CHAPTER XXIII

At noon next day MacBirney, seeking his wife, found her in her dressing-room. She had come from the garden and stood before a table filled with flowers, which she was arranging in vases.

"I've been looking for you." MacBirney threw himself into a convenient chair as he spoke. "Robert Kimberly is downstairs."

"Mr. Kimberly? To see you, I suppose."

"No, to see you."

"To see _me_?" Alice with flowers in her hand, paused. Then she carried a vase to the mantel-piece. "At this time of day?"

"Well--to see us, he says."

She returned to the table. "What in the world does he want to see us about?"

MacBirney laughed. "He says he has something to say to both of us. I told him I would bring you down."

A breath would have toppled Alice over. "I can't dress to go down now," she managed to say. "It may be something from Dolly. Ask him to give you any message he has."

Walking hurriedly to the mantel with another jar of roses, she found her fear extreme. Could it be possible Kimberly would dream of saying to her husband what he had said to her yesterday? She smothered at the thought, yet she knew his appalling candor and felt unpleasantly convinced that he was capable of repeating every word of it. The idea threw her into a panic. She resolved not to face him under such circumstances; she was in no position to do so. "Tell him," she said abruptly, "that as much as I should like to hear what he has to say, he will have to excuse me this morning."

"He offered to come this evening if you preferred."

"We have other guests to-night," returned Alice coldly. "And I can't be bothered now."

"Bothered?" echoed MacBirney with sarcasm. "Perhaps I had better tell him that."

"By all means, if you want to," she retorted in desperation. "Tell him anything you like."

Her husband rose. "You are amiable this morning."

"No, I am not, I'm sorry to say. I am not quite well--that is the real truth and must be my excuse. Make it for me or not as you like."

MacBirney walked downstairs. After an interminable time, Alice, breathing more freely, heard Kimberly's car moving from the door. When she went down herself she watched narrowly the expression of her husband's face. But he was plainly interested in nothing more serious than Fritzie's account of the country dance. When Alice ventured to ask directly what Kimberly's messages were, he answered that Kimberly had given none. With Fritzie, Alice took a drive after luncheon somewhat easier in mind. Yet she reflected that scarcely twenty-four hours had passed and she already found herself in an atmosphere of suspense and apprehension from which there seemed no escape.

While she was dressing that night, flowers from The Towers' gardens were brought to Cedar Lodge in boxfuls, just as they had regularly been sent the year before--roses for the tables, violets for Alice's rooms, orchids for herself. If she only dared send them back! Not, she knew, that it would make any difference with the sender, but it would at least express her indignation. She still speculated as to whether Kimberly would dare to tell her husband and upon what would happen if he should tell him.

And her little dream of publicity as an antidote! What had become of it already? So far as Kimberly was concerned, she now firmly believed he was ready to publish his attitude toward her to the world. And she shrank with every instinct from the prospective shame and humiliation.

The water about her seemed very deep as she reflected, and she felt singularly helpless. She had never heard of a situation just such as this, never imagined one exactly like it. This man seemed different from every other she had ever conceived of; more frankly brutal than other brutes and more to be dreaded than other men.

A week passed before Kimberly and Alice met. It was at Charles Kimberly's. Doctor Bryson, the Nelsons, and Fritzie were there.

As Alice and her husband came down, Charles Kimberly and Robert walked out of the library. Robert bowed to MacBirney and to Alice--who scarcely allowed her eyes to answer his greeting.

"Are you always glad to get back to your own country, Mrs. Kimberly?" asked MacBirney greeting his hostess.

Imogene smiled. "Dutifully glad."

"Is that all?"

"At least, I come back with the same feeling of relief that I am getting back to democracy."

"That is," suggested Lottie Nelson, "getting back to where you are the aristocracy."

Dolly, who with her husband joined them in time to hear the remark, tossed her head. "I always thank Heaven, Lottie, that we have no aristocracy here."

"But you are wrong, Dolly, we have," objected Robert Kimberly as the party went into the drawing-room. "Democracy is nothing but an aristocracy of ability. What else can happen when you give everybody a chance? We began in this country by ridding ourselves of an aristocracy of heredity and privilege; and we have only succeeded in substituting for it the coldest, cruelest aristocracy known to man--the aristocracy of brains. This is the aristocracy that controls our manufacturing, our transportation, our public service and our finance; it makes our laws and apportions our taxation. And from this fell cause done our present griefs arise."

"But you must rid yourself of the grossly material conception of an aristocracy, Mr. Kimberly," said Nelson. "Our real aristocracy, I take it, is not our material one, as Robert Kimberly insists. The true aristocrat, I hold, is the real but mere gentleman."

"Exactly right," assented De Castro. "The gentleman and nothing else is the thing."

"There is nothing more interesting than the gentleman," returned Robert Kimberly, "except the gentleman plus the brute. But the exception is enormous, for it supplies our material aristocrat."

"You must remember, though, that ideas of superiority and inferiority are very tricky," commented Imogene. "And they persist for centuries. To the Naples beggar, even to-day, the Germans are 'barbarians.' And whenever I encounter the two I never can decide which _is_ the aristocrat, the traveller or the beggar."

"I read your speech at the New England dinner last night," said Imogene, turning to Nelson, "and I saw all the nice things that were said about it this morning."

"If credit were due anywhere it would be to the occasion," returned Nelson. "There is always something now in such gatherings to suggest the discomforting reflection that our best native stock is dying out."

Dolly looked distressed. "Oh, dear, are those unfortunate people still dying out? I've been worrying over their situation for years. Can't any one do anything?"

"Don't let it disturb you, Mrs. De Castro," said Bryson.

"But I am afraid it is getting on my nerves."

"Nothing dies out that doesn't deserve to die out," continued Bryson. "As to the people Nelson speaks of, I incline to think they ought to die out. Their whole philosophy of life has been bad. Nature ought to be ashamed, of course, to pass them by and turn to inferior races for her recruits. But since all races are inferior to them, what can she do but take refuge with the despised foreigner? The men and women that take life on the light-housekeeping plan may do so if they will--for one generation. What may safely be counted on is that nature will find its workers in the human hive even if it has to turn to the savage tribes."

"But the poor savages, doctor--they also are on the verge of extinction, are they not?" demanded Dolly.

"Then nature will provide its workers from one unfailing source--from those we have always with us, the poor and the despised. And it can be depended on with equal certainty to cast the satisfied, cultivated, and intellectual drones into outer darkness."

"My dear, but the doctor is savage, isn't he?" Lottie Nelson made the appeal indolently to Imogene. "We shall soon be asking, doctor," she concluded languidly, "which tribe you belong to."

"He would answer, the medical tribe," suggested Fritzie.

"Speaking of savages," interposed Arthur De Castro, "Charles and I were making a portage once on the York River. On the trail I met two superb little Canadian lads--straight, swarthy, handsome fellows. They couldn't speak English. 'You must be French,' I suggested, addressing the elder by way of compliment in that tongue. Imagine my surprise when he answered with perfect composure, 'Non, monsieur. Nous sommes des sauvages!'"

"For my part," said Imogene, "I am always glad to hear Doctor Bryson defend families and motherhood. I don't care how savage he gets."

"I defend motherhood because to me it is the highest state of womanhood. Merely as an instinct, its mysteries are a never-ending marvel."

Lottie Nelson looked patiently bored. "Oh, tell us about them, do, doctor."

"I will tell you of one," returned Bryson undismayed. "Take the young mother that brings her first child into the world; from the day of its birth until the day of that mother's death, her child is never wholly out of her thought. The child may die, may be forgotten by every one else on earth, may be to all other conscious existence in this world as a thing that never was. But in its mother's heart it never dies. I call that a mystery."

The doctor's glance as he finished fell on Alice's face. He was sorry at once that he had spoken at all. Her eyes were fixed on him with a look of acute pain.

Alice hardly knew Doctor Bryson, but what he saw in the sadness of her face he quite understood. And though they had never met, other than in a formal way, he never afterward felt that they were wholly strangers.