The Smart Set/Volume 27/Issue 3/The Shuttlecock

by Neith Boyce

 

THE SHUTTLECOCK

By NEITH BOYCE

MRS. MACKAYE was having a supper after the play. About thirty people had been asked to meet the two stars of the evening. The affair had been designed as a triumphal feast, but since the play had failed, it rather suggested the funeral baked meats, at least to Mrs. Mackaye's frivolous spirit, and she was profoundly bored at having to go through with it. “As if it wasn't enough to sit through your b-beastly play,” she said to Horace Maybrook, “without bringing the atmosphere b-back with us.”

Strictly, it was not Horace Maybrook's play. He had but translated it. It was one of a series given under the patronage of lovers of the drama, and for the purpose of elevating the metropolitan stage. But Maybrook gloomily assumed responsibility for it.

“The atmosphere's all right, and the play, too,” he observed. “The trouble was with the audience. Hang America, anyhow!... Don't put me next to Miss Morrison at supper.”

“Catch me! I shall hide you somewhere. She looks as bored as I feel. This is going to be a failure too.”

“Oh, no.that would be too dreadful,” growled Mr. Maybrook; but she had already assumed an expression of vivacious gaiety and flitted off, as more guests were arriving.

Many people, many lights and flowers, a hum of cheerful talk from a number of little tables, the air of a definitely festive occasion—these things made up Mrs. Mackaye's successes, and she worked hard for them. She hated pauses, gaps and bored-looking people. Her whole light little person was forever poised and on the alert to bridge over pauses, to fill up gaps, to rout anyone who looked anything but festive out of the place where he happened to be and to propel him somewhere else. While she was talking to you, or at you, her large, near-sighted eyes were vigilantly sweeping the field. Her abhorrence of empty space (her house was extraordinarily full of bric-à-brac) extended even to vacuity of countenance, and she was disposed to take anything else than the festive glow as a real personal affront.

The dear lady thus had her social work cut out for her, since fate had played her the trick of throwing her back for her material largely upon “clever” people. She had an undoubtedly clever and eccentric husband; she was not rich enough to live with people who could afford to be dull, as she would have liked to do. Therefore her house was filled with people who were “doing things” and who were “individual.” To make these more or less angular and rigid beings unbend, enjoy themselves and amuse one another was the ungrateful task to which Mrs. Mackaye devoted herself.

As a rule, she distributed her lions, arranging them with economy as the meat in the sandwich. Tonight she had Belton, an actor who had written literary and unsuccessful plays, at her own table, together with some people who were interested from afar in the stage literature. But with uncommon extravagance she had lavished on one another Alicia, the beauty, Miss Morrison, the actress and main luminary of the evening, Marvin, a critic with a name, and George Gay, who was engaged to Alicia, and whose painting would perhaps have been thought amateurish if he had not happened to be rich and with social position.

In a whisper to Marvin she had confided the reason of this arrangement.

“Miss Morrison is tired and a shade more d-difficile than usual—and you're the only person I'm sure of for getting on with her, so do, please. Alicia is very anxious to talk to her, but she's so shy, you know, poor dear—you'll have to help her out. As for George Gay—oh, I've no p-patience with him! I know he's been drinking—now, hasn't he? It's d-disgraceful—he has no business to come to my house. And poor Alicia! I simply don't care to put him anywhere else—that's the truth; and besides, if he isn't where he can talk to Miss Morrison he'll just go away, and that will hurt Alicia. I'm asking a good deal of you.”

Marvin smiled gently on her agitation.

“I'll take care of them,” he assured her. “Gay isn't bad—it's all right. Don't have us on your mind.”

“You're such a d-dear,” she sighed, and flitted on among the bedecked tables where people were settling themselves.

With Marvin's ease and real interest in the three difficult people their hour went off very well. They were perhaps not as obviously gay as Mrs. Mackaye, glancing at them now and then, could have wished, but they were obviously interested in one another and in their talk.

Miss Morrison did show fatigue—a certain weariness of spirit as well as of body. But she showed it as little as she could help, and in a way not unattractive. The quiet of her eyes and mouth—half melancholy, half mere physical lassitude—was a real note of her beauty.

She could not be less than thirty. Her face was definitely experienced, sensitive, positive. Her fair, rather freckled skin showed some fine lines. A plain white dress left her dark reddish hair and red-brown eyes to make their own effect of color. She was, on the father's side, of Jewish race, and showed it mainly in a look of intense vigor and vitality. The wonderful thickness of her hair, the strong line of her arched brows, the fulness of her wide-set eyes and their heavy lids—all spoke of a foreign strain in her, something stronger and warmer than her English blood. A keener intelligence, too, was behind her quiet, rather hesitating manner and low voice. She made no social effort. She was obviously bored by the occasion, by having to meet a number of chatting people, and to pretend to eat unsubstantial food. She was there for business reasons; the same frank egotism inspired her interest in Marvin and in his impressions of the play. He condemned it and she agreed with him, and agreed, too, with his estimate of her own performance, which was not flattering.

“I knew I wasn't making much of it,” she admitted; “not even as much as I could see in the part myself. It was a failure—and I'm awfully sorry, for Kleber was there—came just to see me.”

“Well, he'll have to come again,” said Marvin. “Some of your friends will manage that. I can't, of course—I'm persona non grata to all of his ilk—but somebody must. The next play gives you a better chance.”

“Oh, yes, the Russian play. It has more feeling, more reality. I like it.”

“Then you're sure to do it beautifully,” said Gay. “You can't help your moods, in spite of all that theory about technique carrying you through an unsympathetic role.”

Miss Morrison regarded him seriously. “I never said I shouldn't do a character that interested me better than one that didn't. But I can't afford to let moods make my line for me. All I said was that I ought to be able to do any character that had anything in it—provided, of course, that it hadn't too much.” And she smiled, with the first gleam of lightness, and looking at Alicia, added, “I suppose it rather dreadful tonight, wasn't it?”

“Oh, it was very interesting—everything I've seen you in has been, to me,” Alicia said quickly, with the almost timid air that so oddly accompanied her stateliness. “But I wanted to ask you, did you feel that the Maeterlinck play had any reality in it, or any real feeling? You played it as if you felt it—and yet it seems such a strange, far-away thing—”

Her gray eyes looked out under knitted dark brows with all the appeal of her effort after the intellectual.

“Oh, I think it is full of feeling! Its reality is just the reality of—well, primitive emotions. What could be more real than love and jealousy and mis-understanding and death? Of course, the expression is sometimes symbolic—it's a kind of picture writing—but I think the meaning is perfectly clear, don't you?”

Alicia's intensity of attention became rather strained; she, as well as Miss Morrison, looked across the table, with a deferential clearing of the field for the heavy masculine batteries. George Gay declined the action, however, simply saying, with a smile:

“It was clear and it was exquisite. I wish I could get that quality into my picture of you. Or, rather—no—I like it best as it is. By the way, you won't forget you promised me a sitting tomorrow?”

“Oh, tomorrow—I'm afraid I have some engagement in the morning. Shall I telephone you about it?”

“But please try to come. I'm so awfully anxious to get on with it, and who knows how soon you may be going away?”

Gay was rather flushed and his eyes were hazily bright. The emotional appeal in his voice, his manner, his look at Miss Morrison—and he scarcely looked at anyone else—was so plain that it fairly embarrassed matters. Miss Morrison, with a cold look at him, said, “Very well, I'll try to come,” and turned to Marvin with a question about the Russian author of the play in which she was next to appear. Alicia's color rose faintly. She looked away, the desire for flight showing in her eyes. Except for these gray, black-lashed eyes, her face, in fact, was not expressive. Its handsome lines were conventional, its whole effect virginal and slightly, very slightly, withered. For Alicia, without having tasted life, was a year or two older than Miss Morrison.

II

Alicia was staying with Mrs. Mackaye. She was fond of descending from her Western home upon New York; and Mrs. Mackaye was very fond of her. The two met in Alicia's room at the end of the evening, with the usual dressing gown preparation for talking things over, but not in the dressing gown mood. Stella Mackaye was relaxed enough and critical enough, but preoccupation with something she couldn't be the first to speak of interfered with her usual detailed retrospect. She summed it all up in her own way:

“Well, it was deadly, wasn't it?”

“Deadly? What was?” deprecated Alicia, who in her Chinese blue robe, in the soft light of the fire, looked touchingly lovely and gentle.

Neither woman had taken down her hair—in fact, neither had enough to take down, except in strict retirement. Their intimacy had these useful reserves, which extended also to their speech. There, too, the general decorative effect was easily observed. Mrs, Mackaye, in a loose, white, frilly gown, drooped against a pile of cushions, and her large blue eyes were childlike in their weariness and pathos.

“I was so bored,” she wailed, “and so was everyone else. They went home so early. So were you—confess it; only you couldn't go home, poor dear.”

“I wasn't for a minute. You know how much I was interested in Miss Morrison. And she ts interesting—if she'd only talk more. She must be tremendously clever.”

“Did you think so? Well, she is, I've heard people say. Stuart Marvin, for example, says she's the best-read woman he knows. I don't dare talk to her myself—I've a feeling she thinks I'm an idiot. She looks at me when I'm talking with a kind of strained air of attention—like p-polite foreigners when you're trying to speak their language. And then she hasn't any small-talk—she's always serious, and I must say I think she's an awful egotist. She isn't interested in anything but herself, or her p-profession, apparently—unless it's books. Now, what did she talk about tonight?”

“Well, it was plays, mainly, I think. The one tonight, and Maeterlinck, and a play Mr. Belton had written, and one Mr. Marvin had written—”

“Well, it couldn't have b-been very amusing for you.”

“But it was. You don't know what a pleasure it is to me to hear clever people talk—people who are doing something, you know. I always feel when I come to New York, and especially at your house, that I'm really in things. I wish I had such people at home. Of course, there are some—only I don't seem to get hold of them. I suppose there's no reason why they should be interested in me.”

“Isn't there? Well, so much the worse for them. You're worth the whole lot of them. It isn't only your beauty and sweetness, but you're really human. I'm so tired of people who have no insides except b-brains—and not enough of those to make up, to my m-mind. There wasn't a single person here tonight, except, perhaps, Stuart Marvin, that I care a rap about, or that cares anything about me—” Suddenly her eyes filled with tears and she gave a hysterical gasp. “I'm so t-tired,” she said.

“You must go to bed, dear,” Alicia murmured in alarm, venturing on a vague caress. Stella caught at the gentle hand and drew it under her cheek.

“Oh, I'm not tired that way—at least, not so very. But I'm so, so weary of everything and everybody. And I'm so lonely.... I hope when you're m-married, Alicia, you won't be in love with your husband.”

“But of course I shall be,” said Alicia, half laughing and blushing vividly. “Why else should I want to marry?”

“Oh, it makes everything else seem so flat and stale—I mean when things go wrong between you. When they go right—while they do—of course you're in heaven. But if you can't stay there, I think it's b-best not to begin.”

Stella sat up and dried her eyes, keeping, however, in the strength of her hunger for the touch of love, a resolute hold of the friendly hand.

“How did George like it?” she asked abruptly.

It was a name just now difficult to mention between them, and yet not to be avoided. Alicia responded with an effort at ease and lightness:

“Oh, he liked it. He likes anything where Miss Morrison is just now, I think. He's like that, you know, when he's in love.”

“Oh—in love! Isn't that a little strong?”

“No, it is that. He gets absorbed, wrapped up in a person. It was always happening, all the years I knew him before we were engaged. But this is the first time it's happened since.”

“Well, if he's always doing it you won't worry. It c-can't be serious.”

“I'm not sure. It seems terribly serious, at the time. He never had it for me, you know.”

“So much the better. You don't want the easy sort of thing. But I remember when you were first engaged. I hadn't any d-doubt then of his feeling about you. I don't doubt it now, either, only he is so—”

Alicia moved uneasily. “Oh, he cares for me. I do think he cares as much as he ever has. But I know what you mean about him. He is—susceptible.”

“Yes, that, and—well, v-volatile. That's what I used to call him—” Stella made a light upward gesture. “Up in the air, you know. One doesn't know exactly where he is—and he doesn't know, either, part of the time. But it's all right—he can't help landing all right, with you, Alicia, dear.”

“Oh, I have always, always cared so much more,” said the girl. “Ever since we were children together, I think, really. And I'm willing it should be so. I think he cares for me as much as he ever has for anyone. Perhaps he will never care as I do. But I want to give—”

Alicia stopped, her soft gaze fixed on the fire, as though she had forgotten her companion, as though she had been thinking aloud. Stella gazed at her with hushed wonder. Never before had Alicia spoken out. And the emotion of the evening, which had carried her out of her usual defenses, glowed now with such a still intensity in her eyes that Stella dropped her own, as though she had surprised something too intimate to be looked upon.

They were very quiet after this, and in a few minutes Stella got up and went to her own room. They kissed one another good night with real tenderness and each later wept in the darkness on her lonely pillow—Stella longing after the man she could neither live with nor without; Alicia worn out by the nervous strain of the day, and torn by jealousy, the reaction from her recent exaltation.

III

As for George Gay, the morning on which he was expecting Isabel Morrison at his studio, and on which, after waiting nearly an hour beyond the time set, he finally received her there, might have contained for him no other person in the world. He concentrated on her from the moment she entered an absolute interest and regard which scarcely allowed his eyes to leave her face for a moment. She came alone, in the black walking dress and plumed hat which appeared roughly on the ready canvas, and with a word of explanation went to her seat in the old Italian chair on the dais.

“I'm late, but a reporter came and I had to see him.”

“You didn't mind making me wait,” said George moodily, with no move to take up his palette.

“Why, that was business—that was my bread and butter.” Miss Morrison regarded him with calm astonishment. “I'm sorry you waited, but, after all, you know—”

“I've nothing else to do? That shows how seriously you take me—and my work,”

“Aren't you just a little bit unreasonable? I take your work as seriously as possible, else I shouldn't have come at all this morning, for I'm very busy. I want it to be a success.”

“Yes, I see you do. But if there's to be any chance of a success with it, you must be interested. You must be willing to make some sacrifices to help me. You must—yes, you must make me a little happier. Do you suppose I can work with my nerves upset as they are now?”

“Oh, I don't believe in that at all—not one bit,” said Miss Morrison emphatically. “That shows how serious you are. If you cared much about your work you wouldn't bother about nerves. Here am I—there's your picture. Don't waste any more time, I beg of you.”

“Yes, there you are,” murmured George.

He looked from her to the canvas, and picked up his palette and brushes as an excuse for looking longer. She sat in a quiet, easy pose, her bare hands lying in her lap, her head resting against the topaz leather of the chair back and framed by the worn brown and gilt of the old wood. Seeing him apparently ready to begin work, she turned her head slightly and looked past him, as the pose required.

Seen thus she was incentive enough to work, or, for that matter, excuse enough for neglecting the obvious task. Her beauty was perhaps more open to doubt in this trial of the cold morning light, though her best points—her hair and eyes, and the grace and proportion of her body—came out strongly. But it was not a question of color or form that would most have interested even the painter. She was a distinct and picturesque type; she was a person, a character. And in this view the fact that her delicate skin was too pale, its freshness gone, the lines in her face too visible now, her whole definite look of experience, of having been used, épuisée, even, at times, to the last drop of her strength—all this made just part of her fascination, personal as well as pictorial. She was trained, she was sure, as her whole manner, speech and action showed. She was a person who had in away arrived. She might never arrive in the sense of popular success, and, indeed, it was the opinion of most people who knew her that she never would. But she had, at any rate, envisaged her world rather completely.

It was, perhaps, this cool limitation of her vision to what was perfectly clear and defined that had most helped to fix her attraction for George. George had lived in a world of sensation as warm as it was vague—in a world of which the realities were shifting and the willful illusion the only constant thing Her first charm for him had been physical—the attraction here, too, of a sure grace that had been proved and knew itself. She was without coquetry, to him, at least, so far. But her feminine value, developed and formed partly by her profession, partly by a life of which George knew few details, made itself instantly felt. She was first of all a charming woman. She had the appeal, too, of having been, so far, wasted. She had been married, George knew, and divorced, apparently in the casual stage fashion. But there was nothing in the least casual about her. She had been beaten and shaped by hard experience—the bitter realities of poverty, failure, unhappiness, of which George knew nothing for himself. Compared with her, he was still in the soft clay stage, with perhaps not even enough consistence for the potter's hand.

Yet, if he could not keep the mold, he could be definite enough at times in desire and in expression. Isabel Morrison knew perfectly well, as she could not help knowing, her effect on him; but his emotion for her was no more obvious than her refusal to take it in the least seriously. She was not exactly a humorous person. She treated him, not lightly, but rather coldly, standing aloof from his increasing interest and ignoring his attempts at a deeper intimacy.

Isabel was not an easy person to know, nor to get on with, either in friendly or business relations; and the difficulties made for her by this temperament were what had mainly, so far, stood in the way of her practical success.

She sat now quite silent, evidently absorbed in her own affairs. Her expression of meditative, rather melancholy, detachment was exactly what the painter had wanted to give his portrait; yet he was not getting on with it, further than mixing some colors on his palette for which he had no use.

“Will you have a cigarette?” he asked suddenly.

He brought her one, lit one himself, and sat down on the edge of the dais.

“Do you mind if I talk to you a few minutes?” he inquired nervously.

“I don't mind—except that we haven't much time, and I can't come again this week. We're rehearsing every morning from now on.”

“Well, I can't help it. I must talk to you. You must see that I'm infernally miserable.”

“Oh, don't make love to me!” said Isabel gravely. “You'd much better to paint.”

“I'm not making love to you. I don't know what the devil you're doing to me, though.”

“Oh, if you're going to make me responsible—”

She looked unmistakably irritated and made as if to rise. George seized her hand, which she promptly withdrew, and turned up to her a pale, agitated, pleading face.

“Why is it you act as if you dislike me now?” he demanded. “You liked me at first; you were interested in me, a little, at least. And now, when I'm so deeply interested in you—”

“I don't want you to be deeply interested in me—there's no use in it,” said Isabel. “You've made trouble already; you've made that nice girl, Miss Talbot, unhappy. I don't want that sort of thing.”

“You aren't so careful about other men,” said George angrily. “You don't object to their interest—”

“Whom do you mean? The things you say—” Isabel murmured, and this time she definitely got up, with a look that seemed to put him a hundred miles away.

“Don't be angry! I beg your pardon,” he cried precipitately. “But whenever I go to see you it seems to me I find Marvin or Mackaye there—until he went away. Did you send him?”

“How silly of you! Men like those two can take care of themselves. They do the right thing. Do you think they behave as you do?”

“And you think I can't take care of myself? I do the wrong thing? Well, perhaps I do. But you don't understand me. I don't see why you can't care for me a little. I don't see what harm it would do.... Now I've driven you away! Do forgive me. I suffer more than you do by it. I'm not going to see you again for some time. Do you hate me?”

Isabel laughed and put out her hand to him. “You need a guardian,” she said. “You'd better hurry up and marry that handsome Miss Talbot—she'll look after you. What a lot of trouble people like you make in the world! Interesting, though—it wouldn't be so complete a world without you.”

And she left him alone in the bare room, the few furnishings of which—heavy old Italian pieces and dim ecclesiastical embroideries—showed his taste, as the canvases standing against the walls or stacked in corners proved his industry. And more, these last represented a desire which, in presence of the other things—his familiarity with the best of art in its kind—proved equally a real vitality, a real force of individuality in him, however uncertain its expression. It was this, combined with a sensuously sensitive, though not passionate temperament, that made him, as Isabel said, “interesting.”

IV

The thing that made Gay problematical and rather dangerous—the force and uncertainty of his impulses—was a good deal of a torment to himself. He had been in the past so constantly tossed about and unsure that he rather welcomed any circumstance that helped to keep him stable, even when it came as a check to his temporary desire. For he distrusted the desire—even this present one, the strongest, it seemed to him, of his life. Thus his first feeling, when Isabel had left him, was curiously like relief. He was glad to be left, glad not to have committed himself absolutely; and in this mood he was even happy in going to lunch with Alicia. e wished to be faithful to her if he could. He would have liked to be anchored to her by a cable warranted to withstand all strain. But, as it was, he couldn't feel in the least anchored. All he seemed to be able to calculate upon was, in any impulse that carried him away from Alicia, the rebound that took him back to her.

The luncheon hour was one o'clock, but Alicia had asked him to come as early as he could. He wished, as he walked about the studio and smoked nervously, that he could go backed up by the consciousness of a good morning's work. If he had been able to get on with the portrait—which he wanted to send to a spring exhibition—it would have been something at least to set on the right side of the account, which George was perpetually going over. But, apparently, he could not get on with either the picture or Isabel herself. To stop thinking about her, he put on his hat and coat and went uptown, finding himself at last in Mrs. Mackaye's decorated drawing-room with half an hour for Alicia alone.

She was waiting for him, looking very sweet and young in a dress of soft blue. Alicia, pathetically enough, tried to recapture for him as much as possible of her first bloom; she made her dress definitely more youthful, tamed her regal head to something almost girlish, coiling her hair loose and low; and her manner to her lover corresponded in softness and submissiveness. And, alas! she did the wrong thing. George preferred her infinitely when she was most the woman. He liked best her most stately and formal dress, and her manner in her own world—a perfectly conventional and to her uninteresting world, but one she knew. He liked her best when she seemed sure. He would have liked her much more if she had seemed sure of him.

She blushed deeply when he kissed her—but then, as always, she turned, at the other end of the small sofa before the fire, and asked a deliberately unemotional question:

“Have you had a good morning? It's nice of you to come away early.”

“Not at all nice of me. It never is, of course, and this morning less than usual. I haven't done a stroke of work.”

“Oh, Miss Morrison didn't come, then?”

“Yes, she came—after eleven o'clock, when I'd given her up. And she stayed only half an hour or so. Of course, I couldn't do much with that. I believe I'll chuck the thing.”

“Chuck what thing?”

“Oh, the picture. She's so uncertain—and I am too.”

He bent forward with his elbows on his knees and rubbed his eyes wearily.

“I'd like to chuck it altogether—painting, I mean—and go abroad and live.”

“Well, why shouldn't you?” asked Alicia.

He waited a moment. “Why shouldn't we, you mean? Oh, you wouldn't like it! You'd be bored with me if I had nothing to do, and I should be deadly bored with myself.”

He gazed gloomily at the fire, and Alicia at him, bewildered and hurt to see again for how little their marriage seemed to count in his life, compared with what it meant to her. Then, as he looked up, her eyes fell.

“You could paint over there,” she said tremulously.

George sprang up and walked to the windows and back.

“That's not what I want. I want to make a complete change, sweep everything away, begin over again!” he cried. “Everything has gone wrong so far. I haven't done what I might have done. And I never can do it if I go on this way—”

“I don't understand you,” murmured Alicia.

“No, no, you don't understand.”

“Do you mean—you want to give up painting? I don't see why you shouldn't do exactly what you want.”

“Yes, yes, but what the devil do I want?”

He paused in his restless walk about the room and looked at her. With his thick blond hair rumpled, his gray eyes brilliant, his broad shoulders hunched as though for a spring, he suggested a handsome cat which had been stroked very much the wrong way, and had accumulated an undue amount of electricity. Alicia looked alarmed, hurt, miserable.

“Perhaps you want some luncheon,” observed a cool voice in the doorway.

Mrs. Mackaye came into the room, taking off her gloves, very trim, tailor made and frigid.

“It's just ready—shall we go out?”

It was not a gay meal. George and his hostess sparred rather viciously, while Alicia was painfully silent. George resented her silence, her inability to carry the thing off, and even the fact that she had taken so seriously what she should have taken as merely a mood in him. After luncheon she still further displeased him by declining to walk in the park, on the plea of a headache. He divined that she was going to lock herself in her room and cry and he was strongly irritated by her unreasonableness. Irritation was expressed, with him, by extreme coldness and indifference.

“I'm sorry you won't come out, but perhaps it's as well. Neither of us seems in a very good mood,” he said loftily, and took his leave.

He went straight down to the small hotel where Miss Morrison stopped, and was told in the rather dingy office, after some uncomfortable delay, that she was resting and could see no one. He sent up a note: “May I come back at four? I must see you.” After another long wait the penciled answer came back: “If you must.”

George spent the intervening hour at his club, smoking, turning over a newspaper which he could not read, and staring out the window at the quiet side street. Two or three men spoke to him, and he answered briefly and vaguely. At four he was in Isabel Morrison's little sitting room. It was at the back of the house, and the windows looked out on a space of dirty yards and the draped fire escapes of a tenement. The room had a faded carpet and plush furniture and portières. There was a row of books on the sham mantelpiece, and on a table the armful of roses which George had sent the day before.

In a moment Isabel came, fresh from her sleep, with color in her cheeks, her mass of hair rather carelessly rolled up and a vivid look which lit up her smile for him. She wore a white dress —white always made her look younger.

“What must you see me about?” she asked, not without a touch of malice. Whether or not she had deliberately made herself as attractive as possible for him, whether his presence had anything to do with her glow of life, George could not have guessed; even if at that moment he had been preoccupied with the question of her feeling for him instead of with his for her. He caught his breath with the intensity of his certainty, the keenness of his realization of her enduring charm.

“Because I love you,” he said solemnly.

“You love me—oh, is that all?” and Isabel laughed. “Well, shall I ask you to sit down? There's nothing to say after that, I suppose.”

“There's a good deal to say.”

“Not about that. But we can talk of something else.”

“I can't,” George declared. “Nor think of anything else. Do you know that you haven't been out of my mind once for weeks? I'm simply possessed. I've known all along that I wanted you tremendously, but I didn't know till today that it was forever, eternally, that I wanted you, and want you—”

He poured it all out in a breath, in a low voice, agitated and broken. Then he tried to take her hands, but Isabel moved back. She looked at him straight and piercingly.

“Well, what of it?” she said at last gravely. “Do you think I love you?”

“I don't know, but I think I could make you love me.... But even if you don't now, I want you—for always. I want to marry you.”

Isabel, after looking at him a moment longer, moved away to the window, and there said, with her face half averted, “I thought you were going to marry Miss Talbot.”

“I'm going to marry you, if you'll take me,” said George.

Another pause ensued. “You'd much better marry her. She's in love with you—she loves you more than I ever should. She's a good, sweet person—”

“But I want you. I would rather have you, if you cared for me only a little, than all the other women in the world.”

“But I shall never love you that way.... Have you broken absolutely with her? If not, go back to her—have it out. Have you quarreled? If that's it, you'd better go make it up.”

He went over to her.

“We haven't quarreled—it wasn't a quarrel. It was that she couldn't help seeing, I suppose, how I felt towards you. I haven't told her—it hasn't come yet—”

“Then your engagement—you are still—  Well, what: does this mean, then? I rather think you should clear things up a bit. Or do you want to marry us both?”

“What does it matter—I mean about the form of breaking it off? I shall tell her now at once. Won't you say something to me? Won't you care for me—a little?”

He took her hands now and kissed them passionately, and tried to draw her to him, but she shook her head.

“Go back to Miss Talbot,” she said clearly. “You haven't made things straight with her. When you do, you'll probably find that you prefer her, after all. At any rate, that's the first thing. No, I won't tell you that I love you. Why should I? I don't. Good-bye. I can't talk about it any more. There's been rather too much as it is.”

“But, at least,” he pleaded, “you don't care for anyone else. You told me you didn't—”

“No, I don't. There isn't anyone else to care for. My life is rather a lonely one.”

“And you never have? Tell me, Isabel, more about it, about your life. You're so silent—I don't feel I know anything about you. Tell me about your marriage, will you?”

“Oh, I have told you,” she said rather impatiently. “I don't want to talk about it now. You must go away, please.”

For the first time now, as she looked at him, there was a touch of emotion in her manner. Her usual clearness was troubled slightly. And that was enough to send George away happy. He too was troubled, confused, excited, but more than all, he was happy. She did not love him, but she might. She doubted him—but her enigmatical eyes seemed to tell him to prove himself. Thus he was sent back to Alicia.

V

Stella Mackaye, for the first time, found herself counting the days of Alicia's visit, and heartily wishing that the week before her were at an end. She loved Alicia, but she did not love problems, nor situations, nor tragedies. And Alicia, from the seriousness with which she took life, was fairly sure to be involved in at least problems and situations. Stella Mackaye began to fear now that something like a tragedy was impending. No one could help seeing how Alicia cared for George, nor how—in what a different way—he cared for her. Stella's ideas of the impropriety of his late conduct were only slightly modified—for she was just—by her knowledge of the history of the whole affair. It had really begun some ten years since, when George had just come out of college and Alicia had been a year or so in society. At least, Alicia confessed to having been in love so long; and even to having been the moving force in the engagement. She had routed George out of his bachelor defenses, not indeed by a bold frontal attack, but rather by insidious sapping and mining.

It had really been a definite siege; but, unfortunately, though George had capitulated, no moment of complete victory had yet come to Alicia. True, she had marched in with banners flying, but she had no security in her conquest. She suspected sometimes the possibility of revolt. And the consciousness of her own weakness struck cold to her heart, which was not in the least the heart of a conqueror.

Oddly enough, George came first to explain himself to Stella Mackaye. The fact that Stella was Cambridge born and bred perhaps had nothing to do with her sense of responsibility; but this at any rate she had, and it prevented her a good deal from minding her own business. In no strict sense could she have been held responsible for Alicia's safety and happiness, yet she held herself so, in some degree. And therefore she sent for George next day to lunch with her—Alicia being absent—and called him to account.

It was not the first time George had lunched alone with Mrs. Mackaye, but always before this he had enjoyed it. She had a clever and above all a frank way of talking which amused him; and they had been able to take together a properly aloof and entertained view of the world and of one another. For one season George had been the attendant cavalier, as Marvin now was; thus Stella could take a thoroughly maternal attitude toward him on his engagement, and now was entitled to a tone of authority. She began, however, with sardonic lightness:

“Now, George, of course I know the trouble is with the artistic temperament, and you c-can't help that, poor dear! But tell me, do you think you're going to make my adorable Alicia unhappy? Because if you are, I've a g-good mind to put prussic acid in your coffee. I keep a supply on purpose for p-people with temperament—horrid things!”

But George was deadly serious; he was tragic. He couldn't eat.

“Put it in and welcome,” he said somberly. “I shall undoubtedly make everybody unhappy, including myself. It seems to be what I was made for.”

“Oh, nonsense! Don't get the idea that you're fatal. What's the m-matter? Can you tell me? I can't bear to see Alicia grieving. Why did she ever care for you, anyhow? I can't m-make it out.”

“Neither can I. I wish to heaven she never had!”

“Oh, George, you don't mean that—”

“But I do. I wish I'd never seen her, sweet as she is and lovely as she's been to me. It's been an awful mistake. And now I've got to tell her so.”

“Tell her—?”

“Just that. You may as well know, because you would know, anyhow. I can't help it. If I could care more for Alicia I would—but I can't help it that I've been caught by another woman. I can't marry Alicia when I don't love her.”

“Wait, wait, George! Don't, for heaven's sake, let your imagination, or whatever it is, run away with you now. You did love Alicia—can't you remember how you talked to me about her? And this new f-fancy—good heavens, you don't think you're serious about Miss Morrison, do you?”

“Certainly I am. I wish I were not.”

“But only think how often you've been serious before.”

“No, Stella, never like this. I've been charmed by many women, that's true, but this is different. There's every practical reason against it—absolutely every one. It gets me into no end of trouble. And I don't think she even loves me. But, Stella, I can love her—she's the only woman I've ever cared for that I knew I should never tire of—I know I can love her forever.”

He spoke with a passion and sincerity that for a moment silenced Mrs. Mackaye. But she quickly recovered herself.

“Well, suppose you can, then—or think you can. Do you mean you'd want to marry her?”

“I mean I do want to marry her, since that's the only practical way to acquire her permanently.”

“Well, really!”

“I mean that, from my feeling for her, we two might be the only people in the world. I could imagine living with her all my life in a solitude—on a desert island. She isn't like other women, whom you can't think of apart from a social background. She has no background—no relation to anything else—it seems absurd to consider social conventions in connection with her. She's like some wonderful creature out of a medieval poem—she's like Melisande, only that she has the wisdom of all the centuries—she doesn't belong in time or space at all. I don't know whether she's good or bad. I don't know whether I'm going to be happy or miserable with her. All I know is that she's the one woman out of the whole world for me.”

“Isn't this just romancing? You talk like a b-boy of twenty with his first love affair.”

“There's something about first loves and last loves very much alike, I suppose. You can't have love without romance—that's what makes it. But, Stella, this is real.”

And the worst of it was that she couldn't but feel it was real; that his emotion was sincere and strong, and he strangely steadied by it. But emotion was one thing, duty quite another, in her creed; which she held none the less strongly for not always living up to it herself.

“It may be real,” she said drily. “But so, my friend, is Alicia's love for you. What becomes of her?”

He made a gesture of despair. “Can't you—won't you help me?”

“Help you—how?”

“I mean, let the break come from her. She must have seen the situation, only that she has an extraordinary faculty for blinding herself. She's perpetually in the clouds. She never sees anything just as it is. She's idealized me, for example, out of all resemblance to what I really am. You can tell her anything you like about me.... Don't look at me so—It isn't that I'm a coward about it. Only that it will be so much less painful—for her—”

“No, it won't, not a bit of it—now stop and think. You'll have to do it yourself if you've made up your mind to it. Of c-course, there's no use in my telling you what I think of the whole thing and of you.”

“Yes there is. I want you to tell me. I don't defend myself.”

“Well, I don't see how you c-can. Of course, I think you're c-crazy to begin with. It's all very fine for you to talk about poetry and fairyland and Melisandes—perhaps you feel that way, but you can't expect anyone else to. Then as to social backgrounds and relations and so on. You scorn them now, b-because Miss Morrison hasn't got any. But they're necessary to civilized life, all the same, and you're a social person. You can't g-go and live on a desert island, and you wouldn't if you could. You need someone who will help to link you to the world, instead of c-cutting you off from it. Why, George, you wouldn't want your wife on the stage—and I don't believe she'd give it up, would she?”

“I don't know. I think she would, but it doesn't matter. She'll do as she likes, of course.”

“Oh, yes, of course! That's the way we begin! But if she does as she likes what are you to do? What kind of life would you live, anyhow? She doesn't get on with people—doesn't like them—they don't like her. She'll be a d-dead weight socially—”

George shrugged his shoulders. “You're talking from Alicia's point of view. You know I hate that world.”

“Oh, hate it by all means! Only I don't see where else you belong. Her world, I suppose, wouldn't suit you. Who was her husband, anyhow, and where is he? Do you know?”

“He was a newspaper man and a press agent. She married him when she was seventeen. They separated within a year. She divorced him when she was twenty-one. She'd been on the stage two years when she met him, and she says he was the best that had come in her way up to that time.”

“Yes. And you are the b-best now, I suppose.... Well, all this about her, George, is really beside the point—which is that, in my view, you're solemnly bound to Alicia. You talk of breaking your engagement, and through me, through a third person! Why, Alicia considers herself practically married to you.”

“Well, she isn't, you know,” said George. He looked appealingly at Mrs. Mackaye. His nervous hand knocked off a claret glass, which broke on the floor unheeded.

“It's almost the same thing. It's known everywhere, and she has begun her trousseau—”

“Trousseau!”

“Yes—when she expects to be married in two months—of course. Do you think you can coolly toss her overboard now?”

“You won't help me, then?”

“Help you to tie her hands and give her a push? No, I won't. You'll have to manage it alone, my friend—and what's m-more, I won't have it done in my house. Why, I feel like an accomplice now—I feel almost as though we were planning to m-murder her.”

“Oh, come!” cried George in strong irritation, “don't try to make it out worse than it is. Do you think, then, that I ought to marry her, and tell her nothing?”

“I think you ought to go on as though you meant to keep your engagement, and give yourself a chance. At any rate, you'll just have to do that while she's here. And very likely you'll think better of it by then—it's a whole week, you know.”

George was deaf to this sarcasm. They got up from the table, as he said slowly: “That means, as she's going back to Chicago, that I shall have to write it to her. Well, perhaps that will be the best way. And yet, I wish it could be over sooner. And it will seem as though I were trying to—shirk it.”

“And so you were. I d-don't think very well of you, George Gay.”

They stood in the drawing-room. Evidently Mrs. Mackaye did not mean to ask him to sit down.

“I can't help it,” he said, still with his tragic look. “I suppose all my friends will take it that way. You can cut me, you know, if you like—”

“And you think you won't care? Well, just wait and see. Miss Morrison may be a Melisande, but you're no P-Pelleas—'all for love and the world well lost'! You'll suffer for this, I hope and believe.”

VI

A week later George wrote his letter, not easily, but quite firm in the faith of its necessity.

New York, January 10.

My Dear Alicia:

I know your visit here was not a happy one. Things were not right between us, and I should not have let you go away without an explanation if it had not been for Mrs. Mackaye, who forbade me to talk to you about it in her house. I really can't see why, or how she had the right to interfere. She told me that I was making you unhappy, and I know that it is true. I have felt it for some time past, and it seems to me that I have no right to go on doing it. If our marriage is going to mean unhappiness for you—and I can't help feeling wretchedly that it is—then it must not be. You are far too fine and lovely a creature to be wasted so. I have always told you, you know, that you idealized me, and, I feared, cared for something in me that really wasn't there at all—and just lately it has seemed to me that you were finding this out for yourself, and that this caused your unhappiness. But it's better to find it out now than later—too late. If I married you, and you were unhappy, I should want to kill myself, I think. Will you write me frankly about it all? If you wish I'll go on to Chicago now, instead of in March. I am at your disposal.

Always devotedly yours,
George.

Eight days later he had to telegraph:

Did you receive letter? May I not have a word?

Then Alicia wrote:

Dear George:

I have delayed replying to your letter because I don't understand it. I know you haven't written frankly to me. If I was unhappy in New York it was because I saw you were so. The explanation should have come from you. Apparently Mrs. Mackaye knew it. I can't see why she forbade you to speak of it there to me, nor why you felt bound to obey her. At any rate, you must give it to me now. Perhaps it will be better for you to come out now, if you can conveniently. Unless, of course, you prefer writing. I haven't anything to explain. My feeling for you is what it always has been. If you could be happy I should be so. But if you are, as you so often say, of an unhappy temperament and if you must have these dark moods, I shall still be happier with you than I could possibly be in any other way—that is, if I did not add to your unhappiness. Is this frank enough?

Alicia.

This letter reached George on Saturday, and he telegraphed at once:

:I leave for Chicago Monday noon.

VII

For these two weeks between Alicia's departure and his own, George hardly saw Miss Morrison except in public. He was faithful at the tri-weekly performances of the Independent Theater, and a handful of other people, for other reasons, were faithful. But the failure of this venture was now quite evident. There was discord in the management, and the lack of public support made an early end inevitable. The main actors had already found other work. Isabel Morrison had been engaged for a romantic play, which after a successful opening in the city was going on tour. She was to be leading woman, in place of an eccentric lady who declined to leave New York.

“The play is rubbish, of course,” she said resignedly to George, during one of their few talks, “but I must take what I can get.”

“I hope you'll take me, before long,” was his comment. “Or let me take you—abroad somewhere—to Italy, perhaps. We'll have the spring there, and the early summer—and then go on to Switzerland. Or perhaps you'd rather go to Spain?”

“Have you a castle there?” she asked, smiling. “I'm going to Chicago for two weeks with 'The Heart of the King,' and then to do one-night stands through the South—provided we hold out that long.”

She was so busy now with rehearsals and dressmakers, she said, that the portrait was given up indefinitely, and George had to be content with a few snatched moments. He knew, of course, that she did not want to see him alone, in the present state of things. That meant, he thought, that she was but waiting till he should be definitely free. But she would say nothing definite, on her side—in fact, nothing at all. He could not get from her any intimation that she cared about him in the least. He could not understand this—for caution seemed no part of her, and a rather blunt frankness was decidedly her note—except on the theory that she did not care for him. She might be willing to marry him for ease, comfort and companionship. Her life, he knew, had been full of hardships. She was tired and lonely. And he was ready to marry her on this basis, perfectly confident that, since she cared for no one else, she would love him, For he was sure that she wanted love.

Already it seemed to him that his devotion had made some difference to her. In spite of her press of work, she was more blooming, more animated. He thought, and so did other people, that she was acting better during these last days at the theater. It might be, of course, that knowing the emptiness of the work ahead of her, she was simply throwing herself into the Ibsen and Sudermann plays for her own intellectual satisfaction. Her climax of effectiveness and success came, at any rate, in the strongest and last play, “Johannesfeuer.”

It was given on Saturday night. George had just got his letter from Alicia and sent his telegram, and he meant to have a talk with Isabel next day, when she would be most at leisure. In view of his going away she could not deny him that. He went alone to the theater. The play he vaguely recollected from some performances he had seen in Germany, and it seemed to him to have some slight analogy to his own situation. But he was not prepared for its emotional effect.

The homely realism of dialogue and atmosphere lost, of course, in translation, lacked the inimitable German touch in rendition; but the poetic power of the theme—the sudden flash of tragic passion in the midst of the quietest little domestic drama—held good. George began by wondering at Isabel's technical grasp of her role. From the first moment of her entrance on the stage, in her prim gray dress and apron, she was so completely the picture of Marikke, the German country girl, the housewife, the girl with a secret, a sad history. Her quiet face, experienced, expressive, reticent; her eyes, heavy with sleeplessness and grief; her sad mouth, smiling at the simple people about her—all this suggestive personality became at once, without once obtruding itself, the center of the action. Marikke's shame for her own low origin and her love for the betrothed of Trude, grew and mingled together till, in the big scene with Georg, in the quiet family sitting room in the sleeping house, the mysterious fires of freedom flashing outside in the summer midnight, they broke out together in the wild cry of the girl, as she clasped Trude's lover in her arms: “My mother steals—and I steal also—you, Georg, you!”

The bitter, passionate joy of Marikke's abandon and its deep echo in the final scene, in her parting speech to Georg, “For me St. John's fire has burned once only—one night only!”—this sweep of primal emotion fairly overwhelmed the few auditors, left them almost too startled to applaud, to call out before the curtain the pale actress. She came with the others, and the little company made its final bow. And when the curtain went down for the last time, George Gay was scribbling a note, which he sent around to Isabel's dressing room: “I am going to Chicago. I must see you—must—tonight.” The answer came back: “Come down to the house and take supper with me.” And George caught his breath with surprise and delight.

He had nearly an hour to wait at the hotel before Isabel finally appeared. He was watching in the lobby for her, and ran out on the snow-drifted sidewalk to take her out of the cab.

“I'm sorry to keep you waiting,” she said as they went in, “but there were people to see me, and one thing and another—”

“Oh, it's awfully good of you to let me come at all—this is more than I dared hope. I thought you might be going out somewhere to supper—perhaps Mrs. Mackaye's—”

“Oh, suppers! She asked me, but I don't like that sort of thing. I'm hungry, though. We'll have a steak, shall we? This is really my dinner, you know.”

They went into the small dining room, which was empty except for the night clerk who was refreshing himself at a corner table; and Isabel dropped her loose wraps—a black cloak and a white scarf that covered her hair—and beckoned George to sit down. They took a small table, above which an unshaded gas jet burned bleakly; and a solitary waiter appearing, Isabel gave her order of steak and salad. Then she leaned back in her chair and stretched her arms out wearily, and smiled at him in friendly fashion. “Oh, how tired I am!” she murmured.

Between the black of her dress and the deep color of her hair her face looked pallid, and there were heavy shadows under her eyes; but it was the fatigue of a strong and healthy body, needing only sleep to restore its full vitality. Her look even now suggested energy in its languor. Her nerves were not wholly relaxed. The excitement of the evening was still in her veins. George felt from the first moment that she was treating him with a subtle difference. She was just now not on her guard with him. She was glad of his presence as she had never been before. The emotional storm that she had put herself through on the stage had its effect.

And if it affected her, it no less affected George. Her complex attraction for him was partly due to her artistic intelligence; and of this she had just given a high proof. She moved him at once intellectually, emotionally, sensuously. An intoxication of pleasure burned in him, and an intense desire to be loved as Marikke of the glowing eyes and hair had loved Georg. At first he was very quiet, and ate nervously, his eyes alone showing his feeling.

“So you're going to Chicago,” said Isabel, in her matter-of-fact way.

“Yes; Miss Talbot wants to see me. I shall stay on, to be there when you come.”

“Of course she does,” said Isabel. “You're quite right to go.” And she looked at him, smiling enigmatically.

“And then, when I see you there, you won't put me off any longer, will you?”

“Who knows?” murmured Isabel, with doubt in her smiling look. “How did you like the play tonight?” she asked abruptly.

“Don't ask me. You know. I didn't think you could do a thing like that—so simple and primitive—Isabel!” He leaned across the table and seized her hand. “I wish you'd marry me now, before I go—tomorrow.”

She flushed suddenly and shot at him a glance of anger. “To make sure of you—or to make you sure of yourself? No. Go back to Miss Talbot.”

“It's only to make it clearer to her that I go—you know that, don't you? I can tell her better than I can write—”

“Can you? Poor boy—poor, dear boy!”

“Why do you treat me like a child? And yet I rather like it, too. I am a child with you, I suppose. You're so much calmer, more balanced than I. Oh, Isabel, I want you to love me—as you can love—”

He bent his handsome head and kissed her hand, and laid it against his forehead, closing his eyes. The clerk had gone out now. Isabel asked for a cigarette and leaned back in her chair to light it.

“How many women do you want to love you?” she asked, keeping up a pretence of lightness.

“I want only you!' George cried. “And you know it. I never—if I could tell everything, you'd see how it has been with Alicia. I don't see why I shouldn't tell you—you're nearer to me than she is—”

“You needn't tell me. I can see plainly enough that she is in love with you. I understand—better than you do, perhaps.”

“You think I'm a fool, don't you? I'm not now, though, whatever I may have been. See here, will you marry me in Chicago? Or better still, give up this engagement now; don't go on there at all. I'll come back here on Thursday—”

“Ah, we shall see! I sha'n't give up the engagement, George. I've signed a contract, you know, and one must keep to one's word.”

“Oh, nonsense! Pay the forfeit, or whatever it is—I suppose money will settle it easily. You'll have to break it somehow.”

“Must I? Well, do you break yours first—no, no, I don't mean that!” For a moment she hid her face in her hands.

Then she looked up at him, pale and grave. “George, I don't love you. If I were never to see you again after tomorrow, I don't think it would make a great difference in my life. What would make a difference—a fearful one—is what goes along with you, money and rest and freedom, and—all that. You can tempt me with that—if you want to. But I can't see that it would be a good bargain for you—I advise you to—keep to what you have.”

George laughed shortly. “Never mind about that. I'm content with your bargain. I know you do care a little for me, or you could. Come now, couldn't you? I'm not so bad, after all—”

Their eyes met in a long look. Isabel rose and caught up her wraps.

“It's late,” she said. “I'm very tired. Good night, and good-bye. Bon voyage.”

“And must I—but you're right, of course. I oughtn't to keep you up, But I'm not going till Monday, you know—-”

Isabel shook her head. “Not to-morrow,” she said gravely. “Good-bye.”

He put on his coat, and they moved together to the door.

“When I see you next, then—no more rules and regulations!” He caught her in his arms. “And kiss me good-bye.”

She looked up to see his eyes full of tears. The kiss was given, and a flame mounted to his brain.

“Isabel, Isabel, don't send me away!—take me—let me stay with you!”

For a moment she leaned against him and he held her close. Then with a strong effort she drew away. Neither spoke another word. They went out into the lobby, where the night clerk lounged at his desk. Isabel began to mount the stairs, trailing her cloak after her. George stood watching her till at the landing she turned for a moment before disappearing from his sight. Her last look at him was deep, strange, intoxicating and sad, too. It was a confession of emotion. And its sadness—what could that mean, if it were not doubt of him? This was the memory of her that, with hard beating pulses, he carried away.

VIII

His two visits next day and his great basket of violets and orchids brought not a glimpse nor a word of her. He went out of the city in a blinding snowstorm, which somewhere in the mid-waste of country developed into a blizzard; and there, on the dreary, drifted prairie, in the midst of howling winds and whirls of white dust, the train was stalled, and crept finally into Chicago nine hours late. George had then a further journey out to the paternal home on Prairie Avenue, and arrived half starved and more than half frozen, to find a tumultuous family welcome and a note from Alicia, asking him to dinner that evening at eight.

In fact, he was enveloped in Alicia from the moment when his mother and two sisters precipitated themselves into his snowy embrace in the hall. Alicia had written—her note was instantly produced. Alicia had telephoned two hours since, telling them that his train was late—which they had already found out for themselves—and saying that she hoped he would come over, anyhow, if it were not too late and he too tired, The family had thought that he might have gone directly to Alicia's house, and it was very sweet of him to come home first.

“Sweet? Well, I could hardly present myself there as I am!” he said, when all the greetings, including a quiet handshake from his father, were over. “I don't suppose I can go over at this hour, but I'll telephone.”

Accordingly he did so, almost before he had got his coat off, while the two girls hung rapturously in the background. They were very young, and their romantic interest in his engagement had all along been rather too keen for George's comfort.

The butler's voice answered him, indistinct because of some trouble with the wires, caused by the storm. Alicia was at dinner, but came at once to the telephone. He could hardly make out her words, but it was plain that she wanted him to come. He hung up the receiver and took it down again to call up the nearest stable and order a cab.

“You're going over, then?” breathlessly inquired Mary, the youngest girl.

“Yes. Now I want a bite to eat, and father's evening clothes. Heaven knows where my trunk is.”

“Oh, you poor boy, you must be tired to death now!” sighed his mother. “But I suppose you can't wait till tomorrow.” And she smiled tenderly at the lover's impetuosity.

All his family, George knew—at least the feminine part of it—adored Alicia. His father, the only inexpressive one, liked her. She had been very attentive and sweet, always, to his mother. And Mary and Alice worshiped from a distance her beauty, her distinction and general grandeur. These two, chattering outside the door of the room where he was dressing, told him about Alicia's visit to them the day before—how happy she had seemed that he was coming, how beautiful she had looked all in black velvet and ermine, how nice she had been to them.

George's father, smoking placidly in an armchair by the open fire, directed him where to find the various needed articles of attire. His mother brought up a tray which she had made ready herself, for she had a jealous desire to render him all the personal service possible. The girls were forbidden even to mend his gloves or sew on a button when he was at home.

With all his fatigue, hurry and perturbation of mind, George found this home atmosphere sweet. The old-fashioned simplicity of his people, the parochial monotony of their lives, even the house itself, full of cumbrous, ugly furniture and incredibly bad bric-à-brac—all the things that had bored and bothered him when he was living at home, now seemed unaccountably pleasant. He began to wish that he could stay on for a quiet visit there; at the same time he knew that he could not rest until he had got over the dreaded interview with Alicia, and was free to go back to Isabel.

In the cab, lying back in a corner with his eyes closed, he felt how utterly tired he was. The last weeks had been one long emotional strain. His work, the single steadying influence of his life, had been interrupted, and he had been tossed about by contrary feelings until he was weary of himself. He was physically done up, too, not having slept on the train, and not much the two nights before leaving New York. He dozed off and on during the cab's slow progress through the snow-filled streets, but woke when it came out on the lake front, where the ice blocks were piled in a sort of barricade and the wind poured over it, sweeping clear over dead, frozen spaces.

The big Talbot house was lighted from top to bottom, and as soon as he got into the hall George heard the murmur of voices in the drawing-room. He had expected to find Alicia alone, for it was nearly eleven; instead, there were eight people who had been dining, and all of whom he knew. Mrs. Talbot, a stately woman with thick, elaborately-dressed white hair, met him at the threshold and kissed him. Then Alicia came swiftly toward him and gave him her hand, smiling, flushing, radiant.

At that moment he saw the whole thing, as Alicia had arranged it. In his own home he had been met by it, and here—the little assemblage of people well known to him, pleasant, easy, conventional people, Alicia's own “crowd”—the affectionate welcome of Alicia's mother, and her own look of happiness in his coming—all this, he felt, was prepared, calculated. It was to show her hold on him. He felt a sudden warm pang of admiration for her. She was magnificent—no less; and in looks tonight she was absolutely at her best. She wore black velvet, a wonderful long, sweeping, clinging dress; and a coronet-like band of silver, set with dull-colored stones, clasped her dark head with regal effect.

IX

“You'll stay here tonight, George, won't you?” Mrs. Talbot said, after the last lingering guest had betaken himself out into the cold night. “You can telephone home, you know, and have things sent over in the morning—and I always think it such a pity to have the poor cab horses out in such weather when it isn't necessary. Not to mention that you must be tired out—”

“Thank you very much, but I absolutely must go back tonight,” George interrupted.

He gave no reason, but his tone was so unmistakably firm that Mrs. Talbot did not urge him. She was slightly displeased, as always, when any suggestion of her own was not promptly acted on.

“Very well, if you must I suppose you must,” she remarked. “And now I dare say you and Alicia can spare me. You mustn't keep him long, though, Alicia—it's late. We're very glad to have you here again, my dear, and I hope you're going to stay some time. You're looking ill—have you been working too hard?”

“No, no; 1'm tired, that's all.”

George walked to the foot of the stairs with her, and she bestowed another affectionate salute upon him. She had always been fond of him, from his boyhood up; partly, as she used to tell him, because he was so good looking.

“People have no business being ugly,” she would often say, with the serene consciousness that no one of her family could be accused of that incompetence.

George went slowly back into the large, dusky, quiet room, where Alicia stood before the wood fire. The place was a good setting for her. Everything in it was big and luxurious and costly. There was, perhaps, rather too much foreign spoil—too many things carved and embroidered and gilded and embossed. But firelight and candlelight left these matters of detail in soft obscurity and gave only a general effect of rich accumulation.

Alicia pointed out a deep armchair to George, and sat down herself near, taking up a little painted fire screen to shield her face. But George, in spite of his fatigue, preferred to stand.

“Perhaps I ought to send you away, if you must go tonight,” she said softly. “You've had a hard journey.”

“Yes, but I can't go just yet—not till I've had a word, at least, with you.... You're looking very well, very beautiful, indeed.” He stood looking down at her with a kind of fascinated pleasure in his eyes. Alicia knew her own moment, and the pride and power of it. She put up her hand sovereignly and took his; and obeying her soft motion he sank on the little sofa beside her. She leaned toward him, and in another moment, without remotely intending it, he had kissed her.

“Alicia!” he cried, springing up. He could not go on; the words would not come. “Alicia!” he groaned, and turned, in a very anguish of dumbness, to walk the length of the room away from her.

She would not, perhaps could not, help him out. She sat motionless, staring at the fire, her face in shadow, and the hand that held the screen trembling. He had to come back, to make the supreme effort, it seemed to him, of his life.

“You know—I wrote you—” he began huskily. “I'm here to—to clear everything up. I've made you suffer—if I have—forgive me, will you, Alicia?'”

And a sentence from a play flashed through his mind: “Forgive, O Lord, all my past sins, and this one, just this one little sin, that I am going to commit tonight.”

She moved abruptly and dropped the screen. “I haven't anything to forgive,” she murmured.

“Yes you have, Alicia—my—my stupidity, my weakness, my failure. I'm not the person for you. I'm not big enough, not good enough—” Again he broke off and looked at her pleadingly.

“Of course you know I don't think that.”

She sat in the full glow of the fire now, and held her head proudly erect. There was no sign of tremor about her; her long, slender hands, tightly clasped, lay under a fold of her somber dress.

“But, Alicia, I know it. I don't deserve you—I can't—can't make you happy—oh, can't you see? Won't you—”

“I can't—see—what you mean.”

“You make me say it. Forgive me—Alicia. I love someone else.”

He was standing at a distance from her, not looking, not daring to look, at her. Into the silence fell the oddest sound—a little laugh.

“Oh, George! you know—it happens so often!”

“So often?” he ejaculated in amazement. It was she now who would not look at him, but he could see that she was smiling faintly.

“Yes. How often, how often, have you been in love!”

“But—but this is very different. It is serious, Alicia.”

“Yes, but—each time it has been serious, hasn't it? Or seemed so, at least. Why, I can remember—”

“I can't help what you remember. I can only assure you that—that I am terribly in earnest. I should think you could see that. Do you think this is any easy thing for me to do?”

“In earnest?” she repeated softly. “Have you never been in earnest, then, before? Weren't you in earnest—with me?”

“Oh, I was, I was, Alicia—but—”

“You perhaps never meant to marry me?”

“Alicia, you know that nothing else was in my mind, till—just lately, a fortnight or so ago. If anyone had told me a month ago that I should be in this position now I should have been horrified—I am—I hate myself—but I can't help it.” He threw himself into the nearest chair and bowed his head on his arm.

“No, I know—I understand—you can't help such moods.” Her voice, steadied by a strong effort, was appealingly gentle. “But I think—you don't always quite know—what they really mean. You don't always quite know what you really do want. I think you ought to be—very sure—”

He made a despairing gesture.

“Good heavens! do you think if I hadn't been sure I should be here—like this?”

There was another silence.

“Then you mean—you don't care for me any longer?” she went on, still in that touchingly gentle voice.

“Oh, Alicia, I do care for you! I love your sweetness, your goodness; I—adore you for your goodness to me, But—but this other is—”

“This other? Who is this other, George?”

“You know—Miss Morrison.”

“And you care more—for her?”

“In a different way. She has a tremendous power—I can't resist. I know it's all wrong—everything is—she doesn't even care for me, I think—”

“Does she know?” breathed Alicia.

“Yes—she knows.”

A deep, painful color flooded Alicia's face and neck. She rose now and walked rather waveringly across the room and stopped with her back to George, moving some little bronze figures about on a table. The long train of her dress lying across a dark crimson rug made her look taller, more imposing, than she was. Her slender waist, her white shoulders above the dark velvet, her bent head with its beautiful lines and poise—all her beauty, so fine and delicate, seemed suddenly to make its great appeal for her. Its exquisite fragility, trembling, quivering under a blow, seemed in silence to cry out pain and reproach. And the man cowering behind her felt an equal pain in his own faithlessness, in having hurt her thus.

“Forgive me,” he whispered.

One of the little bronzes fell from her fingers, and struck out against a companion piece a dull, metallic sound. Alicia drew herself up, turned and walked toward him. For very shame of his physical loss of control, he got to his feet as she approached, and tried to present a calm front. He could not bear to look pitiable, even while he wanted desperately to appeal for pity.

“Tell me,” said Alicia.

She took his hand, drew him with her to the little sofa by the fire. “Tell me about her. You haven't known her long?”

“No. A few months—about three, I think.”

“And you've only been—in love with her a few weeks?”

“Yes.”

“And you told her so—when?”

“About two weeks ago.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing. She said I'd better go back—”

“It wasn't keeping faith with me, was it?”

“No.”

George answered her questions quietly, in an exhausted tone, and looked at her the while in dull surprise. Her gentle air might have befitted a wife catechizing an erring husband, or perhaps a mother with her son. She had never taken this attitude to him before. Tacitly George admitted her right to catechize him as much as she chose—he could not help but admit her hold over him. He trembled to perceive that she did not mean to give up that hold. To this the whole course of things that evening had been tending, yet he could hardly believe it, even now.

Alicia's gray eyes, very still and bright, held his own, and her long fingers were nervously clasped about his.

“Do you think, George, that she would make you happy? Are you sure of it?”

Nothing but the truth could meet the spirit that looked out of Alicia's eyes.

“No—I'm not sure of it. I have no idea.”

“Do you think she would love you?”

“I don't know.”

“But she would—marry you?”

“I think so—for some reasons.”

“Then it is—what you think your love for her, against my love for you.”

“Alicia! You mustn't love me!”

“But I do, I do! You asked me to love you, and long before that I had begun to. My whole life has grown 'round you. I cannot stop loving you any more than I can stop breathing. Do you see—do you see what you are doing? Why, it's impossible. You let a feeling of a few weeks, that may be gone tomorrow, come between us and crush me. For a woman you scarcely know, who doesn't love you, you do this to me. I won't let you—I won't let you be so weak, so cowardly—I won't let you spoil your life. If she doesn't love you, you can't be happy; and she can't love you as I do. No one can, no one. Don't you count that for anything? Am I nothing at all? Am I to be thrown aside for a whim, a fancy? I won't be; you dare not. You are mine, as much as if we were married; mine because I love you so completely, and we promised each other. You don't know what I shall be to you. You don't understand—you're blind just now. I won't let you hurt yourself and me. I won't let you go.”

She stopped, gasping for breath, her eyes dilated, almost black, her whole appearance transfigured.

“You admit that I have a claim on you—your own act gave me one,” she added in a whisper.

“Yes,” he was forced to say.

“Then I assert it. You are bound to me.

Suddenly she quivered, drooped. Her two hands went out; her head dropped forward. George caught her and laid her back against the cushions of the sofa. Her eyes closed; she breathed faintly and flutteringly. She looked broken, spent, her supreme effort made.

George gazed at her with a dull conviction that he was doomed. She had conquered him. He could not strike her down and go on over her dead body—and something like this, persistence would mean. A better or a worse man than he might have managed it, but he could not. His feeling now was a kind of fatalistic submission. If she would have it so, so be it. Let her have her will. Let his be the sacrifice. Clearly as he knew his own desire, he was not passionate enough about it to think it worth all sacrifice. He did not care enough for his life to sacrifice any other to it. And Alicia's revelation of herself, her passionate conviction that her love and life were bound up together, overwhelmed him.

In yielding, in giving Alicia her full due, her way, he would reserve to himself, certainly, the right to be unhappy. Let unhappiness then be his portion, if Alicia would have it so. He was not strong enough, not brutal enough, to stand up against her. He must be faithless, of the two, to Isabel—and here a dull pang zigzagged through his confused mind. And that was the fault of his own idiocy, of his complete failure to realize and gauge the forces about him. The thought came to him that he might go and throw himself into the lake.

“So be it,” he said mechanically. “I am bound to you.”

Alicia gave no sign of hearing him. Her deadly pallor, her faint, broken breathing, hurt his bruised sensibility. He drew away from her, then went back, took up her hand and touched it with his lips.

“You understand,” he said solemnly. “It is all as it was, then. That is—”

She made him a sign of dismissal, turning her head away from him.

He went out of the room and the house; first touching a bell in the hall, for he thought Alicia had seemed on the point of fainting.

He did not stop to telephone for a cab, and there was none abroad in the solitude of the street. He walked along, facing the bitter wind, hugging his physical misery, conscious that he was beaten and his mind a blank. Except that once, looking over the dead surface of the lake walled with crushed ice blocks and splinters, feeling its utter mournful silence, its gray, livid pallor, he thought of the Hell of Ice and the spirits prisoned there.

X

Late September, warm sun and cool shadow lay over the old Tuscan city. A window opening to the southeast gave a wonderful prospect: in the foreground, just below, a broad terrace and stairway of stone and a little garden, divided by arbors from a vineyard in full fruitage; beyond, green fields in a wide semicircle inclosed as by two wings or arms the solid, hilly sweep of ancient red brick houses, ending at the city walls. Beyond the walls the fields began again, and rolled softly away, checked here and there by black marching lines of cypresses, to the low, blue hills on the skyline.

On the terrace a table was being set out for luncheon; and at the window above leaned Alicia Gay, in white walking dress and hat, just as she had come in from her morning in the Duomo. She was meditating, as she surveyed the green stretches once covered with houses inside the walls, on the city's great tragedy of centuries ago; and on that strange memorial of Siena's ambitious prime, the great, lonely arch of marble, the beginning of an enormous cathedral which stopped just there, with its civic downfall. And she was watching for George, who was painting an old brick church out by one of the gates. He was a little late today; Alicia looked at her watch again, and finding herself quite ready for luncheon, went down to the terrace. Ten minutes more passed—fifteen—twenty. Alicia paced the terrace from end to end, ceased to look at the view, ceased to think of the Duomo or of antique tragedies; and the upright line between her eyebrows, the first marked print of time on her charming face, deepened as always when she was uneasy, giving her, for all her new bloom, a careworn look. This line had a way of appearing also when she was studying something with Baedeker's help in museum or church, or when she wrote down her impressions in her notebook, so as to be able later to make conversation for George. But it was when she was waiting for George that it came oftenest. And now, by the time he appeared, half an hour late, Alicia looked very dark, indeed; and all her little observations about Pinturicchio and the graffito work in the Duomo had quite fled out of her mind, perhaps never to be recaptured.

George was warm from fast walking, and quite radiant.

“Awfully sorry to keep you waiting,” he said in a light tone which, as he caught sight of Alicia's face, became apologetic. “But I met some awfully nice people—really somebody to talk to, you know—and I didn't notice the time. I'm hungry, though, now] think of it. Why didn't you begin without me? You know I hate to have you wait.”

“You know I don't like to do that,” said Alicia rather coldly.

They sat down at the table, and the servant brought an omelet which had suffered a little by the delay.

“These people,” George went on, “turned up out there by San Domenico while I was working—an Englishman and his wife. They live here. He's an art critic. I remember hearing about him—his name is Hedge.” He fished a card out of his pocket and tossed it over to Alicia. “His wife seems a jolly, pleasant girl. We all had a walk together, and she's coming round to see you.”

“Is she? I'm not sure I want to see her.”

“Oh, yes you do. You'll like her. She's awfully simple and intelligent. And besides, you want somebody, you know. We've been here three weeks and I haven't spoken to a man!”

Alicia neglected her broiled chicken and salad. “That was the reason I didn't see you, then. I drove out to San Domenico, intending to bring you back to lunch.”

“Yes, I'd gone off with them. I went up to their place—they have a floor of an old palazzo—and had a drink. You'll like to see their rooms—they have a lot of good old things, though I judge they're poor. I'm going off with Hedge this afternoon to prowl through the old Ghetto.”

“George!”

“Well, what is it, Alicia? What have I done?”

“Have you forgotten that we were going to walk this afternoon? You were to take me out to the Osservanza.”

“Oh, so I was. Well, I can put Hedge off till tomorrow. Don't cut up about it, Alicia.”

“I'm not 'cutting up,' whatever you mean by that. Only I think that, as you leave me alone all the mornings, and as you want to be wandering about the town at night, you ought to consult me about engagements for the afternoon, or at least remember the ones you make with me.”

George assumed a resigned air and proceeded with his luncheon. It ended with some wonderful sweets, fruit and coffee; he was in the mood to enjoy, and to feel irritated with Alicia because she wasn't, and wouldn't let him.

This was the genesis of most of their quarrels, which were pretty frequent. Some carelessness or neglect, real or fancied, on his part, would hurt Alicia; her resentment—strong out of all proportion, it often seemed to him, with the offense—would be launched upon his head, and his only remedy was to bow at her feet. If his apology were complete enough, and, above all, if he could be moved to emotion, she was easily pacified. But if he took a high tone, or a cool tone, or a bored tone, he might be days in disgrace. Alicia would treat him with icy coldness; and at night she would weep and walk her room, and would look like a ghost next day. He could not hold out long against this; sooner or later he had always to give in.

XI

Now, as he looked at Alicia's somber brows, and observed that she had eaten no luncheon, he saw what had happened and knew what he must do—the sooner the better. He got up, having lit a cigarette, and went around to Alicia's side of the table. The terrace was in view of many windows, but George was willing to be seen making love to his wife.

“Forgive me, will you, dear?” he bent over her to say. “It was stupid of me not to think. Of course, I could have got back in time for our walk, but I'd rather have the whole afternoon with you. I'll send a note around to him. And I won't make any other engagements for the afternoon without you. Will you forgive me, now?”

He tilted the wide brim of her hat and kissed her. Alicia put up both hands to set the hat straight, and bit her lip, but the tears would come.

“No, you'd better go with him—you'll enjoy it better. You seemed so delighted to have found somebody! I didn't realize—how much I'd been boring you.”

“Oh, dearest, don't talk nonsense! Just because I want to see a man now and then—”

“It isn't that, and you know it, George. I never want to interfere with your pleasure—it's cruel to say I do—”

“Well, well, I didn't say it. Now don't cry; don't spoil the afternoon. We'll have a jolly time, just you and I—unless you want to ask the Hedges. Well, all right. We'll go out to the Osservanza, and have tea somewhere. Now do eat something—take some of that cream; it's bully. And then you must lie down and rest, and get your color back. Did you have a tiresome morning?”

“Rather,” said Alicia plaintively, but drying her eyes. “I don't enjoy seeing things so much by myself. But of course it's different for you. And I don't want to be a bother to you.”

“Oh, my dear, you're a great pleasure to me. You know I'd rather go about with you than anyone.... Come now, that's settled.”

He drew a chair near her, and sat smoking while she ate her cream, his right hand holding her left. When she had finished and they had left the table, George drew her hand through his arm, and they walked up and down the terrace together. Alicia clung to him, her gray eyes pathetically bright. She seemed even more glad than he to have steered off the threatened disagreement; but she was not content with that. She wanted also to be made to feel that she had not bullied him into consideration for her; she wanted to feel that he really preferred to spend his afternoon with her. She wanted, indeed, to be made love to. Therefore, when they presently went into the house, she protested that she did not want her usual siesta. She kept him with her in her own room, an immense chamber walled with plaster and floored with stone, almost as cool as a church on this warm day. She tried to make herself as charming as possible; but, at first smiling and caressing, she ended in a hysterical burst of tears. George tried to soothe her, mystified and rather irritated though he was by the apparent unreason of her emotion. He failed to see that it was the cumulative effect of man small incidents like that of today. All such little sins of omission and carelessness, exaggerated by Alicia's sensitiveness, dwelt in her mind, and grew day by day into more definite and stronger proof of his lack of love for her.

Not understanding this, he was a good deal bored by her bringing any fault of his back to that point: “It only shows, of course, that you don't love me. You don't—you never have.”

“Oh, my dear, do be calm,” he would entreat, and then followed protestations and caresses which sometimes, as today, almost seemed to satisfy Alicia's longing.

It was nearly five o'clock, eventually, when they came out of the cavernous stone entrance hall of the old house into the street—too late for the walk to the Osservanza. Instead, George proposed tea and a short ramble outside the walls. It was a popular festival of some sort, and the narrow ways of the town were crowded with holiday makers; but their little caffè seemed to have no more than its ordinary half-dozen frequenters, slowly consuming vermouth or ices with their scandalous evening newspaper. After bad tea and delicious but deadly cakes, the Gays went on, taking their way through the picturesque alleys of the Ghetto, out past San Domenico—a warm glow of old red color on its hill—and through the Porta Fontebranda.

Alicia was fond of walking, and did not mind being stared at by the gentle-mannered populace. She was simply and charmingly dressed, still in white, which she wore as much as possible. She had gained in beauty since her marriage; she looked more blooming and more significant. The habit of asserting herself was growing on her from her association with George. By constantly reasserting the claim of her affection, she had been able, so far, to keep him constantly expressive. If he at any time showed a lack of interest in her, she made, as today, a scene. And this not from deep-laid policy on her part, but as the inevitable expression of an intense love and a passionate jealousy.

These eight months of their marriage had been a troubled time. Even at the times when Alicia was nearest happiness—when they were alone somewhere, in some place like this of Siena, where they had no acquaintance—she could never be at peace. If George did not show discontent and boredom—and he sometimes did—she imagined that he felt them. In proportion as she longed to believe that he was happy in her sole society, she was convinced to the contrary. Nothing could have enabled her to believe it except an ecstatic expression on George's part. And George was never ecstatic. He was at the most only good-humored and pleased with the moment.

This was his mood now, and in his pleasure Alicia was no more than one element, and not the main one. The day was perfect, the colors of the ground and sky almost lovelier than the crumbling handiwork of past centuries—the outlines of the old red-brown city framed between liquid blue and the mixed greens of olive, vine and cypress. The road was blocked now and then by peasant wagons, drawn by ponderous oxen with enormously spreading horns. It passed now between high walls, overhung with vines heavy with grapes; sometimes below a hillside covered with olive trees. Here was the gate of a villa; there a branching lane led into a vineyard. All along, the lovely aspect of the plain, its glowing colors barred by black cypress groves, drew them on; while they turned constantly to see the sky behind them lit with a gorgeous sunset, and against it the huge cliff-like masses of buildings looking black and dead, up to the tower of the Palazzo Publico, which rose into the light, a shaft of glowing red.

It was moonlight when they came back, and the house masses with their windows lit seemed more alive than by day. As they stood on the hill, near the old brick church George was painting, a burst of song rose from a street below—a melody borne by three or four men's voices, singing, perhaps, at the door of a wine shop after a day's pleasure; one voice a magnificent bass on which the others seemed to rest and to be buoyed up as by the waves of the sea. Poured out in superb flowing ease and freedom, the voice seemed to sum up and typify the wonderful richness of the land, lavishing carelessly in nook and bypath its divine gifts, its wealth of the senses and the soul.

Thrilled by the esthetic quality of the moment, George stood motionless, drinking it in with keen pleasure. And Alicia felt it too, though conscious that her pleasure and her thrill came through his presence.

XIII

They had talked of living abroad indefinitely. There had seemed to be no reason why they should not go on drifting about from one beautiful place to another, according to the season or the mood, making themselves comfortable and amusing themselves. There seemed to be no reason why they should live in America. Neither George nor Alicia, after an experience of softer and more civilized climes, had any idea of returning to their native city. George had no civic interests, and Chicago offered nothing else to him. If they went back, it was agreed, New York was the only possible place. But neither of them had any definite place in New York; both had lived there enough to know that it would take a good deal of effort to make a satisfactory position for themselves. On coming abroad in February, immediately after their marriage, neither had been in the mood to make this effort. George wanted only to get away from everything, and Alicia had been only too happy to get him away. They had discussed the respective merits of Rome, Paris and London, as permanent headquarters.

But now, after eight months' trial, the situation was changed; rather they had found out that it simply wouldn't work. Each had come privately to this conclusion; and one day, toward the end of their stay in Siena, George brought it up. They had spent the afternoon up to the closing hour in the Belli Arti, among the exquisite primitive pictures, the Duccios and Lorenzettis that George delighted in; and it was therefore with a full feeling of the charm in this life of wandering and star-gazing that he spoke. Alicia's presence beside him during the afternoon, her attitude toward his interests, gave the needed impulse to expression. Alicia was a perpetual, obedient echo; perpetually listening, obediently repeating each of his ideas, his opinions, his very words. She seemed actually to have no interests apart from him; she depended upon him for everything—emotions, thoughts, pleasures, all. And he was beginning to feel the dead weight of it. He now realized very completely that Alicia had no intellectual interests, and, with the best will in the world, couldn't have them. He realized also that she was not the sort of woman to build up a successful social life in a strange land out of the elements that they found abroad. And, finally, he saw that she was more and more dissatisfied and unhappy.

They had taken tea with the Hedges, and were walking back together through the town.

“You were bored, I suppose, this afternoon,” George began in a cool tone. “You certainly looked so.”

“Did I? I suppose I was,” Alicia returned as coldly. “It seems to me we've been spending our days with the Hedges.”

“Well, we won't have many more to spend with them, at any rate. But they're as pleasant people as we're apt to see anywhere. I can't see why you don't get on with them.”

“They don't interest me, that's all. Mr. Hedge talks shop perpetually, and he has that irritating English way of condescending to a woman. And as you are always flirting with his wife I am deprived of the pleasure of her society.”

“Well, you might have seen her often, if you'd wanted to. She wanted to be friendly with you. As to my flirting with her—well, call it that if you like. Of course, you know there's nothing of the sort.”

“I don't know what you call it—but I do know you're always looking at her and laughing with her. You've taken her out several times and you see her every day. Of course, I don't care if you do, only—I don't like to be pushed aside, as I was this afternoon—left to talk the entire time to that man, who, as you know, bores me to extinction.”

Alicia almost sobbed with anger. George shrugged his shoulders and was silent for some moments. Then he said: “I don't think we're apt to get much out of living about like this—except trouble. You don't like the people we meet, the unconventional people I like, or the life. You don't care for art really, or for study. You won't amuse yourself, or adapt yourself. You're bored, and you show it, and make me uncomfortable. I can't see why you want to stay over here.”

There was another pause before Alicia could command her voice. “I'm not sure that I do,” she said finally. “But I thought you did.”

“I don't care much where I am,” George retorted sulkily. “Only I want to have a reasonably quiet life. And I think if you had some occupation you'd be much happier.”

“I suppose you mean,” Alicia said in a dry voice, “that I'm too much with you. But if that's all—”

“It isn't all. It isn't the point. The point is that we haven't any definite interest in common, and yet you seem to have no definite interest apart from me. If you had something to do that you cared about you'd be happier, and we should quarrel less.”

Alicia did not reply to this at all. They walked on for some time in silence, across the Piazza del Campo, full of sunset light. Neither felt like going indoors; they passed the turning that led to their street and went on to one of the gates, and beyond it for a short distance. George, in spite of his mental disturbance, could not help seeing the beauty of tone and line all about, and being diverted by it; till presently he saw also that Alicia was unobtrusively weeping, one tear after another rolling down her cheeks and being quietly wiped away. He turned back, then, without any other notice.

XIII

Just inside the gate, in a twilight shadow, they met a funeral procession—the corpse carried on a draped litter by black-robed, black-masked men, surrounded by others of the brotherhood bearing torches. The forestieri stood aside, for the procession, moving in a disorderly swarm and at a quick walk, almost a trot, choked the narrow way. Each black figure as it passed showed them the gleam of curious eyes through the holes of its mask.

“Bully!” said George enthusiastically. “How well they do everything here! What a perfectly unspoiled, almost untouched place it is! I could stay here a year painting, I think—a series of street scenes, the life of the people. That is—no, I couldn't, either.”

They were walking on again more rapidly, George setting the pace in the hope that Alicia's nerves might quiet themselves without a scene.

“I mean,” he added quickly, “that of course the place is dead, for us. That's the beauty of it, too—but one couldn't stand it long. I quite understand your being bored by it. Perhaps it wasn't worth while to stay so long—just for a picture or two, which may never see the light, after all. At any rate, we'll move on now—to Venice first and then Rome, if you wish—unless you'd rather go home.”

“Home?” she murmured.

“Yes. Say, to spend the winter in New York. I've been thinking a lot about it lately—from your side, as far as I can. It seems to me that if we should have a house in New York—I think we might arrange to buy one—you might find the place very interesting in a way that Europe never can be. I know some good people there—you know some. It might amuse you to go into society. You wouldn't get in all at once, you know—that's just the point. It's the game. It will take all your social cleverness, and all the pull that either of us has, and time and work, to really count—but I think it would be worth while trying. As an occupation, I mean. With your beauty, and the amount of money we can raise between us, we ought to be able to do something.”

“But you,” said Alicia more calmly. “You wouldn't care for that sort of thing—you'd rather paint over here. And I wanted—I want to do what would be best for you.”

“I'm not at all sure I would,” said George hastily. “I may get tired of painting any minute. And, at any rate, you know, you can't consider my interest apart from your own. You can't expect me to be happy, or to work, when you're constantly, obviously miserable. I'm convinced it's no use our staying over here this winter. We'd better go back next month. That will give you time to look about. We might rent a house this winter, and buy it later if we like it. I think you'll be better off when we're settled and you have more of your own kind of people.”

They entered their own house now, crossed the court, mounted the stairs and were admitted by the smiling mustachioed manservant. Alicia went into her room, followed by George.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked reasonably.

“I think perhaps you are right,” said Alicia, as with shaking fingers she unfastened her hat and threw it on the bed. She was standing before the mirror, but at sight of her own image turned sharply away. Her face at that moment looked old and plain. To hide it she dropped on the stiff sofa, and put up her arm in its loose white sleeve across her reddened eyes.

“If we go home—” she had to stop, and begin again. “If we go home I can find some occupation, as you say; I wouldn't be on your hands so much. I've been thinking of it lately, too. I suppose we'd better decide to go.”

“Very well—I really think it's wise. Then we can come over again, you know, for the summer, whenever you like. You can get all of Europe you want in half the year—you're a good American, after all!” He smiled, ending in quite a cheerful tone, and let himself relax into an armchair. “I think we've hit on the right thing now. There are any amount of things in New York, really, to interest you.”

“Yes,” said Alicia hollowly. “I might go in for charity—or for politics—or society. Then, if you say so, let us go back. Only—I don't care one bit on my own account. If you would be happier here, alone—” she made a long pause, and George looked alarmed—“why, let us stay. And I will promise you that you sha'n't be unhappy—on my account.”

“Yes,” he said calmly, “but that's something you can't promise.”

He lit another cigarette and blew out half a dozen rings; and leaned back in his chair, watching the bluish veils of smoke, in parallel layers, rise and fall and melt and form again in the quiet air.

Alicia's dry misery had reached its climax; her need of affection from him, of the touch of him, had become imperious, overmastering. She sat up, rose, came to him and sank down on her knees beside his chair; put up her arms and laid her head against him.

“Oh, do love me a little,” she moaned.

“Alicia—dear—I do love you. I want you to be content.”

“Oh, how can I be? You know why I'm not happy—you know why I can't be content,” she said, in the same voice of suffering. “It's just that you're not happy—that I don't make you so—it's such an awful failure, all this, for me—”

“Poor girl, poor little girl. I must be a brute!”

“Oh, it isn't your fault! You're very good and sweet to me. It's only that you don't”—she could hardly speak the words, yet they forced themselves out—“you don't love me, you know.” Her slender body trembled in his arms, and she broke into convulsive sobbing.

“Oh, Alicia, don't torment yourself—and me! I do love you, my dear—we shall be happy together yet.”

“Oh, if I thought so! If I thought you could ever be content with me—I could wait years. I wouldn't torment you. But I can't feel it now, and it's that that makes me so irritable and ill-tempered—don't you know it is? I thought—I thought that since I loved you so much, I could take care of you, I could give you some happiness. But I see”—she lifted her head, and her tragic eyes met his—“I see that I've wanted too much. I feel I want to give you everything—and you don't want it all! And I can't help wanting more than you can give—and I know that I don't know what's in your mind. If I could feel that you were absolutely frank with me—but that's too much to expect. I know you want more freedom—but it kills me to give it to you. To feel that you have a life apart from me that I know nothing of! That there are other women, perhaps! Oh, when it means so much, so much to me to be with you like this, to touch you”—she drew his face down to hers, and closed her eyes slowly—“how can I bear to think there could be anyone else? And about going back to America—I know you are thinking of that woman. I feel it in your mind. How do I know that it isn't just for her that you go back?”

He put her gently away from him, and got up.

“You'll have to take my word for it, I suppose, that I wasn't thinking of her; that I was thinking only of what's best for you—for us. I have nothing to do with her, as you know. I shall probably never see her again. And I beg you won't bring up this sort of thing again. It's—very distasteful. It's really beneath you.”

And without another glance at the long white figure lying against the seat of the chair as though broken by a blow, he went out of the room into his own room and bolted the door.

Alicia's usual wild rush of repentance did not come this time. It would have found him in a less flexible mood than usual. He, too, had suffered a blow. It was the first time in months that she had been alluded to, between them; and it was as though a longing, a desire long quiescent, had suddenly been revived, been roused into motion and sent toward her. George felt himself carried away by this sudden impetus; yet his last words to Alicia had been sincere. He did not think of seeing Isabel again. But he thought of her; she lived again in his mind and senses with an intensity not to be denied. He did not mean to see her—but, at least, he might, and he would, have news of her.

XIII

For some time after their return to New York Gay could find no trace of Isabel Morrison. She was not in any of the companies playing in the city, and a theatrical paper which gave news of companies on the road did not contain her name. At the hotel where she had been used to stay they had not seen her for nearly a year. Mrs. Mackaye, at a blunt question from George, shrugged her shoulders and said that Miss Morrison seemed to have dropped out of sight. Mrs. Mackaye herself was in hot pursuit of a new fad—book binding. But she dropped her tools to help Alicia in the hunt for a house. She was'cool to George, as she had been ever since their memorable interview; his marriage, even, had not squared him with her. She pointedly made up to Alicia, and George wondered how much Alicia would confide to her. He didn't like the idea of having his conjugal difficulties discussed, and he wasn't sure that Alicia's pride would be proof against the appeal of Stella Mackaye's long friendship and sympathy. But at any rate, their new intimacy left him more free than he had been for many months.

He had made up his mind that he would not try to see Isabel Morrison, but he could not rest till he knew at least what had become of her. The information came finally through an acquaintance at his club—a newspaper man, unsuccessful playwright and general gossip.

“Isabel Morrison? Of course I know her. She's here in town now, and likely to stay here for some time, too, I fancy. She played a two weeks' engagement here with the Warde company, but when they went out on the road she resigned. You see, she's tied up with a man who's drinking himself to death, and she's trying—”

“What man? How do you know?” demanded George.

“Oh, everybody knows who knows either of them. He's a newspaper man, Jack Dolliver. I used to work with him on the Sun, but now he's on the Dispatch. An awfully clever chap, brilliant talker and all that, but completely gone to pieces now. I haven't seen much of him lately—don't like to watch his pace, you know.”

“How do you mean, 'tied up'?” George asked, moving his glass around on the table.

Stacey shrugged his shoulders, “Don't know how far it goes. They're together a lot, I know that, and she told me herself she wouldn't leave town, on his account. It's too bad for her. She ought to be doing something. And then his crowd is a pretty tough one for a woman like her. The men are interesting, in a way—clever enough, but too Bohemian even for me, don't you know. The sort that can't live off Broadway. And the women—well, they aren't her sort. It hurts her, of course. And I don't believe she can do him any good either, in the long run—in fact, his run's going to be a very short one, if I'm not mistaken. But I suppose she's in love with him. He's attractive to women, I know—yes, and he's an awfully good fellow, too. About the wittiest man I ever knew, I think, when he's half sober—”

George set his glass down sharply.

“Look here, are you sure about this?” he asked rather angrily. “It's easy to gossip, but you ought to be careful what you say about a woman—”

Stacey looked offended for a moment, then curious.

“I didn't know you were interested in Miss Morrison, old man, but this isn't gossip. She ought to be careful, herself, if she doesn't want things said. But she makes no bones about their intimacy—which may be purely Platonic, for anything I know. Only she goes about with him as much as she can in the Broadway gang—which isn't noted for Platonism. And she's spoiling her own prospects—at least, so far as this season goes. She may have some money of her own, I suppose—certainly he hasn't anything but his salary.”

“You don't know where she lives?”

“No,” said Stacey lightly. “She hasn't asked me to call on her. But I can—I'll tell you, if you want to see them both, I'll take you around tomorrow night to a studio blowout where they're sure to be. The artist chap is the cartoonist on the Dispatch, and a chum of Dolliver's. You might be interested in seeing him, too—he's one of the crowd. A Roumanian—descendant of some old emperor or duke or something. Truth, I assure you—at least, the rest of the Roumanian colony get down and kiss his boots when he wants them to. I go around there occasionally for old time's sake. It's the only place in New York where you get a touch of the old Paris feeling..... We want to happen in about twelve or half past. ell, what do you say?”

“Oh, I'll go,” said George, and having made the appointment, he left his garrulous friend abruptly.

XV

The studio was a large, bare room high up in an office building on Broadway. Through the open windows the mild breath of the October night and the street noises entered together. At midnight the room was thick with smoke. At one end a man at the piano was playing a gay waltz, and several couples were dancing in rapid foreign fashion. Thirty or forty other people sat about on the long divans or clustered in corners talking, with frequent visits to the buffet, an enormous piece of oak covered with bottles and supper.

Among the men were a number of a dark, aquiline type, who kept rather to themselves. The women were even more mixed. George noticed in the first few minutes, while they stood in the doorway, a beautiful Italian—a model, Stacey said, two French girls, one of whom in the center of the floor now airily pointed a neat toe at the ceiling, and several others whose nationality he could not tell, but who were voluble and vivacious. He saw also in one corner a tall man with a rumpled shirt bosom and tossed black hair, who was making a speech amid loud laughter and applause. This, Stacey told him, was Jack Dolliver. Just then the host came up to greet them—a big swarthy man with an embroidered coat and a number of orders pinned to his broad chest—and swept them across the room to the buffet. Stacey inquired for Miss Morrison.

“Oh, yes, she's here,” said the artist. “At least, she was a few minutes ago, and she usually takes Dolliver away, you know. Perhaps she's over there at the window.”

The crowd was thickest at that end of the room. George dropped his friend with a nod and went slowly along till he caught sight of a well-known profile and a gleam of tawny hair; in another moment he had put out his hand to Isabel, who was sitting on a low couch smoking and talking to a man.

George stood with his back to the light, and she stared up at him for some instants blankly; then he saw her blush and her hand closed on his with a sudden, delicious warmth.

“Why, is it you? Where on earth have you come from?” she cried.

They both ignored the other man, who quickly took himself off, and George sat down in his place.

“Oh, I've been abroad. I came back ten days ago,” he said, hardly knowing what his words were.

He was studying her, struck by some change in her, trying to make out what it was. She was looking very well, very handsome, in a thin, black dress, discreetly high and showing just her round, strong wrists. Her glowing hair, piled high as she generally wore it, was burnished and beautiful as ever. Her look of vitality and vigor was, if anything, more marked; yet, he thought, she seemed melancholy, too.

This last impression remained with him and deepened as they talked. Her first looks and words for him had been vivacious and gay; but almost immediately she became quiet, perhaps from the effect of George's own manner. She seemed, however, very glad to see him. There was no sign of embarrassment, much less of resentment, in her way with him. She was sweet and kind and frank; and George's heart swelled with a sudden perception of her large nature. He had not seen her like this before; this was part of the change, or development, in her that puzzled him. He lost no time in coming to the point.

“What on earth are you doing in this galley?” he demanded, still intently questioning her face, her eyes.

She laughed a little. “Oh, marking time, I suppose. I'm doing nothing.”

“Well, why are you doing nothing—just here?”

“Tell me, first, how do you come here, and why? I'm awfully curious.”

“Oh, I came with Frank Stacey. I asked him about you, when I couldn't find you out.”

“Well—he told you about me, I suppose. If so, you know why I'm here.”

“I know what he told me. But I can't believe it—I can't understand it.”

Isabel followed the direction of his eyes. The tall man with the excited manner and the tumbled black hair was now telling a German dialect story, and doing it inimitably well, George perceived. He looked at Isabel and she nodded.

“He's the cleverest creature,” she said. 'And has no more sense than a baby.”

“Well, supposing he hasn't, what then?”

“Why, it's such a frightful waste, the way he's been going, the way he will go if he isn't held back. He has a real gift of expression; he's done some quite wonderful things—and all lost, buried in the newspaper grind. And he's such a dear, good fellow, too—endlessly good. And foolish enough, somehow, to be fond of me.”

“Well, and you—what about you? What are you doing, wasting yourself? Your talent—I'll bet it's worth more than his, even if—  And your life! What are you doing with your own life?... Are you in love with him, Isabel?”

At the opposite end of the room a new melody struck up—a song of the studios in which a score of voices were instantly uplifted. People began drifting up toward the piano, near which a girl was dancing wildly. There was now a clear space about the two on the couch. Isabel turned toward the window and leaned forward, her elbow on her knee, her chin in her palm.

“Well, look here—I don't mind your asking me. I suppose perhaps I am. I suppose I shouldn't care so much—or perhaps at all—what becomes of him—if I weren't,” she said pensively.

George was silent for some moments.

XVI

“You perhaps—” he began again unsteadily. “You are sacrificing yourself to him—uselessly, too, very likely. Tell me—honestly—is it more for his sake—or for your own?”

“How can one say?” she smiled. “It's both. Don't you know?”

After a pause he said: “I suppose I know. When—I wanted to marry you, it was because—of course—I loved you! It was for myself, because I wanted to love you. And yet, it was for your sake, too. I wanted to do so much for you. I wanted to give you everything. Is that the way you feel—for him?”

“Something the way, I suppose. It's such a wonderful thing to be able to give,” she said softly.

“Oh, Isabel! But if it is too much—if you suffer from it, and you will, you must! What will become of you? Your profession, your——”

“I don't care,” she said, with a dreamy gesture of indifference. “Do you know what I'm going to do? Jack has got a chance as correspondent for a weekly paper. He's been all over the world, and, as it happens, he speaks Russian. He's going to Manchuria. And I'm going with him as far as I can—perhaps to Japan. I suppose we shall be married. It may save him. Anything to get him out of New York!”

“Save him? Suppose it does—what about you? What can you do for him if you're not even to be with him? What will become of you there alone, Isabel?”

“Oh, it will steady him, if he marries—especially if I'm out there and can't fall back on my profession. Do you see? He'll have to keep steady—and he cares enough for me, I'm sure, to do it. He isn't,” she laughed, “just as keen as he might be about marrying, but—”

“Isabel! You're throwing yourself away for him! For heaven's sake, don't take such risks as this; don't—”

“Oh, but I must! As for risks, I'm used to them. Have I lived in the lap of luxury and security, do you think? And it isn't all for his sake. No, I can't, I can't go on alone any longer; that's the truth. I knew last winter—when I knew you—that I couldn't.”

George looked at her, at first startled, then more and more fixedly. She flushed slightly, but smiled, kept her composure, though she guessed, perhaps, what he was thinking.

He was thinking that her last speech held truth—so much of it, so clear and illuminating, that he could not take it all in at once, could not see at once all that it made vivid to him. In this sudden light he felt he understood the woman as never before. He could not but see how, these few months since, she had been within his reach. She had wanted to yield to his love for her; she had wanted to take what he could have given her. She had not loved him—perhaps would not have cared as much for him as she did now for this other man. Yet an emotional awakening had begun in her with him, George Gay. Who knew what revulsion of feeling had thrown her upon Dolliver? She had been willing to take, to be the passive element, the beloved. Now, apparently, she was the active force. Either way, she was not to stand alone, on her own individual base. And perhaps it was his own wooing that had shaken her, made it impossible for her to go on alone.

He had not seen her once since the night of their parting, on the night of “Johannesfeuer,” in New York. He had written her the outcome of his interview with Alicia in Chicago, and she had replied in a few kind and colorless words.

Now he knew that he could not go into that question. He knew that she had acted decisively, in such a way as to put beyond the pale of possible realization the faint vague hope that he had brought to her this night. She was now utterly beyond his reach, and about the past he could not speak.

After the long, long gaze that half expressed these thoughts of his, he looked away at the noisy crowd about the piano and was still silent. Then at last he said sadly: “Will you write me—from out there? And will you promise to let me know—if anything—if you ever need anyone—if I can help you?”

“Oh, I can't promise—” she began.

“Yes, you can! And you must. You can give me that much, Isabel.”

He took out a card and wrote an address upon it, and she accepted it.

“You don't want to see him—Dolliver?” she asked gravely.

“No—no. I'm going now.”

“But tell me—you're happy, George, aren't you? A little happy?”

She put her hand on his arm. They looked one another deeply in the eyes, and the memory of their one kiss rose between them. George's gaze passed over her face—brow, eyes, lips—like ghostly kisses.

“Happy enough,” he murmured. “Good-bye, Isabel.”

He laid her hand down, and got up and went out of the room, forgetting his host and Stacey.

It was nearly two o'clock, on the edge of the brief lull that nightly visits Broadway. George felt the coolness of the air, the sweetness of it, after the hot and smoky room. He walked back to the hotel where Alicia would be awake and awaiting him. He knew that he would have to give her now, before either of them slept, an account of this meeting. Isabel had been in her mind no less constantly than in his. The fever of her jealousy had burned visibly before him. Now she could be told of the end of everything between Isabel and himself.

And he felt that the end indeed had come—and knew that he had never felt it before. There was but a shadowy possibility that Isabel would ever find his help, or claim it. Humanly speaking, he had seen the last of her. He had lost his chance to give himself completely, perhaps to waste himself, to throw himself away. He had lost a definite, an ecstatic happiness.

What remained to him was to be loved—to be tyrannized over by the inevitable demand of love, the demand that never could be entirely satisfied. A vague pity for Alicia rose in him. Alicia, after all, suffered most. She loved passionately, and wished to give—but her need was so much greater than his that she was constantly in want, a beggar. Isabel—yes, certainly Isabel was happiest of the three.