Part 15

“Because if you laugh I won’t get to see anything of you at all. I’m afraid I won’t anyhow.”

He spoke with gravity, meaning what he said; and the event proved his fear justified. He got halfway round the country club ballroom with her, after the theatricals, a surprising number of times, but seldom much farther. However, he conclusively proved his possession of that admirable quality, dogged persistence, and so did the other young gentlemen of the dinner party. So did more than these, including probably a majority of the men and youths, married or single, present that evening at the Blue Hills Club.

Elsie wondered when the spell would break. It seemed impossible that she wouldn’t be found out presently as a masquerader and dropped into her old homelike invisibility. But whether the break came or not, she knew she would never again be so miserable as she had been, because she was every moment more and more confidently daring to know that she was beautiful. She laughed at a great many things that weren’t funny during this gracious evening; for laughter may spring as freely from excited happiness as from humour; but she made no effort to be noisy—noisiness appeared to be not a necessity at all, but superfluous. And what pleased her most, the girls were “nice” to her, too, as she defined their behaviour;—they formed part of the clusters about her when the music was silent, and they eagerly competed to arrange future entertainment for her. Elsie loved them all, these strange, adorable people who had not seen the wrong thing about her.

The old walls built round her by her own town, enclosing her with such seeming massive permanence and so tightly, now at a stroke proved to be illusion; she was discovering that they were but apparitions all unreal, and that this world is mysterious and can be happily so. Something of its humorous mysteries in dealing with young hearts another person, near her, also learned that night; for Cornelia Cromwell, by coincidence, had a queer experience of her own.

Beyond the outer fringe of dancers she saw her mother standing among a group of the older people;—one of these was Miss Bailey, the principal of the suburban school in which Cornelia had once been a pupil. Cornelia had not seen her for several years and went conscientiously to greet her. Principal and former pupil made the appropriate exchanges; but Cornelia was rather vague with the grayish gentleman who had Miss Bailey upon his arm.

Mrs. Cromwell said something as in correction of an error; but it was too late, and the couple had moved away before Cornelia understood.

“You called her Miss Bailey,” Mrs. Cromwell explained. “She’s been married to Professor Bromley for two years.”

“What! Was that funny little old——” Cornelia checked herself; but the tactful mother had already turned away to speak to someone else. The daughter stood and gazed at the stiff little old-fashioned gentleman standing punctiliously arm-in-arm with his wife. “Oh, dear _me_!” Cornelia whispered.

Then she ran back, wide-eyed, to rejoin an anxious lad who had arrived late. “Look here,” he said. “You’ve missed another chance to let me meet your cousin. What did you run away like that for?”

“To learn something important,” Cornelia told him. “Come on;—I’ll get you through to Elsie somehow.”

For the unmasking of Elsie, that dreaded break in the spell, still postponed itself as the evening wore on. Her miraculous night continued to be a miracle to the end, and she was a girl grateful for wonders when she talked them over with her cousin in the big bedroom, after two o’clock in the morning.

“I never met such darling people in the whole world!” she declared. “I never knew——”

“What nonsense!” Cornelia laughed. “You must be perfectly used to being a sensation wherever you go, Elsie.”

“A ‘sensation’?” Elsie cried. “_I?_”

“Don’t tell me you don’t know it!”

“Cornelia, you don’t understand. Nobody was ever really nice to me at a party before to-night in my whole life.”

At that her cousin beamed upon her. “I believe that’s what I like best of all about you, Elsie.”

“You mean nobody ever being nice to me before?”

“No,” Cornelia laughed. “I mean your not admitting that you know it. Of course you do know, because it’s impossible for a girl like you not to realize the effect you have on people; but I love you for pretending you don’t see it.”

“But it’s true,” Elsie insisted. “Until to-night nobody ever——”

“Yes, yes! Go on! It’s very becoming, and it’s what placates the other girls so that you get both sexes in your train, you clever thing!”

“I’m not clever, though,” the visitor protested. “I’m no good at all at pretending things. I’m not——”

“Aren’t you?” Cornelia laughed. “Well, it’s nice of you to _try_ to be modest, then. Your thinking you ought to be is one of your charms. It isn’t the biggest one, though. Everybody saw that one the instant you came downstairs to-night and stood in the drawing-room doorway, just before Father went to bring you in. It was very striking, Elsie.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“That’s right; you oughtn’t to know,” Cornelia said, seriously. “It has to be spontaneous, I suppose, and it probably can’t be imitated or done deliberately.”

“But I didn’t do _anything_!” Elsie cried.

“I know you didn’t; that’s just what I’m pointing out. Maybe it was something they call ‘magnetism’; but anyhow it was more than just being a beauty. Of course you’re _that_——”

“Nobody ever told me so; not before——”

“Nonsense!” Cornelia interrupted; then she went on: “It seemed to lie in not only being a beauty, but in being a beauty with a kind of glow. I don’t know just how else to express it, because it’s better than having what they call the ‘come hither’ look. It was—well, _charm_, I suppose. People might never notice that a beauty is a beauty if she doesn’t have something of it. But ‘charm’ _is_ too vague to express it exactly. It was a look as if—as if——” Cornelia hesitated, groping. “Well, I can’t find any way to tell it except to say it was as if you knew something mysterious and lovely about yourself. And it makes everybody else crazy to know it, too!”

She jumped up, pointing at the clock upon the mantel. “Good heavens! And we’ve got engagements for every minute of the next two weeks, beginning at half-past eight to-morrow morning! Don’t bother to put those flowers in water, Elsie; it’d only be a waste. There’ll be more to-morrow!”

“I’d like to keep these,” Elsie said. “I think I’d like to keep them forever.”

“Dear me! Did he make that great an impression on you?”

“Who?”

“Elsie, you _are_ a hypocrite! Berthier Ney Junot Harley!”

“I didn’t even know it was he that sent them. I wanted to keep them because they’d remind me of—of everything.”

And when Cornelia, touched by the way this was spoken, had kissed her fondly and gone out, Elsie put the pretty bouquet in a vase of water. Then she took one of the rosebuds from the cluster of them and pinned it upon her breast for the night. She had liked Berthier Harley best; but it was not on his account that she wore his rosebud through her dreams; it was to remind her of—of everything!

She awoke early, smiling, and the bright wings of all her new fairy memories were fluttering in her heart. Then, reflecting, she became incredulous. Somewhere she had heard that every girl, no matter what her looks, has one night in her life when she is beautiful. Her own night had come at last; she could never doubt that. But what if it were the only one?

She jumped up and ran to the mirror. No;—tousled and flushed from warm and happy sleep, still drowsy, too, she was beautiful in the early sunshine. She knew it, and it was true. Last night had been her night, but it was not to be her only night;—and so, half laughing in her delight, she nodded charmingly to this charming mirror and began to think about what clothes to wear for the first day of her triumphant visit. She had no serious doubt now that it would remain triumphant, and so long as she kept upon her that glamour Cornelia had described as the look of “knowing something mysterious and lovely” about herself, Elsie was right not to doubt. She kept the look, and the longer she kept it, the easier it was to keep. Her visit was all glorious.

XXV GLAMOUR CAN BE KEPT

YOUNG Mr. Paul Reamer had been away, too, that winter. With no profession or business to localize his attention, and a heritage sufficient to afford him comfortable wandering, he had “tried California for a change,” as he said; and on his return he went at once to tell Miss Ford about Hollywood. She was not at home; but he waited;—she came in presently, and made a satisfactory noise over him.

“To think of my not being here when you came!” she exclaimed when she had reached a point of more subdued demonstrations. “I’d just run over to Elsie’s for half an hour——”

“Where?”

“To Elsie’s. I spend about half my time there, I expect, and——”

“You do?” He looked puzzled and a little amused. “What for?”

“Why, everybody does,” Mamie returned, surprised. “That is, when she’s home. She’s away a good deal of the time, you know.”

“You mean Elsie Hemingway?”

“Why, naturally. What other Elsie is there?”

“I don’t know.” He looked more puzzled and more amused. “You say, ‘everybody’ spends about half the time there?” He laughed. “That sounds funny! What on earth’s made her house such a busy place all of a sudden?”

“Oh, it isn’t sudden,” Mamie said, and she added, reflectively, “You know Elsie always was about the best-_looking_ girl in town.”

“Oh, possibly. It never seemed to get anywhere though,” he returned. “She’s good-looking all right, I suppose, but not the way anybody would ever notice.”

“What?” Mamie cried. “Why, you don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“I don’t?” He laughed incredulously. “Look here. What _is_ all this about little Elsie Hemingway? When I left town——”

Miss Ford interrupted: “Have you seen old Fred yet?”

“No. I haven’t seen anybody.”

“Well, you’d better see old Fred and ask him ‘What _is_ all this about little Elsie Hemingway?’ He’ll probably fall in your arms and burst right out crying!”

“What for?”

“Why, for the same reason some of the others would do the same thing!”

Paul shook his head. “I don’t think it’s friendly to try to fill me up with fairy stories, Mamie—not just the first minute after I’ve come home anyhow. When I went away——”

“Oh, there’ve been lots of changes,” Miss Ford assured him. “You’ll have to get used to ’em. We’ve been used to the change about Elsie so long now I suppose we hardly realize there _was_ a change. I guess what happened was that we never used to appreciate her, and she had a way of not seeming to feel she counted much, herself; but now we’ve got a little older and have more sense, or something, and we all see what a wonderful girl she is. You ought to hear old Fred! When he gets started—well, of course, I think she’s great myself, but after I’ve listened to poor old Fred’s babble for a couple of hours I almost hate her!”

Again Mr. Reamer shook his head. “It doesn’t seem to me my hearing’s exactly right. Are you really telling me——”

“You better go see,” Mamie advised him. “Oh, you’ll get it, too! You think you won’t, but you will. You’ll get it as bad as any of ’em, Paul Reamer.”

The experienced young man laughed in sheerest incredulity; but that evening, his curiosity being somewhat piquantly aroused, he acted upon Miss Ford’s advice and went to find out if it could possibly be true that he had overlooked anything important in so long overlooking Elsie Hemingway. It didn’t seem probable, but if it proved to be the fact, he was somewhat amusedly prepared to make good to himself what he had lost by the overlooking.

The moment he saw her, when she came into the old-fashioned living-room of the quiet house that had once been too quiet, he understood that he had much more to repay himself for than he had dreamed could be possible. Elsie’s look of knowing something mysterious and lovely about herself was still upon her; and Mr. Reamer set himself ardently and instantly to the task of self-repayment.

“Elsie,” he said, “I’ve been away for a long, dreary time, and I’ve just got back. I’ve come to spend my very first evening with you.”

He was too late.

Following Elsie from the library, where the three had been having coffee and discussing the Battle of Waterloo, came two gentlemen. One was Elsie’s father, and he walked with his hand upon the other gentleman’s shoulder.

The other gentleman was a tall young man from out of town who had been named for two marshals and a general of the First Empire.

XXVI DESERT SAND

WE SPEAK now of that parent-troubling daughter of Mrs. Dodge’s as she came to be through weltering experience, most of it hurried and all of it crowded. For do we not know that there are maidens of twenty-three who have already lived a lifetime? Such is their own testimony. They have had a view of all the world can offer, and foresee the rest of their existence as mere repetition, not stirring to the emotions. Life henceforth is to be but “drab,” they say, several decades of them having strongly favoured the word; and this mood, often lasting for days at a time, usually follows one form or another of amatory anticlimax. Not infrequently the anticlimax is within the maiden herself; she finds herself lacking in certain supremities of feeling that appear not only proper but necessary, if the sentimental passions are to be taken at all seriously.

“It is all over—I shall never care for any man—I shall never marry—I shall never feel anything about anything again,” such a one wrote to a girl confidant abroad, and fully believed what she wrote. “I am tired of everything,” she continued. “I am all dead within me. I look at things, but I do not see them. I see nothing—nothing absolutely!”

And yet at that very moment, as she glanced absently out of the window beside her pretty green-painted desk, her attention became concentrated upon a young man passing along the suburban boulevard below. He was a stranger, but a modish and comely one; she could not accurately call him “nothing,” nor maintain that he was invisible;—her eyes followed him, in fact, until he had passed out of the range of her window. Then, with perfect confidence that she set forth the truth, she turned back to her letter and continued:

“I cannot by the farthest stretch of my imagination picture myself as feeling the least, the slightest—oh, the most infinitesimal!—featherweight of interest in any man again so long as my life shall last. I broke my engagement last night simply on that account. It was not in the most formal sense an engagement, since it hadn’t been announced; but Henry made as much fuss as if I had turned back at the altar. He was frantic, especially as I could give him no reason except that I did not feel for him what I had expected to. He begged and begged to know what he had done to change me. I could only tell him he had done nothing. I had simply become incapable of caring. I think now that I fell in love too often and too intensely in my younger days. My ‘grand passion’ came too soon and since then I have cared less and less each time that I have fancied my interest intrigued. The absurd boy was my Sun-god—and yet I see now that he is and always was a ridiculous person, and I laugh when I remember how I glorified him to myself. He meant nothing. Price Gleason meant nothing. Laurence Grover, Paul Arthur, Capt. Williams, and all the others meant nothing. Henry, so long and tediously a pursuer, means nothing now. None of them mean anything. The spring has gone dry and my heart, that bloomed once so eagerly, is desert sand—desert sand, my dear!”

She was rather pleased with this bit of metaphor and read it over aloud, speaking the words lingeringly. Upon the wall beyond the pretty desk there was a mirror facing her; she could see herself when she chose, and she chose to see herself now in her mood of poetic melancholy. She saw a winsome picture in that mirror, too, when she made this choice—an exquisitely fair, delicate creature, slim, though not so fragile as she had been, and, in spite of her heart of desert sand, all alive indeed. Probably induced by pleasure in the metaphor just written, the young lady in the glass was at the moment more sparkling, in fact, than seemed suitable. Therefore, her face became poignantly wistful—an effect so excellent that a surprised approbation was added, a little incongruously, to the wistfulness. The approbation was removed in favour of an inscrutable pathos, which continued throughout a long exchange of looks between the image and its original; then both of these little blonde heads bent once more above their green-painted desks, in a charmingly concerted action, like two glints of sunshine glancing down through foliage;—and the letter was resumed.

“My dear, our suburb is trembling with excitement. The chief scion of all the McArdles is on the point of being Installed in Residence among us. I think it should be spoken of as at least an Installation, shouldn’t it? In our great Plutocracy, surely the McArdle dynasty is Royalty, isn’t it? Anyhow, you’d think so if you could see the excitement over the announcement that James Herbert McArdle, III, is coming here to represent the dynasty’s interests. That is, he’s supposed to be the new manager of the huge McArdle Works, which are the smallest, I believe, of the dozens of McArdle Works over the country. I understand he’s only to be nominal manager and is really to ‘learn the business’ under old Mr. Hiram Huston, the McArdles’ trusted ‘local representative.’ The youthful Dauphin is given command of an army—but under the advice of old generals strictly! However, you can guess what a spasm is happening here, with seventy million dollars (or is it seven hundred million?) walking around under one hat. I feel sorry for the poor agitated girls and their poor agitating mothers. The rich marry the rich; _we_ sha’n’t get him!”

She looked up thoughtfully at the mirror, frowned in sharp disapproval—not of the mirror—and continued: “It’s really disgusting, the manœuvring to be the first to meet and annex him. Eleanor Gray and her mother are accused of having gone to New York to try to be on the same train with him! Yesterday there was a rumour that he had arrived at the Jefferson Road Inn, which is to be his temporary quarters, and the story went all round that Harriet Joyce thought she recognized him there at tea and actually fainted away in order to make him notice her. My dear, I _believe_ it! Really, you simply couldn’t imagine the things that are going on. As for me, it is the piteous truth that this stupendous advent fails to stir me. I wish it could! But no, upon my life, I haven’t a flicker—not the faintest flicker of ordinary human curiosity to know even if he looks like his tiresome pictures. These curiosities, these stirrings are for the springtime of life, my dear, while I—as I told poor Henry last night—I am autumn!”

Thus wrote Lily that most April-like of all maidens and within the hour went forth, looking like the very spring itself, to meet an adventure comparable to adventures met only in the springtime of the world. The scene of this adventure should have been a wood near Camelot, or the Forest of Arden, and Lily a young huntress in a leathern kirtle and out with a gilded bow and painted arrows for hare or pheasant. Then, if one of her arrows had pierced the thicket and also the King’s Son on the other side of it, so that she came and took him, all swounding, in her arms, the same thing in all true essentials would have happened that happened to her to-day. The surroundings would have been more appropriate—especially for a damsel with a dead heart—than the golf course of the Blue Hills Country Club, but the hero and the heroine and the wounding and the swounding would have been identical.

In particular, there was little difference between James Herbert McArdle and a king’s son. From the time of his birth, which was announced by greater tongues than those of royal heralds, these greater tongues being the principal newspapers of the world, he was a public figure. At the age of four his likeness and those of his favourite goat and dog were made known to his fellow citizens up and down the land by means of photographic reproductions in magazines and in the Sunday prints. Lest there be fear on the part of the public that he might alter beyond recognition as he grew up, these magazines and prints continued reassuringly to present portraits of him, playing in the sea sand, or seated upon the knee of his portentous grandfather, or—with tutor and attendants—upon the platform of his father’s private car, and later, when he reached a proper age, being instructed in the technique necessary for driving his earliest automobile.

His first evening after matriculating as a freshman at a university was spent in dining and conversing with the university’s president. When, as a sophomore, he was found equal to a position in “left field” on the varsity nine, and the nine went out of town to play, reporters interviewed him and neglected to mention the captain. When he had graduated and his father and grandfather began to prepare him for the ponderous responsibilities that would some day rest upon his shoulders, there were spreading “feature articles” about him everywhere. Wherever he went, important old men hurried beamingly to his side, eager to be seen conversing with him; magnificent old ladies went beyond all amiability in caressing him; many of his contemporaries were unable to veil their deference; and lovely girls looked plentifully toward him. All his life he had been courted, attended, served, pointed out, focussed upon, stared at, and lime-lighted before the multitude. No wonder the poor young man liked solitude better than anything else!

When he contrived to be alone he protracted the experience as far as he was able; and to-day, having escaped from a welcoming committee and the mayor of the suburb that was to be his home for a year, he drove alone to the country club, which had already elected him to membership. Here he was delighted to find that the late hour and nipping air had divested the links of every player, and, attended by a lingering caddy who was unaware of his client’s identity, James Herbert set forth upon a round of the course with a leisureliness unmatched by the most elderly member of the club.

It was a leisureliness so extreme indeed that it annoyed a player who arrived in full equipment a quarter of an hour after young Mr. McArdle had made his first drive on that course. Her equipment was too complete to please her, as it happened, for he had taken the last caddy, which was another item in her list of indignations;—Lily had found time to acquire such a list since finishing her letter. Most of the items concerned that unfortunate Henry, mentioned as having been dismissed on the previous evening. Henry had called; had been turned away at the door with “Not at home”; and then, by an unworthy pretext—though his lamentable state of mind might have offered some excuse—he had secured her presence at the telephone, where merely what he said to her was furniture enough for any ordinary list of indignations. She decided to cool her temper by a solitary but vigorous round of the golf course.