygen on Mount Everest as attempt to give his own life the proper dramatic values. He was a cursed puppet and Life itself was a curse.

He excoriated himself for his susceptibility to mere words; he who juggled in words, and often quite insincerely when it suited his purpose. But "that rejuvenated old dame," and "that old Zattiany woman" crawled like reeking vapors across some fair landscape a man had spent his life seeking, blotting out its loveliness, turning it to a noisome morass.

He had used equally caustic phrases when some young man he knew had married a woman only ten years older than himself, and when old men had taken to themselves young wives. And meant them, for he was fundamentally as conventional and conservative as all men. . . . But he cared less that he would be the laughing stock of New York than that his own soul felt like boiling pitch and that he was ashamed of himself.

He looked at the clock. It was twenty minutes to four. There was neither love nor desire in him and he would have liked to throw himself on the divan and sleep. But he set his teeth and got to his feet. He would go through it, play up, somehow.

He felt better in the nipping air and soon began to walk briskly. And then as he crossed Park Avenue and entered her street he saw two men coming down her steps. They were Mr. Dinwiddie, and the extremely good-looking young man whom Osborne had brought to the box on Monday night. The young man was smiling fatuously.

A wave of rage and jealousy swept Clavering from head to foot. She, at least, could have kept these hours sacred, and she had not only received this grinning ape, but evidently given him a delectable morsel to chew on. He could have knocked both men down but he was not even permitted to pass them by with a scowling nod. Another contretemps.

Dinwiddie hailed him delightedly.

"Good old Lee! Haven't seen you in an age. Where've you kept yourself? Know Vane? Mother's an old friend of Mary's. He's head over like the rest of us. Who says we don't live in the age of miracles?"

"Yeh, ain't life wonderful?" Clavering's jocular faculty was enfeebled, but it came to the rescue. He was staring at Vane. Evidently this young man was unimpressed by searing phrases and he must have heard several, for, if he remembered aright, "Polly Vane" with "her head like a billiard ball," who "wore a wig for decency's sake," had been one of the most resentful women at the luncheon. For a moment he had a queer impression that his stature had diminished until the top of his head stood level with this glowing young man's waistcoat. And then he shot up to seven feet. Something had turned over inside him and vomited forth the pitch and its vapors. But he still felt angry and jealous. He managed to reply, however:

"Well, I must be getting on. Have an engagement at four. See you in a day or two, Din." He nodded to young Vane and in another moment he was taking Madame Zattiany's front steps three at a time.

XXXV

When Mary Zattiany had reached her bedroom on Sunday morning she had leaned heavily on her dressing-table for a few moments, staring into the mirror. Then she curled her lip and shrugged her shoulders. Well, it was done. She had been as bald and uncompromising as she knew how to be. A picturesque softening of details, pleas to understand, and appeals to the man's sympathy, might be for other women but not for her. Life had given her a respect for hard facts and an utter contempt for the prevalent dodging of them.

She had told him that she was determined to relate her story in full as much for his sake as her own. But she had told it far more for her own. Before going any farther she was determined to know this man, who may only have intoxicated her, as thoroughly as it was possible for a woman to know any man she had not lived with. If he met the test she could be reasonably sure that for once she had made no mistake. If he did not--well, perhaps, so much the better. Surely she had had more than her share of love, and she had something to do in the world of vastly greater importance than wasting time in a man's arms. And did she really want passion in her life again? She with her young body and her old mind! Did she?

She recalled those brief moments of complete and ecstatic surrender. Or tried to recall them. She was very tired. Perhaps she might dream about them, but at the moment they seemed as far away as her first youth.

She awoke the next day only in time to dress and go to Mrs. Ruyler's for luncheon. She attended a concert in the afternoon, and she did not return from the Lawrences' until midnight. On Monday she lunched with Mrs. Vane and brought "Harry" and Mr. Dinwiddie home with her. She would give herself no time to think and brood. She was too wise to harden her heart against him by bitter fancies that might be as bitterly unjust, and assuredly she had no intention of meeting disaster weakened by romantic castle-building. Not she. Let events take their course. Whatever came, she had the strength to meet it.

As Clavering entered the library she was standing by the hearth, one hand on the mantelshelf. Her repose was absolute as she turned her head. In her eyes was an insolent expression, a little mocking, a little challenging. There was no trace of apprehension. As she saw Clavering's angry face her brows lifted.

"What did you let those fellows in for?" he demanded, glaring at her from the door. "You set this hour for our meeting and I just missed finding them here in this room. I should have thought you would have wanted to be alone before I came----"

And then for a moment Mary Zattiany's mind felt as young as her body. It seemed to her that she heard ruins tumbling behind her, down and out of sight. Her head felt light and she grasped the mantel for support; but she was not too dazed to realize that Clavering was in anything but a love-making mood, and she managed to steady her voice and reply lightly:

"I lunched with Polly Vane, and her devoted son was hanging 'round. Mr. Dinwiddie was also at the luncheon, and as they both walked home with me I could do no less than ask them in for a moment. But I never have the least difficulty getting rid of people."

"Ah!" He continued to stand staring at her, and, as he had anticipated, he saw only Mary Zattiany. As far as he was concerned Mary Ogden had never existed. But he still felt no immediate desire to touch her. He came over and stood opposite her on the hearthrug, his hands in his pockets.

"What have you been through?" he asked abruptly. "I've been through hell."

"So I imagined," she said drily. "I can't say I've been through hell. I've grown too philosophical for that! I have thought as little as possible. I left it on the knees of the gods."

There certainly was neither despair nor doubt in that vital voice of hers as she looked at him, and she was smiling. He twitched his shoulders under those understanding eyes and turned his own to the fire with a frown.

"I don't believe you had a moment of misgiving. You were too sure of me."

"Oh, no, I was not! I know life too well to be sure of anything, mon ami. Unlike that nice Vane boy, you have imagination and I gave you some hard swallowing. Poor boy, I'm afraid you've been choking ever since----"

"Don't 'poor boy' me. I won't have it. I feel a thousand years old." He glared at her once more. "You are sure of me now--and quite right . . . but I don't feel in the least like kissing you. . . . I've barely slept and I feel like the devil."

For the first time in many days she felt an inclination to throw back her head and give vent to a joyous laugh--joyous but amused, for she would always be Mary Zattiany. But she merely said: "My dear Lee, I could not stand being made love to at four in the afternoon. It is not aesthetic. Suppose we sit down. Tell me all about it."

"I'll not tell you a thing." But he took the chair and lit a cigarette. "I'm more in love with you than ever, if you want to know. When will you marry me?"

"Shall we say two months from today?"

"Two months! Why not tomorrow?"

"Oh, hardly. In the first place I'd like it all to be quite perfect, and I'd dreamed of spending our honeymoon in the Dolomites. I've a shooting box there on the shore of a wonderful lake. I used to stay there quite alone after my guests had left. . . . And then--well, it would hardly be fair to give New York two shocks in succession. They all take for granted I'll marry some one--I am already engaged to Mr. Osborne, although I have heard you alluded to meaningly--but better let them talk the first sensation to rags. . . . They will be angry enough with me for marrying a young man, but perhaps too relieved that I have not carried off one of their own sons. . . . Polly is in agonies at the present moment . . . we'll have to live in New York more or less--I suppose?"

"More or less? Altogether. My work is here."

"I believe there is more work for both of us in Europe."

"And do you imagine I'd live on your money? I've nothing but what I make."

"I could pull wires and get you into one of the embassies----"

"I'm no diplomat, and don't want to be. Rotten lazy job."

"Couldn't you be foreign correspondent for your newspaper?"

"We've good men in every European capital now. They've no use for more, and no excuse for displacing any of them. Besides, I've every intention of being a playwright."

"But playwrighting isn't--not really--quite as important as poor Europe. And I know of several ways in which we could be of the greatest possible use. Not only Austria----"

"Perhaps. But you'll have to wait until I've made money on at least one play. I'll be only too glad to spend the honeymoon in the Dolomites, but then I return and go to work. You'll have to make up your mind to live here for a year or two at least. And the sooner you marry me, the sooner we can go to Europe to live--for a time. I've no intention of living my life in Europe. But I'm only too willing to help you. So--better marry me tomorrow."

"I can't get away for at least two months--possibly not then. Ask Judge Trent. And a honeymoon in New York would be too flat--not?"

"Better than nothing . . . however--here's an idea. I'll get to work on my play at once and maybe I can finish it before I leave. If it went over big I could stay longer. Besides, it'll be something to boil over into; I don't suppose I shall see any too much of you. What's your idea? To set all the young men off their heads and imagine you are Mary Ogden once more? It _would_ be a triumph. I've an idea that's what you are up to."

"Certainly not," she said angrily. "How trivial you must think me. I've not the least intention of going to dancing parties. I should be bored to death. I hardly knew what young Vane was talking about today. He seems to speak a different language from the men of my time. But it is only decent that I bore myself at luncheons and dinners, for my old friends have behaved with the utmost loyalty and generosity. Jane Oglethorpe would have been quite justified in never speaking to me again, and I have violated the most sacred traditions of the others. But it has not made the least difference. Besides, I must keep them up to the mark. I have their promise to form a committee for the children of Austria."

"Well, that's that. We'll marry two months from today. I can finish my play in that time, and I won't wait a day longer."

"Very well. . . . I met Marian Lawrence the other day. I'm told you were expected to marry her at one time. She is very beautiful and has more subtlety than most American women. Why didn't you?"

"Because she wasn't you, I suppose. Did she stick a little bejewelled gold pin into you?"

"Only with her eyes. She made me feel quite the age I had left behind me in Vienna." And then she asked irresistibly, "Do you think you would have fallen in love with me, after a much longer and better opportunity to know me, if you--if we had met in Vienna before that time?"

"No, I should not. What a question! I should have loved you in one way as I do now--with that part of me that worships you. But men are men, and never will be demi-gods."

This time she did laugh, and until tears were in her eyes. "Oh, Lee! No wonder I fell in love with you. Any other man--well, I couldn't have loved you. My soul was too old." And then her eyes widened as she stared before her. "Perhaps----"

He sprang to his feet and pulled her up from her chair. "None of that. None of that. And now I do want to kiss you."

And as Mary Zattiany never did anything by halves she was completely happy, and completely young.

XXXVI

He left her at ten o'clock, and the next morning rose at seven and went to work at once on his play. He chose the one that had the greatest emotional possibilities. Gora Dwight had told him that he must learn to "externalize his emotions," and he felt that here was the supreme opportunity. Never would he have more turgid, pent-up, tearing emotions to get rid of than now. He wrote until one o'clock, then, after lunch and two hours on his column, went out and took a long walk; but lighter of heart than since he had met Mary Zattiany. He also reflected with no little satisfaction that when writing on the play he had barely thought of her. All the fire in him had flown to his head and transported him to another plane; he wondered if any woman, save in brief moments, could rival the ecstasy of mental creation. That rotten spot in the brain, dislocation of particles, whatever it was that enabled a few men to do what the countless millions never dreamed of attempting, or attempt only to fail, was, through its very abnormality, productive of a higher and more sustained delight, a more complete annihilation of prosaic life, than any mere function bestowed on all men alike. It might bring suffering, disappointment, mortification, even despair in its train, but the agitation of that uncharted tract in the brain compensated for any revenge that nature, through her by-product, human nature, might visit on those who departed from her beloved formulae.

Nevertheless, and before his walk was finished and he had returned home to dress for dinner with her, the play was on one plane and he on another, visioning himself alone with her in the Austrian agapemone. And cursing the interminable weeks between. He anathematized himself for consenting to the delay, and vowed she'd had her own way for the last time, He foresaw many not unagreeable tussles of will. She was far too accustomed to having her own way. Well, so was he.

For two weeks he left his rooms only to walk, or dine or spend an hour with her in the afternoon when she was alone. He rebelled less than he had expected. If he could not have her wholly, the less he saw of her the better.

Dinners, luncheons, theatre parties, receptions, were being given for her not only by her old friends--who seemed to her to grow more numerous daily--but by their daughters and by many others who made up for lack of tradition by that admirable sense of rightness which makes fashionable society in America such a waste of efficiency and force. And whether the younger women privately hated her or had fallen victims to that famous charm was of little public consequence. It was as if she had appeared in their midst, waved a sceptre and announced: "I am the fashion. Always have I been the fashion. That is my _métier_. Bow down." At all events the fashion she became, and it was quite as patent that she took it as a matter of course. The radiant happiness that possessed her, refusing as she did to look into the future with its menace to those high duties of her former dedication--clear, sharp, ruthless children of her brain--not only enhanced both her beauty and magnetism, but enabled her to endure this social ordeal she had dreaded, without ennui. She was too happy to be bored. She even plunged into it with youthful relish. For the first time in her life she was at peace with herself. She was not at peace when Clavering made love to her, far from it; but she enjoyed with all the zest of a woman with her first lover, and something of the timidity, this tantalizing preliminary to fruition. How could she ever have believed that her mind was old? She turned her imagination away from that lodge in the Dolomites, and believed it was because the present with its happiness and its excitements sufficed her.

Moreover, she was having one novel experience that afforded her much diversion. The newspapers were full of her. It took exactly five days after Mrs. Oglethorpe's luncheon for the story she had told there to filter down to Park Row, and although she would not consent to be interviewed, there were double-page stories in the Sunday issues, embellished with snapshots and a photograph of the Mary Ogden of the eighties: a photographer who had had the honor to "take" her was still in existence and exhumed the plates.

Doctors, biologists, endocrinologists, were interviewed. Civil war threatened: the medical fraternity, upheld by a few doubting Thomases among the more abstract followers of the science, on one side of the field, by far the greater number of those who peer into the human mechanism with mere scientific acumen on the other. Doctors, notoriously as conservative as kings and as jealous as opera singers, found themselves threatened with the loss of elderly patients whose steady degeneration was a source of respectable income. When it was discovered that New York actually held a practicing physician who had studied with the great endocrinologists of Vienna, the street in front of his house looked as if some ambitious hostess were holding a continual reception.

Finally Madame Zattiany consented to give a brief statement to the press through her lawyers. It was as impersonal as water, but technical enough to satisfy the _Medical Journal_. At the theatre and opera people waited in solid phalanxes to see her pass. Her utter immobility on these occasions but heightened the feverish interest.

Women of thirty, dreaming of becoming flappers overnight, and formidable rivals, with the subtlety of experience behind the mask of seventeen, were desolated to learn that they must submit to the claws and teeth of Time until they had reached the last mile-post of their maturity. Beauty doctors gnashed their teeth, and plastic surgeons looked forward to the day when they must play upon some other form of human credulity. As a subject for the press it rivalled strikes, prohibition, German reparations, Lenin, prize-fights, censorship and scandalous divorces in high life.

"Why isn't your head turned?" Clavering asked her one day when the sensation was about a month old and was beginning to expire journalistically for want of fresh fuel. (Not a woman in New York could be induced to admit that she was taking the treatment.) "You are the most famous woman in America and the pioneer of a revolution that may have lasting and momentous consequences on which we can only speculate vaguely today. I don't believe you are as unmoved as you look. It's not in woman's nature--in human nature. Publicity goes to the head and then descends to the marrow of the bones."

"I'm not unmoved. I've been tremendously interested and excited. I find that newspaper notoriety is the author of a distinctly new sensation." And then she felt a disposition to play with fire. Clavering was in one of his rare detached moods, and had evidently come for an hour of agreeable companionship. "I am beginning to get a little bored and tired. If it were not for this Vienna Fund--and to the newspapers for their assistance I am eternally grateful--I believe I'd suggest that we leave for Austria tomorrow."

"And I wouldn't go." Clavering stood on the hearthrug smiling down at her with humorous defiance. "You switched me on to that play, and there I stick until it is finished. No chance for it in a honeymoon, and no chance for undiluted happiness with that crashing round inside my head."

She shrank and turned cold, but recovered herself sharply and dismissed the pang. It was her first experience, in her exhaustive knowledge of men, of the writing temperament; and after all it was part of the novelty of the man who had obliterated every other from her mind. Nor had she any intention of letting him see that he could hurt her. She smiled sweetly and asked:

"How is it coming on? Are you satisfied with it?"

"Yes, I am. And so is Gora Dwight. I've finished two acts and I read them to her last night."

"Ah? Your Egeria?"

"Not a bit of it. But she's a wise cold-blooded critic. You can't blame me for not even talking about it to you. I see so little of you that I've no intention of wasting any of the precious time."

"But you might let me read it."

"I'd rather wait until it's finished and as polished and perfect as I can make it. I always want you to know me at my best."

"Oh, my dear! You forget that we are to be made one and remain twain. Do you really believe that we shall either of us always be at our best?"

"Well, to tell you the truth, I don't care a hang whether we are or not. I'll have you, and all to myself. And I won't say 'for a while, at least.' Do you imagine that when we return to New York I'm going to let Society take possession of you again? Not only shall I work harder than I've ever worked before, but I'd see little more of you than I do now. And that I'll never submit to again. I'll write my next play inside this house, and you'll be here when I want you, not gadding about."

She felt a sudden pang of dismay, apprehension. New York? She realized that not for a moment had she given up her original purpose. But why disturb the serenity of the present? When she had him in the Dolomites . . . She answered him in the same light tone.

"I'm having my last fling at New York Society. When we return we'll give our spare time to the Sophisticates. I see far less of them now than I like." Then, with a further desire to investigate the literary temperament, even if she were stabbed again in the process, she looked at him with provocative eyes and said: "I've sometimes wondered why you haven't insisted upon a secret marriage. I'm told it can be done with a reasonable prospect of success in certain states."

"Don't imagine I didn't think of it . . . but--well--I think the play would go fluey . . . you see. . . ."

"I see! And what about your next?"

"The next will be a comedy. I'll never be able to write a tremendously emotional play again."

"And meanwhile you will not deny that the artist has submerged the lover."

"I admit nothing of the sort. But you yourself let the artist loose--and what in God's name should I be doing these cursed weeks if you hadn't? You know you never would have consented to a secret marriage. You've set your heart on the Dolomites. . . . How about that interval of travel, by the way? Liners and trains are not particularly conducive to illusions."

"I thought I'd told you. My plan is to be married there. I should go on a preceding steamer and see that the Lodge was in proper condition. I want everything to be quite perfect, and Heaven only knows what has happened to it."

"Oh! This is a new one you've sprung. But--yes--I like the idea. I'd rather dreaded the prelude." And then he made one of those abrupt vaultings out of one mood into another which had fascinated her from the first. "God! I wish we were there now. When I'm not writing----! How many men have you got in love with you already? But no. I don't care. When I'm here--_like this, Mary, like this_--I don't care a hang if I never write another line."

XXXVII

During the following week she gave a dinner and insisted upon his attendance. She had given others to that increasing throng that had been young with her in the eighties and to others who had stormed and conquered that once impregnable citadel, but, she informed him, it was now time to entertain some of the younger women, and he must help her.

He consented readily enough, for he was curious to see her surrounded by a generation into which she had coolly stepped with no disadvantage to herself and, from all he heard, considerable to them. He knew that not only Vane but other men in their late twenties and early thirties were paying her devoted attentions. Dinwiddie, who met him in the Park one day and dined with him in the Casino, had spoken with modified enthusiasm of these conquests, but added that it was yet to be demonstrated whether the young men were egged by novelty or genuine coveting. When he hinted that she may have appealed to that secret lust for the macabre that exists somewhere in all men, Clavering had scowled at him so ferociously that he had plunged into rhapsody and bewailed his own lost youth.

And then he had endeavored to sound the young man in whom he was most interested, but of whose present relations with Mary Zattiany he had no inkling; he had not seen them together nor heard any fresh gossip since her second début. But he was told to shut up and talk about the weather.

Clavering, who knew that he would not have a moment alone with her, went to the dinner in much the same mood as he went to a first-night at which he was reasonably sure of entertainment. It certainly would be good comedy to the detached observer, and this he was quite capable of being with nothing better in prospect. Nevertheless, he was utterly unprepared for the presence of Anne Goodrich and Marian Lawrence, for he understood that the dinner was given to the more important of the young married women. But they were the first persons he saw when he entered the drawing-room. They were standing together--shoulder to shoulder, he reflected cynically--and he knew that they privately detested each other, and not on his account only.

How like Mary Zattiany, with her superb confidence in herself, to ask these beautiful girls who she had heard wanted to marry him themselves. Well, he understood women well enough to be indulgent to their little vanities.

He was almost the last of the guests, but he had time to observe the two girls before dinner was announced, in spite of the fact that he was claimed by other acquaintances before he could reach them.

Anne looked regally handsome in gold-colored tissue and paillettes that gave a tawny light to her eyes and hair, and to her skin an amber glow. She held her head very high, and in spite of her mere five feet five, looked little less stately than Madame Zattiany, who wore a marvellous velvet gown the exact shade of her hair. Marian Lawrence was small but so perfectly made that her figure was always alluded to as her body, and she carried her head, not regally, but with an insolent assurance that became her. She was very beautiful, with a gleaming white skin that she never powdered nor colored, and hair like gold leaf, parted and worn in smooth bands over her ears and knotted loosely on her neck in the fashion known as à la vierge. Her large grayish-green eyes were set far apart and her brows and lashes were black. She had a straight innocent-looking nose with very thin nostrils, into which she was capable of compressing the entire expression of a face. She generally wore the fashionable colors of the moment, but tonight her soft shimmering gown was of palest green, and Clavering wondered if this were a secret declaration of war. She, too, was of the siren class, and it was possible that she and Mary Zattiany derived from some common ancestress who had combed her hair on a rock or floated northward over the steppes of Russia. But there were abysmal differences between the two women, as Clavering well knew. Marian Lawrence, with great natural intelligence, never read anything more serious than a novel and preferred those that were not translated into English. She took no interest whatever in anything outside her inherited circumference, and had prided herself during the war upon ignoring its existence. She was as luxurious and as dainty as a cat and one of the most ardent sportswomen in America. She looked as if she had just stepped out of a stained-glass window, and she was a hard, subtle, predatory flirt; too much in love with her beautiful body to give it wholly to any man. She had never really fallen in love with Clavering until she had lost him, and he, his brief enthusiasm for her unique beauty and somewhat demoniac charm having subsided, had avoided her ever since; although they danced together at the few fashionable parties he attended. He knew her better now than when he had seen her daily, almost hourly, at a house party in the White Mountains, and almost as often for several weeks after his return. This was shortly after his mistake with Anne, and her attraction had consisted largely in her complete difference from a really fine character toward whom he felt a certain resentment for having so much and still lacking the undefined essential. He had not deluded himself that he would find it in Marian Lawrence, but her paradoxes diverted him and he was quite willing to go as far as her technique permitted. It had never occurred to him for a moment that she was seriously in love with him, but he had had more than one glimpse of her claws and he regarded her uneasily tonight. And what were she and Anne whispering about?

"You will take in Miss Goodrich," Madame Zattiany had said to him, her eyes twinkling, and he had merely shrugged his shoulders. He did not care in the least whom he talked to; it was the ensemble that interested him. Anne and Marian were the only girls present. The other women were between twenty-five and thirty-five or -six. Madame Zattiany would seem to have chosen them all for their good looks, and she looked younger than several of them.

Mauve was the fashionable color of the season. There were three mauve gowns and the table was lit by very long, very thin mauve candles above a low bank of orchids. Mrs. Ruyler had disinterred the family amethysts, but Mrs. de Lacey and Mrs. Vane, "Polly's" daughter-in-law, wore their pearls. There were several tiaras, for they were going on to the opera and later to a ball. The company numbered twenty in all and there were three unmarried men besides Clavering, and including Harry Vane. Clavering found Marian Lawrence on his left, and once more he caught a twinkle in Madame Zattiany's eyes as the guests surrounded the table.

He had not seen Anne since the night of Suzan's party, when they had varied the program by sitting on the floor in front of the fire, roasting chestnuts and discussing philosophy; then playing poker until two o'clock in the morning. He asked her if she were comfortable and happy in her new life.

"Rather!" She smiled with all her old serene brightness and her eyes dwelt on him in complete friendliness. "I'd even sleep in the studio, but have made one concession to my poor family. They're not reconciled, but, after all, I am twenty-four--and spent two years in France. I have had three orders for portraits--friends of the family, of course. I must be content with 'pull' until I am taken seriously as an artist. If I can only exhibit at the next Academy I shall feel full-fledged."

"And what of your new circle?"

"I've been to several parties and enjoyed myself hugely. Some of them get pretty tight, but I've seen people tighter at house parties and not nearly so amusing. And then Gora and Suzan! I've never liked any women as well. . . . This is the first dinner of the old sort I've been to since I started."

"Ah?" asked Clavering absently. "Why the exception?"

"Well, you see, I am tremendously _intriguée_, like every one else. I'd met her several times at home, and she came one day to my studio, where the Sophisticates made the most tremendous fuss over her. But I was curious to see her in her own old home, where she had reigned so long ago as Mary Ogden. Mother told me that everything was unchanged except the stair carpet and her bedroom." Her tone was lightly impersonal, and still more so as she added: "Why don't you write a novel about her, Lee? She must be the most remarkable psychological study of the age. Fancy living two lifetimes in the same body. It puts reincarnation to the blush. I suppose she'll bury us all."

Clavering shot her a sharp investigating glance, but replied suavely: "Not necessarily. The same road is open to all of you."

Miss Goodrich had never looked more the fine and dignified representative of her class as she lifted her candid eyes with an expression of disdain.

"My dear Lee! Really! There _are_ some women above that sort of thing."

"Above? I don't think I follow you. But of course she's given hide-bound conservatism a pretty hard jolt."

"It's not that--really. But all women growing old and trying to be or to look young again are rather undignified--according to our standards at least, and I have been brought up in the belief that they are the highest in the world. And then, one's sense of humor----!"

"Humor? Is that what you call it?" (Damn all women for cats, the best of them. Anne!)

"Why, yes, isn't it rather absurd--for more reasons than one? To my mind it is the complete farce. She has regained the appearance--and--_possibly_--the real feeling of youth, with all its capacity for enthusiasm and unworn emotions--it seems rather ludicrous, but still it may be; certainly the interior should be in some degree a match for that marvellously restored face and body--but the whole thing is made farcical by the fact that she never can have children. And what else does youth in women really mean?"

"Experience has taught me that it means quite a number of other things. And painting portraits is not fulfilling the first and highest duty of womanhood, dear Anne."

Miss Goodrich flushed, but accepted his score calmly. "Oh, I shall marry, of course. But then, you see, I am young--really young."

"What are you two quarrelling about?" broke in Miss Lawrence's husky voice. She had smoked steadily since taking her seat at the table, not so much because she had an irresistible passion for tobacco as because it destroyed her appetite and preserved her figure. "I haven't seen Anne blush like that since she got back from France."

"I was just telling her how beautiful she looked tonight." And angry as he was, it amused him to hear Anne's little gasp of pleasure.

"Yes, doesn't she?" Miss Lawrence blew a ring and smiled sweetly. "I've always been jealous of Anne. She's such a beautiful height. I'm so glad the giraffes of the last generation seem to have died out. Too bad, when Madame Zattiany rejuvenated herself, she didn't slice off a few inches. She dwarfs even men of your height, although, of course, you are really taller. But then tall women----" She shrugged her shoulders, her crisp voice softened and she went on as if thinking aloud. "Do you know . . . to me she does not look young at all. I have a fancy she's hypnotized every one but myself. I seem to see an old woman with a colossal will. . . . But I'd like to know the name of that whitewash she uses. It may come in handy some day. Not for another ten years, though. Oh, Lee! it's good to be really young and not have to be flattened out on a table under broiling X-Rays and have your poor old feminine department cranked up. . . . I wonder just how adventurous men are?"'

But Clavering, although seething, merely smiled. He knew himself to be like the man who has had a virulent attack of small-pox and is immune for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, he would cheerfully have twisted her neck. She was holding that slim lily-like throat up for his inspection, a cigarette between her thin scarlet lips as she looked at him over her shoulder. At sixteen she could not have been more outwardly unblemished, and she emanated a heady essence. Her long green eyes met his keen satiric ones with melting languor. But she said unexpectedly:

"I hear she's going to marry Mr. Osborne, mother's old beau--or is that Mr. Dinwiddie? How can one straighten out those old-timers? But it would be quite appropriate, if she must marry--and I suppose she's dying to; but I notice she hasn't asked either of them tonight. I suppose it makes her feel younger to surround herself with young people. It certainly makes me feel frightfully young---- I mean she does."

"Do you think it good manners to discuss your hostess at her own table?"

"Oh, manners! You'll always be a Southerner, Lee. New York has always prided itself on its bad manners. That is the real source of our strength."

"Pretty poor prop. It seems to me a sign of congenital weakness."

"Oh, we never defend ourselves. By the way, I hear Jim Oglethorpe rushed poor little Janet off to Egypt because he found her in your rooms and you refused to marry her. You're not such a gallant Southerner, after all----"

"What a lie! Who on earth started such a yarn?" But he turned cold and his hand shook a little as he raised his wine glass.

"It's all over town, and people think you really ought to marry her. Of course those ridiculous little flappers don't care whether they are talked about or not, but their families do. I hear that old Mrs. Oglethorpe is quite ill over the scandal, and she always swore by you."

"Mrs. Oglethorpe, I happen to know, as I dined there last night, was never better and is delighted with the idea that Jim has taken Janet abroad to get her away from that rotten crowd."

She looked nonplussed, but returned to the charge. "How stories do get about! They even say that he horsewhipped you----"

"Pray don't overtax your powers of invention. You know there's no such story going about or everybody here would have cut me dead. Try another tack."

"Well, I'll confess I made that up just to get a rise out of you." She looked at him speculatively. "But about Janet--well, you see, I know you for a gay deceiver--mother is always using those old expressions that were the fashion in her--and Mary Ogden's--day. I hear you even made love to our fair hostess until you found out the truth and then you dropped her like a hot potato--or a cold fish. I was surprised when she told me you were coming here tonight, and asked her at once to seat us three together so that Anne and I could save you from feeling embarrassed--not that I told her that, of course. I merely said we were such old friends we would naturally have a thousand things to talk about. She didn't turn a hair; I'll say that much for her. But perhaps she thinks she's playing you on a long string. She's playing several poor fish who are here tonight."

Should he tell her? He really could stand no more. He hadn't a doubt that the same rumor that had driven Janet to her crude attempt, to compromise him and then blast her rival with naked words, had reached these two older and cleverer, but hardly subtler girls, and they had joined forces to disenchant him and make him feel the misguided young man they no doubt believed him to be. He hated them both. They had that for their pains. He'd never willingly see one of them again.

He longed to blurt out the truth. But his was not the right. He glanced over at Madame Zattiany, who sat in the middle of the table's length, receiving the intent homage of the men on either side of her and looking more placid than any other woman in the room. . . . It occurred to him that the rest were animated to excess, even the wives of those two men, to whom, it was patent, they were non-existent. He would have given his play at that moment to be able to stand up and ask the company to drink his health and hers.

For a few moments he was left to himself, both Marian and Anne being occupied with their neighbors, and during those moments he sensed an atmosphere of hostility, of impending danger. He caught more than one malicious glance directed at Mary, and once a man, in response to a whispered remark, burst into uncontrollable laughter. Had these women come here--but that was impossible. Even New York had its limits. They might be icily rude to a pushing outsider, as indeed they had every right to be, but never to one of their own. Still--to this alarmed generation possibly Madame Zattiany was nothing more than a foreign woman who had stormed the gates and reduced them to a mere background. The fact that she had belonged to their mothers' generation and had abruptly descended to theirs was enough to arouse every instinct of self-defence. He quite understood they must hate her, but in spite of that common enmity his sensitive mind apprehended, they'd surely commit no overt act of hostility. Like all their kind, they were adepts in the art of "freezing out." He had no doubt they had come here from mere curiosity and that he would shortly hear they had ceased to entertain or receive her. But he wished the dinner were over.

He was soon enlightened.

Marian Lawrence leaned across the table. "Oh, Madame Zattiany! Will you settle a dispute? Harry and I have been arguing about Disraeli. Your husband was an ambassador, wasn't he? Did you happen to be at the Berlin What-d'you-call-it?"

"Oh, no," replied Madame Zattiany, with open amusement. "I was still Mary Ogden in eighteen-seventy-eight."

"Oh! The seventies and eighties are all one to me, I'm afraid. I'm shockingly ignorant. But we've all been saying that you ought to write your memoirs. Thirty-four years of diplomatic life in Europe! You must have met every one worth knowing and it would be such a delightful way for us youngsters to learn history."

"Oh, I kept a diary," said Madame Zattiany lightly. "I may publish it some day." And she turned pointedly to the man on her right. Why had she invited the little cat?

"Oh, but Madame Zattiany!" exclaimed young Mrs. Ruyler, whose black eyes were sparkling. "Please don't wait. I'm so interested in German history since the war. You must have known four generations of Hohenzollerns . . . too thrilling! And Bismarck. And the Empress Elizabeth. And Crown Prince Rudolf--do tell us the truth of that mysterious tragedy. Did you ever see Marie Vetsera? I never heard of it until the other day when some of mother's friends raked it up, and I've been excited ever since."

"Unfortunately my husband was an attaché in Paris at the time, and I never saw her. I am afraid your curiosity will never be satisfied. There was a general impression that if Vienna ever became the capital of a Republic the archives would be opened and the truth of the Meyerling tragedy given to the world. But all documents relating to private scandals must have been destroyed." She spoke with the utmost suavity, the patient hostess with rather tiresome guests. "People in Vienna, I assure you, take very little interest in that old scandal. They are too busy and too uncomfortable making history of their own."

"Yes, it must be a hideously uncomfortable place to live in." Mrs. Leonard, another daughter-in-law of one of Mary's old friends, gave a little shudder. "No wonder you got out. I was so glad to subscribe to your noble charity, dear Madame Zattiany. But"--and she smiled winsomely--"I think we should get up a subscription for those wonderful scientists in Vienna. Every once in a while you hear the most harrowing stories of the starving scientists of Europe, and it would be too awful if those miracle men in Vienna should pass away from malnutrition before it is our turn to need them."

"Ah, dear Mrs. Ruyler!" exclaimed Madame Zattiany with a smile as winsome as her own. "You forget they will probably all be dead by that time and that their pupils will be equally eminent and even more expert. For that matter there will be experts in every city in the world."

But Clavering, watching her anxiously, had seen an expression of wonder dawn in her eyes, quickly as she had banished it. It was evident that whatever the secret spite of these women, this was the first time they had given it open expression. He glanced about the table. Young Vane's face was crimson and he had turned his back pointedly on Marian Lawrence, who was smoking and grinning. She had started the ball and was too indolent to take it out of hands that seemed to be equally efficient.

Clavering leaned forward and caught Mary's eye with a peremptory expression, but she shook her head, although too imperceptibly for any one else to catch the fleeting movement, and he sank back with a humiliating sense of impotence. He wished she were not so well able to take care of herself.

"But this is abominable," murmured Anne Goodrich. It was possible that she was not in on the baiting. "Abominable. What must she think of us? Or, perhaps they don't really mean to be horrid. They look innocent enough. After all, she could tell us many interesting things."

"Oh, they mean it," said Clavering bitterly. "They mean it all right and she knows it."

"You speak as if you were even more interested in her than poor Harry Vane." The indignation had faded from Miss Goodrich's lofty countenance. "Are you?"

"Yes, I am, if you want the truth. I'd marry her tomorrow if she'd have me." This was as far as he could go.

"Oh!" Her mouth trembled, but she did not look wholly unprepared for the statement. "But--Lee---- You know how interested I have always been in you--how interested we all are in you----"

"What has that to do with it? If you are so interested in me I should think I'd have your best wishes to carry off such a prize. Have you ever seen a more remarkable woman?"

"Oh, remarkable, yes. But--well----" And then she burst out: "It seems to me unspeakably horrid. I can't say all I'd like to----"

"Pray, don't. And suppose we change the subject---- They're at it again, damn them."

The men were looking very uncomfortable. The women were gazing at their hostess with round apologetic eyes. Mrs. de Lacey, the youngest and prettiest of the married women, had clasped her hands as if worshipping at a shrine.

"It seems too terrible when we look back upon it!" she exclaimed, and she infused her tones with the tragic ring of truth, "_dear_ Madame Zattiany, that for even a little while we thought the most awful things about you. We'd heard of the wonderful things surgeons had done to mutilated faces during the war, and we were sure that some one of them bad taken one of your old photographs--how could we even guess the truth? How you must have hated us!"

"How could I hate you?" Madame Zattiany smiled charmingly. "I had not the faintest idea you were discussing me."

"But why--why--did you shut yourself up so long after you came when you must have known how mother and all your old friends longed to see you again?"

"I was tired and resting." She frowned slightly. Such a question was a distinct liberty and she had never either taken or permitted liberties. But she banished the frown and met her tormentor's eyes blandly. She had no intention of losing her poise for a moment.

"Ah! I said it!" cried Mrs. de Lacey. "I knew it was not because you felt a natural hesitation in showing yourself. To me you seem brave enough for anything, but it must have taken a lot of courage."

"Courage?"

"Why, yes! Fancy--well, you see, I'm such a coward about what people say--especially if I thought they'd laugh at me--that if I'd done it I should have run off and hidden somewhere."

"Then what object in invoking the aid of science to defeat nature at one more point? And I can assure you, dear Mrs. de Lacey, that when you are fifty-eight, if you have not developed courage to face the world on every count it will merely be because you have indulged too frequently in unbridled passions."

"Ah--yes--but you didn't have any qualms at all?"

"Certainly not. I confess I am surprised at your rather strained view of what is really a very simple matter."

"_Simple_? Why, it's the most extraordinary thing that ever happened."

"The world is equally astonished--and resentful--at every new discovery, but in a short time accepts it as a commonplace. The layman resents all new ideas, but the adjustment of the human mind to the inevitable is common even among savages." Her slight affectation of pedantry was very well done and Clavering could not detect the flicker of a lash as her eyes rested indulgently upon her tormentor.

"Well, I don't see what that has to do with it. Anyhow, it must make you feel terribly isolated."

Madame Zattiany shrugged her shoulders. She could make this common gesture foreign, and her accent was a trifle more marked as she answered, "Here, possibly, but not in Europe, where the treatment has been known and practised for several years. It may interest you to hear that only yesterday I had a letter from a friend in Vienna telling me that an elderly countess, a great beauty some forty years ago, had announced triumphantly that once more men were following her on the street."

Mrs. de Lacey burst into a peal of girlish laughter. "Pardon me, dear Madame Zattiany. We are used to it in your case, now that we have got over the shock, but it does seem too funny. And Europe almost manless. What--what will the poor girls do?"

"Scratch their eyes out," said Clavering, who could contain himself no longer.

Mrs. de Lacey made no attempt to conceal the wicked sparkle in her eyes as she turned to him. "How crude! I suppose it was you who set those dreadful newspapers on poor Madame Zattiany." She turned back to her hostess. "That has been a shocking ordeal for you. You know how we always avoid that sort of thing. We've felt for you--I wanted to come and tell you--you don't mind my telling you now?"

"Your sympathy is very sweet. But I really have enjoyed it! You see, my dear child, when one has lived as long as I have, a new sensation is something to be grateful for."

"Oh, but----" Mrs. de Lacey's bright eyes were now charged with ingenuous curiosity. "You don't really mean--we've had the most furious arguments--_couldn't_ you fall in love again? I don't mean like silly old women with boys, but _really_--like a young woman? Please let me have my little triumph. I've sworn you could. And then the poor men----"

"Upon my word!" Madame Zattiany laughed outright. "This has gone far enough. I refuse to be the exclusive topic of conversation any longer. I am immensely flattered, but you are making me feel the rude hostess." And this time she turned with an air of finality to the apologetic, almost purple, man at her side and asked him to continue to enlighten her on municipal politics.

One or two women shrugged their shoulders. A few looked crestfallen, others, like Marian Lawrence, malignant. She had marched off with the flag, no use blinking the fact, and it had been small satisfaction to make her admit what she had already told the world. The "rubbing in" had evidently missed its mark. And the men, instead of looking cheap, were either infuriated or disgusted. Only Clavering, who managed to look bored and remote, was attending strictly to his salad.

One thing more they could do, however, and that was to make the dinner a failure. They barely replied to the efforts of the men to "make things go" and gloom settled over the table. Madame Zattiany continued to talk with placidity or animation to the men beside her, and Clavering started a running fire with Anne Goodrich, who, almost as angry as himself, loyally helped him, on censorship, the latest books and plays, even the situation in Washington; and they continued their painful efforts until the signal was given to leave the table.

XXXVIII

The men did not linger in the dining-room. The women, protesting that they were later than usual for the opera, left immediately after they returned to the drawing-room. There was a cool insolence in their "good-byes" and there was no doubt that they meant them to be final. Only Anne Goodrich shook the imperturbable hostess's hand warmly and asked if she might come some day to tea.

The husbands perforce went with their wives, after farewells that sounded more like au revoirs, and so did the younger men, except Clavering and Harry Vane. Clavering planted himself on the hearthrug, and Vane, scowling at him, lingered uncertainly.

He plunged his hands into his pockets, and, very red, stood in front of Madame Zattiany, who was leaning back in her chair and fanning herself leisurely. "I feel like apologizing for those beastly women," he blurted out.

"Apologize?" Madame Zattiany raised her eyebrows.

"Yes. Can't you see they came here tonight with the deliberate intention of making New York too hot to hold you? So that you'd clear out? They'd made up their minds that you'd changed yours about returning to Europe. They hate you. They're used to being jealous of one another, but this has knocked them silly and they can't get used to it. It's--it's--oh, it's too awful! I almost died of shame."

"I really do not understand. Do you mean to tell me they meant to be rude? I thought they were rather naïve and charming."

"Damned hypocrites. They hoped to make you simply expire with embarrassment. But you were splendid. They must feel like naughty children that have been stood in a corner."

Madame Zattiany laughed. "Then I have unwittingly been playing my part in a little comedy. How stupid they must have thought me! But I really hope for their sakes that you are mistaken." She rose and held out her hand. "I am going to ask you to excuse me, Mr. Vane. I have a small commission for Mr. Clavering, who has kindly waited. And I am very tired."

Vane's face fell and he looked resentfully at Clavering, in whom he instantly recognized a rival. But there was nothing to do but go and he went.

When Madame Zattiany heard the front door close she told the footman on duty in the hall to put out the lights and go to bed.

Then she walked down the room to the library door. "Will you put out these lights?" she asked Clavering. "I believe we still have a fire in here."

Clavering, expecting to find her dissolved in tears, and, violent as his sympathy for her was, rejoicing that his was the part to comfort her, followed her precipitately. But she was standing by the table with scornful lips and eyes.

"I thought you'd be all broken up," he stammered. Tears of disappointment almost rose to his own eyes.

She laughed shortly. "I? Do you suppose I would pay them so great a compliment? But what a ridiculous exhibition they made of themselves. It seems incredible."

"But surely you must have been hurt--and stabbed. It isn't possible that you weren't!"

"Oh, yes, I was stabbed, but I think I was even more amused. I felt sorry for the poor things. I certainly never saw a more comically naked exhibition of human nature. It was worth coming to America for. Nor do I blame them. No doubt I should have felt the same at their age--although I hope I should even then have expressed myself in a fashion a trifle more subtle, a little less primeval."

"Good God! Are you always so--so rational?"

She smiled slightly. "If I deliberately unlearned the more valuable things a long life taught me there would be no object beyond vanity in being young again. And don't you suppose I was grateful tonight for my years--those years so crowded with training and experience? Who better prepared than I to hold my own against a lot of raw Americans?"

"That is the first human thing you've said. Raw? Wasn't it Darwin who said that we are all such a short distance, in time, removed from our common savage ancestors that it is a wonder we don't revert oftener than we do? They were plain unadulterated females. I believe men are more civilized than women."

"Oh, no, but they revert on the grand scale. . . . I cannot say I was totally unprepared--not for such a concerted and shocking exhibition, of course; but I've felt their antagonism and expected to be dropped gradually from their set. Of course, this is the end, definitely. However," she shrugged her shoulders again, "I have enjoyed the New York which seems to have changed in so many ways since my day, and all dramas should have a proper 'curtain,' should they not? Is your own play finished, by the way?"

"Oh!" He turned his back on her and leaned on the mantel-piece, dropping his head on his arms. He had never felt as far away from her when he had been unable to learn even her name. What need had she of him or any man?

Mary gave him a quick comprehending glance, and came out of her isolation. She went over to him, turned him around, and took his face between her hands.

"Can't you imagine what it meant to me to have you there?" she asked softly. "It seemed to me that nothing else mattered. We two are in a world of our own. How could they seem more to me than the buzzing of so many brainless insects? Forget it, and I shall."

But although he was consoled, he wondered, as he left the house, if he would ever feel more depressed in his life. She might love him, but what else could he ever be to her but a lover? His manhood rebelled. If she had only flung herself weeping into his arms. If for once he could have felt himself stronger than she--indispensable.

XXXIX

The dinner was on Monday. On Wednesday morning she met him at the Fort Lee Ferry at seven o'clock for one of their rare tramps. She wore high-laced boots of soft leather, a short skirt and jersey and a soft hat; and if she had met any of her guests of that memorable dinner they would have looked profoundly thoughtful, and renounced whatever hope of having seared her to the bone they may have cherished. She strode through the woods above the Palisades beside Clavering with high head and sparkling eyes, her arms swinging like a schoolboy's. It was evident even to him, who had waited for her anxiously, that she had rubbed a sponge over her memory. She was in high spirits and looked as if she had not a care in the world.

There was a soft mist of green on the trees of the wood, a few birds had already migrated northward, their own world-old wireless having warned them of the early awakening of spring after an unusually mild winter, and they were singing their matins.

She did not seem inclined for more than desultory conversation, but she had the gift of making silence eloquent, and Clavering, his fears banished, although by no means at peace, gave himself up to the pleasure of the moment. They walked briskly for several miles, then had their breakfast at a roadside inn; and both were so hungry that they talked even less than before. But there was little need for words between them; the current was too strong, and both were merely vital beings to whom companionship and healthy exercise were the highest good at the moment.

During the long walk back to the ferry she talked with a certain excitement. But it was all of the woods of Austria, the carefully tended woods with their leaping stags, their winding paths where no trolley-cars over-laden with commuters rushed shrieking by, their enchanting vistas with a green lake at the end, or a monastery, or a castle on a lofty rock. She told him of the river Inn roaring through its gorges, with its solitary mills, its clustered old villages huddled at the foot of the heavy silent woods and forgotten by the world. The millers were all old men now, no doubt, and the poor villages inhabited only by women and children. Or blinded and broken men who had dragged themselves back from the war to exist where they once had given life and energy to that quiet valley of the Inn. If this made her sad for a moment it was purely an impersonal sadness, and when they parted on the New York side of the ferry Clavering had forgotten his doubts and went back to his work with a light heart and an untroubled mind.

The play was almost finished, and its chances for swift production were far greater than is usually the case with the new adventurer into the most inhospitable of all fields of artistic endeavor. Adrian Hogarth, who had a play on Broadway every year, and Edwin Scores, who had recently exchanged the esteem of the few for the enthusiasm of The Public, had read it act by act and given him the practical advice he needed. A dramatic critic always believes he knows more about plays than any one else until he attempts to write one, but Clavering, at least, if not unduly modest, was too anxious to succeed not to welcome all the help he could get.

They even "sat in" with him during the final revision, and the dispute was hot over the last act, an act so daring in technique they were loath to believe that even Clavering, whose striking gifts they had always recognized, could "put it over." Moreover, there was only one woman on the American stage who could act it and that was Margaret Anglin. If it didn't appeal to her he might as well dock it. The younger actresses, clever as some of them were, had so far given no evidence of sustained emotional power. During the entire act no one was on the stage but the woman and she sat at a telephone talking with the man who controlled her destiny. Not only must that one-sided dialogue give as sharp and clear an idea of what the man was saying as if he had been present, with the vivid personality, the gestures and the mobile face he must have for the part, but the conversation, beginning in happy confidence, ran the gamut of the emotions, portraying a war of wills and souls, and rising to inexorable spiritual tragedy. It was a scene whose like had never before been attempted without both protagonists on the stage, and it lasted twenty-five minutes; a scene as difficult to write as to act; but the two playwrights admitted that in the deft use of words which, without repetitions by the woman, left the audience in no doubt what the man was saying, made it almost possible to see him, and in the rising scale of emotion, the act was a surpassingly brilliant piece of work. Clavering rewrote it fourteen times, and Hogarth and Scores were finally almost as excited as himself, although it was the last sort of thing either would have "tackled." Whatever the originality of their own ideas they were careful to stick to the orthodox in treatment, knowing the striking lack of originality in audiences.

Gora Dwight was more enthusiastic than he had ever known her to be over anything, and one night he read the play to a select few at her house. Abbott was there and two other critics, as well as Suzan Forbes and her distinguished consort, De Witt Turner.

The critics preserved their ferocious and frozen demeanor common to first-nights and less common where cocktails were plentiful. Not for them to encourage a tyro and a confrère, as if they were mere friends and well-wishers. They left that to the others, but after the last act had been discussed with fury, Abbott arose and said with a yawn:

"Oh, well, what's the use? It's about the hardest play for actors ever written and the audience will either crack on that last act or pass away of their own emotions. It would be the former if any one else had written the damn thing, but it'll go because it isn't time yet for the Clavering luck to break. You'll get it in the neck, old man, one of these days, and when you least expect it. You're one of Fate's pets, her pampered pup, and she'll purr over you until she has you besotted, and then she'll give you such a skinning that you'll wish you were little Jimmy Jones, cub reporter, with a snub nose and freckles. I only hope to be in at the death to gloat." Then he shot out his hand. "Good stuff, Clavey. Congratulate you. Count on me."

And he drank a highball and waddled out.

The others, expressing their congratulations in various keys, soon followed, and Clavering was left alone with Gora. He was flushed and restless, but he doubted if he would feel happier on the first-night with the entire Sophisticate body howling for "author." He had been more afraid of Abbott and the two other critics than he, a hardened critic himself, had dared admit.

Gora watched him from her ottoman, where she sat stark upright, as usual, and smoking calmly. But her cold gray eyes were softer than usual. She knew exactly how he felt and rejoiced with him, but her expression in the long silence grew more and more thoughtful. Finally she threw away her cigarette and said abruptly:

"Clavey."

"Yes, Gora." He had been wandering about the room, but he halted in front of her, smiling.

She smiled also. "You do look so happy. But you're such a mercurial creature that you'll probably wake up tomorrow morning with your soul steeped in indigo."

"Oh, no, I won't. It isn't as if I had nothing else in my life." Gora alone knew of his engagement to Mary Zattiany.

"That is it. I want to say something. I know you'll be angry with me, but just remember that I am not speaking as a friend, merely as an artist."

"What are you driving at?" Some of the exultation faded from Clavering's face.

"This. I no longer want you to marry Madame Zattiany. She's served her purpose."

Clavering stared, then laughed. "Little you know about it."

"I know more about it than you think. Remember it is my business to know people's mental insides down to the roots----"

"Not such a good metaphor, that."

"Let it pass. I'm not to be diverted. I've seen her several times alone, you know. She lunched here the other day, and I purposely asked no one else. I believe I know her well enough to put her in a book, complex, both naturally and artificially, as she is. Maybe I shall some day. You once told me that she had a character of formidable strength and the 'will to power'--something like that. Well, I agree with you, and I don't think you'd stand a chance of becoming a great artist if you married her."

"You're talking utter rot."

"Am I? Tell me that a year hence--if you marry her."

"If? I'd tear the artist in me out by the roots before I'd give her up."

"You think so. I don't doubt it. But have you really projected your imagination into the future? I mean beyond the honeymoon? She tells me that she intends to live in Europe--that she has a great work to accomplish----"

"Yes, and she needs my help."

"She doesn't need your help, nor anybody's help. For that matter she'd be better off alone, for I don't doubt she would be in love with you longer than might be convenient. She has formidable powers of concentration. . . . But you--what would become of your own career? You'd be absorbed, devoured, annihilated by that woman. You're no weakling, but you're an artist and an artist's strength is not like the ordinary male's. It's too messed up with temperament and imagination. You are strong enough to impress your personality on her, win her, make her love you to the exclusion of everything else for the moment, and possibly hold her for a time. But you never could dominate her. What she needs is a statesman, if she must have marital partnership at all. Possibly not even a great executive brain could dominate her either, but at least it could force upon her a certain equality in personality, and that you never could do. Not only would your own career be wrecked, but you'd end by being wretched and resentful--quite apart from your forfeited right to express your genius in your own way--because you've been accustomed all your life yourself to the dominating act. You've always been a star of some sort, and you've never discouraged yourself--except when in the dumps--out of the belief that a fixed position was waiting for you in the stellar firmament. To vary the metaphor, you've always been in the crack regiment, even when the regiment was composed of cub reporters. . . . And you'd find yourself shrinking--shrinking--nothing but a famous woman's husband--lover, would be perhaps more like it----"

Here Clavering swore and started down the room again. That interview in the library two weeks ago tonight came back to him. He had banished its memory and she had been feminine and exquisite, and _young_, ever since. But that sudden vision of her standing by the table as he had rushed to her succor, calm and contemptuous in her indomitable powers, weakened his muscles and he walked unsteadily.

Miss Dwight went on calmly. "For she's going to be a very famous woman, make no doubt about that. It's quite on the cards that she may have a niche in history. You might be useful to her in many ways, with that brain of yours, but it was given to you for another purpose, and you'd end by leaving her. You'd come home like a sick dog to its kennel--and become a hack. Your genius would have shrivelled to the roots. If you give her up now your very unhappiness and baffled longings will make you do greater and greater things. Talent needs the pleasant pastures of content to browse on but they sicken genius. If you married her you wouldn't even have the pastures after the first dream was over and you certainly would have neither the independence of action nor the background of tragedy so necessary to your genius. That needs stones to bite on, not husks. . . . Believe me, I know what I am talking about. I have been through worse. If personal happiness were brought to me on a gold platter with Divine assurance that it would last--which it never does--remember that, Clavey--I should laugh in its face. And if you let her go now you will one day say the same thing yourself."

But Clavering had made a violent rebound. He threw himself into a chair and lit a cigarette, smiling at her indulgently. "The trouble with you, Gora," he said, "is that you are--and probably always were--artist first and woman last. If you'd got the man you thought you wanted you'd have chucked him in about six months. But I happen to be a man first and artist next."

Miss Dwight shrugged her shoulders. "Will you deny that you have been completely happy while writing that play? So happy and absorbed that you forgot everything else on earth--and everybody?"

"That's true enough. But if it's a mere question of happiness, that's not the sort that lasts, and the reaction is frightful. I am beginning to feel a hideous sense of loss and wish I had it to do all over again."

"You can go to work on another."

"I'll never feel to another play as I have to this."

"That's what every artist has said to himself since the gods plucked out a rib and invented the breed. Even if you do your comedy next your submergence will be precisely the same. It's the creative pot boiling that does the business."

"I don't believe it."

"Well, don't, then. And don't wake up as blue as paint tomorrow morning. Reaction is the price we all have to pay for keeping the brain too long at a pitch so high above the normal. It's the downwash of blood from the organ it has kept at fever heat. And it's a long sight less commonplace than reaction from too much love-making. Especially when love-making has begun to pall--which it does sooner in artists than in ordinary men. . . . Writers begin life all over again with each new release of the creative faculty; and each new work is as enthralling as the last. But love!" She sighed. "You don't look as if I had made the slightest impression on you."

"You haven't. A man can combine both if a woman cannot. You forget that we return here after two or three months in Austria, and here we remain for at least two years."

"Why are you so sure of that? Have you her actual promise?"

"It is understood. I told her we should return and she knew that I meant what I said."

"It is quite likely that she knew you meant it! But I'd like you to promise me that you will ask her to tell you exactly what she does intend to do--when the honeymoon is over."

"What do you mean?" Clavering asked sharply.

"I mean, that although she told me nothing of her plans, it was perfectly evident from her conversation that she intends to live her life in Europe and play a great rôle there. I infer that she is in constant correspondence with political friends in Austria. Do you mean that she has never told you this?"

Clavering sat forward, frowning. "No. We--have had little time together and have not wasted it on politics. Did she tell you this?"

"Not she. But I 'got' it. I can't tell you just how, but my intuitions are pretty good."

"Intuitions be hanged. Your creative tract is prepared for action and has been doing a little stunt all by itself. Better get to work on it and plough up a new book. I don't doubt Mary has political friends in Austria, and corresponds with them. Why shouldn't she? But she's not committed to any definite date or action. I'll swear to that. She'd have told me so honestly."

"Very well. I've said my say. But I wish----" She fell silent and sat very still for several moments regarding the point of her slipper. Then she looked up and said brightly: "Don't you think it's time to let the rest of them know what's going to happen? It's hardly fair to your other friends--and they are your friends, Clavey. Of course they are practically certain of it."

"I don't think she'll mind, particularly as the first sensation has pretty well run its course--she thought she'd spare her own friends two shocks at once. But I fancy she intends to go out among them less and less. I'll ask her, and if she agrees, suppose you announce it?"

Miss Dwight bent down and removed a pinch of ashes from her slipper. "Do--persuade her. It would be a tremendous feather in my cap. I'll give you both a dinner and announce it then."

"Settled. Well, I'm off. Got my column to write." He gathered up his manuscript, and she went to the door with him. As he held her hand, he felt one of those subtle whispers along his nerves that had warned him of danger before. He dropped her hand with a frown.

"Look here, Gora," he said. "You haven't any mistaken idea of appealing to _her_, have you?"

"What do you take me for?" demanded Miss Dwight angrily. "The father in _Camille_?"

"Well, keep off the grass, that's all. Ta, ta."

XL

When Mary Zattiany returned home at twelve o'clock after a tiresome morning in Judge Trent's office she told the butler to send her luncheon upstairs, and ascended to the seclusion of her room, delighted with the prospect of a few hours she could call her own. These hours had been increasing during the past fortnight but were no less welcome. Not a word of that dinner was known to any but those who had attended it. People do not foul their own nest unless they are ready to desert it and sometimes not then. Moreover, the women were too ashamed or too humiliated with their failure to invite the criticism of their friends, and although they avoided the subject among themselves, their agreement to bury it was no less final for being tacit. The men, with something of the deliberation of male guests at a diplomatic dinner where there has been an unfortunate incident involving dangerous possibilities if known, called one another up on the telephone the next day and agreed to "forget it." Even Dinwiddie never heard of it. As for Madame Zattiany, she could be trusted to dismiss it from her contemptuous mind. Nevertheless, these young women, who had entertained her almost constantly, pointedly omitted her from their luncheons and dinners and parties--in her new lightheartedness she had been induced to attend several parties during the past six weeks. And they had little difficulty in persuading others to follow their example. The more amiable of the younger women might have looked upon their attack that night with horror if they had heard of it, as, indeed, several at the dinner had done, but they were no more enthusiastic over the "foreign invasion" than their militant sisters. The remonstrances of the men were unheeded, and when one or two tried to arrange theatre parties or dinners in Madame Zattiany's honor they received graceful regrets.

Even the attitude of her older friends had changed, now that the dramatic novelty of her return to them, and their first determined enthusiasm, had worn off. They were betraying more and more their disapproval of what she had done, the more so perhaps, as the majority of them, being excessively thin, might have accomplished a like result had not their standards protected them. This naturally inspired them with a full realization of their superiority, which increased daily.

If she had made the attempt and failed it would have been bad enough, for such violations of the law of orthodoxy insulted the code in which she had been born and reared: but triumphantly to have succeeded in making herself young again while the rest of them were pursuing their unruffled way to the grave was a deliberate insult both to themselves and to God.

Moreover, they hardly knew what to talk to her about, and although this might still have been the case had she returned to them carrying aloft the crinkled and spotted flag of time, so far apart their lines had run, her scientific victory added an ever-increasing irritant. Also, she had never been a "woman's woman," and it was patent that, as ever, she was far more animated in the company of men. Inevitably, old scandals were raked up. They had been frowned upon in the days when she was protected by her husband and the great position he gave her, and the rumors had been dismissed for more interesting scandals, both public and private, at home. They no doubt would have remained in the limbo of history had she returned looking no better than themselves, but her ridiculous defiance of nature revived them, and these ladies discovered that their memories were more lively than might have been expected of their years.

It would be too much, as Mary told Clavering, to ask a violent contradiction of human nature from worn out glands, and she bore them no malice. She only wondered that Jane Oglethorpe, Elinor Goodrich, and Lily Tracy were still faithful in private--to the world all of them preserved a united front; they would not even discuss her with their children, much less their grandchildren; but they made up their minds that it would be for the good of her soul to let her see, with no flaw in their politeness, just what uncompromisingly sensible women of high moral and social responsibilities thought of her.

Mary, being human, felt the pin-pricks, but was glad on the whole to be rid of them. Those first weeks of almost girlish pleasure in what was to her a novel society, had vanished for ever on the night of her dinner. Scornful and indifferent she might be, but although they could not kill her youth, they drove home to her what she had guessed in the beginning, that the society and the companionship of young people--fashionable young people, at least--were not for her. Their conversations, interests, shallow mental attitude to life, bored her. That curious brief period of mental rejuvenescence had been due to the novelty and excitement of being in love again, after long and arid years.

And now, Judge Trent had told her that she would be free to leave in a fortnight. She had walked the three miles from Broad Street with a buoyant step, and she had vowed that never, not for any consideration whatever, would she set foot in America again. Vienna was the city of her heart as well as of her future exploits. She would buy the old Zattiany palace from her widowed niece-in-law and make it the most famous rendezvous in Europe. But of all this nothing to Clavering until they were in the Dolomites.

She rang for her maid and exchanged her tweed walking suit for a tea gown of violet velvet and snow white chiffon, with stockings and slippers to match. She expected no one but it was always a delight to her to be exquisitely and becomingly dressed. Even in the seclusion of her Hungarian estate she had arrayed herself as appropriately for outdoors, and as fastidiously for the house, as if she had been under the critical eye of her world, for daintiness and luxury were as ingrained as ordinary cleanliness and refinement. During the war she had not rebelled at her hard and unremitting labors, but she had often indulged in a fleeting regret for the frequent luxury of the bath, the soft caress of delicate underwear, for charming toilettes; and she had sometimes scowled at her white cotton stockings with a feeling of positive hatred.

Judge Trent, while she was still in Austria, had sent her a cheque for forty thousand dollars. She had given half of it to relief organizations in Vienna, and then gone to Paris and indulged in an orgy of clothes. She looked back upon that wholly feminine reversion, when she had avoided every one she had ever known, as one of the completely satisfactory episodes of her life. Even with unrestored youth and beauty, and a soberer choice of costumes, she would still have experienced a certain degree of excited pleasure in adorning herself.

She had always liked the light freshness of chintz in her bedroom, leaving luxury to her boudoir; but here she had furnished no boudoir; her stay was to be short, and her bedroom was as large as two ordinary rooms. She spent many hours in it, when its violet and white simplicities appealed to her mood. Today it was redolent of the lilacs Clavering had sent her, and through the open windows came the singing of birds in the few trees still left in the old street.

She loved comfort as much as she loved exercise, and after her careful toilette was finished and her maid had gone, she settled herself luxuriously in a deep chair before her desk and opened one of the drawers. The European mail had arrived yesterday and she had only glanced through half of it. But she must read all of those letters today and answer some of them before the sailings on Saturday.

The telephone on a little stand at her elbow rang, and she took the receiver from its spreading violet skirts and raised it to her ear. As she had expected, it was Clavering. He told her that he had promised Gora Dwight the evening before to ask her permission to announce their engagement.

For a moment she stared into the instrument. Then she said hurriedly, almost breathlessly: "No--I'd rather not. I hate the vulgarity of congratulations--publicity of my private affairs. I've always said that when one marries a second time the decent thing to do is to marry first and tell afterward."

"But they guess it, you know."

"That is quite different." It was Madame Zattiany who spoke now and her tones were deliberate and final. "Quite a different thing from being congratulated, and tormented by newspapers." She dismissed the subject. "I shall be free two weeks from today. What do you think of that?" Her voice was both gay and tender. "Judge Trent will see at once about engaging my stateroom. Don't tell me that that play of yours will prevent you from following shortly after."

"Not a bit of it. We shall only be gone two months, and even if Hogarth succeeds in placing it with his manager as he expects, it might be several months before rehearsals."

"Then it all fits in quite charmingly. You are coming to dinner tonight?"

"Well, rather."

"Mind you come early. I have many things to tell you."

"It'll not be for that I'll come early."

Mary smiled and hung up the receiver. She would have to let him return to New York for a time--possibly. But herself, she would go on to Vienna. No doubt about that.

She returned to her letters. Those that required answers she placed in a separate heap with a pencilled note on the back, for she was neat and methodical; she even slit the envelopes with a paper-knife that was always at hand for the purpose, and the envelopes were dropped at once into the waste basket.

The contents for the most part were expected, and related to her work in Vienna, the disposition of moneys she had sent over, and the usual clamoring for more. But when she had read halfway through a long letter from Baroness Tauersperg, in whose capable hands she had left the most important of her charities, she involuntarily stiffened and sat forward a little.

Several pages of her friend's letters were always devoted to business, the rest to gossip. In return Mary enlivened her own letters with many of her American adventures, although she had made no mention of Clavering.

"I need not ask if you remember Hohenhauer," continued Frau von Tauersperg, "although, I suppose, like the rest of us, you saw nothing of him after the war. He was, as you know, not in bad standing with the new Government, like the reactionary nobles, as he had always been a liberal in politics, and had a good record as a generous and just landlord. But they did not have intelligence enough to ask him to be a member of the Cabinet, or to send him to the Peace Conference, where he alone, of all Austrians, perhaps, might have won some advantage for this wretched country.

"The present Government seems to have appreciated that initial mistake of ignoring him, for they have invited him to return from his estate in Switzerland, where he has been staying, and to act in some advisory capacity. That means, we think here, that he will soon have the whole thing in his hands. The first step he took was to pay a visit to Bavaria and have a conference with Count L., and no doubt you will surmise what that means. He went incognito, however, and few people even here in Vienna know of that visit, much less the rest of Europe. Very shortly he goes to America, whether for reasons connected with his sudden interest in Bavaria, I have no means of knowing, but ostensibly because his New York lawyers demand his presence in regard to the large sum of money he invested in the United States. The Government makes no objection to this journey, as you may imagine, for they know they can depend on him to spend it in the cause of Austria--under his leadership! Imagine what it will mean to have the income of several million American dollars rolling in to be exchanged for Austrian kronen! Or the capital, if he thinks the end justifies it.

"No doubt you will see him, for he always had the greatest respect for your opinion--was it not you who advised him to sell out practically everything he possessed, except the land in Galicia, and invest it in America? I have no doubt he will confide in you and ask your advice. You have a wonderful flair for politics, dear Marie, and you know what we all expect of you. Hurry, hurry and come back to us. We need you in a thousand ways. But what a rest that sojourn in the gay and brilliant and _rich_ city of New York must have given you. It is both wonderful and saddening to read of the almost unbelievable contrast to our poor Vienna. But they are generous. The second cheque from your Vienna Fund came yesterday. Do leave the _oeuvre_ in reliable and sympathetic hands, dear Marie, so that it may go on until--well, God only knows when."

Mary read this portion of the letter over twice, the serenity of her face routed by a frown. Of course she had expected to meet this man in the future, indeed had had a very definite idea of playing his cards immediately upon her return to Vienna. But that he should come here! Now. That was another matter. She had succeeded in dismissing the past, and she resented this dark reminder. Well, she could refuse to see him, and possibly he would not arrive until after her departure. And then she sighed again. The futility of attempting to travel through even one brief cross-section of life on a straight line!

Her luncheon was brought up to her and when it was finished she answered her letters and settled down to the latest novel of one of her new friends. But Gora Dwight was announced and she put the book aside with a sensation of pleasant anticipation. She liked no one better, of her new American acquaintances, and had made no objection when Clavering had asked her to let him confide his engagement to Gora Dwight alone. He felt that he owed her the compliment (how he was to obtain the forgiveness of Mrs. Oglethorpe was a thought he dared not dwell on), and Mary, little disposed as she was to intimacies, had felt a certain release in speaking of her engagement to another woman.

XLI

Gora was looking her best in a smart spring frock of brown tweed with a drooping red feather on her hat, whose pointed brim almost but not quite obscured one eye. The two women greeted each other with something like affection, and after the usual feminine preliminaries were over, Gora exclaimed with enthusiasm:

"I have come to tell you how really wonderful Lee's play is, and to say that I could have shaken him for not letting you hear it, but he seems determined that it shall burst upon you in the unmitigated glory of a first-night performance."

Madame Zattiany smiled, very slightly. "Yes, he made a great point of that. I could only let him have his way. He is very fond of having his way, is he not?"

"Well, we've spoiled him, you see. And those of us who have heard the play are more excited than we have been over anything for a long time. Those that haven't are not far behind. I believe there is a dinner or a party in his honor projected for every night for weeks to come."

Madame Zattiany raised her eyebrows in genuine surprise. "Isn't it rather unusual, that--to fête an author before he has made his débût?"

"It is, rather. But in this case it's different. We've waited so long for Clavey to do the big thing that we must let off steam at once."

"He certainly seems to be a tremendous favorite among you. Several of his friends were here at dinner the other night--I was so sorry you were unable to come--and really they seemed to be able to talk of nothing else. They are all very charming to me now, but I am wondering if they will be more than amiably interested in me when I am merely the wife of a famous playwright?"

"Oh, you must do something yourself," said Miss Dwight emphatically. "I am sure you could write. And equally sure that you will try, for you could not live constantly with such workers as we are without being stung by the same busy little bee. You have suggested genius to me from the first, and I am convinced it is not merely the genius of personality. Your life has stifled your talents, but now is the time to discover them and take your place in American letters."

"I had thought such talents as I possessed should be used in the attempt to play a humble part in the reconstruction of Europe," murmured Madame Zattiany; and one of her beautiful white hands moved toward the cigarette box with a curious tensing of the muscles that seemed to rob it subtly of its likeness to flesh. Nothing escaped Miss Dwight's observing eye, and she replied casually: "Oh, Europe isn't worth the effort, dear Madame Zattiany. It's too far gone. The future of the world lies here in the United States. New York is the brain and soul of the United States. Moreover, if you want to help Europe, you can write about it here, be the one to give us all a clearer understanding of that miserable chaos."

"But I detest writing," said Madame Zattiany, who was lying back and watching her smoke rings. "I like the activity of doing, and I have had an experience that particularly fits me for political intrigue. If this were Washington, now----"

"Oh, Washington! Washington is merely one of the islands outside of New York. So is Chicago, Boston, the rest of them. . . . And don't imagine you would not become fascinated with writing as soon as you were in your stride. Here is a simple recipe to begin with. Get up every morning with the set intention of writing and go to your desk and sit there for three hours, whether you accomplish anything or not. Before long you will find that you are writing madly, not waiting for inspiration. And you will have Clavey to criticize you. The rest is only stern self-discipline. Here is another suggestion: when you have brain fag go to bed for two days and starve. The result is miraculous."

"So, that is the way American writers are made. There are so many of them--I had often wondered----"

"Oh, not at all!" Miss Dwight rushed to the defence of native American genius. "But all writers, no matter what their gifts, often go through a period of torture while forming habits of regular work."

"It sounds like torture!" She gave Gora a glance of lazy amusement. "Really, Miss Dwight! Are you trying to frighten me off?"

But Gora did not blush. If she chose to concentrate her agile mind on acting, the accomplished actress opposite could give her few points. She replied with convincing emphasis: "Certainly not. What an odd idea. I have the most enormous respect for your abilities, and you should be famous for something besides beauty--and I should like to see you live down mere notoriety."

"I've loved the notoriety, and rather regret that it seems to have lost flavor with time. But I'll never make a writer, Miss Dwight, and have not the least intention of trying."

"But surely you'll not be content to be just Lee's wife? Why, practically every woman in our crowd does something. There used to be a superstition that two brain-workers could not live comfortably under the same roof, but as a matter of fact we've proved that a woman keeps her husband far longer if her brain is as productive as his. Each inspires and interests the other. Another old _cliché_ gone to the dust bin. Our sort of men want something more from a woman than good housekeeping. Not that men no longer want to be comfortable, but the clever women of today have learned to combine both."

"Marvellous age and marvellous America! Don't you think I could keep Lee interested without grinding away at my desk for three hours every morning and lying in hungry misery for days at a time?"

"You could keep any man interested. I wasn't thinking of him, but of you. He has more than a man's entitled to already. Men are selfish brutes, and I waste no sympathy on them. It's women who have the rotten deal in this world, the best of them. And men are as vain as they are selfish. It's an enormous advantage for a woman to have her own reputation and her own separate life. No man should be able to feel that he possesses a woman wholly. He simply can't stand it."

"Quite right. Discarding modesty, I may add that I am an old hand at that game."

Gora regarded her with frank admiration, wholly unassumed. "Oh, you couldn't lose Clavey if you tried. He is mad about you. We can all see that, and I knew it before he did himself. It's only--really--that I'm afraid you'll be bored to death with so much shop if you don't set up one for yourself."

"Oh, I never intend to be bored again as long as I live." Mary Zattiany was a very shrewd woman and she determined on a bold stroke. Her suspicion lingered but had lost its edge. Gora Dwight was deep and subtle but there was no doubt that she was honorable. "I shall tell you something," she said, "but you must give me your word that you will not betray me--not even to Lee."

Miss Dwight's mind, not her body, gave a slight stir of uneasiness. But she answered warmly: "Of course I promise."

"Very well, then. It is this. I shall never return to America. I sail in a fortnight. Lee follows soon after, and we shall be married in Austria."

"But--but--his play!" Miss Dwight was too startled to act. "He must be here for rehearsals. Some one has said that plays are not written, they're rewritten, and it's pretty close to the truth."

"I shall consent to his returning in time for rehearsals. Prolonged honeymoons are indiscreet. It is better to divide them into a series. I fancy the series might hold out indefinitely if adroitly spaced. Moreover, being a modern myself, I like new methods. And he will be too busy to miss me. I shall be equally busy in Vienna."

"But will he consent? Lee? He's not used to having his plans made for him. He's about the most dominating male I know."

"I feel sure he will when the time comes. It is woman's peculiar gift, you know, to convince the dominating male that he wants what she wants."

Gora laughed. But she also could turn mental somersaults. "I think it a splendid arrangement. Then we should not lose Lee altogether, for we really are devoted to him. He is an adorable creature for all his absurdities. But I can't endure the thought of losing you."

"You must pay me a long visit in Vienna. Many visits. I can assure you that you will find material there, under my guidance, for a really great novel."

Gora's eyes sparkled. She was all artist at once. "I should like that! How kind of you. And what a setting!"

"Yes, Austria is the most interesting country in Europe, and the most beautiful to look at--and describe."

"It will be heavenly." Gora made up her mind at once that she would waste no more ingenuity to stop this marriage. Its modernity appealed to her, and she foresaw new impulses to creation. "The American Scene," conceivably, might grow monotonous with time; and with these daily recruits bent upon describing its minutiae with the relentless efficiency of the camera. And with all her soul she loved beauty. With the possible exception of Bavaria she knew Austria to be the darling of nature.

Once more she chose to believe this woman would manage Clavering to his own good, and to the satisfaction of his friends, who, as she well knew, were alarmed and alert. They were too polite to show it, but much of their enthusiasm for Madame Zattiany had dimmed with the knowledge that she was a scientific phenomenon. Fundamentally the brilliant creative mind is quite as conservative as the worldly, or the inarticulate millions between, for they have common ancestors and common traditions. They feared not only to lose him, moreover, but had begun to ask one another if his career would not be wrecked.

Miss Dwight concluded that such an uncommon and romantic marriage might be a spur to Clavering's genius, which might weaken in a conventional marital drama set in the city of New York.

She rose and for the first time kissed Madame Zattiany. "It will be too perfect!" she said. "Let me visit you in summer when he is rehearsing. He can arrange to have his first-nights in September, and then write his next play in Austria, filling his time while you are absorbed in politics. Heavens, what a theme! Some day I'll use it. Perfectly disguised, of course."

"And I'll give you points," said Mary, laughing. She returned the other's embrace; but when she was alone she sighed and sank back in her chair, without picking up her book. Miss Gora Dwight had given her something to think of! The last thing she wanted was a serial honeymoon. She wanted this man's companionship and his help. But she had slowly been forced to the conclusion that Clavering's was a mind whose enthusiasms could only be inspired by some form of creative art; politics would never appeal to it. In her comparative ignorance of the denaturalized brain, she had believed that a brilliant gifted mind could concentrate itself upon any object with equal fertility and power, but she had seen too much of the Sophisticates of late, and studied Clavering in too many of his moods to cherish the illusion any longer. Playwrighting seemed to her a contemptible pastime compared with the hideous facts of Life as exemplified in Europe, and she had restrained herself from an angry outburst more than once. But she was too philosophical, possibly too fatalistic, not to have dismissed this attitude eventually. Clavering could not be changed, but neither could she. There would be the usual compromises. After all, of what was life made up but of compromise? But the early glow of the wondrous dream had faded. The mistress was evidently the rôle nature had cast her to play. The vision of home, the complete matehood, had gone the way of all dreams.

XLII

She was not sorry to forego the doubtful luxury of meditation on the sadness of life. When Miss Trevor's card was brought to her she told the servant to show her up and bring tea immediately. She was not interested in Agnes Trevor, a younger sister of Polly Vane, but at all events she would talk about her settlement work and give a comfortably commonplace atmosphere to the room in which tragic clouds were rising. As it had happened, Mary, during these past weeks, had seen little of New York women between the relics of her old set and their lively Society-loving daughters. The women between forty and fifty, whether devoted to fashion, politics, husbands, children, or good works, had so far escaped her, and Agnes Trevor, who lived with Mrs. Vane, was practically the only representative of the intermediate age with whom she had exchanged a dozen words. But the admirable spinster had taken up the cause of the Vienna children with enthusiasm and raised a good deal of money, besides contributing liberally herself. She was forty-two, and, although she was said to have been a beautiful girl, was now merely patrician in appearance, very tall and thin and spinsterish, with a clean but faded complexion, and hair-colored hair beginning to turn gray. She had left Society in her early twenties and devoted herself to moralizing the East Side.

She came in with a light step and an air of subdued bright energy, very smartly but plainly dressed in dark blue tweed, with a large black hat in which a wing had been accurately placed by the best milliner in New York. Her clothes were so well-worn, and her grooming was so meticulous, her accent so clean and crisp, her manner so devoid of patronage, yet subtly remote, her controlled heart so kind that she perennially fascinated the buxom, rather sloppy, preternaturally acute, and wholly unaristocratic young ladies of the East Side.

Mary, who had a dangerous habit of characterizing people in her Day Book, had written when she met Agnes Trevor: "She radiates intelligence, good will, cheeriness, innate superiority and uncompromising virginity."

"Dear Mary!" she exclaimed in her crisp bright tones as she kissed her amiable hostess. "How delightful to find you alone. I was afraid you would be surrounded as usual."

"Oh, my novelty is wearing off," said Mary drily. "But I will tell them to admit no one else today. I find I enjoy one person at a time. One gets rather tired in New York of the unfinished sentence."

"Oh, do." Mary's quick eye took note of a certain repressed excitement in the fine eyes of her guest, who had taken an upright chair. Lounging did not accord with that spare ascetic figure. "And you are quite right. It is seldom one has anything like real conversation. One has to go for that to those of our older women who have given up Society to cultivate the intellects God gave them."

"Are there any?" murmured Mary.

"Oh, my dear, yes. But, of course, you've had no time to meet them in your mad whirl. Now that things have slowed down a bit you _must_ meet them."

"I'm afraid it's too late. I sail in a fortnight."

"Oh!" Miss Trevor's voice shook oddly, and the slow color crept up her cheeks. But at that moment the tea was brought in.

"Will you pour it out?" asked Mary. "I'm feeling rather lazy."

"Of course." Miss Trevor was brightly acquiescent. She seated herself before the table. The man retired with instructions that Madame was not at home to other callers.

Mary watched her closely as she stirred the tea with a little business-like air, warmed the cups, distributed the lemon and then poured out the clear brown fluid.

"Formosa Oolong," she said, sniffing daintily. "The only tea. I hate people who drink scented teas, don't you? I'm going to have a very strong cup, so I'll wait a minute or two. I'm--rather tired."

"You? You look as if you never relaxed in your sleep. How do you keep it up?"

"Oh, think of the life the younger women lead. Mine is a quiet amble along a country road by comparison. . . . But . . . monotonous!"

The last word came out with the effect of a tiny explosion. It evidently surprised Miss Trevor herself, for she frowned, poured out a cup of tea that was almost black, and began sipping it with a somewhat elaborate concentration for one so simple and direct of method.

"I'm afraid good works are apt to grow monotonous. A sad commentary on the triumphs of civilization over undiluted nature." Mary continued to watch the torch bearer of the East Side. "Don't you sometimes hate it?"

She asked the question idly, interested for the moment in probing under another shell hardened in the mould of time, and half-hoping that Agnes would be natural and human for once, cease to be the bright well-oiled machine. She was by no means prepared for what she got.

Miss Trevor gulped down the scalding tea in an almost unladylike manner, and put the cup down with a shaking hand.

"That's what I've come to see you about," she said in a low intense voice, and her teeth set for a moment as if she had taken a bit between them. "Mary, you've upset my life."

"I? What next!"

"I suppose you have troubles of your own, dear, and I hate to bother you with mine----"

"Oh, mine amount to nothing at present. And if I can help you----" She felt no enthusiasm at the prospect, but she saw that the woman was laboring under excitement of some sort, and if she could not give her sympathy at least she might help her with sound practical advice. Moreover, she was in for it. "Better tell me all about it."

"It is terribly hard. I'm so humiliated--and--and I suppose no more reticent woman ever lived."

"Oh, reticence! Why not emulate the younger generation? I'm not sure--although I prefer the happy medium myself--that they are not wiser than their grandmothers and their maiden aunts. On the principle that confession is good for the soul, I don't believe that women will be so obsessed by--well, let us say, sex, in the future."

Miss Trevor flushed darkly. "It is possible. . . . That's what I am--a maiden aunt. Just that and nothing more."

"Nothing more? I thought you were accounted one of the most useful women in serious New York. A sort of mother to the East Side."

"Mother? How could I be a mother? I'm only a maiden aunt even down there. Not that I want to be a mother----"

"I was going to ask you why you did not marry even now. It is not too late to have children of your own----"

"Oh, yes, it is. That's all over--or nearly. But I can't say that I ever did long for children of my own, although I get on beautifully with them."

"Well?" asked Mary patiently, "what is it you do want?"

"A husband!" This time there was no doubt about the explosion.

Mary felt a faint sensation of distaste, and wondered if she were reverting to type as a result of this recent association with the generation that still clung to the distastes and the disclaimers of the nineteenth century. "Why didn't you marry when you were a girl? I am told that you were quite lovely."

"I hated the thought. I was in love twice; but I had a sort of cold purity that I was proud of. The bare idea of--of _that_ nauseated me."

"Pity you hadn't done settlement work first. That must have knocked prudishness out of you, I should think."

"It horrified me so that for several years I hardly could go on with it, and I have always refused to mix the sexes in my house down there, but, of course, I could not help hearing things--seeing things--and after a while I did get hardened--and ceased to be revolted. I learned to look upon all that sort of thing as a matter of course. But it was too late then. I had lost what little looks I had ever possessed. I grew to look like an old maid long before I was thirty. Why is nature so cruel, Mary?"

"I fancy a good many American women develop very slowly sexually. You were merely one of them. I wonder you had the climacteric so early. But nature is very fond of taking her little revenges. You defied her and she smote you."

"Oh, yes, she smote me! But I never fully realized it until you came."

"I hardly follow you."

"Oh, don't you see? You have shown us that women can begin life over again, undo their awful mistakes. And yet I don't dare--don't dare----"

"Why not, pray? Better come with me to Vienna if you haven't the courage to face the music here."

"Oh, I haven't the courage. I couldn't carry things off with such a high hand as you do. You were always high and mighty, they say, and have done as you pleased all your life. You don't care a pin whether we approve of what you've done or not. It's the way you're made. But I--couldn't stand it. The admission of vanity, of--of--after the life I've led. The young women would say, in their nasty slang, that I was probably man-crazy."

"And aren't you?" asked Mary coolly. "Isn't that just what is the matter? The sex-imagination often outlives the withering of the sex-glands. Come now, admit it. Forget that you are a pastel-tinted remnant of the old order and call a spade a spade."

"There's something terrifying about you, Mary." Miss Trevor had flushed a dark purple, but she had very honest eyes, and they did not falter. "But I respect you more than any woman I have ever known. And although you are not very sympathetic you are the only person on earth to whom I could even mention such a subject."

"Well, go ahead," said Mary resignedly. "If you want my advice, take your courage in your hands and do it. However people may carp, there is nothing they so much admire as courage."

"Yes, but they make you suffer tortures just because they do admire it--or to keep themselves from admitting it."

"True enough. But after all, they don't matter. Life would be so much simpler if we'd all make up our minds that what other people think about us does not signify in the least. It's only permitting it to signify that permits it to exist."

"That's all very well for you, but it's really a question of temperament. Do you think I'd dare come back here looking like a girl again--and I suppose I should. I'm sixteen years younger than you. . . . You must know how many of the women hate you."

"That sort of hate may be very stimulating, my dear Agnes," said Madame Zattiany drily.

"I can understand that. But I should return to what it is hardly an exaggeration to call a life of a thousand intimacies. The ridicule! The contempt! The merciless criticism! I don't want to live anywhere else. I can't face it! But, oh, I do so want it! I do so want it!"

"But just think of the compensations. No doubt you would marry immediately. If you were happy, and with a man to protect you, how much would you care?"

"Oh!" Once more the thin ascetic face was dyed with an unbecoming flush. "Oh!" And then the barriers fell with a crash and she hurried on, the words tumbling over one another, as her memory, its inhibitions shattered, swept back into the dark vortex of her secret past. "Oh, Mary! You don't know! You don't know! You, who've had all the men you ever wanted. Who, they say, have a young man now. The nights of horror I've passed. I've never slept a wink the nights our girls married. I could have killed them. I could have killed every man I've met for asking nothing of _me_. It seems to me that I've thought of nothing else for twenty years. When I've been teaching, counselling good thoughts, virtue, good conduct, to those girls down there, it's been in the background of my mind every minute like a terrible obsession. I wonder I haven't gone mad. Some of us old maids do go mad. And no one knew until they raved what was the matter with them. When Hannah de Lacey lost her mind three years ago I heard one of the doctors telling Peter Vane that her talk was the most libidinous he had ever listened to. And she was the most forbidding old maid in New York. I know if I lose my mind it will be the same, and that alone is enough to drive any decent woman mad. . . . I thought I'd get over it in time--I used to pray--and fight with my will--but when the time came when I should have been released I was afraid I would, and then I deliberately did everything I could to keep it alive. I couldn't lose my right---- It _was_ my right. I couldn't tell you all the things I've---- Oh, I tell you that unless I can be young again and have some man--any man--I don't care whether he'll marry me or not--I'll go mad--mad!"

Her voice had risen to a shriek. She would be in hysterics in another moment. Mary, who was on the point of nausea, went hastily into her dressing-room and poured out a dose of sal-volatile. "Here!" she said peremptorily. "Drink this. I'll not listen to another word. And I don't wish to be obliged to call an ambulance."

Miss Trevor gulped it down, and then permitted herself to be led to a sofa, where she lay sprawled, her immaculate hat on one side, giving her the look of a debauched gerontic virgin. She lay panting for a few moments, while Madame Zattiany paced up and down the room.

She turned as she heard a groan. Miss Trevor was sitting up, straightening her hat. "Feel better?" she asked unsympathetically.

"Oh, yes--my nerves feel better! But what have I said? What must you think of me? I never expected to give way like that when I came. I thought I could put it all to you in a few delicate hints, knowing that you would understand. _What_ have I said? I can hardly remember."

"Better not try! I'll promise to forget it myself." She sat down beside the sofa. "Now, listen to me. It would not be wise for you to go to Vienna. They would suspect, if not at once, then certainly when you returned. It can be done here. The rejuvenescence is so gradual that it would hardly be noticed. Fully a year. You do not have to go into a hospital, nor even to bed. You are not spied on, so no one would suspect that you were taking the treatment. At your age success is practically assured. Take it, and don't be a fool. If you don't it's only a question of time when that superb self-control you have practised for so many years will go again. And, too possibly, in the wrong place. . . . It is quite likely that you will never be suspected, because women often bloom out in their forties, take on a new lease of life. Begin to put on a little make-up----"

Miss Trevor interrupted with a horrified exclamation.

"It would be judicious. If they criticize you, remember that nothing they can say will be as bad--from your point of view--as their finding out the truth. They will lay it to that, and to the fact that you have grown a little stouter. And let me tell you, you won't care in the least, even if conservatism attacks you in solid battalions, for your mental attitude to life will be entirely changed. Remember that you will be young again, and too gay and happy to mind what people think of you. Now, promise me that you will take my advice, and then go home and to bed."

Miss Trevor got up and went to the mirror. "Yes, I'll do it." And then she said, no doubt for the first time in her life: "And I'll not give a damn, no matter what happens."

When she had left Mary Zattiany stood for a few moments striking her hands together, her face distorted. A wave of nausea overwhelmed her. She felt as if there had been an earthquake in her own soul and its muck were riding the surface. She loathed herself and all women and all men. She knew that the violence of the revulsion must be temporary, but for the moment it was beyond her control. She went to the telephone and called up Clavering and told him that she had a severe headache and was going to bed. And she cut short both his protests and his expression of sympathy by hanging up the receiver. And then she picked up a vase and hurled it to the floor and smashed it.

XLIII

Clavering stood on his high balcony and looked down upon Madison Square. Spring had come. The Square looked like an oasis in a rocky gorge. The trees were covered with the tender greens of the new birth, and even President Arthur and Roscoe Conkling, less green than in winter, looked reconciled to their lot. A few people were sunning themselves on the benches, many more were on top of the busses over on Fifth Avenue, and even the hurrying throngs, preoccupied with crass business, seemed to walk with a lighter step, their heads up, instead of sullenly defying winds and sleet. The eight streets that surrounded or debouched into the Square poured forth continuous streams of figures, constantly augmented by throngs rising out of the earth itself. There was a vivid color running like ribbons through the crowds, for it was nearly nine o'clock and the doors of offices and shops and business houses were open to women as to men. Overhead a yellow sun shone in a pale filmy sky and the air was both warm and sharp. The doves were circling and settling.

The prize-fighters had taken their prowess elsewhere, and a circus had come to Madison Square Garden. Clavering had heard the roar of lions in the night. A far different crowd would stand under the arcade in a few hours, but the peanut venders would ply their trade, and a little booth for candies and innocuous juices had been erected in an alcove in the front wall, presided over by a plump pretty blonde. She alternated "jollying" and selling with quiet intervals of beading a bag, undisturbed either by ogling or the hideous noises of Twenty-sixth Street.

In spite of his disappointment two nights before he found it impossible to feel depressed in that gay spring sunshine. He did not believe in the headache, but she had written him a charming note and he supposed that a man must get accustomed to the caprices of women if he intended to live with one. And a month from now they would be in the Dolomites, and she would be his. Let her have her caprices. He had his own. There were times when he didn't want to see her.

Moreover, he was still too jubilant over his play to feel depressed for long over anything; the warm and constantly manifested enthusiasm of his friends had kept his spirits from suffering any natural reaction. Their demand for his companionship was almost peremptory, and his thoughts turned to them as he stood on his balcony looking down on the waning throngs: the great stone buildings were humming like hives, and figures were passing busily to and fro behind the open windows. It astonished him a little. True, it was his first play and he was very popular. But he had a vague uneasy idea they were overdoing it. They talked of nothing else: his play, his brilliant future, his sure place in the crack regiment "if he hung on"; and they insisted that he must also express himself at least once through the medium of the novel. The great New York novel had yet to be written. They fairly dinned his gifts into his ears, until he was almost sick of them, and wondered if Mary were not also. She had seen a good deal of the Sophisticates lately, and from what she had let drop he inferred that even when he had not been present they had talked of little else. They had by no means waited for his play to be finished and read to a select few. Hogarth and Scores had assured them long before it was finished that it would be a great play.

Once or twice there was a rustling in the back of his mind. They were not given to wild enthusiasms of this sort. They thought too highly of themselves. He realized how genuinely fond they were of him, but he had not hoped for more than critical appreciation, from the men, at least. Could it be possible . . .

But he was still in the first flush of his triumph, his brain hummed with pleasant memories of those hours at Gora Dwight's, three nights ago. He had cleared the base of the pedestal on whose narrow and unaccommodating top he was soon to have his foothold, and it was not in human nature, at this stage of his progress, to suspect the sincerity of the adulation so generously poured at his feet.

And Mary, during this past fortnight (when he had been present, at least) had seemed to bask contentedly in reflected glory, and smiled sympathetically while they talked of the many Clavering first-nights they would attend in the sure anticipation of that class of entertainment up to which the Little Theatres and the Theatre Guild were striving to educate the public. They took it as a matter of course that he was to abide in the stimulating atmosphere of New York for the rest of his days. And they invariably insisted that "Madame Zattiany" must always sit in a stage box and be a part of the entertainment. They were too well-bred (and too astute) to hint at the engagement they were positive existed, but "hoped" she would be willing to add to the prestige of one who was now as much her friend as theirs. It was a curious position in which to place a woman like Mary Zattiany, but Sophisticate New York was not Diplomatic Europe, and he thought he saw her smile deepen into humor once or twice; no doubt she was reflecting that she had lived long enough to take people as she found them.

His reverie was interrupted by a buzzing at the end of his hall and he went to the door quickly, wondering who could have sent him a special delivery letter or a note at this hour. It proved to be a cablegram. He read it when he returned to his living-room. It was dated Rome, Italy, and read:

"I'll have you yet: Janet."

Clavering swore, then laughed. He tore the message into strips and sat down to read his newspapers; he had merely glanced at the headlines and his column. His eye was arrested by the picture of a man at the top of the first page of his own newspaper. Although smooth-shaven and very regular of feature, with no pronounced racial characteristics, it was, nevertheless, a foreign face, although difficult to place. From its distinction it might be Austrian, but the name below, "Prince Hohenhauer," might as easily be German. Still, it was not a German face, and Clavering studied it for a moment before reading the news text, wondering faintly at his interest.

It was unmistakably the face of a statesman, and reminded him a little of a picture of Prince Schwarzenberg, prime minister when Franz Josef ascended the throne, he had seen lately in a history of Austria. There was the same broad placidity of brow, the long oval face, the thin long slightly curved nose, the heavy lids, the slim erectness, the same suave repose. But this man's large beautifully cut mouth was more firmly set, had a faintly satiric expression, and the eyes a powerful and penetrating gaze. It was the face of a man who was complete master of himself and accustomed to the mastery of men.

Clavering read the story under the headlines:

PRINCE HOHENHAUER ARRIVES IN NEW YORK GOES AT ONCE TO WASHINGTON

"Prince Hohenhauer, a distinguished political factor under the old Austrian Empire, arrived yesterday morning on the _Noordam_. He refused to be interviewed, but it is understood he has a large amount of money invested in the United States and has come to New York at the request of his lawyers to attend to certain necessary formalities. He was, in fact, met at Quarantine by Judge Trent, one of the most distinguished members of the New York Bar since his retirement from the Bench, and they went at once to the Prince's stateroom and remained there until it was time to leave the ship. It is significant, however, that the Prince, after engaging a suite at the Ritz-Carlton, and lunching there with Judge Trent, took the afternoon train for Washington. As he recently left his estate in Switzerland to return to Vienna and accept a position in the Cabinet, and as it is well known that Austria desires the backing of the American Government to enable her to overcome the opposition of France to her alliance with Germany, or, it is whispered, with a kingdom farther south, it is not unreasonable to infer that he has come to the United States on a special, if secret, mission.

"The Prince was the subject of lively interest on the boat and of much speculation, but he took his meals in his suite and walked the deck only in the company of his secretary.

"He is a man of striking appearance, quite six feet in height, with a spare erect figure, fine features, and hardly looks his sixty years, in spite of his white hair."

Then followed a brief biography, which illustrated the efficiency of the newspaper "morgue," for the statesman's reputation was, so far, wholly European.

"Prince Moritz Franz Ernst Felix von Hohenhauer was born October 6th, 1862, on his ancestral estate in what was then known as Galicia. His mother was a princess of the House of Schwarzenberg. He has been the head of his own historic house for the last forty years, and has one son and two daughters. His wife, a member of the Kalnóky family, died several years ago. "Hohenhauer" was one of those almost unbelievably vast estates of sixteen million acres possessed by a few of the Austrian noblemen under the old régime. In spite of the fact that Prince Hohenhauer was one of the greatest landlords in all Christendom he was a liberal in politics from the first and the author of several of the reform laws in behalf of the people which from time to time were forced upon the most conservative monarch in Europe. He was in sympathy with the revolution and offered his services at once to the new Government. They were declined, and he retired to Switzerland, where he has an estate near St. Moritz, and, it is understood, considerable money invested. His vast estates in what is now Poland were confiscated, but he was one of the wealthiest men in the Empire and is said to have transferred immense sums to the United States before the war."

Clavering dropped the newspaper. Liberal in politics. Immense sums invested in the United States. Judge Trent. There could be no possible doubt as to who the man was. The floor seemed unsteady for a moment.

And yet there was as little doubt that Mary Zattiany bad long since ceased to care for him. _That_ was over fifteen or sixteen years ago. They had known each other in later years, both equally indifferent to the other and to the past. . . . Yes . . . but she had then completely lost the beauty and the charm that had enthralled him, while he was still a man in his prime, who, with that appearance, no doubt had other young and beautiful women in his life.

He may or may not have heard of the metamorphosis. At all events they had been political allies. He would call on her as a matter of course. And possibly out of more than politeness: he may have brought her an important message. Or he might find it expedient to confer with her on his present mission. That he had come on an important mission did not admit of a doubt; but at least he had not gone to her at once. His interest in her, so far, was still impersonal.

Clavering had too much of the arrogance of youth and he was too sure of Mary Zattiany's love for himself, to be apprehensive of the charms of a man of sixty, but he was invaded by a nameless and almost sickening fear. He had very swift and often very sure intuitions, and he was shaken by a premonition that in some manner, which, in his ignorance of the facts he was unable to define, this man's presence in America boded no good to himself.

But Clavering was also a man of swift decisions and resource, and he knew this was no time to lose his head, nor even to play a waiting game. And he must tread warily. Impulsive as he was by nature he could be as wary as a Red Indian when wariness would serve his purpose. He called up Mr. Dinwiddie on the telephone and asked if he might see him at once. It was only half past nine and Mr. Dinwiddie was just finishing his breakfast in bed, but he told his favorite cordially to "come along."

XLIV

"What is it?" asked Mr. Dinwiddie, as Clavering entered his bedroom fifteen minutes later. "This is an early call. Thought you didn't get up till noon."

"Went to bed early last night for a change. I've come to ask a favor. I'll smoke, if you don't mind."

He took a chair beside the bed, where Mr. Dinwiddie, in skull cap and decorous pyjamas, leaned against high pillows, happily digesting his breakfast, with the newspapers beside him. Clavering smoked for a few moments in silence, while his host watched him keenly. He had never seen his young friend in quite this mood. There was a curious deadly stillness about him.

"What is it, Lee?" he asked when curiosity finally got the better of him. "Nothing wrong between you and Mary, I hope? Of course you know it's all over town that you're engaged to her. Don't mind my saying this, do you? And you know you can trust me. Nothing like an old gossip for keeping a confidence sacred."

"Well, I am. But she chooses not to announce it and that is her right. And here is where you can help me. I want you to open your camp in the Adirondacks and give Mary a house party. I suppose Larsing and his wife are still there?"

"Yes, but it's too early----"

"Spring is early this year. The ice must have gone out. And the house is always comfortable; we've often had fires there when people were having sunstroke in New York. I want you to get busy, so that we can leave tomorrow morning----"

"Tomorrow morning? You young dynamo. It can't be done."

"It can. I'll call up the people I want in a few minutes--from here. You can telephone to the camp. Provisions can go tonight. I'll see to that also----"

"But can you get away yourself?"

"I'd get away if I had to resign, but I shan't. I shall break away for two months later anyhow. We have planned to marry in Austria in about a month from now."

"Then why in thunder do you want to run off to the woods with her now? I never heard of anything so unreasonable. She has friends here who'd like to see her until the last minute, you selfish young beggar----"

"It's the most reasonable thing I ever did. Don't insist upon an explanation, Din. Just accept my word that it's a vital matter to me."

"Ah! But I know!" Mr. Dinwiddie's eyes glittered. "Hohenhauer is here. That's the milk in the cocoanut."

Clavering scowled. "What do you mean by that?"

"I--I--well--there was a good deal of talk at the time--but then you know, Lee, I told you the very first time we both saw her that there had been stories about Mary."

"Well, as it happens, she told me about this man, although not his name. Enough, however, for me to know at once this morning who he was. I don't intend she shall see him."

"You don't mean to tell me that you are jealous of Hohenhauer. Why, that was nearly twenty years ago, and he is almost as old as I am."

"I'm not jealous, but I've got a hunch." He scowled again, for he fancied he could see that old story unrolling itself in Dinwiddie's mind. It is one thing to dismiss the past with a lordly gesture and another to see it rise from the dead and peer from old eyes. He went on calmly, however. "I've no faith, myself, in the making of bonfires out of dead ashes, but all the same I scent danger and I intend to get her away and keep her away until the day before she sails; and I'll marry her the morning she does. I'll take no chances of their travelling on the same steamer."

"I see. Perhaps you are right. He's a damn good-looking chap, too, and has that princely distinction peculiar to Austrians. Some European princes look like successful businessmen of the Middle-West. I was once stranded at Abbazia, Austria's Riviera, during a rainy spell, and as there were only two other people in the vast dining-room I thought I'd speak to them. I took for granted they were Americans. He was a big heavy man, with one of those large, round, fat, shrewd, weary faces you see by the hundreds in the lobbies of Chicago hotels. She looked like a New England school-marm, and wore a red plaid waist. Well--he was the reigning prince of Carlstadt-Rudolfstein, one of those two-by-six German principalities, and she was an Austrian archduchess. She was the only Austrian I ever saw that didn't look like one, but her manners were charming and we became great friends and they took me home with them to their beautiful old castle. . . . Ah, those wonderful old German castles! Profiteers living in them today, I suppose. But Hohenhauer is a perfect specimen of his class--and then some. I met him once in Paris. Intensely reserved, but opened up one night at a small dinner. I never met a more charming man in my life. And unquestionably one of the ablest men in Europe. . . . However, he's sixty and you're thirty-four. If he has any influence over her it's political, and in European politics one never knows what dark business is going on under the surface. Good idea to get Mary away. I'll get some fun out of it, too. Who'll you ask?"

"None of your crowd. How many bedrooms have you? I don't remember."

"Ten. If you want a large party you can turn in with me. There are twin beds in every room. I don't know how Mary'll like it; she's a luxurious creature, you know, and we don't go to the woods to be comfortable----"

"You forget she got pretty well used to worse while she was running that hospital. And hardy people never do mind."

"True. I'll give her a room to herself, for I don't see her doubling-up, at all events. That would leave eight good-sized rooms. Don't ask all married couples, Lee, for heaven's sake. Let's have two girls, at least. But the season is still on. Sure you can get anybody?"

"Of course. They're not all pinned down to regular jobs, and will be only too glad to get out of New York after a grinding winter. The novelty of a house party in the mountains at this season will appeal to them. I'll call up Gora first."

He was crossing the room to the telephone when Mr. Dinwiddie said hesitatingly: "And so--so--you're really going to marry Mary? Have you thought what it means? I mean your own career. She'll never live here--she's out of the picture and knows it."

Clavering took down the receiver and called Miss Dwight's number. Mr. Dinwiddie sighed and shrugged his shoulders. But his eyes were bright. He would have a love drama under his very nose.

XLV

Mary's "headache" had continued for two days, but Clavering came to her house by appointment that same afternoon at five o'clock. She kept him waiting fully ten minutes, and wandered back and forth in her room upstairs with none of her usual eagerness to welcome him after even a brief separation. The violence of her revulsion had passed, but she was filled with a vast depression, apathetic, tired, in no mood for love-making. Nor did she feel up to acting, and Clavering's intuitions were often very inconvenient. He would never suspect the black turmoil of these past two days, nor its cause, but it would be equally disconcerting if he attributed her low spirits to the arrival of Hohenhauer. What a fool she had been to have made more than a glancing reference to that last old love-affair, almost forgotten until that night of stark revelation. She must have enjoyed talking about herself more than she had realized, unable to resist the temptation to indulge in imposing details. Or self-justification? Perhaps. It didn't matter, and he must have "placed" Hohenhauer at once this morning, and would imagine that she was depressed at the thought of meeting him. There was no one on earth she wanted to meet less, although she felt a good deal of curiosity as to the object of his visit to Washington.

She heard the maid in the dressing-room and was visited by an inspiration. She called in the woman, gave her a key and told her to go down to the dining-room and bring her a glass of curacoa from the wine-cupboard.

The liqueur sent a glow of warmth through her veins and raised her spirits. Then, reflecting that Clavering never rushed at her in the fashion of most lovers, nor even greeted her with a perfunctory kiss, but waited until the mood for love-making attacked him suddenly, she took a last look at her new tea-gown of corn-flower blue chiffon and went down stairs with a light step.

"Shocking to keep you waiting," she said as they shook hands, "but I came in late. You'll stay to dinner, of course. I had an engagement but broke it, as I'm still feeling a little out of sorts."

"Never saw you look better. Nor in blue before. You look like a lily in a blue vase, or a snow maiden rising from a blue mist. Not that I'm feeling poetic today, but you do look ripping. What gave you a headache? I thought you scorned the ills of the flesh."

"So I do, but I had spent three hours in Judge Trent's office that morning, and you know what these American men are. They keep the heat on no matter what the temperature outside, and every window closed. On Tuesday the sun was blazing in besides, and Judge Trent and the two other men I was obliged to confer with smoked cigars incessantly. It gave me the first headache I'd had for twenty years. I felt as if I'd been poisoned."

She looked up at him, smilingly, from her deep chair as he stood above her on the hearthrug. He didn't believe a word of it: he was convinced she had been advised of Hohenhauer's coming, and that for some reason the news had upset her; but he had no intention of betraying himself. Moreover, he didn't care. He was too intent on his own plans.

"The rest has done you good," he said, smiling also. "But as you were looking rather fagged before you came down with that two-days' headache, I made up my mind that you needed a change and dropped Din a hint to open his camp in the Adirondacks and give you a farewell house-party. He jumped at the idea and it's all arranged. You'll have eight days of outdoor life and some sport, as well as a good rest. He's got a big comfortable camp on a beautiful lake, where we can boat and fish----"

"But Lee----" She was almost gasping.

"No buts. Not only do you need a rest before that long journey but I want these last days with you in the mountains where I can have you almost to myself. It seems to me sometimes that I do not know you at all--nor you me. And to roam with you in the woods during the day and float about that lake at night--it came to me suddenly like a foretaste of heaven. I couldn't stand the thought of the separation otherwise. Besides, here you'd be given a farewell luncheon or dinner every day until you sailed. I'd see nothing of you. And you'd be worn out. You must come, Mary dear."

Mary felt dimly suspicious, but it was possible that he had read his morning papers hastily, or that in his mental turmoil that night she had told him her story he had paid little attention to details, or forgotten them later. He certainly had never alluded to the man since. And this sudden impetuous plan was so like him that he needed no foreign impulse.

But she answered with some hesitation: "I'd like it, of course. And Judge Trent has nothing more for me to sign until the last minute. But--a woman always has a thousand things to do before going on a journey----"

"Your maid can do all that. And pack your trunks. She goes with you, doesn't she? And you'll only need warm sweaters and skirts up there. We never dress. You'll not need a maid."

"Well--but--do you mean to tell me that the whole thing is settled?"

"To the last detail. There'll be twelve of us, including Din."

"Really, Lee, you _are_ high-handed. You might have consulted me first."

"No time to waste on argument. We'll only have a little over a week there as it is. It takes a day to go and another to return, and you'll need one day here in New York before you sail. I made up my mind you should go if I had to take you by force. I _will_ have those last days in the Adirondacks."

Her faint resentment vanished and she felt a languid sense of well-being in this enveloping atmosphere of the tactless imperious male, so foreign to her experience; of freedom from the necessity for independent action; and the prospect was certainly enchanting. Moreover, she would be able to avoid seeing Hohenhauer in surroundings where this strange love-affair of hers had obliterated the past (for the most part!), and she had found, for a time at least, happiness and peace. She would see him in Vienna, of course, and she had no wish to avoid him there; no doubt they would work together and as impersonally as they had sometimes done in the past; but to see him here, even in the drawing-room, which held no sacred memories, would be but another and uglier blot on her already dimming idyl; and a subtle infidelity to this man whose every thought seemed to be of her in spite of all he had to inflame and excite his ego.

And if she remained and Hohenhauer wished to see her she could hardly keep on making excuses for nearly a fortnight. So she merely smiled up at Clavering, who was gazing down at her intently, and said softly: "Of course I'll go. I always have sport things in my wardrobe and I think it a wonderful idea. Now tell me who is going. Miss Dwight, I suppose--and hope. And the De Witt Turners?" Madame Zattiany had no respect whatever for the Lucy Stone League, and invariably forgot the paternal names of the emancipated young wives of the men she found interesting.

"They can't get away. Gora, yes; and Rolly Todd, the Boltons, the Minors, Eva Darling, Babette Gold, Gerald Scores."

"Miss Darling is rather a nuisance. She flung her arms round me the other night at the Minors' and left a pink kiss on my neck. She was very tight. Still, she is amusing, and a favorite of Din's."

"I would have submitted the list to you in the first place, darling, but I knew I should have to take what I could get on such short notice. The only two I really care about are Gora and Todd. But there wasn't a moment to lose. I wish to heaven I'd thought of it before, but that play had to be finished, and it looked as if the date of your sailing might be postponed, after all."

He had no intention of letting her suspect that the wonderful plan was just eight hours old.

"I understand," she said. "When do we start?"

"Tomorrow morning. Eight-thirty. Grand Central."

"Tomorrow morning!" She looked almost as dismayed as Mr. Dinwiddie had done, then laughed and shrugged her shoulders. "Of course it can be done--but----"

"Anything can be done," he said darkly. And then, having got his way, he suddenly felt happy and irresponsible, and made one of his abrupt wild dives at her.

XLVI

The "camp," a large log house, with a great living-room, a small room for guns and fishing-tackle, two bedrooms, besides the servants' wing, downstairs, and eight bedrooms above, stood in a clearing on the western shore of a lake nearly two miles long, and about three-quarters of a mile wide in the centre of its fine oval sweep. The lake itself was in a cup of the mountains, whose slopes in the distance looked as if covered with fur, so dense were the woods. Only one high peak, burnt bare by fire, was still covered with snow.

The camp was in a grove of pines, but the trees that crowded one another almost out into the lake among the lily pads were spruce and balsam and maple.

The party arrived at half-past nine in the evening, and crossed the lake in a motor launch. It was very dark and the forest surrounding the calm expanse of water looked like an impenetrable wall, an unscalable rampart. There was not a sound but the faint chugging of the motor. The members of the party, tired after their long trip on the train and two hours' drive up the rough road from the station to the lake, surrendered to the high mountain stillness, and even Rollo Todd, who had been in his best spirits all day, fell silent and forgot that he was a jolly good fellow, remembered only that he was a poet. Eva Darling, who had flirted shamelessly with Mr. Dinwiddie from New York to Huntersville, forgot to hold his hand, and he forgot her altogether.

Mary had a sudden and complete sense of isolation. Memory had played her a trick. These were the mountains of her girlhood, and she was Mary Ogden once more. Even the future that had been so hard of outline in her practical mind, that unescapable future just beyond a brief interval in an Austrian mountain solitude, seemed to sink beyond a horizon infinitely remote. Europe was as unreal as New York. She vowed, if it were necessary to vow, that she would give neither a thought while she was here in the wilderness. And as she was a thorough-going person she knew she would succeed.

She took her first step when Mr. Dinwiddie was showing them to their rooms. She drew Gora into her own room and shut the door.

"I want you to do me a favor--if you will, dear Miss Dwight," she said.

"Of course." Gora wondered what was coming.

"I want you to ask the others to abandon their subtle game while we are up here and ignore the subjects of Lee's play, his future, his genius, which will wither outside of New York, and cease to attempt to strike terror into my soul. You may tell them that we are to be married in a month or two from now--in Austria--but that I shall do nothing to interfere with his career; nor protest against his passing a part of each year in the United States. Ask them kindly to refrain from congratulations, or any allusion to the subject whatever. We have only eight days here, and I should like it to be as nearly perfect as possible."

Gora had had the grace to blush. "They have been worried, and I'm afraid they hatched a rather naughty plot. But they'll be delighted to have their apprehensions banished--and of course they'll ignore the entire matter. They won't say a word to Clavey, either."

"They've not made the slightest impression on him, so it really doesn't matter whether they do or not. But--when it dawned on me what they were up to, and the sound reasoning beneath it, I will confess that I had some bad half-hours. Of course, Lee has a right to his own life. I had hoped he would help me in my own field, but he could not if he would. I have come to see that plainly. I do not mean to say that these amiable machinations of your friends caused me for a moment to consider giving him up. I have survived worse----" She shuddered as she recalled that hideous hour with Agnes Trevor, but promptly whipped the memory back to cover. "But it made me very uncomfortable, and I realized there was nothing to do but compromise. We must take what we can get in this world, my dear Miss Dwight, and be thankful for a candle when we cannot have the sun."

And Gora, feeling unaccountably saddened, summoned the others to her room and told them of Madame Zattiany's announcement and request. Some gasped with astonishment and delight, others were darkly suspicious, but all gave their word unhesitatingly to "forget it" while they were in camp. Those that regarded Madame Zattiany as the most fascinating woman they had ever known, but also as an intrigante of dark and winding ways, made a mental reservation to "say a few things to Clavey" before he had time to buy his ticket for the Dolomites.

Mary, having accomplished her purpose, swept the whole thing from her mind and looked about her room with pleasure. The walls were ceiled with a wood that gleamed like gold in the candle-light, and gave out a faint scent of the forest. On the bare floor were two or three small blue rugs, there were pretty blue counterpanes on the beds, and blue curtains on the small windows. It looked like a young girl's room and was indescribably sweet and fresh. Her own room at her father's camp, on another lake many miles away, had been not unlike it. Moreover, it was pleasantly warm, for the caretaker had made a fire in the furnace the day before. A window was open and she could hear the soft lap of the water among the lily pads, but there was no moon and she could see nothing but a dim black wall on the opposite shore. And the silence! It might not have been broken since the glacial era, when mighty masses of ice ground these mountains into permanent form, and the air was filled with the roaring horrors of desolation. But they had gone, and left infinite peace behind them. That peace had endured for many thousands of years and it was unimaginable that any but the puny sounds of man would disturb that vast repose for thousands of years to come. The peaks of those old Adirondacks, their quiet lakes, their massive forests, looked as deathless as time itself. "The Great North Woods" could not have been more remote from, more scornful of the swarming cities called civilization, if they had been on another star.

Luxury in camp did not extend to hot water in the bedrooms, particularly as Mr. Dinwiddie had had no time to assemble a corps of servants, and as Mary washed her face and hands in what felt like melted ice, the shock made her tingle and she would have liked to sing.

A deep bell sounded. Doors flew open up and down the corridor, which was immediately filled with an eager chatter. Rollo Todd stamped down the stair singing "Oh, Hunger, Sweet Hunger!" The others took it up in various keys, and when Mary went down a moment later they were all swarming about the dining-table at the end of the living-room.

This room, which was fully fifty feet long and half as wide, was lit by lamps suspended from the ceiling and heated by an immense fireplace in which logs, that looked like half-sections of trees, were blazing in a pile as high as a small bonfire. The walls were ceiled and decorated with antlered deerheads, woven bright Indian blankets, snap-shots of Mr. Dinwiddie's many guests, and old Indian weapons. In one corner, above a divan covered with gay cushions, were bookshelves filled with old novels. A shelf had been built along one side of the room for fine specimens of Indian pottery and basket weaving. The comfortable chairs were innumerable, and there was another divan, and a victrola. The guide had filled the vases with balsam, whose pungent odor blended with the resinous fumes of the burning logs; and through the open door came the scents of the forest.

"Ideal place for everything but spooning," cried Todd. "The woods and the lake are all right in fine weather, but what do you expect us to do if it rains, mine host? D'you mean to say you haven't any little retiring rooms?"

"Not a thing unless you retire to the gun-room, but who comes up to the woods to spoon in the house?"

"Rolly never spoons, anyhow," announced Eva Darling, whose blue eyes, however, were languishing toward the table. "But it makes him unhappy to think he can't burst in on somebody----"

"Hold your tongue, Evy. You don't know what you're talking about. Because I'm quite insensible to your charms, don't fool yourself that I'm an anchorite. I merely prefer brunettes."

"Come, come, children!" Mr. Dinwiddie was rubbing his hands at the end of the table covered with blue china and mounds of home-made cake. "Stop quarrelling and sit down. Anywhere. No ceremony here."

Some of the guests were in their seats. The others fairly swooped into theirs, entirely regardless of anything so uneatable as neighbors. Mrs. Larsing, a tall, red-haired, raw-boned New England woman, had entered, bearing an enormous platter of fried trout, fresh from the lake. Larsing, burnt almost as dark as an Indian, followed with a plate of potatoes boiled in their jackets balanced on one hand, and a small mountain of johnny cake on the other. He returned in a moment with two large platters of sliced ham and cold boiled beef, and the guests were left to wait on themselves.

The dinner was the gayest Mary had ever attended, for even the Sophisticates, however lively, preserved a certain formality in town; when she was present, at all events. Rollo Todd, broke into periodical war whoops, to Mr. Dinwiddie's manifest delight. The others burst into song, while waiting for the travelling platters. Eva Darling got up twice and danced by herself, her pale bobbed head and little white face eerily suspended in the dark shadows of the great room. Other feet moved irresistibly under the table. Good stories multiplied, and they laughed uncontrollably at the worst of the jokes.

They drank little, for the supply was limited, but the altitude was four thousand feet and the thin light air went to their heads. They were New Yorkers suddenly snatched from the most feverish pitch of modern civilization, but no less primitive in soul than woodsmen who had never seen a city, and the men would have liked to put on war paint and run through the forest with tomahawks.

Todd, when the dinner was over, did seize a tomahawk from the wall, drape himself in an Indian blanket, and march up and down the room roaring out terrific battle-cries. Three minutes later, Minor and Bolton had followed his example, and marched solemnly behind him, brandishing their weapons and making unearthly noises. Mary, from her chair by the hearth, watched them curiously. At first it was merely the exuberant spirits of their release and the unaccustomed altitude that inspired them, but their countenances grew more and more sombre, their eyes wilder, their voices more war-like. They were no longer doing a stunt, they were atavistic. Their voices reverberated across the lake.

One by one the other men had joined them, until even Mr. Dinwiddie was in the procession, marching with loud stamping feet round and round the big room. The cries became shorter, menacing, abrupt, imperative. The high lamps cast strange shadows on their lost faces. The voices grew hoarse, dropped to low growls, their faces changed from ferocity to a mournful solemnity until they looked even more like primal men than before; but they continued their marching and stamping until Gora, who, with the other women, had begun to fear that the rhythm would bring down the house, had the inspiration to insert a Caruso disk into the victrola; and as those immortal notes flung themselves imperiously across that wild scene, the primitive in the men dropped like a leaden plummet, and they threw themselves on the floor by the fire. But they smoked their pipes in silence. They had had something that no woman could give them nor share, and there was an ungallant wish in every manly heart that they had left the women at home.

Caruso was succeeded by Emma Eames, and the great lost diva by Farrar and Scotti. Then, the concert over, a yawning party stumbled upstairs to bed and not a sound was heard from them until the first bell rang at seven o'clock next morning.

XLVII

"You forgot me last night."

"Yes, I did." Clavering smiled unrepentantly.

"You looked horribly primitive."

"No more so than I felt."

They were in a boat on the lake. The air was crisp and cold although the sun blazed overhead. Clavering was happy in a disreputable old sweater that he kept at the camp, and baggy corduroy trousers tucked into leggins, but Mary wore an angora sweater and skirt of a vivid grass green and a soft sport hat of the same shade, the rim turned down over eyes that might never have looked upon life beyond these woods and mountains. Clavering was hatless and smoked his pipe lazily as he pulled with long slow strokes.

Other boats were on the lake, the women in bright sweaters and hats that looked like floating autumn leaves, and the lake was liquid amber. A breeze blew warm scents out of the woods. The water lilies had opened to the sun and looked oddly artificial in their waxen beauty, at the feet of those ancient trees. Stealthy footsteps behind that wall of trees, or a sudden loud rustling, told of startled deer. The distant peak looked to be enamelled blue and white, and the long slopes of the nearer mountains were dark green under a blue mist, the higher spruce rising like Gothic spires.

Clavering smiled into her dancing eyes. "You look about fourteen," he said tenderly.

"I don't feel much more. I spent a month or two every year in these woods--let us play a game. Make believe that I am Mary Ogden and you have met me here for the first time and are deliberately setting out to woo me. Begin all over again. It--you, perhaps!--was what I always dreamed of up here. I used to row on the lake for hours by myself, or sit alone in the very depths of the woods. Do you think that famous imagination of yours could accomplish a purely personal feat? I haven't nearly as much but I'm quite sure I could. And then--after--we could just go on from here."

He looked at her in smiling sympathy. "Done. We met last night, Miss Ogden, and I went down at the first shot. I'm now out to win you or perish in the attempt. But before we get down to business I'll just inform you of a resolution I took a day or two ago. I shall get a license the day we return and marry you the morning you sail."

"Oh!" And then she realized in a blinding flash what she had fought out of her consciousness: that she had shrunk from the consummation of marriage, visualized a long period of intermittent but superficial love-making and delightful companionship, an exciting but incomplete idyl of mind and soul and senses. . . . Underneath always an undertone of repulsion and incurable ennui . . . the dark residuum of immedicable disillusion . . . that what she had really wanted was love with its final expression eliminated.

But she realized it only as a fact, . . . a psychological study of another . . . buried down there in an artificial civilization she had forgotten . . . in that past that belonged to Marie Zattiany . . . with which Mary Ogden had nothing to do . . . her mind at last was as young as her body, and this man had accomplished the miracle. The present and the future were his.

She looked up into his eyes, anxious but imperious, and answered softly: "Why not?"

"Exactly. I've no desire to take that long journey with you, but I'm not going to take any chances, either. . . . Ah! Here's an idea that beats the other hollow. When the party breaks up we'll go down to Huntersville with them, marry there, and return to the camp. I don't see how your Dolomites could beat this for a honeymoon. Why in thunder should we trail all the way over to Europe to find seclusion when we must return in two or three months, anyhow? It's a scandalous waste. We can go to the Dolomites for our second honeymoon--we'll have one every year. And this is much more in the picture if you want to be Mary Ogden again. She never would have proposed anything so elaborate and unnecessary. Say yes, and don't be more than a minute about it."

Mary drew in her breath sharply. The plan made a violent and irresistible appeal. There would be no long interval for possible reversal, for contacts in which it might be difficult to hold fast to her new faith. But what excuse could she make to leave him later? . . . Later? Did Austria really exist? Did she care? Let the future take care of itself. Her horizon, a luminous band, encircled these mountains. . . . She smiled into his ardent eyes. "Very well. I'll write to Hortense today and tell her to send me up a trousseau of sorts. And now--you are to understand that you have not dared to propose to me yet and are suffering all the qualms of uncertainty, for I am a desperate flirt, and took a long walk in the woods this morning with Mr. Scores."

"Very well, Miss Ogden, I will now do my best to make a fool of myself, and as soon as we return to camp will telegraph to New York for a five-pound box of chocolates."

"Hark! Hark! The Lark!" shouted Todd as he rowed past with Babette Gold. "Only there isn't a lark or any other bird in these woods that I've been able to discover."

"Birds sing one at a time," shouted back Clavering. "Choir of jealous soloists."

He rowed into a little cove and they gazed into the dim green woods, but the maple leaves grew almost to the ground, and it was like peering through the tiny changing spaces of a moving curtain through which one glimpsed green columns flecked with gold.

He beached the boat, and they walked, single file, up a narrow run-way made by the deer. Everywhere was that leafy whispering curtain. Between the rigid spruce and soft maples were fragrant balsams, and ferns, and an occasional pine with its pale green spikes. They passed enormous boulders detached from the glaciers that had ground mountains in their embrace, but today things of mere beauty in their coats of pink and green and golden moss.

Their footsteps made no sound on the mossy path, and they came suddenly upon a deer and his doe drinking at a pool. But the antlered head was flung back instantly, the magnificent buck wheeled on his hind legs, gave a leap and went crashing through the forest snorting his protesting fury. The doe scampered after, her white-lined tail standing up perfectly straight.

They sat down on a log, dried and warmed by the sun in this open space, and talked for two hours. There was no need for careful avoidance of dangerous subjects. Clavering had come to these woods nearly every year since he had made the north his home, and she had forgotten nothing of her woodland lore. When one is "in the woods," as the great Adirondacks are familiarly called, one rarely talks of anything but their manifold offerings. It is easy enough to forget the world. They both had had their long tramps, their rough campings-out, more or less exciting adventures. When a loud bell, hung in a frame outside the camp, summoned them to dinner, they walked out briskly. Once, as the trail widened, he touched her fingers tentatively. She let her own curl for a moment, then gave him a provocative glance over her shoulder and hurried on.

XLVIII

Clavering, when making up his list with Mr. Dinwiddie (by courtesy), had, with the exception of Todd, who was always the life of any party, Gora, whom he always liked to have at hand, and Eva Darling, who was a favorite of "The Ambassador to the Court of the Sophisticates," as Todd had long since dubbed him, chosen his guests at random, taking whom he could get, careful merely to ask those who, so far as he knew, were on speaking terms.

But he hardly could have gathered together a more congenial and lively party, nor one more delighted to leave New York for the woods. Henry Minor, editor of one of the intellectual and faintly radical magazines, whose style was so involved in his efforts to be both "different" and achieve an unremitting glitter, that he had recently received a petition to issue a glossary, was as amiable as a puppy in the society of his friends and when in the woods talked in words of one syllable and discovered a mighty appetite. His wife, who had demonstrated her originality by calling herself Mrs. Minor, was what is known as a spiffing cook and a top-notch dresser. She had, in fact, the most charming assortment of sports clothes in the camp. Eva Darling, who danced for pastime and illustrated for what little bread she was permitted to eat at home, was as lively as a grasshopper and scarcely less devastating. Babette Gold wore her black hair in smooth bands on either side of the perfect oval of her face, and had the sad and yearning gaze of the unforgiven Magdalen, and she had written two novels dealing with the domesticities of the lower middle class, treating with a clinical wealth of detail the irritable monotonies of the nuptial couch and the artless intimacies of the nursery. She smoked incessantly, could walk ten miles at a stretch, and was as passionless as a clam. Gerald Scores, who wore a short pointed beard and looked the complete artist, was one of the chief hopes of the intellectual drama cunningly commercialized; and as capable as Clavering of shutting up his genius in a water-tight compartment, and enjoying himself in the woods. He was mildly flirtatious, but looked upon emotional intensity in the personal life of the artist as a criminal waste of force. Halifax Bolton, who claimed to be the discoverer of the Younger Generation (in fiction) and was just twenty-eight himself, was a critic of formidable severity and the author of at least five claques. The intense concentration of writing routed his sense of humor, but he had as many droll stories in his repertoire as Todd. His wife, the famous "Alberta Jones," fierce Lucy Stoner, was the editor, at a phenomenal salary, of one of the "Woman's Magazines," and wrote short stories of impeccable style and indifferent content for the _Century_ and the _Dial_.

They were all intimate friends and argued incessantly and amiably. And they were all devoted to Mr. Dinwiddie, whom they addressed as Excellence, without accent.

When Mary and Clavering arrived at the camp in response to the dinner bell, Eva Darling, who wore very pretty pink silk bloomers under her sport skirt, was turning hand-springs down the living-room, while the rest of the party applauded vociferously, and Mrs. Larsing, who was entering with the fried chicken, nearly dropped the platter.

"Just in time, Madame Zattiany," cried Minor. "This is the sixth round and she is panting----"

But she interrupted him. "'Mary'--from this time on. I insist. You make me feel an outsider. I won't be addressed in that formal manner nor answer to that foreign name again."

"Mary! Mary! Mary!" shouted the party with one accord, and Clavering drew a long breath. He had wondered how she would manage to feel Mary Ogden under the constant bombardment of a name that was a title in more ways than one. But he might have trusted her to manage it!'

In the afternoon Mrs. Minor suggested having tea in the woods, and they all walked--single file--five miles to drink their tea and eat their cakes (Larsing carrying the paraphernalia) in a pine grove on the summit of a hill, and then walked back again, clamoring for supper. Mary had been monopolized by Scores and Bolton, occasionally vouchsafing Clavering a glance. During the evening they were all too pleasantly tired and replete to dance or to play the charades they had planned, but lay about comfortably, listening to a concert of alternate arias and jazz. Clavering did not have a word alone with Mary. She sat on one of the divans between Gora and Todd, while Scores lay on the floor at her feet, his head on a cushion, one foot waving over a lifted knee, the perfect picture of the contented playwright. They kept up a continuous murmur, punctuated with gales of laughter. Clavering had sulkily taken a chair beside Babette Gold, whose metallic humor sometimes amused him, but she went sound asleep before his eyes, and he could only gaze into the fire and console himself with visions of a week hence, when these cursed people had gone and he was the most fortunate man on earth.

His room was downstairs next to Mr. Dinwiddie's, and he made up his mind to let himself out softly at midnight, throw pebbles at her window and whisper to her as she leaned from her casement. It was a scene that if introduced into a modern play would have driven him from the theatre and tipped his pen with vitriol next morning, but it appealed to him, somehow, as a fitting episode in his own high romance. But he was asleep before his head touched the pillow, and did not lift an eyelash until the first bell roused him at seven o'clock. Then, however, he lay for some time thinking, soberly.

XLIX

The hour between seven and eight was a lively one in the upper corridor. There was only one bathroom on the second floor. Scores and Miss Gold took their morning plunge in the lake, but the rest preferred the less drastic shower, and there was a continual darting to and fro of forms clad in bath-robe or kimono; the vanquished peeping through door-cracks waiting for the bathroom door to open--signal for another wild rush down the hall, a scuffle at the door, a triumphant slam and hoot, and loud vituperations from the defeated. Mary cannily waited until the last, and came down, clad in a white sweater and heavy white tweed skirt, after the others had cleared the generous platter of ham and eggs, and the mountain of corn bread was a hillock of crumbs.

"Oh, Mary!" said Mr. Dinwiddie, reprovingly, "and you as prompt as royalty. In camp----"

"I've no thought of going without my breakfast," said Mary unrepentantly. "Ring the bell, Din."

The men had risen, but Clavering alone had determination in his eye. He pulled out a chair beside his own, and Mary accepted it gracefully, waving a morning greeting to the others.

"How good of you to keep this chair for me, Mr. Clavering," she murmured. "It is shocking of me to be so lazy."

"I'm sick of this game," growled Clavering. "If you act today----"

"Shh! I am sure you are going to take me out on the lake immediately after breakfast."

His amiability was immediately restored, but his gaiety was somewhat forced. "You are looking charming this morning, Miss Ogden. I wished last night that there was a guitar or even a banjo in the camp, that I might serenade beneath your window."

And Mary actually blushed. She had slept dreamlessly, and between the light mountain air and her new rôle, she felt as light-hearted as Eva Darling, who was holding Mr. Dinwiddie's hand openly.

"Oh, Excellence!" cried Mrs. Minor from the other end of the table. "What do you say to having a picnic lunch? Didn't you tell me that you knew of a lovely gorge about six miles from here? Steak broiled between forked sticks! Potatoes roasted in the ashes! Flapjacks! Heavenly."

"Anything you say," replied Mr. Dinwiddie rather tonelessly. "Want to put it to the vote?"

"Let me answer for the crowd," commanded Todd. "It is our duty when in the woods to eat our meals after as much unnecessary toil, and to enjoy as much discomfort, as is humanly possible. Otherwise we might as well stay in town. We'll hilariously tramp six miles with packs, sit on the damp ground, extract earwigs, eat burnt steak and half-cooked potatoes, and then tramp back again, our spirits gradually rising at the prospect of a decent meal eaten in comfort----"

"Kill-joy!" cried Minor. "Don't we come to the woods to tramp? I want to lose twenty pounds this trip, and if you don't you ought to. I vote we make Rolly carry a sack of potatoes."

"It's agreed then?" asked Mr. Dinwiddie, veiling his hope that it was not. But the assent was general. They were all as excited over the prospect of a picnic as if they were slum children about to enjoy their first charitable outing, and it was settled that they were to start at ten o'clock. Mrs. Minor and Miss Gold went into the kitchen to help Mrs. Larsing make sandwiches and salads, and the others ran down to the lake.

L

Clavering had tied the boat to a tree in a little inlet far down the lake, and they were walking through a wood of spruce trees and balsam. There was no leafy curtain here, although they could see one swaying on either side through open vistas between the rigid columns of the spruce. A trail was hardly necessary for there was no undergrowth, and although the trees were set close together they were easily circumnavigated.

It was some time since they had spoken. His face was graver than she had ever seen it, and she waited for him to speak. She almost could feel those unuttered words beating on the silence of the woods. There was nothing else to break that silence but the faint constant murmur in the tree-tops, and once, beyond that leafy curtain, the sudden trilling of a solitary bird. Again, the tremendousness of this high isolation swept over her. The camp and its gay party might have been on some far distant lake.

He put his arm around her firmly. "I am not going to pretend any further," he said. "It is too big for that. And you have never been anything but Mary Ogden to me, except, perhaps, on that night I have practically dismissed from my mind. I called you Mary Ogden to myself until I learned your new name, and I don't think that name has ever come into my thoughts of you. And although you slipped on another skin with it you were always Mary Ogden underneath. You needed a new name for your new rôle, but, like any actress on the stage, it had nothing to do with your indestructible personality. I say this because I want you to understand that although I cannot play up to your little comedy any longer and go through the forms of wooing you as if you were a girl--I shouldn't like you half as well if you were--I do not think of you or wish you to think of yourself as anything but Mary Ogden."

He paused a moment, and she slipped her arm about him and they walked on through the wood.

"I cannot go on with it because these days up here that we can spend almost altogether alone, if we will, are too sacred to waste on an amusing but futile game. Do you realize that we do not know each other very well? I sometimes wonder if you know me at all. From the time I fell in love with you until you promised to marry me, I was at one sort of fever-pitch, and when I got to work on that play I was at another. No writer while exercising an abnormal faculty is quite sane. His brain is several pitches above normal and his nerves are like hot taut wires--that hum like the devil. If this were not the case he would not be an imaginative writer at all. But he certainly is in no condition to reveal himself to a woman. I have made wild and sporadic love to you--sporadic is the word, for between my work and your friends, we have had little time together--and I don't think I have ever taken you in my arms with the feeling that you were the woman I loved, not merely the woman I desired. And I believe that I love you even more than I desire you. You are all that, but so much--so much--more."

She had fixed her startled eyes on him, but he did not turn his head.

"There has always been a lot of talk about the soul. Sentimentalists wallow in the word, and realists deride it. What it really is I do not pretend to know. Probably as good a word as any--and certainly a very mellifluous word--for some obscure chemical combination of finer essence than the obvious material part of us, that craves a foretaste of immortality while we are still mortal. Perhaps we are descended from the gods after all, and unless we listen when they whisper in this unexplorable part of our being, we find only a miserable substitute for happiness, and love turns to hate. Whatever it is that golden essence demands, I have found it in you, and if circumstances had been different I should have known it long ago. I know now what you meant that night when you told me you had spent many distracted years looking for what no man could give you, and although I doubted at that time I could even guess what your own mysterious essence demanded, I know now--still vaguely, for it is something as far beyond the defining power of words as the faith of the Christian. It can never be seen, nor heard, nor expressed, but it is there. And only once in a lifetime does any one mortal have it to give to another. A man may love many times, but he is a god-man only once."

He held her more closely, for she was trembling, but he continued to walk on, guiding her automatically through the trees, for his eyes were almost vacant, as if their vision had been reversed.

"I have had some hours of utter despair, in spite of the double excitement of these past weeks, for it has seemed to me that I was no nearer to you than I had been in the beginning. There was a sense of unreality about the whole affair. At first it seemed to me the most romantic thing that could happen to any man, and it was incredible that I had been chosen the hero of such an extraordinary romance--intensified, if anything, by the fact that it was set in roaring New York, where you have to talk at the top of your voice to hear yourself think. . . . But that passed--in a measure. I was beset by the fear--at times, I mean: I was not always in a state to look inward--that you were slipping away. Not that I doubted for a moment you would marry me, but that your innermost inscrutable self had withdrawn, and that you accepted what must have appeared to be my own attitude--that we were merely two vital beings, who saw in each other a prospect of a superior sort of sensual delight----"

"That is not true," she interrupted him fiercely. "But you seemed to me to be in that phase when a man can think of nothing else. If I hadn't hoped--and believed--in you against all I knew of men, I'd never have gone on with it."

"I'm sure that is true. I must have disappointed you horribly. You had felt the bond from the beginning, and I can imagine what you must have dreamed I alone could give you. The trouble was that I didn't realize that I alone was in fault, at the time. That boiling pot in my brain was making too much noise. But I can assure you that I have returned to normal, and if I thought I couldn't satisfy you I'd let you go without a word. But you know that I can, don't you?"

She nodded.

"What is it, I wonder?" He sighed. "I wish I knew. But it is enough to feel. . . . You must understand that in spite of the erratic creature you have known since you refused to marry me at once and left me with no resource but to let that play boil out, I am man first and a writer incidentally. I also have a stronger ambition to be your husband than to write plays. If I don't strangle what talent I have it is because I must have the money to be independent of newspaper work. Otherwise I should have neither peace of mind nor be able to live abroad with you. I know that you cannot be happy here, and I am not a victim of that ancient myth that two people who love each other can be happy anywhere. Environment is half the battle--for the super-civilized, at all events. But you shall never have another dose of the writer. I'll write my plays in New York and rush production. The greater part of the year I shall spend with you in Europe, and I cannot think of anything I'd like more--why, the very night I first saw you I was longing with all my soul to get out of New York and over to the other side of the world---- Why, Mary! You are not crying? You! I never believed you could----"

"I--I--did not believe it either. . . . But, are you sure? Could you reconcile yourself? You seem so much a part of New York, of this strange high-pitched civilization. If you are not sure--if you are only tired of New York for the moment. . . . I--yes, I will! I'll give it all up and live here. Of course I love New York itself--was it not my Mary Ogden home? And there are delightful people everywhere. . . . No doubt my dream of doing great things in Europe was mere vanity----"

"Do you believe that?"

"Perhaps not. But, after all, what I tried to do might be so easily frustrated in that cauldron--why should I risk personal happiness--the most precious and the rarest thing in life, for what may be a chimera--wasted years and a wasted life. Why are we made as we are, if to coax that hidden spark into a steady flame is not our highest destiny? It certainly is our manifest right. . . . Dreams of doing great things in this world are nine-tenths personal vanity. I believe that when we leave this planet we go to a higher star, where our incompleteness here will be made complete; and perhaps we are spared a term of probation if we make ourselves as complete here as mortal conditions will permit. And, possibly, once in a great while, two human beings are permitted to effect that completeness together."

They were both in an exalted mood. The wood was very still, its beauty incomparable. And they might already have been on another star.

Across that divine balsam-scented stillness came the deep imperative notes of a bell.

Clavering twitched his shoulders impatiently.

"Let them go on their screaming picnic," he said. "We stay here. Did you mean that, Mary?"

"Yes, I meant it. We will not go to Europe at all--except to visit my Dolomites some day. When you are writing I'll come up here."

"I don't know that I shall ask that sacrifice of you. A part of your brain is asleep now, but it is a very active and insistent part when awake. In time you might revert--and resentment is a fatal canker; but let's leave it open. It is generally a mistake to settle things off-hand. Let them alone and they settle themselves."

"Very well. At all events, while we are here, I shall not give it another thought. The present at least is perfect."

"Yes, it is perfect!" He put both arms about her. The past was a blank to both. Their pulsing lips met in the wonder and the ecstasy of the first kiss of youth, of profound and perfect and imperishable love. They clung together exalted and exulting and for the moment at least they were one.

LI

They ate their dinner under the amused eyes of Mrs. Larsing, who had served dinners à deux before to couples that had "lost their way." Afterward they sat by the fire and talked desultorily: a great deal about themselves; sometimes wandering to the subjects that had interested them most before they had met each other. Clavering told her of the many plays he had written, and burned; because in his inordinate respect for the drama he had found them, when not wholly bad, too good to be good enough. But the long practice had given him a certain mastery of technique, and when she had set his brain on fire he had had less trouble than most young playwrights in compelling his imagination to adapt itself to the inexorable framework. He had always felt that the imagination, what is called, for want of a better term, the "creative faculty," was there, but it was lethargic; it sometimes roused itself to spurts and flashes during wakeful nights, but slept like a boa-constrictor that had swallowed a pig when he tried to invoke it. No doubt, as Gora had told him, his life had been too easy and agreeable; he made a good deal of money with no particular effort, he was a favorite with the cleverest men and women in New York, and he had no one to think of but himself. His mother was dead and his sisters married. And there was no doubt that if you were on top, a personality, New York was the most enchanting place in the world to live in, just as it must be the most unsatisfactory for the poor and insignificant. To have conquered New York meant more--several thousand times more--than conquering all the rest of the United States put together, with New York left out. Moreover, it was the only place where you could have any real fun, if you wanted your fun with the sort of men who drifted to New York from all parts of the nation as naturally as pilgrims went to Mecca. If it was your fate to be a politician, Washington, of course, was the goal, but that, in his opinion, was merely moving from a little small-town to a big one, and he thanked his stars he did not have to live in a place where there was nothing but politics and society. In New York you had only to help yourself to any phase of life you wanted.

Mary smiled as she remembered the contemptuous remark of another New York convert: "Oh, Washington is merely an island outside of New York," and she fell to wondering what New York would have been like if it had not been fed so persistently by those streams of eager and ambitious brains debouching into it from every part of a by no means unambitious and negligible commonwealth. Another island, probably. Certainly it was the most exhilarating place in the world today, with its atmosphere of invincible security and prosperity, its surging tides of life. No wonder it was impossible for the intensive New Yorker to realize that four thousand miles away a greater world was falling to ruin.

She told him something of the old political life of Vienna, continually agitated by some "Balkan Question"; of the general dislike of the "Heir," whose violent death at Sarajevo had been the death knell of European peace; apprehensions of the day when he should ascend the throne, for he was intensely clerical and reactionary. If he had survived until the old Emperor's death, and there had been no war, it was doubtful if there would not have been a "palace revolution" within six months of his succession. It was also possible that the people would have had their revolution, for they were becoming enlightened and discontented, and powerful men in the highest offices of the Government were in sympathy with them.

"I suppose you mean this Prince Hohenhauer for one," said Clavering.

"Hohenhauer believed that every throne in Europe would be overturned before the middle of the twentieth century, and that it was the part of wise leaders to prepare not only themselves but the people for a republican form of government. He had the greatest admiration for the principles on which this Republic was founded, and said that Europe was to be congratulated that we had made the mistakes for her to avoid. Much as the rest of the world congratulates itself that Bolshevism was tried out in Russia and made a ghastly mess of improving the condition of the underdog before the masses in other countries had time to lose their heads. I've no doubt that he will be the next Chancellor of Austria, and that when he gets the reins of power in his hands, he'll keep a firm hold on them, which is more than any one else has done----"

"What do you suppose has brought him to this country?"

"I fancy he has come to obtain the moral support of the American Government in whatever plan he may have made for putting Austria on her feet again."

"Have you any idea of what that plan may be?" Clavering was watching her intently, his ear attuned to every inflection of her voice. But her tones were as impersonal as if reciting a page out of ancient history, and her gaze was frank and direct.

"I can only guess. Personally I should think his present plan would be an alliance with Bavaria and other South German States--a South German Confederacy. That would make a powerful combination, and as Bavaria has always hated Prussia, she would be the last to lend herself to any schemes of vengeance the north may cherish--particularly if she remains a republic. And, of course, she would assume her share of the Allied debt. . . . It would be a wonderful thing if it could be brought off. Vienna"--her eyes sparkled--"Vienna, of course, would be the capital--and again one of the great capitals of Europe. Perhaps the greatest."

"Were you ever closely associated with Hohenhauer in any of his schemes?"

"He had no immediate schemes then. He only awaited events. While the old Emperor lived no move was possible; he was most illogically adored by his people. But Hohenhauer told me more than once that he was only biding his time."

"And what of that preposterous estate of his in the old Galicia--sixteen million acres, wasn't it? Did he expect to hang on to that under a popular form of government?"

"He would have retained the castle and a few hundred acres, for he naturally had a great affection for his birthplace; and divided the rest among the people, whose natural inheritance it was. But he could do nothing until the proper time, for such an act would undoubtedly have resulted in confiscation and banishment. He would have accomplished no good, and lost his immediate power for usefulness besides. Like all those old-world statesmen, he knows how to play a waiting game."

"Sounds like a great man--if there are any such."

"I should certainly call him a great man," said Mary, but still with that note of complete personal indifference in her voice. "He not only has immense brain power and personality, but farsight and a thorough understanding of the people, and sympathy with them. Even the Social-Democrats liked and trusted him. And he has more than the ordinary politician's astuteness in trimming his sails; but coming out, nevertheless, at the end of the course exactly at the point he had aimed for. If he captures the bridge, to change the simile, he'll steer Austria out of her deep waters. No doubt of that."

"Exactly what was the part you intended to play in Austria?" he asked. "You have never told me."

"I thought we were not to talk of that. It is impossible to make deliberate plans, anyhow. Only, there is a part for any one who loves the country and has the brains and the wealth and the political knowledge to help her."

"I have never quite understood why it should be Austria. Why not Hungary? After all----"

"I never cared for anything in Hungary but the castle, which was wonderfully situated in the mountains of Transylvania. The surroundings were wild beyond description and the peasants the most picturesque and interesting in Europe. But even if Buda Pesth had appealed to me socially, which it never did, there were deep personal reasons that made me dislike Hungary--I never spent a night in the Zattiany palace until I turned it into a hospital. But Vienna! I always lived in Vienna when I could, even during my first years in Europe, and later I made it my home. It is the most fascinating city, to me at least, in the world. Besides, Hungary is in the hands of Horthy and Bethlen, who have no more idea of making a republic of it than of permitting any one else to be king. There is no rôle for----"

"Hullo! Hullo! Hullo!"

Clavering sprang to his feet. "Shall we take the bull by the horns and go to meet them?" he asked. "Poor devils! They'll hate us for looking so fresh."

LII

They were forced to submit to a vast amount of good-natured chaffing, for they had invited it, but it was the sort of chaffing with which this amiable company would have victimized any pair that had recently met, and found each other's society suddenly preferable to that of the crowd.

They were all very tired. Mr. Dinwiddie, after refreshing his guests and himself with highballs, went to his room and to bed. Rollo Todd announced that it was time to go back to New York to rest, and all fell down on the divans or floor for half an hour before going up to revive themselves with a hot and cold shower.

But fatigue passes away quickly in the mountains. They were as lively as ever the next morning, although they unanimously elected to spend the day on the lake or idling in the woods. Clavering and Mary walked to another gorge he knew of and sat for hours among boulders and ferns on the brink of the stream, and surrounded by the maples with their quietly rustling leaves.

When they returned, Miss Darling, attired in ferns, was executing what she called the wood-nymph's dance, and Todd and Minor were capering about her making horrible faces and pretending to be satyrs. The rest were keeping time with hands and feet. All had agreed that not a letter nor a newspaper should be brought to the camp during their eight days' absence from civilization. Freedom should be complete. It seemed to Clavering that the expression of every face had changed. They all wore the somewhat fixed and dreamy look one unconsciously assumes "in the woods." It was only a few moments before the onlookers had joined hands and were dancing around the central figures; chanting softly; closing in on them; retreating; turning suddenly to dance with one another . . . but with a curious restraint as if they were reviving some old classic of the forest and were afraid of abandonment. Almost unconsciously Clavering and Mary joined in the dance. Only Mr. Dinwiddie, a smile half-puzzled, half-cynical, in his eyes, remained a spectator. They swayed rhythmically, like tides, the chanting was very low and measured, the faces rapt. Even Todd and Minor looked exalted. Impossible to imagine they had ever been Sophisticates. They were creatures of the woods, renegades for a time, perhaps, but the woods had claimed them.

Then Mr. Dinwiddie did an impish thing. He inserted a disk in the victrola, and at once they began to jazz, hardly conscious of the transition.

LIII

At nine o'clock the moon was on the lake, and several couples, announcing their need of exercise, went out in boats.

Clavering rowed with long swift strokes until the others were far behind. Mary, muffled in a warm white coat and with a scarf twisted round her head like an Oriental turban, lay on a pile of cushions in the bottom of the boat, her head against the seat. She had the sensation of floating in space. From the middle of the lake the forest on every side was a mass of shadows, and nothing was visible but that high vast firmament sprinkled with silver--silver dust scattered by the arrogant moon. The great silver disk, which, Mary murmured, looked like the tomb of dead gods, seemed to challenge mortals as well as planets to deny that he was lord of all, and that even human emotions must dwindle under his splendor.

"The moon is so impersonal," she sighed. "I wonder why the poets have made so much of it? I'm sure it cares nothing about lovers--less about poets--and thinks the old days, when the world was a heaving splitting chaos, and glaciers were tearing what was already made of it to bits, were vastly superior to the finished perfection of form today. Like all old things. If it has the gods in there, no doubt it wakes them up periodically to remind them how much better things were in their time. Myself, I prefer the sun. It is far more glamoring."

"That is because you can't look it in the eye," said Clavering, smiling down on her. "You really don't know it half as well, and endow it with all sorts of mysterious attributes. I think I prefer the moon, because it is inimitable. You can counterfeit the light and warmth and heat of the sun, and even its color. But silver is used to describe the complexion of the moon only for want of a better word. It is neither silver nor white, but is the result of some mysterious alchemy known only to itself. And its temperature does not affect our bodies at all. You cannot deny that it has exercised a most beneficent effect on the spirits of lovers and poets for all the centuries we know of. Every pair of lovers has some cherished memories of moonlight, and poets would probably have starved without its aid. It is a most benevolent old god, and the one thing connected with Earth that doesn't mind working overtime."

"I'm sure it must be frayed at the edges and hollow at the core. And when it is in the three-quarters it looks exactly like a fish that has lost its platter."

"If you continue to insult the moon, I shall take you back to camp and ask Minor to teach you how to jazz."

"I love the moon," said Mary contentedly, and pushing a cushion between her head and the sharp edge of the seat, "I'd like to stay out all night."

They continued to talk nonsense for a while and then fell silent. When the boat was almost at the head of the lake Clavering turned it into a long water lane where the maples met overhead and the low soft leaves kept up a continual whispering. It was as dark as a tunnel, but he knew every inch of the way and presently shot out into another lake, small enough for its shores to be sharply outlined under the full light of the moon, which appeared to have poised itself directly overhead.

Here it was less silent than on the larger lake. There was a chorus of frogs among the lily pads, an owl hooted wistfully in the forest, and they heard an angry snort from the underbrush, followed by a trampling retreat.

"I fancy if we had lingered quietly in that passage we should have seen deer drinking from that patch of sward over there," said Clavering. "But I was not thinking of deer."

"What were you thinking of?"

"Why--you--in a way, I suppose. If I was thinking at all. I was merely filled with a vast content. God! I have found more than I ever dreamed any man could imagine he wanted. Vastly more than any man's deserts. It is an astonishing thing for a man to be able to say."

Mary sat up suddenly. "Be careful. A little superstition is a good thing to keep in one's bag of precautions."

"I feel good enough to disdain it. Of course I may be struck by lightning tomorrow, or the car may turn turtle when we go down to be married, but I refuse to contemplate anything of the sort. I feel as arrogant as that moon up there, who may have all the gods inside him, and do not mind proclaiming aloud that earth is heaven."

"Well--it is." She was not superstitious herself, but she was suddenly invaded by a sinister inexplicable fear, and smiled the more brightly to conceal it. But she lowered her eyelids and glanced hastily about her, wondering if an enemy could be hiding in those dark woods. She was not conscious of possessing enemies venomous enough to assassinate her, but she knew little of Clavering's life after all, and he was the sort of man who must inspire hate as well as love . . . danger assuredly was lurking somewhere . . . it seemed to wash against her brain, carrying its message. . . . But there were no wild beasts in the Adirondacks, nor even reptiles. . . . Nor a sound. The owl had given up his attempt to entice his lady out for a rendezvous and the frogs had paused for breath. There was not the faintest rustle in the forest except those eternally whispering leaves and the faint surging tide in the tree-tops. That ugly invading fear was still in her eyes as she met his.

"What is the matter?" he asked. "You look frightened."

"I am a little--I have a curious feeling of uneasiness--as if something were going to happen."

"'Out of the depths of the hollow gloom, On her soul's bare sands she heard it boom, The measured tide of the sea of doom,'"

he quoted lightly. "I fancy when one is too happy, the jealous gods run the quicksilver of our little spiritual barometers down for a moment, merely to remind us that we are mortals after all."

The shadow on her face lifted, and she smiled into his ardent eyes.

"Ah, Mary!" he whispered. "Mary!"

LIV

As they left the boathouse an hour later and walked up the steep path to the camp, once more that sense of coming disaster drove into her mind and banished the memory of the past hour, when she had forgotten it. What did it mean? She recalled that she had had dark presentiments before in her life, and they had always come in the form of this sudden mental invasion, as if some malignant homeless spirit exulted in being the first to hint at the misfortune to come.

But the camp was silent. Every one, apparently, had gone to bed, and slept the sleep of valiant souls and weary bodies. One lamp burned in the living-room, and Clavering turned it out and they parted lingeringly, and she went up to her room.

She had barely taken off her coat and scarf when she heard a tap on her door. She stared for a moment in panic, then crossed the room swiftly and opened it. Mr. Dinwiddie, wrapped against the cold in a padded dressing-gown and with noiseless slippers on his feet, entered and closed the door behind him.

"What has happened?" she demanded sharply. "Something. I know it."

"Don't look so frightened, my dear. I have no bad news for you. Only it's rather annoying, and I knew I shouldn't get a word alone with you in the morning."

"What is it? What is it?"

"I had this telegram an hour ago from Trent." He took a sheet of paper from the pocket of his dressing-gown, covered with handwriting. "Of course those bumpkins down in Huntersville took their time about telephoning it up. Luckily the telephone is over in Larsing's room----"

Mary had snatched the paper from his hand and was reading it aloud.

"Hohenhauer took morning train for Huntersville stop will spend night there and go to camp in morning stop must see M. Z. stop don't let anything prevent stop very important stop he will not ask you to put him up stop thought best to warn you as you might be planning expedition. Trent."

"Hohenhauer!" exclaimed Mary, and now, oddly enough, she felt only astonishment and annoyance. "Why should he come all this way to see me? He could have written if he had anything to say." And then she added passionately, "I won't have him here!"

"I thought perhaps you'd rather go down to Huntersville to see him," said Mr. Dinwiddie, looking out of the window. "Besides, he would make thirteen at table. I can take you down in the morning and telephone him to wait for us at the same time I order the motor to be sent up."

"I don't know that I'll see him at all."

"But you must realize that if you don't go down he'll come here. I don't fancy he's the sort of man to take that long journey and be put off with a rebuff. From what I know of him he not only would drive up here, but, if you had gone off for the day, wait until you returned. I don't see how you can avoid him."

"No, you are right. I shall have to see him--but what excuse can I give Lee? He must never know the truth, and he'll want to go with us."

"I've thought of that. I'll tell him that Trent is sending up some important papers for you to sign, and as some one is obliged to go to Huntersville to check up the provisions that will arrive on the train tomorrow morning, I've told Trent's clerk to wait there, as I prefer to see to the other matter myself. I--I--hate deceiving Lee----"

"So do I, but it cannot be helped. Did he bring me up here to get me away from Hohenhauer?"

Mr. Dinwiddie's complexion suddenly looked darker in the light of the solitary candle. "Well--you see----"

"I suspected it for a moment and then forgot it. No doubt it is the truth. So much the more reason why he should know nothing about that man's following me. Why should he be made uneasy--perhaps unhappy? But what excuse to go off without him?"

"They have a Ford down there. I'll tell them to send that. With the provisions there'll be no room for four people."

"That will answer. And I'll give Hohenhauer a piece of my mind."

"But, Mary, you don't suppose that one of the most important men in Europe, with limited time at his disposal, would take that journey unless he had something very important indeed to say to you? Not even for your _beaux yeux_, I should think, or he'd have asked Trent to get him an invitation to spend several days at the camp. I must say I'm devoured with curiosity----"

Mary shrugged her shoulders. "I'm too sleepy for curiosity. What time must we start?"

"About nine, if the car gets here on time. It takes two hours to come up the mountain, and they'll hardly be induced to start before seven. I'll tell Larsing to telephone at six."

"It's now eleven. We have eight hours for sleep. Good night, and believe that I am immensely grateful. You've arranged it all wonderfully."

She stamped her foot as Mr. Dinwiddie silently closed the door.

"Moritz! _What_ does he want? _Why_ has he followed me here? But he has no power whatever over my life, so why should I care what he wants? . . . But that this--this--should be interrupted!"

She undressed without calm and slept ill.

LV

The flight next morning proved simpler of accomplishment than she had anticipated. The men were going to a neighboring lake to fish, Larsing having excited them with the prospect of abundant trout; and why fish in your own lake when you may take a tramp of several miles through the woods to another? They begged Clavering to go with them, and as man cannot exist for long in the rarefied atmosphere of the empyrean without growing restive, he was feeling rather let down, and cherished a sneaking desire for a long day alone with men.

But he told Mary that he did not want to go out of their woods and down to that hideous village for any such purpose as to watch her sign papers, and he stood on the landing waving his hat as she and Mr. Dinwiddie crossed the lake in the motor boat to the waiting Ford. For once his intuitions failed him, and he tramped off with the other men, his heart as light as the mountain air, and his head empty of woman.

Mary looked back once at the golden-brown lake, set like a jewel in its casket of fragrant trees, and wondered if she would see it again with the same eyes. She was both resentful and uneasy, although she still was unable to guess what harm could come of this interview. If Hohenhauer wanted her to go to Washington she could refuse, and he had long since lost his old magnetic power over her.

But as the Ford bumped down the steep road between the woods she felt less like Mary Ogden every moment . . . those mists of illusion to withdraw from her practical brain . . . returning to the heights where they belonged . . . she wondered how she could have dared to be so unthinkingly happy . . . the sport of the cynical gods? . . . sentimental folly that she had called exaltation? After all! After all!

Could she recapture that mood when she returned? Certainly, whatever this man wanted of her, it would be hard facts, not illusions, he would invite her to deal with. Even when he had been the most passionate of lovers, his brain had always seemed to stand aloof, luminous and factual. He had not an illusion. He saw life as it was, and although his manners were suave and polished, and his voice the most beautiful she had ever heard, he could be brutally direct when it suited his purpose. For a moment she hated him as ardently as she had for a time after he left her.

They descended into lower and lower altitudes until the air grew intensely hot, physically depressing after the cold wine of the mountains; finally, ten minutes ahead of time, they drove into the doubly depressing village of Huntersville. It was no uglier than thousands of other villages and small towns that look as if built to demonstrate the American contempt for beauty, but the fact mitigated nothing to eyes accustomed to the picturesqueness of mountain villages in Europe, where the very roofs are artistic and the peasants have the grace to wear the dress of their ancestors.

There were a few farms in the valley, but if Huntersville had not been a junction of sorts, it is doubtful if it would have consisted of anything but a "general store," now that the saloons were closed. There was one long crooked street, with the hotel at one end, the Store at the other (containing the post office), and a church, shops for automobile supplies, two garages, a drug store, and a candy store; eight or ten cottages filled the interstices. Men were working in the fields, but those in Huntersville proper seemed to be exhausted with loafing. Campers going in and out of the woods needing shelter for a night, and people demanding meals between trains, kept the dismal looking hotel open and reasonably clean.

The situation was very beautiful, for the mountains rose behind and there was a brawling stream.

Mr. Dinwiddie having ascertained that "Mr." Hohenhauer had received his message and gone for a walk, leaving word he would return at ten o'clock, Mary went into the hotel parlor to wait for him. The room was seldom used, patrons, local and otherwise, preferring the Bar of happy memories, and it smelled musty. She opened the windows and glanced about distastefully. The walls were covered with a faded yellow paper, torn in places, and the ceiling was smoked and fly-specked. The worn thin carpet seemed to have been chosen for its resemblance to turtle soup squirming with vermicelli. Over the pine mantel, painted yellow, were the inevitable antlers, and on a marble-topped table were badly executed water lilies under a glass dome. The furniture was horsehair, and she wondered how she and the Austrian statesman were to preserve their dignity on the slippery surface. Then she heard his voice in the hall as he stopped to speak to Mr. Dinwiddie, and she glanced out curiously.

She had not seen him since a year before the war, but he was little changed; improved if anything, for there was more color in his formerly pale face. He was as straight and as thin as ever, his fine head erect, without haughtiness; his dark eyes under their heavy lids had the same eagle glance. He was still, she concluded dispassionately, the handsomest man she had ever seen, even for an Austrian, the handsomest race on earth; he combined high intelligence with a classic regularity of feature, grace, dignity; and when the firm lips relaxed he had a delightful smile. If it had not been for his hair, very thick white hair, he would have passed for little over forty. He wore loose gray travelling clothes, and every detail was as quietly faultless as ever.

She went hastily to the speckled mirror beneath the antlers and surveyed herself anxiously. Her own travelling suit of dark green tweed, with its white silk shirt, was as carelessly perfect as his own, and the little green turban, with its shaded, drooping feather, extremely becoming. No color set off her fairness like green, but she turned away with a sigh. It was not the eyes of the past three days that looked back at her.

And then she remembered that he had not seen her since the renaissance. The moment was not without its excitements.

Their meeting was excessively formal.

"Frau Gräfin."

"Excellenz."

She lifted her hand. He raised it to his lips.

And then he drew back and looked at her with penetrating but smiling eyes.

"I had heard, of course," he said gallantly, "but I hardly was prepared. May I say, Frau Gräfin, that you look younger than when I had the pleasure of meeting you first?"

"I assure you that I feel many years younger," she replied lightly. "May I add that I am delighted to see that you are in the best of health? Your rest in Switzerland has done you good, although it would have been better for Austria had it been shorter. Shall we sit down?"

Two tall dignified bodies adjusted themselves to chairs both slippery and bumpy. He had closed the door behind him.

"Now that the amenities are over, Excellenz," she said with the briskness she had picked up from her American friends, "let us come to the point. I infer you did not take a day's journey and put up with this abominable hotel to tell me that you are forming a Federation of Austria and the South German States. You were sometimes kind enough to ask my help in the past, but I have no influence in Washington."

"No, dear Gräfin. I do not need your assistance in Washington. But I do need it in Austria, and that is why I am here."

"But it is--was--my intention to return to Austria almost immediately. Surely Judge Trent must have told you."

"Yes, dear Gräfin, he told me, but he also told me other things. I shall not waste the little time at our disposal in diplomacy. He told me that you have the intention to marry a young American." There was the faintest accent on the _young_.

Mary was annoyed to feel herself flushing, but she answered coldly, "It is quite true that I intend to marry Mr. Clavering."

"And I have come here to ask you to renounce that intention and to marry me instead."

"You!" Mary almost rose from her chair. "What on earth do you mean?"

"My dear Marie." He renounced formalities abruptly. "I think you will be able to recall that whether I wrapped my meaning in diplomatic phrases or conveyed it by the blunter method, it was always sufficiently clear to the trained understanding. I have never known a more trained or acute understanding than yours. I wish you to marry me, and I beg you to listen to my reasons."

She gave the little foreign shrug she had almost forgotten. "I will listen, of course. Need I add that I am highly honored? If I were not so astonished, no doubt I should be more properly appreciative of that honor. Pray let me hear the reasons." Her tone was satirical, but she was beginning to feel vaguely uneasy.

Neither her words nor her inflections ruffled the calm of that long immobile face with its half-veiled powerful eyes.

"Let us avert all possible misunderstandings at the beginning," he said suavely. "I shall not pretend that I have fallen in love with you again, for although my gallantry prompts me to such a natural statement, I have not the faintest hope of deceiving you. What I felt for you once can never be revived, for I loved you more than I have ever loved any woman; and when such love burns itself out, its ashes are no more to be rekindled than the dust of the corpse. You thought I fell in love with my pretty young wife, but I was merely fond and appreciative of her. I knew that the end had come for us, and that if I did not recognize that sad fact, you would. My marriage, which, as you know, was imperative, afforded a graceful climax to a unique episode in the lives of both of us. There was no demoralizing interval of subterfuge and politely repressed ennui. On the other hand, it did not degenerate into one of those dreary and loosely knit _liaisons_, lasting on into old age. We left each other on the heights, although the cliff was beginning to crumble."

"Really, Moritz! I hope you have not come up here to indulge in sentimental reminiscence. Why rake up that old--episode? I assure you I have practically forgotten it."

"And I can assure you that I never felt less sentimental. I wish merely to emphasize the fact that it was complete in itself, and therefore as impossible of resuscitation as the dead. Otherwise, you might naturally leap to the conclusion that I was an elderly romantic gentleman----"

"Oh, never! It is obvious that you are inclined to be brutally frank. But, as you said, time is short."

"If what I said sounded brutal, it was merely to remind you that love--the intense passionate love I have no doubt you feel for this young man who helps you to realize your renewed youth--never lasts. And when this new love of yours burns itself out--you never had the reputation of being very constant, dear Marie--you will have an alien young man on your hands, while that remarkable brain of yours will be demanding its field of action. You are European, not American--why, even your accent is stronger than mine! That may be due to an uncommonly susceptible ear, but as a matter of fact your mind has a stronger accent still. You became thoroughly Europeanized, one of us, and--I say this quite impartially--the most statesman-like woman in Europe. Your mind was still plastic when you came to us--and your plastic years are long over, _ma chère_. If your mind had become as young as your body, you would have bitterly resented it. You were always very proud of that intellect of yours--and with the best of reasons."

Mary was staring out of the window. She recalled that she had faced the fact of the old mind in the young brain when she first discovered that she loved Clavering. How could she have forgotten . . . for a few short weeks--and up there? . . . She raised her eyes to the mountain. From where she sat she could not see the top. It looked like an impenetrable rampart, rising to the skies.

"Can you tell me with honesty and candor," he continued in those same gentle tones that had always reminded her of limpid water running over iron, "--and for all your subtlety your mind is too arrogant and fearless to be otherwise than honest _au fond_--that you believe you could remain satisfied with love alone? For more, let us say, than a year?"

She moved restlessly. "Perhaps not. But I had planned to live in Vienna. He would spend only a part of the year there with me. His own interests are here, of course. It would be a perfectly workable arrangement."

"Are you sure? If you are, I must conclude that in the mental confusion love so often induces, you have lost temporarily your remarkable powers of clear and coherent thought. Do you not realize that you would no longer be Gräfin Zattiany, you would be Mrs. Lee Clavering? Do you imagine for a moment that you could play the great rôle in Austrian affairs you have set yourself, handicapped by an American name--and an American husband? Not with all your gifts, your wealth, your genius for playing on that complex instrument called human nature. Austria may be a Republic of sorts, but it is still Austria. You would be an American and an outsider--a presumptuous interloper."

She stared at him aghast. "I--oh!--I had not thought of that. It seems incomprehensible--but I had never thought of myself as Mrs. Clavering. I have been Gräfin Zattiany so long!"

"And your plans were well-defined, and your ambition to play a great rôle on the modern European stage possessed you utterly until you met this young man--is it not so?"

"Oh, yes, but----"

"I understand. It must have been a quite marvellous experience, after those barren years, to feel yourself glowing with all the vitalities of youth once more; to bring young men to your feet with a glance and to fancy yourself in love----"

"Fancy!" She interrupted him passionately. "I am in love--and more--more than I ever was with you. Until I met him I did not even guess that I had the capacity to love again. It was the last thing I wanted. Abhorrent! But . . . but . . . he has something for me that you--not even you--ever had . . . that I had given up hope of finding long before I met you. . . ."

She stopped, coloring and hesitating. She had an intense desire to make this man understand, but she shivered, as if her proud reserve were a visible garment that she had torn off and flung at his feet, leaving her naked to his ironic gaze.

He was leaning forward, regarding her through his veiled eyes. Their light was not ironic, but it was very penetrating.

"And what is that something, Marie?" he asked softly.

"I--you know those things cannot be put into words."

"I fancy they can. It is merely one more delusion of the senses. One of the imagination's most devilish tricks. I had it for you and you for me--for a time! In the intimacies of either a _liaison_ or matrimony that supreme delusion is soon scattered, _ma chère_."

"But I believe it." She spoke obstinately, although that brawling stream seemed to take on a note of derision.

"Do you? Not in the depths of your clear brain. The mist on top is dense and hot--but, alas for those mists!"

"I refuse to discuss it," she said haughtily. "Why do you wish to marry me yourself?"

"Because I need your partnership as much as you need mine. Even if you returned to Austria unencumbered, you could accomplish less alone than with a man of equal endowments and greater power beside you. Two strong brains and characters with similar purpose can always accomplish more together than alone. I intend to rule and to save Austria, and I need you, your help, your advice, your subtlety, your compelling fascination, and your great personality."

"Do you intend to make yourself king?" she asked insolently, although his words had thrilled her.

"You know that is a foolish question. I do not even use my title there. But I intend to make Vienna the capital of a great and powerful Republic, and I therefore ask you to renounce, before it is too late, this commonplace and unworthy dream of young love, and stand beside me. Youth--real youth--and the best years of maturity are the seasons for love. You and I have sterner duties. Do you suppose that I would sacrifice Austria for some brief wild hope of human happiness? And you are only two years younger than I am. Nothing can alter the march of the years. Moreover, you owe to Austria this wonderful rejuvenescence of yours. Steinach is not an American."

She stamped her foot. "You descend to quibbling. And I have more than repaid Austria all that I owe her."

"You have given her money and service, but she expects more, and you pledged yourself to her before you left. And don't forget that she is the country of your deliberate adoption. A far more momentous thing than any mere accident of birth. You did not return to America when Zattiany died. You never even paid her a brief visit after your marriage. You would not be here now but for the imperative necessities of business. You are Austrian to your marrow."

"I had a rôle thrust on me and I played it. My parents came to Europe every year until they died. When Zattiany went, there were no ties to draw me back and habit is strong. But--underneath--I don't believe that I have ever been other than Mary Ogden."

She blushed as she said it, and he looked at her keenly.

"I think I understand. He is a very clever young man--of an outstanding cleverness, I am told. Or it may be that he is merely in love, and love's delusions are infinite--for a time. I doubt if a young man with so brilliant an intellect would, if he faced himself in honest detachment, admit that he believed anything of the sort. Nor do you, my dear Marie, nor do you."

She twisted her hands together, but would not raise her eyes. He bent forward again and said harshly:

"Marie! Glance inward. Do you see nothing that causes you to feel ashamed and foolish? Do you--_you_--fail to recognize the indecency of a woman of your mental age permitting herself to fancy that she is experiencing the authentic passions of youth? Are you capable of creating life? Can you love with unsullied memory? Have you the ideals of youth, the plasticity, the hopes, the illusions? Have you still even that power of desperate mental passion, so often subordinating the merely physical, of the mature woman who seeks for the last time to find in love what love has not? The final delusion. No, Marie. Your revivified glands have restored to you the appearance and the strength of youth, but, although you have played with a rôle that appealed to your vanity, to your histrionic powers--with yourself as chief audience--your natural desire to see if you could not be--to yourself, again--as young as you appear, you have no more illusion in your soul than when you were a withered old woman in Vienna."

She looked at him with hostile but agonized eyes.

"Your calculated brutality does not affect me in the least. And you are merely one more victim of convention--like those old women in New York. It never has been, therefore it never can be. Many women are not able to bear children, even in youth."

"It is your turn to quibble. Tell me: until you were attracted to this young man--attracted, no doubt, because he was so unlike the European of your long experience--had you deviated from the conclusion, arrived at many years before, that you had had enough of love--of sex--to satisfy any woman? You implied as much to me a few moments since. I know the mental part of you so well that I am positive the mere thought would have disgusted you. If you had been starved all your life it would be understandable, but you had experimented and deluded yourself again and again--and you were burnt out when you came to Vienna to live--burnt out, not only physically but spiritually. Your imagination was as arid as a desert without an oasis. If any man had made love to you then, you would merely have turned on him your weary disillusioned eyes, or laughed cynically at him and yourself. Your keen aesthetic sense would have been shocked. You were playing then an important and ambitious rôle, you had the greatest political salon in Vienna--in Europe--and you went away to rest that you might continue to play it, not that you might feel fresh enough once more to have _liaisons_ like other foolish old women. . . . But the part you played then was a bagatelle to the one awaiting you now. With your splendid mental gifts, your political genius, your acquired statecraft, your wealth, and your restored beauty, you could become the most powerful woman in Europe. But only as my wife. Even you are not strong enough to play the part alone. There is too much prejudice against women to permit you to pull more than hidden strings. Masculine jealousy of women is far more irritable in a democracy than in a monarchy, where women of rank are expected to play a decorative--and tactful part in politics. But if they step down and come into conflict with ambitious men of the people, class jealousy aggravates sex jealousy. You might have a salon again and become a power somewhat in the old fashion, but you never would be permitted to play a great public rôle. But as the consort (I think the word will pass) of the President--or Chancellor--you could wield almost sensational power."

"I should probably be quite overshadowed by you," she murmured; but she was hardly conscious of speaking. Her brain was whirling.

"Your position would be too eminent for that, even if I wished it, which I assuredly should not. I value you too highly. Perhaps I am one of the few men in Europe who admit--and believe--that a woman may have as powerful and accomplished an intellect as any man. I did not appreciate your mind as you deserved when I loved you, but I did during those subsequent years in Vienna."

"You did not ask me to marry you then--when you appreciated me so highly. You never seemed to know whether you were talking to a man or a woman when you were with me. And yet I was, possibly, more interesting psychologically than I had ever been."

"No man is interested in an old woman's psychology. I am not interested in your psychology today. And I did not ask you to marry me then for a great many reasons. I was too handicapped to play a great rôle myself, you will remember. Nor could you have been of the same service to me. Even if your fatigued mind had been refreshed, by your stay in Hungary, you had lost the beauty and the energy, the power of ardent interest in the affairs of state, which have now been restored to you. With your rare gifts and your renewed youth, I repeat you have it in your power to be the most famous woman in Europe, and perhaps the most useful. But not with a young alien husband. Not only would you automatically revert to the status of an American, but the dignity which, unlike so many women of your age who had been _dames galantes_, you took care to impress on the world, would be hopelessly sacrificed. Incredible. To spend yourself on a love affair, wantonly to throw away an historic career, merely because a young man has hypnotized you into the delusion that you may once more enjoy the passions of youth----"

"Stop! You shall not!" She had sprung to her feet. Her face was drawn and pinched but her eyes were blazing. "Every word you say is for a purpose. If that were all I should have hated him. As much as I hate you. My mind never dwelt on that--not for a moment--I--I never faced it. You don't know what you're talking about."

"Ah, but I do." He had risen also, and he put his hands on her shoulders. They were long thin hands but very powerful, and it seemed to her that they sank slowly through her flesh, until, however painlessly, they gripped the skeleton underneath. "Look at me, Marie. Your Mary Ogden died many, many years ago. She died, I should say, at the first touch of Otto Zattiany. There was nothing in your new life to revive her, assuredly not your first lover. Certainly you were Marie Zattiany, the most subtle, complex, and fascinating woman in Europe when I met you--but abominably disillusioned even then. I revived your youth for a time, but never your girlhood. You have been able to deceive yourself here in the country of that girlhood, for a time, with this interesting young gentleman in love with you, and, no doubt, extremely ardent."

"Oh!" Her head sank. But she could not turn away, for his hands still gripped her shoulders. The roar of the stream sounded to her horrified ears like the crash of falling ruins.

"Listen, Marie," he said more gently. "If I have been brutal, it was merely because there was no other way to fling you head first out of your fool's paradise. If I had not known the common sense that forms the solid lower stratum of your mind, I should not have come here to say anything at all. You would not have been worth it. But remember, Marie, that under this new miracle of science, the body may go back but never the mind. You, your ego, your mind, your _self_, are no younger than your fifty-eight hard-lived years. And what object in being young again for any of us if we are to make the same old mistakes? Remember, that when you were as young as you look now you had no such opportunity offered you as in this terrible period of European history. Nor could you have taken advantage of it if you had, for mere mental brilliancy and ambition cannot take the place of political experience and an intellect educated by the world. It may be that we shall both be destroyed, that our efforts will avail nothing, and we shall all be swallowed up in chaos. But at least we shall have done what we could. And I know you well enough to believe that such an implacable end would give you greater satisfaction than dallying in the arms of a handsome young husband."

He pushed her back into her chair, and resumed his own. "Would you like to smoke?" he asked.

"Yes." She looked at him with bitter eyes, but she had recaptured her threatened composure. He regarded her with admiration but they smoked in silence for several moments. Then he spoke again.

"You remember Elka Zsáky, I suppose? She was several years older than you and one of the _dames galantes_ of her day. She has taken the treatment and looks many years younger, at least, than when she was a painted old hag with a red wig. She is still forced to employ artifice, but she has lovers again, and that is all she did it for. Vienna is highly amused. No doubt all women of her sort will take it for no other purpose. But many of the intellectual women of Europe are taking it, too--and with the sole purpose of reinvigorating their mental faculties and recapturing the physical endurance necessary to their work. I happen to know of a woman scientist, Frau Bloch, who is now working sixteen hours a day, and she had had a bitter struggle with her enfeebled forces to work at all. Lorenz is no more remarkable. He seems to be the only disciple besides yourself that this country has heard of, but I could name a hundred men, out of my own knowledge, who are once more working with all the vigor of youth----"

"Yes," she interrupted sarcastically. "And without a thought of women, of course."

"Probably not." He waved his hand negligently. "But incidentally. That is where men have the supreme advantage of women. The woman is an incident in their lives, even when sincerely in love. And if these men indulge occasionally in the pleasures of youth, or even marry young wives, the world will not be interested. But with women, who renew their youth and return to its follies, it will be quite another matter. If they are not made the theme of obscene lampoons they may count themselves fortunate. There will certainly be verbal lampoons in private."

"Orthodoxy! Orthodoxy!"

"Possibly. But orthodoxy is a fixed habit of mind. The average man and woman hug their orthodoxies and spit their venom on those that outrage them. How it may be some years hence, when this cure for senescence has become a commonplace, I do not pretend to say. But so it is today. Personally, no doubt, you would be indifferent, for you have a contemptuously independent mind. But your career and your usefulness would be at an end."

"And suppose I am quite indifferent to that?"

"Ah, but you are not. I will not say that I have killed Mary Ogden during this painful hour, for it is impossible to kill the dead, but I have exorcised her ghost. She will not come again. If you marry this young man it will be out of defiance, or possibly out of a mistaken consideration for him--although he will be an object for sympathy later on. And you will marry him as Marie Zattiany, without an illusion left in that clear brain of yours--from which the mists have been blown by the cold wind of truth. And in a year--if you can stand self-contempt and ineffable ennui so long--you will leave him, resume your present name--the name by which Europe knows you--and return to us. But it may be too late. Vienna would still be laughing. The Viennese are a light-hearted race, and a lax, but when they laugh they cease to take seriously the subject of that good-natured amusement. . . . It is not aesthetic, you know, it is not aesthetic. Are you really quite indifferent, Marie?"

She shrugged and rose. "It must be time for luncheon," she said. "It will no doubt be horrible, but at least we can have it in here. The public dining-room would be impossible. I will find Mr. Dinwiddie and ask him to order it."

LVI

When the men returned from their fishing trip at six o'clock they saw several of the women on the lake, but there was no one in the living-room. Clavering tapped at Mr. Dinwiddie's door, but as there was no answer, concluded that he and Mary had not yet returned from Huntersville. He was too desirous of a bath and clean clothes, however, to feel more than a fleeting disappointment, and it was not until his return to his room that he saw a letter lying on the table.

It was addressed in Mary's handwriting, and he stared at it in astonishment for a second, then tore it open. It was dated "Huntersvilie, Monday afternoon," and it read:

"Dear Lee:

"Mr. Dinwiddie will tell you that unforeseen circumstances have arisen which compel me to go to New York for a few days. It is excessively annoying, but unavoidable, and I do not ask you to follow me as I should hardly be able to see anything of you. If there is a prospect of being detained it will not be worth while to return and I'll let you know at once--on Thursday night by telephone; and then I hope you will not wait for the others, but join me here. Indeed, dear Lee, I wish this need not have happened, but at least we had three days.----M."

Clavering read this letter twice, hardly comprehending its purport. She made no mention of Judge Trent. The whole thing was ambiguous, curt. A full explanation was his right; moreover, it was the reverse of a love letter. Even its phrases of regret were formal. Something was wrong.

He put on his clothes hurriedly in order to go in search of Dinwiddie, but before he had finished he heard a sound in the next room and opened the connecting door unceremoniously.

Mr. Dinwiddie braced himself as he saw Clavering's set face.

"Too bad," he muttered, but Clavering cut him short.

"I want the truth. What took Mary to New York?"

"Surely she explained in her letter."

"She explained nothing. There's some mystery here and I want it cleared up at once."

"By God! I'll tell you!" Mr. Dinwiddie burst out. "Mary exacted no promise--I suppose she took for granted I'd not tell you, for she told me what she had written. But if she had I'd tell you anyhow. I'd rather break a promise to a woman than lie to a friend. Believe men should stand by one another. She went down there this morning to meet Hohenhauer."

"Hohenhauer!" Clavering's face turned almost black.

"Yes. Trent telegraphed me yesterday that Hohenhauer was arriving at Huntersville last night and would come up here in the morning to see Mary. He said the matter was most important. I went to Mary's room after you came in from the lake and showed her the message. She was extremely annoyed and said at first that she wouldn't see him. But I pointed out that she couldn't possibly avoid it. Then she said he shouldn't come up here, and she was very emphatic about it. The only thing to do was to take her down. Of course you will be reasonable and see there was nothing else to be done."

"What did that infernal blackguard want of her? And why did she go off with him?"

"She didn't go off with him. She hired a car directly after lunch intending to drive as far as Saratoga and take a train from there. She left Hohenhauer to cool his heels until it was time to take the local for the Adirondack Express. She could easily have taken him along, but I think she was meting out punishment."

"Punishment?"

"Yes. They had a private conference for nearly two hours, and, whatever happened, it put her in an infernally bad humor. She scarcely opened her mouth during luncheon, and as Mary is a woman of the world, used to concealing her feelings, I thought it highly significant. She looked as if she were in a secret frozen rage. Hohenhauer, however, was quite himself, and the meal--corned beef and cabbage!--went off very well."

"What did he want of her?"

"Of that I haven't the vaguest idea. Something momentous, beyond a doubt. If I may hazard a guess, it has something to do with this special mission of his, and it is quite possible that he has asked her to go to Washington--insisted upon it--appealing to her love of Austria. I confess I don't see what she can accomplish there, for she never did have any Washington connections--of course she could get letters from Trent and trust to her personal power and prestige. But let me tell you that she didn't do it to please him. She looked as if she hated him."

"Is he still in love with her? Are you sure he didn't come here to ask her to marry him?"

"If he did he had his journey for his pains--although I can see that it would be a highly desirable combination from his point of view. But he's not in love with her. I'll stake all I know of men on that."

"You are sure?"

"As sure as that I'm alive."

"Well, I take the morning train for New York."

"Lee," said Mr. Dinwiddie impressively, "take the advice of an old man, who has seen a good deal of men and women in his day, and stay where you are until you hear from Mary. Some sort of crisis has arisen, no use blinking the fact, but if you burst in on her now, while she is Madame Zattiany, encased in a new set of triple-plated armor, you may ruin all your chances of happiness. Whatever it is let her work it out--and off--by herself. I made her promise she would not leave the country without seeing you again--for I didn't know what might be in the wind--and when she had given her word she added that she had not the least intention of not seeing you again, and that it was quite possible she would return to the camp. If you go down you'll spoil everything."

"I suppose I can trust you, Din, but I've seen plainly that you don't want me to marry her."

"That is true enough. I want nothing less--for your sake; and Hohenhauer would be a far more suitable match for her. But I don't believe you even question my faith----"

"No. I don't. You're a brick, Din. But I'm unspeakably worried--almost terrified. I have never felt that I really knew her. She may have only imagined--but that is impossible! How in God's name am I to sit round here for three days and twiddle my thumbs?"

"Don't. Take one of the men and go off on a three days' tramp. Climb Mount Moose. That will give you no chance to think. All your thinking will be in your muscles."

"And suppose she should return--or telegraph me to go to her?"

"If she returns and finds you gone it'll serve her right. And she won't telegraph before Thursday--if she's going to Washington. Now take my advice and don't be a fool."

Clavering shrugged his shoulders, but he set his lips. "Very well. I won't follow her. Nor will I forgive her in a hurry, either."

"That's healthy. Give her a piece of your mind, have a good row, and then make it up. But let me tell you, my dear boy, that she was horrified at the thought of that man coming up here, and she only refrained from telling you of the summons, so to speak, because she wanted to spare you any anxiety. There's no doubt in my mind that she's as much in love with you as you are with her. . . . You have none, I suppose?"

"None. Particularly lately. I hadn't told you, but I had intended, in a day or two, to ask you if you would let me have the camp for a few weeks. We intended to marry in Huntersville the day the rest of you went out."

Mr. Dinwiddie whistled. "No wonder she was furious at having her preliminary honeymoon disturbed. But if that is the case of course she'll return. You're more than welcome to the camp, and I'll send whatever you need from time to time. You've only to command me. . . . It makes it all the more comprehensible. Whatever it was that man said to her, she wanted to get over it by herself before coming back to the place where she had forgotten that Hohenhauers and politics existed. I could see how it was with her here. She looked exactly as she used to in the old days, and I don't doubt felt like it, too. No wonder she resented being forced back into the rôle of Madame Zattiany, or Gräfin--countess--as he calls her. You must let her thresh it out by herself."

"You believe she will come back."

"If that was your plan, I assuredly do. There isn't a spark of human affection between those two, and Mary never placed herself in any man's power. I am more and more inclined to believe that he appealed to her for help in his mission here, whatever it is--and it's not so difficult to guess--and that against her inclination and out of her love for Austria, she consented."

"Well, it's no use to speculate. There's the supper bell. I'll decide in the morning whether I go off for a tramp or not."

LVII

Clavering slept when he first went to bed, for he was healthily tired, but he awoke suddenly at midnight with body refreshed and mind abnormally clear. He knew that he would sleep no more that night, and he put on his trousers and coat over his pyjamas, thrust his feet into bedroom slippers and went out into the living-room. There he put a log on the fire and paced up and down, not unlike a tiger round its cage.

He felt as if black bats were flying about his brain, each charged with a different portent of disaster. Once more the unreality of the whole affair overwhelmed him. How could he have been so fatuous as to believe that he had really won such a woman? He remembered his first impression: that she was on a plane above, apart. They hadn't an interest in common, not even a memory that antedated their meeting a few short weeks ago. She had lived a life of which he knew nothing outside of European novels and memoirs. She had known nothing of any other world until he had introduced her to his friends, and he made no doubt that her interest in them was about as permanent as a highly original comedy on the stage would inspire. There was nothing, literally, between them but a mutual irresistible attraction, and that bond recognized so unerringly by both.

That bond.

Would it hold?

Had this man offered her something that would make love seem insignificant and trivial? She, who had had a surfeit of love long since? Whose eyes had looked a thousand years old until he had given her mind back its youth as the great Vienna biologist had rejuvenated her body.

He was entirely indifferent to her old love affair with Hohenhauer. It was those years of political association and mutual interdependence in Vienna that he feared. He had, when he first met her, appraised her as a woman to whom power was the breath of life. Ambition--in the grand manner--incarnate. She had all the appearance and the air of a woman to whom the wielding of power, however subtly, was an old story. He recalled that that terrifying suggestion of concealed ruthless forces behind those charming manners, those feminine wiles, had almost made him resolve to "avoid her like the plague." And then he had fallen madly in love with her and forgotten everything but the woman.

He had divined even before these last miraculous days that she had looked upon love with abhorrence for almost half as many years as he had lived, an abhorrence rooted in a profound revulsion of body and mind and spirit. For nearly twenty years that revulsion had endured and eaten into the very depths of her being. . . . He had a sudden blaze of enlightenment. She had frequently alluded to that Lodge of hers in the Dolomites and their sojourn there together, but always in the terms of romance. . . . She had never given him a glance of understanding. . . . And she had put off the wedding until the last possible moment. . . . If she had really been as eager as himself she would have left her power of attorney with Trent and started for Austria six weeks ago. Or the papers could have been sent to her to sign, if her signature were imperative. . . . And in spite of the fact that everybody had taken the engagement for granted, she had, with wholly insufficient reasons,--as he saw, now that he was removed from the influence of her plausible and dominating self,--refused to announce it. Could it be that in the depths of her mind--unadmitted by her consciousness--she had never intended to marry him? Was that old revulsion paramount? . . . Sixteen years! . . . A long time, and nothing in life is more corroding than habit.

Perhaps--as long as they were down there in New York. But not up here. That he would be willing to swear. There had been another revolution, involuntary perhaps, but the stronger for that; and every shackle that memory and habit can forge had dropped from her. She had been youth incarnate. The proof was in her joyful consent to marry him immediately and remain in the mountains . . . and then her complete surrender of the future into his hands. . . . She had during those three brief days loved him wholly, and without a shadow in her soul.

But now? Whatever had happened, she was not Mary Ogden tonight, hastening to New York, nor would she be when in her own house on the morrow. She might hate Hohenhauer, but his mere presence would have made the past live again. She must have known when she went down that mountain that even with her strong will and powers of self-delusion, things could not be quite the same again. Not even if she had returned with Dinwiddie. Why in heaven's name had she been so mad as to go? She could have sent Hohenhauer a peremptory refusal to see him and then gone off on a camping trip that could have lasted until he gave up the game. She must have been mad--mad.

And he did not believe for a moment that she had gone to Washington.

She had gone home to think--think.

And if he followed Dinwiddie's advice and remained here she might think too long. And if he followed and insisted upon seeing her, the result might be more fatal still. He knew nothing of those personalities she may have concealed from him. For all he knew she might have depths in her nature as black as the bottomless pit.

And God only knew what the man had said to her. . . . Should he let her fight it out by herself? What in heaven's name should he do? Whatever happened, this divine interval, like some exquisitely adjusted musical instrument, had been hopelessly jarred out of tune. He almost hoped she would not return. Let it remain a perfect memory. . . . They could marry in New York and return here, when she was his wife. . . . If he had not already lost her. . . . What in God's name was the thing for him to do? He'd go mad if he stayed here, and if he went he might regret it for the rest of his days. Why could not light be vouchsafed him?

Gora.

Fortunately he knew her room for he had carried up her luggage. He ran lightly up the stairs and tapped on her door. A startled sleepy voice answered. He opened the door and put in his head.

"Come downstairs at once, Gora," he said peremptorily. "I must talk to you."

She came down in a moment, clad in a scarlet kimono, her hair hanging in thick braids. With her large round forehead exposed she looked not unlike a gnome, but curiously young.

"What on earth is the matter, Clavey?" she asked as she pushed her chair as close to the fire as possible. "It has something to do with this sudden trip of Mary's, I suppose. Mr. Dinwiddie said she had been called to New York on important business, and the others accepted the explanation as a matter of course; but I'll confess I wondered."

Clavering, still too nervous to sit down, jerked out the whole story, omitting only the old love affair with the man who had exercised so strong an influence on Mary Zattiany's later life.

"You see," he concluded, "there are two things: Austria had taken the place in her affections that women of her age generally concentrate on human beings--it became almost a sacrament. And then--for nearly twenty years she had hated everything in men but their minds. Sex was not only dead but a detestable memory. After that rejuvenescence she had never cast a thought to loving any man again. That mental habit, at least, was fixed. When I met her she was a walking intellect. . . . I thought I had changed all that . . . up here I had not a doubt left . . . but now . . . I don't know. . . . Put that cold-blooded mind of yours on it and tell me what to do."

"Let me think a minute, Clavey."

As he resumed his restless march, Gora sent her mind travelling out of the mountains and far to the south, and tried to penetrate the brain of Mary Zattiany. She could not visualize her in the bed of a casual hotel or sitting in the chair of a parlor car, so she skipped the interval and saw her next day in that intimate room of hers upstairs; the room, assuredly, where she would think out her problem.

Gora had studied Madame Zattiany with all the avidity of the artist for a rare human theme, and she believed that she knew her as well as Clavering did, if not better. She had also not failed to observe Prince Hohenhauer's picture, and had read the accompanying text with considerable interest, an interest augmented, not unnaturally, by his exceeding good looks. That same day she had met a Viennese at dinner who had talked of him with enthusiasm and stated definitely that he was the one hope of Austria.

Gora Dwight was a very ambitious woman and revelled in the authority that fame and success had brought her. She was also as disillusioned in regard to men as any unmarried woman could be; although quite aware that if she had lacked a gift to entice her emotions to her brain, she no doubt would even now be looking about for some man to fall in love with. But her pride was spared a succession of humiliating anti-climaxes, and she had learned, younger than most women, or even men, that power, after sex has ceased from troubling, is the dominant passion in human nature.

And Madame Zattiany was twenty years older than herself, and had drained the jewelled chalice to the dregs. And for many years more she had enjoyed power, revelled in it, looked forward, Gora made no doubt, to a greater and greater exercise of it. Power had become the master passion of her life.

Like men in the same case, she had indulged herself, during a period of enforced inaction, with an exciting love adventure. That she had fallen in love, romantically in love, with this young man, whom so many women loved, and who, no doubt, had given her the full benefit of all his pent-up ardors--Gora could imagine those love scenes--she had not questioned, in spite of Madame Zattiany's carefully composed tones when speaking of him, and her avoidance of so much as the exchange of a meaning glance with him in public. Up here "Mary" had ceased to be a woman of the world, she had looked like a girl of twenty: and that she was in love and recklessly happy in the fact, was for all to see. That had been one of her most interesting divagations to the novelist, Gora Dwight--but a phase. Gora was not deluded.

And this man Hohenhauer had brought her to her senses; no doubt of that either to a mind both warmly imaginative and coldly analytical. And what had he come up here for except to ask her to marry him--to share his power? She dismissed the Washington inference with the contempt it deserved. Mr. Dinwiddie was a very experienced and astute old gentleman, but he always settled on the obvious like a hen on a porcelain egg. . . . What a manifest destiny! What an ideal match. . . . She sighed, almost envying her. But it would be almost as interesting to write about as to experience. After all, a novelist had things all her own way, and that was more than even the Zattianys could hope for.

Then she remembered poor Clavering and looked up at him with eyes that were wholly sympathetic.

"I don't think there's a doubt," she said, "that Prince Hohenhauer came up here to ask her to marry him. You can see for yourself what such a match would mean for him, for aside from that indisputable genius of hers--trained in later years by himself--she has great wealth and few scruples; and where he failed to win men to his purpose, she, with her superlative charm, and every feminine intuition sharpened by an uncommon experience of men and public life, would succeed. She may hate him, as Mr. Dinwiddie says--for the moment. But even if she continued to hate him that would not prevent her from marrying him if she believed he could help her to power. If it had not been for you I don't believe she would have hesitated a moment."

"Do you mean to say you believe she'll throw me over?" demanded Clavering fiercely.

"I think you're in danger, and if I were you I'd throw Mr. Dinwiddie's advice to the winds and take the morning train for New York."

"Don't you believe that she loves me?"

"Oh, yes. As love goes."

"What d'you mean by that?"

"I mean that Madame Zattiany has long since reached the age when power means more than love--in a woman of that calibre. But you, in turn, have tremendous power over her. Sweep her off her feet again and make her marry you."

"You don't believe she's gone to Washington?"

"I do not. If that was all he wanted of her, why didn't he telephone? I am sure he could be ambiguous enough to defeat the curiosity of any listeners-in. But a man of that sort does not ask a woman to marry him over the telephone----"

"But Din thinks----"

"How long do you think you can stand inaction?"

"Not another hour, by God! I'm nearly mad as it is."

"I thought so. You are about the last man on earth equipped to play the waiting game."

"You don't think she means to return here?"

"Never. She's too much of an artist for one thing. She might be willing to begin a new chapter, but she knows that asterisks in the wrong place are fatal. This interruption has done for your idyl!"

"I had thought the same thing." He sighed heavily.

"Oh, yes, Clavey dear, you are an artist yourself. No matter what happens never forget that it is your destiny to be a great one."

"Artist be damned. If--if--God! if I lose her--I'll never write another line."

"I don't doubt you think so. But you're only just beginning to know yourself. You got a few glimpses, I should think, while you were writing that play."

"Don't mention that play to me. I hate it. If I hadn't let myself go with the damned thing I'd have had my wits about me and would have married her off-hand."

"I wonder. Was she so very anxious to marry?"

He turned cold. Fear flared up again. "What do you mean by that?"

"Well, I don't know that I mean anything. Except that like all women she probably wanted to enjoy the thrilling hopes and fears and uncertainties of that never to be repeated prelude, to the limit. Now, better wake up Larsing and order the car if you mean to catch that morning train. If you don't want to go back to bed I'll sit up with you. You can sleep on the train."

LVIII

He left the next morning in a dense fog. As Larsing rowed him across the lake he could not see its surface nor the wall of trees on the opposite bank, and in a moment the camp was obliterated.

Only Gora and Larsing knew of his departure. Even Dinwiddie was still asleep. Larsing had made him a cup of coffee, and Gora had packed his bag, moving like a mouse in his room. She kissed him good-bye and patted him on the back.

"I'll go out myself in a day or two," she said. "You may need me down there."

The fog thinned gradually and the Ford made its usual comfortless speed down the mountain. When they reached Huntersville the valley was bathed in early morning sunlight, and Huntersville, asleep, shared the evanescent charm of the dawn. It was a beautiful and a peaceful scene and Clavering, whose spirits had descended into utter gloom while enwrapped in that sinister fog, accepted it as a happier portent; and when he was so fortunate as to find an empty drawing-room on the Express, he went to bed and slept until the porter awoke him at Tarrytown.

It was his first impulse to rush direct to Murray Hill, but he knew the folly of doing anything of the sort. He needed a bath and a shave and a fortifying dinner.

He concluded that it would be unwise to telephone, and at nine o'clock he approached her house, reasonably calm and quite determined to have his own way. But the house was dark from cellar to roof. Every window was closed although it was a warm night. He sprang up the steps and rang the bell. He rang again, and then kept his finger on the button for nearly five minutes.

He descended into the area, but the iron bars were new, and immovable. Moreover, a policeman was sauntering opposite. He approached the man in a moment and asked him if he knew whether the house had been open earlier in the evening. Yes, the officer told him, he had seen one of the servants go in about half an hour ago.

Clavering walked away slowly. If Mary had gone to Washington, why had the servants not answered his ring? It was too early for them to be in bed. Then his spirits, which had descended to zero, rose jubilantly. Hohenhauer! It was against him she was barricading herself. No doubt she would feel herself in a state of siege as long as the man remained in the country.

He went to the nearest hotel and telephoned. He was prepared to be told, after an interminable wait, that there was "no answer"; but in a moment he heard the voice of the butler. Obeying a sudden impulse he disguised his own.

"I should like to speak to Madame Zattiany."

"Madame has retired."

He hung up. He had ascertained that she was at home and his spiritual barometer ascended another notch. He'd see her tomorrow if he spent the day on her doorstep. He bought an evening paper, picked out a new play, and spent a very agreeable evening at the theatre.

LIX

His nervous excitement returned next morning, but he forced himself to eat a good breakfast and read his newspapers. He was determined to show her that he was completely master of himself. She should be able to draw no unfavorable comparisons with Hohenhauer, whose composure had probably not been ruffled in forty years. His comparative youth might be against him, but after all a man of thirty-four was no infant, and in some respects he was as old as he would ever be. He knew the value of dignity and self-control, and whatever might come he would sacrifice neither. But he sighed heavily. "Whatever might come." But he refused to dwell on alternatives.

It was ten o'clock when he presented himself at Madame Zattiany's door. As he had hoped, his ring was answered. Hohenhauer was not the man to call on a woman at ten in the morning.

The footman permitted himself to stare, and said deprecatingly: "I am very sorry, Mr. Clavering, but Madame told me to admit no visitors----"

"Did she?" He entered and tossed his hat on a high Italian chair. "Kindly tell her that I am in the library and shall remain there until she is ready to come down."

The man hesitated, but after all Clavering had had the run of the house, and it was possible that Madame believed him still to be in the mountains. At all events he knew determination when he saw it, and marched reluctantly up the stairs.

Clavering went into the library. He was filled with an almost unbearable excitement, but at least the man's assertion that she was at home to no one cemented his belief that she meant to see nothing further of Hohenhauer.

He glanced round the beautiful mellow room so full of memories. After all he had been happier here than he had ever been in his life--until they had gone up to the woods! The room's benignant atmosphere seemed to enfold him, calmed his fears, subdued that inner quiver. Surely she would surrender to its influence and to his--whatever had happened. He knew she had always liked him the better because he did not make love to her the moment they met, but today he would take her by surprise, give her no time to think.

But, as Mrs. Oglethorpe had once told him, a clever man is no match for a still cleverer woman.

At the end of fifteen minutes the footman opened the door and announced:

"Madame is in the car, sir, and begs you will join her."

Clavering repressed a violent start and an imprecation. But there was nothing to do but follow the man; fortunately he did not have what was known as an "open countenance." Let her have her own way for the moment. He could--and would--return with her. For the moment he felt primitive enough to beat her.

She was wearing a black dress with a long jade necklace and a large black hat, and, as he ran down the steps, he had time further to observe that she was even whiter than usual and had dark rings under her eyes.

"It is too beautiful a morning to remain indoors," she said, as she gave him her hand and he took the seat beside her. "We will drive in the Park and then up the river for a bit."

She was completely at her ease, and she was the Madame Zattiany of the night he had met her. But she did not elaborate the rôle, and asked him how he had left his friends at the camp and if he had enjoyed his fishing trip.

"Enough of this," he interrupted, when he had mastered his excitement at being close to her once more. After all, he had expected something of the sort. She was just the woman to fall back on her infernal technique. "I know that you went down to Huntersville to meet Hohenhauer, and that the result of that interview was an abrupt flight from me--possibly from him. I want the truth."

Her face had flushed, but as the color ebbed she looked almost waxen. "I relied on Din----"

"Well, I guessed it and he admitted the fact. And if he hadn't I'd have come after you, anyhow. Your note was enough to tell any man something was wrong. I shall not be put off and I will have an answer to my questions. Do you love me no longer?"

"Oh, yes," she said softly. "I love you." But when he tried to take her hand she drew it away.

"Do you still intend to marry me?"

"Won't you give me a few days more to think it over?"

"No, I will not. And--do you need them? Haven't you already made up your mind?"

She sighed and looked out of the window. They were driving up Fifth Avenue and the bright street was full of color and life. The busses and motors were filled with women on their way to the shops, whose gay windows were the most enticing in the world. New York, in this, her River of Delight, looked as if she had not a care in the world.

Madame Zattiany did not speak again until they were in the Park.

"I have promised to marry you, remember; and I do not lightly go back on my word. . . . But . . . I had intended to ask if you would be willing to let me go alone to Vienna for six months--and then join me----"

"After I had lost you completely! I shall marry you here, today, or not at all. I love you but I'll not let you play with me. I'll go to Austria with you, and you may do as you choose when you get there. You'll belong to me and I'll make the best of it."

"If I married you now it would not be worth my while to return to Austria. . . . You see, I'd be an American. I'd no longer be Gräfin Zattiany. . . . I could accomplish nothing. . . . It is the strangest thing in the world, but I never had thought of changing my name----"

"Until Hohenhauer reminded you, I suppose. Well, I could have told you that myself. I had counted on it, if you want to know the truth."

"Ah! Then you counted on that to--to----"

"To have you altogether. Yes." And then he added hastily: "But up there--you must believe this--I never gave it a thought--after--after you promised to marry me at once."

He doubted if she had listened to this protest that there had been an hour when in the complete baring of his soul he had been above plotting and subterfuge. She was still looking out of the window. He saw her long upward-curving nostril grow rigid.

But she said quietly: "And what do you think you would have done with me, Lee, after we were on the plane of common mortals once more? Transports do not last for ever, you know, and we are not heedless young things with no thought of the future. You have acknowledged there is no place for me here, and there would be no place for me in Europe if I married you. Do you wonder that I came away to think, after Prince Hohenhauer--who, remember, knows me far better than you do--pointed out the inexorable truth? What would you do with me, Lee?"

He stared out of the window in his turn--at the tender greens of the Park. He could hear the birds singing. Spring! The chill of winter was in the car, and it emanated from the woman beside him.

"I don't know," he said miserably. "I only know that I love you and would take any chances."

"But, you see, although it is my misfortune to love you, I recognize that there is a long generation between us. I thought I had spanned it, but--do you realize that we have literally nothing to give each other but love? That we are as unlike----"

"Oh, yes, I realized all that the night you left. But I don't care. Cannot you trust me?"

"There is that long generation, Lee. And it is I who have lived it, not you. Lived it and outlived the woman who began it. The gods in a sportive mood made us for each other--and then sent me into the world too soon. . . . I must go on. It is not in me to go back nor to remain becalmed. Hohenhauer told me many cruel truths. Those women at my dinner might have enlightened me if I had not deliberately bandaged the eyes of my mind. I chose to forget them at once. But Hohenhauer----" She shuddered. "Well, although I was infuriated with him at the time--what he said was true. Every word. I must go forward. I cannot--cannot go back."

"He appealed to your ambition, your love of power, I suppose----"

"He showed me to myself for exactly what I am," she said emphatically. "No appeal would have made the slightest impression on me if I had really and finally returned to my Mary Ogdenhood up there in the woods of my real youth. My God! What incredible folly! What powers of self-delusion! But we both have that memory. Let us be grateful. I at least shall hold it apart from all memories as long as I live."

"Are you going to marry that man?"

"That is so purely incidental that it is not worth talking about. I came away to think out my own problem. I love you and I believe that I shall always love you--but I don't see any way out. I have killed once and for all that fatal talent for self-delusion that I had thought was as dead--well, as dead as my love for Moritz Hohenhauer; and nothing could be more dead than that. My brain feels like a crystal house illuminated by searchlights, strong enough to penetrate every corner but not strong enough to blind. I could never, if I would, deceive myself again, nor make another mistake, so far as human prescience will serve me."

He looked at her hands. Her gloves were black suede and they made those hands look smaller, but he had an idea that if he lifted one it would fall of its own rigid weight.

He made no comment and she said in a moment: "Perhaps you may have an inspiration. If there is any solution for us, believe me when I say that it would make me as happy as it could make you."

But her hands did not relax.

"What is the solution, Lee?"

He had buried his face in his hands. "There is none, I suppose. Unless you have the courage to drive down to the City Hall and marry me . . . and"--he lifted his head with a faint gleam of hope--"remember that you are young again. You have many years to live. You are a woman. Can you go through life without love?"

"Far better than with it. Love is a very old story to me," she said deliberately. "It could never be to me again the significant thing it is even to the woman of middle age, much less to the young. And now--with a world falling to ruins--in the most critical period of its history--to imagine that love has any but a passing significance---- Oh, no, my friend. Oh, no! Let those women who have it in their power to repeople the earth which has lost so many millions of its sons, cherish that delusion of the supreme importance of love; but not I! I have had my dream, but it is over. If we had met in Vienna it would never have claimed me at all. In New York one may be serious in the romantic manner when one is temporarily free from care, but seriousness is of another and a portentous quality over there."

"Why did you ask me to wait six months and then join you in Vienna?"

She turned her eyes on him with what he had once called her look of ancient wisdom. There was not an expiring flicker of youth in them, nor in the faint smile on her lips. He had thrown himself back in his corner and folded his arms; he had no desire to attract the attention of the passers-by. But his face was as white as a dark man's can be and his eyes were both stricken and bitter.

"To give you time to get over it," she said. "To write another play. To settle down into your old life--and look back upon this episode as upon a dream, a wonderful dream, but difficult to recall as anything more substantial."

"So I inferred. And you have not the courage to marry me--here--today?"

"No, that is the one thing for which I have no courage whatever. In three months I should hate you and myself. I should not have even one memory in my life that I had no wish to banish--the sustaining memory of love undestroyed I may take back with me now. Courage! I could contemplate going back to certain death at the hands of an assassin, or in another revolution; to stand on the edge of the abyss, the last human being alive in Europe, and look down upon her expiring throes before I went over the brink myself. But I have not the courage to marry you."

Clavering picked up the tube and told the driver to stop.

He closed the door and lifted his hat.

"Good-bye, Madame Zattiany," he said. And as the driver was listening, he added: "A pleasant journey."