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WHAT WILL PEOPLE SAY?

A NOVEL BY

RUPERT HUGHES

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON MCMXIV

ILLUSTRATIONS

They were As Oblivious of Their Peril as Tristan and Isolde Frontispiece And Now Design Emerged, a Woman Stood Revealed Facing p. 18 "There's That Other Me Down in the Pool, Watching This Me" " 252

Her Obstinate Pluck Bewildered Him " 480 [Pg 1]

WHAT WILL PEOPLE SAY? CHAPTER I

FIFTH AVENUE at flood-tide was a boiling surf of automobiles. But at nearly every corner a policeman succeeded where King

Canute had failed, and checked the sea or let it pass with a nod or a jerk of thumb.

The young army officer just home-come from the Philippines felt that he was in a sense a policeman himself, for he had spent his

last few years keeping savage tribes in outward peace. When he was away or asleep the Moros rioted at will. And so the traffic-officer of this other extreme of civilization kept these motor-Moros in orderly array only so long as he kept them in sight.

One glare from under his vizor brought the millionaire's limousine to a sharp stop, or sent it shivering back into position. But once the vista ahead was free of uniforms all the clutches leaped to the high; life and limb were gaily jeopardized, and the most appalling risks run with ecstasy.

The law of New York streets and roads forbids a car to commit at any time a higher speed than thirty miles an hour; and never a man that owns one but would blush to confess it incapable of breaking that law.

As Lieutenant Forbes watched the surge of automobiles[Pg 2] from the superior height of a motor-bus it amused him to see how little people lose of the childhood spirit of truancy and adventure. All this grown-up, sophisticated world seemed to be run like a school, with joyous deviltry whenever and wherever the teacher's back was turned, but woe to whoso was caught; every one winking at guilt till authority detected it, then every one solemnly approving the punishment.

Mr. Forbes had not seen Fifth Avenue since the pathetic old horse-coaches were changed to the terrific motor-stages. He had not seen the Avenue since it was widened--by the simple process of slicing off the sidewalks and repairing their losses at the expense of the houses. The residences on both sides of the once so stately corridor looked to him as if a giant had drawn a huge carving-knife along the walls, lopping away all the porticos, columns, stoops, and normal approaches, and leaving the inhabitants to improvise such

exits as they might.

The splendid facade of the Enslee home had suffered pitifully. He remembered how the stairway had once come down from the vestibule to the street with the sweeping gesture of a hand of welcome. Now the door was knee-deep in the basement, and the scar of the sealed-up portal was not healed above.

The barbarity of the assault along the line had not apparently relieved the choke of traffic. Or else the traffic had swollen more fiercely still, as it usually does in New York at every attempt in palliation.

As far as Forbes could see north and south the roadway was glutted from curb to curb with automobiles. And their number astonished him even less than their luxury. The designers had ceased to mimic hansoms, broughams, and victorias following invisible horses ridiculously. They had begun to create motors pure and simple, built to contain and follow and glorify their own engines.

Many of the cars were gorgeously upholstered, Aladdin's divans of comfort and speed; and some of them were deco[Pg 3]rated with vases of flowers. Their surfaces were lustrous and many-colored, sleekly tremendous. They had not yet entirely outgrown the imitation of the wooden frame, and their sides looked frail and satiny, unfit for rough usage, and sure to splinter at a shock. But he knew that they were actually built of aluminum or steel, burnished and enameled.

What he did not know was that the people in them, lolling relaxed, and apparently as soft of fiber as of skin, were not the weaklings they looked. They, too, like their cars, only affected fatigue and ineptitude, for they also were built of steel, and their splendid engines were capable of velocities and distances that would leave a gnarled peasant gasping.

This was one of the many things he was to learn.

From his swaying eery he seemed to be completely lost in a current of idle wealth. The throng, except for the chauffeurs, the policemen, and a few men whose trades evidently fetched them to this lane of pleasure--the throng was almost altogether women. And to Forbes' eye, unused to city standards, almost all the women were princesses.

At first, as his glance fell on each radiant creature, his heart would cry: "There is one I could love! I never shall forget her beauty!" And before the vow of eternal memory was finished it was forgotten for the next.

By and by the show began to pall because it would not end. As peers become commonplace at a royal court, since there is nothing else there, so beauty canceled itself here by its very multitude. For the next mile only the flamboyantly gorgeous or the flamboyantly simple beauty caught his overfed eye. And then even these were lost in the blur of a kaleidoscope twirled too fast.

There was one woman, however, that he could not forget, because he could not find out what she was like. In the slow and fitful progress up the Avenue it chanced that his stage kept close in the wake of an open landaulet.[Pg 4] The stage never fell far behind, and never quite won alongside.

A young woman was alone in the tonneau. At least, he judged that she was young, though his documents were scant. Her head was completely hidden from his view by a hat that was just exactly big enough to accomplish that work of spite.

It was a sort of inverted flower-pot of straw--one of those astonishing millinery jokes that women make triumphs of. It bore no ornament at all except a filmy white bird-of-paradise feather stuck in the center of the top and spraying out in a shape that somehow suggested an interrogation-mark.

Even a man could see that it was a beautiful plume and probably expensive. It had a sort of success of impudence, alone there, and it mocked Forbes by trailing along ahead of him, an unanswerable query.

He grew eager and more eager to see what flower-face was hidden under that overturned straw flower-pot of a hat.

Now and then, as the stage pushed forward, he would be near enough to make out the cunning architecture of the mystery's left shoulder and the curious felicity of her left arm. Seen thus detached, they fascinated him and kindled his curiosity. By and by he was swept near enough to glimpse one rounded knee crossed over the other, and one straight shin creasing a tight skirt, and a high-domed instep, and the peak of one slim shoe.

And once, when the traffic was suddenly arrested, he was close enough to be wildly tempted to bend down and snatch off that ir-

ritating hat. He would have learned at least the color of her hair, and probably she would have lifted her startled face to view like a

reverted rose. He was a fearless soldier, but he was not so daring as all that. Still, he heard her voice as she gossiped to a momentary

neighbor who raised his hat in a touring-car held up abeam her own.[Pg 5]

Her voice did not especially please him; it was almost shrill, and it had the metallic glitter of the New York voice. Her words, too,

were a trifle hard, and as unpoetic as possible.

"We had a rotten time," she said. "I was bored stiff. You ought to have been there."

And then she laughed a little at the malice implied. The policeman's whistle blew and the cars lurched forward. And the stage lumbered after them like a green hippopotamus. Forbes began to feel a gnawing anxiety to see what was under that paradise feather. He assumed that beauty was there, though he had learned from shocking experiences how dangerous it is to hope a woman beautiful because the back of her head is of good omen.

It became a matter of desperate necessity to overtake that will-o'-the-wisp chauffeur and observe his passenger. Great expectations seemed to be justified by the fact that nearly every policeman saluted her and smiled so pleasantly and so pleasedly that the smile lingered after she was far past.

Forbes noted, too, that the people she bowed to in other cars or on the sidewalk seemed to be important people, and yet to be proud

when her hat gave a little wren-like nod in their directions.

At Fifty-first Street, in front of the affable gray Cathedral, there was a long and democratic delay while a contemptuous teamster, perched atop a huge steel girder, drove six haughty stallions across the Avenue; drove them slowly, and puffed deliberate smoke in the face of the impatient aristocracy.

Here a dismounted mounted policeman paced up and down, followed by a demure horse with kindly eyes. This officer paused to pass the time of day with the mysterious woman, and the horse put his nose into the car and accepted a caress from her little gloved hand. Again Forbes heard her voice:[Pg 6]

"You poor old dear, I wish I had a lump of sugar."

It was to the horse that she spoke, but the officer answered:

"The sight of you, ma'am, is enough for um."

Evidently he came from where most policemen come from. The lady laughed again. She was evidently not afraid of a compliment.

But the policeman was. He blushed and stammered:

"I beg your pairdon, Miss--"

He gulped the name and motioned the traffic forward. Forbes was congratulating himself that at least she was not "Mrs." Somebody, and his interest redoubled just as the young woman leaned forward to speak to her chauffeur. She had plainly seen that there was a policeless space ahead of her, for the driver put on such speed that he soon left Forbes and his stage far in the rear.

Forbes, seeing his prey escaping, made a mental note of the number of her car, "48150, N. Y. 1913."

He had read how the police traced fugitive motorists by their numerals, and he vowed to use the records for his own purposes. He must know who she was and how she looked. Meanwhile he must not forget that number--48150, N. Y. 1913--the mystic symbol on her chariot of translation.[Pg 7]

CHAPTER II

HELPLESS to pursue her with more than his gaze, Forbes watched from his lofty perch how swiftly she fled northward. He

could follow her car as it thridded the unpoliced traffic by that dwindling bird-of-paradise plume, that sphinxic riddle of a feathery question-mark.

He mused indulgently upon her as she vanished: "She breaks the law like all the rest when no one is there to stop her. She wheedles

the police with a smile, but behind their backs she burns up the road."

Evidently there were narrow escapes from disaster. One or two pedestrians leaped like kangaroos to escape her wheels. Once or twice collisions with other cars were avoided by sharp swerves or abrupt stops.

The plume went very respectably across the Plaza, for policemen were there on fixed post; but, once beyond, the feather diminished into nothingness with the uncanny speed of a shooting-star.

She was gone. And now he wondered whither she sped, and why. To what tryst was she hastening at such dreadful pace, with such rash desire? He felt almost a jealousy, at least an envy, of the one who waited at the rendezvous.

And then he felt alarm for her. Already she might have met disaster. Her car might have crashed into some other--into a great steel-

girder truck like that that crossed the Avenue. She might even now be lying all crumpled and shattered in a tangle of wreckage.

That taunting white question-feather might be dabbled with red. The face might be upturned to any man's[Pg 8] view and every

man's horror. He was almost afraid to follow farther lest his curiosity be more than sated.

His irresolution was solved for him. The stage was turning out of Fifth Avenue, to cross over to Broadway and Riverside Drive. Forbes was not done with this lane. He rose to leave the bus. It lurched and threw him from bench to bench. He negotiated with difficulty the perilous descent, clutched the hand-rail in time to save himself from pitching head first to the street, clambered down the little stairway with ludicrous awkwardness, stepped on solid asphalt with relief, and walked south.

The press gradually thickened, and before long it was dense and viscid, as if theater audiences were debouching at every corner.

The stream was still almost entirely woman: beautiful woman at the side of beautiful woman, or treading on her high heels; chains of womankind like strings of beaded pearls, hordes of women, dressed in infinite variations of the prevailing mode. They strode or dawdled, laughing, smiling, bowing, whispering, or gazing into the windows of the shops.

The panorama of windows was nearly as beautiful as the army of women. The great show-cases, dressed with all expertness, were

silently proffering wares that would tempt an empress to extravagance.

A few haberdashers displayed articles of strange gorgeousness for men--shirt-patterns and scarves, bathrobes, waistcoats that

rivaled Joseph's; but mainly the bazars appealed to women or to the men who buy things for women.

The windows seemed to say: "How can you carry your beloved past my riches, or go home to her without some of my delights?" "How fine she would look in my folds!" "How well my diamonds would bedeck her hair or her bosom! If you love her, get me for her!" "It is shameful of you to pretend not to see me, or to confess to poverty! Couldn't you borrow money somewhere to buy[Pg 9] me? Couldn't you postpone the rent or some other debt awhile? Perhaps I could be bought on credit."

Show-windows and show-women were the whole cry. The women seemed to be wearing the spoils of yesterday's pillage, and yet to yearn for to-morrow's. Women gowned like manikins from one window gazed like hungry paupers at another window's manikins.

The richness of their apparel, the frankness of their allure were almost frightful. They seemed themselves to be shop-windows offering their graces for purchase or haughtily labeling themselves "sold." Young or antique, they appeared to be setting themselves forth at their best, their one business a traffic in admiration.

"Look at me! Look at me!" they seemed to challenge, one after another. "My face is old, but so is my family." "My body is fat, but so is my husband's purse!" "I am not expensively gowned, but do I not wear my clothes well?" "I am young and beautiful and superbly garbed, and I have a rich husband." "I am only a little school-girl, but I am ready to be admired, and my father buys me everything

I want." "I am leading a life of sin, but is not the result worth while?" "My husband is slaving down-town to pay the bills for these

togs, but are you not glad that I did not wait till he could afford to dress me like this?"

Lieutenant Forbes had been so long away from a metropolis, and had lived in such rough countries, that he perhaps mistook the motives of the women of New York, and their standards, underrated their virtues. Vice may go unkempt and shabby, and a saint may take thought of her appearance. Perhaps what he rated as boldness was only the calm of innocence; what he read as a command to admire may have been only a laudable ambition to make the best of one's gifts.

But to Forbes there was an overpowering fleshliness in the display. It reminded him of the alleged festivals of Babylon, where all the women piously offered themselves[Pg 10] to every passer-by and rated their success with heaven by their prosperity with strangers.

It seemed to him that the women of other places than New York must have dressed as beautifully, but in an innocenter way. Here the women looked not so much feminine as female. They appeared to be thinking amorous thoughts. They deployed their bosoms with meaning; their very backs conveyed messages. Their clothes were not garments, but banners.

He had dwelt for years among half-clad barbarians, unashamed Igorrotes; but these women looked nakeder than those. The more

studiously they were robed, the less they had on.

A cynicism unusual to his warm and woman-worshiping soul crept into Forbes' mind. He went along philosophizing:

"All these women are paid for by men. For everything that every one of these women wears some man has paid. Fathers, husbands, guardians, keepers, dead or alive, have earned the price of all this pomp.

"The men who pay for these things are not here: they are in their offices or shops or at their tasks somewhere, building, producing;

or in their graves resting from their labors, while the spendthrift sex gads abroad squandering and flaunting what it has wheedled.

"What do the women give in return? They must pay something. What do they pay?"[Pg 11] CHAPTER III

HE brooded like a sneering Satan for a time upon the meaning of the dress-parade, and then the glory of it overpowered him again. He felt that it would be a hideous world without its luxuries. It was well, he concluded, that men should dig for gold, dive for pearls, climb for aigrets, penetrate the snows for furs, breed worms for silk, build looms, and establish shops--all in order that the she half of the world should bedeck itself.

The scarlet woman on the beast, the pink girl with the box of chocolates, the white matron, the widow in the most costly and becoming weeds--they were all more important to the world than any other of man's institutions, because they were pretty or beautiful or in some way charming--as useless, yet as lovely as music or flowers or poetry.

He was soon so overcrowded with impressions that he could not arrange them in order. He could only respond to them. The individual traits of this woman or that, swaggering afoot or reclining in her car, smote him. Every one of them was a Lorelei singing to him from her fatal cliff, and his heart turned from the next to the next like a little rudderless boat.

Each siren rescued him from the previous, but the incessant impacts upon his senses rendered him to a glow of wholesale enthusi-

asm. He rejoiced to be once more in New York. He began to wish to know some of these women.

It was apparent that many of them were ready enough to extend their hospitality. Numbers of them--beauti[Pg 12]ful ones, too, and lavishly adorned--had eyes like grappling-hooks. Their glances were invitations so pressingly urged that they inspired opposition. They expressed contempt in advance for a refusal. But men easily find strength to resist such invitations and such contempt.

It was not in these tavern-like hearts that Forbes would seek shelter. He wanted to find some attractive, some decently difficult woman to make friends with, make love to. He was heart-free, and impatient for companionship.

When a man is a soldier, an officer, and young, well-made and well-bred, it is improbable that he will remain long without opportu-

nity of adventure.

The woman of the bird-of-paradise feather was buried in Forbes' mind as deeply as if a balcony full of matinee girls had collapsed upon her. Forbes fell in love at first sight a hundred and fifty times on the Avenue. Had he met any one of that cohort again under favoring auspices he might have found in her arms the response he sought. It might have brought him tragic unrest, or the sort of home comfort that makes no history.

Perhaps he did meet some of these potential sweethearts later; but if he did, he could not remember them and he did not heed them, for he was by then involved inextricably with the one he had hunted for and lost.

When he found her he did not remember her any more than the others. She impressed him as a woman of extreme fragility, yet she was to test his strength to its utmost, his endurance, his courage, his readiness for hazard.

He had won a name among brave men for caution in approaching danger, for bravery in the midst of it, and for agility in extricating himself from ambush and trap. This most delicate lady was to teach him to be reckless, foolhardy, maladroit. She would wear him

out in the pursuit of happiness and disgust him with his profession, with himself and her. Under her tutelage he would run through scenes of splendor and scale the heights of excitement. He would know beauty and pleasure and intrigue[Pg 13] and peril. He would know everything but repose, contentment, and peace. He would love her and hate her, abhor her and adore her, be her greatest

friend and enemy, and she his.

At his first meeting with her he pursued her without knowing who she was and without overtaking her. And she, not knowing she

was pursued, unconsciously teased him by keeping just out of his reach and denying him the glimpse of her face.

Perhaps it would have been better for both if they had never come nearer together than in that shadowy, that foreshadowing game

of hide-and-seek in the full sun among the throngs.

Perhaps it was better that they should meet and endure the furnace of emotions and superb experiences in gorgeous scenes.

But, whether for better or worse, they did meet, and their souls engaged in that grapple of mutual help and harm that we call love.

The world heard much of them, as always, and inevitably misunderstood and misjudged, ignoring what justified them, not seeing that their most flippant moments were their most important and that when they seemed most to sin they were clutching at their noblest crags of attainment.

It is such fates as theirs that make the human soul cry aloud for a God to give it understanding, to give it another chance in a better world. The longing is so fierce that it sometimes becomes belief. But while we wait for that higher court it is the province of story-tellers to play at being juster judges than the popular juries are.

Meanwhile Forbes was unsuspicious of the future, and unaware of nearly everything except heart-fag and foot-weariness.

When he returned to his hotel he was a tourist who has done too much art-gallery. Fifth Avenue had been an ambulant Louvre of

young mistresses, not of old masters.[Pg 14]

He crept into a tub of water as hot as he could endure, and simmered there, smoking the ache out of him, and imagining himself

as rich as Haroun al Raschid, instead of a poor subaltern in a hard-worked little army, with only his pay and a small sum that he had saved, mainly because he had been detailed to regions where there was almost nothing fit to buy.

The price of his room at the hotel had staggered him, but he charged it off to a well-earned holiday and pretended that he was a millionaire. He rose from the steaming pool and turned an icy shower on himself with shuddering exhilaration. His blood leaped as at a bugle-call, a reveille to life.

He heard the city shouting up to his windows, and he began to fling on his clothes. And then he realized that he knew nobody among those roaring millions. He cursed his luck and flung into his bathrobe. As he knotted the rope he felt that he might as well be a cowled and cloistered monk in a desert as his friendless self in this wilderness of luxury.

Happiness was bound to elude him as easily as that woman of the white query-plume eluded him when he in his tencent bus pursued her in her five-thousand-dollar landaulet. All he had of her was the back of her hat and the number of her car--N. Y. 41508. Or was it N. Y. 85140, or--what the devil was the number?

He had not brought away even that![Pg 15]

CHAPTER IV

NOTHING can be lonelier than a room in even a best hotel when one is lonesome and when one's window looks out upon crowds. Forbes had pitched his tent at the Knickerbocker, and his view was of Longacre Square.

The Times Building stood aloft, a huddled giraffe of a building. A fierce wind spiraled round it and played havoc with dignity. It was an ill-mannered bumpkin wind from out of town with a rural sense of humor. Women pressed forward into the gale, bending double and struggling with their tormented hats and writhing skirts. Some of the men seemed to find them an attractive spectacle till they felt their own hats caught up and kited to the level of the fourth and fifth windows.

A flock of newsboys, as brisk as sparrows, drove a hustling trade in recovering hats for men who were ashamed of bare heads as of

a nakedness. The gamins darted among the street-cars and automobiles, risking their lives for dimes as sparrows for corn, and escap-

ing death as miraculously.

At the western end of Forty-second Street stood a space of sunset like a scarlet canvas on exhibition. Then swift clouds erased it,

and gusts of rain went across the town in volleys of shrapnel, clearing the streets of a mob. Everybody made for the nearest shelter.

The onset ended as quickly as it began. The stars were in the sky as suddenly as if some one had turned on an electric switch. On the

pavements, black with wet and night, the reflected electric lights trickled. All the pavements had a look of patent leather.[Pg 16]

Forbes sat in the dark room in an arm-chair and muffled his bathrobe about him, watching the electric signs working like solemn acrobats--the girl that skipped the rope, the baby that laughed and cried, the woman that danced on the wire, the skidless tire in the rain, the great sibyl face that winked and advised chewing-gum as a panacea, the kitten that tangled itself in thread, the siphons that filled the glasses--all the automatic electric voices shouting words of light.

Forbes wanted to be among the crowds again. He could not tolerate solitude. He resolved to go forth. It inspired him with pride to put on his evening clothes. While he dressed he sent his silk hat to be ironed by the hotel valet. It came back an ebon crown.

He set it on his head, tapped the top of it smartly, swaggered to the elevator, bowed to the matronly floor clerk as to a queen, went down to the main dining-room, and tried to look at least a duke. He was glad to be in full dress, for the other people were. The head waiter greeted him with respect and handed him the bill of fare with expectation.

He ordered more than he had appetite for, and tried not to blanch at the prices.

The flowers, the shaded candles, the tapestries, the china and the glass and silver, the impassioned violinist leading the sonorous orchestra, all gave him that sense of royalty from which money is most easily wooed. But the cordiality of the thing was fascinating. The whole city seemed to be attending a great reception. New York was giving a party.

And now, indeed, he was in New York again--in it, yet not of it; a poor relation at the wedding feast. He lingered at his solitary banquet like a boy sent away from the table and forced to eat by himself. His extrusion seemed to be a punishment for not being rich. But while his funds held out to burn he would pretend.

The room emptied rapidly as the hour for opera and[Pg 17] theater arrived. But he lingered, not knowing where to go. He pretended to be in no hurry. He had, indeed, more leisure than he enjoyed. Still he sat smoking and protracting his coffee, and haughtily playing that he was not starving for companionship.

When almost the last couple was gone he realized that he faced an evening of dismal solitude. He realized also that a number of kind-thoughted gentlemen had erected large structures for the entertainment of lonely people and had engaged numbers of gifted persons to enact stories for their diversion.

He called for his account, paid it with a large bill, and ignored the residue with a ruinous lifting of the brows as he accepted a light for his exotic cigar.

He helped to put false ideas in the hat-boy's head with the price he paid for the brief storage of his hat and coat and stick. He sauntered to the news-stand with the gracious stateliness of a czarevitch incognito, and asked the Tyson agent:

"What's a good play to see?"

The man named over the reigning successes, and some of their titles fell strangely pat with Forbes' humor:

"Romance," "The Poor Little Rich Girl," "Oh, Oh, Delphine!" "Peg o' My Heart," "The Lady of the Slipper," "The Sunshine Girl."

"They're mostly about girls," Forbes smiled.

"They mostly always are," the agent grinned. "But there's others: 'Within the Law,' 'The Argyle Case,' 'The Five Frankfurters,' 'Years

of Discretion.'"

"I reckon I'd better see 'Within the Law.' I've heard a good deal about that."

"I guess you have. It's been a sell-out for months."

"Can't I get in?"

"I'm afraid not. How many are you?" "One."

"One? Let me see. Here's a pair ordered by a party that hasn't called for them. Could you use them both?"[Pg 18] "I could put my overcoat in one seat," Forbes groaned, at this added irony in his loneliness and penuriousness. "I'd split the pair, but it's too late to sell the other one."

"I'll take both." Forbes sighed and waved a handsome five-dollar bill farewell.

The boy who twirled the squirrel-cage door told him that the theater was just down the street, and received a lavish fee for the information. Forbes was soon in the lobby, but the first act was almost finished. Rather than disturb the people already seated, he stood

at the back, leaning over the rail. He thrilled instantly to the speech of the shop-girl sentenced to the penitentiary for a theft she was not guilty of, and warning the proprietor that she would amply revenge herself when she came back down the river. At the height of the outcry of militant innocence Forbes heard the susurrus of robes and turned to see a small group of later comers than himself.

At the head went something that he judged to be a woman, though all he saw was a towering head-dress, a heap of elaborately coiffed hair, a wreath of mist, an indescribably exquisite opera-cloak shimmering down to an under-cascade of satin.

This tower of fabrics went along as if it were carried on a pole, and Forbes could see no semblance of human shape or stride inside it. But he judged that it contained a personality, for it paused to listen to something another pile of fabrics said to it, and from both came a snicker--or was it only a frou-frou of garments? In any case, it angered the part of the audience adjacent. The group went down the side-aisle, up a few steps to the little space behind the box.

From where he stood Forbes could see the usher helping them lay off their wraps. They showed no anxiety to catch the remainder of the act, but stood gossiping while the frantic usher waited, not daring to reprimand them, yet dreading the noise of their incursion.

AND NOW DESIGN EMERGED, A WOMAN STOOD REVEALED [Pg 19]

Forbes watched one of the clothes-horses stripped of its encumbrances.

From somewhere in the chaos two long-gloved arms came up; they were strangely shapely; they made motions like swan's necks dipping into water-lilies. A garland of fog came away, and a head on a throat appeared, a bust set upon a heap of drapery. Then the opera-cloak slipped off into the usher's hands. And now design emerged, a woman stood revealed. The head and throat were seen

to be attached to a scroll of shoulders, and a figure like a column rose from the floor--strangely columnar it was, and so slender that

there was merely the slightest inslope of waist, merely the slightest entasis at the hips.

In other periods only portions of the human outline have been followed by the costume. The natural lines have been broken, perverted, and caricatured by balloon sleeves, huge farthingales, or paniers like a jennet's pack-saddles, the incredible Botocudo ideal of the bustle, corsets like hour-glasses, concentric hoops about the legs, with pantalets coquetting inanely at the ankles--the almost impossible facts of fashion.

Just then the costume was hardly more of a disguise than the gold or bronze powder smeared on by those who pose as statues at the vaudevilles. Inside their outer wraps women were rather wall-papering themselves than draping their forms. It was saner so, and decenter, too, perhaps.

And yet Forbes stared at this woman as Adam must have stared at Eve when the scales were off his eyes. Even her hair was almost all her own, and it was coiled and parted with simple grace. Her head-dress was something bizarre--not a tiara of diamonds, but a black crest with a pearl or two studding it--the iridescent breast of a lyre-bird it was, though he did not know. A cord of pearls was

flung around her throat. At the peak of each shoulder her gown began, but the two elements did not[Pg 20] conjoin till just in time

above the breast, and just a little too late at the back.

The fabric clung lovingly to the loins, thighs, and calves, so closely that an inverted V must be cut between the ankles to make walking possible at all. There was a train of a fish-tail sort, a little twitching afterthought. And so this woman-shape came forth from a shapelessness as Aphrodite from the sea-foam.

Forbes was so startled that he felt all the chagrin of one who is caught staring at a woman just returned from the surf in a wet

bathing-suit. He shifted his eyes from her. When he looked back she had vanished into the crimson cavern of the box.

The other women followed her, and the men them. They seated themselves just as the curtain fell.

And now Forbes felt at liberty to go to his own seat, found an usher to pilot him down the aisle. He bowed and murmured "Beg par-don" and "Thank you" to each of those who shoved back awkwardly and wonderingly to let him in. He felt like explaining to them that he had not just arrived, and that he really was not so foolish or so dilatory as he looked. He put his overcoat in his extra seat and studied his program.

A voice that should have reminded him of the landaulet, but did not, caught his ear and led his eyes to the box. He was not far from the late arrivals.

They were attracting a deal of attention from the audience, and paying it none. The loudness of their speech and their laughter would have shocked him in a crowd of farmers. Coming from people of evident wealth and familiarity with town customs, it astounded him.

He had not yet seen the face of the woman of whom he had seen so much else. She was talking to a man in the interior of the box. Her back was turned to the house.

It never occurred to Forbes that it might be the same back he had followed up the Avenue. How could he have told?[Pg 21]

That back was clothed and cloaked, and even that famous left arm was sleeved. These shoulder-sheaths, not blades, were so astoundingly bare that he felt ashamed to look at them. Their proprietress was evidently not ashamed to submit them for public inspection. One might not approve her boldness, but one could hardly fail to approve her shoulders. When she moved or shrugged or laughed

or turned to speak, their exquisite integument creased and rippled like shaken cream.

At length the footlights went up, the curtain went up. The three women aligned themselves in profile along the rail as if they were

seated on unseen horses. The men were mere silhouettes in the background.

The bulk of the audience was in darkness; but the people in the boxes were illumined with a light reflected from the scenery, and it

warmed them like a dawn glowing upon peaks of snow.

And now, at last, Forbes saw the face he had watched for with such impatience. It did not disappoint him. At first she gave him only the profile; but that magic light of stage-craft was upon it, and once she turned her head and cast a slow, vague look along the shadowy valley of the audience. She could not have seen him, but he saw her and found her so beautiful, so bewitchingly beautiful and desirable, that he caught his breath with a stitch of pain, an ache of admiration.

Just a moment her eyes dreamed across the gloom, and she turned back to watch the stage. It was like a parting after a tryst. Then she broke the spell with a sudden throe of laughter. The little shoplifter and blackmailer on the stage was describing her efforts to learn the ways of society, the technique of pouring tea and pretending to like it. She swore, and the audience roared. Formerly an actor could always get a laugh by saying "damn." Now it must be a woman that swears.

Jarred back to reasonableness by the shock of laughter, Forbes looked again to the box to see what manner of[Pg 22] women this woman went with. One of them was tiny but quite perfect. She had the face of a debutante under the white hair of a matron. If her age were betrayed by her neck, the dog-collar of pearls concealed the ravage. She sat exceedingly erect and seemed to be cold and haughty till another splurge of slang from the shoplifter provoked her to a laugh that was like a child's.

The other woman laughed, too, laughed large and wide. She was beautiful, too, a Rubens ideal, drawn in liberal rotundities--cheeks,

chin, throat, bust, hips. No Cubist could have painted her, for she was like a cluster of soap-bubbles. Her face was a great baby's.

The men were almost invisible, mere cut-outs in black and white.

None of them had the jaded look of boredom that Forbes supposed to be the chief characteristic of New York wealth. They were

as eager and irrepressible as a box-load of children fighting over a bag of peanuts at a circus.

One of the men leaned forward and whispered something; all the women turned to hear. They forgot the play, though the situation was critical. They chattered and laughed so audibly that the audience grew restive; the people on the stage looked to be distressed.

Forbes was astonished at such bad manners from such beautiful people. He wondered how the play could go on. He had heard of actors stepping out of the picture to rebuke such disturbers of the peace. He expected such an encounter now.

Then somebody in the audience hissed. Somebody called distinctly, "Shut up!" The group turned in surprise, and received another hiss in the face. Silence and shame quieted it instanter. The women blushed like grown girls threatened with a spanking. Tremendous blushes ran all down their crimson backs.

Forbes could see that they wanted to run. A kind of pluck held them. They pretended to toss their heads with contempt, but the mob had cowed them so completely[Pg 23] that Forbes felt sorry for them--especially for her. She was too pretty for a public humiliation.

When the curtain fell on the second act Forbes saw one of the men in the box rise and leave along the side-aisle. Forbes knew the

man. His name was Ten Eyck--Murray Ten Eyck.

Forbes dreaded to repeat that voyage through the strait between knees and seat-backs; but he had seen at last a man he knew. And

the man he knew knew the woman he wanted to know.[Pg 24] CHAPTER V

THE women he passed glared hatpins at Forbes and groaned as they rose and hunched back to let him by. They clutched at the wraps he disarranged. He rumpled one elaborate hat stuck in the back of a seat, and one silk tie that had fallen out of the wire rack he kicked under the row ahead. He had an impulse to go after it; but when he realized the postures and scrambles it would involve, it was too horrible an ordeal. He pretended not to have noticed, and pressed onward.

None was so indignant as the man who had similarly climbed out for a drink the entr'acte before. Forbes knew it was a drink he had gone out for the moment he passed him. Forbes was not going out for a drink, but for important information.

He apologized meekly, yet continued on his course. By the time he was in the open Ten Eyck had disappeared. He was not in the lobby, nor among the men smoking on the sidewalk or dashing across the street to one of the cafes where coffee could not be obtained. Forbes found his man at last in the smoking-room below-stairs.

He was puffing a cigarette, and met Forbes' eager glance with such blank indifference that Forbes' words of greeting stopped in his

throat.

To explain his presence in the smoking-room Forbes lighted a cigar, though he knew that he could have but a few puffs of it. And it was such a good cigar! There can only be so many good cigars in the world.

The two men paced back and forth on crisscrossing paths as violently oblivious of each other as the two[Pg 25] traditional English-

men who were cast away on the same desert island and had never been introduced.

It was not till Murray Ten Eyck flung down his cigarette and made to leave that Forbes mustered courage enough to speak, in his

Virginian voice:

"Pardon me, suh, but aren't you Mr. Mu'y Ten Eyck?" "Yes," said Ten Eyck--simply that, and nothing more.

Forbes, nonplussed at the abrupt brevity of the answer, tried again:

"I reckon you don't remember me."

Ten Eyck showed a hint of interest. If he were a snob he blamed it on his own weaknesses.

"I seem to, but--well, I'm simply putrid at names and faces. A man pulled me out of the surf at Palm Beach last winter--I had a cramp, you know. I cut him dead two weeks later. When I knew what I had done I wished he had let me drown. So don't mind me if I don't remember you. Who are you? Did you ever save my life? Where was it we met?"

"It was in Manila. You were--"

"Oh, God bless me! You're Harvey Forbes--well, I'll be--" He reversed the prayer. "Of course it's you." He was cordial enough now as he clapped both hands on Forbes' shoulders. "But how the hell was I to know you all dolled up like this? I used to see you in uniform with cap and bronze buttons and sword and puttees. You were a lieutenant then. I dare say you're a colonel by now, what?" Forbes shook his head. "No? Well, you ought to be. You did save my life out in that Godforsaken hole. And now you're here! Well, I'll be--Let's have a drink."

"No, thank you!"

"Yes, thank you!" He hurried Forbes up the stairs, out into the street, and into a peacock-rivaling cafe. With one foot on the rail, one elbow on the bar, and one elbow crooked upward, they toasted each other in[Pg 26] a hearty "How!" Then, with libations tossed inward, the old friendship was consecrated anew.

"Tell me," said Ten Eyck, "are you alone--or with somebody? Don't answer if it will incriminate you." "No such luck," groaned Forbes. "I'm alone, a castaway on this deserted island."

"Well, I'm the little rescuing party. How long you here for?"

"I don't know. I was ordered to Governor's Island. I don't have to report for a week, so I thought I'd have a look at New York." "That won't take you long. There's nothing going on, and nobody in town."

Forbes remembered the crowds he had seen, and smiled. "I saw three ve'y charming ladies in that party of yours."

"Glad you like 'em. Come and meet 'em."

"Perhaps one of them is your wife. Are you ma'ied yet?" "Not yet. Not while I have my health and strength."

"I'm right glad to hear it. I was beginning to feel afraid that you had ma'ied that wonderful one." Ten Eyck shook his head and laughed.

"Who? Me? Me marry Persis Cabot?" "Is that her name? Well, why not?"

"If you only knew her you wouldn't ask why. I'm not a millionaire." "She doesn't look mercenary."

"She's not. Money is nothing to her; she doesn't know what it means; she just tosses it away. She's like a yacht. You think it costs a lot

to buy, but wait till you count the upkeep. Persis is a corker. She's a fine girl to play with. But you must promise not to marry her."

"I promise."

"Fine! Come along." As they climbed the stairs Ten Eyck was saying: "I hate an obligation like poison.[Pg 27] Always want to pay

back a mean turn or a good one. You made a devil of a hit with me, Forbesy, out in Manila there, when I was blue and sick and a

million miles from home. I suppose there's nothing makes a hit with a man like calling on him when he's sick. You got your hooks on me that way, and I'm yours to boss around. I'll put you up at a lot of clubs and trot you about till you flash the S. O. S. That is, if you want that sort of thing. Maybe you want to be let alone. If you do, you can kick me out whenever I'm in the way."

Forbes denied any inclination to solitude. When they reached the head of the aisle to the box he paused. He had the Southern idea of ceremonial courtesy, and he suggested that Ten Eyck had better ask the permission of the ladies before he introduced a stranger. Forbes had the rare knack of using the word "lady" without an effect of middle class.

And he had never forgotten what Ten Eyck had said to him once: "I love the extremes of society. I can get along with the highest, and I dote on the lowest, but God, how I loathe a middle-class soul."

Ten Eyck waived Forbes' scruples, dragged him to the box, and presented him to the women and the two other men. Forbes was too much perturbed to catch a single name. Even the last name of Persis escaped both his memory and his attention.

Ten Eyck gave Forbes a glowing advertisement as a brilliant soldier and a life-saver, and offered him his own chair next to Persis. She had answered his low bow of homage with nothing more than a wren-like nod and half a hint of a smile.

Ten Eyck threw Forbes into confusion by saying:

"You'll have to do better than that, old girl. Mr. Forbes not only rescued me from the depths, but he told me you were the most beautiful thing he ever saw on earth."

Persis smiled a little more cordially and murmured:[Pg 28]

"That's very nice of him."

She was evidently so used to bouquets in the face that they neither offended nor excited her. But Miss--or was it Mrs?--anyway, the

plump woman interposed:

"He must have been referring to me. My mirror tells me I am fatally beautiful, and God knows there's more of me than of anybody else on earth."

Forbes was in a dilemma. He had not made the comment ascribed to him, yet he could hardly deny it. Nor could he deny the plump

lady's claim to the praise. He simply flushed and smiled benignly on everybody.

Fortunately, the lights sank just then, and the curtain went up with a sound like a great "Hush!" The party, having been once rebuked, fell into silence. Forbes rose to return to his own seat, but Ten Eyck, standing back of him, pressed him into his chair with powerful hands.

He stayed put. But the play no longer held him. He could think only of one thing. He was posted at the side of this creature who

had fascinated him from afar and terrified him anear, and whose last name he did not yet know.

The lesson of the previous act was not long remembered by the irrepressibles. One of the men, a queer little fellow he was, whispered a comment to Persis. She laughed and answered it. The other women had to be told. They giggled. Their voices gradually rose in pitch and volume.

When the thief in the play shot the stool-pigeon with a silencered revolver a man seated below the box was overheard to say: "I wish somebody would invent a silencer for box-parties."

Again there were almost audible stares of reproach from the audience, and quietude settled down once more like a pall. At the end of this act again Forbes rose to go, but Ten Eyck checked him again.

"What you doing after the play?" "Nothing."[Pg 29]

"Come turkey-trotting with us."

"Turkey-trotting!" Forbes gasped. "Do nice people--"

"We're not nice people," said Persis, "but we do."

"It's all we do do," said the lady of the embonpoint, whose first name by now he had gleaned as Winifred.

Forbes was surprised to hear himself speaking as if to old acquaintance. "When I was in San Francisco, six years or so ago, slumming parties were taking it up along the 'Barbary Coast.' And on my way East just now I read an editorial about its rage in New York, but I didn't believe it."

"It's awful," said the little man. "People have gone stark mad over it. The mayor ought to stop it."

"Oh, Willie, don't be a prude," said Persis. "You know it's healthier than playing bridge all day and all night."

"And much less expensive," said the white-haired one.

"It's sickening," Willie insisted. "It's unfit for a decent woman." "Thanks!" said Persis, with a tone of zinc.

The little man made haste with an apology. "I don't mean you, my dear, of course; you dance it harmlessly enough; but--well, I don't like to see you at it, that's all."

"Your own mother is learning it," said Winifred.

"Oh, mother!" Willie gasped. "I gave her up long ago."

Ten Eyck intervened. Forbes remembered now that he was always intervening between extremists in the club quarrels in Manila. "What difference does it make?" he said. "All dancing is impure to some people. The waltz and polka used to be considered bad

enough to get you kicked out of the churches. The turkey-trot is only vulgar when vulgar people dance it, and they'd be vulgar any-way, anywhere. The trot has set people to jigging again. That's one good,[Pg 30] wholesome thing. For several years you couldn't get people to dance at all. Now they're at it morning, noon, and night."

"The police ought to stop it, I tell you," Willie insisted, with a peevishness that was like a dash of vinegar. "I hate to see it." "Then don't come along, my dear," Persis answered, with a glint of temper.

Forbes did not like that "my dear." It might mean nothing, but it might mean everything.[Pg 31] CHAPTER VI

WHEN the final curtain came down like a guillotine on the play there was a general uprising, a sort of slow panic to escape from this finished place and move on to the next event--by street-car to a welsh rabbit in a kitchenette, or by motor to a restaurant of pretense.

Everybody being in haste, everybody went slowly. Forbes retrieved his hat and overcoat after a ferocious struggle. In the lazy ooze-out of the crowd he was gradually shunted to the side of Persis, and willing enough to be there, proud to be there. He walked a little more militarily than he usually did in civilian's.

He heard people whispering with a shrillness that Persis had evidently grown accustomed to, for she could not have helped hearing, yet showed no sign. And now Forbes recaptured her last name, and it was familiar to him, little as he knew of social chronicles.

"Look! That's Persis Cabot," said one. "There's the Cabot girl you read so much about," said another. "She's got a sister who's a Countess or Marquise, or something." Then Forbes learned by roundabout the last name of Willie, and learned it with alarm from two of the sharpest whisperers:

"That's Willie Enslee with her, I suppose." "I guess so."

"Don't see why they call that big fellow Little Willie." "Just a joke, I guess."

"They say he's worth twenty million dollars." "He looks it."

At any other time it would have amused Forbes im[Pg 32]mensely to be called so far out of his name and to receive twenty million dollars by acclamation.

But now he could only busy himself with deductions: why did they assume that any man who was with Persis Cabot was sure to be

Willie Enslee? Could it mean--what else could it mean?

He glanced around to take another look at Willie Enslee. Now that he knew him for what he was, the situation was intolerable. Marry

this dream of beauty to that cartoon, that grotesque who came hardly to her shoulder!

His glance had showed him that the men and women they had passed were looking up and down Persis' back like appraising dry-goods merchants or plagiarizing dressmakers. When he turned his head forward he saw that the women in front were inspecting her with even more brazen curiosity. It astounded Forbes to see such well-dressed people behaving so peasantly. But Persis seemed as oblivious of their study as if they were painted heads on a fresco. Forbes, however, flushed when their eyes turned to him, because he felt that they were saying, "That must be Willie Enslee," and "Why do they call that big thing Little Willie?"

Meanwhile Little Willie himself was handing the attendant at the switchboard a punctured carriage check, with which to flash the

number on the sign outside.

There was a long wait for their own car, while motor after motor slid up and slid away as soon as its number had been bawled and its cargo had detached itself from the waiting huddle.

After the close, warm theater Forbes flinched at the edged night wind coming from the river. With the caution of an athlete he turned up his collar and buttoned his overcoat over his chest. But Persis stood with throat and bosom naked to the wind, and to all those staring eyes, and never thought to gather about her even the flimsy aureole of chiffon that took the place of a[Pg 33] scarf. And equally unafraid and unashamed stood Winifred and Mrs. Neff. (He had collected her name, too, during the conversation that flourished throughout the last act.)

At length the footman, who had howled out other people's numbers, held up a timid finger and murmured, awesomely, "Mr. En-

slee?"

The limousine, whose door he opened, was by no means the handsomest of the line. Enslee was evidently rich enough to afford a

shabby car. The three women bent their heads and entered with difficulty, their tight skirts sliding to their knees as they clambered in.

There was a great ado over the problem of room. Every man offered to walk or take a taxi. Ten Eyck made sure that Forbes should not be omitted. Ignoring his protests, he bundled him into one of the little extra seats and crawled in after him. The huge third man (still anonymous and taciturn) next inserted his bulk--a large cork in a small bottle.

Willie put his head in to ask:

"Where d'you want to go, Persis?"

"Trotting, of course," came from the crowded depths. "But I don't think--"

"Then take me home and go to the devil."

"We'll trot," sighed Willie. He spoke to the chauffeur dolefully, then appeared at the door to wail helplessly:

"There seems to be no room for me."

"You're only the host," said Winifred. "Hop on behind." "You can sit on my lap," said Ten Eyck.

And as that was the only vacant space, the big man lifted him up and set him there. The footman, reassured by the tip in his hand,

grinned at the spectacle and laughed, as he closed the door: "Is you all in?"

Seven persons were packed where there was hardly space for five; but Forbes noted that they were as in[Pg 34]formal and good-natured as yokels on a hay-ride. All except Willie, and his distress was not because of the crowd.

The car had no more than left the theater when Mrs. Neff was groaning: "A cigarette, somebody, quick--before I faint!"

Winifred by a mighty twisting produced a concaved golden case and snapped it open, only to gasp: "Empty! My God, it's empty!"

Persis saved the day. "I have some. Give us a light, Willie. There's a dear."

As usual, Willie had a counter-idea.

"But, Persis, don't you think you could wait till--" Her only answer was, "Murray, give me a light."

Ten Eyck called out, "Right-o, milydy, if Bob will hold our little hostlet half a mo." And he deposited Willie in the arms of the big man while he fumbled in his waistcoat for a book of matches and passed it back into the dark. "'Ere you are, your lydyship." He was forever talking in some dialect or other.

But Persis gave him her cigarette and pleaded: "It's so conspicuous holding a match to your face on Broadway. Light mine for me,

Murray."

"It's highly unsanitary," said Ten Eyck; "but if you don't mind I don't. I fancy these cigarettes of yours would choke any self-respect-

ing microbe to death."

Ten Eyck kindled her cigarette as delicately as he could and handed it to her. The same service he performed for the other eager women, and the three were soon puffing the close compartment so full of smoke that the men felt no need of burning tobacco of their own.

When a particularly bright glare swept into the car from the street the women made a pretense of hiding their cigarettes; but it was an ostrich-like concealment, and Forbes could see other women in other cabs similarly engaged. During his absence smoking had evidently become almost as commonplace among the women as among the men.[Pg 35]

Forbes, cramped of leg and choked of lung, was wondering at his presence here. It was a far cry from Manila. He had never dreamed when he showed an ordinary human interest in the melancholy Ten Eyck, fallen ill there on a jaunt around the world, that his courtesy in the wilderness would be repaid with usury in the metropolis. Nor had he learned from Ten Eyck's unobtrusive manner that

he was a familiar figure in the halls of the mighty. Forbes had cast an idle crust on the waters, and lo, it returned as a frosted birthday cake!

He had come to town at noon a lonely stranger, and before midnight he was literally in the lap of beauty and chumming with wealth and aristocracy in their most intimate mood.

The sidewalks outside were packed with theater crowds till they spilled over at the curbs, and the streets were filled with all sorts of vehicles till they threatened the sidewalks. Guiding a car there was like shooting a rapids full of logs in a lumber-drive, but Enslee's man was an expert charioteer.

Suddenly they whirled off Broadway, and, describing a short curve, came to a stop. A footman opened the door, but nobody moved.

Ten Eyck said: "The problem now is how do we get out. I'm so mixed up with somebody, I don't know my own legs." Like a wise

man of Gotham, he jabbed his thumb into the mixture, and asked, "Are those mine?"

"No, they are not!" said Winifred.

Willie was lowered ashore first. Bob What's-his-name bulged through next, then Ten Eyck, then Forbes. Ten Eyck dropped into the

gutter the three lighted cigarettes that had been hastily pressed into his hand, and turned to help the women out.

Forbes, wondering where they were, looked up and read with difficulty a great sign in vertical electric letters, "Reisenweber's."

Willie told his chauffeur to wait, and the car drew[Pg 36] down the street to make room for a long queue of other cars. Ten Eyck led the flock into a narrow hall, and filled the small elevator with as many as could get in. He included Forbes with the three women, and remained behind with Willie and Bob.

Crowded into the same space were two young girls, very pretty till they spoke, and then so plebeian that their own beauty seemed to

flee affrighted. The blonde seraph was chanting amid her chewing-gum:

"He says to me, 'If you was a lady you wouldn't 'a' drank with a party you never sor before,' and I come back at him, 'If you was a gempmum you'd 'a' came across with the price of a pint when you seen I was dyin' of thoist.'"

And the brunette answered: "You can't put no trust in them kind of Johns. Besides, he tangoes like he had two left feet."

Forbes was uneasy till Persis whispered, "Don't you just love them?" Then a door opened and they debarked into a crowded anteroom. While they waited for the car to descend and rise again with the rest of the party the women gave their wraps to a maid, and Forbes delivered his coat and hat and stick across a counter to a hat-boy.

When Ten Eyck, Willie, and Bob appeared and had checked their things the seven climbed a crowded staircase into an atmosphere

riotous with chatter and dance-music of a peculiarly rowdy rhythm.

But they could only hear and feel the throb of it. They could not see the dancers, so thick a crowd was ahead of them.

A head waiter appeared, and, curt as he was with the rest of the mob, he was pitifully regretful at losing Mr. Enslee, who had failed to reserve a table and who would not wait.

It was disgusting to slink back down the stairs, regain the wraps and coats and hats, and make two elevator-loads again. Willie alone

was cheerful.[Pg 37]

"Now, maybe you'll go to the Plaza or some place and have a human supper."

"I'm going to have a trot and a tango if I have to hunt the town over," said Persis. Willie gnashed his teeth, but had the car recalled, and asked her where she would go. "Let's try the Beaux Arts," she said; and they huddled together once more.

"It's too bad we were thrown out of Reisenweber's," Winifred pouted. "I was dying to see Francois dance and have a dance with him."

Forbes felt well enough acquainted by now to ask: "Pardon my ignorance, but who is Francois?"

"Oh, he's a love of a French lad," said Winifred. "Everybody's mad over him. I used to see him in Paris dancing between the tables

at the Cafe de Paris or the Pre-Catalan with some girl or other. Then somebody brought him over here for a musical comedy, and

he's been on the crest of the wave ever since."

"They say he's getting rich dancing in theaters and restaurants and giving lessons at twenty-five per." "Somebody was telling me he actually makes fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars a week," said Mrs. Neff. "If I had that much, would you marry me, Persis?" said Ten Eyck.

"In a minute," said Persis. "We might earn it ourselves. You dance as well as he does, and you could practise whirling me round your neck."

"Then we're engaged," said Ten Eyck.

"It's outrageous!" said Willie. "That fellow with an income equal to five per cent. on a couple of million dollars."

"What you kicking about, Willie?" said Winifred. "You get several times as much, and you never lifted hand or foot in your life." "But Willie's father did," said Mrs. Neff. "He killed himself working."[Pg 38]

"Willie has it much better arranged," said Bob. "Instead of Willie working for money he has the money working for him." "It works while he sleeps," said Winifred.

Forbes was thinking gloomily in the gloom of the car. This dancer, this mountebank, Francois, was earning as much in a week as the government paid him in a year, after all his training, his campaigning, his readiness to take up his residence or lay down his life wherever he was told to.

Then he compared his income with Willie Enslee's. Enslee did not even dance for his supper, yet into his banks gold rained where pennies dribbled into Forbes' meager purse. And it was not a precarious salary such as dancers and soldiers earned by their toil; it was the mere sweat from great slumbering masses of treasure.

Forbes felt no longer an exultance at falling in with these people. He felt ashamed of himself. He was no more a part of the company he kept than a gnat on an ox or a flea caught up in the ermine of a king. The air grew oppressive. He felt like a tenement waif patronized for a moment on a whim, and likely to be tossed back to his poverty at any moment. He wanted to get out before he

was put out. The very luxuries that enthralled him at first were intolerable now. The perfume of the women and their flowers lost its

savor. Their graces had gone. They were all elbows and knees. He suffocated as in a black hole of Calcutta.

When a footman at the Cafe des Beaux Arts wrenched the door open and let the cool air in, it was welcome. Forbes moved to escape. But he was kept prisoner while Bob was sent as an avant courier. He returned with the bad news that he was unable even to reach a head waiter.

The car nosed round, turned with difficulty, and went to Bustanoby's. It was the same story here.

"New York's gone mad, I tell you!" Willie raved. "And nobody is as crazy as we are. To think of us going[Pg 39] about like a gang of

beggars pleading to be taken in and allowed to dance with a lot of hoodlums and muckers. Even they won't have us."

"We'll try once more," said Persis. "The Cafe de Ninive."

After a brief voyage farther along Broadway the suppliant outcasts entered a great hall imposingly decorated with winged bulls and other Assyrian symbols. The huge space of the restaurant was a desert of tables untenanted save by a few dejected waiters and a few couples evidently in need of solitude.

An elevator took the determined Persis and her cohort up to another thronged vestibule.

Persis had said to Willie in the car, "If you don't get us a table here I'll never speak to you again."

With this threat as a spur Little Willie accosted a large captain of waiters, who shrugged his shoulders and indicated the crowd inside

and the crowd outside. Willie fumbled in his pockets, and his hand slyly met that of the captain, who glanced into his palm, then up to heaven in gratitude, and laid aside all scruple.

Willie triumphantly beckoned Persis, who approached the captain with the pouting appeal of a lady of the court to a relenting sover-

eign.

"Fritz," she said, "you've got to take care of us."

"How can I refuse Mees Cabot," said Fritz. "Do you weesh to seet and watch the artists, or to seet weeth the dancers?" "We want to dance," said Persis.

"There is one table resairve for a very great patron. You shall have it. I shall lose me my poseetion, and he will tear down the beeld-

ing; but that is better as to turn away Mees Cabot and Meester Enslee."

He whispered to a horrified captain on the other side of a silk rope. The barrier was removed, and they were within the sacred inclosure, while the baffled remnant gnashed its teeth outside.[Pg 40]

CHAPTER VII

THE room they were in was a mass of tables compacted around a central space, where professional entertainers were displaying the latest fashions in song and dance. A pair of "Texas Tommy" dancers were finishing a wild gallopade with a climax, in which the man hurled the woman aloft as if he were playing diabolo with her, caught her on his long sticks of arms, and spun her round his neck, then let her drop head first, rescuing her from a crash by the breadth of her hair, swinging her back between his legs and across his hip. When her heels touched the floor he bent her almost double and gazed Apache murder into her eyes. Her hair fell loose on cue, and then he righted her, and they were bowing to the rapturous applause. When they retired they were panting like hunted rabbits and sweating like stevedores.

And now a somewhat haggard girl, who looked as if she had forgotten how to sleep, dashed forward in a snowbird costume and sang a sleigh-bell song. Little bells jingled about her, and the crowd kept time by tapping wine-glasses with forks or spoons. Some kept time also with their rhythmic jaws.

The girl sang in a mock childish voice in the nasal dialect of the vaudevilles, with "yee-oo" for "you," and "tree-oo" for "true," and "lahv" for "love." The words of the song were too innocent, and not important enough to detain Persis, who felt herself drawn by the distant music of a turkey-trot in the farthest room. The warring counterpoint of the two orchestras only added to the lawless excitement of the throng. The dance was just[Pg 41] over, and the dancers were settling down to their chairs, their deserted plates and glasses. The guide led them to the only empty table, whisked off the card "Reserved," and turned them over to a waiter.

While Willie scanned the supper card Mrs. Neff lapsed into reminiscence. It was the only sign she had given thus far that she had earned her white hair by age, and not by a bleach.

"Funny how this building tells the story of the last few years," she said. "A few winters ago we thought it was amusing to go to supper at a good restaurant after the theater, have something nice to eat and drink, talk a while, and go home to bed. We thought we were very devilish, and preachers railed at the wickedness of late-supper orgies. And now the place down-stairs is deserted. Just tak-ing late supper is like going to prayer-meeting.

"Then somebody started the cabaret. And we flocked to that. We ate the filthiest stuff and drank the rottenest wine, and didn't care so long as they had some sensational dancer or singer cavorting in the aisle. They were so close you could hear them grunt, and they looked like frights in their make-up. But we thought it was exciting, and the preachers said it was awful. But it has become so tame and stupid that it is quite respectable.

"At present we are dancing in the aisles ourselves, crowding the professional entertainers off their own floors. And now the preachers and editors are attacking this. Whatever we do is wrong, so, as my youngest boy says, 'What's the use and what's the diff ?'"

"Only one thing worries me," said Winifred, as she peeled her gloves from her great arms and her tiny hands. "What will come next? Even this can't keep us interested much longer."

"The next thing," Willie snapped, "will be that we'll all go into vaudeville and do flip-flaps and the split and such things before a

hired audience of reformed ballet-girls."[Pg 42]

"I hope they play a tango next," was all Persis said. "Willie, call a waiter and ask him to ask the orchestra to play a tango."

"Wait, can't you?" he protested. "Let's get something to eat ordered first. We've got to buy champagne to hold our table; but we don't have to drink the stuff. What do you want, Persis? Winifred? Mrs. Neff, what do you want?--a little caviar to give us an appetite, what? What sort of a cocktail, eh? What sort of a cocktail, uh?"

Before an answer could be made the orchestra struck up a tune of extraordinary flippance. People began to jig in their chairs, others rose and were in the stride before they had finished the mouthfuls they were surprised with; several caught a hasty gulp of wine with the right hand while the left groped for the partner. The frenzy to dance was the strangest thing about it.

"Come on, Murray!" cried Persis. "Willie, order anything. It doesn't matter." Her voice trailed after her, for she was already backing

off into the maelstrom with her arms cradled in Ten Eyck's arms.

Bob Fielding, with his usual omission of speech, swept Winifred from her chair, and she went into the stream like a ship gliding

from her launching-chute. Mrs. Neff looked invitingly at Willie, but he answered the implication:

"I'll not stir till I've had food."

Forbes leaned over to explain to the marooned matron:

"I wish I could ask you to honor me; but I don't know how."

She smiled almost intolerantly and sank back with a sigh just as a huge and elderly man of capitalistic appearance skipped across the floor and bowed to her knees. She fairly bounded into his arms. The two white polls mingled their venerable locks, but their curvet-tings were remarkably coltish. Mrs. Neff, who had sons in college and daughters of marriageable age, was giving an amazing[Pg

43] exhibition. She backed and filled like a yacht in stays; she bucked and ducked like a yacht in a squawl; she whirled like a dervish, slanting and swooping; her lithe little body draped itself closely about the capitalist's great curves; her little feet followed his big feet or retreated from them like two white mice pursued by two black cats.

At first Forbes was disgusted; the one epithet he could think of was "obscene." As he watched the melee he felt that he was witnessing a tribe of savages in a mating-season orgy. He had seen the Moros, the Igorrotes, the Samoans, and the Nautch girls of Chicago, and the meaning of this turmoil was the same. He knew that the dance was the invention of negroes. Its wanton barbarity was only emphasized by the fact that it was celebrated on Broadway, in the greatest city of what we are pleased to admit is the most civilized nation in the world.

He could not adjust it to his mind. In the eddies he saw women of manifest respectability, mothers and wives in the arms of their husbands, young women who were plainly what are called "nice girls," and wholesome-looking young men of deferential bearing; yet mingled with them almost inextricably, brushing against them, tripping over their feet, tangling elbows with them, were youth of precocious salacity, shop-girls of their own bodies, and repulsive veterans from the barracks of evil. And the music seemed to unite them all into one congress met with one motive: to exploit their sensual impulses over the very borders of lawlessness.

Thus Forbes, left alone with Willie Enslee, regarded the spectacle with amazement verging on horror, and thought in the terms of

Jeremiah and Ezekiel denouncing Jerusalem, Moab, and Baal.

Meanwhile Willie Enslee studied the menu and gave his orders to the waiter. When the supper was commanded Enslee lifted his eyes

to the dancers, shook his head hopelessly, and, reaching across the table, tapped Forbes on the arm and demanded:[Pg 44]

"Look at 'em! Just look at 'em! Can you believe your own eyes, uh? Now I ask you, I ask you, if you can see how a white woman could hold herself so cheap as to mix with those muckers, and forget her self-respect so far?"

It was a weak voicing of Forbes' own repugnance, yet as soon as Willie spoke Forbes began to disagree with him. Willie was fatally established among those people with whom one hates to agree. As soon as one found Willie holding similar views, one's own views became suspect and distasteful--like food that is turned from in disgust because another's fork has touched it.

And there might have been a trace of jealousy in Forbes' immediate anger at Enslee's opinions. In any case, here he was, in the notorious haunts of society, seated in its very unholy of unholies, and gazing on its pernicious rites, and saying to his host:

"I must say I don't see anything wrong."[Pg 45] CHAPTER VIII

HARVEY FORBES came of a Southern stock that inherited its manners with its silver. Both were a trifle formal, yet very gracious

and graceful.

The family had lost its silver in the Civil War; but the formalities and the good manners remained as heirlooms that could be neither

confiscated nor sold off.

He had known something of New York as a cadet at West Point. He had seen the streets as he paraded them on one or two great occasions; he had known a few of its prominent families; but principally Southrons.

He knew that the careful people of that day would have shuddered at the thought of dancing even a minuet in public. They surrounded admission to their festivities with every possible difficulty, and conducted themselves with rigid dignity in the general eye. Even the annual event of the Charity Ball had been countenanced only for the sake of charity, and fell into disfavor because of the promiscuity of it.

In the Philippines Forbes had seen the two-step drive out the waltz; but it had not there, as here, almost ended the vogue of dancing

altogether.

And now, after a few years of immunity, people were tripping again as if the plague of the dancing sickness had broken out. The epidemic had taken a new form. Grace and romance were banished for grotesque and cynical antics. The very names of the dances were atrocious--bunny-hug, Texas Tommy, grizzly bear, turkey-trot.

It was a peculiar revolution in social history that people who for so long had refused to dance in public or[Pg 46] at all should take

up the dance and lay down their exclusiveness at the same time, and with a sort of mania; and that they should be converted to these steps by a dance that had first startled the country from the vaudeville stage, and had been greeted as a disgusting exhibition even for the cheaper theaters.

By a strange insidiousness the evil rhythms had infected the general public. The oligarchy was infatuated to the point of finding any place a fit place. The aged were hobbling about. The very children were capering and refusing the more hallowed dances.

Forbes was not ready to see how quickly such things lose their wickedness as they lose their novelty and rarity. "The devil has had those tunes long enough," said John Wesley, as he turned the ribald street ballads into hymns.

But with Forbes, as with everybody, vice lost her hideous mien when her face became familiar. Like everybody else, he first endured, then pitied, then embraced. Later he would talk as Persis did and Ten Eyck; he would proclaim the turkey-trot a harmless romp, and the tango a simple walk around. Later still he would turn from them all in disgust, not because he repented, but because they were tiresome. But for the present he was smitten with revulsion. The very quality of the company had served as a proof of the evil mo-tive.

Even though he told Willie Enslee he saw nothing wrong, he sat gasping as at a turbulent pool of iniquity.

Motherly dowagers in ball costumes bumped and caromed from the ample forms of procuresses. Young women of high degree in the arms of the scions of great houses jostled and drifted with walkers of the better streets, chorus-girls who "saved their salary," sirens from behind the counters.

As the dance swirled round and round among the gilded pillars, the same couples reeled again and again into view and out, like passengers on a merry-go-round.

Forbes watched with the eager eyes of a fisher the re[Pg 47]appearance of Persis. It pleased him to see in her manner, and in Ten Eyck's, an entire absence of grossness; but it hurt him surprisingly to see her in such a crew and responding to the music of songs whose words, unsung but easily remembered or imagined, were all concerned with "teasing," "squeezing," "tantalizing," "hypnotiz-ing," "honey babe," "hold me tight," "keep on a-playin'," "don't stop till I drop," and all the amorous animality of the slums.

He found himself indignant at Ten Eyck's intimacy with the wonderful girl. They clung together as closely as they could and breathe.

Now they sidled, now they trotted, now twirled madly as on a pivot. Their feet seemed to be manacled together except when they dipped a knee almost to the ground and thrust the other foot far back.

Then gradually, in spite of him, the music began to invade his own feet. He felt a yearning in his ankles. The tune took on a kind of care-free swagger, a flip boastfulness. He wanted to get up and brag, too. His feeling for Ten Eyck was not of reproof, but of envy. He longed to take his place.

When at length the music ended he felt as if he had missed an opportunity that he must not miss again. He had witnessed a display of knowledge which he must make his own.

Ten Eyck brought Persis back to the table, and the other women returned, Mrs. Neff 's partner nodding his head with a breathless satisfaction as he relinquished her and rejoined his own group.

The eyes of all the women were full of sated languor. They had given their youthful spirits play, and they were enjoying a refreshed fatigue.

The waiter had meanwhile set cocktails about, and deposited two silver pails full of broken ice, from which gold-necked bottles

protruded. And at each place there were slices of toast covered with the black shot of caviar.[Pg 48] The dancers fell on the appetizers with the appetite of harvesters. Persis thrilled Forbes with a careless: "It's too bad you don't trot, Mr. Forbes."

"He's not too old to learn," said Ten Eyck. "It's really very simple, once you get the hang of it." And he fell into a description of the technic.

"The main thing is to keep your feet as far from each other as you can, and as close to your partner's as you can. And you've got to hold her tight. Then just step out and trot; twirl around once in a while, and once in a while do a dip. Keep your body still and dance from your hips. And--get up here a minute and I'll show you."

Forbes was embarrassed completely when Ten Eyck made him stand up and embrace him. But the people around made no more fun of them than revivalists make of a preacher and a new convert. They were proselytes to the new fanaticism. Forbes, as awkward as

an overgrown school-boy, picked up a few ideas in spite of his reluctance.

He sat down flushed with confusion, but determined to retrieve himself. In a little while the music struck up once more.

"L'ave your pick in the air, the band's begun again," said Ten Eyck. "Come on, Winifred!" Bob Fielding lifted Mrs. Neff to her feet

and haled her away, and Persis was left to Forbes.

"Don't you want to try it?" she said, with an irresistible simplicity. "I'm afraid I'd disgrace you."

"You can't do that. Come along. We'll practise it here."

She was on her feet, and he could not refuse. He rose, and she came into his arms. Before he knew it they were swaying together. He had a native sense of rhythm, and he had been a famous dancer of the old dances.

He felt extremely foolish as he sidled, dragging one foot[Pg 49] after the other. He trod on her toes, and smote her with his knee-

caps, but she only laughed.

"You're getting it! That's right. Don't be afraid!"

Her confidence and her demand gave him courage like a bugle-call. But he could not master the whirl till she said, as calmly as if she were a gymnastic instructor:

"You must lock knees with me."

Somehow and quite suddenly he got the secret of it. The music took a new meaning. With a desperate masterfulness he swept her

from their back-water solitude out into the full current.

He was turkey-trotting with Persis Cabot! He wanted everybody to know it. This thought alone gave him the braggadocio necessary

to success.

Perhaps he was too busy thinking of his feet, perhaps the dance really was not indecent; but certainly his thoughts of her were as chivalrous as any knight's kneeling before his queen.

And yet they were gripping one another close; they were almost one flesh; their thoughts were so harmonious that she seemed to

follow even before he led. She prophesied his next impulse and coincided with it.

They moved like a single being, a four-legged--no, not a four, but a two-legged angel, for his right foot was wedded close to her left,

and her left to his right.

And so they ambled with a foolish, teetering, sliding hilarity. So they spun round and round with knees clamped together. So they seesawed with thighs crossed X-wise, all intermingled and merged together. And now what had seemed odious as a spectacle was only a sane and youthful frivolity, an April response to the joy of life, the glory of motion. David dancing before the Lord could not

have had a cleaner mind, though his wife, too, contemned and despised him, and for her contempt won the punishment of indignant

God.

Abruptly, and all too soon, the music stopped. The dancers applauded hungrily, and the band took up the[Pg 50] last strains again.

Again Forbes caught Persis to him, and they reveled till the music repeated its final crash.

Then they stood in mutual embrace for an instant that seemed a long time to him. He ignored the other couples dispersing to their tables to resume their interrupted feasts.

He was bemused with a startled unbelief. How marvelous it was that he should be here with her! He had come to the city a stranger, forlorn with loneliness, at noonday. And at noon of night he was already embracing this wonderful one and she him, as if they were plighted lovers.[Pg 51]

CHAPTER IX

WILLIE ENSLEE brought the dancers off their pinions and back to earth by a fretful reminder that the bouillon was chilling in the

cups, and the crab-meat was scorching in the chafing-dish.

The question of drinks came up anew. Forbes was in a champagne humor; his soul seemed to be effervescent with little bubbles of joy. But Mrs. Neff wanted a Scotch highball. Winifred was taking a reduction cure in which alcohol was forbidden. Persis wanted two more cocktails. Ten Eyck was on the water-wagon in penance for a recent outbreak. Bob Fielding was one of those occasional beings who combine with total abstinence a life of the highest conviviality. Offhand, one would have said that Bob was an incessant drinker and a terrific smoker. As a matter of fact, he had never been able to endure the taste of liquor or tobacco. When he ordered mineral water, or even milk, nobody was surprised; even the waiter assumed that the big man had just sworn off once more.

Forbes experienced a sinking of the heart as each of the guests named his choice, and nobody asked for any of the waiting cham-

pagne.

Yet when Willie turned to him and said, "Mr. Forbes, you have the two bottles of brut all to yourself," Forbes felt compelled to shake his head in declination. He never knew who got the champagne. He wondered if the waiter smuggled it out or juggled it on the accounts. And Willie forgot to ask Forbes what he would have instead! Willie ordered for himself that most innocent of[Pg 52] beverages which masquerades ginger ale and a section of lemon peel under the ferocious name, the bloodthirsty and viking-like title of "a horse's neck." There was a lot of it in a very large glass, and Forbes noted how Willie's little hand looked like a child's as he clutched the beaker. And he guzzled it as a child mouths and mumbles a brim.

Forbes observed how variously people imbibed. There were curious differences. Some shot their glasses to their lips, jerked back their heads, snapped their tongues like triggers, and smote their throats as with a solid bullet. Some stuck their very snouts in their liquor like swine; others seemed hardly to know they were drinking as they flirted across the tops of their glasses.

Persis did not raise her eyes as she sipped her cocktail. She looked down, and her lips seemed to find other lips there. Forbes won-

dered whose.

There was some rapid stoking of food against the next dance. When it irrupted, Forbes, greatly as he longed to dance again with Persis, invited Winifred for decorum's sake. Winifred speedily killed the self-confidence he had gained from his first flight. His sense of rhythm was incommensurate with hers. When she foretold his next step, she foretold it wrong. He lost at once the power to act as leader, and when she usurped the post he was no better as follower.

As Forbes wrestled with her he caught glimpses of Persis dancing with Willie for partner. Little Willie's head barely reached her bare shoulder. He clutched her desperately as one who is doomed from babyhood not to be a dancer. Still he hopped ludicrously about, and almost made her ludicrous.

Forbes longed to exchange partners with Willie, for he felt that he and Winifred were equally ludicrous. They were making the heavi-

est of going. He gave up in despair and returned to the table.

When the music stopped there was another interlude of supper. People gulped hastily, as at a lunch-counter[Pg 53] when the train is

waiting. Forbes intended to sit out the next dance; but he found himself abandoned as on a desert island with Mrs. Neff. "Come along, young man," she said.

"I'm afraid I don't know how." "Then I'll teach you."

"But--"

"Don't be afraid of me. I've got a son as old as you, and I taught him."

Forbes had danced at times with elderly women, but not such a dance as this. It was uncanny to be holding in his arms the mother of a grown man, and to be whirling madly, dipping and toppling like wired puppets.

Mrs. Neff 's spirit was still a girl's. Her body felt as young and lissome in his arms as a girl's. Her abandon and frivolity were of the seminary period. Now and then he had to glance down at the white hair of the hoyden to reassure himself. The music had the power of an incantation; it had bewitched her back to youth. It seemed to Forbes that this magic alone, which should turn old women back to girlhood for a time, could not be altogether accursed.

Perhaps the music had unsettled his reason, but in the logic of the moment he felt that there was a splendid value in the new fashion, which broke down at the same time the barriers of caste and the walls of old age.

It was the Saturnalia come back. The aristocrats mingled as equals with the commoners, and the old became young again for yet a few hours.

He had read so much about the cold, the haughty, and the bored-to-death society of New York, yet here he was, a young lieutenant from the frontier, and he was dancing a breakdown with one of the most important matrons in America. And she was cutting up like a hired girl at a barn-dance. Plainly the nation was still a republic.

When the music ended with a jolt Mrs. Neff clung dizzily[Pg 54] to him, gave him an accolade of approval with her fan, and booked him for the next dance but one. If Forbes had had social ambitions, he would have felt that he was a made man. Yet if he had had social ambitions he would probably have betrayed and so defeated them.

Mrs. Neff having granted him a reprieve of one dance, Forbes made haste to ask Persis for the next. She smiled and gave him that

wren-like nod.

His heart beat with syncopation when he rose at the first note of music. How differently she nestled and fitted into his embrace. Winifred had been more than an arm-load, and gave the impression of an armor of silk and steel and strained elastic. Mrs. Neff was too slender for him, and for all her agility there was a sense of bones and muscles. But Persis was flesh in all its magic. She was not bones nor muscles nor corsets, she was a mysterious embodiment of spirit and beauty, fluid yet shapely, unresisting yet real, gentle and terrible.

By now Forbes was familiar enough with the trickeries of the steps to leave his feet to their own devices. He was a musician who knows his instrument and his art well enough to improvise: soul and fingers in such rapport that he hardly knows whether the mood compels the fingers or the fingers suggest the mood.

And the same rapport existed with Persis. They evaded collisions with the other dancers and with the gilded columns by a sort of instinct; they sidled, whirled, dipped, pranced, or pirouetted, composed strange contours of progress as if with one mind and one body.

And now the rapture of the dance was his, and he was enabled to play upon her grace and her miraculously pliant sympathy. Her brow was just at the level of his lips, and he began to wish to press his lips there. Now and then her eyelids rose slowly and she looked up into his downward gaze. They were mysterious looks she gave him. They were to her as impersonal and vague as the rapture that fills the eyes when the west is epic with sun[Pg 55]set, or when an orchestra pours forth a chord of unusual ecstasy, or a rose is so beautiful that it inspires a kind of heavenly sorrow.

But Forbes misunderstood. He usurped to himself the tribute she was unconsciously paying to the mere beatitude of being alive and in rhythmic motion to music.

We have built up strange subtleties of perception. The most intolerable discords are those of tones that lie just next each other; the

harshest of noises rise when an instrument is only a little out of tune or a voice sings a trifle off the key.

Persis had accepted Forbes at Ten Eyck's rating as a gentleman to whom she could intrust her body to embrace and carry through the complex evolutions of a dance on a floor whose very throngs made a solitude and concealment for wantonness of thought and carriage.

So intimate a union is required when two people dance that it is easy to understand why the enemies of the dance denounce it as shameless carnality. It is hard to explain to them how potently custom and minute restraints permit an innocent dalliance with the materials of passion. One can only compare it to skating over thin ice, and say that so long as one keeps on skating a tiny crust of chill permits a joyous exercise without a hint of the depths beneath. And the ice itself gives warning when the danger is too close; its tiny crackling sound is thunder in the ears.

This was Forbes' experience. A beautiful woman of exquisite breeding gave him a certain enfranchisement of her person. He could take her in his arms, and she him in hers. She would make herself one flesh with him; he could sway her this way and that, drag her forward or backward, co-exist with her breast to breast, thigh to thigh, and knee to knee. But he must not ever so slightly take advantage of her faith in him. He must not by the most delicate pressure or quirk of muscle imply anything beyond the nice conventions and romantic pretenses[Pg 56] of the dance. Actresses make the same distinctions with stage kisses, and endure with pride before a thousand eyes what they would count a vile insult in the shadow of the wings or at a dressing-room door.

Forbes made the old mistake. Nothing venture, nothing gain, is a risky proverb. He ventured almost unconsciously, without any baseness of motive. Or, rather, he did not so much venture as relax his chivalry. He breathed too deeply of her incense, paid her the tribute of an enamored thought, constrained her with an ardor that was infinitesimally more personal than the ardor of the dance.

Somehow she understood. Instantly she was a little frightened, a little resentful. As subtle as the pressure of his arm was the resistance of her body. The spell of the dance was dissolving, the thin ice crackling. He whispered hastily:

"Forgive me!"

She simply whispered:

"All right."

And the spirit of the temple of dance was rescued and restored. He had sung a trifle sharp, and she, like a perfect accompanist, had

brought him back to the key.

But even as they whirled on and hopped and skipped in the silly frivolity of the turkey-trot he was solemnly experiencing an awe of her. And now her beauty was less victorious over him than that swift pride which could rebuke so delicately, that good-sportsman- ship which could so instantly accept apology.

When the music ended he mumbled:

"Will you ever dance with me again?"

She abashed him with the true forgiveness that forgets, and spoke with all cheerfulness: "Of course! Why not?"

The incident was closed in her heart. Its influence had just begun in his.[Pg 57]

CHAPTER X

THE turbulence of the dance increased as the respectable people were sifted out. Hysteria is a kind of fretful fatigue, and the wearier these children of joy were, the more reckless they grew.

Willie Enslee first insinuated, then declared that he had had enough. He yawned frankly and abysmally. He urged that it was high

time they were all in bed. But the women begged always for yet another dance.

"Just one little 'nother," Winifred wheedled.

Ten Eyck whispered, "About this time Winifred always begins to talk baby-talk."

She was soon calling Forbes "the li'l snojer man." Whether the wine or the dance were the chief intoxicant, a tipsiness of mood prevailed everywhere. It affected individuals individually: this one was idiotically amused, that one idiotically tearful, a third wolfishly sullen, a fourth super-royally dignified, a fifth so audacious that her befuddled companions tried to restrain her.

The thin ice was breaking through in spots, and a few of the couples were floundering in black waters.

Others were merely childish in their wickedness. They tried to be vicious, and their very effort made them only naughty.

It all reminded Forbes of certain savage debauches he had witnessed. Only the savages lacked the weapons of costume. It was curi-

ous--to a philosopher it was amusingly curious--to see how much excitement it gave some of these people to expose or behold a shoulder or a shin more than one ordinarily did. The peculiar cult that has[Pg 58] grown about the human leg, since it has been wrapped up, is surely one of the quaintest phases of human inconsistency.

But intention is the main thing, and a circus woman in trapeze costume may suggest less erotic thought than a flirt who merely gathers her opera cloak about her closely. There was no mistaking the intention of some of these dancers. It was vile, provocative, and, since it was public, it was hideous. Mobs left without rule or inspiring rulers always degenerate into excesses. The pendulum that swings too far one way is only gathering heavier and heavier impetus to the other extreme.

It happens whenever emotions are overstrained. At religious revivals and camp-meetings and crusades, no less than at revels, the

aftermath is apt to be grossness. These people had danced too long. It was time to go home.

Forbes finally agreed with Willie that it was no place for decent people. He began to wish very earnestly that Persis were not there. He would rather miss the sight of her than see her watching such spectacles. He felt a deep yearning that she should be ignorant of the facets of life that were glittering here. This longing to keep another heart clean or to restore it to an earlier purity is the first blossom of real love.

The floor grew so rowdy that Forbes would no longer take Persis out upon it. He did not ask her to dance again. Even when she

raised her eyebrows invitingly he pretended not to understand.

Then she spoke frankly:

"Sha'n't we have another dance? They're playing the tune that made Robert E. Lee famous."

"I'm afraid I'm too tired," he pleaded. As soon as he had spoken he felt that the pretext was insultingly inadequate addressed to a woman and coming from a soldier used to long hikes. But it was the only evasion he could imagine in his hurry. Instead of turning pale with anger, as he expected, she amazed him by her reply:[Pg 59]

"That's very nice of you."

"Nice of me," he echoed, fatuously, "to be tired?"

"Umm-humm," she crooned.

"Why?"

"Oh, just because."

Then he understood that she had read his mind, and she became at once a sibyl of occult gifts. This ascription of extraordinary pow-

ers to ordinary people is another sign that affection is pushing common sense from his throne. Parents show it for their newborn, and what is loving but a sort of parentage by reincarnation?

Forbes thought that he wore a mask of inscrutable calm, because he was accustomed to repressing his naturally impetuous nature. He had not realized that the most eloquent form of expression is repression. It is the secret of all great actors, and enables them to publish a volume of meaning in a glance or a catch in the voice, a quirk of the lips or a twiddling of the fingers.

Forbes never dreamed that the gaucherie of his excuse showed the desperation of his mind and the strain on his feelings, and that

while his lips were mumbling it his eyes were crying:

"Don't stay here any longer. You are tired. You do not belong here. I beg you to be careful of your soul and body. Both are precious. It makes a great difference to me what you see and do and are."

All this was writ so large on his whole mien that anybody might have read it. Even Winifred read it and exchanged a glance with Mrs. Neff, who read it, too. Naturally, Persis understood. The feeling surprised her in a stranger of so brief acquaintance. But she did not resent his presumption as she did Willie's equal anxiety. She rather liked Forbes for it.

Then she saw his consternation at her miraculous powers, and she liked him better yet for a strong and simple man whose chivalry

was deeper than his gallantry.[Pg 60] And when a man from another table came across to ask her to dance with him, she answered:

"Sorry, Jim, we're just off for home. Come along, Willie. Are you going to keep us here all night?"

Willie lost no time in huddling his flock away from the table. He fussed about them like a green collie pup.

They paused at the door for a backward look. Seen in review with sated eyes, it was a dismal spectacle. On the floor a few dancers were glued together in crass familiarity, making odious gestures of the whole body. At the disheveled tables disheveled couples were engaged in dalliance more or less maudlin. Many of the women were adding their cigarette-smoke to the haze settling over all like a gray miasma.

"Disgusting! Disgusting!" Willie sneered.

"Oh, the poor things!" sighed Mrs. Neff. "What other chance have they? At a small town dance they'd behave very carefully in the light, and stroll out into the moonlight between dances. Good Lord, I used to have my head hugged off after every waltz. I'd walk out to get a breath of air, and have my breath squeezed out of me. But these poor city couples--where can they spoon, except in a taxi going home, or on a park bench with a boozy tramp on the same bench and a policeman playing chaperon? Let 'em alone."

But she yawned as she defended them, and looked suddenly an old woman tired out. They all looked tired.

They slipped weary arms into the wraps they had flung off with such eagerness. In the elevator they leaned heavily against the walls,

and they crept into the limousine as if into a bed.

Forbes said that he would walk to his hotel. It was just across the street. They bade him good night drearily and slammed the door. He watched the car glide away, and realized that he was again alone. None of them had asked him to call, or mentioned a future

meeting. Had he been tried and discarded?[Pg 61]

CHAPTER XI

THE sky was black, and the stars dimmed by the street-lights. Stars and street-lights seemed to be weary. The electric acrobats had knocked off work, and hung lifeless upon their frames like burned-out fireworks.

A grown-up newsboy, choosing a soft tone as if afraid to waken the sleeping town, murmured confidentially:

"Morn' paper? Joinal, Woil, Hurl, Times, Sun, Tolegraf ? Paper, boss?"

Forbes bought one to enjoy the paradox of reading to-morrow's paper last night.

He entered the brightly lighted lobby of the hotel. It was deserted save by two or three scrubwomen dancing a "grizzly bear" on all fours. They looked to be grandmothers. Perhaps their granddaughters were still dancing somewhere.

Once in his room, Forbes stared from his window across the slumbrous town. The very street-lamps had the droning glimmer of night lights in a bedroom. The few who were abroad wore the appearance of prowlers or watchmen or hasteners home. New York was not so lively all night as he had been taught to believe.

While he peeled off his clothes he glanced at his newspaper. The chief head-lines were given, not to the epochal event of the first parliament in the new republic of China, nor to the newest audacity in the Amazonian insurrection in London, but to an open letter sent by the mayor of New York to the police commissioner of New York, calling upon him "to put an end to all these vulgar orgies" of the "vulgar, roistering, and often openly im[Pg 62]modest" people who "indulge in lascivious dancing." The mayor announced

that one o'clock in the morning was none too soon for reputable people to stop dancing. He instructed the commissioner to see to

it that at that hour thereafter every dance-hall was empty, if he had to take the food and drinks from the very lips of the revelers and

put them in the street.

Forbes was amazed. The great, the wicked city still had a Puritan conscience, a teacher to punish its naughtiness and send it to bed-- and at an hour that many farmers and villagers would consider early for a dance to end. Forbes was startled to realize that he was included in the diatribe, and that those ferocious words were applied to Persis, too.

In all the things he had to wonder at this was not the least wonderful. He stepped into his pajamas and spread himself between his sheets, too weary to reach forth a hand and turn out the little lamp by his bed.

He had slept no more than half an hour when suddenly he wakened. The last cry of a bugle seemed to be ringing in his ears. He sat up and looked at his watch. It was the hour when for so many years the cock-a-doodle-doo of the hated reveille had dragged him from his blankets. Habit had aroused him, but he thanked the Lord that now he could roll over and go back to sleep.

He rolled over, but he could not sleep. Daylight was throbbing across the sky like the long roll of the drums. Street-cars were hammering their rails. The early-morning population was opening the city gates, and the advance-guards of the commercial armies were hurrying to their posts. The city, which he had seen at its dress-parade and at its night revels, was beginning its business day with that snap and precision, that superb zest and energy and efficiency that had made it what it was.

It was impossible for Forbes to lie abed where so much was going on. Fagged as he was, the air was electric, and he had everything

to see.[Pg 63]

He pried his heavy legs from the bed, and clenched his muscles in strenuous exercise while his tub filled with cold water. He came

out of it renewed and exultant.

When he was dressed and in the hall he surprised the chambermaids at their sweeping. They were running vacuum cleaners like little

lawn-mowers over the rugs.

In the breakfast-room he was quite alone. But the streets were alive, and the street-cars crowded with the humbler thousands.

He walked to Fifth Avenue. It was sparsely peopled now, and even its shops were still closed. The homes were sound asleep, save for an occasional tousled servant yawning at an area, or gathering morning papers from the sill.

He walked to Central Park. The foliage here was wide awake and all alert with the morning wind. He strolled through the Zoo; the animals were up and about--the bison and deer, the fumbling polar bears. The lions and tigers were already pacing their eternal

sentry-posts; the hyenas and wolves were peering about for the loophole that must be found next time; the quizzical little raccoons

were bustling to and fro, putting forth grotesque little hands.

Forbes crossed bridges and followed winding paths that led him leagues from city life, though the cliffs of the big hotels and apartment-houses were visible wherever he turned. On one arch he paused to watch a cavalcade of pupils from a riding-school. He was surprised to see them out so early. Other single equestrians came along the bridle-path, rising and falling from their park saddles in the park manner.

There were few women riding, and few of these rode sidewise. He was used to seeing women astride in the West; but here they did

not wear divided skirts and sombreros; they wore smart derby hats, long-tailed coats, riding-trousers, and puttees.

Coming toward him he noted what he supposed to be[Pg 64] an elderly man and his son. They were dressed almost exactly alike. As they approached, he saw that the son was a daughter. The breeze blew back the skirts of her coat, and as far as garb was concerned she was as much a man as the white-mustached cavalier alongside.

He clutched the rail hard. The girl was Persis, different, yet the same. There was a quaintly attractive boyishness about her now, an unsuspected athleticism. Her hair was gathered under her hat, her throat was clasped by a white stock. Her cutaway coat was buttoned tightly over a manly bosom, and her waist was not waspish. Her legs were strong, and gripped the horse well.

He could hardly believe that the lusciously beautiful siren he had seen with bare shoulders and bosom, and clinging skirts, the night

before, was this trimly buttoned-up youth in breeches and boots. Could an orchid and a hollyhock be one and the same?

He had felt sure that at this hour, and on till noon, she would be stretched out in a stupor of slumber under a silken coverlet in a dark room.

The night had been almost ended when he had left her heavy-eyed with fatigue, yet the morning was hardly begun when he saw her

here with face as bright and heart as brisk as if she had fallen asleep at sunset.

Her eyes were turned full upon him when she looked up before she passed under the bridge.

A salvo of greeting leaped into Forbes' eyes, and his hand went to his hat; but before he could lift it she had lowered her eyes. She vanished from sight beneath him, without recognition.

He hurried to the other side of the bridge, to catch her glance when she turned her head. But she did not look. She was talking to

the elderly man at her side. She was singing out heartily:

"Wake up, old boy, I'll beat you to the next policeman."

The old boy put spurs to his horse, and they dwindled at a gallop.[Pg 65]

Forbes watched her till the trees at the turn in the bridle-path quenched her from his sight. The light went out of his sky with her. She had looked at him and not remembered him! He would have known it if she had meant to snub him. He had not even that

distinction. He was merely one of the starers always gazing at her.

He had held her in his arms. But then so many men had held her in their arms when she danced. Even his daring had not impressed her memory. So many men must have pressed her too daringly. It was part of the routine of her life, to rebuff men who made advances to her.

Forbes left the bridge and left the park, humbled to nausea. His cheeks were so scarlet that the conductor on the Seventh Avenue car stared at him. He could not bear to walk back to his hotel. When he reached there he went to his room, dejected. There was nothing in the town to interest him. New York was as cold and heartless as report had made it.

He realized that he was very tired. He lay down on his bed. A mercy of sleep blotted out his woes. It seemed to be only a moment later, but it was high noon when his telephone woke him. He thought it an alarm-clock, and sat up bewildered to find himself where he was and with all his clothes on.

From the telephone, when he reached it, came the voice of Ten Eyck.

"That you, Forbesy? Did I get you out of bed? Sorry! I have an invitation for you. You made a hell of a hit with Miss Cabot last

night. I know it, because Little Willie is disgusted with you. Winifred says she is thinking of marrying you herself, and Mrs. Neff

says you can be her third husband, if you will. Meanwhile, they want you to have tea with us somewhere, and more dancings. Wish I could ask you to take breakfast with me at the Club, but I was booked up before I met you.[Pg 66] Save to-morrow for me though, eh? I'll call for you this afternoon about four, eh? Right-o! 'By!"

Forbes wanted to ask a dozen questions about what Persis had said, but a click showed that Ten Eyck had hung up his receiver. Forbes clung to the wall to keep the building from falling on him.

She had not forgotten him! She had been impressed by him! It was small wonder that she had not known him this morning. Had he not thought her a young man at first? Besides, she had had only a glance of him, and he was not dressed as she had seen him first.

The main thing was that she wanted to see him again, she wanted to dance with him again. She had betrayed such a liking for him that the miserable runt of a Little Willie had been jealous.

What a splendid city New York was! How hospitable, how ready to welcome the worthy stranger to her splendid privileges![Pg 67]

CHAPTER XII

FORBES had planned to visit the Army and Navy Club, in which he held a membership, but now he preferred to lunch alone--yet not alone, for he was entertaining a guest.

The head waiter could not see her when Forbes presented himself at the door of the Knickerbocker cafe. And when he pulled out the little table to admit Forbes to a seat on the long wall-divan that encircles the room, the head waiter thought that only Forbes squeezed through and sat down. The procession of servitors brought one plate, one napkin, silver for one, ice and water for one, brown bread and toast for one; and the waiter heard but one portion ordered from the hors d'oeuvres varies, from the plat du jour in the roulante, and from the patisseries.

But Forbes had a guest. She sat on the seat beside him and nibbled fascinatingly at the banquet he ordered for her.

The vivacious throng that crowds this corner room at noon paid Forbes little attention. Many would have paid him more had they understood that the ghost of Persis Cabot was nestling at his elbow, and conspiring with him to devise a still newer thing than the dancing tea or the tango luncheon--a before-breakfast one-step. In fancy he was now thridding the maze between the tables with her.

But he paid for only one luncheon. The bill, however, shocked him into a realization that he could not long afford such fodder as he

had been buying for himself. He decided to get his savings deposited somewhere before they had slipped through his fingers.[Pg 68]

On his way to New York he had asked advice on the important question of a bank, and had been recommended to an institution of fabulous strength. It did not pay interest on its deposits, but neither did it quiver when panics rocked the country and shook down other walls.

When Forbes computed the annual interest on his savings, the sum was almost negligible. But the thought of losing the principal in

a bank-wreck was appalling. He chose safety for the hundred per cent. rather than a risky interest of four. Especially as he had heard

that Wall Street was in the depths of the blues, and New York in a doldrums of uncertainty.

To Forbes, indeed, nearly everybody looked as if he had just got money from home and expected more, and the talk of hard times was ludicrous in view of these opulent mobs and these shop-windows like glimpses of Golconda. But perhaps this was but the last flare of a sunset before nightfall.

In any case, he was likely to have his funds tempted away from him, and he must hasten to push them into a stronghold. He found at the bank that there was a minimum below which an account was not welcome. His painful self-denials had enabled him just to clear that minimum with no more interval than a skilful hurdler leaves as he grazes the bar.

He felt poorer than ever for this reminder of his penury, and he almost slunk from the bank. Just outside he stumbled upon Ten

Eyck, who greeted him with a surprised:

"Do you bank here?"

"I was just opening an account," Forbes answered.

"Pardon my not lifting my hat before," said Ten Eyck. "I didn't know your middle name was Croesus."

Forbes could only shrug his shoulders with deprecation. He had no desire to pose as a man of means, and yet he had too much pride to publish his mediocrity.

"I'll call for you at four, Mr. Rothschild," said Ten Eyck. "Got a date at Sherry's here. Good-by!"[Pg 69]

The afternoon promised to be unconscionably long in reaching four o'clock, and Forbes set out for another saunter down the Ave-nue. There was a mysterious change. It might have been that the sky had turned gray, or that the best people were not yet abroad; but the women were no longer so beautiful. He kept comparing them with one that he had learned to know since yesterday afternoon's pageant had dazzled him. Already there was a kind of fidelity to her in this unconscious disparagement of the rest of womankind.

He did not explain it so easily to himself, nor did he understand why the shop-windows had become immediately so interesting. Yesterday a spadeful of diamonds dumped upon a velvet cloth was only a spadeful of diamonds to him, and it was nothing more. It stirred in him no more desire of possession than the Metropolitan Art Gallery or the Subway. He would have been glad to own either, but the lack gave him no concern.

This afternoon, however, he kept saying: "What would she think if I gave her that crown of rubies and emeralds? Does she like sap-phires, I wonder? If only I had the right to take her in there and buy her a dozen of those hats? If that astounding gown were hung upon her shoulders instead of on that wax smirker, would it be worthy of her?"

He found himself standing in front of jewelers' windows, and trying to read the prices on the little tags. He had already selected one ring as an engagement ring, when he managed by much craning to make out the price. He fell back as if a fist had reached through the glass to smite him. If he could have drawn out his bank-account twice he could not have paid for it.

He gave up looking at diamonds and solaced himself by the thought that before he bankrupted the United States Army with buying her an engagement ring, he had better get her in love with him a little.

This train of thought impelled him to pause now be[Pg 70]fore the windows of haberdashers. Without being at all a fop, he had a soldier's love of splendor, and he saw nothing effeminate in the bolts of rainbow clippings which men were invited to use for shirts. He looked amorously at great squares of silk meant to be knotted into neck-scarves, of which all but a narrow inch or two would be concealed. And he saw socks that were as scandalously brilliant as spun turquoises or knitted opals.

These little splashes of color were all that the sober male of the present time permits himself to display. They were all the more enviable for that. From one window a hand seemed to reach out, not to smite, but to seize him by his overworked scarf and hale him within. He departed five dollars the poorer and one piece of silk the richer, and hurried back to his room ashamed of his vanity.

On his way thither he remembered that he was still an officer in the regular establishment, and the first thing he did on his return to his room was to compose a formal report of his arrival in New York City. He sent it to the post at Governor's Island, so that in case a war broke out unexpectedly, an anxious nation might know where to find him.

The only war on the horizon, however, was the civil conflict inside his own heart. His patriotism was undergoing a severe wrench. He was expected to maintain the dignity of the government on a salary that a cabaret performer would count beneath contempt. And for this he was to give up his liberty, his independence, and his time. For this he was to teach nincompoops to raise a gun from the ground to their round shoulders, and to keep from falling over their own feet; for this he was to plow through wildernesses, give himself to volleys of bullets or mosquitoes to riddle, or worse yet, to live in the environs of a great city where beauty and wealth stirred a caldron of joy from which he must keep aloof.

But that was for next week. For a few days more he[Pg 71] was exempt; he was a free man. And she wanted to dance with him again! She would not even wait for night to fall. She would dance with him in the daylight--with tea as an excuse!

He began feverishly to robe himself for this festival. Luckily for him and his sort, men's fashions are a republic, and Forbes' well-shaped, though last year's, black morning coat, the pin his mother gave him years ago skewering the scarf he had just bought, his waistcoat with the little white edging, his heavily ironed striped trousers, and his last night's top-hat freshly pressed, clothed him as

smartly as the richest fop in town. It is different with women; but a male bookkeeper can dress nearly as well, if not so variously, as a plutocrat.

Forbes had devoted such passionate attention to the proper knotting of that square of silk, that he was hardly ready when the room telephone announced that Mr. Ten Eyck was calling for Mr. Forbes.

But his pains had been so well spent that Ten Eyck, meeting him in the lobby, lifted his hat with mock servility again, and murmured: "Oh, you millionaire! Will you deign to have a drink with a hick like me?"

Forbes pleasantly requested him not to be a damned fool, but the flattery was irresistible.

They went to the bar-room, where, under the felicitous longitude of Maxfield Parrish's fresco of "King Cole," they fortified them-

selves with gin rickeys, and set forth for the short walk down Broadway and across to Bustanoby's.

They had been rejected here the night before, but Ten Eyck, at Persis' request, had engaged a table by telephone.

"It's Persis' own party," he explained; "but I have sad news for you: Little Willie isn't invited. He's being punished for being so

naughty last night."

"He acted as if he owned Miss Cabot," said Forbes.[Pg 72] "He usually does."

"But he doesn't, does he?--doesn't own her, I mean?" Forbes demanded, with an anxiety that did not escape Ten Eyck, who answered:

"Opinions differ. He'll probably get her some day, unless her old man has a change of luck." "Her old man?"

"Yes. Papa Cabot has always lived up to every cent he could make or inherit; but he's getting mushy and losing his grip. The draught in Wall Street is too strong for him. Persis will hold on as long as she can, but Little Willie is waiting right under the peach-tree with his basket, ready for the first high wind."

"She couldn't marry him."

"Oh, couldn't she? And why not?" "She can't love a--a--him?"

"He is an awful pill, but he's well coated. His father left him a pile of sugar a mile high, and his mother will leave him another." "But what has that to do with love?"

"Who said anything about love? This is the era of the modern business woman."

Forbes said nothing, but looked a rebuke that led Ten Eyck to remind him:

"Remember you promised not to marry her yourself. Of course, you may be a bloated coupon-cutter, but Willie has his cut by machinery. If you put anything less than a million in the bank to-day, you'd better not take Persis too seriously. Girls like Persis are jack-pots in a big game. In fact, if you haven't got a pair of millions for openers, don't sit in. You haven't a chance."

"I don't believe you," Forbes thought, but did not say.

They reached the restaurant, and, finding that Persis had not arrived, stood on the sidewalk waiting for her. Many people were com-

ing up in taxicabs, or private cars, or on foot. They were all in a hurry to be dancing.[Pg 73]

"It's a healthier sport than sitting round watching somebody else play baseball--or Ibsen," Ten Eyck observed, answering an imaginary critic; and then he exclaimed:

"Here she is!" as a landaulet with the top lowered sped down the street. The traffic rules compelled it to go beyond and come up

with the curb on its right. As it passed Forbes caught a glimpse of three hats. One of them was a man's derby, one of them had

a sheaf of goura, one of them was a straw flower-pot with a white feather like a question-mark stuck in it. His heart buzzed with reminiscent anxiety. He turned quickly and noted the number of the car, "48150, N. Y. 1913." The woman he had followed up the Avenue was one of those two.

The chauffeur turned sharply, stopped, backed, and brought the landaulet around with the awkwardness of an alligator. A footman opened the door to Bob Fielding, Winifred Mather, and Persis Cabot.

The answer to the query-plume was Persis. Forbes saw a kind of mystic significance in it. Winifred, as she put out her hand to him, turned to Persis:

"You didn't tell me our li'l snojer man was coming."

"I wasn't sure we could get him," said Persis, and gave Forbes her hand, her smile, and a cordial word. "Terribly nice of you to come."

He seized her hand to wring it with ardor, but its pressure was so lax that he refrained. His eyes, however, were so fervid that she

looked away. For lack of support his hopes dropped like a flying-machine that meets a "hole in the air."[Pg 74]

CHAPTER XIII

SHE was talking the most indifferent nothings as they went up the stairs to the dancing-room, a largish space with an encircling gallery. As usual the dancing-floor was a clearing in a thicket of tables. It was swarming already with couples engaged in the same jig as the night before.

The costumes were duller than at night, of course. Most of the men wore business suits; the women were not decolletees, and they

kept on their hats.

Only Forbes noted at once that the crowd included many very young girls and mere lads. Here, too, there was a jumbled mixture of plebeian and aristocrat and all the grades between. There were girls who seemed to have been wanton in their cradles, and girls who were aureoled with an innocence that made their wildest hilarity a mere scamper of wholesome spirits.

An eccentricity of this restaurant was a searchlight stationed in the balcony. The operator swept the floor with its rays, occasionally fastening on a pair of professional dancers, and following it through the maze, whimsically changing the colors of the light to red or green or blue. For the general public the light was kept rosy.

When Forbes arrived a certain couple whirled madly off the dancing-floor straight into the midst of Persis' guests, with the havoc of

a strike in a game of tenpins.

The young man's heel ground one of the buttons of Forbes' shoe deep into his instep, and the young girl's flying hand smote him in the nose. He needed all his[Pg 75] self-control to repress a yowl of pain and dismay. Persis must have suffered equal battery, but she quietly straightened out the dizzy girl and smiled.

"Come right in, Alice; don't stop to knock."

The girl under whose feet the floor still eddied clung to Persis and stared at her a second, then gasped:

"Oh, Miss Cabot, is it you? I must have nearly killed you. Can you ever ever forgive me?"

Persis patted her hand and turned her round to Forbes: "You'd better ask Mr. Forbes. You gave him a lovely black eye." The girl acknowledged the introduction with a duck and a prayer of wild appeal:

"Oh, Mr. Forbes, what a ghastly, ghastly shame! Did I really hurt you? I must have simply murdered you. I'm so ashamed. Can you

ever ever forgive me?"

Forbes smiled at her melodramatic agitation: "It's nothing at all, Miss--Miss--I never liked this nose, anyway. I only wish you had hit

it harder, Miss--"

"Miss Neff," Persis prompted. "You met her mother last night."

Forbes vaguely remembered that somebody had said something about a beautiful mother of a more beautiful daughter; but he could

not frame it into a speech, before Persis startled the girl beyond reach of a pretty phrase, by casually asking:

"Were you expecting to meet your mother here this afternoon, Alice?"

"Good Lord, I should say not! Why?"

"I just wondered. She is to meet us here."

"When? In heaven's name! When?"

"She ought to be here now."

Alice thrust backward a palsied hand and, clutching the young man she had danced with, dragged him forward. He was shaking

hands with Ten Eyck, and brought him along.[Pg 76]

"Stowe! Stowe!" Alice exclaimed, with a tragic fire that did not greatly alarm the young man; he was apparently used to little else

from her.

"Yes, dear," he answered, with a lofty sweetness; and she cried:

"Oh, honey, what do you suppose?" "What, dear?"

"That awful Mother of mine is expected here any moment!"

The young man's majesty collapsed like an overblown balloon in one pop: "Lord!" Tableau! Ten Eyck, seeing it, muttered, gloatingly:

"Some folks gits ketched."

Alice turned eyes of reproach upon him:

"She'll kill us if she finds us together. Isn't there some other way out?"

"I could go down the stairs the waiters come up," said Stowe; "but how will you get home?"

"Oh, Mother will get me home all right, never fear!" said Alice. "Run for your life, honey. I'll have my maid call you on the 'phone

later."

The young man gave her one long sad look fairly reeking with desperate kisses and embraces. Then he vanished into the crowd.

Alice must have remarked the comments in Forbes' eyes, for she turned to him:

"You mustn't misunderstand the poor boy, Mr. Forbes. Mr. Webb is as brave as a lion, but he runs away on my account. He knows

that my mother will give me no rest if she finds it out."

"I understand perfectly," said Forbes. "There are times when the better a soldier is the faster he runs!"

"Mr. Forbes is a soldier," Persis explained.

"Oh, thank you, twice as much!" said Alice, "for appreciating the situation." Then she turned to Persis, and clenched her arm as if she were about to implore some unheard-of mercy: "And, Oh, Miss Cabot, will you do[Pg 77] me one terribly great favor? I'll remember it to my dying day, if you only will."

"Of course, my dear," Persis answered, with her usual serenity. "What is it? Do you want me to tell your mother that I met you somewhere and dragged you here against your will to meet her?"

Alice's wide eyes widened to the danger-point:

"Aren't you simply wonderful! How on earth could you possibly have ever ever guessed it?" Persis cast a sidelong glance at Forbes; it had all the effect of a wink without being so violent. "I'm a mind-reader," she said.

Alice caught the glance but not the irony of it, and exclaimed:

"Indeed she is, Mr. Forbes. She really is."

"I know she is," said Forbes, with a quiet conviction that was almost more noisy than the violent emphasis of Alice.

Persis gave Forbes another sidelong glance; this time with a meek wonderment in place of irony. Once more the man had shown a kind of awe of her. Unwittingly he was attacking her on her most defenseless wall; for a woman who is always hearing praise of

her beauty or her vivacity, so hungers and thirsts after some recognition of her intellectual existence that she is usually quite helpless before a tribute to it.

Persis knew that there was no importance in her guess at what Alice was about to ask; but there was importance in the high rating

Forbes gave it. The comfort she found in this homage was put to flight by Alice's nails nipping her arm.

"Before mother comes we must rehearse what we're to say. She thinks I went to one of those lectures on Current Topics. They're so very improving that Mother can't bear to go herself. She sends me and then forgets to ask me what it was all about. So I sneaked it

to-day and met Stowe."[Pg 78]

Persis could not resist a motherly question: "Is this an ideal trysting-place, do you think?"

"Where's the harm? We couldn't go to the Park very well. Everybody's always going by and looking on." "Why don't you receive Mr. Webb at home?"

"Oh, why don't I, indeed! Mother won't allow him within a mile of the place. Didn't you know that?"

Persis shook her head and turned to Forbes: "Doesn't it sound old-fashioned, a young girl afraid of her parents?"

"Quite medieval," Forbes agreed.

"Oh, but you are quaint, Alice," Persis laughed. "I thought it only happened in books and plays, but here's Alice actually obeying a cruel order like that. I'd like to see my father try to boss me. I'd really enjoy it as a change."

Alice broke in: "Oh, fathers--they're different! My poor Daddelums was the sweetest thing on earth. I wrapped him round my little finger. But mother--umm, she gets her own way, I can tell you--at least she thinks she does. I wouldn't let any earthly power tear me away from my darling Stowe, but I don't dare face her down."

"I thought she always liked Mr. Webb?" Persis said.

"Oh, she did till his father's will was probated. His insurance was immense, but his debts were immenser. So poor Stowe is dumped

upon the world with hardly a cent. Of course, I love him all the more; but mother has turned against him. I wouldn't mind starving

with Stowe, but mother is so materialistic! She wants to marry me off to that dreadful old Senator Tait."

"Dreadful?" snorted Winifred, who had listened in silence. "Old? Senator Tait is neither dreadful nor old. He is a cavalier, and in the prime of his powers."

"You can have him!" snapped Alice, with a flare of temper that she regretted instantly, and the more sincerely since she knew that Winifred had long been angling vainly and desperately for the Senator. There was a bitterer sarcasm in her retort than she meant, but Winifred[Pg 79] knew what Alice was thinking, and canceled it by meeting it frankly:

"I wish I could have him. God knows I'd prefer him to any of these half-baked whippersnappers that--"

"Winifred!" Persis murmured, subduingly; and Miss Mather subsided like a retreating thunder-storm. "The Senator is one of the--"

"I know he is, my dear," Alice broke in, in her most soothing tone. "He's far, far too splendid a man for a fool like me. But can't I

admit how splendid he would be in the Senate Chamber without wanting him in my boudoir?"

"Alice!" gasped Persis. "Remember that there are young men present."

Forbes spoke very solemnly: "Pardon my asking, but do you really mean that Senator Tait is--is proposing for your hand?"

"So my awful mother says."

"It doesn't sound like the Senator Tait I used to know."

"You knew him well?" Persis asked, with a quick eagerness that did not quite conceal a note of surprise.

Forbes caught it, and answered somewhat icily: "I had that privilege. He and my father used to ride to the hounds together. In fact, they were together when my father's horse threw him and fell on him, and crushed him to death. Senator Tait brought the body home to my poor mother. He was very dear to us all."

Persis looked what sympathy she could for such remote suffering. And Forbes was something less of a stranger. Also he had moved one step closer to her degree.

He had appeared first under the auspices of Murray Ten Eyck, who guaranteed him as an officer in the army. He had demonstrated his own dignity and magnetism. And now his family was sponsored by an old-time friendship with Senator Tait, a very Warwick of American royalty.[Pg 80]

CHAPTER XIV

PERSIS was not of the period or the set that thinks much of family. In fact, the whole world and its aristocracies have been shaken by too many earthquakes of late to leave walls standing high enough to keep youth from overlooking and overstepping them. Few speak of caste nowadays except novelists, editors, and the very old. What aristocracies we have are clubs or cliques gathered by a community of tastes, and recruited individually.

In any case, the Persis that was willing to go out into the byways and highways and public dancing-places would have made no bones of granting her smiles and her hospitality to anybody that entertained her, mountebank or mummer, tradesman or riding-master.

And yet it did Forbes no harm in her eyes to be established as of high lineage and important acquaintance. If only now he were rich, he would be graduated quite into the inner circle of those who were eligible to serious consideration.

Unconsciously Ten Eyck gave him this diploma also, though his motive was rather one of rebuke to Persis for her little tang of surprise.

"You needn't raise your brows, Persis, because Forbesy knows senators and things," he said. "He's a plutocrat, too. I caught him

depositing a million dollars in one of our best little banks to-day."

"A million dollars!" Forbes gasped. "Is there that much money in the world?"

Forbes had no desire to obtain the reputation of money[Pg 81] under false pretenses. Yet he could not delicately discuss his exact poverty. He could not decently announce: "I have only my small army pay and a few hundred dollars in the bank." It would imply that these people were interested in his financial status. Yet even the pretense by silence troubled him, till his problem was dismissed by an interruption:

"Is anybody at home?"

Mrs. Neff spoke into the stillness as if she had materialized from nothing. Nobody had noticed her approach, and every one was startled. To Forbes her sharp voice came as a rescue from incantation. And Mrs. Neff was in the mood of the most unromantic reality. She did not pause to be greeted or questioned, but went at her discourse with a flying start:

"I'm mad and I'm hungry as the devil--oh, pardon me! I didn't see my angel child. Alice, darling, how on earth did you get here? Murray, if you have a human heart in your buzzum get the waiter man to run for a sandwich and a--a--no, I'll be darned if I'll take tea, in spite of example to youngers, who never follow our good examples, anyway; make it a highball, Murray; Scotch, and quick!"

The waiter nodded in response to Ten Eyck's nod, and vanished with an excellent imitation of great speed.

"Give over, Win!" Mrs. Neff continued, prodding Miss Mather aside and wedging forward with the chair Ten Eyck surrendered to her. "What's in those sandwiches? Lettuce? Thanks! Don't all ask me at once where I've been! I'm the little lady what seen her dooty and done it. If my angel child had done hers she would be even now listening to a lecture on Current Topics, so that she could in-form her awful mother, as she calls me, what the tariff talk is all about, and who Salonica is, and why the Vulgarians are fighting the Balkans. But, of course, being a modern child, she plays hookey and goes to thes dansants while her poor old mother works."[Pg 82]

"But mother dear, I was just--"

"Don't tell it, my child! I know what you're going to say: that Persis picked you up and dragged you here by the hair, and Persis will back you up, of course, like the dear little liar she is. But I'll save you the trouble, darlings. Where is he? Is he still here or did he learn of my approach and flit?"

"He--who?" said every one, zealously, with a stare of innocence sadly overdone.

"He--who?" Mrs. Neff mocked. "He-haw! Oh, but you're a putrid lot of actors. So he has been here. Well, I mention no names, but if a certain young person whose initials are Stowe Webb wants to meet a little old lady named Trouble, let him come out from under the table."

"Mother dear, how you do run on," Alice protested. "I don't think you really need another highball."

"Another! Listen to that. Dutiful child trying to save erring mother from a drunkard's grave! And me choking with thirst since luncheon! Do you know where I've been? Yes? Then I will tell you. I've been at a committee meeting of the Vacation Savings Fund."

The waiter brought a tiny flask, a tall glass, and a siphon, and offered to mix her a potion; but she motioned him aside and arranged it to her own taste. The band struck up, and she sipped hastily as she talked:

"That's the most insulting music I ever heard, and I'm just mad enough to dance well. If nobody has any prior claim on this young soldier man, he's mine. Mr. Forbes, would you mind supporting your grandmother around the room once or twice?"

Forbes had counted on having this dance with Persis. He had wasted one important tango while Alice poured out her woes. To squander this dance on her mother was a grievous loss. There was nothing for him to do, however, but yield.

He bowed low and smiled. "Nothing would give me more pleasure."[Pg 83]

Mrs. Neff returned his bow with an old-fashioned courtesy, as she beamed:

"Very prettily said! Old fashioned and nice. My first husband would have answered like that. Did Murray tell you that I had offered

you the job of being my third husband?"

"Mother!" Alice gasped.

Forbes was exquisitely ill at ease. It is hard to parry banter of that sort from a woman. He bowed again and answered with an am-biguous smile:

"Nothing would give me more pleasure."

"Fine! Then we may as well announce our engagement. Kind friends, permit me to introduce my next husband, Mr.--Mr.--what is your first name, darling?"

"Mother!" Alice implored.

"Oh, I'm sure his first name can't be Mother. But we're missing the dance. Come along, hero mine!"

Forbes cast a farewell look of longing at Persis, who was regarding him with an amused bewilderment.

The blare of the band was as effectual as a Gabriel's trumpet opening graves. From the tables the dead came to life and took on stilts if not wings.

Big Bob Fielding and Winifred Mather set out at once in close embrace.

"Look at 'em! Look at 'em!" Ten Eyck chortled. "They're grappled like two old-time battleships on a heavy sea." Ten Eyck was the great-great-grandson of one of the first commissioned officers in the American navy, a rival even of Paul Jones. So now his comment was nautical. "Bob and Winifred remind me of the Bonhomme Richard and the Serapis. And Winifred is like old John Paul Jones: when everybody else is dead her motto is: 'I've just begun to fight.'"

But Alice could not smile. She folded her hands and sighed. "It's awful to be a widow when they play that tango."[Pg 84] Persis provided for her at once. "Murray, you take Alice out and dance with her."

Ten Eyck saluted. "Come on, Alice, we'll go in for the consolation stakes."

Alice protested: "But we can't leave you alone."

Persis beckoned to a lonesome-looking acquaintance at another table, and he came to her with wings outstretched. She locked pin-

ions with him, and they were away.

Ten Eyck put his arms up like racks; Alice hung herself across them, and they romped away. As they performed it, the dance was as harmless as a game of tag.

As Persis was twirled past Forbes now and again, her eyes would meet his with a gaze of deep inquiry.

And he was thinking so earnestly of her that at some indefinitely later period he was almost surprised to find that Mrs. Neff was in his arms, and that they were footing it intricately through a restless maze. He realized, also, that he had not spoken to her yet. He cast about in his mind for a topic of conversation, as one whips a dark trout-pool, and brought up a question:

"That Vacation Savings Fund--may I ask what it is?"

"You may, indeed, young man," she answered, and talked glibly as she danced, occasionally imitating a strain of music with mocking sounds. "It's an attempt a lot of us old women have been making to teach the poor woiking goil what we can't learn ourselves; namely, to save up money--la-de-de-da-de-da! The poor things slave like mules and they're paid like slaves--te-dum-te-dum!--yet most of them never think of putting a penny by for a rainy day, or what's more important--ta-ra-rum!--a sunny day.

"So Willie Enslee's mother, and Mrs. Clifton Ranger, and the Atterby girls, and a gang of other busybodies got ourselves together and cooked up a scheme--la-de-de-da-de-da!--to encourage the girls to stay home--ta-ra-rum![Pg 85]--from a few moving-picture fetes and cut down their ice-cream-soda orgies a little, and put the pennies into a fund to be used in giving each of them--te-dum-

te-dum--a little holiday when her chance came--te-di-do-dee!"

"Splendid!" said Forbes. "Did it work out?"

"Rather. We started with forty girls, and now we've got--how many do you suppose?"

"A hundred and fifty."

"Eight thousand! And they've saved fifty thousand dollars!"

"That's wonderful!" Forbes exclaimed, stopping short with amazement. Instantly they were as battered and trodden by the other

dancers as a planet would be that paused in its orbit.

"Come on, or we'll be murdered!" cried Mrs. Neff, and dragged him into the current again.

Forbes looked down at her with a different feeling. This typical gadabout, light-minded, cynical little old woman with the girlish ways, was after all a big-hearted toiler in the vineyard. She did not dress as a Sister of Charity, and she did not pull a long and philanthropic face, but she was industrious in good works.

He was to learn much more of this phase of New York wealth, its enormous organizations for the relief of wretchedness, and its instant response to the human cry once it makes itself heard above the noise of the cars or the music of the band.

City people have always made a pretense of concealing their sympathetic expressions under a cynical mask. It is this mask that offends so many of the praters against cruelty, irritates them to denunciations more merciless than the lack of mercy they berate, and blinds their nearsighted eyes to the village heart that beats in every city--a huge heart made up of countless village hearts.

So Mrs. Neff, having betrayed an artless Samaritanism, made haste to resume the red domino of burlesque to hide her blushes, as

children caught in a pretty[Pg 86] action fall to capering. Her motive was not lost on Forbes when she said:

"We've got to do something to get into heaven, you know. That line about the camel and the needle's eye is always with us poor rich, though the Lord knows I'm not rich. I hope you have a lot of money, or we'll starve--unless we loot the Savings Fund."

He hardly knew what to say to this, so he danced a little harder and swept her off her feet, till she was gasping for breath and pleading:

"Stop, stop! I'm afraid I'm only an old woman after all. And I didn't want you to know."

He led her to a chair, where she sank exhausted and panting hard. By the time the dance was over and the rest had returned, she was herself again.

"My new husband is the love of a tangoist," she babbled across her highball. "If that infernal committee meeting hadn't kept me so

late, I could have had more. Are you all going to the Tuesday to-night?"

They all were.

"I was to have taken Alice, but I'm going to put her to bed without any supper. I'll take Mr. Forbes instead. Will you come? Nothing would give you more pleasure. That's right. Sorry I can't accept your invitation to dinner, but I'm booked. What about the opera

to-night? It's 'Tristan and Isolde' with Fremstad. Senator Tait was to have taken us, but he can't go; so Alice won't care to go. He

sent me his box, and I have all those empty chairs to fill. Mr. Forbes can fill one. You can, can't you?" He nodded helplessly, and she hunted him a ticket out of a handbag as ridiculously crowded as a boy's first pocket. "It begins at a quarter to eight. I can't possibly be there before nine. You go when you want to. Who else can come?"

Persis said that she was dining at Winifred's with Willie, and added: "He hates the opera, but if I can drag him along I'll come. And if

I can't I'll come anyway."[Pg 87]

Winifred accepted for Bob. "I always think I ought to have been a grand-opera singer," she sighed, "I've got the build for it." Ten Eyck "had a dinner-job on," but promised to drop in when he could.

Having completed her quorum, and distributed her tickets, Mrs. Neff made ready to depart by attacking her highball again. The

music began before she had finished it, and Forbes rose before Persis with an old-time formula.

"May I have the honor?"

As Persis stepped into his arms, Winifred cried: "Traitress! It's my turn with the li'l snojer man."

And Mrs. Neff caught Persis' elbow to say: "Be very circumspect or I'll sue you for alienation of the alimony." Forbes and Persis sent back mocking smiles as they side-stepped into the carousel.

She was his again in the brief mock-marriage of the dance. His very muscles welcomed her with such exultance that he must forcibly restrain them from too ardent a clasp. The whole mood of the music was triumph, overweening boastfulness, and irresistible arro-gance. It was difficult to be afraid of anything in that baronial walk-around.

But Forbes was afraid of silence. It gave imagination too loose a rein. To keep himself from loving her too well, and offending her again after she had forgiven him once, he had recourse to language, the old concealer of thought.

At first he had been too new to the steps to talk freely. Words had blurted out of him as from a beginner in a riding-school. But now

there was a spirit in his feet that led him who knows how? Forbes astonished Persis and himself by his first words: "Don't you ever sleep, Miss Cabot?"

She threw him a startled glance. "Do I look so jaded as all that?"

He was so upset that he lost step and regained it with[Pg 88] awkwardness of foot and word. "No, no, it's be--because you look--

you look as if you slept for--forever. I don't mean that exact--exactly, either." "Then what do you mean, Mr. Forbes?"

"I mean: I left you this morning at about four o'clock in one costume, and I saw you at eight in another."

"At eight this morning? Oh yes, I was riding with my father. Were you riding, too? I didn't see you." "Oh yes, you did. I stood on the bridge at daybreak. And you looked at me and cut me dead."

"Did I really? I must have been asleep."

"Far from it. Your eyes were as bright as--as--" "This music is very reassuring, isn't it?"

"Yes; please blame the music if I grow too rash. But you really were wonderful. I thought you were a boy at first. And you ride so well! You were racing your father. How could you be so wide awake after so strenuous a night?"

"Oh, I had to get up. It is poor Dad's only chance nowadays. He's awfully busy in the Street, and he's so worried. And he needs the exercise. He won't take it unless I go along."

There was an interlude of tenderness in the music. He responded to it.

"That's very beautiful and self-sacrificing of you. But how can you keep up the pace?"

"I can't, much longer. I'm almost all in. The season is nearly over, though. If everything goes right, Dad and I will get out of town-- to the other side, perhaps. Then I can sleep all the way across. If he can't go abroad, we'll be alone anyway, since everybody else will leave town. Then I can catch up on sleep."

"You must be made of iron," he said. "Am I so heavy as all that?"

"Oh, no, no, you are--you are--" But he could not say anything without saying too much. She saved the day by a change of subject. [Pg 89]

"And I stared right at you, and didn't know you?"

"Why should you? It was stupid of me to expect you to remember me. But I did, and--when you didn't, I was crushed." "Of course you were," she crooned. "I always want to murder anybody who forgets me."

"Surely that can't happen often? How could any one forget You?"

It was perfectly sincere, yet it sounded like the bumptious praise of a yokel. She raised her eyelids and reproved him.

"That's pretty rough work for a West-Pointer. Rub it out and do it over again."

Again he lost the rhythm, and suffered agonies of confusion in recovering it. But the tango music put him on his feet again. How could he be humble to that uppish, vainglorious tune, that toreador pomposity?

Persis herself was like a pouter pigeon strutting and preening her high breast. All the dancers on the floor were proclaiming their

grandeur, playing the peacock.

Forbes grew consequential, too, as he and Persis marched haughtily forward shoulder to shoulder, and outer hands clasped, then

paused for a kick, whirled on their heels, and retraced their steps with the high knee-action of thoroughbreds winning a blue ribbon.

Then each hopped awhile on one foot, the other foot kicking between the partner's knees. Then they dipped to the floor. As he

swept her back to her full height, the music turned sly and sarcastic. It gave an unreal color to his words. "Will you pardon me one question?"

"Probably not. What is it?"

"Didn't you wear this same hat yesterday?"

Her head came up with a glare. "Isn't that a rather catty remark for a man to make?" "Oh, I didn't mean it that way," he faltered. "It's a beautiful hat."[Pg 90]

"No hat is beautiful two days in succession. It's unkind of you, though, to notice it, and rub it in."

"For heaven's sake, don't take it that way. I--I followed this hat of yours for miles and miles yesterday." "You followed this hat?"

"Yes."

They danced, marched, countermarched, pirouetted, in a pink mist. And he told her in his courtly way, with his Southern fervor, how he had been captivated by the white plume, and the shoulder and arm, and the foot; how vainly he had tried to overtake her for at least a fleeting survey. He told her how keen his dismay was when she escaped him and fled north. He told her how he made a note

of the number of her car. He did not tell her that he forgot it, and he did not dare to tell her that he was jealous of the unknown to whom she had hastened.

Persis could not but be pleased, though she tried to disguise her delight by saying:

"It must have been a shock to you when you saw what was really under this hat."

She had not meant to fish so outrageously for a compliment. She understood, too late, that her words gave him not only an excuse,

but a compulsion to praise. Praise was not withheld.

"If you could only know how I--how you--how beautiful you--how--I wish you'd let me say it!"

"You've said it," she murmured. His confusion revealed an ardor too profound to be rebuked or resisted. She luxuriated in it, and

rather sighed than smiled:

"I'm glad you like me."

It was a more girlish speech than she usually made. Unwittingly she crept a trifle closer to him, and breathed so deeply that he felt her bosom swell against him with a strangely gentle power. By immeasurably subtle degrees the barrier between them dissolved, or rather shifted until[Pg 91] it surrounded them. They were no longer strangers. They were together within a magic inclosure.

He understood the new communion, and an impulse swept him to crush her against him. He fought it so hard that his arm quivered. She felt the battle in his muscles, and rejoiced in the duel of his two selves, both hers. She knew that she had a lover as well as a guardian in his heart.

She looked up to see what manner of man this was who had won so close to her soul in so brief a time. He looked down to see who she really was. Their eyes met and held, longer than ever before, met studiously and hospitably, as the eyes of two lonesome children that have become neighbors meet across a fence.

What she saw in his gaze gave a little added crimson to her cheeks. And then the music flared up with a fierce ecstasy that penetrated even their aloofness. He caught her close and spun with her in a frenzied rapture round and round. He shunted other dancers aside and did not know it. He was glared at, rebuked, and did not know it. The impetus of the whirl compelled a tighter, tighter clutch. Their hands gripped faster. He forgot everything in the mystic pursuit and surrender of the dance, the union and disunion of their bodies--her little feet companioning his, the satin and steel of her tense sinews, the tender duality of her breast against the rock of his, the flutter of her quick, warm breath on his throat, the sorcery of her half-averted eyes tempting his lips almost unbearably.

The light burned about them like a flaming rose. The other couples had paused and retreated, staring at them; but they did not heed their isolation. They swooped and careened and twirled till they were blurred like a spinning top, till they were exhausted and wavering in their flight.

At length he found that she was breathless, pale, squandered. She hung all her weight on his arm, and grew so heavy that it ached.[Pg

92]

And now, when he looked down at her, he saw that the operator had inadvertently put upon them the green light. In Forbes' eyes it had a sickly, cadaverous glimmer as of death and dissolution. He did not know that she was about to swoon; but she was so gray and lifeless that he was frightened. In the green, clammy radiance she looked as if she had been buried and brought back to the daylight. She was horribly beautiful.

Just in time the music came to an abrupt end, and the danse macabre was done. But the floor still wheeled beneath his feet, and he

staggered as he held her limp and swaying body.

She shook the dizziness from her eyes, and put away his arm, but seized it again. He supported her to the table and guided her to a seat. Then he caught up a glass and put it to her wan mouth.

Ten Eyck, who had been watching them from his place, shoved a chair against Forbes relaxing knees, and set a tall glass in his hand,

saying:

"Gad, old man, you need a drink!"

Forbes took a gulp of a highball and sat staring at Persis. Ten Eyck was quietly dipping his fingers into his own glass and flicking water on Persis' face. She regained her self-control wonderingly. Her lips tried pluckily to smile, though her eyes studied Forbes with a kind of terrified anger--more at herself than at him. He met them with a gaze of adoration and dread.

As his hot brow cooled, it seemed that an icy hand passed across it.[Pg 93]

CHAPTER XV

THE safety match that resists all other friction needs only the touch of its peculiar mate to break into flame. And many chemical compounds, including souls, change their behavior and expose their secret identities when they meet just the right--or the just the wrong--reagent.

Persis Cabot was the wonder of her world for being at the same time so cordial and so cold, so lightly amused, so extravagant, and yet apparently so immune to the follies of passion. She was thought to be incapable of losing either her head or her heart. Mrs. Neff called her "fireproof."

Willie Enslee was universally accepted as her fiance, simply because his wealth and his family's prestige were greater than anybody's else in her circle. This made him the logical candidate. Everybody knew that he was mad about Persis in his petty way. But nobody expected Persis to fall madly in love with Willie, or to let that failure keep her from marrying him.

And now Forbes appeared from the wilderness and strange influences began to work upon her. She began to study the man with increasing interest. She resented his effect upon her, and could not resist it. He was like a sharp knife, or a loaded revolver, or the edge of a cliff, quiet and unpursuing, yet latent with danger, terrifying and therefore fascinating.

Hitherto she had played with firearms and danced along abysses and juggled daggers in many a flirtation, but always she had kept her poise and felt no danger. Now she was just a trifle startled by a feeling of insecurity.[Pg 94]

Many men had made ferocious love to her, had tried to set up a combustion in her heart, had threatened her with violence, with murder and with suicide; and she had laughed at them, laughed them back to the sanity she had never lost.

But this man Forbes made no campaign against her. If he pressed her too hard in the dance he apologized at once. He seemed to be at her mercy, and yet she felt that he brought with him some influence stronger than both. He was like one of Homer's warriors attended by a clouded god or goddess bent on his victory or his destruction--she could not tell which. When she caught him gazing at her devouringly he looked away, yet she found herself looking away, too, and breathing a little faster.

Scores of men had embraced her as she danced with them and some of them had muttered burning love into her ear. But they left her cold. This man said little or less, and he held her almost shyly; yet she felt a strange kindling in his touch, saw in his eye a smoldering.

In this last dance with him a panic of helplessness had confounded her. He had whirled her about till she had lost all sense of floor and ceiling. She felt herself falling and spinning down the gulfs of space in a nightmare of rapture. She would have swooned had he not seen how white and lost she was and stopped short. She had felt that other people were staring and making comments.

She was afraid to dance with him again. When she had regained her self-control she made a pretext to escape out of the lateness of

the hour and the necessity of dressing for dinner and the opera.

There was an almost hysterical flippancy in her chatter. In spite of the protestations of the three men, she insisted on paying the bill.

It was her own party, she said. The waiter looked sad at this, but what she left on the plate tempered his despair of her sex.

She offered to drop Forbes and Ten Eyck at their destinations, and they clambered into her car with Winifred[Pg 95] and Bob. Forbes was all too soon deposited at his hotel, where the footman and the starter hailed Persis with affectionate homage and Forbes with a new courtesy because of her. Forbes lingered at the curb to watch her away. As the landaulet sped toward Fifth Avenue all he saw of her was the fluttering white interrogation-mark.[Pg 96]

CHAPTER XVI

FORBES was prompt at the Opera. Though it was barely half past seven, he found the foyer already swarming with a bustling mob of women swaddled in opera-cloaks, and prosperous-looking men overcoated and mufflered. Everybody was making haste. Dinners had been gulped or skimped, and there was evident desire not to miss a note.

Forbes knew nothing of the music except a vague echo of the ridicule on which Wagner had ridden to the clouds. He was just as ignorant of the poem, and though he bought a libretto from an unpromising vocalist in the lobby, he had time only to skim the argument, and to learn with surprise that Isolde was Irish, and her royal husband, Mark, a Cornishman.

The head usher directed him up a brief flight of steps, and another attendant unlocked a door marked with the name-plate of Lind-sley Tait. From the little anteroom where he hung up his hat and coat, Forbes saw as through a telescope the vast curtain and the tremendous golden arch of the proscenium; at its foot a pygmy orchestra settling into tune and making oddly pleasant discords.

When Forbes stepped to the edge of the box, he seemed to be the entire audience, another mad King of Bavaria come to witness a performance in solitude. The famous red horseshoe stretched its length a hundred yards or more on either side of him. In each of its little scallops a family of empty chairs sat facing the stage in solemn silliness. The owners were still filling chairs at dinner-tables. [Pg 97]

But when Forbes took the next step forward he found a multitude. Above him he saw other horseshoes in tiers dense with faces peering downward. Below him a plain of Babel inhabited by the tops of heads, numberless pates in long windrows, the men's skulls close-cropped or bald, and their shoulders black; the women's elaborately coiffed, over an enormous acreage of bared shoulders and busts.

Suddenly all the white-gloved hands fluttered in coveys with the show and sound of innumerable agitated pigeons. Toscanini was

picking his way through the orchestra to the desk.

From the opening phrase of the Vorspiel Forbes became a Wagnerian. Those first stifled moans of almost sullen desire so whelmed him that he wondered how Persis and Mrs. Neff and her guests should dare to be late and lose this precious expression. Before the opera had finished breaking his heart on its eternal wheel of anguish, he wondered that any one should care to submit to its intolerable beauty a second time.

Yet here were thousands thronging to its destroying blaze like fanatic moths--moths that paid a high price to be admitted to the lamp, and clamored to be consumed in its divine distress.

Forbes smiled at the universal lust for artistic and vicarious suffering that has made other people's pathos the most lucrative of all forms of entertainment.

The time was to come when he himself would pay dearly for the privilege of great pain; when his mind would strive futilely to dissuade his heart from clenching upon the thorn that made it bleed. Humanity has almost always preferred strong emotions at any cost, to peace however cheap.

The prelude was one long stream of bitter-sweet honey, and it affected Forbes as music had never affected him. He wondered how people could ever have ridiculed or resisted this man Wagner. He wished that Persis would[Pg 98] come soon. He thought of her as "Persis"--or "Isolde"; he could not think of her as Miss Cabot to this music.

The first act was ended and the long intermission almost over before she arrived, with Enslee, followed immediately by Bob and

Winifred, and last of all by the hostess, Mrs. Neff.

Everybody greeted Forbes with the casual informality of old friendship, except Willie Enslee, who nodded obliquely, and murmured:

"H' are yu, Mr. Ward."

Nobody corrected him, least of all Forbes, who was too much disgusted with Willie's existence there to feel any minor resentment. The three women fell to wrangling, altruistically, of course, over the two front seats. Mrs. Neff was trying to bully Persis and Winifred into occupying them. Winifred's demurrer was violent:

"If I sit there nobody can see the stage. You're such a little wisp I can see round you or through you." Persis preferred almost anything to a disturbance, and her protest was a mere form.

Only the rising curtain brought the battle to a close. Persis dropped into a chair on the right. Winifred pushed Mrs. Neff into the other, and sat back of her. Willie annexed the chair behind Persis, Bob Fleming took that aft of Winifred, and motioned Forbes to the center chair. Then Mrs. Neff beckoned him to hunch forward into the narrow space between her and Persis.

All along the horseshoe people were just arriving or returning from visits among the boxes. There was much chatter. The orchestra might as well have been wasting its sweetness on a crowded restaurant.

Forbes pretended to be looking over the audience on his right, but he was looking at Persis. The music of the garden where Isolde awaited her Tristan, and the far-off rumorous hunting-horns of the King, her husband, were working a magic upon her. He could see its influence on her face.[Pg 99]

She wore brighter raiment than at the theater; her head-dress was more imperious, and more jewelry glittered about her. When she breathed or moved the diamonds at her ears, her throat, and in her corsage flashed and dulled as if they had eyelids; the pearls had a veiled radiance.

She was a combination of beauty unadorned and most adorned. Despite her trappings of gem and fabric, even more of her was candidly presented than at the theater last night--or was it not a year ago? Surely he must have known her for more than a day.

Her bodice would have seemed to be shamelessly low, had it not been as high as almost any other there. This was one of those com-

mon yet amazing sessions where thousands of women of every age and class agree to display as much of their skins as the police will allow, and far more than their husbands and fathers approve.

But Forbes had not yet reached the stage where a man resents the publication of his charmer's charms. He was still hardly more than a fascinated student of Persis. He found her a most engrossing text.

She was so thoroughly alive--terribly alive all over! Wordsworth's phrase would have suited Forbes' understanding of her: she "felt her life in every limb." Her brows now moved sinuously, and now relaxed as Isolde sang of her longing and quenched the torch for a signal to her lover. One moment Persis' eyelids throbbed with excitement; the next they fell and tightened across her eyes. Accesses of emotion swelled her nostrils and made her lips waver together. Her throat arched and flexed and was restless; and her lovely disparted bosom filled and waned.

If she sat with clasped hands, the fingers seemed to convene and commune. She was incessantly thrusting back her hair and stroking her temples, or her forearms. Her knees were always exchanging places one above the[Pg 100] other; her feet crossed, uncrossed, and seemed unable to settle upon precedence.

If she had been a child she would have been called fidgety, but all her motions were discreet and luxurious. She was like a lotos-eater

stirring in sleep and just about to open her eyes.

The second act of the opera proved to be hardly more than a prolonged duet. The rapture of it outlasted Forbes' endurance; it did not bore him, it wore him out. He grew weary of eavesdropping on these two. He was jealous to love and be loved on his own account.

The woman next him was becoming more beautiful every moment. He felt a craving to touch her--with reverence; to link arms in comradeship, and to clench hands with her when the music stormed the peaks.

An aura seemed to transpire mistily from his pores to meet the aureole that shimmered about her.

His mood was far above any thought of flirtation, or evil desire. He was too knightly at heart to dream of adventure against her sacred isolation. But he wished and wished that he knew her better; had known her longer. Unconsciously he plagiarized the sigh of Johanna Ambrosius' poem: "Ach, hatt' ich fruher dich geseh'n!"

But Fate can play the clown as well as the tragedian, and accomplish as much by an absurd accident as by elaborate glooms.

That afternoon, when Forbes was lured into the haberdashery, he had invested in black silk hosiery, very sheer and very dear. Later he had acquired a pair of new pumps. The shoes were not too small, but their rigid edge cut his instep like a dull knife. By the time that Isolde's husband had found her in Tristan's arms, and begun to deplore his friend's treachery at great length, the pressure upon Forbes' heart relaxed enough to let his feet attract his attention. They proclaimed their discomfort acutely.[Pg 101]

After some hesitation he resolved to slip them out of their glistening jails a moment, under cover of the darkness.

A sense of immense relief rejoiced him when he sat with his silk-stockinged feet perched on top of instead of inside of his shoes. Though he was unaware of it, he was not the only one in that box to seize the opportunity. Heaven alone knew how much empty foot-gear was scattered along the floors of that opera-house. Persis for one had vacated her slippers long ago. She always did at every opportunity.

Eventually she tucked her little left foot back of her and bent it round the leg of her chair. By and by Forbes, in shifting his position, straightened his right knee. His foot collided with a most smooth something, and paused in a kind of surprise. Primevally our feet had as much tactile intelligence as our hands, and Forbes' almost prehensile big toe pondered that tiny promontory a second; then it hastily explored the glossy surface of Persis' sole.

Silk is a facile conductor of electricity, and Persis was not divine enough to be above ticklishness. Shudders of exquisite torment ran through her before she could snatch her foot away. And before she could check the impulse she snickered aloud.

And Forbes, suddenly understanding what he had done, snickered too, and just managed to throttle down a loud guffaw.

Mrs. Neff and Winifred turned in amazement at hearing such a sound at such a time, and the women in the next box craned their

necks to inflict a punitive glare. Which made it all the worse.

Persis and Forbes were suddenly backslidden almost to infancy. They were like a pair of children attacked with a fit of giggles in church. The more they wanted to be sober, the more foolish they felt. The harder they tried to smother the laughter steaming within them, the more it threatened to explode.[Pg 102]

Persis would have taken to flight, but one of her slippers she could not find, and she could not get the other on.

She and Forbes were still stuffing their handkerchiefs into their mouths when the act ended, as the pitifully distraught Tristan permit-

ted the infuriated Melot to thrust him through with a sword, and fell back in Kurwenal's arms.

Mrs. Neff and her faction did not join the ovation to the singers. They were too busily demanding what Persis and Forbes had found to laugh at. But neither of them would tell. It was their secret.

Willie Enslee was acutely annoyed. He had not curiosity enough to be quick to jealousy, nor intelligence enough to suspect that Per-

sis' and Forbes' laughter might be, must be, due to some encounter.

Still, he had ideals of his own, such as they were, and his religion was to avoid attracting attention. He had liked Persis because she

was of the same faith; but now she had sinned against it, and he rebuked her. She did not flare up as usual. She laughed.

She was ashamed to have been so frivolous, ashamed to have profaned the temple of art with her childishness. And so was Forbes. But when they looked into each other's eyes now they no longer stared with timorous wonderment; they smiled together in a dear and cozy intimacy. And already they owned a secret.[Pg 103]

CHAPTER XVII

MRS. NEFF and Winifred may have had their suspicions. They were both amiable cynics, and always put the worst possible interpretation on any happening. But whatever their theories, they could never have guessed the actual reason for the contretemps, and Persis speedily changed the subject. But her feet remembered it and tingled with reminiscent little electric storms. And when she looked at Forbes she tittered like a school-girl. So she avoided his eyes.

Willie was furious at Persis' lack of dignity, and forgot his own in complaining of it.

"Cut out the soubrette spasms, for God's sake, Persis, or let us all in on the joke. If you have any comic relief for this ghastly opera let me have it. Why did you drag me here, anyway? We might have gone to Hammerstein's. It wouldn't be so bad if Caruso were singing; but Caruso knows better than to bark himself hoarse on this Wagner fella. And that Dutch tenor has got to die yet. He'll be two hours dying, and then the lady has to follow suit. Why should we sit here all that time watching people die? Why didn't we go to Bellevue Hospital and watch an amusing operation? What would you say to making a sneak just about now and--"

"I'd say, run right along, Willie, if you want to," said Persis. "Moi, j'y suis, j'y reste!"

"Oh, all right, I suppose I'll have to suis and reste, too. But don't mind if I snore."

Ten Eyck appeared now with apologies for his delay. And a number of callers knocked at the back door of the[Pg 104] box and were admitted to an informal little reception, shared by the next-door neighbors, who gossiped across the rail with a charming friendliness. These latter were determined to find out what Persis had been laughing at. But she shook her head mysteriously.

Forbes heard great names bandied, and he judged that he was meeting important people, but there were no introductions, except in the case of a man and a woman who were treated with deference. To these Ten Eyck presented Forbes with flourish as an eminent military expert called home from the Philippines to help fortify New York against foreign attack.

Forbes denied this violently, but Ten Eyck winked. "Diplomatic, eh?"

When they were gone Forbes asked who they were.

"Society reporters!" said Ten Eyck. And the next day Forbes read in two of the papers a varying description of the costumes of Persis, Winifred, and Mrs. Neff, and a duplicated mention of his own name with the added information that he was "the eminent military expert called home from the Philippines to help fortify New York against foreign attack."

When he read this Forbes breathed a prayer that none of his superior officers might be addicted to the social columns. But that was to-morrow's excitement.

The third act brought him back under the Wagnerian yoke. Tristan's castle walls ran along a cliff overlooking the ocean; in a green space under a tree the wounded knight lay eternally demanding of his devoted squire if he could not yet see the ship, the ship that was to bring Isolde to nurse him back to life.

Forbes forgot all light thoughts before the infinitely pathetic wail of the shepherd's pipe and the reiterated appeal of Tristan for "das

Schiff ! das Schiff !"

Like most men of to-day, Forbes never wept except at the theater, or at some other fiction. He had not wept[Pg 105] so well since he had seen "Romeo and Juliet" played. Now again, as then, it startled him to think what a genius for love some hearts have, while others have only a talent or a taste for it. He felt a little ashamed that he had never been able to love as Romeo or Tristan loved, and yet he thanked his stars that he had been spared that fatal power.

How often we thank our stars that we have never met the very thing that waits us round the corner! Perhaps that Pharisee who

stands immortally thanking the Lord that he was not as other men, found out the same afternoon how very like he was.

The thrall of the theater was so complete upon Forbes that when the sorrowful drone of the shepherd's pipe suddenly turned to joy at the sight of Isolde's ship, Forbes' heart leaped up as if he were witnessing a rescue in actual life.

The hurrying rapture of the music that described Isolde's arrival, and her haste up the cliff, sent his hopes to heaven; but when the delirious Tristan rose from his couch to his staggering feet and began to tear at the bandages about his wound, Forbes felt the stab of fear. He wanted to cry out, "Oh no! no!" He sat with lips parted in anguish, and his hand groping for support.

The left hand of Persis was reaching about in the same gesture of protest against intolerable cruelty. It met the hand of Forbes. Their fingers clutched each other in an instinct for companionship. The two souls were so intent upon the action of the scene, and so swept along by the torrential music, that they hardly knew their hands were joined.

When Tristan fell at Isolde's feet, with one poor wailing "Isolde!" and died before she could clasp him in her arms, it seemed that Forbes' heart broke. A groan escaped him; his hand clenched the hand of Persis with all its might. He heard a little gasp from her, and he thought that her heart had broken with his.[Pg 106]

He had bitten into one of the beautiful apples of Hades, and his mouth was filled with ashes. The tears poured down his cheeks, and

in his aching throat there was a lump like broken glass.

The noblest song in all music, the "love-death" of Isolde, gave the tragedy nobility; but it was the mad beauty of a grief too great for grieving over. Passion shivered in the air and seemed to come from Forbes' own soul. The harmonies kept climaxing, eternally reaching the last possible thrill, only to find that it led on to one yet higher. The melodies were crowded like the angels climbing Jacob's ladder into the clouds, where every rung seemed heaven, till it disclosed one more.

The music was a love-philter to Forbes and Persis; they could not escape it, had no thought of escape. Their hands swung in a little

arc, clenched and unclenched in an utter sympathy of mind and body, in a kind of epic dance.

And then the opera was over, and Forbes began to dread the raising of the lights. He was grateful for the long ovation to the singers, since it kept the house dark till he could shake off the tears he was ashamed to dab with a handkerchief. Time was when greater soldiers than he were proud rather than ashamed of their tears, but Forbes was thankful for the gloom. He applauded and joined the cries of "Bravo!" to prolong the respite.

Mrs. Neff was sniffling as she beat her gloves together.

"Even Isolde's husband couldn't hate her--or him--for a love like that."

And Winifred, with her cheeks all blubbered, swallowed hard as she applauded.

"Why don't we have such lovers nowadays? Even I could play Isolde if I could find a Tristan." "Permit me," said Bob Fielding. But he was referring to the opera-cloak he was holding out for her. Willie Enslee, however, shook his head contemptuously and made no pretense of applause.[Pg 107]

"Can you beat 'em, Mr. Lord? They're never so happy as when they're crying their make-up off. They pretend they're blue, but

they've been having the time of their lives."

And Forbes hated him for saying it. Then he noted that Persis was not applauding. She was pulling off a long glove slowly and winc-ingly. When it was off, she looked ruefully at her left hand and nursed it in her right. She glanced to see that the others were busy with their wraps, then she held her hand out where Forbes could see it; and gave him a look of pouting reproach.

His first stare showed him only that her soft, slim fingers were almost hidden with rings. And then he saw that the flesh was all creased and bruised and marred with marks like tiny teeth. He realized that it was his fierce clench that had ground the rings and their settings into her flesh, and his heart was wrung with shame and pity.

He saw, too, that on one of the little fingers there was a thread of blood. The alert old eyes of Mrs. Neff caught the by-play of the

two, and her curiosity brought her forward with a question.

"How in heaven did you hurt your finger?" Persis answered quietly and at once:

"I caught it on the thorn of a rose. It's nothing."

Willie insisted on seeing the wound, and was frantic with excitement. He was genuinely distressed. He poured out sympathy for the pain, anxiety for the future of the wound, the necessity for sterilizing it. But it was Willie's doom to be always tactless or unwelcome, and his sympathy was an annoyance.

Forbes was compelled to silence by Persis' explanation of the accident. He must not say how sorry he was, though he had wounded

her--he had wounded Persis till she bled![Pg 108]

CHAPTER XVIII

THERE was an atmosphere of mourning everywhere as the enormous audience issued from the exits. It had assisted at the obse-

quies of a tremendous love, and all the eyes were sad.

Forbes had seen it stated until he had come to believe it, that the Metropolitan Opera was supported by snobs who attended merely to show off their jewels, and that the true music-lovers were to be found in the gallery. It came upon him now that this is one of the many cheap missiles poor people of poor wit hurl at luckier folk, with no more discrimination than street Arabs show when they throw whatever they can find in the street at whoever passes by in better clothes.

Forbes was sure that most of these sad-eyed aristocrats, so lavish in their praise of the singers and the music and the conductor,

had come with a musical purpose, and he wondered if some few, at least, of those in the gallery might not have climbed thither less

for art's sake than to see in the flesh those people of whose goings and comings and dressings, weddings and partings, they read so

greedily in the newspapers.

During the long wait for the carriage, a wealthy rabble stood in a draughty doorway waiting turns at the slowly disintegrating army of limousines and landaulets and touring-cars and taxicabs--even of obsolete broughams and coaches drawn by four-legged anachronisms.

Mrs. Neff claimed Forbes as her personal escort, and carried him off in her own chariot, which rolled up long before Enslee's.[Pg

109]

Forbes regretted to leave Persis standing there, with throat open as usual to the night gale; but his consolation was that he could gos-

sip about her.

Mrs. Neff 's first word, of course, was of tobacco. The door was hardly slammed upon them before she had her cigarettes out. "Give me a light, there's a dear boy. I've just time for a puff. And you light your cigar; I know you're dying for it. You can finish it in

the cloak-room. You men have still a few advantages left. The one I envy you most is your right to smoke in public."

It was strange to Forbes to be proffering a light to a white-haired lady. His own mother had thought it almost an escapade to sit on a piazza with a man who was armed with a cigar. Years ago, when Forbes had come home from West Point, she had said to him after dinner:

"I reckon my boy is simply pe'ishing for a cigar. Of course a gentleman can't smoke in the drawing-room, and the odor never comes out of the curtains. But I don't mind it in the open air--much. We'll stroll in the garden. They say tobacco is good for the plants-- bad for the insects."

And she took his arm and sauntered with him while he ruined the scent of the honeysuckle vines.

And Forbes had heard an anecdote, probably untrue, of the great Mrs. Astor; according to this legend, a man, hankering for a cigar, yet hesitating to suggest it, asked her casually: "What would you say if a man asked you for permission to smoke?" To which she answered, in her stately way: "I don't know. No man ever asked me." And neither did he.

But nowadays a man rarely ever murmurs the formula: "Do you object to smoke?" He is apter to say: "Do you carry your own, or

will you try mine?"

The petite grande dame, Mrs. Neff, carried her own. The glow of it in the dark seemed to add one more ruby to her burdened fingers. And when she lost her light,[Pg 110] she reached out for Forbes' cigar and rekindled her cigarette, smiling:

"Aren't we nice and clubby?"

Once her weed was prospering, she began to puff gossip:

"Isn't she a darling--Miss Cabot, I mean? Everybody is crazy over her, but Willie scares 'em all off. What a pity she's mixed up with the little bounder! Of course, she needs a lot of money, and her It of a father is nearly ready for the Old Ladies' Home; but what

a shame that love and money go together so rarely! For the matter of that, though, I don't think Persis knows what love is--yet. Maybe she never will. Maybe she won't learn till it's too late. Murray Ten Eyck says you are rich. Why don't you marry Persis? What a pair you'd make! What children you'd have! They'd win a blue ribbon at any stock-breeder's show."

Forbes was much obliged to the dark for hiding his blushes. Besides, he felt it a little premature to be discussing the quality of his offspring. He made bold to ask a leading question.

"You say that Miss Cabot is mixed up hopelessly with Mr. Enslee. Do you mean that they are engaged?"

"They haven't announced it, of course, but it's generally agreed that they are. Still, I suppose that if some handsome devil came along with a million or two, he might coax her away."

"But they are not actually engaged?"

"I don't know. But it looks inevitable to me. If you've got a lot of money, ask her--and save her from Willie. She'd make a nice wife to a nice man, with a nice income. Go on and get her. Oh, Lord, here we are at Sherry's and I've got to throw my cigarette away. I'll have to sneak another in the women's room somehow."

They went through the revolving doors and into the corridor, where women in opera-cloaks were moving forward with something of the look of a spice caravan, some[Pg 111] to the supper-rooms, and some toward the elevators to the various assembly-rooms, where various coteries were giving dances.

The ways of Mrs. Neff and Forbes parted at the elevator's upper door. His led to the large room where he passed his hat and coat across a table to be stowed in a compartment in one of the wicker wardrobes.

While he waited for Mrs. Neff, he sauntered to and fro, smoking and feeling a stranger among the men, who were just beginning to collect. Forbes noted the callowness of most of them, and felt himself a veteran among the shiny-haired blonds and glistening brunettes pulling on their white gloves, straightening their ties and trying, some of them, to find mustache enough to pull.

He could see the women they brought--girls and their mothers, or aunts or something.

After his experience at the restaurant dances, Forbes had begun to wonder if New York's aristocracy had been entirely converted to socialism, and had given over all attempt at exclusiveness. Here at last he found selection. People were here on invitation, and they were at home--chez eux.

If they went among the common herd, it was only as a kind of slumming excursion, a sortie of the great folk from the citadel into the town. It did not mean that the town was invited to repay the visit at the castle.

This was a dance at the castle. Everybody here seemed to belong. There were no shop-girls, no pavement-nymphs, or others of the self-supporting classes. These women had been provided for by wealthy parents. They had been provided with educations, and aseptic surroundings, and sterilized amusements, and pure food of choicest quality. Hence they all looked hale and thoroughbred. And they were not discontent. They came with the spirit of the dance.

Yet there was variety enough in the unity. Girls of intellectual type, girls of plain and old-maidish prospects,[Pg 112] girls of prudish manner, wantons, athletes, flirts, and uncontrollables. There were good taste and bad in costume, simple little pink frocks and Sheban splendors, loud voices and soft, meek eyes and insolent. But they were all protected plants, not hothouse flowers, yet flowers from high-walled, well-tended gardens.

Inside the wall there was the pleasantest informality. Everybody seemed to call everybody else by the first name or by some nick-name, and there were surprisingly many old-fashioned "Jims" and "Bills," "Kates" and "Sues." There was much hilarity, much slang, and the women seemed to use the music-hall phrases even more freely than the men.

In the dances there was a deal of boisterous romping. The turkey-trot, here called the one-step, was as vigorously performed as in

the restaurants, and some of the highest born showed the most professional skill and recklessness.

While Forbes was waiting for Mrs. Neff, he saw Persis arrive with her entourage. She was like the rest, yet ever so different. In her there was the little more that meant so much. She had, of course, the advantage of his affection. Yet he could see that everybody else gave her a certain prestige, too. It was "Oh, there she is!" "Look, there's Persis!" "Hello, Persis, how darling of you to come!"

The fly in the ointment was Willie Enslee, preening himself at her side, taking all her compliments for his own, as if he were the proprietor of a prize-winning mare at a horse-show. Forbes hated himself for hating him, but could not help it. When Enslee left Persis and entered the men's coat-room, Forbes' eyes followed him balefully.

Ten Eyck happened to glance his way as he held out his hand for his coat check. He noted the glare in Forbes' eyes and followed their direction to Enslee. He was so amazed, that when the attendant put the check[Pg 113] in his hand, he started as if some one had wakened him. Then he went to Forbes and took him by the elbow. And Forbes also started as if some one had wakened him. Ten Eyck smiled sadly:

"Is it as bad as that, already, old man?"

"Is what as bad as what already?" Forbes answered, half puzzled and half aware. Ten Eyck replied with a riddle.

"You can buy 'em for almost any price. It's the upkeep that costs."

"What the devil are you talking about?" "Yachts."

"Yachts?"

"Yachts. Better do as I do, Forbesy: instead of trying to own and run one, cultivate the people who do; and then you can cruise

without expense."

"What's that about yachts?" Willie Enslee asked, unexpectedly at his elbow. Ten Eyck answered, blandly:

"I was making the highly original remark that it's not the initial expense--"

"--But the up-keep that costs," Willie finished for him. "And that's no joke, either. Thinking of buying one, Mr. Forbes? Take my ad-vice and don't! Gad, that ferryboat of mine costs me twenty-five or thirty thousand a year, and she's not in commission two months in the season."

Twenty-five thousand a year! The words clanged in Forbes' mind like a locomotive's warning bell. He would hardly earn so much in the next ten years. He would certainly take Enslee's advice and not buy a yacht. He was as ill-equipped for a contest with the Enslee Estates as David was for the bout with Goliath. David won, indeed; but he had only to kill the giant, not to support him in the man-ner he had been accustomed to.

What could Forbes offer a woman like Persis in place of a yacht? He could offer her only love. His love must be cruiser and automobile, town house and country[Pg 114] house, home and travel. Isolde had married the king only to run away from his palace to the ruined castle of the wounded knight. Perhaps this Isolde would take warning and prefer the poor knight and his shabby castle in the first place.

As Forbes glanced down at Willie Enslee he could not feel that even the Enslee millions could suffice to make the fellow attractive.

They certainly had not added a cubit to his stature. Persis could not conceivably mate herself for life to a peevish underling like him.

Plainly Forbes needed only to be brave and persistent and he would win her. Then Persis reappeared, and looked to be a prize worth fighting for, at any hazard of failure. There was a bevy of young women about her, bright clouds around a new moon. They were all jeweled to incandescence. On their fingers and wrists were rings and bracelets whose prices Forbes could guess from his inspection of shop-windows the day before. He could not give such gifts.

But he would not let anything chill him. He advanced to Persis with as much cordiality as if he had not seen her for years. Persis was too human to follow the usual New York and London custom of avoiding introductions. She presented Forbes to the galaxy with

a statement that he was a famous soldier (which brought polite looks of respect), and a love of a tangoist (which evoked gushes of enthusiasm).

He had not caught a single name, and as the group dispersed, each girl took even her face from his memory as effectually as if it were a picture carried out of a room.

This did not distress him at the time, for the orchestra on the stage in the grand ballroom was busily at work. "The music is calling us," said Forbes. "May I have the honor?"

"I wish you might," Persis sighed, "but Willie would be furious if I gave his dance away. And Mrs. Neff would snatch me baldheaded if I kidnapped her preux chevalier.[Pg 115] I'm afraid she'll expect you to pay for your ride in her car by a little honest work, won't she?"

"I'm afraid so. Of course she will," Forbes groaned, ashamed of his oversight. "But the next one I may have?" "The next one is yours. Don't forget."

"Forget!" He cast his eyes up in a look of horror at the possibility. He hastened to Mrs. Neff, who was just simmering to a boil. She

forgot her pique with the first sidewise stride. She tried to imagine herself young, and Forbes tried to imagine her Persis.

He passed Persis in the eddies again and again, and she always had some amiable wireless greeting to flash across the space. She was difficultly following the spasmodic leadership of Willie, who puffed about her like a little snubby tug conducting a graceful yacht out to sea.

When the dance was done and the inevitable encore responded to, Forbes tried to carry on a traffic of conversation with his hostess; but he had only the faintest idea of what she said or what he himself said--if anything. His mind was lackeying Persis, who knew so many people and was having so good a time. At the first squeak of the next dance Forbes abandoned Mrs. Neff like an Ariadne on a beach of chairs, and presented himself open-armed before Persis.

She slipped into his embrace as if she were mortised there. The very concord of their bodies seemed an argument for the union of

their souls. They were as appropriate to each other as the melodies of a perfect duet, such a love-duet as Tristan and Isolde's.

Once more Forbes was master of Persis; she followed wherever he led. He could whirl her, dip her, sidle her, lead or pursue her; and she obeyed his will as instantly as if he were her owner. She did belong to him. How could he ever give her up? And yet at the mo-ment the orchestra stopped he must let her go.

The end of the dance was their divorce. He transferred her into Bob Fielding's arms for a time, while he[Pg 116] swung Winifred with as much rapture as he would have taken from trundling a bureau around. Even Winifred's surprising lightness of foot reminded Forbes of nothing more poetic than casters.

After this ordeal a strict sense of duty forced him to dance with Mrs. Neff once more. And after her with an anonymous sprig, to whom Mrs. Neff bequeathed him. This girl was as young as Alice Neff, but loud of voice, gawky, and awkward. Some day she would grow up to herself and enter into her birthright of beauty. Now she was neither chick nor pullet, but at the raw-boned, pin-feathered stage between--just out from her mother's wings. Her knees were carried so well forward that Forbes could not avoid them. He

came out of the dance with both patellas bruised.

And then, at last, he was free to tango with Persis again. In the brief space of a few dances, he had held in his clasp the young-old Mrs. Neff, the super-abundant charms of Winifred, and the large-jointed frame of a young girl. When Persis was his again the contrast was astonishing. In these forms the cycle of the rose was complete; the girl was the bud still clenched in its calyx; Winifred was the flower too far expanded; Mrs. Neff the flower of yesterday with the bloom gone from the petal and the wrinkles in its place; but Persis! Persis was the rose at its exact instant of perfection.

At the close of the dance, the hour being somewhat past midnight, supper was announced. Persis seized upon one of the small tables, and stood guard over it while she despatched Forbes to round up Mrs. Neff and Willie and Bob and Winifred, and Ten Eyck and a debutante he was rushing.

Persis saw to it quite casually that Forbes sat close to her; and that was very close, since the little clique was crowded so snugly about the table, that half of those who ate had to convey the food across the elbows and knees of the others.[Pg 117]

Persis sat with both elbows on the table, and raised her bouillon cup with both hands. Her elbow touched that of Forbes, and she did not draw it away. For the matter of that, all the elbows were clashing in the crowded circle.

It was now that Forbes was tempted to make his first advance. How was he to marry her if he never made love to her? How show his love except by some signal? Before all those ears he could not speak his infatuation; before all those eyes he could not seize her hand and kiss it, or kneel, or push his arm around her.

Under the table he might have held hands with her, but she kept her hands above the board. Then, as she leaned close to him to speak across him to Mrs. Neff, her foot struck lightly against his. It was gone at once, but it suggested to his mind an ancient form

of flirtation that has been more honored in modern observance than in modern literature. Remembering the experience at the Opera

House, he was visited with a tender temptation to renew that acquaintance of feet.

He gathered his courage together, as if he were about to step off a precipice into a fog, and pursued her foot with his. He found it, but at a touch it vanished again. Realizing that she took his silly action for an accident, he determined to see the adventure through. He sent his foot prowling after hers, found it, and raising his toe, pressed hers softly.

This time her foot was not withdrawn, and he felt that his emprise was rewarded. But a moment later, when every one's attention was

attracted to another table, and the rest were discussing a prematurely fashionable costume, Persis leaned close to him and murmured:

"In the first place, how dare you? In the second place, I have on white slippers. And in the third place, you are perfectly visible from

all the other tables."

And then she slipped her foot away. It was as if she had unclasped his arms from about her waist, only not so hallowed a precedent. [Pg 118]

Forbes turned pale with shame. He felt that his deed was boorish, and now it had been properly rebuked and resented. The gentleness of the reproof made it the more galling; for it was the gentleness of authority so sure of itself that it needed no clamor of assertion. Another woman might have been, or pretended to be, furious at an insult; a flirt might have rebuked him only to encourage and tease him on; a vixen might have dug her other heel into his instep and forced her release.

But Persis was sophisticated enough not to set her protest in italics. She was probably used to such suggestions. It hurt Forbes' pride to feel that he was not the first man she had rebuffed for this. He had loved her and longed to tell her his secret secretly, and had merely apprised her that he was a blundering bumpkin. She had shamed him yet spared him open disgrace. She had made him respect her intelligence and her tact.

He gnawed his lip with remorse; but his apologies were frustrated by the return of all hands to the table. Persis chattered with the rest and nibbled a marron with an apparent relish that implied forgetfulness of what was only an incident to her.

Forbes was learning what Persis was, by all these little tests, as a general studies the enemy's strength and disposition, by trying the

line at all points. If he finds the pickets always alert, his respect increases the more he is baffled.[Pg 119]

CHAPTER XIX

AFTER the supper no time was lost in returning to the main business of the meeting. Again Willie claimed the first dance, and Forbes was deputed to Ten Eyck's debutante. The next dance, however, brought him back to Persis. He had asked for it, uneasily, and she had granted it with an amiable "Of course."

The moment they were safely lost in the vortex he began to make amends. While he was strutting his proudest through the tango, he was stammering the humblest apologies.

"Oh, don't let that worry you," she answered. "I suppose all men believe they have to do that sort of thing to entertain us. Poor fellows, you think we women expect it of you. Some of us do, I suppose; but I don't like it. And it doesn't seem quite what I had expected of you."

He got a little comfort from the thought that she had taken the trouble, at least, to form an opinion of him. But mainly he admired her for the continued good sportsmanship of her attitude. There was a kind of manliness about it, as if one gentleman should say to another:

"Pardon me, but you are trespassing on my property. It was a natural mistake, but I thought you'd like to know my boundary line." And yet something was gone from her warmth. She danced with him, chatted, laughed. But a chill was upon her. That little bloom of

tenderness that had softened her words as the down velvets the peach, had vanished. Frost had nipped the firstling of spring.[Pg 120]

Forbes was infinitely repentant, rebuffed, but not routed. He began once more to scout along her outposts.

"That hat you wore, you remember, day before yesterday?" "Yes."

"I told you how I followed it." "Yes."

"My heart ran after you like a newsboy calling to you. But you didn't hear."

"I'm so sorry!"

"All of a sudden you spoke to your driver, and he put on full speed up the Avenue, as if you were in a great hurry. I had a funny idea that you might be making haste to meet some man."

"Let me see! Yes, I was. I was hurrying home to meet Willie. He is always furious when I am late."

This time the name of Enslee was like a blow in the face. It dazed Forbes with a confirmation of his worst fears. He did not realize that he thought aloud:

"I guessed right! I knew it was a man, and I was jealous."

Persis stared up at him. She smiled incredulously. "You were jealous? But you hadn't even seen me."

"No, but I wanted to see you. I felt you in the air. And I was jealous."

His eyes were laughing into her laughing eyes. But both of them were a trifle solemn at heart. Forbes determined to learn how her affairs stood with Enslee. He could never have found the temerity to demand the information if the music had not flared with such dare-deviltry.

"Would you mind if I asked you one very personal question?" he said. "Not if you'll look the other way when I answer it."

"Are you engaged to Willie Enslee?"

The question was so unexpected and so forthright that[Pg 121] it almost staggered her. She flashed one look up into his earnest eyes

and laughed; but it was a cold laugh.

What Will People Say? - The Original Classic Edition

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