Part 1

THE UNPRETENDERS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE CHALK LINE. 12mo. $1.25 net.

VICTORY LAW. 12mo. $1.30 net.

COMPENSATION. 12mo. $1.30 net.

THE UNKNOWN WOMAN. 12mo. $1.30 net.

THE MECCAS OF THE WORLD. 8vo. $2.00 net.

JOHN LANE COMPANY, NEW YORK

THE UNPRETENDERS

BY ANNE WARWICK

AUTHOR OF “VICTORY LAW,” “THE CHALK LINE,” “COMPENSATION,” ETC.

NEW YORK JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXVI

COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY JOHN LANE COMPANY

Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company New York U. S. A.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. ANNE--JUST A PLAIN WOMAN 9

II. TIMOTHY--ONLY A WRITER 33

III. GLADYS-MARIE--MERELY A MAID 59

IV. SHEILA--SIMPLY A SOCIETY PERSON 80

V. WARNER--WHAT ELSE BUT A WAG 104

VI. CHALMERS--CLEARLY A CLUBMAN 126

VII. PIX--PURELY A PHILANTHROPIST 147

VIII. RICHARD--NO MORE THAN KING 178

IX. LUCIA--A MERE WIFE 205

X. ROGER--PLAINLY AN IDLER 227

THE UNPRETENDERS

I

ANNE--JUST A PLAIN WOMAN

“Perhaps Anne----” suggested Michael.

“Why, yes--certainly, Anne,” seconded Doromea, eagerly. “Of course Timothy’s our friend, but Anne knows that we have just this last chapter and--all we need do is to ask her.”

“Um-m. What is she doing?”

“She was trimming a hat on the west porch a few minutes ago.”

“_Trimming a hat?_ Why, she never has one on her head!” Anne’s husband looked at his unfinished manuscript aggrieved.

“I think it was Gladys-Marie’s hat.” Doromea struggled back of plot to remember. “It had a look of Gladys-Marie--an incoherent sort of cloche, you know, that was meant to have been a sunbonnet.”

Michael laughed. “If you weren’t my sister I should be afraid of you,” he said, looking at her admiringly. “You see too deep--even in hats.”

“But I cannot trim them,” answered Doromea, seriously. “Anne can--she can make the most delicious hat out of an old square of lace or something. I can’t even tack a plume in place and have it look like anything but a curled poker.”

“You can only help write books,” smiled Michael, “and this one”--he smoothed the thick pile of closely written paper--“is the best you’ve ever helped to write. Er--suppose we just go and speak to Anne.”

The two figures, ludicrously alike in spite of the tall stoop of one and the trim roundness of the other, hurried around the house to the west porch.

“Is the book finished?” asked Anne, posing buttercups with an upward glance of amazement.

“No--that is, not quite--just that one more chapter, you know; but----”

“It must be finished to-day,” concluded Doromea, firmly, “and--the post came a few minutes ago and there was a letter from Timothy.”

“Yes?” Anne’s voice warmed. She had never seen Timothy, but Michael and Doromea had made him sound very nice.

“Timothy,” said Doromea, mildly indignant, “with all his excellences, has an abominable habit of not arriving psychologically at all.” (Michael beamed--there was not a phrase of Doromea’s turning whose cleverness he ever lost.) “He is coming this afternoon on the four-thirty,” plumped Doromea, with no cleverness at all.

“I had better meet him with the cart when I go to Aunt Hester’s,” Anne reflected, “unless--perhaps you had planned to meet him yourself, Dorry?”

“No”--Doromea magnanimously overlooked the abbreviation of her cherished name--“no, I hadn’t. Of course you’ve never seen him, but----”

“There’s no one else to get off,” Anne answered, simply.

“Oh, I didn’t mean that. I meant you have never met him, or anything.” Doromea always floundered in her explanations to Anne--perhaps because she found it necessary to make so many.

“Well, that needn’t worry her any,” put in Michael. “Timothy will make her feel at ease right away.” And he smiled at Anne with an affection back of which lurked an impatience to be off and at work, now that incidental disturbances were disposed of.

“Then you’ll meet the four-thirty,” reminded Doromea, impressively.

“But you’re coming in to lunch?” called Anne, seeing them about to start off. “It’s almost time.”

“I don’t know if we’ll bother with lunch to-day,” returned Michael, absently. “You can ring, but don’t wait for us if we don’t come.”

“Gladys-Marie wants to go to the city,” commenced Anne, but the sharp corner of the porch cut off her audience; “and I must read to Aunt Hester and shell the peas,” she finished. “Gladys-Marie!”

“Yes’m--yes, my lady.” There was but one woman in the world to whom Gladys-Marie would acknowledge such subservience, but one woman before whom she would appear instantly--and awesomely.

“Here’s the hat, Gladys-Marie. Run along with it and have a good time, only come back so that you can get dinner; and, Gladys-Marie, perhaps you had better leave a little lunch on the buffet. I don’t believe the others will be quite ready to eat with me.”

“Never are,” muttered Gladys-Marie, handling the hat as though it were Venetian glass. “Sit with their noses glued over an old pad o’ paper all day long, ’n’ the house ’n’ the meals ’n’ Lady Elinore ’n’ me c’n go to--c’n go hang, ’s what I mean,” she apologized to Anne. “Oh, I know you think I’m the pert one with me nerve carried round in me side pocket, but I c’n see, I can; ’n’ if ever I see perruls cast before swine--Gee! it’s plainer ’n any Sunday-school chromo ever tried to be.”

She looked back at the pearl in question with a kind of wrathful tenderness. But the Lady Elinore, apparently, had not heard a word; only the soft part in her warm gold hair was visible above the sewing in her hands.

“She’s awful sweet,” sighed the worldling, pityingly, “’n’ twice as smart with hands as I am. But--my word! she ain’t clever! The way she lets herself get done an’ don’t even squirm about it pickles me!”

* * * * *

The fussy little train steamed off with an important backward lunge, as though to say, “There! I did the very best I could for you!” And Anne, who alone with the station-master saw what it had deposited, could understand how it lingered on the siding and switched back and forth several times after it had given every pretence of departing. For the spare, shortish person it had set down at the small station made of the station a suddenly very wonderful place indeed.

“You are Timothy,” said Anne, gravely, going forward. “I came to meet you--I am Anne, you know.”

“I am very glad to know.” When the spare person smiled like that the station-master straightened his tie and began to whistle. “For you to come to meet me is the most cordial introduction we could possibly have had. Is that your cart?”

“Yes.” Since Timothy mentioned it, Anne thought it was not such a bad cart, after all. “If you will put your bag inside I will get the milk-can.”

“Oh, _I’ll_ get the milk-can, miss,” offered the station-master, hastily, as though he were not in the habit of lounging over his pipe while he watched Anne carry it night and morning. “There you are!” He swung it up with a flourish.

“Thank you,” said Anne, and her eyes were bluer than before. “Did you hear him call me miss?” she asked Timothy almost before they rattled off. “He thinks I’m a girl.”

“I should say he was of a sound psychology,” pronounced Timothy. “I suppose he hasn’t seen Michael following you about, then?”

“No.” Anne drew the reins a shade tighter. “You see, Michael has been finishing his book--he and Doromea, I mean; and that keeps them very busy. I come down for the milk by myself--unless sometimes Gladys-Marie comes along.”

“And Gladys-Marie is----”

“My maid. She is very fond of dime novels and chews gum. I think you will like her.”

“I am sure of it.” Timothy’s gray eyes had bent a little closer upon Anne’s serene naturalness. “Do Michael and Doromea like her?”

“They have no time for her. They are too busy making up characters for the book.”

“I suppose you help at that, too----”

“I?” Anne’s blue gaze marvelled at him. “Oh, no--I am not clever enough to help Michael. Doromea is the only one who does that. Isn’t she pretty--Doromea?”

“Yes,” said Timothy, so fulsomely that any woman would have known at once. “But I wish she would stop being clever,” he added, after a minute.

“Men always want wives who are not clever, don’t they?” Anne meditated. “So many people said that when Michael married me. Are the women in your stories clever, Mr.--Timothy?”

“Never,” asserted Mr. Timothy, solemnly--and traitorously to Doromea.

“They--they are just plain women?”

“Just plain women. That is why women never buy the magazines they’re in.”

“But men do?”

“Oh, yes--men who have married the clever ones like to remember that there are the other kind. And men who have married the other kind--your kind” (this time it was Anne who straightened the little frill at her throat)--“like to be reminded how sensibly they have done for themselves.”

“Michael does not read your stories,” said Anne, turning a sharp corner carefully. “He says he does not understand them in you.”

Timothy’s quaint twisty mouth grew twistier for a moment. Then he said, “That is because he does not understand me in them--or you, or anybody else one sees day after day--and never sees at all.”

“One doesn’t see you day after day,” objected Anne. “If one never saw you at all, though, one would always be sure that one had--that one had wanted to.” She looked up at his glasses without coquetry. “Doromea and Michael have talked a great deal about you.”

Timothy groaned. “And said clever things about me, I suppose--epigrams?” He waited, as for the worst.

“I think so. Yes, Doromea said you were a literary Roycrofter--that is an epigram, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid so--or a Mission-made metaphor. I wish”--Timothy’s voice grew wistful--“she had said she hated me.”

“Said she hated you? Oh! I see”--Anne remembered--“you want her to be in love with you.”

“She is in love with me,” admitted Timothy, modestly. “Only she thinks it’s beneath her--being in love at all, I mean. She thinks it isn’t subtle.”

“I suppose it isn’t,” Anne meditated, allowing the horse to walk in zigzag laziness across the road and back. “That must be why I don’t mind it,” she decided, as they came in sight of the house. “I’ve been in love ever since Michael asked me to try to be--and a long time before that.”

Timothy looked at her again more closely. “Michael should write better books,” he murmured, getting down to open the gate.

“So you really didn’t mind our not meeting you?” Doromea’s anxiety was most appealingly clothed in a rose-sprigged frock. “You see, Anne offered, so we thought----”

“You thought you couldn’t be more gracious to me,” finished Timothy, glad that Doromea’s hair curled over the ears as unsubtly as ever. “By the way, where is Anne?” He looked about the wide homely porch, where a work-bag and a tennis racquet spoke of some one, evidently just a plain woman.

“She is getting dinner.” Doromea shifted uncomfortably to another chair. “I wish I could help her, but I can’t even boil an egg--and not have it crack! Anne is so practical.”

“And so impractical,” appended Michael. “Fancy letting Gladys-Marie go to the city when Timothy was coming! And of course there was no one by whom to send the manuscript, once we had finished it. Anne had gone over to read to Aunt Hester, and Doromea hadn’t the least idea how to hitch up.”

“Neither had you,” added Doromea, a little warmly.

“Naturally not--having been brought up in the city with you.”

“Poor people!” Timothy’s gray eyes commiserated them. “But now that the book is done, you can begin to learn something?”

“I mean to find myself,” said Doromea, loftily. “And I shall have to go off alone for the whole day in order to do it.”

“That would be very rude--and no help at all to you. Why not take Gladys-Marie along?” Timothy meant it--though he had never seen Gladys-Marie.

“I would, if she were not so typical.” Doromea was quite serious. “Nowadays one must insist upon the unusual, or grow usual oneself. Even one’s maid is an influence.”

Michael looked triumphantly at Timothy--they were used to holding some argument together as to Doromea’s cleverness.

“I see--then how important we usual ones are, aren’t we?--for if it wasn’t for us, all of you’d be usual, too!” Timothy’s smile included Anne, who came out just at that moment, completely covered with a checked blue apron.

“_Anne_--Timothy!” Doromea’s voice showed what she thought of aprons.

“Yes, I know--I met him.” Anne sat down, innocently, and began to fan her flushed face. “Dinner’s ready,” she added, as an incident.

Both Doromea and Michael jumped up at once. “We didn’t have a bite of lunch,” cried Michael, plumping down into his chair and attacking the olives rather crudely. “By the time we had finished the book, you had gone to Aunt Hester’s----” he turned to Anne.

“Yes,” said Anne, setting down the water-pitcher. “There was lunch on the buffet, you know.”

“I told you!” Doromea triumphed at Michael. “I said Anne wouldn’t forget--but you wouldn’t even go and look.”

“Oh, well----” Michael’s voice was a shade less agreeable than usual. “I knew she was busy in the garden all morning, and trimming Gladys-Marie’s hat--I didn’t suppose she’d think. Anyway, what does it matter? The dinner’s tremendously good. Come, Timmie, tell us what you’ve been doing--more Plain Stories?”

“Not so many more.” Timothy wondered inadvertently if Michael had put Anne’s elbows in the book--they were exceedingly nice elbows. “You see, there aren’t so many Plain People left to write about. Every one’s going in for being extraordinary, these days--psychic or something.” He looked at Doromea inquiringly.

“I go to New Thought lectures,” defended Doromea, promptly.

“Do you?” Timothy asked Anne.

“I don’t have time--besides, I’m afraid I wouldn’t understand. I never went to college or anything.”

“Oh!” said Timothy, approvingly.

“You see, Anne”--Doromea interposed with a quick kindliness--“Anne always lived in the country before she came to New York to keep house for her grandfather--that winter we met her--so she isn’t as interested in the new mental trend. You must take it up when we go back, though, dear; after all, it’s the thing that counts--one’s psychic education.”

“I should say that depended on what one counts with.” But Timothy said it so low that nobody heard him.

“Psychic education----” Michael crumpled his roll thoughtfully. “In the book there’s a woman (Faero’s her name) who is absolutely the most perfect psychic completion you ever encountered. Simply a _ripping_ creation, isn’t she, Doromea?”

“Wonderful!” Doromea sighed admiration; then she smiled, and all her dimples came out, which was to Timothy much more important. “You see, this woman, this Faero, has a way of seeing things--the most subtle, evanescent sort of things that nobody could possibly see----”

“Eh?” Timothy bolted, involuntarily.

“And it’s she who gathers up all the threads of the plot--there really isn’t so much plot, Michael--”

“No, not so much plot----” Michael paused vaguely over a stalk of asparagus. “People are sick of plot nowadays. They want something less apparent, less----”

“So this Faero is a sort of psychic gleaner,” went on Doromea, eagerly. “All the subtleties other people let fall unnoticed she picks up and treasures, until the mental of her, the infinitely fine sensitive perception that’s stretched to the vibration of a thin, thin silken string----”

“Gee whiz! Now ain’t I the late one! Me walkin’-papers ’n’ the cashless mitt’s all I deserve, I guess--but honest, Lady Elinore, if y’ could uv seen that Theatorium show! My word! it had Sothern ’n’ Marlowe lookin’ like two ice-cream freezers--yes’m! Why, when that girl, Phylo-Floretta, jumped out of a forty-six story buildin’, into her waitin’ lover’s arms, with Popper hangin’ out the winder threatenin’ air-ships--my eye! I says to Mamie, I says, this may be riskay, but it’s life, I says! ’N’ y’ c’n take it from me it was, too--oh!” From the window Gladys-Marie became suddenly aware of new audience, and hunted for her vanity-bag to see if her hat was on straight.

“A quaint person,” commented Doromea, when the buttercup hat had passed on, to the tune of _The Rosary_, “though a trifle hectic in her descriptive parts.”

Michael glanced again triumphantly at Timothy.

“I must go and see her about breakfast,” said Anne, rising.

“I thought you would play to us.” Michael’s voice was wistful as a child’s. “Anne always plays to us after dinner,” he explained to Timothy.

“I don’t play,” disclaimed Anne; “I only hum a little. There--tuck yourself up--I’ll play for a while.” She brought his pipe over to the hammock, and arranged two chairs undemonstratively tangent, before she went in to the piano.

Timothy, who had wandered into the yard, gazed at Michael; he was puffing peacefully as the simple little Irish ballad came to emphasize his comfort.

“Does the Lady Elinore always sing like that?” Timothy asked Gladys-Marie, who appeared (quite without reason) on the side porch.

Gladys-Marie listened. “I guess it’s you,” she said, finally, fumbling with her pompadour. “Sometimes she sounds kind a sad, but--I guess nobody could help pinchin’ their gladness a little when you’re around----” Her eyes under the pompadour went from Timothy to the two chairs Anne had left. One of them was occupied. “Her hair curls real pretty, don’t it?” she added, generously--for Doromea and Gladys-Marie had a vegetable understanding only. “An’ that rose-color is awful becomin’----”

Timothy threw away his light and turned toward the rose-sprigged chair. “It is a pretty dress, isn’t it?”

“Lady Elinore made it,” returned Gladys-Marie, proudly. “Sure it’s a pretty dress!”

Doromea and Michael and Timothy sat on the porch. “I can’t think it has been really two weeks since you’ve been here.” From the steps Doromea looked at Timothy a bit dolefully. “But it must be--since it was two weeks ago we--we sent the book off. Must you actually go to-morrow, Timothy?”

“It seems a breach of sense to admit it,” Timothy agreed, looking at her through the gloaming, “but my editors imagine that the summer has created some new Plain People--at least they want me to come and see.”

“I suppose so,” Doromea sighed. “I wish some one wanted me to come and do something,” she added, vehemently, under her breath. “Goodness knows there’s been nothing to do here, since the book’s been finished. Anne seems to be busy every minute,” she observed, aloud, “but I don’t sew or cook or row, or anything--I don’t even play the piano!” This with a gust of indignation, as some very good playing came through the window.

“It’s the book’s fault.” Michael’s voice sounded rather weary. “If I hadn’t held you to the book every minute, you might have learned these other things. But I never imagined for a moment that the publishers would reject it--it seemed so much better than the first one, so much subtler----”

“What did they say about it?” Timothy moved to where he could not see the quiver of Doromea’s lips.

“They said”--Michael repeated with the monotony of one who has gone over the lesson many times--“that they were much surprised and not a little disappointed over the decided inferiority of this book compared with the other; that I seemed to have striven for an effect rather than for a truthful portrayal of actual life. Oh, they tore it up sharply enough!” he concluded, breaking off as though the recital choked him.

“They did say,” Doromea comforted, wiping her eyes back of Michael’s cushions--“they did say there was some clever dialogue in it--you remember, Michael, where Faero talks with the rector? They mentioned that especially.”

“Yes--yes”--Michael caught at the consolation--“where she says, ‘One can be so many worse things than bad,’ and--Why, Anne said that, Doromea; funny, isn’t it? Don’t you know, when we were talking about that stable-boy who stole--the one who had been in the Reformatory? You said you thought he was the baddest boy in the world, and Anne--why, yes, of course!”

“What else did they say was especially good?” Timothy’s voice suggested, with suspicious impersonality.

“Why, farther on, the scene between the kitchenmaid and the policeman--that was a story of Gladys-Marie’s, Anne told us--awfully natural, you know, and--er--local-colorish. They like that.”

“Yes, and the bit about the ladies’ clubs.” Doromea would not allow Michael to omit anything.

“Surely, that--that was funny, you know----” Michael laughed heartily for the first time since yesterday, when the book had come back. “That was a conversation Anne had with--Doromea!” He sat all at once bolt upright in his hammock. “Every one of those things was Anne’s! Every single one of them--do you know that, Doromea?--and the publishers said they were the only clever things in the book!”

“_Anne_--clever?” Doromea stumbled, dazed with the dawning of it. “Why--why, Michael!”

“Yes”--Michael was standing up now, and almost excited--“yes, those were Anne’s things--the clever ones--and all the rest was rot. We sat in there racking our brains over subtle things to say, and all the time, if we’d just listened to Anne, we could have written a perfectly extraordinary book--the cleverest book in the world! It’s maddening--it’s----”

“Do you know why it would have been the cleverest book in the world?” asked Timothy, quietly--for Anne’s singing stopped just then. “Because it would have been the story of just a plain, ordinary woman--and that’s the rarest woman one can find to write about--women like Anne, and that little Patsy sister of mine, and a host of others. Why don’t you go in,” he said to Michael, gently, “and ask her to help you find her?”

As Michael slipped through the long window, Timothy moved to the step below Doromea. “Aren’t you convinced that she’s the subtlest woman, too--this plain, ordinary woman?” he asked. Doromea’s curly head was bent very low. “Don’t you think you might like to cook, and sew, and trim hats sometimes?”

His voice was so wistful that Doromea wiped her eyes quite frankly this time. “I--I am perfectly wild to trim hats,” she burst out, laughing between her sobs. “Oh, Timothy, I am so sick--sick--_sick_ of trying to be clever and think up things! I am really the dullest, plainest woman in the world.”

“I hope so,” said Timothy, gravely, taking the unskilful little hands. “I need a heroine most awfully. You see”--turning her about to face the library windows--“Michael has found his.” For Michael was standing by, while Anne lit the lamp and undid a heavy pile of manuscript.

“Anne--just a plain woman----” Doromea’s voice caught--but with a yearning desire. “Even Gladys-Marie had the sense to tell me that she had the Duchess heroines beat by a lope! Do you suppose, Timothy”--her hands crept to his shoulders pleadingly--“do you suppose that I can ever learn to be as clever as Anne?”

II

TIMOTHY--ONLY A WRITER

Patsy thumped Timothy’s fattest yellow cushion viciously. “It’s all very well for you to sit there and smile,” she scolded her pretty stepmother. “Dad was always perfect to you, and Timmie--if he is my brother--is a joy to keep house for. You’ve never known what it is to live with a man from Boston!--oh, how I hate him, how I’d like to make him fairly eat slang! The idea--my own husband saying I was r-rowdy, and--and tomboy,” Patsy’s head went down into the yellow cushion, “and before my own mother-in-law, too, just because I slid down the banisters! Ugh!”