# Hare and Tortoise (Davison)/Part 2/Chapter 5

BEFORE Louise had been an hour in the Valley she saw that the election was not going to be the "walk-over" that Pat Goard was predicting, despite the solid support which Keble was receiving at the hands of all the commercial interests. Although she could be contemptuously disregardful of public opinion, she seldom made the mistake of misreading it to her advantage, and as she moved about among groups of idlers in Main Street she intuitively discovered that there was a formidable undercurrent of opposition to her husband.
It came to her with a shock that part of the opposition was directed at herself. She knew there were people in the Valley who thought of her as a "menace". There were women who resented what they regarded as her superior airs, her new way of talking, her habit of dashing into town in an expensive motor. She found that her frivolous treatment of the far-off Watch Night service had not been forgotten, had even been exhumed by people who had boisterously profited by Keble's hospitality on the night in question. She discovered that sarcastic equivocations were being circulated regarding her "sick man" and Keble's "secretary". Further than ​that, capital was being made of the fact that Keble had brought laborers from the east to work on his land. This was a particularly malicious weapon, since Keble had advertised months in advance for local workmen, and of the few who had offered their services, he had engaged all who qualified for the work in hand.
She made a rapid computation of her enemies, then a rapid computation of her friends. Luckily she had invited Mr. and Mrs. Boots to her house during the visit of her English guests. That had greatly strengthened the Eveley prestige among the faithful. Mrs. Boots recalled that she was the first to tell the Eveleys that they should go in for politics. Even the tongue of the mail carrier's wife had wagged less carelessly since Louise had invited Amy Sweet to dinner with a lord. Pearl Beatty, who had recently become Mrs. Jack Wallace, was a tower of strength for Keble's cause, for while the women of the Valley whispered about her, Pearl's respectability was now unchallengeable and most of her detractors owed money to Jack for ploughs and harness bought on credit. Moreover, Pearl, as a university graduate, could make the untutored respect her opinion, and she was phenomenally successful on the stump.
The opposing party had, early in the campaign, strengthened their cause by dropping the man who had represented and neglected them for so many years, and chosen as their candidate the much more ​redoubtable Otis Swigger, proprietor of the Canada House, a director of the Witney bank, and the holder of many mortgages. Oat was a good "cusser"; he always had a chew of tobacco for any one amiable enough to listen to his anecdotes; he was generally conceded to be an enlightened citizen; and he was a typical product of his district. Moreover, he was popular enough to enlist the support of many Progressives, who had decided not to put up a candidate of their own.
For Louise, whose erratic ways of arriving at conclusions in no sense invalidated the accuracy of the conclusions arrived at, the factor which made Oat Swigger a dangerous opponent was that she had, for her own reasons, decided not to invite him and Minnie to what the Valley referred to as her "high-toned house-warming". In the drug-store Minnie had tried to pass her without speaking, her chalky chin very high in the air. Louise had grasped Minnie's shoulder, with a smile on her lips but a glint in her eye, and said, "You're getting near-sighted Minnie. How are you?"
"Oh, I'm all right, Smarty!" Minnie had retorted, and broken away. "Never better in my life!" she flung back.
"For God's sake touch wood!" Louise had screamed after her, with a wink for the man behind the counter. "You're going to vote for us, I hope," she said to him.
"Sure thing!" he agreed.
​It was with these discoveries bubbling in her mind that she sought out Keble to present a hasty report before the "monster meeting" in the Valley town hall.
Keble and Miriam seemed to have taken stock of most of the points she had observed, but they had thought of nothing as good as the satirical counters which leaped to her tongue, and in the short interval before the meeting, Keble jotted down hints.
Of the three, Louise was the only one who was seized with misgivings when Pat Goard came to say that the hall was full and it was time to go on the platform. She held Keble back for a moment. "Do let me speak too," she pleaded.
Keble laughed and she saw a glance pass between him and Miriam which seemed to say, "That incurable theatricality cropping out again!"
"I'm afraid there's no room on the program," he said.
"As if that made any difference!" she retorted. "It wouldn't take me five minutes to say my piece."
"An extempore address might spoil everything," he remonstrated. "I'm using your suggestions; they will be the plums in my pudding."
She gave it up, but only because the glance between Miriam and Keble had abashed her. Perhaps it was mere play-acting, she rebelliously reflected, but it would be first-rate play-acting, and she had meant every word she had said weeks ago when she had ​warned Keble that drama must be infused into politics if he wished to carry the mass.
She sat on the platform in her khaki riding suit and was startled by the volume of applause which greeted Keble when it came time for his speech. She was also cut by the hissing and booing which seemed to be concentrated in the back of the hall, where she recognized a number of hoodlums, probably paid.
She was also startled by the effectiveness of Keble's speech. It sounded honest, and she thrilled to a note of authority in his voice and a strength in his manner for which she had not given him credit. Miriam seemed not at all surprised,—but Miriam had heard him speak in public before.
The audience was attentive, at times vociferously friendly. There were occasional interruptions and aggressive questions, which Keble found no difficulty in answering. At the end there was some cheering, and as the meeting broke up scores of men and a few women came to shake hands with Keble.
Louise greeted friends and used every acquaintanceship in the interest of propaganda, but secretly she was panic-stricken. She had seen the Valley in all its moods, and she knew that this evening's hearty good will had not been fired with the enthusiasm that won Valley elections. She was afraid to meet Keble's eyes, and was glad that in his flush of triumph at the cheers and individual assurances, he failed to see her doubt.
​They reached the doctor's house late in the evening, and went straight to bed in order to be fresh for the strenuous day at Witney. Louise did not sleep. She was haunted by the sight of earnest, slightly puzzled, friendly and unfriendly faces, and by the sound of jeers. Her brain revolved a dozen schemes, and before she fell asleep she had drawn up a private plan of campaign.
After breakfast she went to the bank and cashed a cheque. Then she made a round of the garages and stables and hired every available conveyance. While Keble was talking with groups of men in the town, she was using every minute, unknown to him, to collect influential members of the community and make them promise to travel to Witney for the final rally that evening. The cars and wagons were to leave an hour after her husband's departure. Nothing was to be said to him about the scheme, for she was reserving it as a surprise. Her conscience told her it was what Keble would spurn as "flummery". Well, it was a flummery world.
After dinner at the Majestic Hotel in Witney, followed by anteroom interviews, Keble and his band of supporters, to the blare of trumpets which made Miriam conceal a smile, proceeded to the Arena, a wooden edifice with a false front rising proudly above the highest telephone poles. Flags, posters, slogans, confetti, and peanut shells abounded. There were argumentative groups outside the doors, while within, every available seat was taken and already ​there was talk of an overflow meeting. Louise had had the satisfaction of seeing her phenomenal procession of cars, wagons, and beribboned citizens from the Valley swarm into the town, headed by the Valley band. It had taken all her skill to prevent Keble from discovering the ruse. Later on he would find out and be furious. For the moment she didn't care what he thought. Besides, it wasn't bribery to offer people a lift over a distance of thirty-five miles to listen to a speech. She wasn't bribing them to vote; they could vote for or against, as their feelings should dictate after she had got through with them. Moreover, even if it was trickery, she had used her own money,—not Keble's. She smiled at the reflection that Walter's predictions were coming true; how it would have amused him to see her being, with a vengeance, "one decent member of society"!
The applause on Keble's appearance was not deafening. After all, Witney was less well acquainted with Keble than the Valley, even though it had pleasant recollections of the compliments uttered by his father from the back platform of a governmental railway carriage. Keble's address was similar to former addresses, though throughout this final day he had brought together concise counter arguments to new attacks, and had prepared a damaging criticism of his opponent's latest rosy promises. He was more than cordially received, but again Louise felt the absence of enthusiasm which represents the margin of a majority.
​When he had resumed his seat, Mr. Goard, in accordance with a secret plan, called on Mrs. Eveley, to the amazement of Miriam and Keble, and to the wonderment of the big audience, who had had three serious speeches to digest and who sensed in the new move a piquant diversion.
"Last night," Louise began, "I asked my husband to let me speak at the Valley mass meeting, and he objected. So, ladies and gentlemen, to-night, I didn't ask his permission at all. I asked Mr. Goard's, and as you all know, Pat Goard could never resist a lady."
Already she had changed the mind of a score of men who had been on the point of leaving the hall.
"I wouldn't give my husband away by telling you he refused, unless it illustrated a point I wish to make. The point is that no matter how hard a man objects,—and the better they are the more they do object,—his wife always takes her own way in the end. Not only that, ladies and gentlemen, but the wife adds much more color to her husband's public policies than the public realizes. You've heard the proverb about the hand that rocks the cradle. I don't for a second claim that the average wife is capable of thinking out a political platform; certainly I couldn't; but she is like the irritating fly that goads the horse into a direction that he didn't at all know he was going to take. What it all boils down to is this: when you elect Keble Eveley at the polls to-morrow, you'll elect me too. And if you were by any mischance to elect Oat Swigger, you'd be elect​ing Minnie Swigger. Minnie Swigger is a jolly good girl, one of my oldest friends. But the point is, ladies and gentlemen, I can lick Minnie!"
Shouts of laughter interrupted her. Miriam and Keble had ceased being shocked. However much they might deprecate her sops to the groundlings, they were hypnotized by her control of the mass which had a few minutes earlier been heterogeneous and capricious. Her direct personal allusions had dispelled a hampering ceremoniousness that had prevailed all evening.
"Once when we were girls together at the Valley school," Louise continued, seeing that her audience appreciated the reference to Mrs. Swigger. "I did lick her. I had more hair for her to pull, and she made the most of it. But I had a champion's uppercut. Now gentlemen, when you go to the polls to-morrow, don't back the wrong girl."
She took a step nearer the row of lamps and held them by a change of mood. "A little while ago somebody said that Keble Eveley was a dude. If he were, his wife would be a dude too; and though I've come up against a lot of rough characters in my time, nobody has yet been mean enough to call me a dude to my face; things said behind your back don't count. So now, man to man, is there anybody here who has the nerve to call us dudes? If there is let him say it now, or forever hold his peace."
There was a silence, then a shuffling sound directed attention to a corner, whence a facetious voice ​called out, "His father's a sure enough dude, ain't he?"
Louise darted a glance to see who had spoken, paused a moment, smiled, and took the audience into her confidence. "It's Matt Hardy," she announced. "Matt's a clever boy (Matt was fifty and weighed fifteen stone), but like many clever people he overshoots the mark. Matt says Keble Eveley's father is a dude; and his obvious implication is that we are therefore dudes. For the sake of argument, let's admit that Lord Eveley is a dude——"
"A damn fine dude at that," interposed a friendly voice.
"A damn fine dude," echoed Louise. "We'll admit that." She wheeled around with dramatic suddenness, facing Matt's corner. "Now Matt Hardy's father used to live in Utah. The obvious implication is that Matt is a Mormon with six concealed wives."
There was a howl of enjoyment while the discomfited Matthew tried to maintain a good-humored front against the nudges with which his neighbours plagued him. The success of the sally lay in the fact that every one knew Matt for a bachelor who paid his taxes and enjoyed an immaculate reputation.
Louise's spirits rose as she leaned forward over the lights and focused attention again by a gesture of her arms.
"It doesn't in the least matter whether we're dudes or not," she said. "You're going to elect us anyway. Bye and bye I'll tell you why. My husband told you ​some of the reasons, but there are a lot of others he hadn't time to touch on. Never mind that now. Before I get to the reasons I must sweep the ground clear of objections. That's the quickest way. I've disposed of one. Are there any other objections to us as your representatives in the Legislative Assembly? Any more objections, Matt?"
Matt was still smarting. He had been harboring a desire for revenge. But his wits stood still under provocation.
"Matt's cartridges are used up," she announced, turning away.
"No they're not," he shouted, with a sudden inspiration. "You're French."
His voice was drowned by a chorus of jeers. Louise motioned for silence, then smiled imperturbably. "That's what Minnie Swigger said, ladies and gentlemen. That's what we fought about. And Minnie was half right. But only half. She overlooked the fact that me mother was Irish!"
The success of this was almost too great. It threatened to rob the session of its seriousness. After the first delight had simmered down, individuals were suddenly seized with a recollection of the wink and the brogue and burst into renewed guffaws or slapped their legs with resounding thwacks.
Louise saw the necessity of counteracting this levity, and for several minutes talked straight at the issue, pointing out the practical changes that had come about as a result of her husband's efforts to ​civilize and develop his district, and the far-reaching improvements that he, of all people, was in a position to effectuate. She heard herself enunciating facts and generalizations which had never occurred to her before. Once again, as in the case of Billy Salter's funeral, she found herself thinking in public more rapidly and concisely than she had ever thought in private. And under the surface of it all was a wonderment that she should be so passionately supporting Keble in a plan that had been distasteful to her.
Only once she relieved the tenseness by another flash of humor, when, referring to the candidature of Otis Swigger, she said that while Oat's barber shop in the Valley had always been recognized as a public forum, Oat would be at a distinct disadvantage in Parliament, because he couldn't lather the faces of the other members, consequently no one would be obliged to listen to him.
She brought her address to a climax with the instinct of an orator, just when the whole audience had settled down comfortably for more.
She paused a moment, exulting in the silence, then, changing from an earnest to a girlish manner, she dropped her arms and said quietly, "Well, ladies and gentlemen, you still have twelve hours to think over the truth of all I've said. Are you going to vote for us?"
The answer was in an affirmative that shook the rafters of the Arena and made Miriam turn pale. ​The air was charged with an enthusiasm which for Louise, as she sank back exhausted, spelt Majority. Keble was forced to acknowledge the prolonged acclamation, and Pat Goard quickly followed up the advantage with a few words of dismissal.
Excitement and lack of sleep, following on her long ordeal, had overtaxed Louise. She felt weak and a little frightened as she walked towards a side door in a deserted back room of the building, followed by Keble, who came running to overtake.
"I know it was cheap," she quickly forestalled him, "but I couldn't help it." He seemed to have been subdued by the pandemonium she had let loose, as though suddenly aware that he had been satisfied with too little until she gave a demonstration of what pitch enthusiasm could and must be raised to. "It's my love of acting," she added. "I hope you weren't annoyed."
Keble was in the grip of a retrospective panic. "Why am I always finding things out so late!" he cried, with a profound appeal in his voice. "I'm always walking near a precipice in the fog. Why can't I see the things you see?"
Her fatigue made her a little hysterical. "Why do you keep your eyes shut?" she retorted.
A cloud of feeling that had been growing heavier for weeks burst and deluged Keble with the sense of what his wife meant to him. He saw what a jabber all social intercourse might become should she withhold her interpretative affection from him or ex​pend it elsewhere. He had long been restive under her continued use of the weapon of polite negativity with which he had originally defended himself against her impulsiveness. Now he longed to recapture the sources of the old impulsiveness, to defend them as his rarest possession, and his longing was redoubled by a fear that it was too late.
"Why——" he commenced, but his voice broke and he reached out his arms. It was dark. She was dazed, and seemed to ward him off.
"Then what made you do it?" he finally contrived to say. "You've saved the day, if it can be saved. Not that it really matters. Why? Why? Why not have let me blunder along to defeat, like the silly ass I am?"
"No woman likes to see her husband beaten," she replied, in tired, tearful tones, "by a barber!" she added.
"Louise!" he implored, in a welter of hopes, fears, and longings that made him for once brutally incautious. He caught her into his arms, then marvelled at the limpness of her body. He turned her face to the dim light, and saw that she had fainted.
Not until Dare had been driven to Witney, there to entrain for the coast, did Louise give in to the weariness with which she had been contending for many days prior to Keble's election. Only her determination to spare Dare the knowledge that she had ​overtaxed her strength for him kept her from yielding sooner. On the day of his departure she retired to her bedroom, drew the blinds, got into bed, and gave an order that nobody should be admitted. They might interpret her retirement as grief at Dare's departure if they chose; for the moment she didn't care a tinker's dam what any one thought.
Aunt Denise discouraged Keble's immediate attempt to telephone for Dr. Bruneau. "She doesn't need medicine," she said, "but rest. Leave her to me; I understand her temperament."
Once more Keble and Miriam could only pool their helplessness.
"We had better leave matters in her hands," Miriam decided. "The Bruneaus seem to be infallible in cases of illness."
Keble was only half reassured. "Usually when Louise has a headache that would drive any ordinary person mad, she goes out and climbs Hardscrapple. I have a good mind to telephone in spite of Aunt Denise."
"If you do," said Miriam, "Louise will be furious, and that will only make matters worse. It's merely exhaustion. Even I have seen it coming."
"I wish to God I'd fetched a nurse from Harristown when Dare was ill."
"Louise wouldn't have given up her patient if you had imported a dozen."
Keble was vexed and bitterly unhappy. "What are you going to do with a woman like that!" he ​cried. "I don't mind her having her own way; but damn it all, I object to her doing things that half kill her. That's stupid."
One of the most difficult lessons Miriam had learnt in her long discipleship under Louise was how and when to be generous. She saw an opportunity and breathed more freely. "I think it's cruel of you to call her sacrifice stupid. If she breaks down it is not that she has undertaken too much; but that other people undertake so little. When Louise resolved to nurse Dare she did it because there was, as she said to me, no one else. But during that period she was putting the best brain-work into our campaign. The minute she was free she went to the Valley, worked like a horse, and turned the tide single-handed because, as she might have put it, there was nobody else. She thinks and acts for us all. It isn't our fault if we are not alert enough to live up to her standard, but the least we can do when she becomes a victim to our sluggishness is to refrain from blaming her."
"Well, Miriam, I give it up! I don't understand Louise; I don't understand Aunt Denise; I don't even understand you. You women have one set of things to say for publication, and then disclose amendments which alter the color of the published reports. Each new disclosure rings true, yet they don't piece together into anything recognizable. I no sooner get my sails set than the breeze shifts. . . . There's only one thing left for me to do, and ​that is to go on as I began, just crawling along like a tortoise, colliding into everything sooner or later. By the time I'm eighty I may have learned something and got somewhere. If not I'll just stumble into my grave, and on my tombstone they can write, 'Poor devil, he meant well'."
Miriam had been laughing at the funny aspect of his misery, but her smile became grim. "That isn't a bad epitaph. I wish I could be sure that I'll be entitled to one as good."
Keble glanced at her curiously. "You're morbid, Miriam. I don't wonder, with the monotony of our life here."
"No," she corrected, despite the tyrant. "The life here has done more than anything to cure me of morbidness. Although, to tell the truth, I wasn't conscious of the morbid streak in me until after I'd been here for a while." To herself Miriam explained the matter with the help of a photographic metaphor: Keble's personality had been a solution which brought out an alluring but reprehensible image on the negative of her heart; Louise's character had been a solution which had gradually brought out a series of surrounding images which threw the reprehensible image into the right proportion, subordinating it to the background without in any way dimming it. Miriam was now forced to admit that one overture on Keble's part, one token of a tyrant within him that reciprocated the desire of ​her tyrant, would have sufficed to overthrow all her scruples.
"I don't see what you mean," said Keble.
Miriam thought for a moment. "You deserve an explanation. I can't explain it all; it's too personal." She had almost said too humiliating. "But I'll make a partial confession. Louise imported me here long ago as a sort of tutor, at her expense. You weren't to know; but it can't do any harm to give the game away now. While I was supposed to be tutoring her, I was really learning. By watching Louise I've learned the beauty of unselfishness, trite as that may sound. I can't be unselfish on Louise's scale, for I can't be anything on her scale, good, bad, or indifferent. But like you I can mean well, and since I've known Louise I can mean better.
"You sometimes speak of Louise's play-acting. When your people were here we once said that she was having a lovely time showing off. I know better now. I'm convinced that she was trying, in her own way, to reflect distinction on you, just as I'm convinced that when she jerrymandered the proletariat she was going it in the face of bodily discomfort and your disapproval simply because she couldn't bear the thought of your being disappointed. I don't think either of us has given Louise enough credit for disinterestedness, chiefly because she doesn't give herself credit for it. She prates so much about her individual rights, that we assume her incapable of sacrificing them. At times we've mistaken ​her pride for indifference. Do look back and see if that isn't so. I'm inclined to think that even her present illness is merely the nervous strain consequent upon some splendid reticence."
Miriam paused, unable to confess that the reticence had to do with herself, as she suspected it had. She saw that she had permission to go on.
"Then her interest in Dare. That, you and I have avoided referring to, and I think we were a little hypocritical. But the core of the secret is connected with Dare, and I can't do Louise the injustice of not telling you. It was unpardonable of me to listen, but I did. I was in the sun-parlor, in the hammock, dozing, and she and Dare came and sat by the fire in the hall. The door was open."
"When was this?"
"Only yesterday. They were talking about the elections. 'When I saw all those idiots wavering between Oat Swigger and Keble,' she said, 'something snapped. From that moment I had only one determination: to make them feel the worth of all the things Keble stood for in the universe' . . . The conversation swung around to the monkey. She told Dare, as she had long ago told me, that before the monkey arrived she hoped he would be a boy, not for her sake, but to gratify his grandfathers. Then when he did turn out a boy, she was amazed to find herself thankful for your sake. The grandfathers were forgotten, but she was indifferent. Then after the elections she was for the first time ​conscious of cherishing the monkey for her own sake. That feeling grew until she suddenly resented your rights in him. Then yesterday she took it into her head to bathe the monkey, and had an insane delusion that she could wash off his heredity,—scrubbed like a charwoman till the poor darling howled. 'Then,' she said, 'I was sorry, and by the time I had got on all his shirts I felt that I had put his heredities on again, and was glad and kissed him and he flapped his arms and squealed. Then I cried, because, deep down, I was terrified that perhaps Keble might some day, if he hasn't already, resent my contribution to the monkey'."
Miriam waited. "I couldn't resist passing on that monologue to you, for it seems the most complete answer to many criss-cross questions, and Louise might never have brought herself to let you see. It would be impudent of me to say all this had we not formed a habit out here of being so criss-crossly communicative, and if you hadn't tacitly given me a big sister's licence. Anyway, there it is, for what it's worth. At least I mean well."
Keble was too strangely moved to trust his voice, and walked out of the house to ride over the rain-soaked roads.
That was the most bitter moment that Miriam had ever experienced. She had come to know that Keble had no emotion to spare for her; but that he should fail to see into her heart, or, seeing, refuse ​her the barest little sign of understanding and compassion,—it was really not quite fair.
She had letters to write. She had decided to leave, but apart from that her plans were uncertain. Her most positive aim was to avoid living with her old-fashioned aunt in Philadelphia. Grimly she looked forward to a process of gradual self-effacement. In two or three years she would probably not receive invitations to the bigger houses. Then there would be some hot little flat in Washington, on the Georgetown side, with occasional engagements to give lessons in something,—at best a post as social secretary to the wife of some new Cabinet Member full of her importance. Something dependent, and dingy. Each year would add its quota to an accumulation of dust on the shelves of her heart. And with a sigh she would take down from a shelf and from time to time reread this pathetic romance in the wilderness. From time to time she would receive impulsive invitations from Louise, and would invent excuses for declining. Perhaps, some years hence, when she could view the episode with some degree of impersonality and humor, she would write a long letter of confession to Louise. In advance she was sure of absolution. That was her only comfort.
Dare had guessed her secret, and she had been too hypocritical to take him into her confidence. Now that he was gone she regretted that she had not been flexible enough to enter into the spirit of his overture. By evading, she had not only screened her ​own soul, but denied commiseration to him. In future she would try to be more alert to such cues. She wondered whether inflexibility might not have had a good deal to do with the barrenness of her life. She even wondered whether at thirty-five one would be ridiculous in vowing to become flexible,—would that be savoring too strongly of the old maids in farces?
From her window, as she was patting her hair into place before going down to tea, she caught sight of Keble's tall, clean figure dismounting at the edge of the meadow. Katie was passing along the road with the perambulator, and Keble went out of his way to greet the monkey. His high boots were splashed with mud. His belted raincoat emphasized the litheness of his body. The face that bent over the carriage glowed from sharp riding against the damp air. The monkey was trying to pull off the peak of his father's cap, and Keble was pretending to be an ogre. Katie looked on indulgently.
"Even Katie," thought Miriam, "puts more into life than I do." A few months before, Miriam would have thought, "gets more out of it."
The mail had been delayed by the state of the roads. Miriam found a letter from London. When tea was poured she read as follows:
"My dear Miss Cread: I don't know whether you are still at Hillside or whether you will be at all interested in the suggestion I am about to make, but I am writing on the off chance. My old friend ​Aurelie Graybridge is leaving soon on a visit to America. Yesterday, during a chat with her, I happened to mention your name. She recalled having met you some years ago, and inquired minutely after you. She has been looking for a companion to help her keep the run of her committees, and so forth. For several years a cousin was with her, but her cousin married and that leaves her with no one. I suggested that you might be induced to go to her, and she asked me to sound you.
"You would divide your time between England and the continent. The duties would be light, chiefly correspondence. A good deal of spare time; travelling and all expenses provided, and a decent allowance.
"Aurelie plans to sail next week. I'm enclosing her address. Please write her if the idea appeals to you. I hope it may, for that will mean that I shall be likely to see you from time to time. You may of course have much more interesting plans, in which case don't mind this gratuitous scrawl."
It was signed by Alice Eveley. Miriam restored the letter to its envelope, and was thankful that Keble and Aunt Denise were too occupied to notice her face.
Her anger was redoubled by the realization that the offer was too good to be turned down. She knew she would end by despatching an amiably worded letter to Mrs. Graybridge, then write Keble's ​sister a note thanking her for her kind thoughtfulness.
"The cat! Oh, the cat!" she was saying under her breath.
In the third week of December Keble returned to Hillside after his first session in the Provincial Assembly. He had been loth to leave his wife at the ranch, but she had been too weak to accompany him and was still somewhat less energetic than she had formerly been. Keble found her on a divan in her own sitting room, with the monkey propped up beside her.
"It's just as you said it would be," he remarked. "Having to waste precious weeks in that dull hole makes the ranch so unbelievably wonderful a place to come back to!"
When the first questions had been answered, Louise held up a prettily bound little volume from which she had been reading. "Look! A Christmas present already,—from Walter Windrom. A collection of his own verse."
Keble admired it, then Louise, in a tone which she succeeded in making casual, said, indicating one of the pages, "That's a strange sort of poem, the one called 'Constancy'. Whatever made Walter write a thing like that?"
Keble read the poem. "I've seen it before. It's ​quite an old one. Girlie clipped it from some review or other and sent it to me."
"What does it mean?" Louise insisted.
"How should I know?" he laughed. "Girlie had a theory about it. Walter was smitten with an American actress for a while,—what was her name? Myra something: Myra Pelter. She treated him rather shabbily. Took his present, then threw him down for somebody else, I believe, after they'd been rather thicker, as a matter of fact, than Girlie quite knew. Walter is romantic, you know, for all his careful cynicism; he's always singing the praises of bad lots, and that makes Girlie wild, naturally. Girlie said the poem was Walter's attempt to justify this Myra person's uppish treatment of him, an attempt to make her out a lady with duties to art,—all that sort of blether. It's Girlie's prosaic imagination: she can never read a book or a poem without trying to fit it, word for word, into the author's private life. I had quite forgotten its existence."
It was difficult for Louise to conceal her relief after years of pent-up unhappiness caused by her over-subjective interpretation of the poem's mission. "How could a man as clever as Walter ever take Myra Pelter and her art seriously. Miriam and I went to see her once. She's only a Japanese doll!"
"Dolls are an important institution. They have turned wiser heads than Walter's."
Louise looked again at the historical lines. "I hate it," she mildly remarked.
​"Tell Walter so—not me!"
"Oh no," she sighed. "The poor little lines meant well enough."
While her remark did not make sense to him, it seemed an echo of something he had once said to himself; it brought a dim recollection of pain.
"But I would tell him at a pinch," she continued. "I'm no doll that says only the ugly things for which you press a button in its back!"
"Ungainly sentence, that!"
He remembered now. It was the ghostly little gramaphone record, that had brought him a message about Dare.
"It's an ungainly subject," she retorted, absent-mindedly.
"Change it then. There's always the monkey."
"Yes, there's him. Aren't you glad?"
"Rather! . . . I don't suppose anything could be done about his legs. They're as curved as hoops. If he ever tries to make a goal he'll have to stand facing the side-lines and kick sideways like a crab."
Louise buried her nose in the monkey's fragrant dress and shook him into laughter. She was languidly wondering where her own goal was, whether it was still ahead or whether, as Walter had so discouragingly predicted, she would find it at her starting post. She was happy; but she suspected that she was happy only for the moment. The complacence with which Keble had accepted their revival of interest in each other was already stirring a little sing​ing restlessness of nerves within her. He so had the air of having won the race. Perhaps he had, and perhaps he always would. But she was none the less hare-like, for all that! She looked into the monkey's eyes. "Tell your daddy," she said, "the important thing is to make the goal,—whether you do it sideways or frontways or whatever old ways!"
The end