CHAPTER XVII

One morning she called up The Towers to ask Kimberly for a dinner. He answered the telephone himself and wanted to know if he might not be excused from the dinner and come over, if it were possible, in the evening.

Alice had almost expected the refusal. "I wish you would tell me," she said, laughing low and pleasantly, "what I have done."

He paused. "What you have done?"

"What I have done that you avoid coming to Cedar Lodge any more?"

"I don't, do I?" He waited for an answer but Alice remained silent. His tone was amiable and his words simple, yet her heart was beating like a hammer. "You know I haven't gone about much lately," he went on, "but whenever you really want me for a dinner you have need only to say so."

"I never ask a guest for dinner without wanting him."

It was his turn to laugh. "Do you really manage that, Mrs. MacBirney? I can't; and yet I think myself fairly independent."

"Oh, of course, we are all tied more or less, I suppose, but--you know what I mean."

"Then you do want me to appear?"

Alice suddenly found her tongue. "We should never ask any one to whom Mr. MacBirney and I are under so many obligations as we are to Mr. Kimberly without 'wanting him,' as you express it. And we really want you very much to-morrow night."

He laughed, this time with amusement. "You are rather strong now on third persons and plurals. But I think I understand that you really do want me to come."

"Haven't I just said so?" she asked with good-humored vexation.

"Not quite, but I shall arrive just the same."

Alice put up the receiver, agreeably stirred by the little tilt. It was a lift out of the ruck of uncomfortable thought that went to make up her daily portion, and the elation remained with her all day.

She decided that some vague and unwillingly defined apprehensions concerning Kimberly's feeling toward her were after all foolish. Why make herself miserable with scruples when she was beset with actual perplexities at home? Walter himself was now more of what she wanted him to be. He perceived his wife's success in her active hospitality and applauded it, and Alice began to feel she could, after all, be safe in a nearer acquaintance with Kimberly and thus lessen a little Lottie Nelson's pretensions.

It is pleasant to a woman to dress with the assurance that anticipates success. Alice went to her toilet the following afternoon with an animation that she had not felt for weeks. Every step in it pleased her and Annie's approbation as she progressed was very gratifying to her mistress.

The trifles in finishing were given twice their time, and when Alice walked into her husband's room he kissed her and held her out at arm's length in admiration. She hastened away to look at the table and the stairs rose to meet her feet as she tripped down the padded treads.

Passing the drawing-room the rustle of her steps caused a man within it to turn from a picture he was studying, and Alice to her surprise saw Kimberly standing before a sanguine of herself. She gave a little exclamation.

"I asked not to be announced," he explained. "I am early and did not want to hurry you." He extended his hand. "How are you?"

"I couldn't imagine who it was, when I looked in," exclaimed Alice cordially. "I am glad to see you."

He held out his hand and waited till she gave him hers. "You look simply stunning," he answered quietly. "There is something," he added without giving her a chance to speak and turning from the eyes of the portrait back again to her own, "in your eyes very like and yet unlike this. I find now something in them more movingly beautiful; perhaps twenty-five years against eighteen--I don't know--perhaps a trace of tears."

"Oh, Mr. Kimberly, spare your extravagances. I hear you have been away."

"At least, I have never seen you quite so beautiful as you are this moment."

"I am not beautiful at all, and I am quite aware of it, Mr. Kimberly."

"I would not wish you to think anything else. There the beauty of your character begins."

Her repugnance was evident but she bore his eyes without flinching. "You humiliate me exceedingly," was all she attempted to say.

"The truth should not humiliate you. I----"

"Must I run away?"

"Not, I hope, because I tell you you are beautiful, for I shall continue to tell you so every time I see you."

"Surely you will not take advantage of your hostess, Mr. Kimberly?"

"In what way?" he asked.

"By saying things most unpleasant for her to hear."

"I say things awkwardly, perhaps unpleasantly, but always sincerely."

Alice looked down at her fan, but spoke with even more firmness. "If we are to be good friends, you must excuse me even from sincerity on topics of this kind."

"Don't cut me from your friendship. We must be the best of friends. I cannot conceive of you as being other than kind, even patient with me."

"Then do not say things I cannot listen to."

"I will never say anything you may not listen to. But concede me the privilege--for it is one--of paying honest tribute to your loveliness when I can't help it."

Without raising her eyes she spoke with decision. "I positively will not listen." With the word she caught up her gown and started away. He walked with her. "I am afraid," he said regretfully, "you are sorry you sent for me."

She turned with burning eyes. "You should be the last to make me so, Mr. Kimberly."

"I wish to be the last. Yet I hate to sacrifice sincerity."

"There is something I put far above sincerity."

He looked mildly surprised. "What can it be?"

"Consideration for the feelings of another--particularly if she be somewhat helpless."

"Just a moment." They were entering the hall and he stopped her. "In what way are you helpless?"

"Through consideration on my part for my guest to-night, for my husband's friend, for a friend to whom we both owe much----"

"You owe that friend nothing. If you really think so, disabuse your mind. And I have never professed the slightest friendship for Mr. MacBirney. Whatever we do, let us keep the facts clear. If we speak of consideration, what about my feelings? And about helplessness--I am up against a stone wall all the time in trying to say anything."

"You have no right to say anything!" exclaimed Alice energetically and starting on as she spoke.

"Perhaps that is true. One that can't say things better than I do shouldn't attempt them. If one of us must be humiliated let it be me. Where are you taking me?"

She stopped. "Nowhere at all, Mr. Kimberly. Won't you----"

"Where are you going?"

"To look at my table. Mr. MacBirney will be right down. Won't you wait for him in the library?"

"No."

"I should be most grateful."

"I want to see the table myself."

Alice tossed her head. "This way then."

At the threshold of the dining-room, Kimberly paused. The table was dressed in yellow with the lowest tones in the fruits of the centrepiece. The pears were russet, the grapes purple, and pomegranates, apples, and golden plums supplied the tints of autumn. The handles of the old silver basket were tied with knots of broad, yellow ribbon. Alice, touching the covers here and there, passed behind the chairs.

"You get your effects very simply," observed Kimberly. "Only people with a sure touch can do that."

"I thought there were to be no more compliments."

He looked at the sconces. "Just one for the lighting. Even Dolly and Imogene sin in that way. They overdo it or underdo it, and Mrs. Nelson is impossible. Where have you put me?"

She pointed with her fan. "Next to Mrs. Nelson."

"Next to Mrs. Nelson?" he echoed in surprise.

"Why not?"

"Did you say humiliation? Do I deserve so much?"

"At dinner one tries, of course, to group congenial people," suggested Alice coldly.

"But we are not congenial."

"I supposed you were Mrs. Nelson's most frequent guest."

"I have not been at Mrs. Nelson's since the evening Guyot and Lambert were there," said Kimberly. "You, yourself, were there that night."

Alice betrayed no confusion but she was shocked a little to realize that she believed him instantly. Kimberly, at least as to truthfulness, had won her confidence. Her own husband had forfeited it. The difficulty now, she felt, would be ever to believe him at all.

"I remember," she assented with returning cordiality. "I was very proud to listen that night."

Kimberly stood with his hand on the back of a chair. "Lambert is a brilliant fellow."

"Possibly; my sympathies were not with his views.

"So I sit here?" continued Kimberly patiently. "Who sits next to you?"

"Your brother."

Kimberly spoke with resignation. "Charles always had the luck of the family."

A door opened and a butler entered the room. On seeing Kimberly he attempted to withdraw.

"Come in, Bell," said Alice. "What is it?"

"The juggler, Mrs. MacBirney; his assistant has telephoned they've missed their train."

"Oh, Bell!" exclaimed his mistress in indignant protest. "Don't tell me that."

"And it's the last out, till ten-thirty o'clock."

Alice's face fell. "That ends my evening. Isn't it _too_ exasperating. Stupid jugglers!"

Kimberly intervened. "What train did he miss, Bell?"

"The seven-ten, sir, from town."

"Why don't you call up the division superintendent and ask his office to stop the eight-ten?"

Bell looked at his mistress. "I might do that, sir."

"Oh, can you?" cried Alice.

"You ought to have done it without being told, Bell," observed Kimberly. "You've done such things before."

"Might I use your name, sir?"

"Use whatever is necessary to get him. And ask them to hunt up the juggler in the waiting-room and put him aboard. Who is he?"

"A China boy, sir, I understand."

"In that case, they could not miss him."

The butler left the room. "Do you think they will do it?" asked Alice anxiously.

"Don't give it further thought. We could get him out on a special if necessary."

Voices came from the front room. Alice started forward. "There are guests."

"By-the-way," added Kimberly, pointing to the card on his cover and that on his brother's, "you don't mind my correcting this mistake, do you?"

Alice looked very frankly at him, for the success of the dinner was keenly on her mind. "You will be of more assistance, Mr. Kimberly, if you will not make any change. Mrs. Nelson and Mrs. Morgan are my difficulties and I hoped you would solve them for me."

"By all means."

Dolly's voice was heard in the hall. "Where are you, Alice? Here are the McCreas, from town, and Doctor Hamilton."

They sat down fourteen at the table--the Kimberlys, De Castros, Nelsons, McCreas, Hamilton, Miss Venable, and Dora Morgan.

Alice was playing to the enemy and meant to demonstrate to the Nelson coterie that she needed no assistance from them to establish herself as a hostess at Second Lake. If she wished, on this occasion, for a great success it was hers. The dinner was good, and the moment that Nelson had assured himself of this he began good-naturedly to help things on.

A remark from some one about the gulf between law and justice gave him a chance. "Why associate the two at all?" he asked lazily. "Law is strictly a game of the wits. It is played under the convention of an appeal to justice, but justice is invoked merely to satisfy the imagination. If people understood this there would be no complaint about a gulf between the two. We imagine justice; we get law. Similarly, we imagine heaven; we get--what we deserve. If the imagination be satisfied, man will endure the sweat of Sisyphus; most of us suffer it in this world, anyway. Law and justice are like chemical incompatibles and there must be a gulf between them. And law is no better and no worse than other conventions of society. Who that studies human government in any form has ever been able to regard it otherwise than with contempt?"

"Certainly," interposed Fritzie Venable, with formal irony. "No one that takes care of the Kimberly interests at Washington."

"The Kimberly interests at Washington," returned Nelson with complaisance, "are so well behaved that they take care of themselves."

"Then I don't see what contempt you should have for this government," retorted Fritzie vigorously.

"Only that it affords him no adequate exercise for his ingenuity," suggested Arthur De Castro.

"I don't care," protested Fritzie; "I am an American and I won't have our government abused. I believe in sticking to your own."

"Well, if _we_ haven't stuck to our own, I should like to know who has?" observed Charles Kimberly benevolently. "We've stuck for fifty years to our tariff builders, as Mustard would to a stot. MacBirney's farmers are doing the work for us now," he continued. "Our beet growers guard the sugar schedule at Washington. These wonderful Western States; lowest in illiteracy, highest in political sagacity! It is really a shame to take the money."

"I don't see how _you_ conscientiously can take it," declared Hamilton, appealing to Robert Kimberly.

"I do it by educating my conscience, Doctor," responded Robert Kimberly. "Every one that takes the trouble to inquire knows I am a free trader. I abstain from the Reform Club, but that is out of deference to my partners. I contribute to both campaign funds; to the one for our shareholders, to the other for my conscience; for as I say, personally I am a free trader."

"And a tariff beneficiary," added Arthur De Castro.

"Why not, Arthur? Wasn't it Disraeli who said sensible men are all of one religion? He might better have said, sensible men are all of one politics. It is true, we are tariff beneficiaries, but this country is doing business under a protective theory. We are engaged, as we were long before there was a tariff, in what is now a protected industry. We can't change our business because the government changes its economic policy.

"And if anybody _is_ to have protection here, Arthur, why shouldn't we? Who has a better right to it? Our warrants of occupation were extorted from the Iroquois. We fought the Indian, we fought the French, we fought the English----"

"Was there anybody you didn't fight?"

"We put up our credit in Paris and Amsterdam for the colonies and for the Federal Government when the colonies and the Federal Government had none. Then along comes a little coterie of steel men in our own day," Kimberly tossed his head with disdainful impatience, "who make the toil of a hundred years look like a farce--out-Herod Herod in protection and pile up hundreds of millions while we are up to our armpits in molasses trying to grind out a mere living. Protection! We don't get half enough. Who has any better sanction for exercising that airy, invisible pressure of a tariff tax?" he demanded, lifting a glass of wine to the light.

"Picturesque old pirate," murmured Hamilton.

"And he needs the money," commented De Castro. "Why quarrel with him?"

"I am sure you will all pledge the sugar business," continued Kimberly, raising a refilled glass blandly, "and join me in welcoming anybody that wants to go into it. This is a free country, gentlemen."

"What do you use on competitors, the rack and dungeon?"

"Nothing that savors of them."

"But you take care of competition," persisted Hamilton.

Kimberly laughed.

"Certainly we do," interposed McCrea, quickly and frankly. "But without unnecessary cruelty, as Mr. Robert Kimberly puts it. No man that ever fought the company and had horse-sense has ever starved to death. We can use such a man's talents better than he can, and very often he comes into camp and becomes our teacher; that has happened. Our system of combination has brought comforts and luxuries into thousands of homes that never would have known them under the waste of competition. Hundreds and thousands of men have profited by uniting their efforts with ours. And no man that wasn't a business lunatic has ever been the worse for anything we've done."

"Your husband talks well, Mrs. McCrea," said Robert Kimberly, to a quiet little woman near him.

"He has had able teachers," laughed Mrs. McCrea.

"No, it is because he believes in himself. It's a great thing to be able to believe in yourself."

"Don't you?"

"Far from it."

"You've made a good many others believe in you."

"Not always for their own best interests, I'm afraid."

"Yes, I know," Dolly was saying to those of the women who were listening to her, "the weight of authority is against me. But I have always held, and hold yet, that a simple thing, such as lapis-lazuli, is best set in gold--much better than in silver. Talk with Castellani about it sometime, or Viola."

"Yes, and they'll tell you silver, every time," interrupted Fritzie vigorously.

Dolly waved her hand as if to dismiss controversy.

"Gold is so common," objected Lottie Nelson.

"Not more so than lapis," retorted Dolly.

"But isn't that the glory of gold," suggested Robert, "that it is common? It has the seal of approval of mankind; what higher sanction do you want? You are always safe in resting with that approval. I believe in common things--pearls for example and rubies. I am just common enough to like them."

Bell, passing behind his mistress, spoke in her ear. Alice's face lighted and she caught Kimberly's eye. "He is here," she nodded laughingly across the table.

The juggler had come and as the dessert was being served he followed a butler into the room in his native robes and assumed his place as one of Bell's assistants. The Chinaman was handsome and of great size and strength. Alice only hinted to her guests what awkwardness might be looked for from the new footman, and the juggler smiling in Oriental silence began to cajole the senses of his spectators.

After he had amused them with trifles he floated a gossamer veil of yellow silk over a huge glass bowl filled with fruit from a serving table. With this in his hands he hastened to the fireplace at the end of the room and turning heaved the bowl swiftly toward the ceiling, catching it in his arms as it descended filled with quivering goldfish swimming in water of crystal clearness.

He took oranges from the side tables and, splitting them, released song-birds into the air. The guests tossed fruit at him, and from apples and pomegranates he cut favors for them--jewelled stick-pins, belt agraffes and Florentine bonbonieres. When the evening was over Alice thanked her guests for their compliments. Lottie Nelson's words in particular left a flush of triumph in Alice's cheeks and she looked so happy that Kimberly paused before he spoke.

"Well?" said Alice questioningly. And then: "If you have had a good time, don't be afraid to say so."

He looked at her as if pleased at her fervor. "Are you a little bit sorry?" he asked quizzically.

Her brows rose with a pretty assumption of ignorance. "I have nothing to be sorry for."

"Then I suppose I must have."

She dropped her eyes for a moment to her sandalwood fan. "Of course, you will decide that."

"I presume," he continued, taking the fan without apology from her hands, "I may come over when you are not at home and look at your portrait?"

"I am sure you don't realize how silly that sounds. I hear you have a new picture," she added, looking up.

"It is to be hung next week. MacBirney is to bring you over to see it. Are you sorry I came?"

"Oh, is _that_ what you meant? Why, such a question! You saved my evening."

"But are you sorry?"

"I shouldn't say so if I were, should I?"

"No, but answer, anyway."

Her expression of vexation was pleasing. "How obstinate! No, then. And you saved my evening besides."

"You must take me as I am."

"You cannot, I know, be less than you should be."

"How about you?"

She drew herself up the least bit. "I hope no friend of mine would wish me anything less."

"We are both then to be all we should be."

"Don't you think I am very patient?" she demanded impatiently.

"You are. We are both to be, aren't we?"

She did not conceal her annoyance. "I sincerely trust so," she said coldly. "But there is a limit to all things."

He held out his hand. "Thank you for a delightful evening."