27.

very reason of her insignificance, a pathetic, almost a tragic figure: re-married — and married to Tillotson Wing — she simply ceased to count. He had pictured her as reaping the consequences of her fault; but he saw now that she belonged to the class who have such reaping done for them by others. Clephane, Valeria — perhaps Wing himself — would gather in this particular harvest. Severance felt a shiver of disgust. His interest in her had been based on the assumption of sentient depths beneath her surface; and this assumption removed, there remained a sense of something thin and larval, a glittering emanation of decay.

Severance's impressions slowly summed themselves up in the question with which at length he turned to Clephane: "And what do you mean to do with yourself?"

Clephane had regained control of his *shrieking* nerves, and his tone showed the Anglo-Saxon *dilution* of self-betrayal.

"Oh, I'm tied to the oar for awhile *at least*. I'm paying for my shot now — there were a good many bills to settle. By and bye, perhaps, when I've straightened my accounts, I may chuck the momey-grubbing and go back to my natural way of living — I remember you defined it once as a tendency to lie on my back under a tree and plan essays on the minor poets. But just now I rather prefer Wall Street and double entries. Perhaps I may be the chrysalis of a millionaire." He lifted an ironical eye to Severance. "There would be a certain zest in eclipsing Wing, wouldn't there?"

28.

IV.

George Severance had begun life at the bar, with some promise of success in his profession; but the drudgery of routine work and the long months of town life had combined to break down his health, and he found himself, at twenty-seven or eight, in the drifting state of a man who has mistaken his calling. Luckily for Severance, he could not afford to drift long. If he gave up the law, he must find an alternative means of livelihood; and a boyish taste for adventure and the primitive activities, reasserting itself with fresh vigour in the reaction from his office bondage, urged him to undertake the inspection of his uncle's South American mines. He had taken, on leaving college, a course in civil engineering, and this made him enough of a specialist to serve his uncle's purpose. The life had suited him in many ways, and the isolation it necessitated had given him a chance to keep his studies abreast of his practical work. He had returned to New York with a certain reluctance, mitigated by the fact that his coming back was connected with his work, since he was to establish a New York office for his uncle's mining company. His mixed training made him the fittest person to be at the head of this branch of the business, and he had agreed to undertake, for a time, the management of the office; but there lurked in him an undercurrent of restlessness which made him secretly regard the agreement as a provisional one. He was glad of the chance to take up old ties from a new stand-point of experience; but he had a

29.

sub-conscious sense of the instability of the renewed relation.

Severance's absence from New York had been sufficiently prolonged to give a certain relief to the first impressions of his return. People and conditions stood out in the round, instead of forming the tapestry background of existence, and he found plenty of work for the perceptions which solitude had sharpened.

He had not been a week in town before he discovered that the Tillotson Wings were the chief conversational resource of the waning season. At the dinners he went to they came on with the little Neck clams and lingered till the Florida strawberries. Society was divided between those who believed they would "pull it off," and those who believed they wouldn't. The majority believed they wouldn't, and the few who predicted their ultimate success were set down as inexperienced or reproved as cynical. The case had really been too flagrant: society must protect itself, must draw the line somewhere. Divers reasons made it desirable to draw the line at Mrs. Wing. A great many ladies, it appeared, had always suspected her of being "horrid". She had abandoned a devoted husband and a charming child, and her motives for doing so were too crudely utilitarian to be condoned by a society accustomed to drape expediency with sentiment. As Maud Dulacey put it, to elope with Tillotson Wing was like running away with a cheque-book.

It was at one of Mrs. Dulacey's Sunday luncheons that Severance heard the subject most exhaustively discussed. Maud Dulacey was a distant cousin of Severance's, and would have been a near friend if he had not, in the long run, found her too continuously clever. She knew this, and described herself as a dish that he enjoyed tasting occasionally. "He thinks me," she said, "too highly seasoned for

30.

human nature's daily food, but now and then he likes to make a meal of me."

She took his intermittent attentions philosophically, and on his return to New York he found her house the best point from which to gather up dropped threads and make a general survey of the social woof. Maud Dulacey herself occupied a little pinnacle of observation on which she was always ready to make room for a friend. She was a cheerful widow of forty, without money or beauty, who consoled herself for the lack of these gifts by an amused sense of their relativity. "If you're rich," she said "there's always somebody richer; and if you're pretty there's always somebody prettier — or younger, which is worse. If you're ugly, you're at least spared the strain of competition: nobody is trying to be uglier, and if some woman succeeds without trying, why you're just that much to the good. And as to the money, it robs a plain woman of her last hope of being loved for herself."

So impartial an observer of the human ant-heap could not but find food for philosophy in the case of Mrs. Wing; but what Mrs. Dulacey really enjoyed was hearing her friends talk about it. It was her ~~tired~~ belief that people are never so foolish as when they are expatiating on the folly of others, and human foolishness was a phenomenon she never tired of studying.

The means whereby the Wings hoped to gain recognition were as earnestly discussed as their chances of gaining it; and here again opinion was divided. It was generally agreed that, if they had done wisely in going abroad as soon as they were married: the battle raged about the expediency of their return, and the wisdom of the course they had since followed.

31.

"The case is hopeless, my dear," Mrs. Van Arkell said, leaning forward to catch her hostess's ear. Mrs. Van Arkell was an emphatic woman, who did not propose to trust her deliverances to chance currents of attention. "The case is hopeless," she repeated. "They have come home too soon. It is impossible to pretend that we've forgotten: they haven't given us time."

"It is unfortunate for them," remarked Mr. Vimpry, "that no conspicuous scandal has occurred in the interval. They are still the most striking objects on the horizon." He adjusted his glass to examine the lamb cutlets at his elbow, and waved them aside with a disenchanted gesture ofفضo.

Mr. Vimpry was a small dry man who had adopted disparagement as a career. It had introduced him to the most select circles, and usually secured him the best seat at table and his host's oldest Madeira. The fact that he lived obscurely in lodgings, and, in spite of a comfortable income, made no effort to return the hospitality he criticized, did not detract from the _force_ of his depreciation. Even Mrs. Van Arkell stood in awe of his verdict, and wavered in her established conviction that her _cuisine_ must be good because it was expensive. It was against all the laws of fitness that Mr. Vimpry should adjust his glass as _cautiously_ before helping himself to her _mousse de foie gras en Bellegère_, as before risking himself on one of Maud Dulacey's cutlets; but he did it, and no matter how far down the table he sat, Mrs. Van Arkell could feel his rejection through her panoply of gold plate and orchids.

"I can't agree with you in regard to their coming home," Mr. Vimpry continued, turning to her from the repudiated cutlets. "If they had stayed abroad longer they would have seemed to admit

32.

that they were afraid. Their only course is to assume that every-
thing is as it should be, and secure the best cook they can find."

Mrs. Van Arkell murmured her disapproval. "Oh, if you
think it's a mere question of *money* — "

Mr. Vimpry dropped his glass in a pitying stare. "Money? A good
cook a question of money?" Mrs. Van Arkell felt his commiseration
down her spine. "If that is the case," he enquired urbanely, "why
does one invariably eat the worst dinners in the biggest houses?"

"Ah, a big house — a big house," interposed Mr. Willowby
Bence, an immature old man whose satiny upholstered appearance sug-
gested a fly-blown bonbonnière, while his remarks recalled the mot-
toes wrapped about chocolate creams. "A big house," repeated Mr.
Bence, whose idea of conversation was to carry it on from the last
word of the previous speaker. "That's what they want, you know —
the biggest house they can find; the kind of house that makes people
want to get inside. I wonder they haven't built near the Park; I
call it bad policy to hire in a side street."

"I should call it bad *taste* to build near the Park," in-
terposed Mrs. Van Arkell, who lived there herself, and felt that
virtuous wealth should have a monopoly of the neighbourhood. Mrs.
Van Arkell believed in keeping a snub in circulation, and it was
convenient to pass on to Mr. Bence the one she had just received
from Mr. Vimpry. Mr. Bence, however, was too intent on catching
her last word to be disturbed by the context.

"Ah, *taste* —" he said, turning the word over in his
mouth like a sugar-plum. "There's where Mrs. Wing excels, isn't
it? I always tell her that she is the Muse of Millinery. Her
gowns are poems, her bonnets sonnets — "

33.

"Her gloves couplets," Severance obligingly suggested.

"Couplets? Ah, couples — to be sure! Pretty — very pretty," cried Mr. Bence, with a gesture which seemed to confer the laurel on Severance.

"I hope her boots are not alexandrines," said Mrs. Dulacey, laughing; but this carried the joke out of range, and Mr. Vimpry, laying down an olive of which he had taken a tentative bite, said judicially: "I believe the truth of the matter is that Wing is too close to buy back his place in society. He ought to spend money, as Bence says; chuck it out of the window — the upper window, so that it makes a clatter when it falls; but I'm told he is already finding Mrs. Wing a more expensive luxury than he'd bargain-ed for."

"Poor Henry Clephane," Mrs. Van Arkell sighed; "you know he is still paying off her debts."

"It would really take a syndicate to dress Alice Wing," said Mrs. Dulacey thoughtfully.

The lady next to Severance emitted a deprecating murmur. She was a pretty nun-like woman, who wore the most expensive gowns with a pemitterial air, as though she were under a vow of wealth.

"I don't see how you can joke about it," she said. "It all seems to me so very dreadful — especially when one remembers that Henry Clephane is an agnostic, if not worse, and that her mother's desertion will deprive poor little Valeria of that early religious training which nothing else can ever replace. It seems to me that if Mr. Wing spends any money it ought to be in charity — in good works — "

"A chapelle expiatoire, eh?" said Mr. Vimpry. "My dear Mrs. Dawnay, perhaps Wing has already set up a private one that we

34.

don't know anything about."

Mrs. Dawnay cast down her eyes: she always thought irony indelicate. "It has been a dreadful blow to the Church," she said. "Did you hear the Bishop's sermon last Sunday on the Sanctity of Marriage? There was no mistaking the reference to the Wings."

"A sermon <u>à clef</u>?" said Mrs. Dulacey laughing. "That's a clever idea of the Bishop's. If his clergy adopt it they will have no difficulty in filling their churches. What fun it will be to puzzle out the allusions to one's best friends!"

"My dear Maud," exclaimed Mrs. Van Arkell, "I hope you don't mean that expression to apply to the Wings?"

Mrs. Dulacey made a slight grimace. "Everything is relative," she said. "I'm sure we all used to enjoy dining with Alice Clephane."

"She had a cook who had some faint inkling of a <u>Julienne</u>," murmured Mr. Vimpry, in a regretful parenthesis.

"I can't see that that makes any difference — our having dined with her," said Mrs. Van Arkell. "Except that it makes her conduct the more inexcusable. But I can't agree with Mrs. Dawnay. I don't think the Church ought to accept money from such a source."

Mrs. Dawnay smiled faintly. In worldly matters she was willing to submit her judgement to Mrs Van Arkell's; but, as the Bishop's Egeria and the holder of an ecclesiastical salon, she could not allow herself to be set right on points of religious discipline.

"You seem to forget, dear Mrs. Van Arkell," she said in a tone of Christian suavity, "that the Church sanctifies any gift she consents to receive, no matter how contaminated its source may be."

Vimpry leaned toward Severance. "Considering where the

35.

Claymore money came from," he said in an undertone, "that doctrine must be a great consolation to your neighbour."

"I have it on very good authority," Mrs. Dawnay continued, "that, in the Wings' case, a large contribution to the Diocesan Fund — or possibly to Foreign Missions — might —" Mrs. Van Arkell interrupted her. "You don't mean to say it would make the Bishop recognize them?" she gasped.

"Oh — in his prayers," said Mrs. Dawnay gently.

Mrs. Van Arkell tossed her head disparagingly. "Yes — that's as far as they are likely to get," she said.

"In that case," murmured Mr. Vimpry, "they would be like people who had taken tickets to the wrong station. I fancy it would be rather annoying to the Wings to find themselves on the through train to heaven."

"Oh, never fear," said his hostess rising. "We shan't have to go to heaven to meet them. I'm afraid they won't afford us such a direct incentive to good conduct."

"I can't understand you, Maud," exclaimed Mrs. Van Arkell, following her; "you don't seem to realize their position. All Alice's relations have cut her. Even Isabella Neafe, to whom she used to give all her old gowns, won't speak to her."

"Let her try giving her some new ones, then," said Mrs. Dulacey with cheerful scepticism, as she led the way into her small sunny drawing-room; and Mrs. Van Arkell, with a discouraged sense of crying in the wilderness, turned to murmur to Severance: "Dear Maud makes a joke of everything; but it is sickening to hear Louisa Dawnay talk in that way about religious training of children, when

36.

one knows that Phil Dawnay is the worst boy of his age at St Leo's,
and that Dr. Wessel has twice threatened to expel him."

Severance, as he walked up Fifth Avenue after Mrs. Dula-
cey's luncheon, found his thoughts less engaged with the Wings than
with the persons who had been discussing them. These formed a part
of the little group amid which he had grown up, so that Mrs. Van
Arkell's auburn front and axiomatic utterances, Mr. Vimpry's fault-
finding and Louise Dawnay's sacredotalism, were inwoven with his
earliest ~~of consciousness.~~
He was surprised to find how un-
changed they were. Their ideas grazed in the same circle, though
the space they fed on had long since been cropped bare. Things
that seemed to them to loom large and imminent were to Severance
mere specks on the horizon; and they themselves had become to him at
once more remote and more definite, so that he saw them from a
greater distance yet with a new distinctness -- saw the surprising
~~naïveté~~ of Mrs. Van Arkell's social ambitions, the simplicity of
which ~~Mrs. Dawnay had traced her~~
goodness hidden under Mr. Bence's perfumed manner, the ~~shallow im-
structure of worldly pietism~~ which Mrs. Dawnay had built upon the
muddy Claymore millions. He was aware that the sense of incongrui-
ty would lose its edge as he slipped back into the old grooves of
thought and feeling; but there would remain a difference bred of his
wider contact with life, a difference which would cause him to see
people and conditions in relation to larger issues than were dreamed
of in his old philosophy.

As he reached this point in his reflections he found him-
self caught in the cross-current of fashionable church-goers pouring
into the pseudo-Gothic doorway of Saint Andrew's, and drew back for

37.

a moment to observe the procession. He did not expect to find any
friends in it. His own familiars, at that hour, were more likely
to be playing bridge in drawing-rooms hazy with cigarette smoke; but
he was mildly interested in noting the usual types of afternoon
piety: old maids, incipient and evolved, middle-aged ladies swathed
in chronic crape, and solid-looking men in whom the bank-president
and church-warden were judiciously blent. It was a species differ-
ing totally from the showy morning congregation, and representing,
as it were, the scant survival of earlier devotional forms. But as
Severance watched, a brougham glossy with recent varnish and drawn
by a pair of flamboyant chestnuts drew up at the door with a jangle
of pole-chains which broke flippantly on the drowsy prelude of the
organ. From this mundane equipage there emerged a gentleman, im-
peccably frock-coated and pearl-gloved, but descending somewhat
cautiously, as though afraid to trust the whole weight of his pleth-
oric person to the patent-leather foot which preceded it. He turn-
ed to help his companion, and as he did so Severance recognized the
vague countenance and cloudy eye of Tillotson Wing. The eye had
grown cloudier, the features more indefinite, as though the man's
identity were disappearing under a steady accretion of fat. But no
such effacement threatened the lady who accompanied him. Time and
absence restored her to Severance's sight in a completer fulness of
youth, of health, of smooth untarnished loveliness, than his memory
of her had retained. Never, surely, had there been such harmony
between the rich discretion of her toilet and the temperate bril-
liance of her mien. There was a classical balance, a delicate
finality, about her outline, her movements, her way of turning to
receive her prayer-book from the foot-

38.

man, as though every line and gesture implied that here was the accepted standard of beauty, to which other women must conform or be found wanting. But as she turned her eye caught Severance's, and at once the look of competence, of security, vanished. She flushed red, with the redness that spreads relentlessly from throat to brow, her hand nearly missed the turquoise-studded prayer-book, and for a moment she fixed on Severance a gaze of mingled deprecation and en-treaty. For a moment only; then he raised his hat, and as she caught his bow and returned it, she became once more the unruffled beauty dispensing her impartial smiles.

It was over in a flash; but after she had passed into the church, Severance, for an appreciable time, continued to stare at the wake of impressions she had left.

"They must cut her; how damnable!" he murmured; and as he turned to resume his walk up Fifth Avenue, his inferences summed themselves up in the mental ejaculation: "She couldn't have realized that she'd have to go to afternoon church!"

37.

V.

Valeria rose from her seat in the broken-down grape-arbour and stood gazing across the garden toward the shore.

The house lay near the water: it showed in blue glimpses, from garden and verandahs through clumps of willows and untrained shrubs. Beyond the estuary, a line of low hills shut out the sea; but when the south wind blew it brought with it the boom of hidden breakers. Near the house, an old box-garden spread its perfumed puzzle-map: phloxes, moth-haunted in the summer dusk, moss-roses, neglected patches of purple iris, and a few ineffectual annuals, sown by an old man in blue over-alls, who was chiefly to be seen leaning on his rake and eyeing the garden as though it were a fallen enemy. He always spoke resentfully of the plants under his care, enumerating their treacheries and defiances with such unconcealed hostility that Valeria didn't wonder the poor things seldom came up a second year. The hardier sorts, however, phloxes, peonies, bleeding-hearts, and the loud irrepressible poppies, were too sure of themselves to care what he said, and each year flung out a brighter defiance of his dark prognostications. These flowers with the lilacs, the "strawberry-bushes," and the lavish syringa, made the garden and its outskirts a place of ever-shifting hues and scents,

40.

where it was sweet, in the long morning shadows, to hear the twitter
of waking birds, sweeter, at dusk, to watch the moths float like
loosened petals above the spectral bloom of the evening primroses.

The garden was the creation of Clephane's great-grand-
mother, the lady whose portrait by Stuart, in mob-cap and lawn neck-
erchief, hung above the chimney-piece of the faded low-ceilinged
drawing-room. The fostering hands of three generations of Clephane
ladies had nursed the parterres to a sweet maturity of bloom; but
the last Mrs. Clephane, having at first glance pronounced the Long
Island place "a hole", had reduced the staff of gardeners to the
solitary pessimist in over-alls, abandoning the clipped box-borders
to their natural tendencies, and the flagged paths to the destruc-
tive agency of weeds and frost.

At one end of the garden stood the grape-arbour, once
painted white, its trellising propped and held together by the
knotted arms of the vine. Here Val Clephane read and studied, the
water watching her like a living eye through the gaps in her leafy
shelter. Hence a path led to the shore; an over-grown path, bent
out of its way by an old arbor-vitae which stood out darkly against
the crowding light greens of the deciduous shrubbery. In the twi-
light this tree became a black-hooded figure, menacing and myste-
rious, to be rushed by breathlessly on the way home from the beach;
but by day Valeria loved to press her face against its warm spicy
layers, which gave forth a strange scent, as of bales of Eastern
silk unrolled from lacquered chests. This fragrance, and the dry
embalmed texture of the twigs, gave the tree a peculiar quailty of
suggestiveness. The vision-tree, Val called it — for a magic

41.

atmosphere enclosed it, and stepping into the circle of its shade she was transported to that enchanted land which bounds the horizon of every imaginative child. Val's domain was built of strangely-mingled shreds of association, gathered from the talk of her elders, and from an unchecked exploration of her father's library; the whole fused by an intense visual sensibility into something not unlike one of those imaginary scenes in which the old landscape painters sought to sum up their beatific vision of earth's loveliness.

In this region Val was more and more given to taking refuge from perplexities which, already, she dimly felt to be beyond her years. She was no longer the ignorant little girl who had teased her nurse with questions about her mother. The years had brought sophistication, and Val, at thirteen, looked back with a certain contempt on her earlier state of innocence. She knew well enough now where her mother had gone, and why she was never coming back. She knew that Mrs. Clephane had become Mrs. Tillotson Wing, and that Mrs. Wing was "not nice". It would have been hard to say how these inklings of knowledge had been acquired: they lurked as much in the evasions of the discreet as in the admissions of the imprudent. At Val's age the air is full of the floating seeds of experience, and when they fall on ground prematurely prepared for them the harvest is bitter and abundant. If it was not for nothing that Val had absorbed Betty's hints of something irretrievably amiss, she had learned almost as much from her father's studied assumption that all was as it should be, from his refusal to recognize any gap or displacement in the pattern of their lives. In her intercourse with him, were there not desert places shunned by both? To her

42.

daughter, Mrs. Clephane seemed at times to have devastated the whole region of human experience. It would have been hard to find, in Valeria's consciousness, a spot which the blight had not touched. Her mother had broken her father's heart; she had left them, because they were poor and shruken and shabby, for some one who was rich and diffused; and her going had emphasized the poorness and shabbiness against which it had raised so cruel a protest. It was to Mrs. Clephane that everything depressing in Val's life was due: her father's fretfulness and inertia, the dinginess of the house, the neglect of the garden, the endless worry with new servants, who came, quarrelled with Noony, and left without unpacking their boxes; even the shortcomings of Valeria's own wardrobe, selected by Mrs. Neafe with perfunctory haste, and an eye addressed to the useful. Valeria loved pretty frocks, and the utilitarian cut and colour of her meagre wardrobe were as depressing to her as prison-garb to a convict. She felt herself, in fact, the prisoner of circumstances: as though her mother, in securing freedom, had left her as a hostage to fate. In Val's rudely-constructed theory of life, such iniquity cried for retribution; and it was some satisfaction to know that Mrs. Clephane's offense had relegated her to the limbo of the unvisited. Val was old enough now to appreciate the significance of that state. She understood that the sight of a card on her hall-table would be to Mrs. Clephane as water to a soul in torment; and on days when her father was sharp with her, or the new cook gave warning just before dinner, she took comfort in reflecting that the author of these woes was banned to a desert place outside the geography of the visiting-list.

43.

But these emotions slept in the depths of Valeria's nature.
Its surface reflected all the variable impressions of childhood, and
gave back to the looker-on a series of sunny images thrown into
clearer relief by the profundities below. Life was, after all, ex-
traordinarily full and vivid, and from the mere joy of breathing and
moving to the thrill of dragging down a new volume from the library
shelves, every moment was beset with rich sensations. Just now,
for instance, Val was straining her eyes over the water in happy
anticipation of a visit from Severance, who was spending the Sunday
across the bay, at Mrs. Dulacy's, and had promised to sail over in
the afternoon. Val knew he would come, for Severance never broke
his promises; but she saw that the set of the wind would compel him
to tack, and she began to fear that Mrs. Neafe and Betty would re-
turn from their drive before he arrived.

At stated intervals Mrs. Neafe and her daughter came to
stay with the Clephanes with the intention of mitigating their soli-
tude; and these visits were not without the depressing influences
inseparable from such a beneficent purpose.

Mrs. Neafe never did anything without putting it in the
light of a duty, and duty being the negation of enjoyment, her min-
istrations were apt to have a lowering effect. She regarded it as
her duty to descend periodically on Henry Clephane's household and
establish a temporary truce in his kitchen; while Betty was supposed
to provide Valeria with that juvenile companionship which maturity
imagines to be one of the needs of youth. As a matter of fact, the
Clephanes usually went dinnerless for a week after one of Mrs.
Neafe's visits of readjustment; while Valeria, in spite of a sincere

44.

admiration for Betty, sometimes privately chafed at her proximity.

Least of all did she care to share Severance's company with her cousin. When the girls were together Severance always treated them as children; while, when Val had him to herself, he took her seriously and talked to her like a grown person, discussing the books she read and listening to her expressions of opinion with a flattering show of deference. It had always been Val's foible to like to occupy the centre of the stage; and the sense of a similar inclination in Betty may have prompted the wish to keep her at a distance.

Besides, on this particular day, Severance, who helped Val in her desultory studies, had promised to construe a page of Virgil for her; and she disliked to figure before Betty in the position of a learner. The look in Betty's eyes when Latin conjugations were discussed did not so much declare her ignorance of them as their own intrinsic unimportance; and Val's reluctance to admit that she did not know was exasperated by the feeling that it was foolish to want to know.

But Val's thirst for knowledge was not easily repressed, and Severance's companionship helped to keep it alive. Clephane took an intermittent interest in his daughter's education; but since he had retired from business and returned to his fitful dalliance with literature he was somehow less accessible than before. A profound reverence for his calling restrained Val from carrying her perplexities to the desk over which he sat bent in a brooding apathy which seemed to her the very ecstacy of inspiration. How could one bother a real author with questions about the Latin subjunctive or a puzzle in fractions? With Severance it was different. He let

45.

Val feel herself on his level, and such superiority as his age and
sex conferred was tempered by an infinite good-humour. Val was
eager to learn. She thought the daughter of an author should re-
flect the lustre of the paternal genius; and visions of some day
helping her father in his work, and supplementing his declining
faculties by a filial devotion which should go down to history,
sustained her.

As Val crossed the lawn a sail rounded the point beyond
the beach. She knew it was Severance's, and started for the shore
on a run; but a call arrested her, and turning she saw her father
strolling toward her. He moved deliberately, his hands in his
pockets, his head drooping a little, as though long hours of musing
had bent him prematurely. His slender loose-jointed figure in
shabby velveteen seemed to proclaim in every line a passive specta-
torship inconsistent with personal wants or interests. His whole
aspect declared the fact that there was nothing left to hurry for,
no particular point that he cared to make; and Val, accustomed to
his gait, waited resignedly till it brought him to her side.
"Where are you off to?" he asked, slipping his hand through her
arm.

She pointed to the sail. "Sevvy is coming. He promis-
ed, and that's his boat."

"The syllogism is imperfect, but the conclusion seems con-
vincing. Let us go down and meet him."

They moved on together, Val as it were folding the wings
in her heels. If only Mrs. Neafe and Betty did not overtake them!

"What has become of your cousin Isabella?" Clephane con-

46.

tinued. "Have she and Betty not come back?"

Val shook her head. "Cousin Bella sent back the pony-carriage, and told Jerry to say that they would find their way home later. He left them at Mr. Claymore's."

"Ah, to be sure: a visit of condolence — that will take Isabella some time," murmured Clephane with an undernote of irony.

Val was silent. She knew that their rich neighbour, old Mr. Claymore, had "failed", and she had heard his failure spoken of as dishonourable; but the fact did not interest her. Mr. Claymore had a show place at the head of the bay, adjoining their own land, and sometimes, when Mrs. Dawnay was there, he invited Mrs. Neafe to come for the day with Val and Betty; but his grandson, Phil Dawnay, just in transit between Saint Leo's and Harvard, was too young to compromise his dignity by noticing little girls, and the cousins, while their elders talked, were reduced to listless wanderings through a wilderness of gilded drawing-rooms which Betty thought splendid and Valeria vulgar.

"I suppose Oakside will be for sale now," her father continued. "An unequalled opportunity to secure Bouguereaus and plush portières. Ah, there's Severance's sail. His second visit this week, isn't it, Val? I shall have to be asking his intentions."

He gave his daughter's thin arm a pinch, and his hand came in contact with an angular object pressed against her side. "What book have you there?" he asked.

"Oh, nothing," murmured Val, thrusting out of sight the pocket Virgil which had been a recent gift of Severance's.

45.

She was always a little afraid of her father's irony when he turned it on her own pursuits.

Clephane was too completely uninterested to press any point, and they stood in silence watching Severance moor his boat to the float in the cove and paddle toward them in the leaky punt attached to the moorings.

As he stepped ashore Val sprang to him with an impulsive embrace which landed his hat in the water and loosened his hold on the punt. She plunged after the hat and restored it dripping to his head, while he recaptured the boat with an oar and dragged it up over the shingles. Clephane looked on with a smile.

"How like a woman!" he murmured. "They complicate the simplest situations."

"Well, what's up?" said Severance, pausing to dry his hat while Valeria shone on him expectantly.

"Oh, Sevvy, I want you to take me out in the canoe."

"In the canoe? You must think I'm amphibious. You know you never can keep still five minutes."

"Yes, I can. Only try me!"

"Why do you want to go out in the canoe? Let's go and have tea in the summer-house instead."

Val shook her head.

"Why not?"

"Because — because —" she swung on her father's hand and stirred the pebbles with a sheepish heel. "Aunt Bella and Betty will be coming back —"

"Ah — that alters the case. — They're still here,

48.

then?" Severance enquired of Clephane, as Valeria scampered toward the broken-down boathouse, which sheltered the canoe.

"They leave tomorrow, I believe. Isabella has gone on a visit of condolence to the Claymores," (She's in her element on such occasions. I don't think Val need be afraid of her coming back yet."

"A visit of condolence? — Because of old Claymore's smash?" Severance frowned. "That was a pretty business. I wonder how Mrs. Dawnay feels about it."

Clephane smiled. "Do you? I don't. At least I know how she'll talk about it. She will be full of edification. I believe the old man's money will be of more use to her now than it ever was while he had it. This time it's a clean sweep, I suppose?"

"It is for every one connected with him; but there's no knowing what he may have up his sleeve. At any rate, he'll have to pretend to be wiped out for a while."

"And Louise Dawnay will have to put that reprobate Phil to work when he leaves college."

"If she does, it will be her one chance of saving him."

Clephane's smile lingered. "You still believe in work as the universal panacea? I wish I did. I'd go and mow this lawn — it needs it." He glanced over the sweep of weedy turf toward the blistered white paint and unhinged shutters of the house.

Severance's eye followed him. Clephane had a special tenderness for the old house which held under its gabled roof and on its panelled walls that fine dust of family tradition so seldom left to gather undisturbed in American dwellings. He had already cher-

49.

ished the family pieties, had been conscious in himself of vibrations
prolonged from an unbroken past. The portraits of his great-grand-
parents, the chairs they had sat in, the floors their feet had worn,
kept the imprint of their living personalities — the whole house
was as warm to him as a glove just drawn from the hand. It was an
honourable past with which he felt himself linked — six or seven
generations of upright and gentle living, marked here and there by
figures which still kept the name alive: — A general of the revo-
lutionary army, a Chief Justice, a minister to France, and others
whose private accomplishments and public merits lingered in the
civic memory. Clephane's mental range did not imply emotional
limitations. He lived preeminently in his affections, and his
ideas served to light up his feelings, to shed on them the glow of a
deeper significance. To continue the family tradition, while add-
ing to it new qualities of fine living and feeling, had been a part
of his conception of life, the larger purpose enclosing his personal
happiness; to have failed in this continuance meant the rending of
innumerable fibres with which his own were inwoven.

At first it had been impossible for him to return to the house.
The feeling of kinship which had given depth and continuity to his
happiness offered no compensating support to his grief. His fail-
ure had not been of a kind to find a response in the scrupulous
clear-eyed faces of his progenitors, who had moved in a round of
duties uncomplicated by modern complexities of motive. Nothing
could have separated Clephane from his past more effectually than
the scandal of an unhappy marriage: it was a misery he could not
bring into the presence of his firm-lipped grandfathers and their
duly subordinate wives.

50.

But as time passed and his pain took on a dull edge of resignation he turned back to the old house as the place least tarnished by recollection. His wife had seldom come there, and had brushed past his associations without perceiving them. The place had been to her simply a refuge when they could not afford Newport. It had hurt him once that she saw nothing more in it, but now he was glad she had never entered into its intimacy; and he had a vision of renewing his own life there, of drawing a fresh current of activity from the stored energies of the past. Severance had guessed the impulse and seen its speedy extinction. Clephane's wounded life could never be healed. The old house was his natural shelter, the spot where he rested with least pain; but he cared no more for it than a tired traveller cares for the untended shrine into which he has crept for a night's cover.

"It's a thousand pities you don't mow the lawn!" said Severance impatiently.

Clephane laughed. "Now that Long Island has grown so fashionable we're not up to the local standard, I confess. But perhaps Val will marry a millionaire and turn the whole place into an Italian garden to outdo Oakside." He turned abruptly to Severance. "You've heard who has taken Linwood for the summer, I suppose?"

Severance nodded. "Maud told me."

"The insolence of it — the — the humour too, in a way." Clephane struggled to recover his smile, like a man straightening a mask which has slipped.

51.

"The exquisite feminine inconsistency — she couldn't bear the place when she had to live here, and now she comes and plants herself at my door! To be sure, the companionship is different."

"Does Val know?"

Her father's gesture proclaimed his indifference. "Probably. They know most things at her age, I find, if there's no mother between them and life. Did you ever realize that the material consciousness was meant to form a sort of outer cuticle to the child's mind, a sheath to protect its growth? Val has been robbed of the special prerogative of the human young — the period of prolonged infancy. She's grown up already."

"Oh — I should qualify that," said Severance, smiling, as Val, panting and crimson, her hair flying, her lank black legs elongated by their slanting attitude, tugged the canoe across the shingle.

Clephane shrugged his shoulders. "Ah, the worst of it is that it doesn't show."

At that instant, a noise of wheels on the entrance drive made both men turn their heads toward the house. Val, too, dropped the rope by which she was hauling the canoe, and stood staring at the open carriage which swept around the circle, pausing to deposit Mrs. Neafe and Betty at the door. The spectators on the shore were too far off to distinguish the features of the third person in the carriage, a lady who, as she drove away, leaned forward with a smiling gesture of farewell; but something familiar in her poise and outline reflected itself simultaneously in their three faces. Severance turned and bent over the canoe; Clephane stood motionless, the light

52.

smile stiffening on his lip, and Valeria, as if with a vague impulse
of protection, crept nearer and slipped her hand in his.

As Val and Severance, in the twilight, strolled up from
the beach, they found themselves confronted by Mrs. Neafe.

That lady seized caressingly on Valeria. "My dear child,
how late you are! And your feet must be dreadfully wet. I knew
you were quite safe with Mr. Severance, butBetty has been waiting
an hour for her tea. Run off to the schoolroom, there's a dear,
and be sure you let Noonan tidy you both properly before you come
down to the drawing-room."

Val shook her off with scant courtesy, and ran toward the
house. The instinct of hospitality forbade any open defiance of
cousin Isabella, but it was intolerable to be treated like a baby
before Severance.

Cousin Isabella did not appear to notice the rebuff. She
stood silently before Severance, a slender but determined obstacle
to his advance toward the house. Severance did not like Mrs.
Neafe. Clephane treated her with a numerous tolerance bred of his
enforced dependence on her; but the younger man had no such motives
circling for leniency, and his judgments were less subject to his
Mrs. Neafe scented the distinction and respected it; but this even-
ing it was evident that some stronger pressure had counteracted the
habit of keeping out of his way.

"Mr. Severance," she said, "may I have a few minutes' talk
with you?"

Severance, pulling out his watch, politely objected that

53.

he had barely time to sail back to Mrs. Dulacey's before dinner; but
Mrs. Neafe brushed aside the objection with unwonted decision.

"Oh, then you can dine here, and Jerry will drive you
over. You must give me a few minutes — I'm so nervous, so up-
set."

The propitiatory flow of her speech seemed to break itself against
some unusual obstruction, and she stood a moment in silence, fret-
ting the gravel with her sunshade. Mrs. Neafe was one of those
fluid persons who fill the interstices of other lives. Wherever
there was a crack she flowed into it; and though for a stretch here
and there she spread her current to the light, one never lost the
sense of hidden percolations. It did not, therefore, surprise
Severance to have her come to the surface at a point where he was
not expecting her.

"I am so anxious," she murmured, "about Henry."

"About Clephane? What is wrong with him?"

"Haven't you noticed? He has been so unwell lately — so
irritable and uncertain. Just now I have had a most painful scene
with him." She etched the gravel parenthetically, as though wait-
ing to be questioned; but Severance made no sign. He knew he would
learn more by leaving her to extricate herself from the labyrinth of
innuendo through which her meanings moved.

"It was so unexpected — so distressing," she continued. "I won't
say so ungrateful — I leave that for Henry's own conscience to
decide. As you know, I come here for poor Valeria's sake — it is
a sacrifice I am only too glad to make. I can't bear to see the
house going to rack and ruin, and the child left to the mercy of an
ignorant woman like Mary Noonan; I've been almost too ready to ne-
glect my own household and my own child, in the desire to help
Henry; but to have my devotion repaid by — by — such insulting
insinuations — I can explain it only

54.

by supposing that my poor cousin's unfortunate temper has gradually
affected his mind."

Severance smiled. "Clephane seems to me quite sane," he said.

"Ah, he would not be likely to let you see," exclaimed
Mrs. Neafe, as though this fact confirmed her diagnosis. "But if
you had been here just now — I can only say I blushed before Betty
— before my own daughter, Mr. Severance!"

Severance showed himself properly impressed by this physio-
logical phenomenon, and Mrs. Neafe went on more lucidly: "It all
happened in the most unexpected way. I had borrowed thepony, e-
drew carriageto drive over to Oakside with Betty; // poor Louise Dawnay
is with the Claymores, you know, and I felt that at such a moment
she might need me. I found her at home, and sent the carriage back;
it is one of my rules never to keep other people's horses wait-
ing, and dear Henry is rather exacting in such matters, so Betty and
I, in spite of the heat, intended to walk home from Oakside. I
found Louise very much broken, but so gentle, so heroic — you know
her nature, Mr. Severance; this will mean giving up her annual trips
to Europe, and even putting down her carriages; yet there was not a
word, not a murmur!"

Mrs. Neafe again paused and drew a deep breath. "You had
heard," she asked, "that the Wings were at Linwood this summer?"

Severance assented.

"Well — it all happened in the most natural way. Alice
— Mrs. Wing, I mean — had heard of Mr. Claymore's failure, and
knew Louise was at Oakside. With all her faults, Alice is a woman
of the most generous feelings — that I have always maintained!

55.

and when she heard Louise Dawnay was in trouble her first impulse
was to go to her, ~~regardless of~~ of — the past. Dear
Louise received her in the same spirit — I was present at the
meeting — and then it appeared that Alice had already hit upon a
way of helping her. She had persuaded Mr. Wing to buy Oakside."

"To _buy_ it? Good heavens!" exclaimed Severance.

"Oh, the Claymores will have to part with _everything_ —
it is all too dreadful. Of course Louise was very much touched,
and begged me to stay and talk the matter over. It was all so
agitating — my meeting with Alice, and having to see old Mr. Clay-
more, and the rest of it — that I was nearly too exhausted to walk
home, and when Alice offered to drop us here on her way back to Lin-
wood I accepted without stopping to think that any uncharitable in-
construction might be put on her coming here — much less on my
being seen with her. I am sure poor Alice didn't think of it
either — we were both too much engrossed with Louise's trouble —
and I assure you, Mr. Severance, when Henry received me as he did I
hardly knew what he was talking about. My one idea was to get him
away from Betty and the servants till he had calmed down a little."

Mrs. Neafe paused, breathless but self-confident, as
though awaiting Severance's verdict with the assurance of perfect
recidence. But Severance, for the moment, had lost sight of her.
He could think only of the fact that the Wings had bought Oakside,
place divided into ten equal shares, each being a hundred
acres from Stepanane's
ownership. Severance had not yet seized the situation in all
its bearings, but the bare fact stirred up a rush of conjecture.
Oakside was one of the show places of Long Island, and the purchase

56.

of such an estate must mean that Mrs. Wing intended to live for
several months of the year in the immediate neighbourhood of Cle-
phane and her daughter. An immense pity for his friend filled the
young man's thoughts.

"Does Clephane know?" he asked.

Mrs. Neafe drew back disappointed. "I have no idea what
he knows or does not know," she said coldly. "I naturally could
not consent to discuss my conduct with him — I do not consider
that it requires any defense. But he must see that this scene
brings our visit to an end. I am sorry — very sorry; I cannot
bear to turn my back on poor Valeria."

"Oh, but you mustn't," exclaimed Severance, roused to a
sense of the immediate issue. "You must think this over, Mrs.
Neafe. It's natural, surely, that Clephane should have been upset
— "

"It is _not_ natural, Mr. Severance, that he should insult
his child's devoted friend — her second mother, almost — "

"Of course not. But you must make allowances. I know
how much he depends on you — you can't desert Val. This will
blow over."

He spoke with the idea that it was what Mrs. Neafe meant
him to say, that he was expected to prepare the preliminaries of her
capitulation. But to his surprise she showed no signs of yielding.

"Henry may come to his senses," she said, "and when he
does so he will find that I bear no malice. But meanwhile it is
impossible that Betty and I should stay here. My husband would not
approve of our doing so." (It was only under the most solemn cir-

57.

cumstances that Mrs. Neafe invoked this phantom authority.) "I want you to tell Henry this, Mr. Severance. After what has happened, it would be painful for him to see me again. I have borne a great deal from Henry Clephane; but after all, I cannot forget that Alice is my cousin—by marriage."

VII.

Severance, the next afternoon, on Mrs. Dulacoy's verandah, reviewed the situation in the dry light of his cousin's comments. He was giving her a week of his midwinter vacation, and he had explained his reason on the previous evening by telling her what had happened to detain him.

Mrs. Dulacoy listened in an ecstacy of comprehension. She was never so happy as in the unravelling of motives.

"I always said so," she cried. "I know Alice would do it in the end. But I never imagined anything so clever as this, let alone a stroke of good luck."

"You think she has bought the Claymore place to get the hope of getting back into society?"

"The hope? It's a certainty. What's what I could do? I could sell the farm. To buy a big farm wouldn't have helped her, but to buy Calhoun, and rescue Louisiana—why, to have Louisiana during which her inalienable abdication?"

"But why should you think that? Mr. Ingleton means to clearcut the farm. But Mrs. Dulacoy threw her hand with a manner of enjoyment.

58.

V1.

Severance, the next afternoon, on Mrs. Dulacey's verandah, reviewed the situation in the dry light of his cousin's comments. He was giving her a week of his midsummer vacation, and he had explained his lateness on the previous evening by telling her what had happened to detain him.

Mrs. Dulacey listened in an ecstacy of comprehension. She was never so happy as in the unravelling of motives.

"I always said so!" she cried. "I knew Alice would do it in the end. But I never imagined anything as clever as this. It's a stroke of genius!"

"You think she has bought the Claymore place in the hope of getting back into society?"

"The hope? It's a certainty. That's what I call so wonderful. To buy a big place wouldn't have helped her; but to buy Oakside, and rescue Louise Dawnay — why, to have Louise dining with her is plenary absolution!"

"But why should you think that Mrs. Dawnay means to dine with her?"

Mrs. Dulacey threw back her head with a murmur of enjoy-

59.

ment. "You don't suppose that when Alice gave that half million she got nothing but Oakside in return? Besides, you tell me that Bella Neafe has quarrelled with Henry Clephane."

"She and Betty are leaving this morning. But perhaps he is the angrier of the two."

"Bella wouldn't mind his anger if she wanted to stay. And if she wants to go, it's because — " Mrs. Dulacey leaned toward him in the glee of the elucidation — "it's because Alice has bribed her away!"

"Oh — " Severance protested, with a laugh.

"I don't mean anything as crude as you think. Money isn't the only means — though it's almost the only end. — I won't say how Alice has done it — but in one way or another, she's made it worth while to Bella to quarrel with Clephane."

"Isn't that a good deal for an afternoon's work?"

"We don't know how long she's been working underground. She's had plenty of leisure since her marriage! Why, her driving Bella up to Clephane's door was equal to a manifesto. Why couldn't she have been dropped at the gate? I daresay she and Alice met at the Claymores' by appointment. I shall never believe it was by chance that Alice landed two such prizes in a day. Of course you may say that in Louise's case it was a question of necessity.

Louise can't do without money: she has to have it in order to show how little she cares for it. But Bella had only her own advantage to consult; and if she's made up with Alice Wing, it's because she feels sure of Alice's future. I don't know any one more weather-wise than Bella. She's a social barometer; and if she says so,

60.

Alice can safely venture out without an umbrella!

Severance listened with a certain impatience to his cousin's ingenius deductions. He often felt a lack of perception beneath her seeming penetration, a crudeness in her subtlety. The finer issues seemed to escape her analysis; and yet he knew that her actions allowed for them.

"If they really buy the place," he said, following his first thought, "I suppose Clephane will leave Long Island."

"If!" exclaimed Mrs. Dulacey, and handed him one of the papers in which he had found her immersed.

"Million dollar Estate changes hands: Oakside bought by Tillotson Wing for five hundred thousand dollars. Will the money go to Claymore's creditors?"

Severance dropped the paper with a gesture of disgust. For the moment it seemed impossible that Mrs. Wing's purchase should not have been prompted by deliberate cruelty.

"Why should she persecute him in this way?" he exclaimed.

"Persecute him? Do you mean Henry Clephane? I don't believe she's given him a thought. It's the fashion to buy a big place on Long Island, and when one can buy one's social rehabilitation into the bargain it would be absurd to let sentimental considerations interfere. Besides, they never do interfere with Alice Wing, for the simple reason that they don't exist for her."

"Her marriage with Wing must have made her realize that they exist for others," said Severance musingly. "It revives one's faith in human nature to see that sentimental considerations are, after all, the only obstacle to the Wings' getting back into society."

61.

"It revives my faith in human hypocrisy," his cousin returned with a shrug. "Though Alice had the law on her side, everyone knew that was merely a pretext to avoid scandal: the case was too flagrant to be ignored — it simply stared one in the face. Society had to pay it the tribute of being shocked; but one can't stay shocked forever: it's such a strain on the moral muscles. You'll find people will be very glad of the chance to unbend — and besides, next to cutting a divorced woman there's nothing so interesting as taking her up again." Mrs. Dulacey leaned back with a meditative smile. "And just think how soon our scruples will be obsolete! Before long the divorced will outnumber us, and then it may be the fashion to cut any one who hasn't been to South Dakota."

Severance rose impatiently. The personal element in the question made it impossible for him to take it in his cousin's key. "Society will have ceased to exist by that time. There will be nothing to hold it together. You can't found a state on a penal settlement. But before that happens, the social instinct of self-preservation will assert itself: society will not let itself be destroyed by a band of robbers and murderer."

"Gracious — is that what you call them?" his cousin exclaimed.

"Yes. I've seen some of their victims. There was just a little red mark over the heart."

"Don't — you make me shiver!" cried Mrs. Dulacey.

"But then in the society of the future that superfluous organ may be removed in infancy," like the appendix.

63.

proached the door Noony emerged, untidy but triumphant, from the
background to which Mrs. Neafe's housekeeping had relegated her.

"Have you been ringing long, sir?" she asked with an ad-
mirable assumption of concern. "You might ha' pulled the bell off
while that parlour-maid was putting on her cap." This was in al-
lusion to a sumptuary regulation of Mrs. Neafe's, to which Noony had
never bent her head.

"I don't know as you can get in past all them trunks,
sir," she continued apologetically. "Cluttering up our front-door
since daylight!" She glanced at Severance with an innocent smile.
"Looks as if Mrs. Neafe had meant to stay with us all summer, don't
it, sir? But it appears she changed her plans quite suddenly."
Noony's smile broadened to a grin. "That new cook she brought
down last week went back in the same train with her," she said.

In the library Severance found Clephane lounging in his
usual chair, a heap of books at his elbow and the shabby carpet
littered with the ashes of half-smoked cigarettes. Val sat reading
at his feet.

"My dear fellow," he said cheerfully, "I'm so glad you've come.
The house is swept and garnished — the seven devils are ejected.
Val and I are having a kind of honeymoon — aren't we, old girl?"
Val looked up at Severance with a smile of racking intelligence;
then her hand tightened on her father's as it hung downward from the
arm of his chair.

"It's wonderful, how this little commotion has cleared the air,"
Clephane continued. "I've been in a state of mental coma lately;
my ideas stood still, like a wind-mill in a calm. Now there's a

64.

fine breeze in my head, and the mill is working again — grinding
out food for this hungry mouth here." He drew Val's rough locks
through his fingers. "The fact is, our funds were running rather
low, and I couldn't see my way to any new work; but now the inspira-
tion has come, and I lay awake all last night blocking out a new
book — a book that needs writing, by George, and that I believe I
can write as well as any man living."

He started up, almost stumbling over Val, and began to pace the room
in a burst of factitious energy.

"It's to be a study of the new privileged class — a
study of the effects of wealth without responsibility. Talk of the
socialist peril! That's not where the danger lies. The inherent
vice of democracy is the creation of a powerful class of which it
can make no use — a kind of Frankenstein monster, an engine of
social disintegration. Taine saw it long ago — I'm only preach-
ing from his text. But he merely pointed out the danger: he didn't
study its results. The place to study them is here and now —
here in this huge breeding-place of inequalities that we call a re-
public, where class-distinctions, instead of growing out of the in-
herent needs of the social organism, are arbitrarily established by
a force that works against it! Think of the mass of evidence our
society supplies! No laborious researches — no years wasted on
the trail of a connecting link. All the species are here, spread
out under the immense lens of our social publicity. Why, I'm the
finest kind of an example myself: I can take down my own symptoms
and note the progress of the disease in my own case."

He broke off suddenly, seeing his daughter's eyes fixed on him.

67

turned her out on the stage and recovered command of the purse-
strings, were things going so much better? Ask Isabella Neafe, she
had stories to tell! Clephane had implied in her necessity of
going into business — a necessity caused by his wife's extrava-
gance — had interfered with his literary career; but, since his
withdrawal from business, how much writing had he done? If he was
so clever, why didn't he publish something? Was it not his wife
who, long ago, had been the clever one in finding him out, and es-
caping, on the first pretext, from the collapse of his futile ambi-
tions? The child, to be sure — the courts had given him Valeria.
But Mrs. Neafe was now ready to meet enquiry at this point. Mrs.
Clephane, on taking refuge in the arms of a romantic affection
(poor Wing, for years, had waited with arms extended for her leap
from the falling house) — Mrs. Clephane, in the act, had realized
that what saved her would destroy her child; that her own leap to
safety must, as society was constituted, inevitably leave a splash
on her daughter's freshness. She had accepted the obligation of
making her own case worse to better her mother's; of seeming to
surrender the child till time should put her course in its true
light, and thus sanction a reunion with Valeria. Then, Mrs. Neafe
already hinted, people would see if she had lost the feelings of a
mother — if all she had done had not, in the last analysis, been
done at the prompting of the maternal instinct.

Whatever instinct prompted Mrs. Wing, it was certainly one
that she had reason to rely on. So far its guidance had been un-
erring. The purchase of Oakside had attracted notice to the Wings
as people of undoubted potentialities; while, as involving the

68.

prompt rescue of Louise Dawnay from the most harrowing straits, it appealed to those finer sensibilities which require that the pill of expediency shall be sugar-coated. The sentimentalists had felt it to be intolerable that Louise Dawnay should be crushed in her father's fall — she had so long been society's pretext for condoning that father's ~~rise~~ And Mrs. Dulacey had been exquisitely right in supposing that the purchase of Oakside involved more than the deeds recorded. It included, on Mrs. Dawnay's part, an effusion of gratitude from which Mrs. Wing emerged almost purified.

Mrs. Dawnay could never be suspected of interested motives. If she allowed Mrs. Wing to help her, it was because she had forgiven Mrs. Wing; the purchase simply set the seal on their reconciliation.

But, according to Mrs. Dulacey, Mrs. Wing's cleverest stroke had been to force a quarrel between Isabella Neafe and Clephane. If she had allowed Mrs. Neafe, after that lady's wont, to hover between the two claims, with an eye to taking toll from both, the situation would have hung undetermined, and the slightest reaction of sympathy might have turned it in Clephane's favour. Now the facts spoke definitely. Isabella Neafe had quarrelled with her own cousin for Mrs. Wing's sake. There was no escaping the inference: she had chosen, and the act challenged her to justify her choice. Mrs. Neafe might always be trusted to abound in her own sense. Her reasons for any course she had determined on were so numerous that they excluded only one motive — her own advantage. This it was her boast never to consider. She implied that she could safely leave it to Providence, and what better proof could she give of this trust than her bold plunge into the chartless sea of Mrs. Wing's future?

69.

The process of what might be called Mrs. Wing's materialization went on slowly but steadily. She was gradually becoming visible to society; her crescent light was perceptible in the social heavens, and she contrived to keep the telescope turned her way. came
First there was the redecoration of Oakside: a wholesale ejection of Mr. Claymore's Bouguereaus and Fortunys, followed by the importation of a French decorator who was to transform the interior into a Trianon — or was it a Fontainebleau? The essential point was that he had been given a free hand: people began to say that Tilletson Wing must be much richer than they had supposed. The suspicion was agreeably confirmed by his purchase of a plot of ground in upper Fifth Avenue — a corner plot adjoining Mrs. Van Arkell's! Mrs. Van Arkell's Renaissance finials began to tremble for their supremacy. Past was the proud moment when they had led their ex-ultant owner to travel to the valley of the Loire for the express purpose of inspecting their originals. Even Mrs. Van Arkell, to whom aesthetic impressions penetrated slowly, was beginning to be aware that the Renaissance had "gone out", and that the house to-raise next to hers would embody, in some chaste union of shaft and pediment, a tacit criticism of her own redundancies. That the criticism should be administered by Alice Wing was the bitterest drop in the cup. In an impulse of self-defense Mrs. Van Arkell tore out her stained glass and did over a panoplied guard-room into a Louis XVI boudoir. She even sent for Mr Bence and whispered that if he could sell the house to some "new people" who had not yet got wind of the coming fashion in architecture, she might, for a cool million, be induced to move farther up the avenue.

72.

American friends. Mrs. Neafe, as Mr. Mawson knew, connoted Mrs. Wing, and there was hardly a perceptible pause of calculation before he answered: "Well, I am taken up, I confess — but it's the fault of their coming out here at such impossible seasons. Who ever heard of coming to New York in October? I told the Duchess so, but she wouldn't listen."

"Ah," said Mrs. Neafe. "You mean Lady Pollifex, I suppose?"

"Of course!"

"I saw she had arrived."

"Without a letter, except to the Gunmeres, who happen to be in India. She sailed at a moment's notice and the Duchess has simply thrown her at my head."

Mrs. Neafe was paying for her frugal luncheon. "I must catch a train," she murmured. "I am at Oakside with the Wings." She let her eye meet Mr. Mawson's. "She hasn't done anything in the least — off colour — has she?"

"Lady Pollifex? Heaven forbid! But she's rather hard up, and she'd heard of Lady Cyril's success in Wall Street last year. You know Pollifex is a frightful gambler."

Mrs. Neafe nodded.

"And she's the Duchess's only sister?"

"Yes. The Duchess is devoted to her. She's paid her way over." Mr Mawson smiled. "I'm expected to do the rest. Of course it's an obligation — I'm so much at Clinton Towers."

"Where is she staying?"

"At a beastly little hotel — I couldn't do anything for

74.

At this moment Mrs. Wing's fate hung in the balance. If Lady Pollifex had been a failure her hostess would have gone under with her. But Lady Pollifex was a success. She was brilliant, efficient, indefatigable. She rode ad admirably to hounds, she played a very good game of bridge, she dressed as well as an actress, and talked as freely as a peeress; she fused the arts of every class and country in the happy medium of an affable manner and engaging a singular presence. It was impossible not to want to know her, and it was impossible to know her without knowing Mrs. Wing. The two were inseparable. If Lady Pollifex ever learned that she had been injudicious in accepting Mrs. Wing's hospitality, she was not disturbed by the discovery. To her genial survey, all the people she met were on the same social level, and what earthly difference could it make if a few of the husbands and wives had got mixed? It couldn't prevent their going to court, because there wasn't any court to go to — and as for the White House, nobody but foreigners wanted to go to the White House! She had learned that before she had been a week in America. Meanwhile Mr. Wing had given her some invaluable "tips", and Mrs. Wing had obliged her in various indirect ways; and later on they were to take her to Florida in their private car. Lady Pollifex knew when she was well off, and sang the praises of the Wings under the very noses of their detractors. When they went up to town she showed herself generously in their Opera box, and fulfilled to the letter Mrs. Wing's request that she should regard their stable as if they were her own. She stayed six months in America, made $20,000 in Wall Street and went home leaving the Wings demanded but reinstated.