O Genteel Lady!/Chapter 13

by Esther Louise Forbes

Chapter XIII

She Keeps a Good Man Dangling, But—

1

She looked about her little office, grown dusty in her absence, and settled herself before the waste-basket to sharpen pencils. Below her was School Street with its rattle of equipages and beyond was Tremont Street and the Common. The lacing trees were little by little releasing their drying leaves and under them and through the leaves criss-crossing on little walks, stepping positively to and fro—were the Bostonians!

No chair in the world as comfortable as the old red-leather one in which she had once sat for months drawing fashion-plates and writing genteel stories for female consumption. She was glad that they had come out under a nom-de-plume—even under many noms-de-plume. Of course they were a disgrace, but she felt no personal regret for them. They were written by some one else, who, although she looked and talked like her, had thought other thoughts and had really been quite another person. And that was a year ago.

'I think,' she said to herself, 'it is because I really care so much more for life than I did a year ago—that is why I cannot distort it now. You can't, if you like people well enough. You don't want to make them out different from what they really are. I don't want heroes and heroines any more—people are quite good enough.' She realized abruptly that if this were true she would probably never again write the ordinary salable story, for which she could be sure of a place in a dozen different magazines. What, then, would she write or would she never write again? Her 'Intimate Sketches' had, she knew, not only been acceptable to Mr. Fox's high standards of taste, but had been the outstanding feature of the 'Journal' for the last six months. Letters came every day addressed to 'Tempus Fugit.' Most of them began, 'Dear Sir,' but there were several 'Dear Mr. Fugit'; and one lady, after some literary discussion, had facetiously addressed the unknown critic as her 'Dear Tempus.' Why she had taken this name she could not say...something to do with Roger Cuncliffe. And as she looked out at the Common she saw the sky was beginning to color faintly in the west, far out beyond the Back Bay, the blue hills, and the reaches of the Charles River. She thought of the statues in Roger Cuncliffe's Italian garden, and how in such a light the nymph assumed the tints of life. Who now had the little Villa Poppea, now that Roger lay stretched under the earth he had adored. Had they put the satyr's head back again? Had they dismissed the servants and sold the pony and broken the delicate fine Venetian goblets?

She might study, become a scholar even as Sears Ripley would wish, and give up fiction. But she had not a scholarly nature and she knew it. Well, then—fiction. But not for the 'Godey's Book,' not for 'Hearth and Home.' She thought of Porlock Weir, and the old inn, and the proud Miss Champion. She thought of the wet moors and the sun coming out over the Severn. She thought of the four stories that had come suddenly and flamed across her sky. They had scorched her body with their intensity, and had left her when they were written weak and shaken but sweetly content. Writing them had been extraordinarily like loving Anthony Jones. It burned you and you suffered, but when it was over you knew happiness. And it was over—Anthony Jones was over. He was as much gone as though he had never been. That last terrific flare of passion that had driven her to pursue him to Winchester had burned out. She pressed her hands to her temples...'Suppose I should marry Mr. Ripley?' it was the hundredth time that day she had had that thought.

She never doubted her witch stories were good. Violently colored things—dark and angry in places, but with a fierce bright pagan joy in them, too. 'The Tale that is Told,' with its theme of demon-lover. The miserable death of the young witch on the dirty straw of the town jail...It was a terrible story; so were they all. In spite of their fantastic trappings they satisfied her as in some way being true to life as she knew and loved it. Their roots were firmly woven in the rich dark soil of humanity, even if their flowering was exotic. The 'Hearth and Home' stories had been rootless, their flowers had been of paper. But what publisher would care for these dark mysteries? Perhaps Mr. Fox would advise her. 'The Whisperer' was the least 'objectionable.' With its wistful child hero it was vaguely reminiscent of Hawthorne. This was, she knew, the weakest of the lot.

She told Mr. Fox an elaborate and clever story—how, while in London a young man who had read Captain Poggy's great historical study of Salem witchcraft, had sought her out and given her a story which he had based upon the book. She looked Mr. Fox straight in the eye and admitted that she had added paragraphs here and there—especially the one about the spring flowers, the little cold hepaticas with their furry leaves and chill blue faces. The dainty anemones—out too early in their muslin frocks. She had also copied it for him. Intelligent in the ways of authors, Mr. Fox all but winked at her. He took 'The Whisperer' home with him, and in the morning reported it was by far the best thing that she had ever done—even better than that splendid chapter in the Poggy history, or the really masterful 'Intimate Sketches.'

'Miss Bardeen,' he said, 'if you can do this, there is no reason why you cannot do anything—including making this story twice as good again. You couldn't have written this a year ago. Did you pray upon the grave of Emily Brontë, or did she send you a bit of the stuff that dreams and "Wuthering Heights" are made of? I don't know what it was made your spiritual wings to sprout—if you were a man I would say, "Cherchez la femme"—I can't pretend to guess why you so suddenly burgeoned into life—but if you know, go and thank—him.'

How readily this wise man put his finger on the truth! Lanice withdrew in confusion. He called her back.

'Now I am going to disappoint you. Although this tale, even as it now stands, is really superior to most of the stories in the "Journal," I cannot offer to undertake it. You put your poor little hero through such a parcel of tricks (actually I sometimes think women are positively cruel), and at the end, although he sees the nymphs in the birch trees on a spring night and has felt the satyr in the wind buffeting the house—in spite of all these wonders he has seen you leave him in such an abnormal state he is really little short of idiocy. In other words, your story is one of disintegration—a study of morbid mentality ending in breakdown.' Then he added kindly: 'But it is rather splendid. I'm glad that you wrote it. It is much better to start out with a runaway Pegasus and then train him down than to straddle a brewer's lumbering dray horse. Even if you can whip the thing up to a gallop, at is not its natural gait. It always has a heavy foot. Go to it, Miss Bardeen. Write like the Devil—even about the Devil if you want to. Go to it, and please always feel free to show me what you do.'

Although she appreciated his kindness and wisdom, she did not show him the other stories. So 'The Amber Witch' and 'The Salem Satyr' and 'The Tale that is Told,' soon joined by 'The Whisperer,' lay in the bottom of her dresser drawrer. By Christmas she had almost forgotten them.

2

There was always in her head the refrain, 'Suppose I married Mr. Ripley...'

Her 'Sketches,' enlarged from her journal and illustrated by her sketch-book, were published. In a minor way their success was brilliant. The men and women of whom she wrote were amazingly alive. The work was clear and a little hard, sometimes coldly epigrammatical. Ripley, in spite of the sphinx-like silence he had maintained towards all personal matters since that day, months ago in Winchester, expressed himself freely and often on the subject of her book. He saw Lanice almost daily, either in her office or more often in the Poggy drawing-room. It was by his advice that she had discarded the nom-de-plume and had written frankly over her own name. But a title-page is an unfeminine and doubtful place for a lady's name. Lanice first realized this in Smith Scollay's agitation.

'If you must write books,' he had said haughtily, 'you might have satisfied yourself with "Tempus Fugit." I cannot see how a ladylike girl like yourself can want the whole world gaping at her name. And then, Lanice, this is a heavy book for you to have written. Why were you not content with those pretty romances you used to write? I must confess that that seems to me much more in keeping with your character—and gender. Why, people are saying you were actually sarcastic about the Tennysons.'

'Oh, no, I loved the Tennysons—but he frightened me so much.'

Lydia, who had accompanied her handsome young uncle to the Poggy Mansion, crossed over and kissed Lanice's sleek hair. 'It's a lovely book. I'm proud to see your real name on it. Smith—the old bear—is jealous.'

'No, not jealous,' said Smith, flinging up his spirited head—'only I was thinking—suppose one married a lady authoress, what, then, is the etiquette? Does one's own name go on the title-page, predicated by a Mrs., or does she merely ignore one's existence and retain her own name for such purposes? I can't say which idea offends me most.' Lydia whispered in the authoress's ear 'Jealous!' But Lanice knew it was something more fundamental. Although Lydia was, as Mrs. Andrews expressed it, as much underfoot' about the Poggy house as ever, Smith Scollay's calls gradually dwindled away and at last ceased. He was, so Lydia told her friend, very restless and he had been drinking too heavily. He had been seen much in New York on certain fast and fashionable occasions.

3

Lanice, shamming a bad cold, stayed in bed, although the Captain had limped off to Sabbath service in King's Chapel, and Pauline, she supposed, had gone early by horse-car to Roxbury to worship there locally with her wonderful Miss Gatherall, freshly returned from her noble work among the Southern negroes. She had her coffee served grimly by Mrs. Andrews and, having submitted to a rather becoming red flannel about her neck, enjoyed the lazy luxury of a morning in bed. But when the sun was high enough to fall across the footboard and half of the ruffled muslin counterpane, Pauline, skimpily dressed in rusty black, made her appearance.

'Oh—why, Pauline, I thought you were in church.'

'No—I think I have a touch of your cold.' She looked suspiciously at the luxurious young lady in bed.

'It's hardly a very bad cold, Pauline,' Lanice assured her guiltily; 'I shall be up for dinner.'

'What are you going to do this afternoon?'

'Why, nothing I know of—write letters—perhaps.'

'And to-morrow—and the day after—Lanice, what are you going to do with your life?'

'Oh, I'm going to live it...' Lanice's voice rose either from irritation or from the pleasant prospect of living a life.

'You are now twenty-six. If you live to be seventy, it will be all over before long—then what?'

'Then I shall be dead. But I do hope there will be others who will enjoy the same things that I have enjoyed—like the red salamanders in the woods and mice whiskers—and people, and—'

'Men—'added Pauline rudely.

Lanice put her slender arms over her head and laced her long fingers back of her neck. She answered this gibe seriously.

'And men—I don't know why it is that I really love men—and trust them...They have never shown any real reason why I should. Some people might think that I had been treated badly by them—but the way I feel towards them is deeper than experience.'

'I know what it is,' blazed Pauline, 'at heart you are a slave-woman—you are the true product of generations of women whom men ruled with a whip! You bow before the tyrant, you kiss the hand that strikes you—yes, and the mouth that tells you you are only a live doll—a plaything for the lords of creation!' Pauline's color rose—either from her anger or at the erotic suggestion of kissing a tyrant's mouth. 'But, Miss, please remember that before the human male so came into ascendancy there was a time when women ruled the world. And when you get down among the spiders and the octopuses the male is hardly visible—and by the time you have reached—I think it is the...jellyfish, he is—extinct.'

'How pathetic!' said Lanice—who had not entered very deeply into the spirit of the game.

'But there are women—noble, high-minded women—who, I am sure, are descended, not from the slave-women of history, but from the great free female rulers of an earlier date....So in a few years you will be quite ready to let them put a weeping willow and an urn at your head and write your epitaph.'

'Yes, something like this—

'Here lies the body of Lanice Bardeen,
The recklessest girl that ever was seen.'

'Humph, they will hardly call you a girl at seventy-odd. But you have so much ability and yet you are ready...' Pauline's hands clenched...'to let it—rot. Rot, I say—rot.'

Lanice answered meekly. 'I know I have some ability. Perhaps if I were a man I could do something with it. There is something wrong with women and I can't put my finger on it—only feel it, in myself and in others. It isn't that we haven't the brains—or even the emotional force—but I'm afraid we are too sensible. Frankly, I'd much rather live a comfortable life now—while I am alive—than starve in a garret and be worshipped for centuries. Or suppose success came during my life. What pleasure to me that every one stop and gape when I come into a room or climb trees with opera glasses to spy upon me—the way they do at poor, dour Tennyson? We lack the divine childishness of men that drives them to sacrifice their own health as well as their families for such phantoms as art and fame. I think the great artists never outgrow adolescence—never grow up...see things disproportionately, my picture, my book, my immortal four lines.'

'You are a pagan...Lanice, shame upon you.'

'Perhaps I am,' she confessed, and thought swiftly and poignantly of Roger Cuncliffe—who was dead. 'Pauline,' she said, without bothering to make the connection between her last sentence and her next, 'I want to tell you something. When Anthony Jones left me, I found he had pulled down everything—my whole house of life. He had moved out all the furniture and left everything strewn about like children's blocks. Then Roger, without saying anything, built the whole thing up again, out of the same blocks. Now the house is really done. Some one else'—she thought of Ripley—'might add a few gables or a classic portico, but he couldn't tear it down nor build it up.'

'And yet you have no idea what you want to do with this elegant structure.'

'Live in it. Work in it. I really like to work, and I have not done badly. Mr. Fox now pays me almost as much as Miss Bigley.'

'Money! Bah, is money your standard? If it is, why did you not marry Smith Scollay? You'd have earned more money that way than you ever will with Messrs. Redcliffe & Fox. He seemed to drop you very abruptly, Lanice. I suppose you were vastly disappointed to see such a good catch get out of the bag.'

'No, we weren't suited. I opened the bag myself—and let him out.'

'Do you intend to marry?'

'No,' she gave the stereotyped answer convincingly.

'Then why,' blazed Pauline, in a voice that suggested that this was the climax of the whole conversation, 'do you wickedly persist in dragging Professor Ripley, that distinguished scholar, about after you? He is an older man, Lanice, of established reputation. It seems to me that you have kept him dangling long enough.'

'Dangling? He doesn't dangle. I did think for a while that he was interested in me—romantically. That was when I was in England. I...er...even gave him a chance to declare himself—out on Bodmin Moor. But he felt no necessity—and later at Winchester. But men are strange—they get excited over one and think they love—and then they cool off and don't. It's very wrong, I think, to take too seriously what they say sometimes, by mistake. And since we've been back in Boston I don't know what to think. He likes me, but...he won't marry me. I'm glad I have my work. He always seems to be waiting for something—I don't know what.'

'I imagine he is waiting for you to show sufficiently noble character to dismiss him. Oh, Lanice, why can't I inculcate in you some of those lofty aims, those noble principles which characterize, which should, must characterize our sex?'

Lanice had no answer, and Pauline continued: 'But I suppose you are unable to see the fine quality of a man like Professor Ripley. You like loose-living young rakes like that terrible Jones man or even Smith Scollay. Well, such men seem to drop you quickly enough.'

Lanice waved a graceful hand clad to the wrist in an uncompromising cambric robe de nuit. She said in proud pantomime, 'Let them come, let them go.' Then she turned her eyes truthfully towards her cousin.

'You know as well as I that Smith Scollay was nothing to me, and Captain Jones—well, he has gone—that is all; as if he were a bright flame that some one blew out. And marrying is a different thing.' She sat up in bed and clasped the tent of her knees and said rather wistfully, 'I have now come to a place many girls reach in life, I believe, and never in stories. Would I rather not marry—or marry some one whom I care ever so much about and who understands me, but doesn't simply carry me off my feet?'

'You are referring, I suppose, to Professor Ripley. But you just said that he did not want to marry you. Are you such a hussy as to use tricks to force him into an unwelcome union? Oh, no wonder men scorn our moral sense!' She added as a triumphal afterthought: 'And then, you told me that you once tried to make him declare himself out on some moor last summer. Are you now more skilful, or is he more gullible? You simply have a low feminine desire to force him to propose so that you may'—Pauline waved her rusty arm in imitation of Lanice's graceful genture—'turn him down, and say with a shrug you can get a better one.'

'No,' said Lanice with a sudden angry defiance, 'there is no better...' She stopped, surprised that she had said so much. 'I think he is the best man in the world. At first I only saw him as a—a background for Anthony. And then in England, and since then in Boston, I've come to like him more and more. Now...I like him the best of any man I've ever known...I like him so much that I really, in a way, love him.'

'Indeed!'

'There are so many different ways of falling in love—'

'As many ways as there are men?' inquired Pauline with exaggerated courtesy.

Unoffended, Lanice continued: 'You fall in love one way and you think that is all there is to it. And then—some other person...and a different way...not the same, not the same ever again. Pauline, tell me. I've always wanted to ask, was Captain Jones really as handsome and fascinating as I thought he was?'

'The man was a viper. Unfit to undo the latchet of the shoe of a good woman—like Miss Gatherall or Mrs. Mosely. It was an insane infatuation.'

'But he must have been attractive. Even men like Mr. Ripley and Mr. Fox said he was...but I can't remember any more...he's gone from me, Pauline. I can't even see his face clearly and I've forgotten his voice.'

'One thing I wish you would tell me. Did you or did you not see this Jones man when you went to England?'

Lanice gazed at her cousin with startled, innocent eyes.

'Why, Pauline, of course not. A lady travelling alone cannot be too careful.'

4

'But do let me tell the Captain that you are here, Mr. Ripley. He will be vastly disappointed to wake up and find that I have kept you to myself for over an hour.'

'I would not interfere with the gentleman's Sunday nap, not for three glasses of his famous Madeira. But how stupid of me! Of course, you are going somewhere and I am keeping you here talking.'

'Oh, I love to talk, and really there is nowhere to go. It doesn't pay not to go to church in the morning, one feels so restless all day.'

'Are you restless?' He asked the question as if it had great meaning for him, and looked at her with his wise little eyes. She had a sudden premonition that if she said she was, the conversation would leave the heights of Transcendentalism, which he had endeavored to elucidate for her, and become purely personal; if she said she was not, they could go on with the interesting philosophical discussion.

'Yes...sometimes, dreadfully restless.' She felt a delicate, imperceptible barrier snap between them. He felt it, too, for he moved a little nearer. Her sensitive nostrils caught the faint and delightful aroma of his riding-clothes, for he had come in from Concord on Minerva, his sturdy bay mare. It brought back wave after wave of tender childhood memories. How lovely they had been, Mamma's sleek horses standing in the Amherst stable, their polished haunches towards you, always peeking back so prettily! Ginger and Ruby, the pair; and Alfred, who grew so fat and lazy; Silk and Satin, how black and dangerous they had been, and how big! She could not have been more than five or six when Mamma had bought them in New York and soon afterwards sold them. And once she had had a white donkey called Moses, and once a spotted Western pony named Dizzy. He had broken his leg, poor soul...oh, a hundred years ago. They were gone, all these lovely creatures.

'It is a good thing for one occasionally to feel restless. It makes you take stock of yourself and the manner of life that you are leading.'

'Oh, Cousin Poggy always keeps track of that for me. Only to-day she asked me what I intended to do with my life.'

'And what did you tell her?' His voice was eager, and again he bent towards her so that again she thought of all the fine horses she had known, and of Moses, the donkey.

'I told her that I intended to—live it.' She looked him squarely in the eye as if challenging him to keep her from this secret expectation of joy.

'Live it?'

'Yes. I want to travel some more and write a great deal; what, I hardly know as yet, but something that will include all of life as I have seen it. I mean all. Show how varied and exciting and boring and vulgar and beautiful and funny and serious it is...'

'You aim high; Lanice...you once let me call you that...tell me this, will you be satisfied to go on, always looking back towards a love—I suppose you'd call it—that's gone, never expecting anything from the future?'

She cast down her eyes, partly because she was afraid that he might read there the fact that what he supposed she called love was indeed gone. It hurt her because the pain of the memory was now almost a pleasure. She sat calm and collected close beside Sears Ripley and could hardly remember how such proximity to Mr. Jones had made her heart race within her breast.

'Lanice...' and yet her feeling for him was deeper, more lasting than it had ever been for the Englishman.

'I said in Winchester, you remember, I said that I would wait, and I have, six months, eight months.'

'Wasn't Winchester a lovely town? And I'm so glad to have actually seen the Itchen.'

He looked dogged and slightly hurt, 'As a matter of fact, I'm not making conversation—about Winchester.'

'What are you doing?'

'Well, I'm trying to propose.'

They both laughed, and Lanice drew away and considered him. Rather like a bear with his size and rough hair and beard and sagacious triangular eyes. Only his heightened color showed his inner excitement.

'If I were proposing,' she said, 'do you know how I'd do it?'

'Tell me...No, tell me louder. I didn't hear.'

'I said I'd have to show you,' she whispered.

She glanced about and listened a minute with upraised hand. 'Sssh,' she said. Gracefully and much to the man's amazement she cast herself on her knees before him, her skirts collapsing in circles about her. Out of the black lace froth, the tight bodice, the sleek head, the arms emerged like stamens from a flower. He saw her face color divinely and grow lovely. Her throat and breast swelled. Her mouth, which had not uttered a word, mocked him and the black eyes promised incredible things. He was wild with joy and put out his arms to pick this exotic black flower at his feet, then he realized that she had not once glanced at him during the enactment of her pantomime. Her beautiful, passionate eyes had been fixed steadily on some point behind him, some image or some memory. He drew back from her and her cruelty.

'You do wrong to—torture me,' he said slowly. 'Do not show me—what you can be to—other men, if you cannot be so to me. Get up, Lanice. Some one may come in.'

Shamefacedly she got to her feet and walked over to the table in the window where the Chinese objects of ivory, jade, amethyst, and amber were spread on a heavy piece of gold embroidery. The late afternoon light shone through them and they cast pools of colored shadow.

'I beg your pardon,' she said, and sleeked her hair with a trembling hand.

'My dear,' he said, coming close to her, 'why are you crying?'

'I don't know, but I'll never get what I really want from life, never.'

'Do you know what you want?'

'No.'

'Then how do you know you'll never get it?'

'Oh, I have always known that, really.'

'Lanice, will you let me give you—all I can, and see if that may not be enough?'

She felt his thick, strong arms around her and turned towards him docilely.

'Yes.'

'You know I love you very much...too much. I'm afraid when you realize how infatuated I am you will feel contempt for me.'

'Oh, no. I want you to love me—too much. It is such a soft, comfortable thing to sink back into so much love.'

Body and soul he engulfed her. She felt secure and contented.

'I have always liked the smell of horses,' she said, looking up at him.

'Oh, I forgot I had these dirty old things on; but, Lanice, what is it I have always liked so much? It smells so clean and yet so subtly wicked!'

'It comes in silk envelopes and I got them in Paris.'

5

On her visits to the Alcotts in Concord, Lanice had often driven or strolled past the four-square yellow house that stood aloof under its elms, bearing upon its door a silver oblong engraved 'Sears Ripley.' She had remembered it as a pleasant place, gardens, paths, long windows with Venetian blinds, wistarias, and within a flutter of ruffled curtains. She had even noticed that there were children, often playing about under the arching elms with a stuffy black pony in a blue halter. This, then, was the place where she would live her life. And when she died the cemetery lay but half a block away. One more weeping willow, one more urn. She would eventually lie between Sears and his Prunella. No, Sears would lie in the middle with a wife on either side. There was no doubt in the world but here she would live, here die, and here her body return to earth. It was fortunate that Louisa and May Alcott lived so near. They would give her some companionship with her own sex, and now that she was definitely contracted to matrimony, she felt a sudden homesickness for all that she was leaving. Friendships never meant the same to married women, so she had noticed. She loved Sears, but she would gladly have put off the marriage for a year.

Early in the month of July in the late afternoon she drove to Concord with what Miss Bigley called 'her intended.' Sears left her sitting in the buggy as he ran across the street to bring back Mrs. Alcott as chaperon. It was with her she would spend the night. 'Marmee' the girls called this stoutish, kindly, intelligent matron. Louisa accompanied her, quite overcome with the romantic aspects of the occasion. She kissed her friend profusely and, awkwardly offering her hand to her old neighbor, began to tell him in the torrential manner of the shy that if ever she could make up a heroine worthy of him she would have her marry him on the last page.

'I can see the scene,' she continued excitedly, 'under a green umbrella—I think I may have him a German, they are so romantic, and then no one would know it was really you! Marmee...let's you and I go into the garden and play with Mary and Ridgewood.'

'We'll all go,' said Sears.

It touched him to see how natural was the meeting and how good the esprit de corps established between his fiancée and the children of Prunella, yet he realized with half a sigh that this new wife had never had any deep, emotional longing for children; if she had she could not have played with them so naturally. There was in her none of the tight embarrassment that women who love children must so often manifest before they themselves have borne them.

'I love children.' Lanice confided to him; and was surprised when he answered rather wearily,

'Yes—and kittens, too.'

6

They went into the house. It was exquisitely chill after the sun beating down in the garden. The rugs had been rolled up for the summer, and straw matting that smelled sweetly and slightly sickishly had been laid down. There were cool plants, slippery black horsehair, quaint glazed chintzes. The stairway, wide and carved, led off into more cool, quiet rooms where everything was in order. On each washstand the towels hung unused, seemingly unusable. The pattern on the honest yellow soap in the heavy white dishes had never been blurred by water. The curtains were immaculate. The windows shone.

'You must have told your housekeeper I was coming,' she said.

Professor Ripley evidently was so accustomed to this perfection he did not at first understand her remark.

'Oh, no,' he said in astonishment, 'Mrs. Rice always has it in order.'

Suddenly Lanice felt very homesick. To have seen a necktie on the floor or a picture awry might have made her love the house. She looked at Sears beseechingly.

He laughed and shook his head. 'No, I do not dare to kiss you. If I did I couldn't stop, and I hear "Marmee's" skirts on the stair.'

'But the house is so in order; I would always feel like a guest.'

Ripley went to his bureau, pulled out a drawer, and dumped its contents on the floor, stocks, ties, socks, a tobacco pouch, handkerchiefs, and, far back and forgotten, but tactlessly landing on the top of the heap, a faded, broken fan.

'I am, after all, only second choice,' thought Lanice.

Sears Ripley thought of the yellow room at the end of the hall where many a night his inexplicable friend, Anthony Jones, had slept. He suffered dully, and decided not to show this room to Lanice until a later date.

They went downstairs again, and Louisa and Mrs. Alcott tactfully withdrew to the piazza where they busied themselves darning stockings. It grew cool through the garden and Mary and Ridgewood were led off to the kitchen for bread and milk. Lanice and Sears sat in the library on either end of a sofa, facing each other. He wished to make lists. He felt he had to confide in her the exact number of salt cellars that he possessed and the vintages of his wine. He wished one of the upstairs rooms done over entirely in Lanice's own taste.

'Some Chinese lacquer,' he suggested, 'ivory carvings, silks. Captain Poggy has told me that he intends to give you his collection of carved animals that he keeps on the living-room table. His daughter cares nothing for them and I really believe he wants to find a kind and loving home for them.'

'Oh, I will love them, indeed, and then he will certainly come out to see us. There are some jade fishes that he never is tired of looking at and touching, but really I couldn't take them from him.'

'I will always think of them on that gold embroidery with the light shining through them, and you in black lace standing before them and crying a little and looking so—alone and powerless.'

'I cried because you were rude to me. Why did you tell me so peremptorily to "get up, some one may come in"?'

'I was afraid to let you stir me so deeply, and I felt that your demonstration—was not for me. The thought hurt me.'

'No. It was just a demonstration.'

'Not in honor of any one in particular?'

'No, but in honor of life in general. But did you know that you were going to ask me to marry you that afternoon?'

'Just as soon as I came into the house and you told me that the Captain was asleep. The instant I saw you I knew.'

'You're a funny, spiritual man. You look wise, but not intuitive, and you really are both. If you had asked me only a few months earlier I would not have known what to have said.'

'You would have known if I had asked you out on Bodmin,' he reminded her grimly.

'But how did you know that I was rather...expecting something like that, and planning to say "no"? I really thought it all out before I went down to Liskeard. Then you wouldn't and you wouldn't. I was quite provoked.'

He laughed shortly. 'I saw I had to wait. That the time hadn't come—for me. Well, I waited. Then that afternoon I knew immediately, and your demonstration...after that I couldn't have stopped even if it had been the wrong time. I'm afraid I am not...not a platonic man by nature. I can't manage to kiss lightly and forget it. You had the power, almost from the beginning, to hurt me so much. I could never let my shoulder touch you or caress you in any number of careless ways men caress women.'

Eager as most of her sex to hear that love on his part had been from first sight, she gave him the opportunity to confess it.

'No,' he said slowly, 'not at first, but of course that meeting with Jones was momentous. I can see you now, looking up from your work. Your eyes passed over me, just a glancing blow, and then I saw your face become transfixed as you met his gaze, and I knew you were going to love him and going to suffer, and I thought of you a great deal. And later, about the time you went daily to his house on West Cedar Street, months later, I knew I loved you, but I felt too old and rather weary. But what good to talk about Jones? You were free, white, and twenty-one. I couldn't intrude. But I suffered, walking every morning past that small house. Oh, yes, I stopped in casually enough, three times. And that last time you were so flushed and lovely, and Jones...well, that day I called on you in the afternoon. I wanted to say I loved you. I wanted to forbid you ever to see that man again, wanted to carry you away with me in a hired hack. But I couldn't say and do these manly things. I could only talk about the Mormons and moral codes throughout the world.' He laughed ruefully, and Lanice saw his large hands were gripped into the sofa back until the knuckles whitened.

'Sears,' she said, and leaned towards him, 'it is so inappropriate that you should have suffered because of me. I wasn't worth it. I'm not now. Tell me'—and she looked away—'does it hurt you now so much—the memory of Anthony Jones?'

'If you had never met him, never loved him, you would be a different person to-day—not you—not the girl I love—some one else. It was seeing you with him that first interested me in you. I couldn't quite understand, and was, perhaps still am, puzzled. Now I can no more wish you different in that respect than I could wish your eyes a different color. It is you.' He leaned towards her rather heavily and gripped her wrists. She realized that if she returned his caress the conversation would be ended. With a pretence of arranging her curls she freed her hand.

'Once I thought, Sears, you believed me to be only a woman whom Anthony had tired of, discarded.'

'No,' he said with a sweet sadness, 'you are only you, and I love you.'

They kissed thoughtfully and sat in silence. The approaching night was gathering through the hollow room. When next they turned back to each other, he saw only a pale oval set with shallow features, and she a dark beard, rough dark hair, and the bulk of his shoulders. Lanice clung to him.

'Sears,' she said, 'I want to tell you about Anthony,' and pressed her mushroom-smooth cheek to his bearded lips. 'Sears...I've never told any one.'

A silence fell and through it the clocks struck, one after the other, each politely waiting until its brother was done. She thought to herself 'How well, sometime, I will know those clocks, lie awake and listen to them, wind them up, perhaps dust them.' Below her resting head she heard the strong heart-beat of her lover.

'If you must,' he said, 'but I'd rather you didn't.'

She rose to her feet, a wan, wistful lady. In the twilight of the room she was a lifeless ghost of some one else.

'I am going now; I am sure the Alcotts want to go to bed.'

'No, wait. Tell me, Lanice...'

'Not if you do not wish to know.'