FIVE & TEN (continued 2)

On the other hand, there was an amusing mixture of the Socratic and Rabelaisian about Gerkes. He loved the private and impolite jokes that had to be told behind the barrier of a hand, and the curbstone and the platform were alike his rostrums. He had never married, due principally to chronic lack of income and what he regarded as the popular fallacy that two could live as cheaply as one. His eye for a pretty woman was a quick, discerning one. It lit on Jennifer, who was standing in one of the pools of light, glittering in her armor, her dress a blaze of winking metallic disks, and her eyes as if they had come off the gown.

Rarick’s pride in his friend was pretentious and clumsy.

“Gerkes, I wish you’d tell my daughter that story about the Taoist priest who once found himself, when a meteor fell, in Lahore, India. There’s a mighty fine moral there.” Or, “Gerkes, I’d like for my wife to hear your opinion of our own Arizona summers and how they compare with say a country like Switzerland. I cannot get my family to realize that they don’t have to cross the Atlantic for beauty of scene or variety of climate.”

“Three chamber-of-commerce cheers,” said Jennifer, and held her cocktail-glass up against the light.

“See America first,” said Jenny, and gulped hers down.

It was the kind of patter for which Gerkes had little retort. Persiflage, the smiting word at any price, chic sophistication for the average truism, tea-table and round-table caliber of profundities, disarmed and bewildered him. He was at his worst. The descent to the dining-room through aisles of tapestries was made goose-step. Gerkes, who was never ill at ease, only silent where it seemed the better part of wisdom, plowed solemnly through the high-napped rugs.

Not even port wine or champagne-cup, made by Jenny at table in a frosted-silver pitcher over a mélange of fresh, whole, cling-stone peaches and black cherries, could succeed in drawing him out of the slough of amiable silence into which the occasion had thus far submerged him.

“I hope you are finding your quarters comfortable, Doctor Gerkes,” said Jenny from the head of her table, where they sat sparsely grouped, because it could have accommodated four times their number. The secret of the icy grace with which Jenny presided at her table, Jennifer was fond of declaring, was that her mother never permitted her head to touch the back of her tall chair, or her hand to lie along its arms.

“Very comfortable, thank you,” said Gerkes, who was interested in his portion of slim frizzled smelts. “It’s a pleasant room.”

“Room?” repeated Jenny, and swung her high, curved glance to her husband.

“You’ve a couple of them, Gerkes, or is it three? Don’t guess you’ve had time to check up.”

“Well now, Rarick, I haven’t,” said Gerkes without embarrassment. “There’s another room leads off, I take it.”

“No, old dear, you don’t take it,” said Jennifer, popping an almond into her mouth and grinning; “you apparently leave it.”

“I’m pretty much of an Eskimo,” he said. “They live in bare rooms and keep stacked such furniture as they need, outside their houses, until a piece is called in for use. Simplifies.”

“Dr. Gerkes has lived up there a lot among them, Jenny. He also spent two years in Lapland, studying.”

“You don’t say so,” said Jenny, regarding him over a smelt poised on the end of her fork. “Wasn’t it somebody or other said of the French that no race which eats little escargots, suffocated in their shells, can ever achieve civilization? Well, that’s the way I feel about Eskimos and blubber. Fancy being the kind of person that can drink it!”

“One must fancy it; because they don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Drink blubber.”

“But I always thought....”

“No, my dear lady, you never thought, or you wouldn’t be of the opinion that Eskimos drink blubber.”

“Why don’t they?”

“Why can’t you drink this wine-tumbler full of olive-oil?”

“Why—er—obviously—I can’t.”

“Well, for that same obvious anatomical reason, the Eskimo, who, strange as it may seem, is constructed just as you are, could not drink quantities of oil, either, and keep it down. Sorry to have to seem to be concrete.”

“You are smart, aren’t you?” said Jennifer, and propped her elbows on the table and her chin in her palm, and regarded his lusterless figure across the table. “Now tell me how they put ships in bottles, and who wrote ‘Titus Andronicus.’”

“The best way to make a ship in a bottle is to begin working from the inside of the bottle, outward. Glycon is the reputed inventor of a kind of logaœdic verse. Bivalves have snouts. Biology, around the time of the Council of Trent, insisted that the vein of the fourth finger of a fiancée’s hand led to the heart. Does that square me scholastically with your daughter, Rarick?” said Gerkes, irritated or stimulated to a point of loquacity that took his breath away.

“I think it must be wonderful,” said Jennifer, widening her eyes at him, “to be wise enough to play dumb. I’m always trying to be not too dumb to play wise. It can’t be got away with.”

“Nothing of the sort,” championed her mother. “You’ve a good brain. Jennifer is a graduate of Miss Pratt’s, Doctor Gerkes.”

“Yes, and I would have gone to college, Doctor, but I would have been sure to fall in love with all my professors under forty, and it would have been so complicated.”

Gerkes told a none-too-chaste tale then from the Cent Nouvelles, about a lady and a certain three lovers.

“He’s a nasty old roué,” said Jenny to herself, although she had rocked with laughter through far more pointless tales when her table blazed with friends of her own choosing.

“By the way, Rarick, there’s an idea behind the story I just told that ought to interest you. Louis Sixteenth, to whom the authorship is attributed, goes on to relate that this lady, while bathing, lost her diamond ring. While diamonds were undoubtedly not common at this time, it proves, however, that the stone which Henley picked up for you at Bruges, could easily date back to at least 1460.”

“By Jove! So it could! It also proves that they faceted their stones back in those days, too, now doesn’t it? That’s a mighty interesting point. That’s what I mean, Jennifer, by the historical value of inanimate things.”

It was Rarick’s way of attempting to justify to his daughter the telling of the risqué story. “Even at his worst, the talk of Gerkes mattered, which was more than he could say of the endless sluices of it that roared through the Rarick functions,” was what he was desperately and in his clumsy, antagonizing way, trying to convey to Jennifer.

And strangely enough, Jennifer’s reaction to one whom she might just as readily have regarded as a vile old bore, was as rare to herself as it was to Rarick.

After coffee, when the candles softened down closer to their reflection in the long fine pool of table, and Jenny, maneuvering to extricate her daughter from the vise of a dull evening, suggested that she accompany her to the last act of “Louise,” for which a pair of tickets were going begging, there was hesitation from Jennifer. She knew that after the opera they were sure to join up with the Chadwicks and the Edgertons for dancing at Florentine’s. Except for the seductive fact that Berry Rhodes might also be in the party, and Berry could tango like the Argentine Republic, Jennifer for the moment, wanted to remain around the pool of quiet talk and quiet candlelight and the slow syrupy flow of liqueurs and the intellectual luster of this dim old fogey, Gerkes.

Except there was that seductive possibility that Berry might drop in at Florentine’s....

“I’m glad you’re going to stick around,” she told Gerkes, when she gave him her hand in good-night.

“Doctor Gerkes has promised to make this his home indefinitely.”

“Let me come up, will you, and get on to some books to read and some things to think about?”

“Come up and I’ll show you a manuscript of the ninth century, which I am translating for a library in Cologne. It will make the hottest sex-novel in your library look like a juvenile book.”

“I think you’re immense. You keep your feet nice and pedicured, because I am going to sit at them. Do you think you can convert a sow’s ear into a silk purse?”

“I might find I have a silk purse to start with, and what if I should unwittingly reduce it to a sow’s ear?”

“Father, where did you find him!”

“Dr. Gerkes will tell you for himself tomorrow evening, if you will join us.”

“Have a footstool ready for me every evening, Doctor Gerkes. I’m going to try a new way of showing myself a good time. My present one is a flop. Until tomorrow....”

Poor Jennifer. She meant it. But, as a matter of fact, she saw him exactly two subsequent times, that high-exciting and excited winter of her twenty-third year. Once when muffled from her knees to the tip of her nose in an ermine-and-sable wrap, she had rushed downstairs between two young men who were making noises with their teeth like ukuleles, just in time to nod to Gerkes as he came out of her father’s library with a stack of books in his hand.

The second time, she had seen him quite crazily, through a keyhole. She was never to be quite clear about that, however. It was six o’clock in the morning, and she had been “on a party” with Berry Rhodes. The door before which she had crouched had lurched about so; and so had the figure of Dr. Gerkes, seen crazily through the keyhole.

Jenny, standing before a full-length, three-sided mirror, did an uncharacteristic thing. She removed from the front of her peignoir of coffee-colored lace, a small cascade of ruffles, which left her chest bare, daubed powder on to the V, and then stood off to survey. Her bathroom, an enormous one guiltless of tile, cleverly disguised in rugs, taffetas, a sunken bathtub with growing plants on its coping, and porcelain water-birds on little stands against a background of glazed Chinese wall-paper, reflected her figure over and over again. There was no angle from which she could not contemplate herself. Profile. Semi-profile. Full front. Back. She bent into them all, surveying. She was the angular type of woman that wears high neck-ruffs well. She owned dog-collars of jewels; principally pearls with vertical bars of sapphires, emeralds, diamonds, or jade. She need not have feared for her neck and shoulders. It was just that, somehow, the close collar, the narrow cuff, the high ruff of fur at the hands and wrists and neck, gave Jenny what air of distinction she could claim. Tall, narrow, her high coiffure boldly revealing her ears and planes of cheek, there was something studiedly, if remotely, Bernhardtian about Jenny. At least she grasped at the wisp of resemblance and pandered to it for all it was worth.

Yet, standing before the mirror, holding the cascade of coffee-colored lace alternately against her chest and then removing it, she finally decided to leave it off, feeling strangely not herself as she did so.

As a matter of fact, she was not herself. So strangely not herself that once she crossed her arms over her flat chest and hugged her shoulders in an exultant little fashion.

The no-longer-to-be-evaded truth of it was that Jenny, whose impeccable wifehood, extending over a period of twenty-three years, had been an easy virtue, was excited away and beyond her usual and curiously volatile air of composure, by the fact that a young Argentine, named Ramond Lopez, was coming in for a five-o’clock cocktail with her in the conservatory.

It had been arranged in the hurried breaking up of a party at the Ambassadeur the previous afternoon. Abbey Chadwick had asked twenty to tea and dancing, including young Lopez, who was said to be a paid dancer at Florentine’s, a gigolo of exalted type who mingled socially by virtue of his connections, but who, nevertheless, was paid by the management. He had sat next to Jennifer at the Ambassadeur and had coaxed her to attempt a tango which she had never before ventured on a public floor. He and a Spanish girl professionally known as Cleo, had danced two Brazilian ballroom numbers at one of Jennifer’s dinner dances a few weeks previous, and been paid handsomely for it.

The son of a partially defunct coffee king, whose fortune had been spent in defending his daughter Bianca from the charge of having shot and instantly killed her young roué of a millionaire husband as he was leaving his racing-stable, Ramond’s anomalous position kept him hovering precariously between two worlds. He had been a mere lad in school, in Switzerland, at the time of the notorious case of Bianca Lopez Dakin, but the swift tides of family fortune, the death of his father, a little later the death of Bianca, and the paltriness of his inheritance, had swept him from Rio Janeiro. He was any young man with a dancing-figure and a personable air.

It was said of him, as it was said of his kind, that women contributed chiefly toward his support. Possibly. It is certain, however, that Jenny, whose social world was a happy hunting-ground for the hired or more subtly rewarded gigolo, had never bartered in the strange coin of that realm except in the out-and-out terms of signing checks to paid entertainers for services rendered and received. The case of Ramond had been different from the case of Nemo, the case of Tom and Dick and Harry, only to the extent that he had occasionally been present in social capacity at functions where she and Jennifer dined or danced.

It had all come about so suddenly that it seemed to Jenny her confused senses must be playing her a prank. As tidy about her emotions as she was about the objects on her dressing-table, and more and more given of late years to going about to all occasions and functions without Rarick, the man beside her at dinner or in an opera box or with whom she danced, catalogued readily according to these tidy emotions.

Whatever Rarick might hold against her, Jenny was given to reminding herself, infidelity by word or action, as wife, or mother to his children, could never be one of his indictments.

The former, on those not infrequent occasions when she brought this subject to the fore, Rarick let rest uncontroversial; but the latter, which was scarcely true to Rarick, was more than he could hear without rebuttal. The very fact that Jenny’s children adored her, caused him to contend bitterly that she misused her power by smothering them beneath bracelets and shields.

Be that as it may, here was Jenny now, standing before her mirror, hugging her shoulders and shaken to the very foundation of that temperamental frigidity which had always stood her in such good stead. Ramond Lopez, cross between a gigolo, and somebody or other’s tame robin, and who taught the tango for fifteen dollars a lesson at Palm Beach during the season, had suddenly walked devastatingly into her consciousness. She could trace its inchoate beginnings back to the night of Jennifer’s dinner dance, when he and the Spanish girl, the fellow Nemo and a beautifully sinuous little Russian, had alternated in exhibition dances. Later Ramond had asked her to sit out a tango with him in Rarick’s conservatory, of all places! A brackish retreat, this erstwhile breakfast-room, of hot-smelling soils and difficult pottings in Osmunda leaves and sphagnum moss, and which was devoted almost exclusively to orchid plants imported from Brazil and Japan. In the various processes of their hybridization, they were seldom, as Jenny and Jennifer were constantly complaining, sufficiently presentable to save them florist’s expenditures.

Jenny was not the one to invite the highly special attentions of slim young men with Latin eyes. She danced with them, dined, and cocktailed, even flirted in that rather excited brittle manner of hers; but, outside of that, her slate was clean. The security of that state of her mind was unconsciously apparent in the thrust of her clean scimitar-thin features.

A young wag of a society writer for a caustic weekly had described Jenny’s face as two profiles pasted together. It was enormously apt. Lopez, at Jennifer’s dance, had sat among the unflowering hybrids of Rarick’s odontiodes, cypripediums, and other curious orchids of purely botanical interest, and with his immediate eyes covering her face like a mask of sweet ether, had solemnly refuted this delicious indictment, paying her, instead, breathy compliments that somehow failed to arouse her usual sure-fire ability to laugh a bad boy cruelly into his place.

At Ramond’s lispings, something starved in Jenny had lifted its desolate head. Excepting for the months of courtship, when an eager, rather timidly idealistic young clerk had wooed the intelligent-looking Jenny Avery on the “chigger”-infested banks of the Meramac, there had been precious few words, except in platitude, addressed warmly and closely into Jenny’s eyes.

Almost immediately after her marriage, the alienating affair of the twenty-five hundred had mattered terribly in their relationship.

Bitter with having given, bitter with having allowed himself to accept, once Rarick had seen her reaction set in, the honey dried out of the brief flower of marriage.

No, it had been many a day since close, fervent things had been said to Jenny. Ramond had made her suddenly and hurtingly aware of it. Something in her had thawed and was aching. Ramond, half her age, had interpreted her with a melancholy kind of wisdom.

“Why do you try to deceive me, as you do the others, with your icy manner?” he said to her, with the slight accent that lifted his lips in a flare off his square white teeth.

“My dear boy,” she said, starting to be brittle and annihilating in the cocksure way she had, “you are now in the act of telling me how misunderstood I am.”

To her surprise, he was neither annihilated nor subdued. He caught both her slim cool wings of hands, half-buried under wrist-ruffs, in the grip of his own.

“You must not talk like that to me. You do not mean what you say. You are the most interesting woman that I know. One cannot bear to be in the company of the insipid young girls, once he has known you. Do not pretend, Mrs. Rarick, that you need to be told that you are fascinating. Sometimes I think you are as Dante would have been if he had been beautiful and a woman. Sometimes I think you are most like Bernhardt. Then I think you are like the best of both of them.”

“Why, you foolish boy!” she said, the words, from lack of conviction, slow and stiff on her lips. American men simply did not look at one like that. They had not the eyes....

“I want to see more of you, Mrs. Rarick. I want to know you. Am I impertinent——”

He was.

“—or just one more admirer. After all, I cannot be what you call in America, such a ‘total loss,’ Mrs. Rarick, or I would not have the good sense to recognize so quickly a brilliant and worth-while woman when I see one. It is easy to dance with your beautiful girls over here—but they are not so nimble with their brains as with their feet and tongues. Am I impertinent?”

He was. Yet how amusing of him! Here was no mere patent-leather-haired gigolo, with a gift for wearing evening clothes and making middle-aged women horrible. Impudent of him to have insinuated his fingers up under the fur cuff of her long, tight sleeve—in flames—she did not withdraw them——

There was a letter between Jenny’s bodice and her flesh, as she maneuvered before the mirror. It was a line from Ramond, confirming what had been the hurried arrangement for this afternoon’s cocktail.

Lest you forget what is unforgettably important to me. This afternoon at five, where the orchids dare not bloom for fear of comparison.

Ramon.

The “d” off the “Ramon” had somehow excited her more than the note itself. She was aware, as she sat up that morning in bed and put the square white envelope back on her breakfast tray, that her legs, which were stretched between the sheets, were trembling and would have doubled under her had she attempted to stand. The place at her side, with the covers folded back by Rarick, as he had risen from his night there, was still dented with his body. Through the years, there had been no gesture from either of them to alter these arrangements in any of their town or country homes, with the exception of the camp in the Adirondacks, where the women’s quarters of de luxe simplicity were in one twenty-four-room log building, and the men’s in another of equal size.

A wave of self-pity, not unmixed with anger, drenched Jenny as she sat and dipped strawberries-in-November, into a small brown bowl of sour cream. What a starveling she must be, if just the ordinary homage and admiration from a boy such as Ramon could bring about all this turmoil within her.

Why, in the last few years she and Rarick had left off even pecking each other good-night. She had been aware of it, and, in the spirit of letting the old cat die, had managed to seem asleep first, if they retired together, which was rare.

It was well over twenty years since the days when he had placed kisses against her lips when he came home evenings, or stretched himself out after dinner on a couch, holding her hand while she sat beside him and read aloud. Twenty years, or was it ever? There were limits to the memory of the flesh. The feeling of the print of caresses had long since died from Jenny’s. Not that Jenny was a type to whom the end of every road was the arms of the man she loves. Her temperamental frigidity saw to that. And yet, suddenly sitting there in bed, the sense of desiring a great deal and being not desired, stabbed through her consciousness.

Life was passing her by. And for what? For nothing more than a dumb-animal response to the instinct to abide by her sense of wifely duty. For what? For Rarick, to whom even her fidelity might be a matter of indifference? For her children? Bless them, they were no worse and possibly not much better than the average. Life was going to be bountiful to them. Jennifer would marry brilliantly. Avery, you somehow felt about him, even then, in his adolescence, was sure in some way to be as distinguished as he was rich. She would be crowded out of their lives. And then what? A specter of an old age with Rarick, whose eccentricities and cloistered habits were sure to grow upon him, stalked down a corridor of her imagination—then what?——Thank God, thank God, it was still left in her to feel that cut of thrill at the left-off “d.”

Ramon was coming.

She handed the small cascade of ruffles to the maid in the Breton cap and hurried out as if she dared not glance back at this symbol of the soiled inner workings of the mind of Jenny Avery Rarick, mother of two grown children.

Ramon was in the conservatory, poking about among goldfish which darted about a beautiful wall-fountain of Pulhamite stone that Rarick had brought over, with its lichen still clinging to it, from a rock-garden he had admired in Taormina.

He kissed her hand, lifting back some lace first, and then regarded her in long silence, a slight film of moisture across his eyes making them deeper.

The quick picture of half a dozen men she knew, including Rarick, flashed across her mind’s eye. How clumsily they would have paid this same simple tribute. Mark House, an American who had been fabulously rich all his life and lived much abroad, always employed this continental greeting. But how clumsily, creaking where his shirt bent, and leaving the disagreeable feeling of smear across the knuckles. A Count Luckow, whom Jenny suspected of casting amorous eyes at Jennifer, who had only ridicule for him, had this habit gracefully. Rarick, somehow, would not visualize.

She could imagine that, to a young man like Ramon, whose masculinity was not mere maleness, there must be something chapped and a little funny about the unkissed hands of American women.

Twenty and more years of the perfunctory pats of greeting and adieu from Rarick had been Jenny’s sole share in a world which she was suddenly aware must be filled with the grand passions between women and men. Not that anything she had not received from Rarick mattered, but the slow anger of resentment flared just the same.

Women who had been less meticulous than she about their marriage-vows were loved women. There were women of Jenny’s acquaintance, of great wealth and social security, who had not been meticulous, whose wifehood was far from irreproachable, but who somehow had the gift of demanding full measure of homage from their husbands.

Precious little Jenny had demanded or received. A stab of self-pity, the immemorial self-pity of a woman feeling denied, cut Jenny. Rarick as a husband and lover! It was inconceivable that he could be missing in his turn any of those things he denied her. The lover had died back there in the beginning; and for the twenty and more subsequent years she had been living with a husband. What would even this Latin-eyed youngster, who was paying her pretty, slightly old-fashioned compliments, and letting his eye linger far too long on the spot where the insert of ruffles had been removed, think of her sterile kind of life if he knew? Really, his eyes, black-velvet ones of deepest nap, were naughty, roving as they did, from hers down to the tip of the V-neck which she had calculated before her mirror. A wave of self-disgust made her redden. With a prim reaction, over which she had no control, she suddenly felt stripped, and withdrew her hand, to clap it against her chest.

He regarded her with gentle reproach.

“Why are you like that?”

“Like what?”

“Shy, like a—like one of those beautiful wild pumas that used to live on the edge of one of my father’s estates in the interior of Peru.”

Puma! She did not know whether to laugh down what she regarded as his absurdity or incinerate him with the rebuff of which she was so capable.

“You don’t understand the strange wild beauty of these graceful creatures. You must not think the comparison odious, Mrs. Rarick.”

What were you to do with a boy like that, whose sweetness was indomitable?

They sat on the coping of the fountain, against a back-rest formed by a Malaga-grape vine the thickness of an arm. Delicate Asia Minor aconite crawled along the coping; and even though not one of Rarick’s hundreds of species of orchids was at the moment in bloom, an overheated air of exotic humidity prevailed.

“You’re a silly boy for making me indulge your whim for a cocktail in this ridiculous conservatory of my husband’s, where nothing ever really blooms, but unpronounceable, unwearable species and expensive botanical things are always about to happen and somehow don’t. Except by the time orchids are ridiculously cheap at every corner florist’s.”

The impersonal portion went sailing over his head.

“I know it is only a little glass house, but it cannot ever seem quite that to me, since it is where you first let me dare know you a little better.”

“I’m afraid, dear boy, there is nothing to know. If I am still water, I am not only the kind that doesn’t run deep, but perhaps the kind that doesn’t run at all.”

“You do not expect me to believe that.”

No, she did not, but she said it again.

“You are a liberal education to me.”

“How liberal?”

“I am tired of all your pretty girls here in this country who have no faces in particular. You have a face.”

“My dear boy, are you given to profound observations like that?”

“You must not make me ridiculous. I mean you have a face that hangs like a cameo in the memory.”

She looked at him, and, through the glazed fabric of a skin that did not easily take the flush, blushed with the surprised sweetness of a girl.

“You naughty Latin boy. I am old enough to be your mother.”

“I am glad, though, that you are not. Fancy the tragedy of having to be no more than son to Dusé or Cleopatra or Bernhardt.”

“My boy doesn’t feel that way,” she said, clambering back to what safety-ledge she could.

“Don’t say that.”

“What?”

“It hurts me.”

“What?”

“‘My boy’—in that tone. I am jealous, Mrs. Rarick—not of him—but of all the life that has claim on you——”

She had the impulse to rise and rebuke him, and, instead, permitted his hand to wander again toward the thick fur ruffs at her wrists. Then a butler served cocktails, and they were silent and at nice distance while he puttered; but the eyes of young Lopez, above the three cocktails he tossed off, were over her face with the sweetishness of an anæsthetic mask.

“I’m going to send you along home now,” she said, and rose. There were no lights, and a thick hush of November snow was falling against the glass walls, closing them in.

“I don’t want to go home, Jenny.”

Jenny. The plushy way he had of saying that. The impertinence of his saying that. The dearness....

“I don’t want to go home, Jenny, without something to tide me over until next time.” That plushiness in his speech was not from the effect of the three cocktails, but from an excited lisp, adorable to her, that seemed to crowd his speech.

“Impertinent,” she said, frightened, in an exultant way beyond anything that had ever happened to her, and putting out a stiff arm to ward him off.

He used the arm as a lever to draw her toward him. To the silence of the big white flakes that were pasting themselves against their glass inclosure, he dipped the back of her neck against his arm and sank his lips down on to hers.

Racing home from a charity bazaar, where she had raffled off character dolls with conspicuous success, to change her clothes for a tea dance at the St. Regence, a surprise awaited Jenny.

Avery was home.

An envelope addressed in his large free hand was handed her by the maid in the Breton cap.

Dear Moth:

Hullo! Surprise, eh what? I’ll wait in my bedroom until you pop in on me.

Av.

Avery home!

The first thought that flashed through Jenny’s mind, as she stood with the note dangling among her purse and gloves, flooded her with such self-disgust that, on the very heels of it, she went hurrying to Avery’s room, as if in expiation, the enormous sable coat that wrapped her from eyes to knees still dangling back off her slight shoulders.

If only she had gone straight from the bazaar to the St. Regence, without having bothered to come home and change into a taupe Lanvin gown with a high neck-ruche of chinchilla that Ramon liked. It made Ramon nervous to wait. Actually gave him indigestion, which asserted itself in little splotches of pink across his forehead. High-strung....

A lump of mortification was in Jenny’s very soul as she sped to her son. Was Avery ill? Crazy thought, but this was the first time she had seen Avery in the two months since—Ramon. Would he—could he—sense anything different? No. No. No. She need not reproach herself where her children were concerned. She had been plugging harder than ever for Avery’s speed-boat. Would—Avery—being home—make a difference to Ramon? He had never seen her with her boy. With Jennifer, now, it was different. With that not-to-be-resisted lisp of his when he attempted to employ the idioms of American slang, he called them the “Flip sisters.” But Avery—Avery, though only sixteen, had a grave, rather precious quality. His blond straight youth, while boasting a maturity of appearance that matched some of the young fellows who trailed around Jennifer, was shot through with the most knowing perceptions. Would Avery, with those curiously delicate perceptions, sense that in the two months since she had seen him, strange, turbulent, and high emotions had been sluicing through the slim being of his mother?

How annoyed Rarick would be if something only casual were bringing Avery home in the midst of his semester. He had come down so flat-footedly against it. Surely Avery could not be ill....

He was standing in a striped-flannel dressing-gown, tamping tobacco into his short-stemmed pipe, when his mother entered. The contents of a large pigskin bag, good accouterments, littered the room. A portable phonograph was open on the table, with a disk on, and a needle in position.

“Good for you, Mother! I was afraid it might not be you. Peacock tells me father often gets home nowadays around four.”

“Avery, you’re not ill?”

“Nothing so pleasantly explanatory of my sudden return to the magnificent fold of the family,” he said, giving his parent a lift off the floor as he kissed her.

“Avery, you’re not in trouble of any sort?”

“Not the kind you think.”

“What other kinds are there?”

“Deep psychological fee-fie-fo-fum ones.”

“Avery, don’t tell me you’ve started to be foolish about a girl—or anything like that,” she cried, flashing a glance, even in the suspense of her sudden suspicion, to her wrist watch.

“No, I’m off women,” he said, with elaborate grandeur and innocence of them, that made her take his long, pale cheeks between her hands and kiss him.

“Darling, tell me what has brought you home in this sudden fashion. You know how set your father is against it, since all those supper dances we used to drag you in for. Tell me, son, I’ve only a moment between appointments.”

“Mother, be a brick and cancel. How can I talk to you if you’ve only a moment? I must see you before father comes in. Please manage.”

She stood fluttering between her indecisions. After all, the important thing was that Avery was well. Some schoolboy predicament no doubt, that seemed enormous enough to the schoolboy living it. Ramon hated to wait. Waiting acted as an actual physical depressant upon him, from which he was slow to recover. Jenny had learned that. Their most violent quarrel had resulted from her arrival twenty minutes late at a small tea-room in West Seventy-sixth Street which they were beginning to frequent for its obscurity. Women who took tango lessons of Ramon learned quickly, too, that to keep him waiting was to receive only desultory and sullen attention, instead of the subtle thrills they came for and paid for.

Jenny’s virtue as wife and mother had been founded on no principle of life or religion. That she happened to possess it up to now had apparently been a matter of no counter-forces sufficiently strong to imperil it. Raging to see Ramon, who in five minutes would be beginning his wait for her, Jenny regarded this slender choirboy-faced son of hers, while turmoils battered her. He was not an easy son. Never had been. There had been long and frequent sieges of difficult child-illnesses and curious phases of mental reserve. His schooling had not been an easy matter to settle, what with his father’s desires, the boy’s, and her own. She had won her points, where Avery was concerned, too slowly to have them appear won.

The years at Newberry, and now his freshman year at Eastern, had drawn Avery out of his reticent, inhibited, boyhood precisely as she had predicted they would. Avery was pretty much of a regular fellow now. He had “made” the right fraternity. The son of a former Vice-president of the United States had sponsored him for K. A. K.; and the Avery who used to hide from his riding-master and feel squeamish in a rowboat now rode his own polo mount and did not remonstrate at Jenny’s high desire for him to own a speed-boat. As a child he had feared water.

Yes, Avery was pretty much of a fellow now. In fact, she was fond of admitting, a little slyly and with innuendo that was without foundation, that he was too much of a fellow.

“Boys will be boys” flowed in relief off the lips of Jenny, who had spent her quota of time doubting if her boy would. Ah yes, boys nowadays knew how to handle their love-affairs, various tooth-cutting amours and indiscretions, as skilfully as they knew how to handle their cars. That was to presuppose that Avery had always handled his, just that casually.

Avery, always more or less at shy odds with life, with his father, and even with Jenny herself, had not been the gay and uncomplex youngster that Jennifer had been. Even now he was sometimes dark and turgid water to her. Had she failed him as confidante on those occasions when he had seemed to want to grope his way into her understanding of this or that plight of his? Chiefly psychological ones that she had found it hard to comprehend. She had read books on adolescence. In a vague way, they accounted.

Once, on one of his Easter vacations from Newberry, Avery, to whom his mother was by far the happiest aspect of his holidays, had tried to read her excerpts from a very private journal which he had kept for three years, and which locked with a key he kept on a chain with his fraternity symbol.

She had felt deeply the spirit which prompted the confidence, but was conscious of having failed miserably to understand what to her had seemed the rather embarrassing vaporings of a young mind floundering to climb out of some sophomoric morass. It was a phase of adolescence, she concluded, as she dismissed the sense of failure that had followed these private disclosures of some of the mental travail of her son. No one could quite be expected to be able to comprehend the tortuous and tortured workings of the adolescing mind. From the books she had read, it would be rather abnormal to find Avery normal at this stage. All would work itself out. As a matter of fact, of course, a boy’s father was the proper confidant at such times.... But secretly, Jenny gloried in her strategic position in the minds and hearts of both her children. It was a sort of trump card up her sleeve; it was the writing on the wall of who was who.

Was she about to fail again of her coveted place in the eyes of her son? If Avery were impelled to once more put before her the difficult and even embarrassing torments of his expanding and maturing mind, would it not be better, after all, to evade the issue, than to fail in it?

Let Avery have it out with his father! Let them become acquainted and find a common language. It was not even fair to continue to stand as buffer between them. Great responsibilities, that had to do with his father, were ultimately to descend upon this young boy. Better to try to have him cross the stormy Niagara gorge that divided the two of them.

But, in her heart, Jenny knew that the source of all this hurried disposition of her immediate predicament was the fact that Ramon was waiting. He must be chewing at his lip now, and sliding in and out of the waistcoat pocket that lay against the slim torso of his dancer’s body, a platinum-and-diamond watch, the thickness and diameter of a silver dollar, Jenny’s first gift to him.

“Mother, I know I’m putting the cart before the horse, to try and make you understand the result first, and then give you the reasons that led up to the decision, but the fact is, I’m done with college.”

Then it was something schoolboyish! Let him have it out with his father. Eastern was the ideal college for a son of the rich. Important connections. Socially right. Proper setting. Rich men with sons about to inherit vast responsibilities, chose Eastern for their boys. Ramon was waiting ten minutes by now. High time Avery and his father were making each other’s acquaintance.

“You talk as if such decisions were a matter of course, Avery. I’m surprised.”

“I knew you would be, Mother. That’s why I want like the dickens to talk to you before the explaining to father begins. Or maybe you’ll talk to him, Mother?”

“I cannot always be taking sides with you against your father, Avery. After all, he is your father and my husband, and must be respected.”

That, ever since the advent of Ramon, was part of her new psychology of atonement to her husband. She had applied it directly to Rarick the few weeks just passed, causing him no surprise in particular, because he was no longer sensitive to her doings. Her son, however, looked up at her in almost startled surprise.

“Out of whose book of life have you torn a new page, Mother? Not your own?”

Now he was going to be abstract! That was the difficulty about being able to understand Avery. It made her proud of what she was pleased to call his depth; but, just the same, he was at the stage where he was forever vaporing about life. As such. It was a thoroughly concrete affair to Jenny, life was. Witness the precise situation of Ramon waiting for her. It was hard to treat life as a generality. You talked about your own life, of the life of some one in whom you were passionately interested. Just life as a subject was sermon matter, or something you did not discuss except under precious circumstances.

“You’ve only three more years at Eastern, Avery. There is something about the idea of a college degree! It’s an asset in after-life. Avery T. Rarick. Century Club, Racquet Club, Eastern Club. It’s fine to hear one man say of another, ‘We finished at Eastern together. We made the polo teams together at Eastern!’” (Ramon was capable of going off, after waiting a half-hour.)

“Mother, I want a couple of years to myself.”

“Yourself?”

“Yes. Alone. Mother, I want terribly some time to myself. In Europe. On my own. I imagine Paris is as good a place as any for a place to get one’s bearings. Or, better still, some off-the-beat places like Sicily or Greece. I’m fed up. College is all right for a certain sort of fellow; I’m wasting my time at it.”

“That’s ungrateful, Avery. I’ve almost won your father over about your boat.”

“Mother, I need to tell you a few things about myself. I’d have told you long ago, you’re so sweet. But you dodged; and I do hate like the dickens to say them....”

Then it was to be in the key of the writings in that locked journal of his. Darling, silly adolescent! Ramon was waiting.

“Avery, I cannot stand the strain of the rôle of go-between for you and your father any longer. Isn’t it manlier for you to face him yourself? This is too serious for me. You yourself must ask him for what you want——”

“Why, mother, do you know I’ve never really wanted anything before? It is you who have always wanted for me. That’s what makes it impossible for me to really get at father. He thinks I’m the fellow who has wanted all the things I’ve never really wanted.”

So! It had come home to her. So much sooner than she could have dreamed. It was for this she had practically alienated her husband, worn down her vitality, sacrificed her peace of mind. From the very infancy of her children, Jenny had been fighting for what she wanted for them; and here was her son interpreting it for her in a way that robbed her of any of the fruits of sacrifice.

“Avery Rarick,” she said, with everything reproachful in her voice that she could muster, “I cannot believe my ears.”

“Mother dear, you mustn’t take it that way! Let me explain.”

Ramon was waiting.

“Listen, dear, I must——”

“Mother, I haven’t hopped on to this decision today or yesterday. I’m everybody’s total-loss at college, dear.”

“That’s a pretty disheartening thing to have to hear, after the long wrangle I had with your father, who wanted a state university. Really, Avery——”

“I’d be no go at any college, Mother. It’s hard as the devil to try to explain—even to you.”

“Yes, Avery,” she said, mashing out a cigarette off which she had taken two puffs, and trying to bite down an impatience that was almost a frenzy within her; “I should think it might be.” Ramon was waiting.

“Mother, what do you think?”

“I can’t. I don’t,” she said, and pressed her eyeballs.

“Mother, for the last six months I’ve been carrying only one course at college. You might as well know and have it over with.”

“You’ve made excellent connections. Donnie Chattenfield told Jennifer that Hal is inviting you to Whitecastle for the Christmas holidays.”

“Mother, doesn’t that surprise you?”

“Why should it? The Chattenfields weren’t always as socially secure as they are now. I——”

“I mean, doesn’t it surprise you that I’ve only carried one course, and that a dead-cat one in current events?”

“Of course it does——”

“It doesn’t really, old darling, because you’ve never thought about it one way or another. But anyway—even my address at college has been a fake one, Mother. I’ve faked.”

“Avery!”

“I haven’t lived on the campus for six months. The college canning-factory began to tin my brains, so I moved out of it. I’ve rooms up on the hill with an artist and his wife.”

“Why, Avery Rarick, how could you!”

“It’s the only thing I could do, Mother. I’m not cut out for the college-factory. Matter of fact, if I am cut out for much of anything, I haven’t found out yet what it is. That’s what I want to talk about. You’ve been such a brick getting Father to put up with me, that it’s kind of rotten to bring this home to you after the way you maneuvered for Eastern. But it would have been the same at Penn, or whatever state university it was Father preferred. It isn’t that I haven’t been working. I have—after a fashion—worked, if you’d call it that!”

“Oh, Avery, don’t meander. Talk to the point.”

“Right, Mother. I mean, I’ve been scribbling. Writing a little. Verse and stuff. Pretty rotten. Wouldn’t like to see it, would you? Might give you a better idea of why I think a couple of years on my own—knocking about Europe—alone—alone—would put me straight—with things. Mother, you’re not listening!”

She lifted her tormented eyes to him, which for the moment she had closed against the milling of her inner frenzy, and made the pretense of having heard.

“That is all stuff and nonsense, Avery. You are to bide your time at college, and next summer take that trip to Norway and Sweden with the Stanley-Blake twins.”

“I don’t give a damn for those saps, Mother.”

“‘Those saps,’ as you are pleased to call them, will some day be two of the most powerful men in America.”

“I tell you I need to be alone, Mother. To find myself.”

“Oh—Avery——”

“I know! I sound like a letter to a newspaper. Well, I’m capable of writing one like this. ‘Editor, Daily Bunk. Dear Sir: What should a young man of seventeen years of age do who simply cannot get interested in life as he sees it about him. I cannot find myself. Everything becomes disgustingly monotonous. Not interesting enough to call for any real effort. I’m a perfect failure to date, and unless I pull out, may remain so for the rest of my days on this supposedly glorious earth. Everything about me is as interesting as a morgue, where I am concerned. What’s wrong with this picture?’

“Letter from Editor to Morbid Young Man: ‘Your symptoms, young man, include indifference to whatever you do and the belief that a congenial task would reveal your hitherto unappreciated values. As you see the world, it is sadly out of joint, and you wonder why others are so indifferent to the pearl of great price hidden in your personality. Young man, behind your inability to connect with life, lurks an egregious self-centeredness and an exaggerated idea of your own consequence.’”

“Avery, I can’t bear it. You’re too funny to be borne. Stop it, idiot! How can one take you seriously?”

“But I am serious, Mother. I’m clowning Hamlet for you.”

How slenderly handsome he was, his father’s son around the eyes and brow, but son of his mother in the lean, lithe figure. As he sat there on the edge of the table, dangling one long cleverly-clad leg, and showing, as if to excellent stage-direction, his clean blade of profile, he was like one of those well-made youths in English society-comedies.

“Avery, I simply must go. My advice to you is to pack yourself back to college without even letting your father know about this—brainstorm.”

“Mother, I’m in hell!”

“Then you are in some trouble, son,” she cried out, a sudden terror dilating her eyes.

“I know, Mother, I know, it all sounds like tommyrot,” he cried, and struck his breast with a gesture that immediately became sophomoric to her, once he followed it up with words. “But can’t you understand? The hell is here inside me. I must get away. Alone. To think—it out——It’s too cluttered up here. I can’t stand the clutter. I’m sick of being me. And doing the things a fellow has to do if he is me. Give me a year or two on my own, Mother. Get Father to. I want to think. I want to think my way out....”

“Of what?”

“How do I know? How can I try to tell it, when you sit there thinking of other things. When you won’t understand.”

How dear he was! How inexpressibly dear. Hurtingly young. Silly, sensitive, sophomoric dreamer. She had never seen him like this. At least not exactly like this. She wanted to take him in her arms.... Ramon was waiting.

“Mother dear, be a brick. Put it up to Father before I have to face the music. Make him see that I need a couple of years away—to myself——”

“I simply must go, son.”

“He’ll never understand, Mother. Coming from me, the suggestion will only antagonize him. I can’t be myself with Father—any more than I sometimes think he can be with me.”

“Hush, Avery.”

There was one principle of hers which Jenny had never even bent, much less broken. She could not bring herself to discuss her husband’s shortcomings with his children.

“I must go!” she cried, wildly. “If you insist upon coming home from college with such ideas, son, it is manlier that you should face your father yourself. Tell him just what you have told me.”

“I can’t! I can’t! You know that.”

“Then begin to learn now. I cannot always be buffer between you. Tell him what you’ve told me.”

“Not in a thousand years. He’ll want facts. I haven’t any.”

“Here he comes. Tell him now.”

“Mother, for God’s sake! You wouldn’t do that——”

For the first time in her life, Jenny would. She was off and gone, down the corridor, frantic with haste, just as Rarick, attracted by his son’s voice, paused at his door to peer in.

For several years now, Rarick had been cultivating this habit of extricating himself from his office at four o’clock in the afternoon. It was not easy, except that he had found that the closing of his multifarious day, whether at four or six or eight, was sure to leave an overflow of affairs to which he could not get around.

The year that Rarick instructed his chauffeur to enter his office at precisely the stroke of four, and, regardless of who or what might be present, hand him his hat, the force began to refer to him as “the old man.”

As a matter of fact, it was Rarick’s conclusion that these few precious hours of late afternoon which included the sedative one of twilight, if properly induced, could be made to stack upon the credit side of health and vitality.

His golf consisted of those hours spent in the forest-like silences of his library, where he read little, if at all, but where glyphs and triptychs; helmet and sword of Doge’s guard; “Virgin and Child”; Auvergne art of the fifteenth century; pillars of stone decorated in Roman cups; red velvets inlaid with heraldic leopards, played effect after effect into his solitude.

He could sit in the dim splendor of this hall, and out would creep the mood to empty his pocket of its strange fires of stones of the earth and place them in smoldering rows along a strip of black velvet which he kept concealed behind the cushion of a divan. Out of his organ, “Father’s Folly,” there came pouring to his pressing of a button the storied action of “Tosca” or “La Bohème,” told in the illuminated stained glass above the triple grin of keyboards. Musical cataracts that leaped in glory over the din of a day that had been lived to the tune of dishpans, hair-nets, lingerie ribbon, and forty thousand small dolls made out of imitation peach-skin from the Vermont factory. Countless and ever-fascinating devices lurked within the Gothic maw of this pretentious instrument. Symphony orchestras, Japanese bells, xylophones, bird-notes, and cymbals. Violin solos, sextettes, octettes, “Chimes of Normandy,” Bach, Verdi, Guilmant, Handel, Saint-Saëns, Bonne, Mendelssohn, and a reproduction of the Vatican choir, with the lifted faces of the singing boys rising chastely above their surplices and glowing softly into stained-glass flesh.

To Rarick, who scarcely knew his son, there was something of Avery in these pale soprano boys, a look of spiritual contact, until he invariably jerked himself away from a comparison that, no sooner made, seemed ridiculous.

Avery, indeed! Speed-boats. Plus-fours. Oriental-pearl studs at seventeen. A growing suspicion that all was not open and above board about his college had been Rarick’s. Something not quite bona-fide about what Avery had to say about his life there——

The suspicion moved up a notch at the sight of his boy, standing in the French-flannel dressing-gown, with the contents of his open bag scattered about the room, and the plane surface of his lean, pale face plastered with a look of panic that was positively grotesque as his father leaned in at the door. The flash of Jenny’s sable coat, as she sped down the hall, had not been lost upon him, and now there came to him rather belatedly the consciousness that he had been hearing the dim patter of her and Avery’s voices all the way along the corridor.

The thrill that he invariably experienced over this narrow young person he called son, shot through him before his first resentment had time to leap out.

Good youngster! A bit too thin. Needed filling out. A bothered look to him. What made him gape like a fish that had just been landed, hook and all? The scent and the echo of Jenny still lay on the air. Conniving again, filling Rarick with a roiling sense of outsider in his own home. Heads together, the two of them had been shutting him out. Some scrape had brought him home, no doubt.

“Well, Father, here I am.”

The little man stood in the doorway, shoulder-high to his seventeen-year-old son, head up, hand thrust into the groove between his coat buttons. After all, your prisoner was innocent until you proved him guilty. Illness, or whim, or unavoidable difficulty might have brought Avery home. Surely he would not dare to be showing himself in the midst of a school-week, for some of the nonsense frivolities Rarick had come down hard against, such as Jenny’s plans for the social divertissement of the youngest set.

“This is a surprise, boy. At least to me,” he could not help supplementing.

Hang it! Why had he added that? It threw the boy still further off his ease.

“I guess it is sort of a surprise to me, too Father. Hadn’t particularly planned on coming, until I found myself driving down. One of those decisions a fellow kind of makes for a long time without knowing he’s doing it. All of a sudden it’s made! If you see what I mean.”

“I see,” said his father, in the polite tones of not seeing at all.

“Will you sit down, Father?”

The boy did have oyster-shells under his eyes. Ill-health? Dissipations? Well? What?

They seated themselves, facing each other, on two straight chairs. It occurred to Avery miserably, as he swept one of them clear of a litter of his belongings, that he and his father were forever facing each other on straight chairs.

With his tongue as thick as a rusk in his mouth, the determination to unbend came flooding over him. A fellow had a right to some kind of a decent break with his father. Old gentleman wasn’t God. Regular enough fellow, no doubt, if you once broke through the crust. Crusty with crust, though, no doubt of that. Low-down of mother, to leave him flat—but here goes.

“You see, Father, here’s the situation,” began the son of Rarick.

They were going to get on! Sometimes a man and his boy just naturally came to a place where they began to get on. Avery was old enough now to understand....

“I’m mighty anxious to hear it, son.”

Now that was a handsome enough beginning of the old gentleman! Many a fellow and his ‘gov’, after starting it off on the wrong foot, had hit a pace. Not a bit improbable but what the old gentleman might be the one to understand more quickly than anyone else, that a fellow needs to somehow—get his balance. God, though, could anyone understand, except the fellow himself who was living through this particular hell?

“The situation is this, Father.”

“Yes, son.” Patience. Patience. Shouldn’t expect a lad to come directly to the point like a business man. What the dickens was the trouble with him? Bothered looking boy, no doubt of that. Well, it was a good time to get at him. This fine, straight fellow on the chair before him was his son. The pleasurable years were about to begin. The time had come to draw this boy into his life. This boy was no stranger. This boy was his!

“Yes, son?”

“The situation is this, Father.” What in the name of Heaven was the situation? Sitting there, facing his father, frantic for point of contact, now-or-never blazing in his bright blue eyes, words seemed to log-jam back in Avery’s throat.

You didn’t sit opposite one of the titan business men of the country—of the world, for that matter—and tell him that your soul was hurting you. You didn’t sit opposite the director of a string of banks, a merchandise king of two continents, the biggest individual dispenser of pins, Eskimo pies, and ink-erasers in the world, and tell him of the strange torments, the nervous panic, the despairs, the ecstasies, the strange stirrings of the desire to love and be loved, or the yearnings for some power to express the wonder and the pain of those first faint stirrings. You didn’t sit opposite a small, literal man called your father, whose ideals were as well hung as his paintings, and tell him that the world was a manhole into which you felt yourself falling. It was one thing to pour forth these torments and ecstasies and lonelinesses into your journal, which locked, or into the trunk of verses that were your own disembodied nerves, jangling away for dear life. It was another to sit facing this small remote man, your father. “The situation is this, Father.” What in God’s name was the situation? One did not dare to say to one’s father, “Life is too much for me, Dad.” One did not quite dare bring to the point of discussion the curiously recurrent thoughts of the lips of women that were flashing through his torment ... the desire to create ... the desire to live beautifully ... the need to be alone to work it all out. The confusion ... somewhere there was a father to understand ... not this father. And yet—strange little man—he liked his organ with the horrible stained-glass operas. The fires in the stones of the earth had witchery for him. The salty wisdom and humor of the old fossil he kept up in the yellow suite tickled and delighted him. What the devil was the truth of this man, his father? What the devil was the truth of himself, Avery, sitting there in torment, idiotically repeating over and over again, “This is the situation, Father.”

“Go ahead, son.”

“As I had been saying to mother, just before you came in, or rather, it’s been running through my mind....”

He and his mother had had their heads together as usual. She had been first in his confidence. This was the method cooked-up between them, of approach to the ogre. Damit! Jenny was a good mother, a more successful parent than he was, no getting around that; but a man was entitled to the first-hand confidence of his boy!

Was the old gentleman stiffening already?

Damit! damit! this boy was his. The only thing on earth he could look to train into being closely and intimately his. There were a hundred things he needed to begin to get said to this boy, if ever they were to begin to prepare for the intricate problems that lay ahead for both of them. A good way to begin was to give in. Why not on the speed-boat! That was what he was most probably wanting. Damned dangerous playthings of the rich. Speed-devices for going nowhere. Things. More things to alienate him from the power to be tranquil. The way to get at these youngsters, though—Jenny had the right idea—was to give them things. Things. The way to get at Avery was the way of indulgence. Youth wants indulgence.

“Well, I suppose if there is something you want, son, you’re beginning to be of an age now where you’ve got to depend on your own good judgments.”

“That’s mighty fine of you to say, Father.”

“I sometimes have my own ideas about these things, Avery. Some day, when you don’t have to get back to college, we’ll take time off and——”

“But, Father——”

“—talk some of these things out. We haven’t ever had much to say to each other about you and your relationship to this big world you are preparing to grapple with. It’s a bigger and more complex world than falls to the lot of most youths. I’d like to talk to you along those lines——”

“But, Father, that’s not what I want to ta——”

“It’s all right, son; I understand this may be a bit premature. No hurry. I think I know what’s brought you down from college today. Want you to start back this afternoon.”

“But, Father——”

“Don’t like sloppy attendance. Don’t like sloppy anything. Wait a minute. Hold your horses. You’re going back with what you came down for. I don’t like speed-boats, as a general rule. Don’t like speed-devices in general, when they’ve no other purpose than saving time that you don’t know what to do with after it’s saved. Nerve-racking. Extravagant. Dumb. But I figure you’re getting to an age when your own judgments should count. I’m glad to give in. Is that all right with you, son?” said Rarick, and took out his check-book.

They sat there, knee to knee, in their straight chairs, their faces seeming to swim together as twilight came to blur them. Rarick, a sudden sliding blur to his son; Avery, a sliding blur to his father.

“Is it all right, son?”

“It’s all right with me, Father—if it is with you—I guess.”

“You guess?”

“I mean—it’s all right with me, Father—if it is with you——”

The pen of Rarick began to splutter along his check-book.

The consciousness had long since begun to dawn upon Jenny, in whom the impulse to climb was an acquired, rather than an inherent characteristic, that she had started off, socially speaking, on the wrong foot.

The advent of the John G. Raricks, from out of the Middle West, had not been a planned campaign, for the reason that the need for strategy had simply not occurred to her until the propitious moment had passed and the house of Rarick had settled. Subsequently her mistakes had been fast and successive. After the dust of the publicity attending the purchase by John G. Rarick of the famous Ficke mansion had been laid, Jenny, appalled by the lull, had snatched, with more nervousness than diplomacy, at old relationships, mostly families of wealth and no particular social position, whose migration from the Middle West had preceded theirs.

Thereafter, the Raricks bobbed about in uneven waters, sometimes riding up to quite a social crest, but in an erratic, unstable way that was precarious, and then, just as likely as not, sliding down again into the valleys between the waves.

No gainsaying the fact that the Raricks were invited to six houses outside the social register for every one within. Jenny’s awareness of social-register discriminations did not even begin to dawn upon her until well after the move, when that dawn came up like thunder.

The time was not slow in coming when she was to encounter the difficulty of rounding up a formal dinner composed of the people she came gradually to realize were the right ones, and when she was to scorch under such mortifications as sending out thirty-six invitations to the alleged right ones and have twenty-eight regrets come home to roost heavily upon her heart.

It was not exactly in the spirit of snubbing. The Raricks were not sufficiently in the running for that. It was just that in settings where even great wealth required proper exploitation, the Raricks had somehow not arrived right.

What brought this home with sudden acuteness to Jenny was the fact that the Isaac Slocums, whose wealth and social connections back in the St. Louis days, when they were neighbors in Westmoreland Place, were comparatively negligible, had moved East considerably after the Raricks, and were now moving securely and consistently in social circles which Jenny achieved only sporadically.

Betty Slocum’s careful social sense had accomplished that. She had planned ahead. She had surveyed, and ended by employing, at a vast sum, the services of a woman of impeccable social position, whose chief financial resources flowed in bountifully in return for achieving a wedge for the socially ambitious. One of Jenny’s sources of undying regret was the fact that at the time such services would have been invaluable to her, she had never even heard of the Slocum method of crashing the social gate.

There was no going back. The best that could be hoped for was less uneven sledding.

The mistake had rebounded most cruelly on Jennifer. Passionately Jenny had wasted heartburn on the futility of wishing that Jennifer and Avery had been born to her in reverse order. An eligible son, somehow, millions in his offing, would have accelerated social matters. As it was, Jennifer, always popular, whirled nevertheless in three worlds. A Bohemian one which her set invaded in “slumming-parties”; an outer-fringe one which represented wealth and perhaps a bit too much gayety; and, far too occasionally, the one within the walls which the Slocums had scaled by careful maneuver and which Jenny had mistakenly planned to hurdle by a running high-jump.

It was not, Jenny felt sure, that Rarick money could not have accomplished anything that Rarick money set out to do; it was that Rarick money had not taken its psychological moment.

These realizations began to marshal themselves into Jennifer’s younger and more nimble mind the first year that she was out of Miss Pratt’s School for Girls. To begin with, Miss Pratt’s School had been a mistake. The daughters of millionaires attended all right, but not the daughters of the socially-right millionaires. Jennifer kept a stiff and even an impudent upper lip about it all, but in the seclusion of talks with her mother those lips of hers could drag at the corners.

“Where do they get off, leaving us out! I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel to go to the Monkton-Beck’s cotillion. I thought cotillions went out with bustles, anyhow. But what do you bet they don’t forget father’s name on their Joint-Disease Hospital subscription list?”

“Let them get it!”

“Don’t be silly, darling. You know perfectly well Leila Monkton has as good as got you down for five thousand.”

Jenny did. “Well, just the same,” went on Jenny, whose eyes were heavy from a sleepless night over this same case of omission, “what can you expect? Your father never accepts an invitation of any sort. People don’t know quite how to approach us, the women of the family always either asking permission to bring another man, or attending alone.”

“Nonsense, Mother! Look at the Slocums. Does their old man ever show himself? Look at the Turpitzes. The face of the husband and father of that family has almost become extinct. Fewer and funnier husbands is the social cry of the hour. Bring your own gigolo. Don’t kid yourself along, darling, that’s not the reason we’re zero.”

In the inelegant parlance of her daughter, that was precisely what Jenny was doing, casting about within her troubled spirit for some sort of satisfactory explanation of a position that was hourly becoming more enigmatical to her.

“There’s nothing mysterious about it, Mother, we’ve treated the exact science of social climbing inexactly, that’s all.”

“But just the same, Jennifer, assuming that we are horrible people, with intellectual harelips and no ‘g’s,’ this is a country where money is supposed to buy everything.”

“And so it does, if you know how to go about spending it. Money will buy anything from a plush horse to an Aubusson tapestry. You’re out of luck if you go after the plush horse when Aubusson tapestries are the swanky buy. We should have employed a social, interior-decorator to keep us from making mistakes such as cultivating plush horses, like the Ben Wimans or the Maxfield Doons. Not that I would give one blondined Wiman hair in order to crash into the Monkton cotillion. But just the same, you’ve got to know your onions.”

“Do you know, I sometimes think,” said Jenny, contemplatively, and with the crinkled look of continuing to break her head for more satisfactory explanation, “that there’s such a thing as being too nice? There is nothing more ghastly than the hung-on smile of trying to be too amiable.”

“Perhaps, socially speaking, darling, we haven’t got ‘It.’”

“Nonsense!” said her mother, regarding her with tilted lids of admiration. “You have every kind of ‘It.’”

“Oh, I get by in a crowd. That is, if I can manage to care enough. I’m so damned half-baked! Even the desire in me to be something besides the thing I am is half-baked, or I’d go be it. I’ve got a brain, Mother.”

“Use it, Jennifer,” said her mother, regarding her through lids that were untilted now. “On Berry Rhodes.”

“You’re being disgusting, darling,” said Jennifer, and rose to her height, stretching as a cat stretches, one arm climbing over the other.

“Don’t be an idiot, Jennifer, you’re too intelligent.”

“In other words, the beautiful and reluctant daughter of wealth must jerk her family into social security by marrying the scion of a great family. What is a scion, anyway?”

“Jennifer, you’re being coy. It’s horrible.”

“Honestly, Mother, you’re the one who’s being idiotic,” cried Jennifer, and began to flush in waves.

“Berry is a person on his own, you’ve said so yourself. Why not come out and own you like him?”

“Why Mother, you pain and surprise me!”

“You’re not clever in the rôle of ingénue, darling. A little awful, in fact.”

“Well, all right, if you insist. He’s a bad boy, but I like him. God knows why, but I do.”

“You like him because you have the good sense to believe in my adage that it is as easy to fall in love with the right one as with the wrong.”

“That adage gives me shivers down my spine. But then, so does Berry.”

“Leslie Edgerton hasn’t asked you to her dance tonight because she loves you.”

“Mother, you continue to pain and surprise me.”

“Berry got you asked there. She must have thought it the better part of wisdom not to refuse.”

“It’s all off there!”

“Are you sure, Jennifer?”

“That’s the devilish part. I’m not.”

“Jennifer, there’s one thing I must say for your father. He never played for small stakes in his life.”

“There was all that talk that Leslie’s trip to Europe was a trip to Brooklyn to have a baby—Berry’s.”

“You know that if that were true, it would have been marry-the-girl at the point of the merciless Edgerton tongue!”

“Berry’s a queer, evasive devil of a darling-on-wheels. I don’t know where I get off with him.”

“Find out.”

“Of course he got me asked out to the Edgertons’ tonight, but I don’t give a damn. I’m going! With him. I like him, Mother. Hang it! I like him,” said Jennifer; and, and to add to the horror of the sound of her own voice giggling in a key beyond her control, the laugh petered out suddenly and became a thin cry. “He’s a bad boy, but, hang it! I like him.”

“You know perfectly well that he is better than the average would be in his position. He has everything, and besides, a clever girl can settle him down. Jennifer, if you would!”

“You mean if I could.”

“You can.”

“I will.”

The great-grandfather of Leslie Edgerton had once been governor of a Confederate state. It had cost the grandfather of Leslie Edgerton one million and a half dollars to run on a foredoomed ticket for President of the United States.

The father of Leslie Edgerton had married a Miss Henrietta Crosby, of Crosby, Connecticut, and had retrieved the million and many more by subsequently inheriting, by proxy of this wife, the Crosby watch-factories.

The paths of the Crosbys and the Raricks crossed occasionally, chiefly at Bailey’s Beach, public charity functions, bridges, bazaars, teas, and occasionally in a purely social way.

Jenny had ventured to include the Crosbys in what had been the largest dinner dance of the season, with which she had magnificently set the winter ball rolling the night after the opening of the opera.

The Crosbys had “regretted.”

Jennifer had cried, with her usual irrelevant questionnaire, which she hurled, while smarting, at such situations, “Where do they get off? The Edgertons don’t set my hair on fire.”

Be that as it may, when the Edgertons regretted, one of the high-water-mark hopes for their dinner had fainted within Jennifer and her mother.

Leslie had sat opposite Jennifer at a Hunt Club subscription-luncheon two days later, and made no reference either to the occasion of the dinner dance itself, which had caused talk because of its elaborateness, or to her regrets.

That had somehow rankled in Jennifer more than the original refusal. It was as if, with a preciosity that was chiseled thinly into her face and lay along the delicate arch of her brows, Leslie had set about wounding a wound.

A Rarick had never set foot on Parmley, where the Edgertons kept open house all winter on their enormous estates skirting Tarrytown.

Jennifer was about to set foot there now. A small, bizarre-looking foot, in a white-fur sandal that was mounted on a four-inch ivory heel.

Parmley ran back into the Pocantico Hills. The house itself rose off a cleared eminence in the heart of four hundred heavily wooded acres. A terrace, tiled in bright blue, shone around it like a lake. Marble stairs, flanked with balustrades and lions, led to the blue-tiled terrace from lower ones of green turf. The building itself was a long low one, of enormous width, no particular depth, and a whiteness to it as if a Mediterranean sun were perpetually beating down. Some wag had tagged it “Carnegie Library” because of this low width and the pairs of Carrara lions that crouched beside the four flights of marble staircases.

The Edgertons had decided to have a sense of humor about this sixty-eight-room white elephant, which five years previous had been rushed to completion in time for Leslie’s birthday. Henrietta Edgerton promptly christened it her “white bête noire” and had the coping of the superb swimming-pool, which was out of natural rock, elaborately inlaid in black and white symbolic beasts of two heads and four tails.

The white crash of this house into the finest stretch of forest land within its radius from New York was a sore point with Tom Edgerton. It had cost easily over a million and a half, and there it stood, an affront to his taste, his intelligence, and his dignity. It was the sort of home a war millionaire might have erected out of an overnight fortune.

Truth of the matter was, and bitterly he knew it, Henrietta had been deep in an affair with the architect who designed it.

Tom’s sop to his sense of the ironic was to be unfaithful to his wife, on every possible occasion, in this house which had turned into a monstrosity because she had insisted upon giving carte blanche to her lover, the nincompoop young architect on dancing legs, who had created it.

“We’re a pretty lot,” Leslie Edgerton had once said to her father, who, when in his cups, could laugh uproariously at a remark he would slap her clear, heart-shaped face for when sober. “We’re a pretty lot, Dad. The only thing virgin around here is the soil. If!”

Jennifer and Berry tilted into the three-mile driveway of that virgin soil on two wheels at a sixty-mile clip. They had driven out in Berry’s underslung, boat-shaped roadster. Jennifer at first had remonstrated, holding out against cramming herself, in her slim sheaf of baby-ermine gown, into a crouched position in the natty sports-car.

“You’re a dog, Berry, to even ask it. I’m not dressed for a football game.”

“Come along. Be as boyish as your bob. I’ll wrap you in a raccoon coat, and that little white mitten you’re wearing for a dress won’t turn a hair,” he said, and brushed aside a butler who had been holding some more white ermine for her to slide arms into, during the twelve minutes of this controversy.

She liked his riding her down this way. Old cave-man stuff, she told herself. Putrid-old. But she liked it. Wasn’t often a fellow with millions, only grandson of a personage like old Rodney Rhodes, and more millions to come on top of it, came in a package like Berry. Personality. Brains. Brawn. At least if Leslie had to have a nervous breakdown, it had been a little worth-while to have it over Berry. Jennifer had heard she had a nervous twitch to her face nowadays, that was part of that nervous breakdown.

“Nervous?” he said, letting out a rip of speed, as they cleared the city line.

“Not to the point of breakdown,” she said, and tilted a look at him from the low crouch into which the car forced her.

“You girls give me a pain in the neck,” he said. “Innuendo. All lies.”

“I’m sorry, Berry,” she said, and laid a hand against his driving arm. “And I’m glad it’s all lies.”

“That’s right,” he said, “be yourself,” and smiled at her with white teeth set in a face that had been polished tan by the sun.

“What self is that?”

“The self I like. You’re a darling, Jennifer. I strongly suspect you of having brains, too, and you’re brainy enough to keep them carefully concealed under that Joan of Arc bob.”

“Give me a light, Berry.”

He flecked on his lighter and held it to her while the car sped swift and sure under his lone-hand grip.

“Oh!”

“There, you had it!”

“No, you burnt my lip. Let’s stop anyway, Berry. I can’t smoke in this open boat. Draw in here.”

“You little designing designer,” he laughed, and drew up. “It’s darling of you, though, to want our ride to last.”

“It’s darling of you, Berry, to have got me asked out to the Edgertons’ tonight. I’m on.”

“Nonsense!”

“I don’t give a damn for them or their parties, except for you——”

“By God! I think you lisp! Let me thee your tongue.”

“There!” She darted it at him. Quick. Pink.

The sultry haze of late October twilight, sharp with the smell of burning leaves, twined about them.

“Let’s see it again.”

His quick close kiss went against the second dart of pink.

“You sweet Sweet,” he said, out of its long endurance.

She pushed him back, her face suddenly smeared with the pallor of excitement.

“Berry, let’s you and me be low-down honest.”

“I choose the first. You be honest.”

“If you had half an idea of how honest I’m going to be, you’d climb out and hitch-hike your way back to town.”

“Fortify me for that exigency—this way,” he said, and kissed her again, his strong lips flaring so that involuntarily she drew the back of her hand across the feeling of the wetness of his teeth against her face.

“Berry, you and I weren’t born yesterday.”

He made to kiss her again.

“Don’t do that.”

“You egged me on.”

“I know, but——”

“You are so blamed honest, Jennifer, it makes a fellow want——”

“But now I’m going to be awful serious.”

“Awful is right, as applied to seriousness in all its forms.”

“Awful serious, Berry.”

“It can’t be done, Jen. I’m immune.”

“Berry, marry me.”

He tightened as if a lock had sprung.

“Certainly. But I haven’t my music with me.”

“Berry, get this. I’m serious. Marry me. Don’t answer. Just listen. You’re no angel, Berry. God knows I’m not. I like you. A lot. I want you to respect that. I’m pretty crazy about you. You’re a bad boy, Berry, but neither of us is sprouting wings. I think it’s a swell plan and I’m sober. I’ll marry you, not to reform you, but to reform with you.”

“The only way to get me to marry the girl, Jennifer, is at the point of the well-known gun.”

“Bing!” she said, and cocked a finger.

He grasped it and locked it between his teeth.

“I don’t know whether you’re spoofing me or not, but let’s not be serious tonight, Jennifer. Isn’t it enough—this night—us—this way——”

She let her head swing back against the crook of his arm.

“Damn you, darling,” she said, “you’re standing up the girl.”

“Jennifer, let me know you tonight—afterwards—my rooms?”

“You go plumb to hell, Berry,” she said, pushing him from her with high laughter. “Step on her, we’ll be late! And if you don’t behave, the girl will leap from the car and her mangled remains will be found on the roadside by an early-morning farmer carting his carrots to market. Daughter of Dime Millionaire leaps from speeding car of son of rubber-heel magnate!”

“Jen! Nee! Fer!”

“Step on her, I said.”

It was to her high, fast, and incessant laughter that they tilted into Parmley on two wheels at the sixty-mile clip.

At the last moment, and to the rushing of innumerable servants, the Edgertons had turned their dinner dance out-of-doors. The suddenly limpid October, the imminence of moon, the belated perfume of late white honeysuckle, had pressed their way into the ballroom, which was spread with fifty small tables and elaborately laid out across one end with a complete bar, brass rail, polished counter, battalion of bottles and glasses, and the faithful verisimilitude of a sprinkling of sawdust.

The milky light of one of those pale nights that never becomes quite dark poured down on to the blue-tile terrace. Tables had been dragged out there. A hurried platform for musicians was being set up between one pair of the lions, submerging one flight of terrace-stairs. Lanterns were run up in the groves and along the edges of the swimming-pool.

A formal party had suddenly gone violently informal. Tom Edgerton, already convivial, had conceived the idea, along with the change of party-policy, of dragging out a vast iron pot on a crane, to boil corn-on-the-cob in the open. The bar was being set up in a pergola. When the first guests arrived, Leslie Edgerton, in a bouffant white gown with wired panniers and a tumbler in one hand, was still in the act of trying to convey to a gardener her idea of how a small red bulb should dangle from the pointed left ear of a marble faun.

It was true that every few moments her rather pretty heart-shaped face twitched as if her nervousness were a prankish jack-in-the-box. The small red electric bulb refused to dangle from the left ear of the marble faun. She grasped it from the servant, and, leaping to a stone bench, began to adjust it herself.

She was in that position when Jennifer and Berry and a smattering of early guests appeared on the wide marble staircase. At sight of them, she swung herself by the neck of the faun, legs out in a rigid horizontal, and began kissing him against his chilly lips.

It started out as that kind of party.

The way, Jennifer had long since decided, to feel at ease at what she called these closed-corporation functions, was to pretend to be as intimately a part of them as everyone else was, or pretended to be.

A sense of not belonging; of not knowing these people on the easy informal basis they knew one another, assailed her, and seemed to lock her tonsils and stiffen her heart on those occasions when she penetrated into the social fastness of the gayer, if less conservative, elements of these safely intrenched families. Their intimate talk that took so much for granted. High bandying of Christian names where she was addressed as Miss Rarick. References to past functions to which she had not been bidden, and to future ones to which she would not be bidden.

Not that she was not very much part of these scenes. The Edgertons moved in swift, newspaper-headline sets. But even here, she was consciously Miss Rarick. The way to keep a stiff upper lip when you were ill at ease and inwardly frightened was to see to it that you were conspicuously Miss Rarick. You listened, when the two on either side of you at dinner leaned across you to indulge in familiar discussion of an important social function to which you had mysteriously and damnably not been bidden, with a smile as bright as platinum drawn across your face. You let them make up a party around you to go off cruising in warm waters on the yacht of the father of a boy who had just kissed the back of your neck, and laughed at some sally about the Delaware Gap and the Delaware Yawn, as if you were not stinging at the omission.

The lively Miss Rarick was loud in her laughter. That was part of the stiff upper lip. She was daring in her dress, but impeccably so, never erring beyond the bonds of chic. A good fellow up to a point, and that point, as she was fond of putting it, an exclamation point.

When Jennifer walked down the wide staircase of the Edgertons’ famed blue terrace, with Berry at her right and a one-armed chap named Roger Madison, descendant of a President, at her left, her heart was in her mouth; insolence in her smile; and a burning humiliation before Berry, beating about in her.

Perhaps he had never realized she was not spoofing. He had, though! He had. He had. He had jumped like a sprung trap when she had come out with it. Perhaps he had thought her a little spifflicated. God, make him think I was tight! No, no, no, he wouldn’t. They had not even stopped for cocktails before they drove off. There came that hateful Irene Annescy! How did one address her? Hello, Irene? Or just Miss Annescy?

Miss Annescy solved it. “Hello, Berry! Haven’t seen you since three A.M. Good party at the Ruhls’, wasn’t it? Hello, Roger! Say, you’re driving with us over to Edgecombe from here for a sunrise cocktail. Howdo, Miss Rarick!”

Damn them! Damn life! “Berry darling, that’s my ankle you’re climbing.”

With the exception of a center-table which seated twelve, the flocks of surrounding smaller ones were for six. Berry and Jennifer were at one which adjoined the larger one, presided over by Leslie.

Berry’s absence from that center-table was one of those elaborately casual maneuvers which usually fail of their purpose and become merely elaborate maneuvers.

“Berry’s been banished,” said a Miss Steen der Venter, who was narrow and caustic and something of a town legend because she continued to refuse to sell or build on fifty fabulously valuable feet of vacant lot on Fifth Avenue, but maintained it as a playground for her three black poodles. “I scent a diplomatic move!”

“I’m making him eat at second table, Van Steen; his manners are too atrocious for first,” cried Leslie, whom Berry had once accused of overhearing, no matter how large the crowd, any reference to him.

Almost immediately the occasion began to progress. The amusing feature of the bar kept a steady stream of young men skating across blue tiles, imperiling waiters, and returning with assorted tumblers of assorted drinks, which they balanced precariously, to the squeals of women in décolletée who feared for their shoulders. A Miss Flavverdale, impoverished, but one of the right Flavverdales, the one, by the way, who had managed things for the St. Louis Slocums, began by insisting upon carting Berry off before the fowl course, with a napkin filled with dinner rolls to be crumpled into the goldfish-pond.

“I want to stay with my field-mouse,” bawled Berry, and began to stroke Jennifer’s ermine and pull at the fringe of soft black tails which bordered it.

“Don’t be an idiot, Berry,” said the efficient Miss Flavverdale; “I’ll buy you a five-and-ten-cent one.”

“Was that a dirty dig?” said Jennifer to a beautiful boy beside her, whom she did not know, but who was in the first throes of getting drunk on champagne, which he kept sipping, while he refused all food.

“A dirty dig,” he repeated, rolling his extraordinarily blue and luminous eyes. “A dirty dig.” Apparently the octave of his conversation, at least at this stage, consisted in repeating the last three words of what was said to him.

“The Beautiful next to you, Miss Rarick,” sang out Leslie Edgerton, on a sudden surge of geniality, when she saw Berry hauled protesting along the Mediterranean of blue tiles, “is Jules Wilke-Barre. He’s going to cut a tooth for us later in the evening!”

A Wilke-Barre! A thrill shot through Jennifer. Despise herself for the snobbery of it as she would, it was impossible not to bristle with awareness among names that were whole planetary systems in the social firmament. This naughty-eyed, beautiful-eyed boy, whose knee had to be shoved away again and again as it approached hers, a Wilke-Barre! Here, gathered at these fifty tables, were the youngsters of the mighty ones of the land. Madison. Rhodes. Flavverdale. Wilke-Barre.

She leaned toward Wilke-Barre.

“I thought you were Bobby Shaftoe, who went to sea with silver buckles on his knee.”

The youth she thought was Bobby Shaftoe, who went to sea with silver buckles on his knee, was asleep, his chin resting squarely and precariously in the shallow crystal basin of his empty champagne-glass.

Before the crash came that was to gash the Rossetti-looking Wilke-Barre chin with splintered glass, Berry was back, in great and rising spirits.

“Glory! what a night!”

Its glamor was out over Jennifer. Its pollen fell over the scene and in a sheen across her flesh.

“It was on such a night as this——”

“—that I made the damnedest mistake of my life,” said Berry, and jerked the great athletic hulk of his body back to his place at the table.

“Leslie’s been looking for you, Berry,” said Irene Annescy.

“Finders keepers,” said Berry under his breath to Jennifer.

She flashed her face, with the indescribable pallor of moon over it, upon him.

“Mean that?”

“If I ever meant anything, I mean it. Find me, Jennifer.”

“You won’t let me.”

“Try me.”

“Don’t be darling to me, Berry, unless——”

Beneath the table his heavy palm clamped down on her knee.

“How can I help it, when you are darling to me.”

“How do you mean that?”

“I’ll tell you later——”

“I’ll not drive back with you alone unless——”

“Unless what?”

“Unless I damn please,” she said, and swung her smooth bare shoulder from him and turned to talk to Wilke-Barre, who was having his chin nursed by a princess of Greece.

Tom Edgerton began to beat a tom-tom in an effort to drum up trade for his boiling pot of corn on cob. He was voted ridiculous, because, while the party had gone informal, so to speak, the food had remained strictly de rigueur. It was difficult, after mushrooms under glass and duck soaked in sherry, to warm up to the impulse to nibble the mealy pearls off the cobs which Edgerton forked up out of the fine hullabaloo of boiling pot.

Most of those who ventured never quite reached the boiling pot. The gardens lay embalmed in a night through which the moonlight poured like spring showers. Marble curve of benches gleamed in among hedges. Islands of shadow crawled back into the groves. The waterfall that fed the natural swimming-pool made silver-tipped commotion. The dinner broke into dancing almost before the tables could be cleared from the tiles. It was as dreamy as absinthe to tango out there under the stars.

Six Hawaiian boys in shellacked hair sang to Argentine music. A jazz-band alternated. A Spanish slip of a girl, with hips which she managed like a spaniel shaking off water, danced solo with Ramon Lopez. Her bold, sinuous body-beauty went through you in points of excitement. The give of the slim jacket of her ribs as she doubled with a boneless ductility back over his elbow. Slitted eyes of Ramon, braced for her whirling body to spin into the close insinuating haven of his arms. Slow shuffling feet, too sensuous to leave the ground. Faces, as through a curtain of moonlight, dimly; the Spanish girl’s fore-shortened upper lip hiked back to reveal small wet teeth; Ramon’s face, sliding down like a warm brown breathing lid—over hers....

“God, Berry, they’re wonderful,” said Jennifer.