Part 7

"Not at all, my boy," said Fosdick, clapping him on the back. "Our rivals have got up an investigating committee--have set on some of our policy holders to pretend to be dissatisfied with our management. I thought until yesterday that the committee was simply a haphazard affair, got together by some blackmailing lawyer. Then I learned that it was a really serious attempt of a rival of mine to take the company away from me. They're smelling round for things to 'expose'--the old trick. They think this is a rare good time to play it because the damn-fool public has been liquored up with all sorts of brandy by reformers and anarchists and socialists, trying to set it on to tear down the social structure. No man's reputation is safe. You know how it is in big affairs. It takes a broad-gage man to understand them. A little fellow thinks he sees thief and robber and swindler written everywhere, if he gets a peep at the inside. I don't know what we're coming to, with the masses being educated just enough to imagine they know, and to try to take the management of affairs out of the hands of the substantial men."

With lip curling Narcisse looked at her brother, expecting to see in his face some sign of appreciation of the disgusting comedy of Fosdick's cant; but he seemed to be taking Josiah and his oration quite seriously; to her amazement he said, "I often think of that, Mr. Fosdick. We must have a stronger government, and abolish universal suffrage. This thing of ignorant men, with no respect for the class with brains and property, having an equal voice with us has got to stop or we'll have ruin."

A self-confessed thief trying to justify himself by slandering those he had robbed, and angry with them because they were not grateful to him for not having taken all their property--and her brother applauding!

"You're right," said Fosdick, clapping him on the knee. "I've been trying to explain to your sister--though I'm afraid I don't make myself clear. The ladies--even the smartest of them--are not very attentive when we men talk of the business side of things. However, I suggested to her that you recall those specifications you gave my enemies----"

"Is it possible!" exclaimed Siersdorf, shocked. "Yes--yes--I see--I understand. But I can straighten it all out. I was rather vague with Delmar. I'll send for him and tell him I was calculating on very different kinds of buildings for him--something much cheaper----"

"Precisely!" cried Josiah. "Your brother's got a quick mind, Miss Siersdorf."

Narcisse turned away. Her brother had not even waited for Fosdick to unfold his miserable chicane; his own brain had instantly worked out the same idea; and, instead of in shame suppressing it, he had uttered it as if it were honest and honorable!

"There's another matter," continued Fosdick. He no longer felt that he must advance cautiously. Sometimes, persons not familiar with large affairs, not accustomed to dealing under the conditions that compel liberal interpretation of the moral code, had been known to balk, unless approached gradually, unless led by gentle stages above narrow ideas of the just and the right. But clearly, the Siersdorfs, living in the atmosphere of high finance, did not need to be acclimated. "It may be this committee can get permission from the State Government to pry into our affairs. I don't think it can; indeed, I almost know it can't; we've got the Government friendly to us and not at all sympathetic with these plausible blackmailers and disguised anarchists. Still, it's always well to provide for any contingency. If you should get a tip that you were likely to be wanted as witnesses you could arrange for a few weeks abroad, and not leave anything--any books or papers--for these scoundrels to nose into, couldn't you?"

"Certainly," assented Siersdorf, with great alacrity. "You may be sure they'll get nothing out of us."

"Then, that's settled," said Fosdick. "And now, let's have lunch, and forget business. I want to hear more about those plans for Amy's house down in Jersey. She has told me a good deal, but not all."

"We can't stop to lunch," interposed Narcisse, with a meaning look at her brother. "We must go back to the office at once." And when she saw that Fosdick was getting ready for a handshake, she moved toward the door, keeping out of his range without pointedly showing what she was about. In the street with her brother she walked silently, moodily beside him, selecting the softest words that would honestly express the thoughts she felt she must not conceal from him.

"A great man, Fosdick," said Alois. "One of the biggest men in the country--a splendid character, strong, able and honorable."

"Why do you say that just at this time?" asked his sister.

Alois reddened a little, avoided meeting her glance.

"To convince yourself?" she went on. "To make us seem less--less dishonest and cowardly?"

He flashed at her; his anger was suspiciously ready. "I felt you were taking that view of it!" he cried. "You are utterly unpractical. You want to run the world by copybook morality."

"Because I haven't thrown 'Thou shalt not steal' overboard? Because I am ashamed, Alois, that we are helping this man Fosdick to cover his cowardly thief tracks?"

"You don't understand, Cissy," he remonstrated, posing energetically as the superior male forbearing with the inferior female. "You oughtn't to judge what you haven't the knowledge to judge correctly."

"He is a thief," retorted she bluntly. "And we are making ourselves his accomplices."

Alois's smile was uncomfortable. With the manner of a man near the limit of patience with folly, he explained, "What you are giving those lurid names to is nothing but the ordinary routine of business, throughout the world. Do you suppose the man of great financial intellect would do the work he does for small wages? Do you imagine the little people he works for and has to work through, the beneficiaries of all those giant enterprises, would give him his just due voluntarily? He's a man of affairs, and he works practically, deals with human nature on human principles--just as do all the great men of action."

Narcisse stopped short, gazed at him in amazement. "Alois!" she exclaimed.

He disregarded her rebuke, her reminder of the time when he had thought and talked very differently. "Suppose," he persisted, "these great fortunes didn't exist; suppose Fosdick were ass enough to take a salary and divide up the profits; suppose all these people of wealth we work for were to be honest according to your definition of the word--what then? Why, millions of people would get ten or twelve dollars a year, or something like that, more than they now have, and there'd be no great fortunes to encourage art, to employ people like us, to endow colleges and make the higher and more beautiful side of life."

"That's too shallow to answer," said Narcisse sternly. "You know better, Alois. You know it's from the poor that intellect and art and all that's genuine and great and progressive come--never from the rich, from wealth. But even if it were not so, how can _you_ defend anything that means a sacrifice of character?" She stopped in the street and looked at him. "Alois, _what_ has changed you?"

"Come," he urged rather shamefacedly. "People are watching us."

They went on in silence, separated at the offices with a few constrained words. They did not meet again until the next morning--when he sought her. He looked much as usual--fresh, handsome, supple in body and mind. Her eyes were red round the edges of the lids and her usually healthy skin had the paleness that comes from a sleepless night. "Well," he said, with his sweet, conciliatory smile--he had a perfect disposition, while hers was often "difficult." "Do you still think I'm wrong--and desperately wicked?"

"I haven't changed my mind," she answered, avoiding his gaze.

He frowned; his face showed the obstinacy that passes current for will in a world of vacillators.

"You've always left business to me," he went on. "Just continue to leave it. Rest assured I'll do nothing to injure my honor in the opinion of any rational, practical person--or the honor of the firm."

She was not deceived by the note of conciliation in his voice; she knew he had his mind fixed. She was at her desk, stiffly erect, gazing straight ahead. Her expression brought out all the character in her features, brought out that beauty of feminine strength which the best of the Greeks have succeeded in giving their sculptured heroines. Without warning she flung herself forward, hid her face and burst into tears. "Oh, I _hate_ myself!" she cried. "I'm nothing but a woman, after all--miserable, contemptible, weak creatures that we are!"

He settled himself on the arm of her chair and drew her into his arm. "You're a finer person in every way than I am," he said; "a better brain and a better character. But, Cissy dear, don't judge in matters that aren't within your scope."

"Do as you please," she replied brokenly. "I'm a woman--and where's the woman that wouldn't sacrifice anything and everything for love?"

She had, indeed, spent a night of horror. She felt that what he had done was frightful dishonor--was proof that he was losing his moral sense and, what seemed to her worse, becoming a pander to the class for which they did most of the work they especially prided themselves upon. She felt that, for his sake no less than for her own, she ought to join the issue squarely and force him to choose the right road, or herself go on in it alone. But she knew that he would let her go. And she had only him. She loved him; she would not break with him; she could not.

"You know nothing about those buildings, anyhow," he continued. "Just forget the whole business. I'll take care of it. Isn't that fair?"

"Anything! Anything!" she sobbed. "Only, let there be peace and love between us."

*VIII*

*IN NEVA'S STUDIO*

Shown into the big workroom of Neva's apartment with its light softened and diffused by skillfully adjusted curtains and screens, Narcisse devoted the few minutes before Neva came to that thorough inspection which an intelligent workman always gives the habitat of a fellow worker.

"What a sensitive creature she is!" was the reminiscent conclusion of the builder after the first glance round. A less keen observer might have detected a nature as delicately balanced as an aspen leaf in the subtle appreciation of harmony and contrast, of light and shade. And there were none of the showy, shallow tricks of the poseur; for, the room was plain, as a serious worker always insists on having his surroundings. It appeared in the hanging of the few pictures, in the colors of the few rugs and draperies, of walls, ceiling, furniture, in the absence of anything that was not pleasing; the things that are not in a room speak as eloquently of its tenant as do the things that are there.

"Not a scrap of her own work," thought Narcisse, with a smile for the shyness that omission hinted.

"Pardon my keeping you waiting," apologized Neva, entering in her long, brown blouse with stains of paint. "I was at work when you were announced."

"And you had to hustle everything out of sight, so I'd have no chance to see."

Neva nodded smiling assent. "But I'm better than I used to be. Really, I am. My point of view is changing--rapidly--so rapidly that I wake up each morning a different person from the one who went to bed the night before."

Narcisse was thinking that the Neva before her was as unlike the Neva of their school days as a spring landscape is unlike the same stretch in the bleak monotones of winter. "Getting more confidence in yourself?" suggested she aloud. "Or are you beginning to see that the world is an old fraud whose judgments aren't important enough to make anyone nervous?"

"Both," replied Neva. "But I can't honestly claim to be self-made-over. Boris teaches me a great deal beside painting."

Narcisse changed expression. As they talked on and on--of their work, of the West, of the college and their friendship there, Neva felt that Narcisse had some undercurrent of thought which she was striving with, whether to suppress or express, she could not tell. The conversation drifted back to New York, to Boris. There was something of warning in Narcisse's face, and something of another emotion less clearly defined as she said with a brave effort at the rigidly judicial, "Boris is a great man; but first of all a man. You know what that means when a man is dealing with a woman."

Neva's lip curled slightly. "That side of human nature doesn't interest me."

Narcisse, watching her closely, could not but be convinced that the indifference in her tone was not simulated. "Not yet," she thought. Then, aloud, "That side doesn't often interest a woman until she finds she must choose between becoming interested in it and losing the man altogether."

Neva looked at her with a strange, startled expression, as if she were absorbing a new and vital truth, self-evident, astonishing.

"Boris has lived a long time," continued Narcisse. "And women have conquered him so often that they've taught him how to conquer them."

"I don't know much about him, beyond the painting," said Neva. "And I don't care to know."

The silence that fell was constrained. It was with tone and look of shyness more like Neva than like herself that Narcisse presently went on, "I owe a great deal to Boris. He made me what I am.... He broke my heart."

Neva gave her a glance of wonder and fear--wonder that she should be confiding such a secret, fear lest the confidence would be repented. Narcisse's expression, pensive but by no means tragic, not even melancholy, reassured her. "You know," she proceeded, "no one ever does anything real until his or her heart has been broken."

Neva, startled, listened with curious, breathless intentness.

"We learn only by experience. And the great lesson comes only from the great experience."

"Yes," said Neva softly. She nodded absently. "Yes," she repeated.

"When one's heart is broken ... then, one discovers one's real self--the part that can be relied on through everything and anything."

Neva, with studied carelessness, opened a drawer in the stand beside her and began to examine the tips of a handful of brushes. Her face was thus no longer completely at the mercy of a possible searching glance from her friend.

"Show me anyone who has done anything worth while," continued Narcisse, "and I'll show you a man or a woman whose heart has been broken--and mended--made strong.... It isn't always love that does the breaking. In fact, it's usually something else--especially with men. In my case it happened to be love."

Neva's fingers had ceased to play with the brushes. Her hands rested upon the edge of the drawer lightly, yet their expression was somehow tense. Her eyes were gazing into--Narcisse wondered what vision was hypnotizing them.

"It was ten years ago--when I was studying in Paris. I can see how he might not be attractive to some women, but he was to me." Narcisse laughed slightly. "I don't know what might have happened, if he hadn't been drawn away by a little Roumanian singer, like an orchid waving in a perfumed breeze. All Paris was quite mad about her, and Boris got her. She thought she got him; but he survived, while she-- When she made her way back to Paris, she found it perfectly calm."

"And you still care for him?" said Neva gently.

Narcisse laughed healthily. "I mended my heart, accepted my lesson.... Isn't it queer, how differently one looks at a person one has cared for, after one is cured?"

"I don't know," said Neva, in a slow, constrained way. "I've never had the experience."

After a silence Narcisse went on, "I've no objection to your repeating to him what I've said. It was a mere reminiscence, not at all a confession."

Neva shook her head. "That would bring up a subject a woman should avoid with men. If it is never opened, it remains closed; if it's ever opened, it can't be shut again."

Narcisse was struck by the penetration of this, and proceeded to reexamine Neva more thoroughly. Nothing is more neglected than the revision from time to time of our opinions of those about us. Though character is as mobile as every other quantity in this whirling kaleidoscope of a universe, we make up our minds about our acquaintances and friends once for all, and refuse to change unless forced by some cataclysm. As their talk unfolded the Neva beneath the surface, it soon appeared to Narcisse that either she or Neva had become radically different since their intimacy of twelve years before. "Probably both of us," she decided. "I've learned to read character better, and she has more character to read. I remember, I used to think she was one of those who would develop late--even for a woman."

"It was stupid of me," she said to Neva, "but I've been assuming you are just as you were. Now it dawns on me that you are as new to me as if you were an entire stranger. You are different--outside and inside."

"Inside, I've certainly changed," admitted Neva. "Don't you think we're, all of us, like the animals that shed their skins? We live in a mental skin, and it seems to be ours for good and all; but all the time a new skin is forming underneath; and then, some fine day, the old skin slips away, and we're quite new from top to tip--apparently."

Narcisse's expression was encouraging.

"That happened to me," continued Neva. "But I didn't realize it--not completely--until the divorce was over and I was settled here, in this huge wilderness where the people can't find each other or even see each other, for the crowd. It was the first time in my life. I could look about me with the certainty I wasn't being watched, peeped at, pressed in on all sides by curious eyes--hostile eyes, for all curious eyes are hostile. But you were born and brought up in a small town. You know."

"Yes," said Narcisse. "Everybody lives a public life in a little town."

"Here I could, so to speak, stand in the sun naked and let its light beat on my body, without fear of peepers and pryers." She drew a long breath and stretched out her arms in a gesture of enormous relief. "I dare to be myself. Free! All my life I'd been shut in, waiting and hoping some one would come and lead me out where there was warmth and affection. Wasn't that vanity! Now, I'm seeking what I want--the only way to get it."

Narcisse's face took on an expression of cynicism, melancholy rather than bitter. "Don't seek among your fellow beings. They're always off the right temperature--they either burn you or freeze you."

"Oh, but I'm not trying to get warmth, but to give it," replied Neva. "I'm not merchandising. I'm in a business where the losses are the profits, the givings the gains."

"The only businesses that really pay," said Narcisse. "The returns from the others are like the magician's money that seemed to be gold but was only withered mulberry leaves. Won't you let me see some of your work--anything?"

Neva drew aside a curtain, wheeled out an easel, on it her unfinished portrait of Raphael. At first glance--and with most people the first glance is the final verdict--there seemed only an elusive resemblance to Raphael. It was one of those portraits that are forthwith condemned as "poor likenesses." But Narcisse, perhaps partly because she was sympathetically interested in Neva's work and knew that Neva must put intelligence into whatever she did, soon penetrated to the deeper purpose. The human face is both a medium and a mask; it both reveals and covers the personality behind. It is more the mask and less the medium when the personality is consciously facing the world. A portrait that is a good likeness is, thus, often a meaningless or misleading picture of the personality, because it presents that personality when carefully posed for conscious inspection. On the other hand, a portrait that is hardly recognizable by those who know best, and least, the person it purports to portray, may be in fact a true, a profound, a perfect likeness--a faithful reproduction of the face as a medium, with the mask discarded. The problem the painter attempts, the problem genius occasionally solves but mere talent rarely, and then imperfectly, is to combine the medium and the mask--to paint the mask so transparently that the medium, the real face, shows through; yet not so transparently that eyes which demand a "speaking likeness" are disappointed.

Neva, taught by Raphael to face and wrestle with that problem, was in this secret unfinished portrait striving for his "living likeness" only. She had learned that painting the "speaking likeness" is an unimportant matter to the artist as artist--however important it may be to him as seeker of profitable orders or of fame's brassy acclaim so vulgar yet so sweet. She was not seeking fame, she was not dependent upon commissions; she was free to grapple the ultimate mystery of art. And this attempt to fix Raphael, the beautiful-ugly, lofty-low, fine-coarse, kind-cruel personality that walked the earth behind that gorgeous-grotesque external of his, was her first essay.

"All things to all men--and all women, like the genius that he is," said Narcisse, half to herself. Then to Neva, "What does _he_ think of it?"

"He hasn't seen it.... I doubt if I'll ever show it to him--or to anybody, when it's finished."

"It does threaten to be an intrusion on his right of privacy," said Narcisse. "No, he's not attracting you in the least as a man."

Neva looked amused. "Why did you say that?"

"Because the picture is so--so impersonal." She laughed. "How angry it would make him."

When Narcisse, after a long, intimacy-renewing, or, rather, intimacy-beginning, stop, rose to go, she said, "I'm going to bring my friend, Amy Fosdick, here some time soon. She has asked me and I've promised her. She is very eager to meet you."

Instantly Neva made the first vivid show of her old-time shy constraint. "I've a rule against meeting people," stammered she. "I don't wish to seem ungracious, but----"

"Oh!" said Narcisse, embarrassed. "Very well."

An awkward silence; Narcisse moved toward the door. "I fear I've offended you," Neva said wistfully.

"Not at all," replied Narcisse, and she honestly tried to be cordial in accepting denial. "You've the right to do as you please, surely."

"In theory, yes," said Neva, with a faint melancholy smile. "But only in theory."

Now unconsciously and now consciously we are constantly testing those about us, especially our friends, to learn how far we can go in imposing our ever aggressive wills upon them; and the stronger our own personalities the more irritating it is to find ourselves flung back from an unyielding surface where we had expected to advance easily. In spite of her sense of justice, Narcisse was irritated against Neva for refusing. But she also realized she must get over this irritation, must accept and profit by this timely hint that Neva's will must be respected. Most friendship is mere selfishness in masquerade--is mere seeking of advantage through the supposedly blindly altruistic affections of friends. Narcisse, having capacity for real friendship, was eager for a real friend. She saw that Neva was worth the winning. And now that Alois was breaking away-- Stretching out her hands appealingly, she said, "Please, dear, don't draw away from me."

Neva understood, responded. Now that Narcisse was not by clouded face and averted eye demanding explanation as a right, she felt free to give it. "There's a reason, Narcisse," said she, "a good reason why I shan't let Miss Fosdick come here and gratify her curiosity."

"Reason or no reason," exclaimed Narcisse, "forget my--my impertinence.... I--I want--I need your friendship."