Part 9

"Will I? Sometimes, Felicia, I have a horrible suspicion I am just a taster--like tea tasters, you know. Only I like to go round tasting experience. I never thought I was a bit of a flirt until lately. But I'm just finding out there are ways and ways of flirting, having 'adventures in personality' as Suzanne calls it. Jack says my 'Damnable sympathetic ways' are vicious. Maybe they are. I think I must be a sort of chameleon--all things to all men, you know. I shouldn't wonder if I couldn't really love anybody--_grand style_."

"You goose! When the right man comes along you will know the difference."

"I wonder." And suddenly Sylvia remembered how she had felt that night on Lover's Leap, when she and Philip Lorrimer had been the only two individuals in a whole spacious, shining universe. It seemed now as if she had heard a kind of Hallelujah chorus, or was it that the silence had been a strange kind of music itself?

And then on the heels of this blinding sweet memory had come another, bringing with it a bitter taste, a memory of those long days after Phil had gone back to the city and she had watched the mails and pretended to ignore them.

And then she remembered Gus and Jack and Doctor Tom. Had they all been just understudies for somebody else she really wanted in her heart of hearts? How many other understudies would there be? And would she marry one of them sooner or later?

"Women are rather like cats, after all, aren't they, Felicia? They will pat their mice and keep putting their paws on them, even if they don't want to eat them."

Felicia laughed.

"What a traveler you are! Have you been half round the world since you spoke last? Shall we ask Tom and Lois over to dinner to-night? We haven't seen either of them for an age."

"Yes," said Sylvia. "You telephone, Felicia. I have to pack."

Sylvia had seen practically nothing of Doctor Tom for the past few weeks. Never once in that time had she been alone with him. Twice Doctor Tom had been over when she was in, which was not often during those full holiday evenings, and she had taken pains to be sure Felicia was present on those two occasions. Once he had called to her to come for a drive but she had had a genuine engagement with Jack to plead. She felt silly enough placing any sort of a barrier between herself and Doctor Tom but she was afraid for her own part it would be some time before she could meet him quite naturally again. Sometimes she wished Jack had kept his "darned impertinence" to himself and other times she owned it was safer this way. Better that children should not play with matches at all, since matches did sometimes ignite. At any rate, she did not mean to see her neighbor alone again until after she got back from New York.

But Fate ruled otherwise. That very afternoon, after her breakfast table philosophizing, she had gone downtown to attend to a few last errands and the delicious, crisp frostiness of the day tempted her to walk instead of having the car out. She had hardly finished her tasks and started homeward when she heard Doctor Tom's familiar whistle, and, turning, saw him reigning in black Bess by the curb.

"Game for a spin?" he asked. "I have to go a few miles out in the country and was looking for company."

His tone was so natural that Sylvia herself lost her self-consciousness and was so thankful for the loss that she was very gay and talkative. If only he needn't find out that it had not been accidental that he had seen so little of herself of late all would be well.

"Seems to me you are turning into a regular society Miss after all," he teased. "Bet you've been cutting Red Cross and everything else since this dance mania set in."

"I am afraid I have. I've been an awful backslider in pretty much everything lately," she told him soberly.

He flashed one of his quick, shrewd glances at her.

"What's this, Miss Christmas? Your own special season here and you in the dumps without even a solitary star sparkle?"

"You are as bad as Felicia," said Sylvia a little crossly. "Do you all expect me to grin like a Cheshire cat every minute?"

He chuckled.

"Sylvia touchy! What next? Indigestion or bad conscience?"

"Neither--well, maybe a bit of the latter," admitted Sylvia. "Anyway, I am not at all pleased with myself lately. I'm getting to be a selfish pig, and that's the ungarnished truth."

"Indeed! I hadn't noticed it. The McGuires had a powerful good dinner yesterday and--"

"Do hush. It is nothing to send dinners to McGuire's. It doesn't cost me anything--not even much thought. You needn't try to smooth it over. I know. I haven't been thinking about a single soul in the world lately except Sylvia Arden. I set Jack to work and I've just diddled round myself doing next to nothing. I haven't even learned to cook as I said I was going to, and since Gus went I haven't practiced and--"

"And since three weeks ago Thursday you haven't even played me a psalm tune," he jested.

Then suddenly he stared. For out of the corner of his eye he perceived that Sylvia was unmistakably blushing, blushing, of course, the more hotly because she was so furiously angry at herself for so doing.

"So it isn't my imagination. There has been some kind of fool talk somewhere. Confound me for an idiot! Poor kid! We'll settle that." So thought Tom Daly. Then aloud, "See here, Sylvia, may I say a little speech? You needn't look at me. I was a manger dog all right, a few weeks ago, without meaning to be. I had no business to be keeping the young chaps away from you. I didn't even see I was doing it. I was down and out for a while, and you, bless your kind heart, saw it and came to the rescue, like the Christmas girl you are. I shan't forget what you did for me. If you pulled me out of a rut--and you did--maybe we both came somewhere near being pulled into a bigger one. So far as I know, no man is ever old enough to be sure he's passed the fool limit, and maybe I was nearer the edge than I knew. Anyway, you were a trump as usual. The blame, if there is any, is mine. All right, little sister?" Then, at last, he turned to face Sylvia.

And suddenly and disconcertingly her eyes filled with tears. She was very tired and her nerves were unstrung by too much gayety and mental uneasiness.

"Of course it is all right. There never was anything much wrong, only--well, I thought I was beginning to plume myself and get complacent because I was the only one who patted you and smoothed your fur the right way and maybe I'd better stop before--Doctor Tom, I hate things to be as they are."

"Meaning?"

"Lots of things, but mostly why can't people--men and women--just be friends and not have anything else snarled up with it?"

"They can." Tom Daly's steady voice was like oil to the troubled waters of Sylvia's soul.

Nor did she guess that it cost him something of an effort to throw precisely the right amount of big-brotherness into his words. As he admitted, no man could safely boast that he had passed the fool limit, but he could and would be man enough himself to be sure no girl like Sylvia was going to be bothered by the folly.

"_We_ can anyway," he smiled down at Sylvia to add in the old friendly way, a friendliness whose very familiarity was steadying.

She smiled back mistily.

"Of course we can. I'm a silly idiot to-day. Ghosts seem to walk even in the sunniest, most everyday places. Thank you, Doctor Tom. I don't know why I wept. My spirit isn't weepy. It was just my eyes. My spirit feels like singing 'Yankee Doodle' this minute."

"Let her go," he approved gayly, and directed the conversation through the rest of the ride so skillfully to safe and sane and neutral matters that long before they reached the Hill Sylvia had lost the last vestige of self-consciousness, and was her old, merry, natural self, with a good many of the "star sparkles" back in their places.

This process was so salutary that later when Tom and Lois were at the Hall to dinner it hardly seemed possible to Sylvia that she had had any queer feelings at all about the matter and teased and joked with the doctor in precisely her old merry, audacious way, exactly as she had been accustomed to doing since she was a naughty little schoolgirl at St. Anne's. When they were walking home together in the starlight Lois turned to her husband with a curious question.

"Tom, don't you ever wish you had waited for Sylvia? She is so lovely and full of life. She is much more your kind than I am."

Tom Daly shook his head, and added with all honesty that there never had been but one girl he had wanted to marry and he had been lucky enough to get her. And Lois, suddenly lifting her face to his, gave him one of her rare love looks; a look which he would have crossed the very fires of Hell to gain.

As they entered the house she turned to him again.

"Tom, I am cold and indifferent and I don't always care about the things you care so much for but I do care--about you. I wish you would try to remember that, even when I hurt you. Do you mind kissing me?"

Tom Daly had not "minded." But it was not until they were upstairs in their own room that the whole of Lois' slow speech evolved. She turned from the mirror before which she had been letting down her long, ash blond hair.

"Tom," she said.

"Yes, Lois."

"Do you know I have been having a feeling for a long time that you and Sylvia were beginning to care for each other? It began that night she was here and played to you all the evening while I wrote out checks. I went out to cover the flowers and I saw you on her steps, with her hands in yours looking so exactly like lovers something just froze in me. I hate jealous women and I wouldn't say it or hardly think it, but that is why I have been holding you so far off. If you could love Sylvia, I didn't want to keep you. I wouldn't fight for anything--even love. But to-night I saw it had all been just my imagination. I have hurt myself and you just for nothing. I might have known Sylvia wasn't that kind. Oh, Tom!"

But even as he drew Lois into his arms Tom Daly knew that it is sometimes a woman's business to fight for love. Humbly he admitted that it had been Sylvia and not himself nor Lois who had saved the day. As honest a man as ever lived was Tom Daly, but neither then nor at any other time did he tell his wife how narrowly her fears had escaped realization. Nor did Sylvia Arden ever guess how slight an impetus would have set herself and the fine man she knew as neighbor and brother drifting into perilous seas, instead of being as they now were, anchored safely in the haven of old friendship. That was Tom Daly's secret, and he was used to keeping secrets, even his own.

*CHAPTER XIV*

*"AND HAVING EYES"*

After the night when Phil Lorrimer played with opportunity a minute, then set it aside as not for his taking, things began to be different. Human relations have a way of shifting into new combinations of form and color like a kaleidoscope just when you think they have become as fixed as the stars in their courses.

That night brought a reaction with Phil. He was actuated by a fierce and relentless energy which only work could appease. Hence he came less often to Miss Josephine Murray's pleasant apartment, but kept burrowing deeper and deeper like a mole into the professional soil, working like a demon by day, and studying, reading, experimenting doggedly by night, trying his best to fill his mind so full that the thought of Sylvia could not find a cranny in which to creep and grow. But the less vacuum he left in his mind the bigger seemed the emptiness of his heart, or rather its fullness, for was it not full to overflowing with love for Sylvia? Like a mole, too, in his blindness, it did not occur to Phil that his stubborn silence might be hurting Sylvia. Still less in his humble unselfconsciousness did it occur to him that he might also be hurting Barbara Day. He had supposed always she understood. His love for Sylvia seemed as obvious and inevitable as rain and sun. It was incredible that any one should be unaware of it. So he would perhaps have reasoned, if it had seemed necessary to reason at all on the subject, which it did not.

And while Phil burrowed and blundered Barbara grew up. Her cheeks shed their soft childlike curves. Her eyes lost their dewy morning-glory look. They seemed not to wonder any more, but to know. The city had set its seal upon her, fed her youth to its strange gods. But the city was not all to blame. What had happened to Barb might have happened anywhere. The little drama in which she was playing out her part might have been staged in any other place quite as well. Nor was it at all an original drama. Its plot is curiously old though it has infinite variations.

It came to Barb that winter that, after all, happiness wasn't the essential thing she had believed. One could, it seemed, go on eating and sleeping and walking and talking and typing and even laughing, just the same, even if one did feel a little like an empty goblet, turned bowl down, with all its sparkling contents spilled out. It was queer, but it was so.

Yet way down in the bottom of Barb's heart there still nestled a little winged creature called Hope, just as there had been in the bottom of Pandora's box. Maybe things were not as strange as they seemed. Maybe it was just that people were very busy about Christmas time. Possibly after New Year's it would be different again.

But before New Year's Barb discovered that things would never be different, and the way she found out was very simple.

On the second evening of her visit to Jeanette, Sylvia had run away from the stately "Duplex on the Drive" to take supper with Barb, and Miss Murray, for purposes of her own, had asked Doctor Lorrimer to join them also. He had been a little late in arriving and as the others had already gone into the dining-room Barb opened the door for him. He greeted her with the old friendly terrible grip which crushed Barb's ring into her finger and set the blood singing through her. He started to make a remark about the weather but his opinion of that commodity was never completed for suddenly from the room beyond Sylvia's laughter rippled out.

Did you ever happen to be engaged in decorous conversation with a man and suddenly see a change sweep over his face, and an arrested, listening, illuminated look take possession of it, just because somewhere in the distance he had heard a step, a voice, a laugh, belonging to somebody who was not yourself? That was what Barbara Day saw, and the little winged creature used her wings then and there and never came back. Barb heard the clock tick out as before, "Suppose a chap wants to marry a girl," but she knew now, once and for all, that the clock had never been talking about Barbie Day. It had always meant Sylvia Arden from the beginning.

But Barb's fathers had been fighting men and she herself was game to her little brown fingertips.

"Hurry!" she said gayly, just a shade _too_ gayly, perhaps, only Phil did not notice. "Sylvia's here and soup's served." And as she pushed aside the curtains into the dining-room she announced with a gallant flourish, "Doctor Lorrimer, ladies."

But while Phil and Sylvia shook hands she did not look at them, busying herself instead with rearranging the scarlet carnations which stood in the center of the table, complaining to her aunt as she did so that the flowers looked "stiff" and "old-maidish" and needed a "touch."

It was Barb who was the blithest of them all that night at the little supper party, bestowing to it the "touch" just as she had to the carnations. Sylvia and Phil were both slightly self-conscious and not very conversational. Miss Josephine Murray was somewhat silent too, watching the young people with eyes that saw all there was to see and understanding things at which she had been able only to guess hitherto.

That night after Sylvia and Phil had gone, Barb slipped quickly away to bed, a little afraid of what her aunt's keen gaze might have discovered, and longing, in any case, to be alone with the dark and the Thing she had been dodging all the evening, the Thing which sooner or later had to be faced and grappled with.

Later Miss Murray found her wide awake and stooped to kiss her with unwonted tenderness.

"Good night, Barbie. Anything I can do to--put you to sleep?"

Barb shook her head with a tired little smile. Then suddenly she sat up.

"If you don't mind, I think I'd like you to put your arms around me and hold me tight for a minute. Mother used to hold me that way when I felt--achey."

Miss Josephine's arms went around the girl, holding her very "tight" indeed for a few moments of silence.

"Do you feel very achey, Barbie?" she asked presently.

"Oh, no," lied Barb. "I just wanted to be petted a little weeny mite, that was all. I'm all right. Thank you, Aunt Jo. Don't bother. Do go to bed. I know you are tired."

That was the nearest the two ever came to speaking of the Thing but neither fell asleep until dawn, and when Barb awoke from her brief, heavy slumber she was entirely grown up.

Out in the crisp chill of the December night, after leaving Miss Murray and Barb, Phil and Sylvia had found their tongues. All the hurt and estrangement of the past months seemed magically to have shed itself, leaving only the old happy intimacy with perhaps a touch of something new and even more exhilarating about it.

As they walked along the river front they talked of many things, of Phil's work, of Jack's unprecedented diligence, of Gus Nichols' success on the road, of Felicia's designs, and Lois Daly's novel, of "Hester house" and Phil's mother, of Barb's services to the Cause, and Suzanne's mysterious journeyings; of everything indeed, it seemed, except the subject which was nearest the surface, their own selves.

When they reached the Lathams' apartment they were still as far from having said the really important things that trembled on their lips as they had been at the beginning. Sylvia knew perfectly well what she wanted to say but being a woman could not say it. Phil also knew perfectly well what he wanted to say but being a man set his lips and did not say it. It was only as Sylvia paused in the doorway and held out her hand to Phil that the thing came near to getting said in spite of them both.

"Sylvia!" Phil's voice had a quick little catch in it very unlike his usual rather deliberate speech. "If I don't see much of you while you are here you will understand, won't you? It won't be because I don't want to but because I--don't dare." And his frank blue eyes implored her to understand and forgive.

"Are you sure--there is anything--to be afraid of?" Sylvia's words had jerked a little, too, and as she drew her hand away to press the bell her eyes expressed more even than her tongue had said.

"Sylvia!" Phil took a swift step nearer but before he could say any more a solemn liveried person had appeared in the doorway and stood at blinking attention while Sylvia shot one dazzling glance at the young doctor and vanished into the dim spaces of the hall, whence it seemed to Phil, though he could not be sure, she kissed her hand to him behind the liveried person's back, before she was lost in the elevator. Phil stared after her a moment in dazed silence then went out into the night.

The next day, when he came in from the clinic, he found a little note from Sylvia inviting him to take tea with her the following afternoon. "Of course it is all nonsense about your not seeing much of me while I am here," the note had added. "Phil, can't you understand there isn't anything to be afraid of?" The last was underscored. And then the writer subscribed herself conventionally his as ever.

Phil read the note hungrily several times and puzzled more than a little over its contents, which he perceived were open to more than one interpretation, especially the underscored portion. And then he had sat down and written an answer which he dispatched by special messenger. The answer expressed thanks and polite regret that the writer had a previous engagement.

Sylvia had run away into her own room to read the note and grew first a little rosy, then a little white as she read. Then she tore the missive into bits, and going to the window, deliberately let the fragments flutter away in the December blast outside.

"I might as well have proposed and done with it," she thought hotly. "Phil Lorrimer needn't worry. I won't endanger his precious peace of mind again while I'm here. Previous engagement, indeed! He's afraid of my money and he makes me tired."

As a matter of fact she did Phil injustice in one particular at least. The previous engagement had been perfectly authentic. The Washington Square Players were giving that afternoon a first performance of a play which had been translated from the Russian by a friend of Phil's and he had promised to be present and had long ago invited Barb to go with him. And Barb being fully determined that Phil should never guess how things were had kept her engagement and succeeded in behaving so comradely and sisterly, which was precisely the way she had been behaving all along only more so, that her escort was allowed to continue in his state of innocence and ignorance as to things better left unknown, which was quite according to code.

But it was one of those odd coincidences that sometimes occur that Sylvia and Jeanette should have been whirling swiftly toward the park on their way home from the matinee just at the moment when Phil and Barb were transferring to the Subway at the Circle. Very much absorbed the latter appeared to be in each other's society, so much so that neither saw the limousine pass them, but Sylvia had not been so blind, and Jeanette also had taken in the scene.

"Wasn't that your little friend with Phil Lorrimer?" the latter had asked. "Somebody was telling me he goes everywhere with her. I shouldn't wonder if they were engaged, should you? They certainly looked devoted enough." So Jeanette had rattled on and never noticed that Sylvia had not answered.

That night Sylvia had gone to a big ball and worn a wonderful, sophisticated Paquin gown of sea green satin and pearls. She looked very young and lovely. The men flocked around her and she managed them all like a seasoned coquette and had three proposals during the course of the evening. Of course it was perfectly well known that she was an heiress as well as a beauty, so the proposers was not so romantically rash as might have been thought.

And from that time on Sylvia "went the pace" as madly as Jeanette herself, without pause or rest. After that one supper party Barb was never able to capture her friend again, her engagements piled up so fast and high. It looked as if Suzanne's prophecy about the "labyrinth" were being fulfilled. As for Phil, never once was he able to see her again. She was always out when he called or telephoned and always had previous engagements when he tried to get her for the theater or a concert. She was as invisible, so far as he was concerned, as if some fairy's wand had drawn a magic circle about her, a fact which made him burrow deeper than ever in his work and made him look a little older and grimmer than his twenty-five years warranted.

*CHAPTER XV*

*THE CITY AND SYLVIA*

Sylvia had supposed herself sufficiently grown up and wise and modern when she came to the city but she had not been there a week before she knew that she had been a veritable innocent, an infant in swaddling clothes, so to speak. Here was life, of a sort, with a vengeance.