CHAPTER XXIII

THE PALACE OF DREAMS

When the cablegram from Teheran had announced that Walter was starting homeward, it became necessary for Yetta to rearrange her attitude towards him. As long as he had been an abstraction she had been perfectly free to love him according to her fancy. Evidently she would have to treat the real person differently.

Of course she was glad that he was coming back, but there was an undercurrent of sadness to the thought. It is very hard to give up habits which have become dear. And she was habituated to his absence. In a more tangible way his rooms had become dear to her. In this setting she had come into life. Almost every memory she valued, except those of her father, were connected with the place. She had read so many books in his great leather chair! She had learned to write at his desk. Even the two oil portraits, of his grandfather in a stiff stock and his grandmother in crinoline, had become in a way personal possessions. She must leave all this, must learn to live in new surroundings.

But this regret was only half conscious. There were more vivid sensations of expectancy. Above all she tremblingly hoped for his approbation. When the Great Jahwe had completed his six days' labor and was looking it over, the Earth must have had a palpitating moment of suspense while it waited His verdict. Yetta felt herself the work of Walter's hands. Would he say, "It is good"?

Her love had made her foolishly humble. An objective observer would have doubted if Walter was worthy to unlace her shoes. The fairies had been generous at his christening. They had given him health and wealth and brains. He himself would have admitted that most of his talents had lain idle, wrapped in a napkin. Yetta had not been so richly endowed. At fifteen, with hardly any education, the Fates had put her in a sweat-shop. But she had been given one priceless talent--a keen hunger for an ever larger life. No slightest opportunity for growth had she let slip. Walter was a pitiful example of wasted opportunities compared to this young woman of twenty-two.

There was a more subtle disparity between them.

Yetta's beliefs were passionate faiths, Walter's were intellectual convictions. The dozen odd years' difference in age might have explained this, but it went deeper. Walter had never had the knack of being an intimate part of activity. He was an observer rather than a participant in life. He never got closer to the stage than the wings. And more often he sat in a box. Between her ardent faith and his tired disillusionment lay a chasm which was more than a matter of years. But she, being in love with him, and hardly knowing him at all--at most she had had a dozen talks with him--could not see this.

Would he give her more than approbation? As long as she could, Yetta tried to avoid a definite answer to this question. But it became insistent. She knew he had been in love with Mabel. Eleanor Mead's gossip had supplemented her own conviction. At first it had seemed the inevitable that he should love the wonderful Miss Train. But the last year had seen almost a quarrel between Yetta and Mabel. There were constant disagreements as to the policy of the Woman's Trade Union League. Mabel did not want it to become avowedly Socialist and Yetta