Book One

Chapter 413,117 wordsPublic domain

Spring

IV Vine Cottage

The cottage had been vacant almost four months, an economic waste that cut deeply into Lavinia Trench’s pin-money. Not that David stinted her in the matter of funds. The purse strings had always lain loosely in David’s hands. But her penurious soul, bent on making the best possible showing of whatever resources came within her reach, rebelled at the insolent idleness of invested capital. Vine Cottage had been hers, to do with as she pleased, since the completion of the big Colonial mansion that housed the remnant of the Trench family. There were not half-a-dozen furnished residences to let in Springdale, and that this one should have been unoccupied since the middle of November was inexplicable.

“You haven’t half way tried to rent it,” the woman charged, her eyes shifting from her husband’s face to the cottage beyond the low stone wall, with its sullenly drawn blinds and its air of insensate content. Her glance rested appraisingly on the broad veranda, now banked with wet February snow; the little glass-enclosed breakfast room that had been her own conservatory, in the years gone by; the sturdy-throated chimney, that would never draw--but that none the less served as one of the important talking points of the cottage. An attractive set of gas logs did away with the danger of stale wood smoke in the library; but the chimney remained--moss-covered at the corners, near the ground, a hardy ampelopsis tracing a pattern of brown lace against its dull red bricks. There were eight rooms and a capacious attic. The furniture was excellent. There was a garage, too, with living quarters for the servants. In the year of grace, nineteen hundred and nine, there were not many residences in Springdale with garages.

“I heard at church, Sunday, that Mrs. Marksley is looking for a house. You know, Vine, their place on Grant Drive is for sale--against the building of the new house in Marksley’s Addition. Do you want me to--”

“Mrs. Marksley! Humph!” Lavinia’s black eyes snapped. It would be to her liking to have the wife of the richest man in town as her tenant. Still ... the situation had its disadvantages, not the least of which was that they would be moving out again in a few months, and the same old problem to be faced afresh.

“Do as you like about speaking to Mr. Marksley. But remember, David, I don’t recommend it.”

“It’s your house, my dear. You blamed me for offering the place to Sylvia when she was married. I told you, last fall, I’d have nothing more to do with it.”

He bent to kiss her, a kiss that was part of the compulsory daily routine, and hurriedly left the house. Lavinia turned his words over in her mind, and her gorge rose. David was always that way. You could never make him shoulder responsibility. True, she had wanted Sylvia next door, where she could watch over her daughter’s blundering beginnings at housekeeping. And anyone would say it was an honour to have Professor Penrose in the family--even if his salary was small. But another lessee--with the boon of a commercial position in Detroit at four times the amount he received from the little denominational college in Springdale--would have been held to the strict interpretation of the lease. David would not hear of Oliver and Sylvia paying rent for a house they did not occupy, a sentiment promptly seconded by his daughter. Sylvia never failed to perceive her own advantage--a fact at once gratifying and maddening to her mother. What if David had been like that? What if.... She always put David aside. Why bother about the inevitable?

Mr. Trench did not go at once to the office of Trench & Son, architects and general building contractors. It was important to his domestic peace that some definite step be taken towards the renting of the cottage. He would stop, he thought, at the office of the Argus, and insert a three-time advertisement. He could bring the matter up with Henry Marksley, for whom he always had some construction work on hand. But second thought deterred him. It might be disastrous to have young Hal Marksley next door, if only for a few months. Hal was a senior in the Presbyterian college. His recent attentions to Eileen Trench, just approaching her sixteenth birthday, had been disquieting to her father, none the less because of her mother’s unconcealed approval.

Eileen was impressionable. A youth of Hal Marksley’s--David searched his mind for the word. Disposition? He was more than amiable. Principles? Not quite that, either. In short, there was nothing he could urge against the young man that had not been set at naught by Eileen’s mother. Money had lifted the Marksleys above the restrictions imposed upon common people. Their life had been unconventional, at times positively scandalous. Eileen’s iconoclastic spirit would grasp at anything to justify her revolt against the conventional trammels of her home, the puritanical regulations which served Lavinia in lieu of religion. There was enough friction in that quarter already.

As he passed the college campus, with its motley group of buildings--dingy red brick of forty years’ standing, and the impudent modernity of Bedford stone with trimmings of terra cotta and Carthage marble--he caught sight of Dr. Schubert’s mud-bespattered buggy. The grey mare, these ten years a stranger to the restraining tether, nosed contentedly in the snow for the succulent sprigs that were already making their appearance among the exposed roots of the huge old elms. From the opposite side of the street the family physician waved a driving glove.

“Wait a minute, David.” He made his way cautiously through the ooze of the crudely paved avenue. “I was on my way out to your house. Stopped to look in on a pneumonia that kept me up nearly all night. Does Mrs. Trench still want to rent the cottage? Or is it true that Sylvia and Penrose are coming back?”

“They are well pleased with Detroit. And my wife is most anxious for a tenant. You know, Doctor, she draws the line on children and dogs.”

“We ought to be able to close a very satisfactory deal. My old friend, Griffith Ramsay, spent the night with us. He’s out here from New York--some legal business connected with the mines at Olive Hill, for a client of his, a Mrs. Ascott. The lady is recently widowed, and in need of some kind of diversion. I had been telling him about my experiments, my need for a competent assistant in the laboratory, and he arrived at the conclusion that these two needs would neutralize each other. Mrs. Ascott, having a large financial stake in the mines, would be interested in the possibility of increasing the value of soft coal. The more he though about it, the greater his enthusiasm. The one thing in the way, he thought, would be a suitable place for her to live. That was when Vine Cottage popped into my mind. I’ll send him around to the office to talk over the details of the lease with you.”

V Judith Goes West

Mrs. Ascott had an early appointment with her attorney. An early appointment necessitated her catching the nine-fifteen train for the city. That, again, implied the disruption of the entire household regimen, and Judith Ascott had learned not to try her mother’s patience too far. She was the unpleasant note in an otherwise satisfactory family. True, her mother had stood by her through all the scandal and unpleasantness. But the changing of the breakfast hour was quite another matter.

As she slipped into the pantry of the big suburban home and set the coffee machine going, she turned over in her mind another reason for her care not to disturb the family slumber. She did not know why her attorney wished to see her--was not even sure which member of the firm would be awaiting her, that still March morning. The long-distance message conveyed the bare information that the business was urgent. Might there be another delay in the divorce? She had been assured that the decree would be in her hands by the end of the week; but gruff old Sanderson, the senior partner, was not so sure. Any reference to the “distasteful affair” threw her mother into a nervous chill. A note on the breakfast table, informing the family that she had caught the early express for a morning at the art gallery, would suffice as well as any other explanation.

All the way in, between the snow-decked New York fields and the dreary waste of the Sound, she dwelt moodily on the unpleasant possibilities of the coming interview. But when she emerged from the confusion of the Grand Central station, already in the turmoil of reconstruction, she thought only of the relative merits of the taxicab and the subway. She had schooled herself, in times of stress, to take refuge in irrelevant trifles. She had learned, too, that the more she worried before the ordeal the less occasion she found for worry when the actual conditions confronted her. In view of her sleepless night, she would probably find roses and Griff Ramsay instead of thorns and Donald Sanderson.

The attorney had thought it all out, had decided just how he was going to break the news. But when he found his client confronting him, across the unaccustomed barrier of his desk, his assurance forsook him.

“Judith, what are you going to do, now that you are free?”

“What am I going to do, Griff? That, as usual, depends on mamma. You know I have never planned anything--vital--in my life. When she lays too much stress on the ‘must’ I do the opposite. She says that I am going to sail with her and the boys on the fifth of April, a month from to-day. Ben is going on with his architecture at the Beaux Arts and Jack is wild about airplanes. Paris has hideous memories--but there’s no other place for me.”

“You are not going to Paris.”

The woman started. “No?”

“Not if you have the qualities I believe you have. Judith, may I for once talk cold unpleasant facts? You are twenty-seven years old and the life you have made for yourself is a failure.” Mrs. Ascott deprecated the finality of the word, but she let it pass. “Going to Paris would only be temporizing. Your mother’s influence has always been bad. You and your father are scarcely acquainted. Your brothers are too young to count. Laura and I have been your only intimates, since your return to New York. I need not remind you of our staunch friendship for you.”

“Griff--tell me what you have in mind. I promise not to cry out, if I do squirm a little.”

He told her of Springdale, the kindly old physician who had a theory that soft coal could be transformed, at the mines, into clean fuel and a whole retinue of valuable by-products--of his need for a secretary and laboratory assistant, to keep his records and assist him with experiments. He told her of Vine Cottage, its wide garden and fruit trees. “The house faces south. Get that solidly established in your mind,” he admonished. He knew how important it was for Judith Ascott to be properly oriented. Other details of the place he painted, graphic and engaging. She would take with her her old nurse, Nanny. For servants he had leased Jeff Dutton and wife, who occupied the rooms above the garage. As an afterthought he added that she would spend four mornings a week in Dr. Schubert’s laboratory. Her compensation--a large block of treasury stock in the corporation that would result from the evolving of a process for the cleansing of soft coal.

“Where is this Springdale--this Utopia? What has it to do with Sutton and Olive Hill, where the mines are located?”

“As little as possible. You’ll note that Springdale draws its virtuous white skirts away from those filthy towns, with an air so smug that it would disgust you if it were not so amusingly naïve. It claims ten thousand inhabitants--when the census taker isn’t within hearing. There is a denominational college--co-ed, I believe--with a conservatory of music and a school of dramatic art. The President isn’t the lean sycophant in a shabby Prince Albert coat that you might expect. I met him--a singularly spruce-minded successor to that old Presbyterian war-horse, Thomas Henderson, who built the college out of Illinois dirt.”

“Sounds interesting, Griff. Is there any more?”

“Yes, ever so much. The college isn’t the whole show, by any means. At one end of the town is a Bible Institute and at the other an asylum for the feeble-minded. There is a manual training school for deaf-mutes and a sanitarium for drug fiends and booze fighters. On the whole, quite an intellectual centre. It is under no circumstances to be confused with Springfield, the capital of the state. You are sentenced to live there for a year. At the end of your term you may come back to New York--if you haven’t found yourself.”

“Only last night I was wishing that I could run away--somewhere--anywhere--to a place I had never heard of. Do you think I can do the work?”

“Oh, that part of it.... My only concern is for your mother. I’ll send Laura down to Pelham to help persuade her.”

Judith Ascott’s finely modelled shoulders came up in an almost imperceptible shrug. “Mamma will be so relieved. Don’t trouble Laura. I was only going to Paris because there was no convenient pigeonhole to stow me away ‘till wanted.’ Mamma, of course, hopes that I will marry. She wouldn’t want me tagging around after her, the rest of her life. _You_ know that I am done with men.”

“By-the-way,” Ramsay interrupted, “I led those people to suppose your husband was dead. It’s that kind of town. Not the old doctor, understand. His sympathy’s as wide as humanity. But your next-door neighbours--excellent people, though with small-town limitations. You’ll have to depend on them for such social life as your gregarious nature demands. How soon can you be ready to go west?”

“As soon as I can bring Nanny from Vermont. I ought to be on my way in a week.”

III

Later in the day, when she found herself alone in a quiet corner of the Metropolitan, Mrs. Ascott turned the preposterous proposition over in her mind. No doubt the Ramsays were as tired of her eternal flopping from one untenable situation to another as her own people were. In Springdale she would be safely off their hands ... at least until the sensation of her divorce had subsided. Would her late husband marry the nonchalant co-respondent? Would Herbert Faulkner, with whom she had all but eloped, while Raoul Ascott and the girl were in Egypt.... But she was not interested in Herbert Faulkner, and she cared not a straw whether Raoul married or pursued his butterfly career, free from the stimulating restrictions of domestic life. Was Griff afraid she would disturb the farcical relations of her late impassioned admirer and the stern-lipped woman who bore his name and made free with his check-book to further her aberrant social ambition? Was it for this that she had been banished to the coal fields of western Illinois--to save Maida Faulkner the annoyance of a divorce and consequent loss of income? Whatever the actuating motive, the thing was done. She had acquiesced without a murmur of protest. This was in keeping with her whole nondescript life. Nothing had been worth the effort of opposition. She had never known the stinging contact of human suffering. Oh, to burn her fingers with the flame of living! But Springdale--a hide-bound college town, where divorce is reckoned among the cardinal sins....

VI The Trench Children

Lavinia stood in the sun-room, staring perplexedly across the lawn in the direction of Vine Cottage. She was trying to decide a ponderous question. To call on the new tenant ... or to wait the prescribed two weeks? David and the children felt that a neighbourly visit was already overdue. Probably, Larimore had said at breakfast, Mrs. Ascott knew nothing of the silly custom which prevailed in Springdale, and would think her landlady either hostile or rude. For once in her life Lavinia Trench was uncertain. The new tenant was a woman of the world. Ominous distinction. How could one gauge a neighbour who had crossed the ocean sixteen times and had lived in every European capital from London to Constantinople? She did not wear black. Incomprehensible for a widow. Likely as not, she held Springdale unworthy the display of her expensive weeds. Or perhaps she was saving them for some adequate occasion. Just going to Dr. Schubert’s laboratory to work ... one’s old clothes would serve for that. Besides, there were so many new fads about mourning. It might be that taupe was the correct thing. She would write and ask Sylvia about it.

Sylvia was the one member of the family whose opinion was accorded a meed of respect--now that she had gone to Detroit to live. It was too bad that she should have moved to another city, just when a woman who might have been of service to her had come to Springdale. It was always that way. Life offered the great desideratum--after the wish or need for it had gone by. Life, Lavinia Trench’s life, was an endless chain of disappointments. Of this there was no shadow of doubt. David and the children had heard the statement reiterated with such consistent regularity that they failed now to hear it at all--like the noise of the trolley cars on Sherman Avenue, behind the Trench home, that at first made such a deafening clatter.

“You seem to get everything you ask for,” her second son, Robert, had once reminded her. “That’s more than you can say for the rest of us.” Whereat she reeled off such a catalogue of woes that even Bob was silenced.

There was something abnormal about the Trench children. Nothing ever went right with them. Sylvia was the college beauty, an exact replica of her mother, and she had been forced in sheer desperation to marry, at twenty-four, the baldheaded professor of chemistry and physics, whom half the girls in town had refused. Larimore was a successful architect, had taken honours at Cornell; but he detested girls and boys. Had his nose in a book most of the time. He might have done things for his sister, if he had not been so steeped in his own morbid fancies. Bob would have brought eligible young men to the house, if he had been the next one in age to Sylvia. Mrs. Trench shuddered when she thought about Bob. It was the culminating tragedy of her badly ordered life.

A good many things made her shudder ... horrible patches of the past, that had been lived through, somehow. There were the first few years of her married life at Olive Hill, when David worked as a carpenter, and two babies invaded the three-room cottage before her second anniversary. She had not considered the possibility of children when, after an engagement lasting less than a month, she and David had been married. A little daughter--three weeks older than Ellen’s first child! Lavinia made it an occasion for rejoicing. Sent dainty announcements to Bromfield, tied with blue ribbon. But when, after fourteen months, a boy came, she began to question the leap she had made, that tempestuous October day.

The boy was called Larimore, in protest against the unmistakable lineaments of the Trenches that revealed themselves in his pathetic baby face. He was an anaemic child, given to wailing softly when in pain--a sharp contrast to Sylvia’s insistent screams. As he grew into boyhood he was quiet and studious, as David had been. Seldom gave his mother cause for anxiety, glutted her maternal pride with his achievements at school, and yet she never quite overcame the feeling that he was an interloper in her family. There were three years of immunity, and then came Robert, the child whom everybody else regarded as a stray. But Lavinia saw in his thick black hair and virile body the materialization of her contempt for David’s softness, as it had perpetuated itself in her first son.

There was nothing about Bob that was soft but his skin. And that was another Trench anomaly. Between Lary’s curling blond locks and Bob’s peach bloom complexion, Sylvia had a desperate time of it, before the period of adolescence when her own sallow cheeks began to clear. Those were the dim prehistoric days when, in Springdale, rouge and lip sticks carried all the sinister implication which had attached, in the Bromfield of Lavinia’s day, to the suggested idea that a “nice” girl wanted to marry. There was implicit in each the stigma of the wanton, and Lavinia had taught her children that, before all else, they must be respectable. Her own powder box was closely guarded, its existence denied with oaths that would have condemned a less righteous soul to perdition.

After David removed to Springdale, as junior member of the firm that had the contract for two new buildings on the college campus, and Vine Cottage had been erected beyond the residence district of the town, three other babies arrived--at perfectly decent intervals. They were all girls. Isabel, like Lary, was given an unequivocal Larimore name, because she was so exactly like her father. She was four years younger than Bob, and the death of these two made a strange break in the family continuity. Mrs. Ascott heard about the Trench children in a manner at once vivid and enlightening.

III

It was the ninth day of her tenancy at Vine Cottage, and she and Dr. Schubert were already old friends. With the exception of a reference to Eileen, whom the quality rather than the content of his allusion marked as his favourite, he had studiously avoided any comment on the Trenches that would serve to divert the free flow of her own sensitive perception. Larimore and Sydney Schubert were of about the same age--had been intimate friends from boyhood. Syd’s affection for Lary, at one period of his youth, had overflowed and engulfed Sylvia. But Mrs. Trench had set her face sternly against any such alliance. “The obstacle seems to have been that intangible thing, a discrepancy in age--on the wrong side of the ledger,” the physician explained. “_There_ is one woman,” he stressed the first word extravagantly, his eyes twinkling, “who has the whole scheme of life crystallized. With most of us, certain problems remain fluid. Mrs. Trench _knows_. The eternal verities don’t admit of argument. My boy was only a medical student when he went mooning after Sylvia, but his prospects were good. If he had been born the day before--instead of lagging a stupid sixteen months after the girl--it would have been all right for her to wait ten years for him. As it was, he simply wouldn’t do. Mrs. Trench objected to Walter Marksley on entirely different grounds. Mrs. Trench is strong for the moral code, and Walter kept a fairly luxuriant crop of wild oats in his front yard.... But my dear, my dear, I’m developing the garrulity that is a sure harbinger of old age. Don’t let a word I’ve been saying serve to bias you in your estimate of your landlady. I assure you, she’s a trump.”

Judith reflected, on the way home that morning, that if she wanted to get on with Mrs. Trench, she must guard her own questionable past with double zeal. It came to her, with a curious feeling of separation, that she might care what Mrs. Trench thought. The concept was a new one, and she inspected it with interest. But then ... she had been so desperately lonely, so remote from everything she had known in the past. And she was, as Griff Ramsay suggested, a gregarious animal--recognizing only in its absence her need of the herd. For the sake of Griff and Laura she would endure her exile to the end, and she was, it seemed, dependent on the morally austere woman in the great Colonial house for such human contact as Springdale might offer--human contact which for the first time in her life she craved with poignant longing.

Nanny met her at the door, her face red with laughter, her ample sides shaking. There had been a gravel fight between Jeff Dutton and one of the Trench children. It appeared to be one of the regular institutions of Vine Cottage.

“You must hurry with your luncheon, Miss Judith, so as not to miss the next round. The little girl was furious. She said Dutton muffed his play, and that was against the rules. She’s coming back to settle with him.”

Nanny had prepared an unusually tempting repast, in the tiny breakfast room that looked out, with many windows, on the stretch of lawn that separated the two houses, on the little wicket gate in the low stone wall, and the ample kitchen garden beyond the wall, brown and scarred with the first spring spading. The lonely woman viewed, with chill apprehension, the imposing façade of the house, the crisp white curtains that served, with their thin opacity, to conceal all the activity of the Trench home life. A sugar-coated sphinx, that house, guarding its secret soul with a subtle reticence that belied its seeming candour. Larimore Trench had drawn the plans for the new home. Was he that sort of man--or was this another expression of the ubiquitous Lavinia, whom Dutton had characterized as “running the hull ranch”?

There was a commotion in the hall that led from the kitchen to the breakfast room, and Nanny opened the door. She was plainly perplexed. Miss Judith was still a child to her, but she was too instinctively a servant to venture upon the prerogative of her mistress.

“You let me by,” a shrill voice piped. “I’m going to tell her, myself.”

The housekeeper yielded to a vicious pinch in the rotund cushion of her thigh, and a small parcel of humanity slid adroitly into Mrs. Ascott’s field of vision. Her head was set defiantly on one side, but the dark eyes were inscrutable. A moment only she faltered, tucking in her long under lip and shifting her slight bulk from one foot to the other.

“I broke a window in your garage. It was Jeff’s fault. He had no business ducking. How did he know I had a rock in that handful of gravel? Just gravel wouldn’t have broken the window. I’m willing to shoulder the blame, and pay for the glass out of my allowance--if you’ll make Jeff put it in. I can swipe that much putty from my papa’s shop. And--and don’t let Jeff Dutton snitch on me--to Lary.”

She finished with an excited gasp, and stood awaiting the inevitable.

“Come here, little girl. Don’t mind about the pane. Are you Eileen Trench?”

“Me? Mercy, no!” Astonishment dissolved into mirth, mirth that savoured of derision. The next instant the laugh died and the high forehead was puckered in a frown of swift displeasure. She came a step nearer, her thin brown hand plucking at her skirt. “I shouldn’t have laughed that way, as if you’d said something silly. It goes hard with me to say I’m sorry--because--usually I’m not. I hate lying, just to be polite. Eileen’ll take a lickin’ any day, before she’ll say she’s sorry. But Sylvia says it’s better to apologize and be done with it. And I guess it does save time.”

The ideas appeared chaotic, as if the child were in the throes of a mighty change in ethical standards. Judith looked at her, a whimsical fancy taking possession of her mind that she was watching some fantastic mime--that this was no flesh-and-blood child, but an owl masquerading in wren’s attire.

“My dear old doctor mentioned Sylvia and Lary and Eileen. Would you mind telling me your name?”

“Theodora.”

“Theodora--the gift of God.”

“Yes, and it was a rummy gift. Jeff Dutton says the Lord hung a lemon on my mother’s Christmas tree. I was supposed to come a boy--there’d been too many girls already--and they were going to name me after my uncle Theodore. Jeff thinks I cried so much because I was disappointed at being just a girl. I guess I cried, all right. My brother, Bob, named me ‘Schubert’s Serenade’ because he and Lary had me ’neath their casement every night till two o’clock. Mamma’s room was where your library is now. I like this house lots better than ours.”

“Do you remember this one? I thought the new house was built five years ago.”

Theodora turned questioning eyes upon her. Then, in a flash, she understood.

“Dear me, you have an idea I’m about six years old. Strangers always do. I can’t help it that I never grow any bigger. I was twelve last Christmas, and I’m first year Prep. It’s horrid to be so little. People never have any respect for you. Eileen’s tall as a broom--but nobody has much respect for her, either.”

“Tell me about Eileen. Dr. Schubert is fond of her, I believe.”

“Yes, he sees good in her. He’s about the only one who does. She was sixteen last Sunday, and she’s third year Prep. Goes into college next fall, if she don’t flunk again. She’s getting too big for mamma’s slipper, and I don’t know what is going to become of her. She’s been ugly as sin, ever since mamma heard a Chautauqua lecturer say you had to go in for technique. You know, Eileen plays the violin. And when mamma shuts her up and makes her practice--she gets even by making her fiddle swear. It says ‘hell’ and ‘damn’ and some worse ones, just as plain. And when she’s mad, her eyes get as yellow as cat’s eyes. You never saw yellow eyes, did you?”

“My own look that way, at times--when I’m ill or out of sorts.”

“But they’re the loveliest--like gray violets!” She looked deep into Mrs. Ascott’s eyes, and her own kindled with admiration. “Dr. Schubert told us yours were like Lary’s. But they aren’t, a bit. His are light brown. That barely saves him from being a Trench.”

Manifestly Lavinia had impressed on her family the advantage of looking like the Larimores. And yet, Judith thought she had never seen a finer looking man than David Trench--not so well groomed as his son, and with the gait of a man perennially tired, but with a face that Fra Angelico would have loved to paint.

When the elfin child had gone, in response to the ringing of a great bell on the distant campus, Mrs. Ascott sat a long while in smiling silence. Not in years had she been so entertained. Bit by bit she added the child’s revelations to the broken comments of her garrulous gardener. The Duttons had been neighbours of the Trenches in Olive Hill, when Jeff and Dave were fellow workmen, and before Jeff’s baleful visit to the “Jag Institoot” that robbed him of his prowess as a brick mason, along with the appetite for undiluted whiskey. Mrs. Dutton “wasn’t very friendly” because her fortunes had declined until she was compelled to serve as laundress and house-maid to Mrs. Trench’s tenants. But there was a time when she and her husband were glad of a refuge in the rooms above the garage. This small brick structure, it transpired, had been David’s work shop, and here Lary had made his first architectural drawings.

Theodora’s prattle fairly bristled with Lary. Whatever his mother might think of him, in his little sister’s eyes he was the one flawless being. It was he who had supervised the furnishing of Vine Cottage, for a certain Professor Ferguson, a testy little Scot in charge of the department of biology at the college. And Lary and his mother had almost broken heads over some of the details.

Everything about the house was exquisite. Judith thought she knew what Lary would be like--the man who could limit himself to a single dull blue and yellow vase for the library mantel. The external appearance of the cottage had promised fustian ... the fish-scale ornament above the bay-window, the elaborate carvings between the veranda pillars, the somewhat fussy pergola that covered the gravel walk from the kitchen to the garage.

Bare vines were everywhere, swelling with sap and viridescent with eager buds that strove with their armour of winter scales, although it was not yet the end of March. Beds of narcissus and tulips gave promise of early bloom, and already the yellow and white crocus blossoms were starring the withered bluegrass of the front lawns. There was an unwritten law that the lattice which screened the vegetable garden must never carry anything but cypress and Japanese morning glories, and that potatoes must be planted east of the pergola. There were other unwritten “musts” that came to light, day by day, all of them having to do with the garden, over which apparently Mrs. Trench had retained control.

“But, Lordee, you don’t have to pay no attention to her,” Dutton sniffed, when a rather arbitrary ruling was undergoing vicarious transmission. “Treat her like Ferguson did, the fust time she butted in. It’s _your_ house.”

Between Dutton and Theodora, it would not be long until all the Trench skeletons had been dragged from their closets and set dancing in hilarious abandon, for the amusement of the new tenant. They were not real people, the Duttons and the Trenches, with their unfamiliar life-experience. She had never envisaged anyone like them. It was all a part of the dream she had cherished--a place she had never heard of, where she could lose herself ... and forget....

VII Lavinia Pays a Call

In the pigeonholes of her memory, Mrs. Ascott had stowed a collection of unanswered questions, neatly tabulated and reserved for possible solution. Why had her marriage with Raoul been the inevitable failure she knew it must be, almost from the beginning? Would they have found each other if there had been children? Would her own life have been more satisfactory, had her mother married for love and not for social position? And now she added another, trivial as compared with these, yet quite as elusive: Would Mrs. Trench have waited the prescribed two weeks for a first call on a new neighbour, had her small daughter failed to report the broken window--and other things?

Whatever the answer, the stubborn fact remained that Mrs. David Trench did call, on Friday afternoon. She left a correctly engraved card on the vestibule table, and sat erect on the edge of her chair. She wore an austere tailored suit, patent leather boots that called attention to the trim shape of her feet, and a flesh-tinted veil of fine silk net with flossy black dots. In the full light of the south window, she might have passed for thirty-six. Barring a conspicuous hardness of the mouth, her features were excellent. The hair that lay in palpably artificial curls along the line of her velvet hat was as black as it is possible for Caucasian hair to be, and the eyes were coldly piercing--as if appraisal were their chief function. But her speech.... Cloying sweetness trickled through her words, as she assured her tenant that they were destined to be friends. She would come and care for Mrs. Ascott if she should fall ill--so far from home and mother. She was a famous nurse. Dr. Schubert would bear her witness. Her heart ached as she thought how desolate must be the life of a young widow.

“Yet,” she added, “it is an enviable state, after all--when one has passed the first shock of grief. Like everything in life, it has its compensations. You don’t have to bother with a man, and there is no danger of your being an old maid.” She pronounced the last words as if she were referring to the plague or small-pox. “The West must look strange to you,” she hurried on, “a little town, too, after spending all your life in New York and the great cities of Europe.”

“I have spent very little time in New York,” her tenant corrected. “When I was married I went to Philadelphia to live--such time as we were not travelling. And I was scarcely away from Rochester until I was fifteen.”

“Rochester! You don’t tell me! We went to Rochester for shopping and the theatre, as people in Springdale go to St. Louis. What a little world it is, after all. Did you ever hear of a town called Bromfield?”

Judith searched her memory. At last she had it. She had driven to that village more than once with her grandfather, Dr. Holden. She recalled one visit, when the sleigh was insecurely anchored in front of a house on Main Street, while she curled up for a nap in the great fur robes on the seat. The horse, arriving at the mental state which demanded dinner, before the physician was ready to leave the house, had untied the hitching strap and cantered unconcernedly to the livery stable where he was in the habit of being fed.

“You don’t mean that you were the little girl in the sleigh!” Mrs. Trench’s eyes were scintillating with astonished interest. “I’ll show you the account of it--in the Bromfield Sentinel. I have a complete file of the little home paper. And it will surprise you to know that the man your grandfather was calling on was Robert Larimore, my father. He died of brain hemorrhage, that same night. All the Larimores go that way--suddenly. Dr. Holden was called, when my father’s mother died, but it was all over before the telegram reached him. And your grandmother ... she must have been the Mrs. Holden who did so much work among the poor.”

“Yes, my parents left Rochester to escape from her pets. That, of course, is only a family joke. My father spent a good many years in South America, and I was left with my grandparents. One of my brothers was born in Bolivia and the other in the Argentine. I didn’t see them until they were six and ten years old.”

Mrs. Trench was not listening. Should she ... or should she not? In the end, she did. “Mrs. Ascott, I know it sounds like a foolish question--a city the size of Rochester--but you said a moment ago that as a child you knew everybody. Did you ever hear of a family named Fournier?”

“The people who kept the delicatessen, around the corner from my grandfather’s private sanitarium? Yes, I knew them well.”

“Was there a daughter--Lettie or Arletta--some such name? She’d be a woman of about forty-five by this time, I should think.”

“No, she was the niece, a wild, highstrung girl who gave them a good deal of trouble. She ran away and was married, at sixteen--some worthless fellow from up-state, who afterward tried to get out of it.”

“Worthless?” Mrs. Trench bristled unaccountably.

“That was the way Lettie’s people regarded him. Their little boy and I played together, as children. My grandmother took a lively interest in Lettie, as she did in all wayward girls who found no sympathy at home. I remember she devoted a good deal of her time to the patching up of quarrels between Lettie and her husband--and keeping peace in the family, when he was in Rochester with them.”

“Was there anything--peculiar--about their marriage?”

“Lettie was romantic. I believe that was all. It happened before I was born; but I remember that there was always talk. Grandma Holden compelled her to confess her marriage, to save her good name. And the foolish part of it was that she and the youth were married under assumed names--”

“The boy--how old is he?”

“By a very amusing coincidence, I happen to know that, too. I couldn’t tell you the ages of my brothers, with any degree of certainty. But Fournier Stone and I were born the same night, in adjoining rooms of Dr. Holden’s sanitarium. He arrived early in the evening, and I a little before dawn. By that much I escaped the ‘April Fool’ that was so offensive to him. I shall be twenty-seven next Friday.”

Mrs. Trench made swift mental calculation, and her stiffly pursed lips uttered one inexplicable sentence:

“Thank God, my people have always been respectable.”

Lavinia went home, her whole being in turmoil. She had not seen Bromfield since the day when she and David packed their scant belongings and turned to seek oblivion or happiness in Olive Hill. With the exception of the Sentinel and her sister-in-law’s verbose letters, she knew little of the course of events in that quiet back-water that had environed her stagnant girlhood. And Ellen left large gaps in the village news, gaps that could be filled, inadequately, by inference or imagination. That Calvin had a child, this much she knew. That he had spent most of his time in Rochester, prior to his father’s long illness and death, this, too, had been conveyed to her by a random personal notice now and then. But that he and Lettie had gotten on badly--had quarreled.... Cruel joy burned in her eyes. They had had recourse to the neighbours, to smooth out their family affairs. Whatever unpleasantness she had had, within the four walls of her own home, none of the neighbours had been permitted to suspect that her life was not all she wished it to be. The neighbours. What kind of woman was Mrs. Stone, that she would.... But Lavinia knew, at last, what kind of woman Mrs. Stone was. She reflected that Lettie’s marriage certificate probably had not been framed in gold, as hers was, and conspicuously displayed on the wall of her bedroom. The past ten years, the Stones had prospered, and Calvin had succeeded his father as president of the bank. Ellen and Lettie were on calling terms. She would write Ellen....

In memory she went back to the days when Vine Cottage was new, when to her fell the task of choosing a line of social progress in the clique-ridden town of Springdale. She had three small children, ample excuse for a little dalliance. And the cottage, with two hundred feet of ground to be transformed into a marvellous garden, was a little way out--a double reason for delay, when David urged her to return the calls of the Eastern Star ladies, who had been most gracious. “I don’t want to make any mistake,” she told him. “If you once get in with the wrong set....” David didn’t know what she meant.

III

Society in Springdale, such society as counted for anything, was divided by a clearly marked line of cleavage, with Mrs. Henry Marksley dominating one stratum and Mrs. Thomas Henderson the other. The Hendersons were leaders in the intellectual life of the community and staunch pillars in the Presbyterian church. Lavinia was glad that David had been brought up a Presbyterian--or rather, that that happened to be the fashionable church in Springdale. When it came to matters of principle, it was not easy to manipulate David.

The Marksleys seldom went to church. On the other hand, Mr. Marksley stood ready with three contracts, before David had finished the work on the campus, contracts which enabled him to reap the benefit of his labour, instead of delivering two-thirds of the profits into the hand of the senior partner. Mrs. Marksley was particularly anxious to rally to her standard the best looking and aggressive young women of the town. She was trying to live down the latest escapades of her husband and her eldest daughter, Adelaide. Such a woman as Mrs. David Trench would be of service to her--and she could make the association correspondingly profitable. But at the psychological moment Mrs. Marksley went into temporary social exile, ceasing all activity until after the birth of a son. The hiatus, together with certain whispered stories concerning Adelaide, drove Lavinia to Mrs. Henderson and the Browning Club. It was a step she never regretted. Within a year she was able to send to the Bromfield Sentinel an account of a spirited business meeting, at which “young Mrs. Trench” had been elected secretary, over the heads of two rival candidates whose husbands were in the college faculty. Mrs. Henderson was perpetual president, and membership in the club gave just the right intellectual and cultural stamp.

Years afterward, Tom Henderson and Walter Marksley began an exciting race for Sylvia’s favour--courtship that came to nothing, as all Sylvia’s courtship did. And now, the boy whose advent had settled, once and for all, Mrs. Trench’s social destiny, was playing around with Eileen, taking her to and from school in his car and ruining her digestion with parfait and divinity. David and Larimore--to his mother he was always Larimore, never Lary--had set their faces stubbornly against this flattering attachment. There had been no scandal in the Marksley family in recent years, and no other objection that a sensible person could name. But how to persuade them.... Mrs. Ascott! To be sure. It was providential that she had come to Springdale at such an opportune time. She would see things in their true light--being a woman of the world. If only Larimore could be induced to call on her. She was--m-m-m, yes, nineteen months older than Larimore. That made it safe. A young widow.... But Larimore Trench had never been interested in any woman. She would trump up some reason for sending him over, that very evening. She must have Mrs. Ascott’s assistance. Eileen’s future--her own future, for reasons as yet but dimly apprehended--was at stake.

But Theodora spared her the trouble. Judith was finishing her lonely dinner when the telephone rang. “I’m bringing my brother over to see you. I told him you wanted some changes made in the living-room.” In a muffled whisper she added: “Of course you didn’t; but I’ll explain. We’ll be there in a minute.” Before she could reply, the receiver had clicked into its hook, and the two were seen emerging from the house.

“Mrs. Ascott, this is Lary. It’s the lamp shade, the one on the newel post--you know--that’s the colour of ripe apricots.”

She darted from the vestibule into the wide living-room, from which a stairway ascended to the floor above, and turned on the light, although the day was not yet gone.

“You don’t like it?” Larimore Trench, asked. “This colour scheme, I know, is a bit personal.”

“Why, child, when did I say such a thing? I don’t recall discussing the lamp shade with you.”

“I didn’t exactly tell him you said that you objected to it. I said I _thought_ you did. You see, mamma told us at dinner that you agreed with her in everything. And she has always said that for this room the lamp shade must be rose pink.”

“I’m sorry to disagree with your mother, but I should not like rose pink.”

“Mrs. Ascott,” Lary began, his clear brown eyes mock-serious, “I must warn you that Miss Theodora Trench is a conscienceless little fibber. It isn’t her only fault, but it is her most serious one.”

“Lary! To think of _you_--giving me a black eye, right before Lady Judith! When I haven’t had a chance to make good with her. If mamma or Eileen.... But _you_!”

“I couldn’t make either of them any blacker than they already are, dearie. And I didn’t mean to humiliate you. But you mustn’t begin by fibbing to Mrs. Ascott.”

She hung her head, crimson blotches staining the sallow cheeks. After a moment she looked up, and the angry fire had been extinguished by shining tears.

“I guess it’s better this way. Now Lady Judith knows what kind of a family we are. You can’t get disappointed in people if you know the worst of them first.”

It transpired that within the Trench home the new tenant had already been established as “Lady Judith,” a name which Theodora afterward explained, with documentary and graphic evidence to substantiate her none too credible word. A long time ago Lary had given her a book of fairy tales, the heroine of which was Lady Judith Dinglewood--beloved of all the bold knights, but destined for the favour of the king’s son. Lary had adorned the title-page with a miniature of the beautiful lady, and had added a colophon showing her in the robes of a royal bride. Theodora could recite every word of the romantic tale before she was old enough to read. She had gone to sleep with that book in her arms, as Sylvia had insisted on taking her best wax doll to bed. The moment she espied the name, Judith Ascott, on the lease that Griffith Ramsay had signed, she decided that her Lady Judith had come true.

It mattered little that the new occupant of the name bore not the slightest resemblance to the two little water colour drawings. Lary could paint a new Lady Judith, now that he knew what she really looked like. It was not his fault that he had made the eyes black. He had to do that, to appease mamma and Sylvia--whose standards of beauty were rigidly fixed. But eyes that could be blue or grey, or flecked with brown, as they were this evening.... How much more interesting than eyes that were always the same colour! The hair, in that new picture which Lary must paint, would be pale chestnut, with golden glints where the light fell on it. And the mouth--the sweetest mouth! She told Lary about it as they went home, through the close dark of a wonderful spring night. Had he noticed Mrs. Ascott’s mouth? He had.

VIII Hal Marksley Intrudes

April brought a break in the stolid serenity of Elm Street. The big house across from the Trench property began to manifest signs of awakening life. For almost a year it had stood vacant, with only a caretaker to guard it against the depredations of Springdale’s budding youth. Paint and pruning shears had scarcely achieved the miracle of external transformation when a consignment of furniture arrived, via the Oriental express and San Francisco. This much Theodora discovered as she risked her fragile bones among the packing cases in the reception hall. She had contrived to make out four letters, N-I-M-S, in great smears of glossy black ink on several of the boxes. That hardly sounded like a name.

“Mamma says it will be time enough to find out about them when they move in,” she complained to Mrs. Ascott. “I heard her ask the agent--and she was mad as hops when he refused to tell her.”

“Delightfully mysterious, Theo. Perhaps some European monarch has grown tired of his crown, and is coming to live across the street from us.”

“Maybe it’s the Emperor of China. I saw the loveliest great red dragon--where one of the cases had broken open and the burlap was torn off. Oh--” in sudden fright, “don’t let Lary know I pried.”

She had perceived her brother’s approach, by some subtle sense that bound them. He and Eileen were crossing the lawn with noiseless steps and Theodora’s back was turned. When they reached the front gate, Mrs. Ascott gave greeting:

“What does one do in Springdale, these glorious spring evenings?”

“One goes to the show, if one has an amiable brother.” To Eileen’s suggestion, Larimore added: “Won’t you come along, Mrs. Ascott? Vaudeville and pictures--not much of an attraction; but it might amuse you. My mother is entertaining the ladies of the missionary society this evening, and she doesn’t want us around.”

“Yes,” Theodora added, “and Mrs. Stevens is coming. She and Eileen don’t speak, since the ‘ossified episode.’ You know, Lady Judith, that’s all that saved you from being invited to join the Self Culture Club. Mamma belongs. She was one of the charter members--reads the magazine, like it was the Bible--and she meant it for a compliment to offer your name for membership. But Mrs. Stevens was so furious at Eileen that she tabled all the names mamma submitted.”

“You wouldn’t have gone in for that rubbish anyway,” Eileen defended herself. “Mrs. Stevens makes me tired. She hasn’t a thing in her library but reference works. And mamma holds her up to Theo and me as a bright example. Tells us that we can’t expect to get culture unless we look things up. Ina Stevens does that, and she has facts hanging all over her. She’s as prissy as her mother.”

“But what was the ‘ossified episode’?” Judith asked, recognizing one of Larimore Trench’s expressions, wherewith Theodora’s speech was frequently adorned.

“Humph, I got caught on the word, in rhetoric class. Thought it meant something about kissing, and the whole class hooted at me. Ina was at home, sick, that day, and Theo and I went over in the evening to take her credit card. Her marks were loads better’n mine, and Mrs. Stevens swelled up so about it that I couldn’t help telling her that my grandfather was expected to die, because all his bones had ossified. And, Mrs. Ascott, both of them--Ina and her mother--fell for it. Mrs. Stevens said it was a dreadful disease, but she had known one old lady who lived three years in that condition. I looked blank as a grindstone; but Theo had to go and snigger. And after we went home, Mrs. Stevens looked it up--and ’phoned mamma that I had to apologize, or she wouldn’t let Ina chum with me any more. I don’t care. I like Kitten Henderson best, any way.”

She turned to look anxiously up the street, as if she were more than half expecting some one, while Judith went into the house to get her hat.

The performance had been going on for an hour when the four entered the theatre, groping their way down the dark aisle to a row of unoccupied seats at the left side. The stage was being set for a troupe of Japanese tumblers, and the interval was bridged by news films and an animated cartoon. To Judith this form of entertainment was new. Raoul could tolerate nothing but the sprightliest comedy. With the Ramsays and Herbert Faulkner she had tried to find surcease in grand opera and the symphony. Once in London she and her mother had taken refuge from the rain in a cinema theatre where, on a wide screen, a company of fat French women chased a terrified little man--who had loved not wisely but too often--through the familiar streets of the Latin Quarter, overturning flower stands and vegetable carts, falling in scrambled heaps that writhed with a brave showing of lingerie, untangling themselves and scampering to fresh disaster, when they discovered that the object of their jealous rage had somehow slipped unhurt from the mass. Mrs. Denslow was disgusted. Judith was only bored.

But this bit of screen craft was different. On an expanse of dazzling white a single black dot appeared, paused a breathless moment and went tripping about in a zigzag dance, spilling smaller dots as it went. These resolved themselves into figures that stalked about with the jerky motion of automata. A ghostly hand passed over the picture, and it stood revealed a plenum of regularly arranged dots. With another wave of the wraithlike hand, the dots began to move slowly to and fro, advancing and retreating until they assumed the outlines of a great picture, “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” Other pictures were produced by means of those same dots. But Mrs. Ascott, who had never before watched the vibrant changes of an animated cartoon, found it necessary to close her eyes to relieve the strain. And then ... some one was leaning over her shoulder, heavy with the odour of a spent cigar, and a full, authoritative voice was saying:

“Come on, Eileen. The whole bunch is down in front. Ina and Jimmy are there, and Kitten and Dan.”

“Hal Marksley, if you can’t come to the house for me--” the girl said petulantly, but she stepped to the seat of her chair and vaulted nimbly over the back. Theodora moved to the vacant place beside her. Lady Judith and the play went on.

III

At the gate, Lary kissed his little sister and sent her home, going into the house with Mrs. Ascott. There was no need of so much as a nod to assure him that the evening was not yet finished. She wanted to ask him about Dr. Schubert--the tragedy that had mellowed and sweetened him. But the revelation would come in due time. Instead, she demanded to know the significance of Indian Summer. Only that morning the old physician had remarked--when she told him of Dutton’s warning--“We hop from snow to sweat, out here in Illinois,”--that one could endure the heat if one kept constantly in mind that after frost there would be Indian Summer.

Indian Summer. She had read a sentimental essay, years ago.... April--the arrogant, reckless abundance of Youth. August--the passionate heat of Love. October--the killing frost of Sorrow. And after that, the golden peace of Indian Summer. In her part of the world there was no such division of seasons. Yet the figures had attached themselves to the walls of her memory by tenacious tentacles. For her there had been neither sorrow nor peace ... just the bald monotony of a life that had been regulated by the artificial standards of her mother or her husband. She was so deadly tired of it all. And her work at the laboratory had not proved absorbing. It was too easy ... the copying of formulæ and an occasional hand at an experiment that might be dangerous. But she knew that none of them would be dangerous. Dr. Schubert was too cautious to permit her even that zest. Sydney Schubert, the son, who specialized in diseases of children, she hardly knew. An epidemic of scarlet fever was raging in the mining towns of Sutton and Olive Hill, and he was away from home most of the time.

“In order to appreciate Syd, you must know the tragedy of his boyhood,” Lary began. “It was more terrible for his parents, of course. But to a sensitive boy who had an instinctive love of beauty--quite aside from his natural devotion to his mother.... Mrs. Schubert was without doubt the most beautiful woman either of us had ever seen. Not the type my mother admires. And it may not have been the kind that would last. She was too fair and exquisite.”

“And she died, while the bloom was still fresh?” Judith asked.

“No, she lived eight years. We never knew how the thing happened ... a breeze that ruffled her clothing too close to the grate, or it may have been that her veil caught fire from an exposed gas flame. She was dressed to go out, and was waiting for the doctor in the great hall of their house, when she discovered that her clothing was ablaze. She wrapped herself in a carriage robe that happened to be lying on the settle; but she was horribly burned. One side of her face was disfigured beyond recognition. Fortunately the eyes were saved. It was after her recovery that Dr. Schubert had the pipe organ installed in the hall, to occupy her time, for she never went out, and at home she always covered her scars with a veil of white chiffon. Syd and Bob and I took turns at pumping the organ for her, before the days of electric motors, and she taught all of us music. One afternoon, three years ago, they found her at the organ ... her head resting on the upper manual. They thought at first she was asleep.”

“I’m glad she went that way,” Judith said, her throat tight with emotion.

Lary might have resumed, but he was arrested by boisterous laughter, out on the street. Eileen and her friends were going by, and young Marksley was saying, with a good-natured sneer: “Cornell--nix on Cornell for mine. The kid and I have this college business all doped out. She’s going to cut this little Presbyterian joint, next fall, and we’re both going to Valparaiso University. Greatest college on earth! Place where they teach you to dissolve the insoluble, to transmute the immutable and unscrew the inscrutable. I’m going to take commercial law, and Eileen can go on with her music....” The voices died away, as the group turned the corner beyond Vine Cottage.

“I wish my sister wouldn’t--” Lary checked himself, colouring.

“I shouldn’t take it too seriously. Such school boy and girl affairs seldom come to anything. Eileen’s a stubborn child. I wouldn’t oppose her ... openly.”

It proved a mistake, letting Eileen go away with Hal and the others. At midnight she tried to let herself in noiselessly at the side door, found it unaccountably locked, and was forced to ring the bell. There was a scene at the breakfast table, reported to Mrs. Ascott by Theodora, with dramatic touches. Scenes were not uncommon, but this one was different. It developed along unexpected lines. No one had taken into account the possibility of Mrs. Trench as a bulwark of defence for Eileen. But that wary ally was not wont to fight in the open. She was so accustomed to storming the postern gate, that she was likely to creep around to the rear of her objective, when the front portal stood open, undefended. This morning she had for subterfuge the highly practical business advantage of cultivating Hal Marksley’s friendship. Hal’s father, as the whole town knew, was preparing to build a palatial mansion in the parklike addition he had recently laid out, at the western limit of Springdale’s residential section. Six architects had been invited to compete for the plans. It was important that Larimore Trench be the victor. This would place the contract for construction automatically in David’s hands. But David and Lary wanted to eliminate themselves from the competition, and admonish Hal that it would be advisable for him to take his affection elsewhere. At this, Lavinia forgot her prudence--delivered a direct assault on her husband, which might have been but an echo of the thing she had been saying to him at regular intervals for twenty-eight years:

“Yes, and you’d insult Hal--spoil Eileen’s chance, _the way my father spoiled mine_--just because a young man has money and knows how to show a girl a good time! I don’t intend to go through another such experience as I had with Sylvia.”

The reference to Sylvia was beside the mark. She had not intended to betray her eagerness for an early marriage for her second daughter.

IX News From Bromfield

Lavinia was finding her tenant increasingly useful--the wicket gate an open sesame to many of the difficult problems for which she had been wont to search in vain the pages of the Self Culture Magazine. A development watched by her son with incredulous wonder. Hitherto Lavinia Trench had believed nothing that was conveyed to her by word of mouth. “She’s a pure visuel,” Dr. Schubert had sought to explain. “She gets her mental concepts through her eyes.” But Lary knew that that was not all of it. His mother held an enormous respect for the printed word. She wanted one of her sons to be a writer. That would reflect real credit on the family. Her own inability to form fluid sentences only increased her admiration for those unseen masters whose thoughts and experiences had received the accolade of printer’s ink. True, she had many times appeared over her own signature, in the clumsily edited columns of the Bromfield Sentinel--when there was a chance to weave into the story some reference to Larimore’s triumphs at Cornell, Sylvia’s social conquests or Bob’s athletic achievements. But to get things published ... and paid for.... This last comment always sent Lary flying from the room. She would probably not take any stock in the things he wrote, even if she read them in print. They were so at variance with all her established convictions.

On a certain Thursday morning she made occasion to call on Mrs. Ascott, the newly arrived copy of the Sentinel in her hand. Her dark sallow cheeks showed hectic splotches, and her eyes flared and dimmed with the emotion she was trying to conceal. She had not written the story on the front page of the Bromfield paper. Her fancy’s most ingenious flight could not have fabricated anything one half so ... gratifying. So terrible, she amended, to her own soul. But the real, the usually submerged Lavinia, knew that the former word was the right one.

“You remember the boy, Fournier Stone, that you used to play with when you were a little girl in Rochester,” she began tensely. “Read that.”

The story was told with all the crass vulgarity and offensiveness of small town journalism. The bank examiner had paid an unexpected visit to the Bromfield National bank--because of certain stories that had been circulated concerning young Stone’s extravagance in Rochester and Buffalo. It was found that a large gap between the bank’s records and the actual cash on hand had been bridged by spurious paper that implied the additional crime of forgery. This, it transpired, was not Fournier Stone’s first offence. In the past he had fled to his mother for assistance; but now Mrs. Stone was critically ill, and he had not dared to tell her of his dilemma.

“To think of a mother shielding her son in such rascality!” to which Lavinia added, with snapping satisfaction, “But what could you expect of such a mother?”

The account closed with the statement that Mrs. Stone had suffered a relapse, because of the shock of her son’s arrest, and for several hours her life was despaired of. The culprit was released, under heavy bond, and was constantly at his mother’s bedside.

Saturday brought a letter from Ellen Larimore, with further details. Fournier Stone had disappeared--walked out of the house, in the clothes of one of the servants, right past the secret service man who was there to trap him. It was thought that he had gone to Canada. His mother was in a desperate condition. “Of course,” Ellen added, “we don’t know a thing for certain. I talked to Calvin this morning, and the poor man is distracted. But most people here think he might have set the boy a better example. I never forgot the day you told me it was too risky to marry a man who drank and gambled. What if it was Larimore that was a fugitive from justice! Aren’t you thankful that you married David instead of Calvin? I’ve had an idea for a long time that you got wind of the affair with Lettie, and threw Calvin over, in a jealous huff. Now I see your wisdom. Oh, I almost forgot to tell you that when they came to look up Fournier’s records, in Rochester, it came out that he is six months older than we thought he was. There are a lot of things about Calvin Stone’s marriage that some of us older people would like to find out about.” Lavinia set her teeth hard, and a yellow pallor replaced the flush of indignant pleasure that had accompanied the reading of the letter ... up to this point. She had intended to show the letter to David; but when she came to the mention of her wisdom in the choice of a husband, she wavered. That last sentence brought her to an abrupt decision. She burned the letter--and repeated such parts of it as would fit in with a half formed plan in her own mind.

David was profoundly sorry for the Stones. Their misfortunes helped to ease the pain in his own heart, a pain that had never been lulled since the black day when Bob Trench’s dripping body was taken from the river. It was his mother who had urged him to compete for one more trophy at the annual college field meet. To David it seemed that his wife cared more for Bob’s ribbons and foolish little silver cups than for all Lary’s scholarships and medals. He had never connected these spectacular mementoes with the boastings in the Bromfield Sentinel, and their possible effect on certain of the old friends, whose children had not distinguished themselves. Providence, it now appeared, had been kind in the untimely taking off of his son. Such disgrace as Fournier Stone had brought upon his parents would be harder to bear. In David’s limited vocabulary respectability had no place. But principle loomed large. It was the thing Fournier Stone had done, not the newspaper account of it, that mattered.

X Eileen Seeks Counsel

Mrs. Ascott went out into the garden after breakfast to watch the transfer of tomato plants from the cold frames beside the garage to the loamy bed that bordered the west wall. Dutton had explained to her that nothing would thrive against the high board fence that shut the grounds from the street, at the east side of the garden--on account of the afternoon sun--and that these tomatoes would grow six feet high and would disport their fruit above the stone wall ... if the suckers were kept picked off. She wondered what suckers were, and how the afternoon sun had acquired such a sinister reputation.

She had not slept, and the April air was cool and refreshing. Mamma and the boys were safely installed in a Paris apartment. Papa had closed the big house at Pelham, taking two of the best trained servants with him to the city establishment on Riverside Drive, and was happily engrossed in the Wall Street fight for further millions--secure from the annoyance of family intrusion. She had several letters and one cablegram. How remote it all seemed, how like the hazy memory of another existence! Two months ago she was trying to forget Raoul, his amiable as well as his maddeningly offensive side. Now she seldom thought of him at all. His personality had lost its definite line and mass. Even his form was growing nebulous. She could not remember what it was that he particularly disliked for breakfast ... and whether he was growing alarmingly stout or thin when he went away to Egypt with Hilda Travers.

It was strange that she should have forgotten. Her life with him had been made up of just such things as these. She searched herself for an explanation, as the gardener rambled on, his words scarce reaching her consciousness. Slowly the imponderable thoughts assembled themselves, fashioning for her a shadow picture of her remote childhood. She was in the old kitchen at Rochester and her grandmother Holden was baking cookies for the slum children. There on the marble slab lay the great mass of yellow dough that so tempted her eager fingers. More than once she had seized a breathless opportunity, while grandma’s back was turned, to thrust an index finger far down into its golden softness. And behold! The mass had come together, leaving scarce a trace of the deep impression she had made.

Was she as plastic as dough, and had her husband gone from her life without leaving an impression? There must be something more ... something that had not worked out with precision in their case. Did not that same yielding substance take on the fairly permanent shapes of lions and camels, dancing girls and roosters with arching tails? Perhaps Raoul had neglected to bake the dough. Was she still an impressionable girl, for all her tragic experience?

The wicket gate opened and Eileen came towards her. The slim shoulders drooped carelessly and there was a sullen look about the too voluptuous mouth. Mrs. Ascott noticed for the first time that Eileen’s mouth was like her mother’s. All the rest of her was, as Theodora put it, “pure, unadulterated Trench” ... excepting, of course, the eyes, which were amber or vicious yellow, according to her mood. Lary had his father’s mouth; but had compromised with his mother on the question of eyes. Lavinia abhorred compromises, albeit she had learned to accept them as if they had been of her own choosing.

The girl stood in rebellious indecision, a few feet from the tomato bed. Then, as if she had made up her mind to do the thing ... and take the consequences, she came swiftly forward, put an arm around Judith’s waist and kissed her full on the mouth. It had been so long since any one had kissed her! The lips were speaking now, the tone low and vibrant with pleading.

“You don’t mind, do you? If you only knew how I adore you! I have sat at my window and watched you--and wondered about you--and wanted to kiss you, till my mouth ached.”

A thrill went through the woman’s usually tranquil body. Here was passion, susceptibility, imagination. She had not dreamed of such intensity in a girl so young. And this was the girl Larimore Trench had begged her to influence, to mould into some shape of his choosing--a shape that would be utterly displeasing to her mother.

“Can you come into the house with me? It’s only a little after eight. You won’t be late for chapel if you start at half-past.”

“I’m in no hurry. Hal’s coming by for me with the car. He’ll be on the campus five minutes before he started, if our old moth-eaten policeman happens to be looking the other way. I framed up the best looking excuse for a morning call ... and now I don’t need it. You invited me in--just like that! It’s always the way. If I have my gun loaded, there isn’t any bear.”

“Did you think you needed a pretext?”

“I couldn’t be sure. And with you ... it’s too important to take chances. I’ve been feeling my way, ever since you came. I can’t go dancing in, as Theo does. She is like mamma. You simply can’t snub that kid.”

The pretext was the revelation of the mystery-house across the way. Hal had told her all about it, after they left Ina and Kitten and their escorts. The owner of the carved dragon was Hal’s sister, Adelaide Nims. There had been a former marriage, about the time of Hal’s birth, a most unsavoury affair. Adelaide was seventeen at the time, and the reluctant husband was the divorced partner of one of Henry Marksley’s affinities. The Marksleys, père and mère, had been separated three times. Eileen and Hal agreed that it was indecent for people who despised each other to live together. Still, if his parents had not made up that last time, there would have been no Hal. This would have been calamity for Eileen.

The present Mrs. Nims was little known in Springdale, having lived abroad for almost twenty years. Her first husband, in Eileen’s piquant phrase, “had chucked her” after a few months--as a man usually does when he is dragooned into a distasteful marriage. There had been other marriages, “without benefit of clergy,” the details of which were suppressed in Springdale. Indeed coming to light only in connection with a divorce or two wherein Adelaide had figured as the reprehensible other woman. She had hair like polished mahogany and melting brown eyes, a skin like the petals of a Victoria Regia, at dawn of the morning after the lily’s opening, before the sun has tinged its creamy white with the faint rose that is destined to run the colour gamut to rich purplish red. She and Syd Schubert vied with each other in the number of instruments they could play; but she had made her great success with the ’cello, an instrument whose playing revealed to the best possible advantage the slim sensual grace of her body.

It was in a London music hall that Reginald Nims, younger son of a peer, had fallen beneath the weight of her manifold charms and had married her--to the dismay of his family. Eileen knew what she looked like. Not from Hal’s description, but because Springdale had seen her portrait. Just before she and her husband left England for China, they had sent it home for safe keeping ... the magnificent portrait that Sargent had painted. Mrs. Henderson gave a talk on it, in the reading room of the college library. Red hair, coppery in the high lights, eyes that would turn an anchorite from the path of duty, skin texture that was unsurpassed in the far reach of Sargent’s marvellous texture painting, a chiffon gown that reminded you of a cloud of flame-shot smoke, and a bit of still-life that was definitely, though not insistently, turquoise.

“Mrs. Henderson said that when she read a description of the picture, she supposed it was going to look like a Henner; but it was nothing of the sort. I had to go on the Q. T. to hear her talk. Of course you know, mamma belongs to the Art Study Club; but she was scandalized at Mrs. Henderson getting up there and talking about Adelaide Marksley. Lary tried to make her see that it was Sargent ... but what’s the use? You can’t get that kind of an idea into my mother’s head.”

The Browning Club had long since gone the way of Browning. But Mrs. Henderson, after the death of her husband, was constrained to seek new means of holding her grip on the social and intellectual leadership of the town. Fortunately Mrs. Clarkson, wife of the new Dean, was not aggressive. She was glad to be enrolled, along with Mrs. David Trench, as a member of the Art Study Club. Being a late comer in the town, she knew no reason why she should withdraw her moral support from the club, after its shocking display of the Sargent picture.

“But I hope the poor girl is at last happily married,” Mrs. Ascott hastened to say. She wondered if Eileen was always quite fair to her mother.

“That’s just what she isn’t. And thereby hangs the tale of their coming here to live for a couple of years. Hal said his father wanted to rent Vine Cottage for them--and in that case they wouldn’t have brought their furniture. But your Mr. Ramsay got ahead of him. I’m glad he