Читать книгу Narcissus - Evelyn Scott - Страница 3

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At three o'clock in the afternoon Julia put on her hat. Her dressing table with its triple mirror stood in an alcove. It was a very fine severe little table. It was Julia's vanity to be very fine and dainty in her toilet. Here was no powder box, but lotions and expensive scents. When she sat before the glass she enjoyed the defiant delicacy which she saw in the lines of her lifted head, and there was a thrill which she could not analyze in the sight of her long white hands lying useless in her lap. They made her in love with herself.

Her hat was of bright brown straw and when she slipped on her fur coat she was pleased with the luxurious incongruity of the effect.

Nellie, the old Negro servant, was away, and Julia's step-children, May and Bobby, were at school. As Julia descended the stairway to the lower hall, her silk dress, brushing the carpet, made a cool hissing sound in the quiet passageway.

She opened the front door softly and passed into the long street which appeared sad and deserted in the spring sunshine. Under the cold trees, that were budding here and there, were small blurred shadows. In the tall yellow apartment house across the way windows were open and white curtains shook mysteriously against the light. Above a cornice smoke from a hidden chimney rushed in opaque volumes to dissolve against the cold glow of the remote sky.

Julia walked along, feeling as though she were the one point in which the big silent city in the chill wind grew conscious of itself. It was only when she reached Dudley Allen's doorstep that her mood changed, and she felt that when she went in she would be robbed of her new glorious indifference about her life.

She rang the bell above the small brass plate, and when the white door had opened and she was mounting the soft green-carpeted stairs up the long corridor, it seemed to her that she was going back into herself.

In the passage before Dudley's rooms he came to meet her as he had done before. His hard eyes as they looked at her had a sort of bloom of triumph.

"I was sure you'd come." He grasped both her hands and drew her through the tall doorway. "Dear!"

"I suppose you were." She smiled at him with a clear look, knowing that in his discomfort before her he was condemning himself.

"Won't you kiss me?" They were in his studio. He pouted his lips under his mustache. His eyes shone with uneasy brilliance.

She kissed him. She understood that the simpler she was in her abandon the more disconcerted he became.

When she had taken off her hat and laid it upon his drawing-board, he held her against him and caressed her hair. Because he was afraid of his own silence, he kept repeating, "Dear! My dear!"

"Aren't we lovers, Julia?" he insisted at last, childishly. He was embarrassed and wanted to make a joke of his own mood, but she saw that he was trembling. His mouth smiled. His eyes were clouded and watchful with resentment.

"How deeply are we lovers, Dudley?" She leaned her cheek against his breast. She did not wish to look at him. Suddenly she was terrified that a lover was able to give her nothing of what other women received.

"You love me. Look at me, Julia. Say you love me."

Her lids fluttered, but she kept her eyes fixed upon his small plump hand, white through its black down. The hand was all at once a pitiful trembling thing which belonged to neither of them. It had a poor detached involuntary life.

Because of the hand she felt sorry for him, and she said, warmly and abruptly, "I love you." Her eyes, when they met his, were filled with tears. Yet she knew the love she gave him was not the thing for which he asked.

He was suspicious. His hands fell away from her. "Was I mistaken yesterday?" His voice sounded bitter and tired.

She was pained and her fear of losing him made her ardent. "No, Dudley! No!" Her face flushed, and her eyes, lifted to his, were dim with emotion.

"Did you understand what I hoped—how much I hoped for when I asked you to come here to-day, Julia?"

"Yes," she said. All the time she felt that she loved him because they were both suffering and in a kind of danger from each other which he was unable to see. She loved him because she was the only person who could protect him from herself. She was oppressed by her accurate awareness of him: of his hot flushed face close to hers, the shape of his nose, the pores of his skin, the beard in his cheeks, the irregular contour of his head matted with dark curls, his ears that she thought ugly with the tufts of hair that grew above their lobes, his neck which was short and white and a little thick, and his hands, hairy and at the same time womanish. Already she knew him so intimately that it gave her a sense of guilt toward him. Her recognition of him was so cruel, and he seemed unmindful of it.

When she had reassured him that she loved him, he drew her down beside him on the couch with the black and gold cover. He wanted to make tea for her and to show her some drawings that had been sent to him for his judgment.

She knew that while he talked he was on his guard before her. It seemed ugly to her that they were afraid of each other.

The drawings, by an unknown artist, were very delicate, indicated by a few lines on what appeared to her a vast page. It humiliated her to recognize that she did not understand the things he was interested in. To admit, even inwardly, that something fine was beyond her awoke in her an arrogance of self-contempt. I'm only fit for one need, she said to herself. Then, aloud, "They are very subtle and wonderful, Dudley. Much too fine, I think, for me to appreciate. I really don't want any tea." And she gazed at him hatefully as though he had hurt her.

Feeling herself so much less than he, even in this one thing, made her hard again. She stretched her hands up to him. "Kiss me!" The frankness and kindness were gone out of her eyes.

He was startled by the ugly unexpected look, and his own eyes grew sensual and moist as he sank beside her on his knees.

She drew his head against her breast and between her palms she could feel his pulses, heavy and labored. Each found at the moment something loathsome in caressing the other; but it was only when they despised each other that their emotions were completely released.

It was growing dusk. The cold pale day outside became suddenly hectic with color. Through the windows at the back of the room Julia could see the black roof of the factory across the courtyard and the shell-pink stain that came into the sky above it. The heavy masses of buildings were glowing shadows. The room was filled with pearl-colored reflections.

Dudley watched her as she lifted her hair in a long coil and pinned it against her head.

She glanced at his small highly colored face with its little mustache above the full smiling lips. Again she was ashamed of seeing him so plainly. She wished that she were exalted out of so definite a physical perception of him.

"Julia. Julia." He repeated her name ruminatively. "You did come to care for me. What do you feel, Julia? What has this made you feel?" He could not bear the sense of her separateness from him. He was obsessed by curiosity about her and a lustful desire to outrage her mental integrity. He could not bear the feeling that the body which had possessed him so completely yet belonged to itself. His eyes, intimate without tenderness, smiled with a guilty look into hers.

She gazed at him as if she wanted to escape. For a moment she wished that they could have disappeared from each other's lives in the instant which culminated their embrace. Their talk made her feel herself grotesque. "I don't know," she said. "How can I say? I don't know."

Though he would not admit it to himself, her air of timidity and bewilderment pleased him. "How many lovers have you had, Julia?"

She thought, He only asked that to hurt me. She could not answer him. She smiled. Her lips quivered. She looked at her hands.

She saw him only as something which contributed to her experience of herself. She had her experience of him before she gave herself to him. What happened between them happened to her alone.

"What do you feel? Tell me? How deeply do you love me, Julia?" He knew that he was making her resentful toward him, but it was only when women felt nothing at all in regard to him that he found it hard to bear. He grasped her hands and held them.

"Of course I love you deeply." Her voice trembled. She turned her head aside.

"What do you feel about your husband, Julia?"

In spite of the pressure of his hands she felt Dudley far away, dissolving from her.

When she did not answer him at once he was afraid again and began to kiss her. "You love me. You love me very much."

"Oh, you know I love you," Julia said. She wanted to cry out and to go away. He hurt her too much. Everything about him hurt her. She had a drunken sense of his disregard of her. She could no longer comprehend why she had come there and given herself to him. It was terrible to discover that one did irrevocable things for no articulate reason. She was less interested in Dudley now than in this new and terrible astonishment about herself. She could not believe that she had taken a lover out of boredom and discontent with herself, so she was forced to a mystical conviction of the inevitability of her act.

"I must leave you, Dudley. I can't bear to go. I love you. I love you." She kept reiterating, I love you, and felt that she was trying to convince herself against an uncertainty.

He regarded her curiously with the same uneasiness. "I may be going away soon, Julia. The French painter I told you about—the friend I had when I was in Paris. He's through with America now and wants me to go to Japan with him. Do you want me to go? I can't bear to be away from you."

"Go. Of course you must go." She felt hysterical. She took up her hat.

He could not endure the cold reserved look that came over her face. "Julia." Hating her, he put his arms about her, and when her body suddenly relaxed he resented its unexpected pliancy.

I don't know her, he repeated to himself with a kind of despair against her.

Julia unlocked the front door and stepped into the still hall. A neat mirror was set in the wall of the white-paneled vestibule. Here she saw herself reflected dimly. Everything about her was rich-colored in the afterglow that came golden through the long glass in the niches on either side of the entrance. The polished floor was like a pool. Julia felt that she had never seen her house before and this was a moment which would never come again.

When she went into the dining room she found the table laid, and the knives and forks on the vague white cloth were rich with the purplish luster of the twilight. The white plates looked secret with reflections. Beyond the table, through the French windows, she could see the darkness that was in the back yard close to the earth, but above the high wall at the end was the brilliant empty sky. The base of the elm tree was in the shadow. The top, with its new buds, glistened stiffly.

She passed into the clean narrow kitchen. She had planned white sinks and cupboards when she and her husband, Laurence Farley, were directing the renovation of the place. Julia loved the annihilating quality of whiteness.

Old Nellie, standing before the stove, glanced impassively at her mistress.

"Dinner time, Nellie?" Julia wondered what was in the old woman's mind, what made her so strong in her reticence that everything about her seemed carved from her own will. The long strong arms moved stiffly in the black sleeves. The ungainly hands moved heavily and surely.

"Reckon 'tis, Miss Julia." Nellie mumbled with her cracked purplish lips. When she smiled her brown face remained cold. She wore a wig of straight black hair, but baldish patches of gray wool showed under the edges against the rich dry color of her neck. Her shoulders were rounded as if by the weight of her arms. Her breasts fell forward. When she moved, her spine remained rigid above the sunken hips of a thin old savage woman. Her buttocks dragged. She was bent with strength.

Julia was all at once afraid of her servant. "I must find my children." She moved toward the door, smiling over her shoulder. Nellie's reserve seemed to demand a recognition. Julia wanted to get away from it.

She went on to her sitting room. The door was ajar. Fifteen-year-old May was there with her boy friend, Paul. As Julia entered Paul rose clumsily and May leaned forward in her chair.

Paul, irritated by the sight of Julia's radiance, was gloomy. He was aware of May, young and awkward, a part of his own youth. May's presence exposed a part of him and made him feel cowed and soiled.

"Paul's still talking about Bernard Shaw, Aunt Julia." May was glad "Aunt" Julia had come. When May was alone with Paul he expected things of her that she could not give. He would not allow her to be close to him. He required that she pass a test of mental understanding. She liked him best when others were present. Then she could warm herself timidly and secretly in a knowledge of him that she could never utter.

Julia laughed affectionately. "Aren't you weary of such serious subjects, Paul?" She felt that she saw the two from some distance inside herself. She saw herself, beautiful and remote before Paul, and him loving her. They loved the same thing. It filled her with tenderness. He's a child! She felt guilty in her recognition of his youth.

"Is that a serious subject?" Paul was wary. Being serious always made one ridiculous. Without waiting for her reply, he said, "I'm boring May with my company. I must go." As he glanced toward Julia his eyes had the sad malicious look of a monkey's. A little color passed over his pale narrow face with its expression of precocious childishness.

Julia's long arms reached up to her hat. Paul's gaze made her feel her body beautiful and strong, but her heart felt utterly lost in wickedness. I'm Dudley Allen's mistress, she said to herself. She had expected the reassurance of pain in her sense of sin; but the meaning of what she had done was so utterly vacant that it frightened her. "Why not have dinner with us? I want to hear more of your discussion."

Paul resented everything about her, her strongness and poise and the impression she gave him of having passed from something in which he was still held. He moved his shoulders grotesquely. "Oh, Shaw's too facile. He's only a bag of tricks." He could not bear to be with May any longer. She's a silly little girl. "Good-night." He went out quickly. She's laughing at me! She's trying to make me rude. They heard the front door slam.

Paul's accusing air had given Julia a feeling of self-condemnation. She could not look at May at once.

"I am stupid with Paul," May said. "I don't see why he likes to talk to me. He's so grown-up and intellectual and I never know what to say to him." She smiled unhappily. Her thin little hands moved awkwardly in her lap. She wanted Aunt Julia to like her.

Julia found in May's eagerness an inference of reproach, and was kind with an effort. "Nonsense, May. Paul finds you a very interesting little companion. He enjoys talking to you very much."

May's mouth quivered. Her eyes were soft and appeared dark in her small pale face. "But he's eighteen," she said.

There were slow footsteps, ponderous on the stairs. Julia knew that Laurence had come. Her heart beats quickened almost happily. She wanted to experience the reproach of his face. Without naming what she waited for, as a saint looks forward to his crucifixion, she looked forward to the moment when he should condemn her.

Laurence stood in the doorway. "Well, Julie, girl, how are you to-night?" His brows contracted momentarily when he noticed May. "How are you, May?" But his gaze returned to Julia and he smiled at her steadily. His lips were harsh and at the same time sweet.

"You're tired, dear. Come sit by our fire." Julia could not meet his eyes. She watched his heavy slouched shoulders and observed the loose bulge of his coat as he sank deeply in the high-backed chair which she offered him. His hands were wonderful. Small white hesitating hands. She remembered Dudley's hands passing over her, repulsive to her, hungry hands with a kind of lascivious innocence that hurt.

Dudley's bright secretive eyes seemed close to her, between her and her husband, giving out a harsh warmth that suffocated her. She identified herself so with her imaginings that it was as if she had become invisible to Laurence.

"Yes. I've had an interesting day at the laboratory. Even the commercial side of science has its diversions."

On the hearth the delicate drifting ash took a lilac tinge from some fallen bits of stick in which a crimson glow trembled like a diffused respiration. The room was strange with firelight. Bronze flames burst suddenly from the logs in torrents of rushing silk.

Laurence began to tell about the experiment in anaphylaxis which he had been making in the laboratory that he had charge of at a medical manufacturing establishment. He put the tips of his fingers together while his elbows rested on the arms of his chair. His heavy distinguished face was brown-red from the fire. The gray hair on his temples was animate as with a life unrelated to him. In his ungainly repose there was a dignity of acceptance which Julia recognized, though she could not state it.

Julia felt annihilated by his trust. When he talked on, unaware of her secret misery, it was as though he had willed her out of being. She and her pain had ceased to be.

She had a vision of herself in Dudley's arms. That person in Dudley's arms was alive. She was conscious of herself and Laurence as a double deadness on either side of the living unrelated vision. Then it passed and there was nothing but Laurie's dead voice.

After dinner, while Julia was hearing Bobby's lessons downstairs, Laurence went up to her sitting room to rest and wait for her. He sat down by the Adams desk. The glow from the blue pottery lamp with its orange shade shone along his thick gray-sprinkled hair and lighted one side of his strongly lined face, his deep-set eyes with their crinkled lids, his large well-shaped nose with its bitter nostrils, and his rather small mouth with its hard-sweet expression.

When he heard Julia's step he lifted his head and glanced expectantly toward the door.

Julia's hair was in a loose knot against her neck. She was dressed in a long plain smock of a curious green. Laurence wondered what genius had taught her to select her clothes. While his first wife was alive he despised the mere vainness of dress, but since marrying Julia he had come to feel that clothes provided the art of individualization. It was marvelous that a woman who had previously expended most of her industry as a laboratory assistant had lost none of the knack of enhancing her feminine attributes.

"Bobby has the most indefatigable determination to have his own way. He hasn't any respect for our educational system. I felt he simply must finish his history before he succumbed to the charms of Jack Wilson's new motor cycle."

Laurence found in her voice a peculiar emotional timbre which never failed to stir him, and when she sat down near him he was caught as always by the helplessness of her large hands lying in her lap.

"I don't fancy his playing with motor cycles."

They were silent a moment.

"Julie?" He smiled apologetically. He noticed that her eyes evaded him and it made him unhappy. "Not much company for you. I'm a typical American man of business—engrossed in my profession. Wasn't it to-night that you were going to that meeting on Foreign Relief?"

"You've discouraged my philanthropies," Julia said. "Besides, they won't miss me." She lowered her gaze, and made a wry deprecating mouth.

He felt that she was shutting him out from something—from her cold youth. He had not intended to discourage her enthusiasms, but it would have relieved him to enfold her in the warmth of his inertia. He said inwardly that he must keep himself until she needed him. He wondered if he were merely jealous of her youngness which went on beyond him discovering itself.

There was a pastel on the desk beside him. "I see Allen has done another portrait of you."

Julia flushed as she turned to him. In her open look he found something concealed. He was ashamed of his thought. He stared at his own hands and hated their sensitiveness.

"I can't pretend to see myself in it. It looks grotesque to us with our Victorian conceptions of art, doesn't it?" She smiled, gazing at him with a harassed but eager air of demand.

He did not wish to see her eyes that asked to be defended against themselves. He stared at the picture a moment in silence. It irritated him to feel that the artist had observed something in Julia which was hidden from her husband. When he finally glanced with hard amused eyes at her, he felt himself weak. "My mentality is not equal to an appreciation of your friend's stuff. I'm hopelessly bourgeois, Julia." He would not admit his hardening against each of Julia's interests as they came to her. He put his pain with the transience of her youth and condescended to her so that he need not take note of himself. "Did you arrange for the lecture courses at the settlement house?" he asked. He missed her former feverish engrossment in the projected lecture series and wanted to bring her back to it.

Julia made a pathetic grimace. "You've laughed at me so, Laurie. I realize all that was absurd—terribly futile."

"Did I? I thought I agreed with you that it was a fine thing to inoculate the struggling masses with the culture bug." He could not control his sarcasms, though he uttered them lightly. He wanted her to be as tired as he was—to rest with him. There was sweat on his wrists as he took his pipe from his pocket and pushed some tobacco into the dry charred bowl. When he laughed at her the pupils of his gray eyes were small and sharp and defensive, as though they had been pricked by his pain. Beautiful, he thought. She doesn't need me.

"I have a very middle-aged feeling about the welfare of humanity."

She came over and knelt by his side. "Am I too ridiculous? Can't you take me seriously, Laurie?" She wondered why it was that when he looked at her she always found suffering in his face. He held himself away from what she wanted to give. She wanted an abandon in which she would be glorified. She imagined eyes finding her wonderful. She smiled at him, her sweet humorless smile.

Laurence stroked her hair. "I take you too seriously," he said. "I sometimes feel that a husband is a very casual affair to you modern women."

She was tender to his ignorance of her and vain of her secret terror of herself. Watching him, she thought of the day when his youngest child died and he had allowed her to see his suffering. Because she had never wished to hurt him she resented it that he had never again been helpless before her. She wondered if he had been strong like this to his other wife, or if he gave more of his suffering to the dead than to the living. Suffering filled Julia with tenderness, so she could not think herself cruel. "Dear!" She kissed him gently, maternally, and climbed to her feet.

He saw her reproachful eyes. Youth, so free with itself. Rapacious for emotion. He felt bitterly his necessity more final than hers. "Where's my last Journal of American Science?" He dismissed her intensity. Lifting his thick brows, he took out spectacles and put them on. He watched her over the rims.

She handed him his paper. He was a child to her. Her secret sense of sin made her strong and superior. She wanted to be gentle. She did not know why the sense of wrongdoing made her so confident of herself. While he read the journal she seated herself on the opposite side of the fireplace with her embroidery. When he lowered the paper for an instant and she had a glimpse of his oldish oblivious face, she loved its unawareness and tears came to her eyes again.

On Saturday morning Julia attended the meeting of a club in which the problems of business women were reviewed. The members gathered in a hotel auditorium where musicales were sometimes given. The long windows of the room opened above an alleyway and its gold rococo gloom was relieved of the obscure sunshine by electric lights. The women sat in little groups here and there, only half filling the place, and the murmur of voices went on indistinguishably until the president, Mrs. Hurst, a pale self-confident little woman with a whimsical smile, stepped to the platform, below the garlanded reliefs of Beethoven and Mozart, and struck her gavel on the desk. Then an unfinished silence crept over the scattered assemblage. A stout intellectual-looking Jewess came forward ponderously, adjusted her nose glasses, and read the minutes of the previous meeting, while those before her listened with forced attention, or frankly considered the interesting design of green and black embroidery which ornamented her dark blue dress.

But once the subjects of the day were under discussion the concentration of the audience was natural and intense. Then the president, with demure severity, rapped with her gavel and reminded too ardent debaters that they were out of order.

Julia could not resist the sense of importance that it gave her to state her serious opinion upon certain problems which affected her sex. When she rose to express herself her exposition was so succinct that she was invited to the platform where what she said could be better appreciated.

The repetition of her speech was uncomfortably self-conscious. Her cheeks grew faintly pink. There were several women in the audience whom she disliked, and when she talked in this manner she felt that she was beating them down with her righteousness. She observed in the faces of many a virtuous and deliberate stupidity that was a part of their determination not to understand her.

Her speech intoxicated her a little. When she stepped to the floor amidst small volleys of applause, the room about her grew slightly dim. For an hour the discussion went on, back and forth, one woman rising and the next interrupting her statement. After Julia herself had spoken, nothing further seemed to her of consequence. The other women were hopelessly verbose, or, if they argued against her, ridiculously unseeing. Their past applause rang irritatingly in her mind. She recalled Dudley Allen's contempt for this feeble utilitarian consideration of eternal things. She was proud of comprehending the unmorality—the moral cynicism—of art. She felt that her broad capacity for understanding men like Dudley Allen liberated her from the narrow ethical confines of the lives that surrounded her, which took their color from social usage.

Yet she resented Dudley's attitude toward her slight attempts at self-expression. It reminded her of Laurence's protective air when she first took a position under him at the laboratory. It was part of the conspiracy against her attempt at achieving significance beyond the limits of her personal problem. It hurt her as much as it pleased her when either Dudley or her husband complimented her dress or commented on the grace of her hands when she was pouring tea. Her feeling was the same when she thought of having a child. She wanted the child in everything but the sense of accepting the inevitable in maternity. She sometimes imagined that if she could bear a child that was hers alone she could be glad of it. In order to avoid being stifled by a conviction of inferiority, she was constantly demanding some assurance of dependence on her from those she was associated with.

Since childhood Dudley Allen had looked to himself to achieve greatness. He had been a pretty child, but effeminate, undersized, and not noted for cleverness. His father was a Unitarian minister in a New England town; his mother, an ambitious woman absorbed in the pursuit of culture. Her esthetic conceptions were of an intellectual order, but she sang in the choir of her husband's church and thought of herself as frustrated in the expression of a naturally artistic temperament.

Dudley remembered her with vexation. She had been ambitious for him, and he had resented her efforts to use him for vicarious self-fulfilment. She had him taught to play the violin and developed his taste for music. It was chiefly in contradiction to her suggestions that he early interested himself in paint. Now he played the violin occasionally, but never in public.

His father was a man repressed and made severe by his sense of justice. As a child Dudley knew that this parent was ashamed of his son's physical weakness and emotional explosiveness. His father wanted him to be a lawyer. His mother wished him to become a man of letters or a musician of distinction.

Dudley was reared in the sterile atmosphere of a religion which confined itself to ethical adherences. However, he absorbed Biblical lore and adapted it to his more poetic needs. His father's contempt pained him, but in no wise diminished the boy's vaguely acquired conviction that he was himself one of the chosen few. Dudley identified himself with the singers of Israel who spoke with God. As he was unable to cope with bullying playmates of his own age, his exalted isolation was his defense.

When he was twelve years old his mother discovered a journal in which he had set down some of his intimacies with the Creator. She admonished him for his absurdities and burned the book. The incident helped to develop his resistance to the opinions of those who would destroy his consoling fancies. He noted precociously symptoms of his mother's weaknesses.

By the time he was sent away to college he had developed his secret defense, and his timidity was no longer so apparent. His progress through his courses, while erratic, was in part brilliant. When he returned home after his first absence his father showed some pride in the visit.

At eighteen Dudley had evolved a philosophy which permitted him to look upon himself as a prophet. Praise irritated him as much as blame. When people made him angry he retorted to them with waspish sarcasms. When he was alone he worked himself into transports of despair which made him happy. He thought of himself as the peculiar interpreter of universal life. He liked to go out in the woods and fields alone, and under the trees to take his clothes off and roll in the grass. He was recklessly generous on occasion, in defiance of habits of penuriousness. He felt most kindly toward Negroes, day laborers, and other people whose social status was inferior to his own. Yet among his own kind he exacted every recognition of social superiority.

After vexatious arguments with his father, he went to Paris to continue the study of painting. His technical facility surprised every one. His conversations were facile and worldly, he was impeccable in his dress, while he thought of a trilogy in spirit which embraced David in Israel, Spinoza, and himself. His greatest fear in life was the fear of ridicule. The physical cowardice which had oppressed his childhood remained with him, and his escape from it was still through his religious belief in his inward significance. Men of the crasser type despised him utterly, and he confuted them with stinging cleverness. A few who were artists were attracted by the rich, almost feminine quality of his emotions. He found these men, rather than the women he knew, were the dominant figures in his life.

He was in terror of all women with whom he could not establish himself on planes of physical intimacy. But after he had arrived at such a state with them, they interested him very little. Their attraction for him was curious, rarely compelling. In all of his affairs his condition was complicated by his fear of relinquishing any influence he had once been able to assert.

When he returned to America after two years abroad he felt stronger by the intellectual distances which separated him from his former life. If he had not rebelled against the tone of condescension in which his fellow artists referred to his youthful success, he might have been contented with the humbler friends who were waiting to lionize him. He continued to cultivate an aloofness which sustained his pride as much against inferior compliments as, in the past, it had protected him from jibes.

He could not console himself with the praises of most of the women he met, for he always fancied that they were attempting to flatter him into entanglements. When he encountered Julia, however, the mixture of egoism and humility which he sensed in her discontent intrigued his vanity. He saw that she was isolated and unhappy, and he longed for an admiration which his discrimination would not condemn. In her he anticipated a disciple of whom he need not be ashamed; but until she should be sexually disarmed he was frightened of her.

May and Paul were in the park, by the side of the lake. The water was caught in meshes of hot rays as in a web. In the sky, above the trees, the light, drawn inward from the vague horizon, glowed in a fathomless spot where the sun was sinking. The grass was uncut in the field about them and the little seeded tops floated in a red-lilac mist above the green stems.

"I don't like your Aunt Julia, May!"

May's mouth half smiled, uneasy. "Why not?"

They sat down on a hillock and Paul began to tear up grass blades as if he wanted to hurt them. When he thought of Julia it made him feel sorry for himself, and he hated her. "She's so darn complacent and shallow."

"Why, Paul, Aunt Julia's always doing things for people. She's been awfully good to you. After the way she helped you with your exams I shouldn't think you'd talk like that." May gazed at him with wide soft eyes of reproach.

He picked at the grass. "Oh, I'm joking. I suppose she felt very virtuous when she helped me."

"But she does lots, Paul. She's always interested in some charity work."

"Pish! Charity! What does a woman like that know about life!"

May was timidly silent.

"Some of these days I'm going to cut loose from everything—all these smug conventions."

"But where'll you go, Paul? I thought you wanted to study medicine."

"Well, I'd rather give up that than stand this atmosphere. Oh, hell! What's the use!"

She liked it when he said hell. It made her feel intimate with a strange thing. Afraid. "But what do you want to do, Paul?"

Looking away from her, he did not answer. It soothed him to be superior to May, but he knew enough to be ashamed of such consolation. Too easy. A kid like that! "It don't matter. I've got to get away. I don't fit into the sort of life your Aunt Julia stands for. What's there here for me anyway!" He added, "Of course you're too young to bother with my troubles." He stared stubbornly at the twinkling tree tops across the lake.

May was crushed by this accusation of youth. "You used to say you wanted to stay here and help radicals. Some day there'll be a revolution—" Her humility would not permit her to continue.

Paul was irritated by this reminder of his inconsistency. Still he felt guilty and wanted to be kind. "Pshaw! A lot of chance for revolution in America now. You must have been listening to your Aunt Julia talk parlor socialism, child."

May was feebly indignant in defense. "You didn't think so when you used to read Karl Marx. You know you didn't!"

The thin immature quality of her voice wounded him. He wanted to be separate from it. He was aggrieved because all the world seemed to come to conclusions ahead of him. He wanted to think something no one had ever thought before. Now he had an unadmitted fear that what Julia had said had diminished his interest in the struggles of the working class. "I know a fellow who cut loose from home a couple of months ago and shipped as a steward on a White Star boat. His sister got a letter from him saying that when he got over he was fired, but he found another bunk right away in a sailing vessel. He's going to West Africa. You remember that kid that came and visited the Hursts?"

"Yes, but I don't see any reason for you to throw up everything you've always planned."

Paul rubbed his chin. Beard. Of course it was childish to talk about "seeing life". He didn't take pride in such absurdities as that. "What are you going to do with yourself, May?" He was gentle but light.

"Me?" She smiled with a startled air. She felt helpless when people asked her about herself. Of course she understood he wasn't serious. "I suppose I'm going to college where Aunt Julia went—and then—oh, I don't know, Paul! I'm not clever like Aunt Julia. You know she put herself through, and then earned her own living for a long time." Her small face flushed.

As she turned a little he watched the thick pale braid of her hair swing between her shoulders. "Yes, I know. Aunt Julia thinks the fact that she once worked deserves special recognition." His sarcasm was laborious. He knew that he was saying too much. He leaned forward and twitched May's plait. "Why don't you do your hair up? You want to look grown-up."

She laughed. She was grateful when he teased her. That meant it didn't matter what she answered. "I don't want to look grown-up."

"Aunt Julia doesn't want any grown-up step-daughters around." Something had him, he thought. It was irresistible.

"Paul!" A catch of surprise and rebuke in her soft tone. "I don't know what's got into you lately. I think it's horrid—always suggesting Aunt Julia has some mean motive in everything she does! She's one of the loveliest people on earth! She's too good for you. You just don't understand her and you're jealous."

Paul was amused. "Jealous, am I!" He would not show the child his vexation with her. All at once he was disconcerted to realize that he had become very depressed. He pitied himself. He watched May's legs as she stretched them stiffly before her, thin little legs. Her high shoes were loosely laced and the tops bulged away from her ankles. Sweet. He reached and took her hand. Cold little hand! May, too embarrassed to take notice of his gesture, let him hold it. He thought she was sweet. He might like to kiss her—maybe. Not now. He could not bear to be as young as she was. While he held her hand it came over him that there was something dark and sickly in himself. He was vain that she could not understand it. Rotten. She's a kid. He tried not to recognize his pride in finding himself impure. He was fed up with everything. Hell!

As the sun disappeared the world grew suddenly bright, and long red rays striped the tree trunks and the grass, endless rays reaching softly out of the gorgeous welter in the western sky. The water twinkled fixedly. The green grass was like mist over the fields.

Paul became abruptly agitated. "Better go home, hadn't we?"

May glanced at him furtively. His eyes made her unhappy. "I suppose we had."

They got up awkwardly. When they were standing he let her hand drop as if it had been nothing. She walked before him, a little girl in a short dress with a soft braid of hair hanging under a red cap.

"You don't look fifteen, May."

"Don't I?"

He tried to catch up with her. He wondered what he was afraid of. Her voice had a smothered sound, almost like a sob. She did not look back.

It was nearly night now. The sky without the sun was a dark burning blue. A strange cloud floated white above the black trees.

Paul was suddenly happy and excited. When I get home—Uncle Alph—that old fool. Aunt Susie. They were married. What did that ever mean! Purification by fire is all that's good enough for people like that. A sin to get married at all. If I thought people's bodies were like that! Paul wondered to himself if he were mad. It hurt to think through things. People went on living in their filthy world. Thick stockings were ugly. May's legs. Thin little legs in ugly stockings. Why doesn't she shine her shoes! Little rag picker! "Did you know that you were an untidy person, May?" he called. As she looked back over her shoulder he could feel her smile. Her vague face stared pale at him down the path. The moon was floating out from the trees, pale moon like a face. Thin light stole silver along the branches high up. Little moon, said Paul to himself, staring at May's face and smiling. He felt ill, foolishly, pleasantly ill.

When he came up with her it was as if he were his own shadow walking beside her. "Little moon, I love you." He talked under his breath. He scarcely wanted her to hear his absurdity. Then he placed his arm around her. Her cold sweet thinness was like the shadow of the moon, thin and still on the topmost branch of the strange tree. Her small breast swelled against his hand and he could feel her heart beat. "Oh, May!" He kissed her. He kissed the silence between them. "Gee, kid!" he said.

"Paul, dear."

They walked along together, happy; but less happy as they neared the hedge that cut them off from the street and the glow from an arc lamp began to fall across the grass.

When they stood under the light the absurdity had gone from Paul. He wondered what had happened to him back there in the darkness. He had taken his arm from her waist and now he pressed her hands, afraid that she would observe the change in him. "Good night, May, child."

May was tremulous and bewildered. "Good night, Paul." She tried laboriously to fit her tone to his brotherly kindliness.

Mrs. Hurst sat with Julia at tea in Julia's upstairs room. The late sun stretched tired rays across the soft blue carpet. The yellow curtains glowed before the open windows, and, fluttering apart, showed the thick foliage of the trees that screened the houses opposite. The atmosphere intensified the very immobility of the furniture. There was a voluptuous finality in the liquid repose of light on the polished floor and the glint of a glass vase, where needle rays of brightness were transfixed among the stems of flowers.

Julia poured tea from a flat vermilion pot. The tea stood clear and dark in the black cups. Over the two women hung a moist bitter odor, the bruised sweetness of withering roses. The afternoon smells of dampened dust and new-cut grass blew in from the street.

Mrs. Hurst took her cup in her small, slightly unsteady hand, and sipped. The veins were growing large and hard and showed through the delicately withered skin on which there were tiny brown spots like stains. She wore a wedding ring rubbed thin. "My dear, you still have that wonderful old Negress who used to be your maid? How do you manage to keep her? I'm always struggling with some fresh domestic problem." Mrs. Hurst smiled and with her free hand settled her trim glasses on her neat nose. Her sweet little face, turned toward Julia, showed a determined insistence on negative happiness. "I think we have a great deal more to struggle with than our grandmothers did. We haven't only our homes to look after, but our social responsibilities are so great." Mrs. Hurst was beautifully and simply dressed in gray, and the soft outline of her hat, with its tilt of roses at the back, gave an air of gallantry to her faded features, which were those of a sophisticated little girl—the face of a woman of forty-six whose sex life has passed away without her knowing it.

"I'm afraid I've become a renegade as far as my social responsibilities are concerned. I feel myself so inadequate to any real accomplishment, Mrs. Hurst." Julia smiled guardedly and resentfully. Something in her wanted to destroy the delicate aggressive repose of the woman opposite, and felt helpless before it.

"Ah, you mustn't feel that, my dear. All of us feel it at times, but I do believe that it depends on us women more than on our men folk, perhaps, to allay the unrest of our day. Changing conditions of labor have taken the homes away from so many. I think we should carry the spirit of the home out into the world." Mrs. Hurst made a plaintive little moue of faded sauciness. As men were obliterated from her personal interests, she reverted to a child's demure coquetry in pleading her cause with her own sex.

"I can't look upon myself as the person for such a mission," Julia said. Her eyes and lips were cold as she stared pleasantly at her visitor. Julia felt a sudden sharp vanity in the thought of the sin against society which initiated her into another life. She was confused by her pride in adultery, and sought for an exalted ethical term which would justify her sense of glorying in her act. Dudley—his hands upon me. I couldn't be free. Eagles. The ethics of eagles. Julia knew that she was absurd. She was humiliated and defiant. She was aware of her body under her clothes as apart from her, and as though it were the only thing in the world that lived. It was terrible to feel her body lost from her. She fancied this was what people meant by the sense of nakedness. When Dudley kissed her on the lips there was no nakedness, for she and her body had the same existence. She despised Mrs. Hurst, who separated her from her body. "You know I haven't a real genius for setting the world right."

Mrs. Hurst was gentle and severe. "We can't afford to lose you! I shall ask your delightful husband to influence you. As for genius—I imagine each of us has his own definition of that. We all think you showed something very much like genius in your conduct of the college campaign fund last winter. You should hear Charles expatiate on your cleverness as a business woman. We are practical people, Julia Farley, and we do need money. It is the golden key which opens the door for most of our ideals, I'm afraid."

Julia frowned slightly and tried to control her irritation. "Why can't Mr. Hurst undertake some of the financial problems? He would reduce my poor little efforts to such insignificance."

"But there you are, my dear! Charles lives in a man's world. He doesn't understand these things. Women are the conscience of the race." Mrs. Hurst smiled again and in her small mouth showed even rows of artificial teeth.

When Julia woke in the night beside Laurence she perceived her body lying there naked and apart, and hands moving over it—horrible and secret hands. In the daytime in the street the body walked with her outside her clothes. With strange men her consciousness of that horrible impersonal flesh that was hers, though she knew nothing of it—though it belonged to the whole world—was most acute.

The curtains moved and the spots of light on the floor opened and closed like eyes. A fly had crept inside the screens and made a singing noise against the window. A vase of flowers was on the table, and the shadow of a blossom, rigid and delicate, fell in the bar of sunshine that bleached the polished wood. There was pale sunshine on the chess board at which May and Paul were playing. Light took the color from the close-cropped hair at the nape of Paul's neck, and, when May glanced up at him, filled her eyes with brilliant vacancy so that she looked strange.

May bent forward again, her mouth loose in wonder.

Paul made a stupid move.

"Ah! You've lost him!" Aunt Julia said.

He did not answer her, but his shoulders took a resentful curve. He felt as if the veins in his temples were bursting, pouring floods of darkness before his eyes. He wished he might be rid of her, always there in the room beside him and May. He pushed forward another piece.

Aunt Julia came and stood beside him. She leaned down. She leaned down and laid her hand on his arm. "If only you hadn't lost that knight!"

The sound of her voice made everything dark again. He resented her more than he had ever resented anything on earth.

"Let me move for you once, Paul, child."

"But that won't be fair, Aunt Julia!" May watched them with a sudden brightening and dimming of the eyes. She was startled by the look of Aunt Julia's faintly flushed face so close to Paul's. What makes him look like that!

"I'll play for you, dear, too," Aunt Julia said. She was sorry for herself because her loneliness made her want even the children. She was tender of them. They could not understand her. She would not admit to herself that Paul's response to her presence thrilled and strengthened her. She wanted to be kind to the poor awkward boy. May was such a baby. "Will you let me move your pawn there, May?"

May nodded. She was restive. She wanted to move for herself. When she resumed the game her eyes became wide and engrossed. "Check! Check!" She came out of her delight. She was clapping the palms of her thin hands and they made a muffled sound. They fell apart abruptly. Once more Aunt Julia was leaning close to Paul.

"You finished me all right, May."

May wondered if Paul were angry with her. What made his eyes so hard!

Julia was ashamed before May. That spineless little girl! Julia wanted to leave them both. May and the boy hurt her. Her body was so alive that her awareness of herself was very small. She was sure of her existence only through this humiliating certainty of other being. Their youth seemed disgusting to her and she wanted to leave them with it. She smiled at them constrainedly. The two figures swam before her. "Good-by, Paul. I must leave you children and attend to some humdrum duties below stairs."

"Good-by," Paul said. He could not look at her. She went out. The stir of her dress died away. He feared to hear it go and to be alone with something in himself. "I'm sick of chess, May. I must be going too." He rose.

"Must you?" May got up.

Paul went to the table and took his cap. He wondered why she was so still, why he could not bring himself to see her. When he turned around she was watching him with her silly timid air. It repelled him that she smiled so much for nothing at all. His eyes were blank with distrust of her. Why does she smile like that! She made him cruel. He hated her for making him cruel. He wanted to be cruel. "You seem pretty glad to get rid of me!"

"Why, Paul!" May flashed a glance at him. She stared at the floor, and she was dying in the obscure impression of moonlight on trees near a park gate.

Paul came up to her and, with the surreptitious movement of a sulky child, pressed a hard kiss against her mouth.

Before she could respond to him he ran out, through the hall and down the stairs and into the street. He was terrified lest he should see Julia before he could leave the house. Anything but May! He didn't want May. Aunt Julia always coming close to him, touching him, laying her hand on his. He felt trapped in his loathing of her. Why was it he could never forget her!

It was growing dusk. On either side of the infinite street the houses were vague. The trees were like plumes of shadow waving above him. The stars in the sky, that yet glowed with the passing of the sun, were burning dust. He tried to think that he was mad. Beyond him under a street lamp he saw a dimly illumined figure—big buttocks wagging before him under a thin calico skirt. And the Negress passed out of sight.

By the time he reached home he was sick of himself, thoroughly dejected, perceiving the vileness of his own mind. He crept up the back stairs unseen, and in his small room lay face downward on his bed. He thought he ought to kill himself to keep from thinking things like that. Uncle Alph and his Aunt down in the dining room. He began to sob. God, all the rottenness in the world! If I did that it would be outright in the daytime. I wouldn't be ashamed. Naked bodies moved before him in a long line. They were ugly because he wanted to keep them out. Aunt Julia was there and even May. He would not see them, but they were ugly. Their ugliness was the horror that enveloped him. He knew their ugliness because it became a part of him without his having seen it.

There was something beautiful at last. It was nakedness that belonged to no one. Nakedness without a face. It took him. He was asleep. There were breasts in the darkness. He was afraid. He could not wake up. He was fear and he was afraid of himself. He was against naked breasts that held him, that he could not see.

May tip-toed down the dark stairs, her small hand sliding along the cold mysterious rail.

When she reached the lower hall she saw the door of the study open and Father sitting there with Bobby who was studying and very intent on the book he held upon his knees. There was a green lamp on the desk and a moth bumping against the shade and shattering its wings. The light, falling on Father's back, made the strands of hair twinkle on his drooped head, and his shoulders looked dusty in the black coat he wore. The study windows were open. Beyond Father was the dark yard. A square of the sky was like green silk. The moon, laid on it softly, was breathing light like a sea thing, glowing and dying.

When May had reassured herself of this unchanged world she tip-toed up to her room. She wanted to undress quickly so that she could be in bed and forget everything but Paul's unexpected kiss and the new cruel feel of his lips. Now that she was alone she wanted to forget about being ashamed. She had a curious, almost frightening, intimacy with her own sensations. She wanted to go on thinking of herself forever and ever.

Dudley's intuitions were capable of sensing what might be called the psychological essences of those about him. He never became aware of the elusive value of a personality without wishing to absorb it into himself so that it became a part of his own experience. He could not bear to lose his sense of identity with those from whom he had compelled such contacts. For this reason, though he despised his parents, he maintained toward them the attitude of a dutiful son.

It was the same with all the friends of other days. When he was attracted by some one Dudley initiated him into a devastating intimacy. The person, for a time, would yield to a flattering tyranny, but, in the end, would rebel against the inequality of possession. Dudley refuted all intellectual justifications of protest, and attributed the failure of his friendships to the emotional inadequacies of his disciples.

When women abandoned their sexual defenses to him, however, he found nothing left to achieve. They held a view of their relationships which made the subtler kinds of personal pride unnecessary to them. If they had received in life any spiritual disfigurements, they were only too ready to expose these where it would buy them a little pity through which they might insinuate themselves into another soul. Their spiritual instincts were as promiscuous as the physical expressions of embryo life. It was only as regarded their bodies that they showed anything like reserve. Even here it was more a matter of vanity than anything else, for in surrendering themselves in the flesh the thing they seemed most to fear was that once they were revealed they would not be sufficiently admired. It was irritating to feel that when they abandoned everything to a man they but attained to a subtler possession.

Not long before meeting Julia, Dudley passed through an experience in which he narrowly avoided matrimony. The girl had appeared to be peculiarly submissive to his influence; but at a time when his complacency had allowed him to feel most tender of her she had evaded him. If she had been less precipitate he would have married her. He was thankful for the circumstance which had saved him, and when he corresponded with her he called her "my dear sister," or "my very dear friend". Now that she had abandoned him he was more generous toward her than he had ever been. He knew that one could give one's self in an impersonal gesture. But it was very tricky to take from others. He wrote her that he must learn to function alone, that it was the artist's life. She could never explain to herself why it was that she resented so deeply his condemnation of his own weakness and his reiteration of his need of the isolation and suffering which would clarify his inner vision.

Dudley hinted to all the women he met that Art was his mistress and that he could not permit himself to approach them seriously without subjecting them to the injustice of this rivalry. The physical terrors of his childhood had aggravated his caution. His inward distress was terrible when he was obliged to reconcile his resistance to the world outside him with the ideal of the great artist which commanded him to abandon himself to all that came. His desire, even as regarded material things, was to hoard everything that contributed to the erection of a barrier between him and the ruthless struggle of men. He longed for commercial success, and he displayed an ostentatious indifference to the salableness of his work. He had a physical attachment for his possessions.

He hated gatherings of all sorts unless they were of friends who would respond to all he had to say and whom he might insidiously dominate. Yet he had encountered Julia first at the home of Mrs. Hurst, whose bourgeois pretensions to esthetic interest he despised. These heterogeneous assemblies gave him the cold impression of a mob. Anything which affected him and at the same time evaded him was unadmittedly alarming. He had not appeared at his best that night until he was able to lead Julia aside and talk to her alone. Then he became suddenly at ease. There was a slightly bitter humility about her confessions of ignorance that made him feel her potentially appreciative in a genuine sense.

Strangely enough the frankness of her self-depreciation disarmed him. He felt that he must search for a hidden pretension that would show her weak and allow him an approach. Wherever she displayed symptoms of confidence he confronted her with her dependence on illusion. He told himself that all that one individual owed another was the means to truth. Believing in the dignity of self-responsibility, he could not assume the burden of Julia's discouragement. He imagined her unhappy. If he helped her to see herself he was aiding her to attain the only ultimate values in life.

After he and Julia became lovers he was troubled not a little by the necessity for concealment, for he had told her so frequently that her relation to Laurence had been falsified by the accumulation of reserves.

Dudley had said so often that he considered Laurence a repressed and misunderstood man that Julia, with an antagonism which she did not confess to herself, asked her lover to dine at her home. Meeting Dudley as Laurence's wife again put her on the offensive regarding everything that concerned her house and the usual circumstances of her existence. She had never taken such care in composing a meal as she did for this occasion, and she spent half an hour arranging the flowers in a low bowl on the table.

When Dudley came he greeted Laurence with peculiar eagerness. Julia found it hard to forgive her lover for making himself ridiculous.

During dinner the guest led the talk which was exclusively between the two men. He insisted on discussing bacteriological subjects with Laurence. Laurence deferred politely to Dudley's ignorance.

The large room in which they sat was lighted by the candles at either end of the long table. The glow, like a bright shadow, was reflected in the dark woodwork and against the obscure walls. Through the tall open windows the wind brought the warm night in with a soft rush of blackness. Then the pale candle flames flattened into fans and the wax slipped with a hiss into the burnished holders.

Laurence was humped in his chair as usual, so that the rough collar of his coat rose up behind against his neck. Most of the time as he talked he stared straight before him; but occasionally he glanced with his small pained eyes into Dudley's engrossed and persistent face.

Julia saw with unusual clearness everything that Laurence said and did. She was possessively aware of his gestures, and when he spoke easily and fluently of his work she had a proprietary satisfaction in it, and was full of animosity toward Dudley's questioning.

She felt betrayed by Dudley, who approached Laurence by ignoring her mediumship. She could not bear the admission of Dudley's power to exclude her. They could only live in each other. She gave him life in her, but he obliterated her from himself, and so condemned her to a sort of death. And while she was dead he gave Laurence her life. She was dead and alone with her body that was so alive. She felt her breasts swelling loathsomely under her crisp green muslin dress, and her long hidden legs stretched horribly from the darkness of her hips. Her live body possessed her stupidly. If only he would take it from her! If only with one glance he would admit her to himself!

As they passed from the dining room Julia touched Laurence despairingly. He saw her worried smile. "You're warm, dear," she said. And she added, "I wonder how our children fared upstairs, eating alone in state." She wanted to compel Laurence into the atmosphere of domestic intimacies where her guest had no part.

"I wonder." He returned her smile abstractedly and spoke to Dudley again. "You know Weissman of Berlin—"

Julia looked unconsciously tragic and bit her lip. "Have you been able to arrange for your exhibition, Dudley?" she interrupted demandingly. Her voice was sharp.

"Why, no—" Dudley glanced at her with pleasant interrogation. "You were saying—about Weissman?" He was naïve like a child unconscious of rudeness.

When they came to the staircase Laurence went on ahead because of the light. Dudley took Julia's arm, bare to the elbow. She shuddered away from him. She was observing his strut, the way he walked, his weight bearing on his heels. When the glow from the upper hall fell on them she saw his short arms held stiffly at his sides, the black down clinging on his wrists and the backs of his hands, the twinkle of his crisp reddish mustache that appeared artificially imposed on his small, almost womanish, face, and the thick black curls, soft and a little oily, that clung about his ill-formed head. She disliked even the careful carelessness of his dress.

But her loathing of him was after all only horror of herself. If he had given her a look of acceptance she would have become one with him. Then it would have been impossible to see him so separately. She wanted to explain the horror to him. If he had known her thoughts he could not have endured them, and he would have saved them both.

But he was separate and satisfied in himself. "Julia," he said in a low voice, "Laurence Farley is a remarkable person. There is something in the dignity of his reserve that puts us to shame. My God, what a tragedy he is! He interests me tremendously. I'm grateful to you for letting me know him."

Julia felt hateful that he presumed to tell her this. She had always spoken gratefully of Laurence. She had much pride in her pain in never finding excuses for herself.

"He isn't sophisticated in our sense," Dudley said, "but he makes me feel that there is something puerile and immature in both of us."

Julia said, in a hard voice, "I don't think I have ever failed in appreciation of Laurence." Suddenly she realized that both these men were strangers to her, that she loved and wanted only herself. Her despair was so complete that it relieved her, and she could scarcely hold back the tears.

Dudley wanted to despise Laurence. There was something in the personality of Julia's husband which defied contempt. If Laurence had displayed any crass desire for recognition Dudley would have passed him by with relief; but the artist wished to force all sensitive natures to admit that their secrets could not be hidden.

Laurence's regard for Julia was full of the condescension of maturity. He gave to her where it was impossible for him to take. Dudley had always despised her a little, and now the fact that her husband excluded her from his suffering was testimony of her inadequacy. Without admitting it to himself, Dudley was beginning to resist being associated with her. He reflected that it was grotesque to dream of finding understanding in such a struggling and incomplete nature. Julia was possessive. The heroic woman must rise above this instinct.

Her breasts were a little old, her body thin. He remembered the angularity of her hips, the too long line of her back. He saw her eyes uplifted to his with that pained, withheld look which annoyed him so much. Her skin was very white, but a little coarse. When she put her arms about him her hair, all disarranged, fell wild and heavy about her strained throat. He did not wish to admit that he had discovered his mistress to be less beautiful than, in the beginning, he had imagined her. He revolted against these obvious judgments of the senses. It was unpleasant to recall her so distinctly. He pitied her mental incompleteness which made it impossible to give her the purer values which he wanted to share with her.

Dudley congratulated himself on a curiously sensitive understanding of what Laurence had endured. To escape the unpleasant vision of Julia's body and the dumb gaze which fatigued him so much he concentrated all his reflections on his magnanimous sympathy for the man.

He felt that face to face with Julia he would never be able to explain to her what he perceived in regard to her husband, so he wrote her a letter about it. "Laurence Farley is our equal, Julia," he wrote. "We owe it to ourselves to treat him as such. Now that I have had the opportunity to observe and appreciate his rare qualities I know that the relation between you and me will never fulfil its deep promise while this lie exists between you and him. The truth will be hard, but he is big enough to bear it. He is a man who has suffered from the American environment, and has been warped and drawn away from his true self. If his scientific erudition had been fostered in an atmosphere which loved learning for its own sake, he would have been able to express himself. He has the ripe nature of a savant. I feel that meeting with you both has a rare meaning for me. We must all suffer in this thing. Perhaps he most, except that I must suffer alone. You and he are close—in spite of everything you are close. Closer perhaps than even you and I have been. But I must learn, Julia. I am struggling yet. I have farther to go than he has, in spite of my superior knowledge of certain things, of worlds of which he has never become cognizant. I have not yet learned as he has to rise above myself. In my slow way I shall do so. I shall learn, Julia, and you shall help me—you two people. I want him to be my friend. I respect him. I love you both. Oh, Julia, how deeply, deeply I have loved you."

When Dudley had dispatched this letter he found himself liberated from many obscure depressions that had been hampering his spirit. The important thing in Julia's life was her relation to Laurence. He, Dudley, would accept the fact that he was only an incident in her struggle to achieve herself.

Yet he was disconcerted by the premonition that her interpretation of what he had done would not be his. He was in furtive terror of being made ridiculous.

Through the tall, open windows of the dining room, Julia, seated with some mending, could see the dull line of the roofs in the next street, and the dreary sky shadowed with soiled milky-looking clouds. The grass in the back yard was a bright dead green. It had grown tall. Flurries of moist acrid wind swept across it, and it bent all at once with a long, undulant motion that was like voluptuous despair. The table cloth rose heavily and fell in a spent gesture against the legs under it. Julia's black muslin dress beat gently about her ankles.

Then the wind passed. The grass blades were fixed and still. In the silent room the ticking of a small clock on a secrétaire sounded labored and blatant. The odor of the cake that Nellie was baking filled the warm air.

Julia heard the postman's whistle and Nellie's heavy step in the hall. Julia thought of Nellie, of the old woman's sureness and silence—a lean old savage woman of many lovers. In all the years that the old Negress had been there she had never showed the need of a confidant. Her children had abandoned her and she had no tie with any human creature save the old man whom she supported who came sometimes to do odd chores.

Julia wondered what had poisoned the white race and given it the need of sanction from some outside source. She wanted a justification of herself, but did not know from what quarter she should demand it.

Nellie entered with a letter and Julia, recognizing the handwriting at once, left it on the table without opening it. As long as the letter lay on the table unknown she controlled its contents.

She turned her back to it and watched the branches of the elm tree, which were stirring again, heavily and ceaselessly, against the fence. Her needle pricked her finger and a rust-colored stain spread in the bit of lace which she was mending. The sun burst through the clouds and the room was filled with the shadowless glare, and with moist intense heat.