Part 4

"Of course she'll find it," seconded Suzanne. "If there is anybody on this green earth capable of squeezing the traditional camel through the needle's eye it is the young person I see before me. Isn't it time our cavaliers arrived? I begin to pine for action already."

"Jack said he would be here at four sharp. We are going to take you to the most heavenly spot, right over the river with the whole Ridge for a background. Some day when you are being compressed to a wafer in the Subway in your precious old city you will remember it and be willing to give your second-most-becoming hat for a magic carpet to take you back."

"I shouldn't wonder," murmured Barb. "I believe Suzanne would rather hear the roar of the El than the wind in the pines though. She is the most urban person I ever knew."

Suzanne laughed at this arraignment.

"It isn't the music of the El, _per se_ that I delight in. That's nearer like the thing it rhymes with. But it's a symbol. It means hurrying human beings, the rush and stir of things. I love crowds."

"And I detest them," groaned Barb. "I'm afraid of New York in spite of all its wonderfulness. It is so big and hard and impersonal. If it weren't for being with Aunt Jo I know it would scare me to bits to live there."

"You poor babe!" Sylvia smiled sympathetically at the speaker. "It is unthinkable that a little shrinking infant like you should be dedicated to a great screaming cause. You ought to live in a cozy cottage, in a friendly little village, where everybody knows everybody and grow pansies."

"And babies," added Suzanne, an addition which brought a quick flush to Barb's cheeks and made her put out her hand with a deprecating gesture. "You'll never be able to stand the pace. Better wire your Aunt Josephine you have decided to bury the mantle."

"For mercy's sake, what do you two think I am? I guess I don't have to be packed away in rose petals and pink cotton." There was a strain of indignation in Barb's voice. "I don't belong in the sheltered woman class, and I wouldn't stay in it if I did. How long do you suppose I'd have any peace in my cozy cottage, in my friendly little village, remembering all the other women who don't live in cozy friendly places but have to work in horrid, noisy, sweaty factories or worse? What pleasure would I get out of my pansies--and babies--so long as I knew there was a child in the world who wasn't free to chase butterflies in the sunshine? You two think I am just playing at this woman game. I'm not. Sylvia can act Lady Bountiful from the top of her Hill and you can write about woman, Suzanne, but I'm going to fight for her, so there!"

"Bravo! I stand reproved and beg a thousand pardons. You're a trump, Barbie. You are right, too. Sylvia and I are likely to play with this thing called Feminism, but you'll fight for it to the last trench like the wee bit heroine you are. Oh, there's Mr. Amidon's car. There is Mr. Amidon and Dr. Lorrimer and--Sylvia, _who_ is the third man?"

"If my eyes do not deceive me the third man is Roger Minot. Did you know he was imminent?"

"I did not. Moreover, I am extremely displeased with him for appearing," frowned Suzanne. "I told him distinctly I didn't want to see him again unless I sent for him."

"Well, you will have to look the other way then," observed Sylvia. "He is in plain sight."

So indeed it proved, for three minutes later, Roger Minot, a tall young man with hazel eyes and a firm chin, was shaking hands with the assembled group and explaining with considerable explicitness that he had happened to be in Baltimore on business and had also happened to call up Jack Amidon by telephone, who, in turn, had happened to be taking Sylvia and her guests on an excursion and had been kind enough to include himself in the invitation.

At all of which elaborate eloquence Suzanne had shrugged her displeasure and pointedly turned her back on the young barrister and devoted herself to the doctor. So much "happening" in the face of her expressed command deserved punishment and Suzanne was a firm disciplinarian where her lovers were concerned, especially the unfortunate Roger.

"Sylvia, you will have to sit with me to show me the way," ordered Jack in his usual "magerful" way, taking things into his own hands. "All aboard, everybody? Sure Madame Felicia won't go?" He turned to Sylvia to inquire.

"No, she said not. Felicia is not exceedingly devoted to picnics, and I suspect she has had more than enough of them this summer. Ready?" Sylvia turned back to her guests to ask and in a moment they were off down the hill.

The rich, vivid-hued Maryland fields and meadows lay indeed, "fair as the garden of the Lord" as the car sped out of Greendale beyond to the open country, along the smooth, hard, white pike. The afternoon shadows fell cool and long, and already there was a faint autumnal hint of crispness in the air and a mellow, misty gold to the sunshine. The mountains were outlined, palely blue, against the deeper azure of the cloudless September skies. Here and there a buzzard sailed and dipped above some wooded slope or a blue jay screamed and flashed out of an oak thicket.

Amidst the chatter of the rest Barbara fell silent and gave herself blissfully to the serene beauty of the outdoor world so utterly remote from that other world of din and traffic, of strenuous toil and keen competition in which she was to merge her own existence on the morrow. She was profoundly grateful for this last opportunity to feel the benign presence of Nature in field and sky and mountain. Her quick eye took in every patch of purple aster bloom, every scarlet glory of sumach and warm bronze hue of oaks. Even the corn shocks spreading their brown skirts as if indulging in some quaint minuet stamped themselves upon her inner vision to be remembered long after. She did not wish to talk, scarcely even to think. She desired only to feel--to let the benediction of the jewel-tinted day possess her spirit.

Suzanne, less susceptible to the mood of tranquillity, was bubbling over with gayety, her attention centering chiefly on Phil Lorrimer sitting in the seat opposite her. She chose to ignore Roger Minot's steady hazel eyes. He need not think his coming made any difference to her. Whether he came or went was a matter of supreme indifference. He might just as well have stayed in his grim little, trim little, office in Norton, Pa., as to have pursued a will-o'-the-wisp to Arden Hall so far as Suzanne was concerned. Some women were made unhappy by men. Suzanne had a cousin to whom this had befallen and had long since determined none should have power to hurt her. She meant to guard well the citadel which was Suzanne Morrison. If there were any casualties in the attempt to scale the walls the responsibility would not be on her head. Let men look to themselves. Suzanne had small compassion. Though she thoroughly enjoyed the stimulus of the society of the other sex and dearly loved to clash swords with them she wished nothing at their hands. She meant to show the world that a woman could stand alone, strive and conquer alone, fail if need be, alone, sufficient unto herself unto the end. There should be no doll's house for her, no more confining limits than life itself, wide as ether and deep as the sea, for her abiding place.

On the driver's seat were Jack and Sylvia, the latter a little silent. Though she had made no protest against her companion's rather high-handed disposition of herself it had not wholly pleased Sylvia. For one thing, she thought it assumed too much on the basis of that half promise of last night. She did not desire that Phil or indeed any of the party should infer that she and Jack must necessarily pair off like a couple of Noah's ark animals; moreover she considered it extremely thoughtless, not to say selfish, of Jack to leave Phil to the society of a group of almost strangers when his time in Greendale was so limited; for Phil was taking the midnight train back to New York having allowed himself little more than twenty-four hours for a holiday.

"Too bad everybody has to go away," Jack was saying. "May I come over often and help cheer your lonely hours?" His voice was lowered and his head bent toward Sylvia in an intimate fashion.

"No." The negative was sufficiently decisive to make the driver send a sharp glance at his companion.

"Why not?"

"Several why nots. One is because you said last night you were going to work in earnest. You can't do that and keep flying out to Greendale every other day the way you have been doing all summer. Besides, I expect to be busy myself."

"You! May I ask what you are going to do that is so almighty important?"

"You may ask but I am not likely to inform you if you take that tone."

Jack whistled softly.

"Gee! Am I in as bad as all that?"

"As all what? Did I sound cross?" Sylvia smiled relentingly. "Well, maybe I was. I hate the lordly male attitude you assume at times. Your tone bristled with it just then."

"Did it?" he chuckled. "Sorry. Honest, I didn't mean to patronize your ladyship. So far from feeling lordly in your presence you usually make me feel infernally infinitesimal, not to say atomic. I have a fearful and wonderful respect for your serene high mightiness. I truly did want to know what you were going to do."

"I am going to get to work on my music for one thing. I've promised to practice with Gus. Then I am going to learn to cook."

"In the name of heaven why?"

"Because I want to, chiefly. Also I think everybody--male and female--ought to know how."

Jack groaned.

"Thence to dressmaking and millinery, I suppose?"

"Hardly. I haven't the slightest interest in sewing, though I could do it on a pinch I believe. I know I couldn't trim a hat--at least not one I would wear. But cooking is different. I believe I could get up quite a passion for it. Hilda used to. She claimed it was just as much an art to create a perfect salad as to write a sonnet."

"I'd vote for the salad personally. By the way, where is Hilda? Heard lately?"

"No, and I'm worried. One hears such horrid stories of what is happening over there. I don't know whether she and the Armstrongs can't get back or don't want to."

"Most likely the latter. Johnny Armstrong is darned likely to do what he wants. He is just the boy not to want to get back to safe and sane America. He is much more apt to be down in a trench or up in a 'plane by this time."

"I know. He's a wonder--one of the finest men I know. Just to think he was my gardener once! Wasn't it funny?"

"He got mighty good pay for that piece of masquerading. Constance is a shade too much on the grand duchess order for my taste but she suits him down to the ground. Only wish Isabel had drawn a man like John instead of the rotter she took a fancy to marry." For a moment Jack's serene brow looked thundery. "Queer world!" he muttered. "Sometimes I think we Amidons are doomed to go amuck one way or another. Jeanette's not much better off. Guess we're all sort of rudderless as you say, excepting Dad. He knows where he is going all right."

"You had better get on to his ship then," suggested Sylvia a little dryly.

"I am going to. You needn't think I didn't mean what I said last night. I did mean it, every word. If sticking to a job is going to mean getting what I want, I'll stick tighter than a stamp."

There was a ring of determination in his voice which startled Sylvia a little, it sounded so alarmingly conclusive.

"Jack! I didn't promise," she protested.

"Oh, I know. I'm not such a cad as to throw it up at you if even the sticking isn't enough. But if it's the one chance I'm too good a gambler not to take it--or to kick if I fail in the end." And Jack's lips came together with a firmness which avouched the sincerity of his statement.

Sylvia watching the landscape flit by looked thoughtful. It suddenly occurred to her that her companion had spoken the literal truth. Jack Amidon was first and last a good gambler, ready to play high stakes, to win or lose like a gentleman, without vainglory or bitterness. If she had said yes to his impassioned plea last night Sylvia could not help wondering if a little of the ardor of his love might not have abated in spite of himself. Wasn't it the chase itself he loved? If so, he was only his father's own son. Jackson Amidon, Senior, went on quietly bagging his millions, not because he cared a snap of his fingers for the money but because the exhilaration of achieving it in the face of obstacles was the breath of life to him. Like the biblical war horses he metaphorically trumpeted "Ha Ha!" in the battle hour. With father and son the game itself was the thing. The nature of the stake did not matter so much. With one it was Power, with the other Love, as it happened, but with both the zest lay, not in the end, but in the pursuit. Of course Sylvia did not reason all this out clearly, but vaguely she sensed the truth which the boy's words had revealed. Many months later the revelation recurred to her and she wondered if Jack, too, had understood himself as clearly as for a moment she had understood him. She thought it possible with his keen power of intuition, he had always understood. Perhaps he had.

So through the deepening autumnal twilight sped Youth with its visions and its questionings, Youth unproved, pressing forward toward some unknown mark in challenging mood, knowing little of the eternal mystery of Life and less of that even more baffling mystery, the mystery of Self.

*CHAPTER VI*

*OF MISSIONS, AND OMISSIONS*

"H-mm!" Suzanne meditatively surveyed the depleted feast. "Thermos bottles! Silver spoons! Sophisticated salads! Is this your notion of roughing it, Mr. Jack Amidon? Of all Sybaritical picnics!"

"Same old bugs! Same old sticks in the lemonade!" retorted Jack, leaning forward to extract a leaf from Sylvia's cup with the prong of a salad fork. "The good old times aren't utterly gone."

"Oh, but think of the bacon bats of yesteryear!" mourned Suzanne. "The fingers I've burned! The clothes I've spoiled! The smudges wherewith I've smudged my nose! I begin to feel fatally reminiscent. Give me some more lemonade, I pine to drown my grief."

"And I pine to see the sunset from Lover's Leap." And Sylvia sprang up hastily, perceiving that the sun was already glinting flame and gold through the trees. "Come on everybody or it will be too late." The others rose to follow her lead. Phil fell into step beside Sylvia, leaving Jack to Barbara's society, as Suzanne and Roger had at last struck up a conversation, albeit a rather non-amicable one and strayed off together.

"Are you sure your name isn't Pease Blossom or Mustard Seed? I could swear you were a fairy. Are you really a Militant? Would you resist forcible feeding? Here, let me test you with a pickle."

But Barb only laughed and accepted the pickle.

"I'm nothing militant to-night. I'm at peace with the whole world."

"Even the menacing male?" teased Jack.

"The menacing male is a spoiled baby, biting off his own nose. Mr. Amidon, it would serve you right if I delivered a suffrage lecture here and now. I don't believe you know a thing about the movement," severely.

"Heaven forbid!" he ejaculated piously.

"You will sing a different tune before many years. You'll have it forcibly fed to you unless you take to it of your own accord as babies take to their thumbs."

"I believe I could bear to have even Suffrage rammed into me at your hands, Mademoiselle Mustard Seed, especially if you would make pansy eyes at me while you did it," he added audaciously. "What are you going to do with those eyes of yours anyway? They are altogether too expressive to be wasted on a Cause."

Barb frowned.

"You wouldn't wear a last year's hat. Why do you use last century methods with women? They hate compliments."

"Do they? I wonder." And his wonder was genuine. He honestly reflected a moment. Sylvia did hate compliments he knew. But then he never offered her any. He never even flirted with Sylvia, though she was about the only pretty girl of his acquaintance of whom as much could be said. He had been perfectly willing to play the game a deux with this demurely charming, pansy-eyed, little suffragist however. But he was evidently not going to be permitted to have his will. Were Barbara Day and Sylvia and the sharp-tongued Suzanne really a new breed of womankind? Were his own sisters and the dozens of other girls of their kind with whom he had played and danced and flirted for the past five or six years really an older type, soon to be as extinct as the Dodo? Only for a moment, however, he wondered. Jack was not much given to serious thinking. He took life and the feminine sex on the whole rather as he found them. He was always genially ready to "play up" to both. He was now. It was rather agreeable he thought to watch Barb's eyes shine and the color surge in her cheeks, so he laid the match to the tow chiefly from an artistic impulse to see the flame.

"Tell me," he urged. "What is this thing you girls are up to? What is it you are going to New York to do?"

Barb shot him a shrewd rather indignant glance. Then she laughed.

"You don't really care, but, just to punish you, I'm going to tell you. You deserve it."

And then she did tell him, a little reservedly at first, but soon losing both her resentment and her shyness she forgot herself entirely and warmed to her loved theme, betraying something of the dream of her Aunt Josephine, of herself, of all women who think and feel and are forever disenchanted with any Pisgah heights they themselves might have the luck to attain, so long as the great weary horde of the "dispossessed" wait without the gates, scarcely even knowing in the apathy of their misery that there is a Promised Land. And her listener did not scoff even to himself at the revelation he was vouchsafed. He had the grace to recognize with suitable humility that he unworthy had been permitted a brief glimpse into a holy of holies. And irreverence was not one of Jack's failings, for all his habitual levity of mood.

In the meanwhile, not far ahead, Roger and Suzanne were quarreling hotly. At least Suzanne was quarreling. Roger never quarreled, which was perhaps one of his most glaring defects in Suzanne's eyes.

"I told you not to come and you came," was the burden of Suzanne's complaint.

"I didn't come to see you. I didn't even know you were in Greendale until Jack told me. And when I knew, how could I resist a chance to see you, especially as it will be months before I can see you again? Be reasonable, Suzanne. Why are you so angry at me for coming?"

Suzanne shot him an exasperated and somewhat malicious glance. Unfortunately, Mr. Minot was a lawyer and not a clairvoyant and therefore was totally without means of knowing that the chief reason for Suzanne's anger was the fact that she had been so foolishly glad to see him. For every quickened beat of her pulse in his near presence poor Roger had to pay with a lash of her tongue. Angry, indeed, was Suzanne at Roger Minot for disobeying her royal mandates, but angrier still was she at Suzanne Morrison for being automatically glad of his nearness. Scant wonder the young lawyer had a very bad quarter of an hour as he mounted the pine-needled slope toward the sunset.

Phil and Sylvia had less to say than either of the other couples, strange to say, though it had seemed to both beforehand they would have volumes. The hush of the forest and the hour seemed to have cast a spell upon them, or was it an even more potent enchantment that held them fast bound in silence? They had seen so little of each other during this brief visit of Phil's. Last night had been too full and joyous and excited for much conversation, even had Sylvia's responsibilities as hostess left her much time for her latest arrived guest. Those few moments on the stairs had been practically--indeed, the only ones--they had enjoyed alone, and this morning Phil had given to his mother while Sylvia and her guests slept away the hours up at the Hall. Both had felt a little aggrieved and cheated at the way circumstances had curtailed the pleasure of their being together for the first time since the June Commencement at college. Yet now that the awaited moment had come at last neither seemed to have anything particular to do with it. It was strange, and both felt slightly embarrassed by the strangeness, suddenly grown shy, after all their years of friendship.

"Oh!" Sylvia uttered the exclamation as she stepped out upon the great ledge of rock from which she could see the sun's gold rim just dipping behind the crest of the topmost purple peak leaving a sea of tulip colors in its wake.

For a moment neither spoke again. A mood of complete serenity was upon them that forbade speech, a sense of nearness, each to the other, and to some high other Presence which might have been God or Nature or Love or a mystic commingling of all three. Were the three, indeed, a new Trinity, perfect and indivisible? There was a crackling among the bushes behind, the sound of voices. The others were near. The enchanted moment passed. Sylvia sighed, and, turning, met Phil's eyes and her own drooped before what she saw there. No word was spoken, nor needed, yet something unforgettable had been communicated. Sylvia's heart was beating a little more quickly than usual and there was dew and star shine in her eyes as she smiled at Jack and Barbara, a shine which was lost on neither of the two new arrivals, though later it suited both to pretend they had never seen it. For the moment Barbara's only feeling was a quick compunction lest they had interrupted something which they had no right to share. As for her companion, sharp fear and half resentful jealousy went through him like keen-bladed knives. Had he lost just at the moment when he seemed to have gained something almost tangible? And then Suzanne and Roger reached the rock also, arriving rather dilatorily by another path, having arrived also apparently at a state of something faintly resembling truce, for Suzanne was wearing a spray of vivid scarlet berries which Roger had risked thorns and a possible broken neck to acquire. The risk had been worth it, it seemed, for Roger was looking happier than at any moment since Suzanne had first snubbed him several hours ago on Sylvia's piazza.

Barb, standing apart, watching the whole pageant from the outside, felt oddly cold and lonely all of a sudden. There seemed to be so much love in the world somehow and yet so little left over, as it were. And Sylvia and Suzanne--did they know? Did they even begin to know how precious love was? How one needed it in this great lonely world? She walked to the edge of the cliff and looked down at the river whose rapid current whirled fiercely, down below her. She remembered Sylvia's story of how the rock was named. There are so many Lover's Leaps in the world and their stories are all somewhat the same story. An Indian girl and her lover had been forbidden to marry because they belonged to hostile tribes and here they had gladly taken the consecrated leap together, hand in hand, into space and eternity, one in death as they could never have been in life.

What a strange thing love was! So Barb meditated. Was it something to be avoided as Suzanne insisted because it demanded too high toll? The others had seated themselves on the rock to watch the shifting panorama of color in the western skies, but Barb wandered off by herself, still pondering about that strange thing love. And the others scarcely noticed her going, which was in its way a symbol.