BOOK TWO: FRANKIE’S BRIEF DAY

CHAPTER NINE

I

Frankie was quite desperate with grief and anxiety. She rushed into the old lady’s room, bare-footed, in her nightdress, and denounced her in a storm of sobs.

“How could you!” she cried. “How could you! How did you and Minnie dare to arrange my life for me that way?... You didn’t know.... You couldn’t know—what plans I had.... How could you! You don’t know what you’ve done!”

The old lady said that no great harm had been done.

“It has! It has!” Frankie cried. “You don’t know! You’ve spoiled everything!”

This the old lady didn’t believe; she asked for an explanation, and Frances would give none.

“But Grandma!” she implored, “Grandma, trust me! Believe me when I say I’ve got to go back! It’s terribly important. It means my whole life. Oh, Grandma, please, please write to Minnie and make her come home!”

“My dear child, I can’t. She wouldn’t come. And I must say I think she’s entitled to a little—— Don’t you think you’re rather selfish, Frances?”

“Oh, stop!” Frances interrupted, rudely. “You don’t understand. It’s something ... I have to see about, something important.”

“What can it be?”

The old lady was indulgent; she fancied she scented a sentimental interest.

“I can’t tell you—just now, anyway.”

Frances dried her eyes and looked at her grandmother with a new look, hard and clear.

“You’ll have to make out alone for a few hours,” she said, “I’ve got to go in on that four-eight train. I’ll be back some time to-night.”

She went into her room and, closing the door, flung herself down on the creaking bed, not to cry, but to think, to plan for him. All morning the breakfast dishes were unwashed, the beds unmade, nothing touched in the house. It was noon when a curious sound startled Frankie. She fancied she heard a step in the passage.

She flung open the door, to see a poor, trembling little figure come out of her grandmother’s room.

“Grandma!” she shrieked, and flew to catch her and half carry her back to her bed, reproaching her bitterly, tenderly, while she got her clothes off. She noticed with intolerable remorse how clumsily the things were put on and the scanty hair twisted up.

“Grandma,” she cried. “You know you shouldn’t! Suppose you had slipped! It was dreadful of you!”

She saw to her horror that there were tears in the poor thing’s eyes and her feeble voice quavered.

“Frances,” she said, “I couldn’t stand it. Both of you going off ... neither of you wanting to stay with me.... I felt I didn’t care what happened to me.... And——” she broke into a weak little sob as she came to her last and worst grief, “one o’clock and the house not touched! I just couldn’t lie abed any longer!”

“No, Granny dear, I know! I’ll do everything right away. Only lie down and rest, won’t you? I’ll do everything before I go.”

The old lady patted her hand.

“Won’t you ask Sally Washington to sit in the kitchen while you’re gone?” she asked. “I’m so nervous about fire.”

Frankie hurried across to the cottage, but Sally couldn’t come; she was sick in bed and there was no one available but young Norman Washington, aged nine, who was guaranteed by his mother to be trustworthy.

The old lady, however, rejected him.

“Worse than no one!” she cried. “A boy! He’ll eat up all my preserves. And goodness knows what he’ll break.”

It also occurred to her that he was quite likely, in his quality as boy, to set fire to the house; in fact, as she considered it longer, she declared it certain that he would do so.

She was in a pitifully nervous state. She entreated Frances to dress her again and help her downstairs, so that she could wait there, where, in case of fire, she could manage somehow to get out. She couldn’t eat anything for lunch. She sat propped up in bed, her trembling fingers moving ceaselessly, her watery eyes staring vacantly, in dim anxiety, consumed with dread, with the horror of her own helplessness. As she passed by the door, Frances could see her there, each time more intolerably pitiful. Until, one time, she saw her press her poor, clawlike hand against her mouth.... Somehow that decided Frances; she couldn’t leave her; couldn’t endure the idea of her alone there until two in the morning, when the last train would have brought her back. No; she couldn’t go. She went into the room, hard and brusque again.

“I won’t go to the city,” she said. “I’ll just harness up Bess somehow and go to the village and send a telegram.”

All over—all finished. She knew it. She had no hope, no illusion about the matter, only the certainty that her terribly brief time of happiness was done.

II

Happiness which existed now only in her memory, in time to grow incredible even there....

One year!

She remembered very well when she had made that first visit to Miss Eppendorfer. She had never before been alone in New York, didn’t know how to find the address, had to ask one policeman after another, and try in a sort of agony to comprehend the directions they gave. And when she had arrived, her terror of the unknown city was supplanted by a worse one; suppose she didn’t get the job, that the authoress didn’t like her, and she had to return home, shamefully defeated.

She had plenty of time to contemplate this, waiting in the sitting-room of Miss Eppendorfer’s flat. An insolent coloured girl showed her in and left her there without a word. She was almost ill from nervousness; she watched the door without stirring for fifteen minutes or so, then, when no one came, grew bold enough to look about her. It was a small and rather dark room, furnished in a style new to her—the ubiquitous Mission style. Little square chairs of imitation weathered oak, with imitation leather seats, studded with gilt nails, fit for an authoress from the Middle West to sit in while she laughed indulgently at Victorian mahogany. Mock austerity, mock simplicity, a crowd of cheap and monotonous stuff, all square and squat; plain curtains, bookcases with sets of books selected always by authorities, and never by the owner. Replica of a thousand rooms, mirror of a thousand souls, a room which signified and expressed nothing. It was the first cheaply-furnished room Frances had ever entered, and she was innocently impressed with it. The good taste she possessed was not innate, it was traditional; she wasn’t able to judge the unknown.

The mistress of all this came in an hour late. She was a thin, blonde woman with hollow cheeks and a sweet, sweet smile; she hurried forward, holding out both hands with a profuse cordiality that surprised Frances.

“Is this the little country girl who’s going to do so much for me?”

Blushing but courageous, Frances made some sort of answer, her candid eyes fixed on the face before her. If she hadn’t known, she might have thought that this haggard woman with bleached hair was “not quite nice.” But she knew that her rural standards couldn’t be applied everywhere. She wasn’t a bumpkin....

“Sit down,” Miss Eppendorfer invited, “and we’ll have tea while we chat.”

It was the first time Frances had ever had tea; it was an institution as yet unknown in the suburbs during her girlhood, and utterly undeveloped in Brownsville Landing; there, when one had guests in the afternoon, they were splendidly served with lemonade and good cake. Tea and toast would have been almost an insult.

The authoress had to fetch everything herself from the kitchen.

“I don’t dare to disturb that black wretch,” she whispered to Frances. “She’s only looking for an excuse to go, and then where shall I be? I couldn’t boil an egg, could you?”

Frances said that she could.

“Well, my dear,” said the authoress, when she had got her samovar started, “tell me about yourself.”

But she didn’t need much telling; aside from the letter she had had from the librarian in Brownsville Landing, she could see in one shrewd glance that Frances would “do”; was able to realise, as only an imitation could, how honest, how genuine was this girl.

She engaged her then and there, said she was “strangely attracted” by her. And urged her to take up her duties at once.

“Send home for your things,” she advised, “and settle right down to-night in your comfy little room. That’s the way I always like to do things—on the spur of the moment.”

“I’d like to, but I couldn’t. They’d worry at home.”

“Send a telegram, honey,” Miss Eppendorfer suggested.

It was her first telegram, too, and it gave her a delightful sense of adventure, and of defiance, for she knew that Minnie would disapprove.

Miss Eppendorfer opened the door of a tiny room, which, she said, was to be Frankie’s “very own.”

“Isn’t it dear?” she asked. “I think I must have known when I furnished it, that someone just like you was coming to me some day. It expresses you, don’t you think so?”

At first Frances thought it a delightful room, furnished all in wicker even to the bed and decorated in gay chintz; there were candles on the dressing table with rose-covered shades which at once took her eye, and a brocade glove box. She felt that she would be tremendously happy in such a nest.

And then, as she laid her hat on the bed, she was startled, dismayed, at the sight of the pillow-cases. Suspicions aroused, her glance travelled from corner to corner, and she apprehended the appalling griminess of the place. Griminess not confined to this room of “her very own,” as she was soon to discover.

She had turned back the lace-trimmed chintz bedspread and was suspiciously examining the sheets when Miss Eppendorfer came in again with a filmy nightdress decorated with pale green ribbons, a boudoir cap and an elaborate negligee.

“Put these on now and be comfy,” she urged, “and we’ll have a nice little supper, all alone together.”

She herself had got into a lace tea-gown over a torn lace petticoat and quilted satin slippers which weren’t high enough to hide the holes in her stockings....

“Thank you,” said Frances, “but I’m quite comfortable as I am.”

She felt that her neat linen blouse and dark skirt gave her a sort of advantage; anyway she couldn’t have gone trailing about in a wrapper, she wasn’t that sort.

Disillusionment progressed rapidly. She sat down at the supper table, hungry and curious, and disposed to be charitable; but the dirtiness of the tablecloth was flagrant and her napkin had obviously been used before. And her glass had a milky ring inside it.... She was not over-fastidious, or inclined to give great importance to domestic matters, but she had a genuine passion for cleanliness. She couldn’t help being disgusted. Still, she reflected, it was no doubt all due to the scornful coloured girl, and she consoled herself by thinking that perhaps, when not engaged in literary work, she could look after things a bit.

She put on the ribbon-trimmed nightdress and went to sleep between the dubious sheets, a little homesick for the big, airy bedroom where Minnie was lying, and the darkness and the quiet. Her window opened on to a court; she could hear voices talking and phonographs playing, and the light from Miss Eppendorfer’s room shone under her door and disturbed her. She couldn’t compose herself, she was excited and confused, and imagined that she lay awake for hours.

Miss Eppendorfer came in to wake her up the next morning, in a state of great excitement, still wearing the trailing tea-gown. She told Frankie that the coloured girl had gone; and she related a long story of wrongs and grievances; the girl drank, lied, pilfered, was even engaged in complicated plots against one of the best and kindest mistresses extant. Miss Eppendorfer gave a list of her benefactions: a pink hat, a dotted veil, blouses, shoes, and still——!

“She used to say all sorts of things about me over the telephone, if anyone rang up when I was out. And, my dear, the things she told that hall-boy!”

Frankie pitied her distress and was eager to soothe her excitement.

“Never mind!” she said, “We’ll find another. And now wouldn’t you like me to make a cup of coffee for you?”

“Oh, I would, my dear! I’m no good till I’ve had my coffee, and I can’t make it decently myself.”

She sat down on the bed, and though Frances waited impatiently for a chance to get up, she showed no signs of moving. Nothing could have induced Frankie to dress in her presence. A faint annoyance crept over her. She got out of bed on the other side, gathered up her clothes and went into the bathroom, with a brusque excuse.

She came out, stiffer and straighter than ever, and went into the tiny kitchen to make the coffee. It was the filthiest place; roaches running over everything, grease, dust, crumbs.

“That girl was a very poor servant,” she said severely.

Miss Eppendorfer was sitting on a corner of the table, swinging her slippered feet.

“I spoil them,” she said. “I’m too good to them. And then I don’t keep after them. You have to, if you want anything done.... But with my writing, of course I can’t keep my mind on that sort of thing very well.”

She praised the coffee extravagantly, and, as she drank it, explained to Frankie that she was very, very nervous, and that a scene such as she had had with that dreadful girl upset her beyond measure. Frances noticed her trembling hands, her quick breath, and accepted this nervousness, and, in her competent way, went about making her comfortable.

They had a rather pleasant day together. The hall-boy was sent to fetch “Jennie” who had often before come to fill in gaps, and while she was creaking and wheezing, scrubbing and mopping her faithful way round the flat, the authoress lay on a sofa and talked to Frankie. She told her about her work, which so far consisted of three short stories and two very successful novels.

“But I’m really only beginning,” she said.

(Frances thought privately that she was rather old for any sort of beginning.)

Her latest book was called “The Lonely Woman.” She gave a copy to Frances and begged for a candid opinion after she had read it.

“But I’m not a judge,” Frances told her earnestly, “I don’t know anything about literature. Only that I love books and reading.”

“My dear,” said Miss Eppendorfer, “I saw at once how sensible and level-headed you were. I want your opinion!”

Noon came. Miss Eppendorfer sighed as the clock struck.

“I do not feel equal to going out,” she said, “I’d rather do without lunch. Of course, there’s plenty in the house, but Jennie can’t cook a thing.”

Frances was quite willing to get a lunch ready, and to bring it on a tray to the nervous authoress. Also tea and supper. Otherwise there was nothing to do but sit and talk.

III

Frances would have found it difficult to explain what her secretarial duties were during that year. Principally to go with Miss Eppendorfer everywhere that she went—to the shops, the bank, the dentist. She was too nervous to go out alone; she wouldn’t stir without her “little pal”; and, as far as Frances could see, she had no other friends. There were a few people who telephoned, and who very rarely dropped in to see her, but she never got invitations of any sort. It puzzled Frances; she could see no reason why Miss Eppendorfer shouldn’t be popular; in the first place, she was a quite successful writer, which should have brought some sort of fame, and in the second place, she had an excellent disposition. They lived together, all day and every day, month after month, those two women, without a sharp or a violent word, with the exception of the two famous Scenes, to be described later. And these didn’t exactly count, for the authoress was not altogether responsible, altogether herself then.... Of course, there were times when relations were a bit strained, but not often. And the remarkable, the admirable thing was, that they were not congenial, not in any way suited to each other; it was simply their common kindliness and good temper that so preserved harmony.

Lack of friends was not the only point to puzzle Frankie; there were other mysteries. It was a long time before she could understand Miss Eppendorfer, or appraise her with any justice. At first she saw much to disgust her. The slatternliness, above all, the shameless lack of pride. She used to look across the supper table at the pallid, faded blonde creature, with uncombed hair, still dressed in a wrapper over her nightdress, and wonder how, how ...! Even this, though, she learned to condone when she saw that it sprang not so much from neglect as from awful weariness. The poor soul was either hectic with excitement, flying from shop to shop, restaurant to restaurant, taking every meal away from home for perhaps a week, or else she couldn’t make up her mind even to walk round the corner for a breath of air, would stay shut up in the flat for days. She dressed well enough when she went out; she spent money lavishly on her clothes and wore them with a conspicuous and rather vulgar sort of style, but she didn’t really care; had no sort of decent pride in her body. Didn’t trouble much about cleanliness, for instance.

Her book, too, was a shock to Frances. It was the story of a woman living on the prairies—the Lonely Woman—alone with a stolid husband; then a young clergyman stopped there on his way somewhere, and chapter after chapter recounted the wiles, the lures of the lonely woman to rouse his passion, to destroy his honour. In the end she got him, triumphed for a few lurid days, and then tried to run away with him. But they were overtaken by a blizzard and died, frozen to death. The pursuing husband saw them, sitting clasped in each other’s arms, and shot them, not knowing that they were already dead, and then gave himself up to the police and was hanged. It was what her publishers called “palpitating”—very. Nothing was left to the imagination.

Frances thought it awful; she hadn’t been trained to see the poetry in lust. All she could say in praise was that the prairie scenes seemed very true to life, and Miss Eppendorfer assured her that they were.

“I’ve lived out there,” she said. She often told scraps of her past life, but they wouldn’t piece together; sometimes one story directly contradicted another. She had been married, sometimes she said once, sometimes twice, and her husband—or first husband—had been “unspeakable.” She had divorced him, or he her. Sometimes she described her childhood as ideally happy, her parents as wealthy and indulgent; then, once, she told Frances she was the daughter of a wretched woman who had lived with a worker in the Chicago stockyards. Yet all this didn’t impress Frances as lying; it was too vague, too aimless; she couldn’t help a stupid feeling that Miss Eppendorfer didn’t know exactly what had happened to her. Which was of course absurd.... And she was sure that the stories which told of want, pain, and struggle were the true ones, that the poor woman had suffered.

Talent she undoubtedly possessed. Although Frances detested the persistent fleshliness of her stories, she had a generous admiration for the gift itself. She would watch her writing, almost with awe, wondering where the ideas came from, from what unfathomable reservoir she drew so easily. She had no style, little art, couldn’t even use the language properly; simply she put on paper the visions of her curious mind. She sometimes used to cry as she wrote. And, although her books were oversensual, her talk wasn’t. She avoided those topics which distressed the austere Frances.

IV

It was not for six months that Frances got her first clue to this baffling creature. She tried to study her, to understand her, why she had no friends, no “circle” such as she had imagined literary people always had, why she was sometimes so slovenly, sometimes so extravagantly dressed, why sometimes she couldn’t bear to go out, and sometimes couldn’t endure staying at home.

It was after one of her infrequent visits home. Miss Eppendorfer hated to let her go, and would never go out during her absence, which naturally used to distress Frankie and cause her to cut her time at home unduly short. She did everything possible before leaving, and always saw to it that Jennie was there, under a solemn promise not to leave for a minute until she got back; then with soothing assurances, as if Miss Eppendorfer were a very nervous child, she would pack her bag and hurry off, oppressed and serious, worrying over the household she had left.

This time, when she came back, Jennie didn’t answer the bell. She rang again and again, but couldn’t hear a sound. Then she questioned the hall-boy and he told her Jennie had left that morning, but that Miss Eppendorfer was at home.

“Maybe she’s asleep,” he said, with a grin.

Frances turned white, remembering all the stories she had read of suicides and murders.

“Isn’t there any way I can get in?” she cried.

The boy leisurely suggested going to the flat below and asking leave to go up through the fire escape. He didn’t offer to do it for her; he was, on the contrary, as indifferent, as contemptuous as he could well be.

Fortunately the window on the fire escape was open and Frances got in without difficulty. And rushed into Miss Eppendorfer’s room.

She was asleep, her mouth open, her hair in her eyes, lying on the outside of the bed with no covering but a gauzy nightdress. The room was full of a smell unfamiliar to Frances, but she surmised, even before she saw the empty bottle.

Whiskey.

Somehow she got the poor thing warmly and decently covered up and the horrible littered room tidied. Then she went into her own room and sank into a chair, for her knees would support her no longer. She couldn’t think about it, her intelligence seemed to have fled, to be suspended, waiting. She was conscious of nothing but horror and a reluctant and painful compassion. She felt that now, after this, she could never, never leave Miss Eppendorfer.

CHAPTER TEN

I

Frances did not mention this shortcoming of Miss Eppendorfer’s at home, and it was never openly referred to between the authoress and herself. But Miss Eppendorfer ceased to be so careful, she was even relieved that Frances knew her vice and that she didn’t have to live in fear of her discovering it. The whiskey came openly with the grocery orders, then vanished into her own room. She was never to be seen drinking it, but there were many mornings when she couldn’t be awakened till noon, and when she did get up, she would be in a state that wrung Frankie’s kindly heart. The poor shaky, weeping thing, moaning about her aching head, swallowing her dreadful “headache cures,” and waiting in agony till relief came.... Frances had to sit by her, holding her hand and trying to quiet and cheer her. She struggled against disgust, but in vain; she would reach the point where the whole affair seemed intolerable, and she was determined to go home, and then Miss Eppendorfer would suddenly change, get up in the morning, dress elaborately and take her “little pal” out for a day of amusement. She was at such times so ingratiatingly kind that Frances put aside all thought of leaving her. No doubt these intervals of hectic excitement were her periods of reform; in fact, she almost admitted it.

“I have to keep on going,” she said, “to take my mind off things.”

Curious that Frances should find herself so placed, Frances who had been brought up to regard drunkenness in a man as a bestial crime, and in a woman, a thing almost impossibly awful. She sometimes wondered at herself, how was it that she didn’t blame Miss Eppendorfer, but looked upon her failing as if it were a disease? She felt herself very old, very experienced. In spite of her pity and real unhappiness over the thing, there was in it a deep, secret satisfaction; it was, she felt, Knowledge, Life; she was learning, developing. She had so far, far outgrown Minnie and her grandmother and their standards! She was tolerant, worldly-wise; there wasn’t, she believed, much more for her to learn....

The future rather worried her. This couldn’t last forever, and after this, what? She was not gaining experience that would be of any practical value to her in any other position. She was not able to save money; at the end of six months she found herself no better off than when her career had begun. And she was so ambitious, so passionately anxious to succeed, to be important and famous. She gave her problem much serious thought. One thing was certain; she couldn’t and wouldn’t leave Miss Eppendorfer under the present circumstances; the only thing was for her to prepare herself, to be ready for something better when there was a change of some sort. She presented her scheme to Miss Eppendorfer as tactfully as possible.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, “if I knew how to type better and faster, and something of shorthand, I’d be ever so much more useful ... to you, and—and in general ... I wrote to a business school near here, and I think, if you don’t mind, I’ll take a course there in shorthand and typing. Three evenings a week, from seven to nine.”

But Miss Eppendorfer protested, begged her to put it off and not to leave her so much alone. She was afraid of this plan, afraid that she would, by it, lose this girl she so much needed.

“Just wait a month, dear, won’t you? Till the days are longer?”

It seemed an idiotic reason to Frances, and she looked obstinate.

“Perhaps I could take the course with you,” Miss Eppendorfer suggested, “I think I’d enjoy it.”

That idea didn’t please Frankie at all; the thought of going to school with anyone of Miss Eppendorfer’s age, appearance and temperament was appalling. She imagined what people would say—how they would be ridiculed. She was obliged to postpone the plan for a time, until she could think of a different way of presenting it....

Chance gave her an opportunity very soon. One morning the telephone rang, in itself a rare happening, and she hurried to answer it, as the authoress was asleep.

“Is this Miss Eppendorfer?” enquired a high, loud voice with an exaggerated London accent. “Oh, her secretary! Very well! You will please to tell Miss Eppendorfer that her cousin Kurt Hassler from Hamburg is here, and would like to call.”

“She’s not awake yet,” Frances explained, “but if you’ll leave your number——”

“The Ritz,” he replied haughtily. “Find it in the telephone directory. I am here until one.”

She had scarcely replaced the receiver when Miss Eppendorfer opened the door of her room and stood smiling absent-mindedly at her.

“I thought I heard the telephone,” she said.

“You did. It was your cousin from Hamburg. He wants to see you.”

Miss Eppendorfer became immensely excited, and insisted upon Frankie’s calling him up at once.

“I’m too nervous,” she said. “Tell him to come to-night for dinner at seven.”

He accepted the invitation, and the authoress was delighted.

“I haven’t seen him since he was a child,” she told Frankie, “but I’ve heard lots about him. He went to Heidelberg, and then he went into his father’s business and he’s done wonderfully well, they say. He speaks English, French and Spanish perfectly.”

“Are you a German then?” Frankie asked.

“No; my father was, but I’m not. I’m American through and through. I can’t even speak German. If Kurt didn’t speak English, I don’t know what I’d do.”

While she drank her coffee, Miss Eppendorfer ingenuously confided to Frances her great desire to impress Mr. Hassler.

“You see, his family—- my father’s cousins, over in Germany, always looked down on us. They were as rude as they could be. You know how proud those old commercial families are. Why, my dear, Kurt Hassler would never have dreamed of putting his foot inside my door if I hadn’t got a name for myself with this writing. So I’m going to show him that I’m somebody, after all. That I know how to do things right!”

Jennie was fetched to wait on the table, and supper was ordered from a restaurant nearby, with an extravagant variety of wines. Miss Eppendorfer dressed herself in her very best, and implored Frances to do the same, but Frances, although expecting a bearded and majestic man in evening dress, refused to put on any of the authoress’s finery.

“He’s not coming to see me,” she cried, “and, anyway, I’d rather look like what I am.”

Proud humility! And wasn’t she aware all the time that in her fresh blouse and blue serge skirt she utterly eclipsed Miss Eppendorfer, she with her clear brown skin and her beautifully honest eyes, with her youth and strength and dignity?

She had resented Mr. Hassler’s manner over the telephone and she had only to take one look at him in person to hate and detest him forever. He was unexpectedly young, not so old as herself, she imagined, but with a self-assurance seldom attained by other races this side of forty. He was handsome enough, but detestably arrogant, a smooth-shaven, blonde-crested boy with up-turned nose and wide, impudent mouth. He was stupid and pompous, couldn’t talk about anything but himself and his “world-export business” as he called it, yet Frances saw that he had wit enough to take the measure of his cousin. His gallantry was so obviously mocking that she burned with shame for the poor haggard, painted woman who gulped it down. It was really torment for her to look on.

Alas, poor Frankie! She had yet to learn of Miss Eppendorfer’s second great weakness!

II

After that evening everything was changed, Miss Eppendorfer herself a quite different person. She was as good-tempered, as kindly as ever, but so silly that Frankie’s own amiability began to wear thin. She wrote no more, all her talk was of clothes, of hair dressers, of manicures. She would spend all morning sitting at her dressing table, polishing her nails and “jabbering,” as her secretary mentally called her talking. She was full of the affectations of a happy young girl, was impulsive, whimsical, even pouted. And for whom but that obnoxious little Hamburger, young enough to be her son!

He called every evening, and made it plain to Frankie that he wanted to be alone with his cousin. So she withdrew to her bedroom and tried to read, to ignore that light, hysterically gay voice answering his impudent compliments.

“Can’t she see?” Frankie used to ask herself, almost in tears. “Doesn’t she know he’s laughing at her? Oh, what an idiot she’s making of herself, poor old thing!”

He and Frances hated each other. She stared at him with cold contempt, he looked her up and down insolently; they never spoke unless it couldn’t be avoided. Unfortunately Frances had to listen to a great deal about him from Miss Eppendorfer, how successful and brilliant he was in business, how supremely well-educated, how fastidious and aristocratic, how irresistible to the fair sex. He told her about his “affairs” and she insisted upon telling Frankie, although the latter said bluntly enough that she wasn’t interested. It was necessary that she should be shown what a remarkable conquest Miss Eppendorfer had made. She was forced to hear about the Russian princess, the awfully exclusive Parisienne, and above all about the eminent and very chic Damen in Wien. The colossal success he had had! Frances had either to consider him a liar, or the ladies on the continent of Europe as pitifully lacking in taste.

He very soon began coming to dinner every night, and Miss Eppendorfer went to great trouble to secure a cook who was not only a German, but a German from the only correct part of Germany for cooks to inhabit. She extorted big wages and made life wretched with her shrewishness, but her delicacies were supposed to atone for all this. Expenses mounted steadily; Frances had not imagined that Miss Eppendorfer had so much money. She bought new clothes continually, and flowers, and very expensive wines. Mr. Hassler was not absent for a single night for two months after the coming of the German cook, but not once did he invite his cousin to go anywhere with him, or did he bring her flowers or sweets.

Frances could not comprehend this thing; she thought she did, but she didn’t, in the least. It was the sort of affair not related in romantic novels; there was nothing romantic about it. It might be classified as a “love affair,” although it would have been confoundedly hard to find any love in it.... Frankie simply thought that Miss Eppendorfer was “silly” about the young man, and anxious to impress him, and that he was attracted by the good dinners.

Her first real suspicions awoke when she was checking up the stubs in the authoress’s cheque book, which she did every month when the vouchers came back from the bank. And she saw, no less than five times, cheques made out to “Kurt Hassler” for fifty dollars, sixty dollars, up to a hundred. It gave her a vague feeling of uneasiness, which she couldn’t shake off, although she assured herself that it was all “business.”

Then she and Miss Eppendorfer had the first of their quarrels. The cook wanted a day off, and Miss Eppendorfer gaily asked Frankie if she wouldn’t cook one of her dear little suppers for “Kurtie.” Frances flushed.

“Why don’t you go to a restaurant?” she suggested.

“Kurtie’s so sick of restaurants. I told him what heavenly things you used to fix up for me, and he said he’d like to see what you could do. He’s——”

“I’m sorry,” said Frances, “but I’d rather not.”

“My dear! Please! I’ve practically promised.”

“I can’t help it. I couldn’t.”

“But why?”

Frances looked at her indignantly.

“I wouldn’t cook for that man!” she said, severely.

“What is your objection to him, may I ask?” enquired Miss Eppendorfer, with sudden frigidity.

“I’d rather not say.”

“I insist.”

“I’m not going to say. It has nothing to do with the case, anyway. I don’t mind—I never mind doing things for you. But ... I should think you’d know better than to ask me to cook for your guests. I’m supposed to be your secretary, Miss Eppendorfer, not your servant.”

She was startled by the expression on Miss Eppendorfer’s face.

“A hell of a secretary you are!” she screamed. “You don’t know a damned thing. You’re no more use to me than a parrot. You take my money and never do a stroke of work. You’re as lazy as a nigger.” And much, much more, of abuse that grew fouler and fouler, most of it unintelligible to the girl. She stood motionless, white as a sheet, dumb with horror, her own little anger swept away on this violent torrent. She never forgot the scene, or the words.

“Oh!” she whispered. “Oh!... How terrible!... Oh, God, how terrible!”

For she had a dreadful feeling of helplessness, of being in a world where her dignity was of no avail. She cried forlornly for Minnie and her grandmother, even for her mother, dead a score of years.

She had packed her trunk and was absolutely determined to go home that night when Miss Eppendorfer came to the door, imploring to be let in. She, too, was in tears, streaming with tears, and she went down on her knees to Frances.

“Forgive me!” she cried. “Forgive me! Frances, darling, you know how terribly nervous I am! Don’t be too hard on me. I can’t live without you!”

She was so dreadfully upset that Frances had to get her to bed and give her a dose of some powerful sedative she used for her “nerve attacks,” and telephoned to Hassler not to come. And in the end she agreed not to go home.

But she remained very grave and thoughtful. She went out to supper at a little French table d’hôte nearby, came back and went to bed, without seeing Miss Eppendorfer again.

She was waked up late that night, though, by her. The poor creature was crying again, standing by Frankie’s bed.

“Oh, Frances!” she moaned, “I’m so wretched! I wish I were dead!”

Frances asked what was the matter.

“Kurt was so nasty to me,” she sobbed. “I rang him up after you’d gone out, and he came. But he wouldn’t stay a minute. He just looked at the supper and went away. I tried! I had sardines and caviare and fruit, all fixed in a dainty way.... Oh, Frances!”

Her voice rose to a shriek that alarmed Frances.

“Don’t get excited!” she entreated. “Just tell me, quietly, all about it. First let me close the window.”

It was an incoherent tale; he had told her that she didn’t know how to dress, that he wouldn’t be seen in a public place with her, that at her age she shouldn’t try to wear pink. Told her she looked vulgar. That he couldn’t see a trace in her conversation of the brains he imagined were required in novel writing.

Frances was exasperated.

“Why in the world do you bother with him!” she cried. “He’s—I’m sure you’re deceived in him. Why don’t you let him go?”

Miss Eppendorfer began to weep anew.

“I love him!” she declared. And seeing Frankie’s shocked face, she added, with humane motive, “We’re going to be married!”

Frances believed it.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I

After this, Miss Eppendorfer was not able to make any further objection to Frankie’s study.

“I may as well tell you now,” said Frankie, “that I shan’t—I couldn’t stay with you after you’re married to that man.”

“But it won’t be for a long time,” Miss Eppendorfer protested.

A very long time indeed! Dimly, in her muddled head, she realised how much she wanted and needed Frankie, even foresaw the day when Mr. Kurt Hassler would go the way of other men to whom she had been so generous, and she would be quite alone. She tried to bribe her not to learn shorthand, she didn’t want her to be able to find another place; she said it would tire her, hurt her eyes, everything she could imagine.

Frances was firm.

“You’re not alone in the evenings now,” she said, “and I’ve got to think of my own future.”

“I’ll always look after you——”

“I don’t want to be looked after, thank you. Please don’t be unreasonable!”

Miss Eppendorfer cried a little and consented.

II

Frances found it a curious experience. She wrote home to Minnie, after the first week:

“I’m a sort of grandmother here in the business school. All the rest are little girls with pigtails and hair ribbons, and little boys in short trousers. You can imagine how I feel, so old and sedate. And even in size! They’re all so stunted. I tower above my tiny desk. I’m taller even than any of the teachers, and quite a different colour, at least five degrees redder.

“I thought I knew something about typing, but I’ve had to start all over again, and learn the ‘touch system.’ And shorthand! Oh, Minnie! I’m so stupid, you can’t think. The others learn like eager little trained animals. They can’t speak decently, or spell, of course, but what does that matter? They can put down on paper what they hear someone say, and copy it off, without the trouble of understanding. I foresee that I shall be here for years while all the little boys and girls pass on and out, and become bank presidents.”

It was quite true that she wasn’t quick at learning her new trade. She was studious by nature, and painstaking, but her hand was not ready. She was more discouraged than she cared to tell.

Life seemed, just then, a rather miserable affair. Her ambition was balked by her slowness in learning, and she began to think that she would never be able to do better than she was doing with Miss Eppendorfer. A filler of odd jobs, employed principally because she was personally agreeable.... And, somehow, Miss Eppendorfer’s talk of love made her lonely and sad. She thought of her twenty-three years, and was terrified by the fear that she would never be loved. She longed so to be loved! What chance, though? She went from Miss Eppendorfer’s flat, which no man entered but “Kurtie,” to the night school, where the oldest male was perhaps nineteen.

A situation ripe for the coming of the hero. As usual he came. Or perhaps, the one who came had to be he....

It was the end of June, and after two months of effort, Frankie still sat among the beginners. She had developed a new trouble. She was able now to scratch desperately while the teacher dictated, almost keeping pace with her, but she could never afterward read what she had written. She was trying in vain to type a letter she had taken down, in which all she could distinguish was “Dear Sir:” and the “14th inst.” when she heard someone sit down in the seat next her, which had till then been vacant. Naturally she glanced up. It was, as she later wrote to Minnie, a “real grown-up human being,” a tall, thin fellow with a haughty, stupid face, a man who couldn’t be under thirty and who was dressed in well-fitting and expensive clothes. She couldn’t help staring at him, all the more because he took no notice of her at all. “He was so out of place there,” she wrote. “He was so well-bred, with the nicest thin brown hands. And, my dear Minnie, he was even stupider than me. Much stupider.”

She watched him a great deal, as he tried to write on his machine. The keyboard was hidden with a tin cover, so that he was obliged to learn the letters by memory; this puzzled and annoyed him, and he frowned severely over his chart.

“I say!” he said, suddenly, to Frances, with a marked English accent, “Isn’t there something wrong about this thing? B ought to come next to A.”

She explained that the keyboard wasn’t arranged alphabetically. He asked why not, and she said she didn’t know.

“Some American idea, I suppose,” he observed, with displeasure, and turned away to resume his struggle.

He was not polite, he was certainly not clever, and, in spite of limpid and innocent grey eyes, not handsome; his nose was too large, his expression too contemptuous. Why then should Frances think him so terribly appealing and attractive? She felt an exaggerated good-will toward him, an ardent wish to help him, even to comfort him. There was no obvious reason for this painful compassion; he was well-dressed, showed not the least trace of poverty, quite the contrary. He looked healthy too, although very thin. And he had very much the air of being satisfied with himself. Ridiculous girl!

He had come to the end of a line and not understanding the bell’s signal, was trying to keep on writing. He saw that something was wrong, and he turned to Frances again. She had been watching him, and was ready to explain at once.

“I’ve never tried one of these infernal things before,” he remarked, quite unnecessarily.

“I’ve been at it for two months,” said Frances, with a sigh, “but I don’t seem to get on. Not like the others.”

He looked at her thoroughly for the first time.

“You’re not like the others,” he said, “that’s probably why.”

And added:

“You look like an English girl.”

That meant that he was pleased, she knew.

“I’m not. I’m American—as far back as the Revolution.”

“What revolution?” he asked.

With the characteristic innocence of her country-people, whose Genesis it is, she was astounded.

“Why, our Revolution! In 1776!” she explained.

He said “Really!” and went on with his writing.

The next night he saluted her with a stiff “Good evening!” directly she entered the room, so formal and frigid that her heart sank. They weren’t friendly, then! But, after half an hour’s desperate effort, he grew bored and discouraged, and once more turned his attention to the pretty girl.

“You’re doing well,” he observed.

Frances gave a sigh and smiled at him.

“I hate it!” she said.

“Rather! But why do you do it?”

“I want to get on—get a better job.”

“What are you doing now?”

He was, she thought, very personal, but he didn’t seem aware of it.

“I’m a secretary, for an authoress.”

That seemed to interest him.

“I’d thought of something of that sort for myself,” he said. “What do they expect of a secretary over here?”

“My position’s rather peculiar,” Frances told him. “I do all sorts of things that aren’t really part of my duties.”

“What, for instance? Can’t you give me some sort of idea?” he persisted, and, half-laughing, she tried to tell him.

“Oh, I go shopping with her,” she said, “and I listen while she reads, and I get up little chafing-dish suppers, and answer the telephone, and check up her bank book, and talk to her publishers, and—oh, well—lots of things like that!”

“I shouldn’t call that a secretary,” said the young man. “At home we’d call you a sort of companion.”

Frances turned red, and began typing again. He was rude, and no mistake about it. Detestable! She worked violently for a time, then, out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of him, pecking away at his typewriter so slowly and stupidly that her heart smote her.

“Good night!” she said cheerfully when the gong sounded, and she went off to the dictation class and he to the beginner’s room, where she could see him through the open door, writing on the arm of his chair, surrounded by eager children.

III

Frances was a little late the next night, and from her locker in the corridor, she looked anxiously into the classroom for the young Englishman’s nice brown head bent over his machine. But he wasn’t there. She went to her place and began to work half-heartedly, with one eye on the door, watching for him. The clock ticked on and on, half an hour gone, still she couldn’t believe he wasn’t coming. The whole long hour passed, the typing lesson was finished, and he hadn’t come.

Disappointment out of all proportion assailed her. Her heart was like lead, the whole world blank.

“What a fool I am!” she told herself. “Why on earth should I care? I don’t really; it’s only that he’s the only other possible person in the place—— Why should he come? Of course he’s given up the whole thing in disgust. Of course he’s not coming back, at all. Ever. Of course I shan’t see him again. What difference does it make?”

And yet, in spite of all this excellent common-sense, that feeling of desolation persisted. She hated and loathed the silly school, made up her mind to stop coming. She sat in the shorthand class, scratching down her unintelligible little symbols——

Suddenly an awful thought swept over her. It grew rapidly to a conviction. He had certainly stayed away solely because of her, because she had been so preposterously over-friendly that he was disgusted and alarmed. She did wish that she might see him once more, just to tell him that she didn’t like him, not him, personally; simply, like all nice Americans, she had wanted to be kind to a stranger....

She rushed out the minute the class was over. She was very anxious to get home. And there he was, waiting for her, standing under a street lamp where the light streamed on his arrogant face, a slim, foppish figure, with a walking stick. She felt suddenly angry at him; replied with coldness to his greeting.

“It was such a nice evening,” he said, “I couldn’t stand that filthy place.”

It was; sweet, calm, fresh, with a bright little moon overhead.

“I thought perhaps you’d like to walk a bit,” he said, “if you’re not tired.”

She hesitated imperceptibly, then accepted.

“A few blocks,” she said. “I shouldn’t like to be late.”

“Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked presently.

Frances said she didn’t, and they began strolling, quite aimlessly, uptown.

“I say!” he exclaimed, “It’s very decent of you to come. You Americans are unconventional, aren’t you?”

“Not all of us,” said Frances drily.

“We’re different. We won’t have anything to do with a stranger till we’ve got his credentials. I dare say we’re over-particular. No English girl I’ve ever met would take up a man this way——”

“I’m not in the habit of it,” said Frances. She was affronted and angry. “But I’m not a child. I’m accustomed to—to forming my own judgments. I—as far as I could judge, you were a gentleman. I thought you’d quite understand——”

“I do!” he protested, “I do, absolutely. I only wanted to tell you that I like it—all this freedom, you know. An English girl of your class would be so—so much more prudent——”

“I’m not imprudent!” cried Frances, passionately.

“Ah, but you are, though. My dear young lady, you don’t even know my name.”

“Well, what is it, then?” she asked, half-laughing, half-furious. “You’d better tell me, if that will make this shocking walk more ‘prudent.’”

“Lionel Naylor,” he said.

“Haven’t you any letters, any papers, to identify yourself? How can I tell if that’s really your name?”

He replied with perfect seriousness:

“I’ve one or two things—a letter——”

“Oh, nonsense! Couldn’t you see that I was joking? Why on earth should I care who you are? I’m old enough and sufficiently intelligent to find out very soon what you are. I’m not afraid of strange men. I can take care of myself.”

“It does no harm for a girl to be careful,” he answered, stubbornly.

And that was, apparently, his final word. They went on in silence. Frances counted fifteen blocks without a word. At the first crossing he had rather ceremoniously taken her arm, and he didn’t release it. He seemed quite contented to go on forever in this way. But it provoked Frances beyond measure. She longed to say to him:

“Why did you ask me to take a walk, if you didn’t want to speak to me?”

She made up her mind that she wouldn’t speak first, no matter how long it was. She had to, though. She looked at her watch.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to turn back now,” she said. “It’s time I was home.”

“I say!” he cried. “That’s too bad! I wanted to have a talk with you.”

“Why didn’t you talk then?” she asked, sharply, and he answered with equal irritability:

“My dear young lady, I can’t plunge into things the way you people do. I have to collect my thoughts a bit——”

“Strange as it may seem to you,” said Frances, “all the people in this country are not exactly alike.”

It began to dawn upon him that she was really annoyed, that these people were possibly as sensitive to offence as himself. Instantly he was very sorry.

“I dare say I’m not very tactful,” he said, “I didn’t mean to be offensive, though, I assure you. I admire you people very much.”

“All of us?”

He laughed.

“There are some, of course.... My sister-in-law—She!...”

“She’s an American?”

“Yes. My brother lives over here, you know. Been here some time. We thought he was a confirmed bachelor. Practically certain not to marry. Then, the very day after I got here, he did it. And such a girl! Of course it made trouble at once.”

Frances was interested, and moreover, she could see that he wanted to talk about it.

“How?” she asked.

“Set my brother against me. Put all sorts of beastly—Am—beastly ideas into his head. She has no use for a man unless he’s eternally stewing over a row of figures, grubbing after money. So now he’s got this idiotic idea of my learning this typing and shorthand rot. And why? So I can get a job in his office. I never heard such silly rot. What earthly use is that stuff going to be? I shan’t be one of his clerks. It’s her idea. She wants to humiliate me.”

Frances murmured something sympathetic.

“What business were you in before?” she asked.

“Not in any business,” he replied, surprised. “Didn’t you understand? I suppose, according to your ideas, I’m no good. I’ve never done anything much. Just stopped at home while my mother was alive.... Until two years ago ... when she died. She—liked to have me at home. We got on together very well.”

He was rather pathetically anxious to be friendly and communicative now, to show her that he wasn’t aloof and condescending. He tried to tell her about himself, indirectly to present his credentials. And did so, far more fully than he imagined. With every word, spoken and unspoken, she was more certain that she had not been mistaken—that he was “nice,” that he was to be trusted, that he was mysteriously likable.

“We travelled, and so on,” he continued. “She liked that.... Do you know, when I look at this girl Horace has married, I’m glad—really glad, the poor old mater—isn’t here.”

Then, unfortunately, he got started on a very favourite topic; he told her what he had endured from “that girl”; how she sneered at him, persecuted him, was continually poisoning his brother’s mind against him. Frances listened with a heavy heart. She couldn’t approve of this! It wasn’t manly; it wasn’t fine. She pitied him, yearned over him, and at the same time felt a passionate Defoe desire to lecture him, to tell him he was wrong, didn’t see things in a proper light. She wanted to tell him what to do and offer to help him to do it.

Conversation about his sister-in-law lasted until they had reached Frankie’s door. Then he was once more surprised and regretful that he hadn’t made better use of his time. He took Frankie’s proffered hand warmly.

“You see,” he said, “I didn’t ask your name. It wasn’t necessary.”

“Do you know it?” she asked, a little puzzled.

“No, not that. Simply, I don’t need any credentials to know that you’re—absolutely—all right. Absolutely.”

She smiled at him maternally. She liked that clumsy compliment; she liked his naïveness, his simplicity, even his rudeness. She saw him no longer as a young man, but as a boy, who had been badly trained, a rather spoilt boy. She felt very peaceful, very kindly, toward him and toward everyone else. She had never known life to be so satisfying as it was that evening, for no reason at all.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I

He was there, the next evening, and welcomed her as an old friend; in fact, he talked so much that she grew uneasy.

“We’d better work a little,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be awful if a teacher should come and scold us—at our age!”

“What I particularly want to ask,” he said, “is, if you’d come down to Brighton Beach to-morrow? I’ll run you down in Horace’s motor. We’ll have lunch and a swim and get back early. Will that be all right?”

“I’d love it,” she answered, “but I don’t know whether Miss E. could spare me. I’ll ask her.”

“Perhaps if I came home with you this evening, it would look better. So that she can see what sort of chap I am. I could stop in for a moment, couldn’t I?”

“Yes,” Frances answered, doubtfully, “but—I suppose so ... but I’ll have to explain a little in advance. There’s a young German who comes every evening to see her, and you’re sure to find him there.”

“Every evening, eh?”

“Yes; he’s her cousin.”

He frowned over this; asked a number of questions.

“Are you sure she’s all right?” he demanded. “You can’t be too careful, you know.”

“Oh, yes!” Frances asserted, positively, although she was far from sure that he would think so.

“I’ll certainly stop in this evening,” he said. “I want to see for myself.”

“I don’t think you’d better,” she said, reluctantly, “Miss E.’s awfully queer, eccentric, you know. She mightn’t like it.”

“But I want to see her,” he insisted. “She surely can’t object to my stopping in for half a minute. You’re not a servant.”

“It’s not that——”

“I want to see for myself,” he repeated. “It may not be a suitable place for you at all. I’d know at once.”

His attitude, his air of protection, delighted Frankie while it annoyed her. She was so firmly convinced that she could take care of herself, so jealous of her freedom, that she didn’t want even advice. And still couldn’t help being very much pleased by this wholly masculine gesture.

In the end she agreed. And was at once sorry and wretched, going through her classes in a nightmare of worry. How would Miss Eppendorfer take it? What would she think of Frankie’s walking in, uninvited, unpermitted, with a strange man? And how to explain him? Now she was ready to confess herself imprudent. She would have given anything she owned if something would have prevented Mr. Naylor from coming.

He, of course, was perfectly unruffled, as anyone conscious of such superiority would be. He followed Frances into the little Mission sitting-room where Miss Eppendorfer and Mr. Hassler were smoking side by side on the sofa. Frances was bitterly embarrassed; for a minute she couldn’t speak at all. She saw them both staring at her in amazement.

“I’ve brought my friend, Mr. Naylor, in for a few minutes,” she said, in a strained, artificial sort of voice. “We——”

Nothing more came; the girl who could always take care of herself couldn’t account for her visitor.

“We met at the business school,” said Naylor, “and as we were more or less the only human beings there, we naturally had to be friends.”

At the sound of his careless voice, Miss Eppendorfer’s look of amazement died away. She got up and shook hands with him, presented him to Kurt, and asked him to sit down. She was like a good servant; she knew class when she saw it.

Never before had Frances realised how distinguished her Mr. Naylor was until she saw him in Miss Eppendorfer’s sitting-room. She saw the authoress inspecting him in her detailed and unabashed way, staring at him, computing the cost of his clothes, comprehending the high degree he possessed of what she called “style,” and so greatly admired. She was deeply impressed.

He was very gallant to the poor thing, which delighted her beyond measure. No denying that she made a fool of herself. She was coy, imperious, more youthful than she had ever dared to be with Kurt, and, no matter how preposterous her behaviour, Mr. Naylor didn’t once attempt to catch Frankie’s eye, never encouraged her to be more preposterous.

Poor Miss Eppendorfer! Frankie, watching her, reflected on her ingratiating servility toward Mr. Hassler and her present conduct with Mr. Naylor, and found it impossible to reconcile all this with the Miss Eppendorfer she knew. Could it be the same woman who often talked to her with sense, with cynical shrewdness, with sharp knowledge of the world? The same woman who wrote books and sold them, knew how to make money and how to invest it? At the sound of a man’s voice she was horribly bewitched, even her face lost its look of worn good nature and took on a false and stupid simper. It hurt Frances, she was genuinely grateful to Mr. Naylor for not sneering.

But the baleful eye of the young German was fixed upon him. He was forced to sit in silence and listen to their badinage, and it infuriated him. He broke in suddenly, in a harsh, high voice:

“You are in business here?”

Mr. Naylor turned toward him, looked at him, and hated him.

“No,” he said.

“Perhaps you are looking for an opening?”

“No; there’s an ‘opening’ for me when I’m ready for it,” he answered haughtily.

“It should not be at all difficult to find an opening in this country. The requirements are so small,” Mr. Hassler announced, with tact. “Here they will willingly employ a man who knows nothing. Even hard work they don’t expect. With us in Germany all is very different. It is necessary to work very hard. We are all trained to work very hard. A young fellow starting in business with us would never ask, ‘What are the hours?’ Certainly not. We realise that you have got to work very hard, in order to get somewhere.”

“We don’t need to work so hard in England,” said Mr. Naylor. “We are somewhere.”

“Yes, where!” cried the other, raising his voice.

“Where you’d like to be,” Mr. Naylor replied with a smile.

“Bah! You’re getting left behind. We’re beating you everywhere, in every line. Your British trade—where will it be in ten years’ time?”

“Can’t say, I’m sure. I’m not in trade. But I’m not worried. I dare say we’ll still be on the map.”

Mr. Hassler’s excitement carried him away.

“Yes, you’ll be on the map!” he shouted, “as a German Provinz. We’ll stamp out a little of that damn arrogance.”

“I say, are you trying to be funny?”

“That damned British arrogance,” he went on, at the top of his voice. “You half-educated, half-trained, half-alive nation of money-greedy pigs——”

“I say!” cried Mr. Naylor again, puzzled and angry, “You’re going a bit too far!”

“PIGS!” shouted the young German.

Naylor sprang to his feet, as white with anger as the other was red; he was on the point of speaking when Frances caught his arm.

“Oh, please!” she entreated, and suddenly and helplessly, began to laugh.

“Oh, why do Germans always call people pigs!” she cried.

They all looked at her, and under their surprised glance, she struggled for self-control and gained it. She looked down at the ground, her mouth still quivering, and kept very still.

“As for you——” began Mr. Hassler, and then stopped.

“Now! Now!” begged Miss Eppendorfer, in terrible distress, “Now, gentlemen!... What about some nice cold beer?”

She was afraid, though, to fetch it and leave the men alone; she was afraid also to ask Frances, not knowing whether or not she considered herself insulted in the person of her guest. She stood nervously smiling, her eyes on her cousin, mutely beseeching him to be placated by beer. At last Frances took pity on her, and went herself to get the stuff. But Mr. Naylor declined.

“Thanks,” he said, stiff and outraged, “I’ll be going.”

“Pshaw!” muttered Mr. Hassler, who stood at the window with his back turned ostentatiously.

“What’s that?” demanded Mr. Naylor, crisply.

“Pshaw!” the other repeated, somewhat louder.

With a very obvious effort the young Englishman said nothing to this; he took his hat, and with a hasty hand-clasp for Frankie and a bow for Miss Eppendorfer, took himself off.

Frankie went into her own room and tried to compose herself by reading, but not for long. Almost immediately the front door slammed and Miss Eppendorfer came into her room like a whirlwind.

“There! You see!” she screamed. “You miserable creature! He’s gone! He’s gone!”

Frances looked at her severely.

“You’ve spoiled everything!” she went on. “How did you dare to laugh at him? What right have you to laugh at him! You’re nothing better than a servant. And he belongs to one of the finest families in Hamburg. His father’s worth nearly half a million. He’s been through Heidelberg. And you dare to laugh at him! Who are you, anyway? A big, gawky fool of a girl.... Picking up a man in the street and bringing him into my house.... He’s shocked at you.”

And so on, in the strain that so sickened and dismayed Frances.

“He laughs at you. He says you’re a clumsy, ignorant——” ... All manner of dirty insolence.

The heart of the trouble was there, that Frances had laughed at him. He could forget his anger against the Englishman, but he could not stomach being laughed at by a pretty girl. He had said horrible things about her, which Miss Eppendorfer had treasured up and now repeated, with greater malice because she dimly perceived that in his hatred for Frances there was more than a little lust.

Against this attack Frances was defenceless. There was nothing in her nature, nothing in her training, to arm her. She stood up very straight, very proud, but tears were running down her cheeks. She waited until every one of the dreadful words had been said, and the speaker had flung out of the room, then she set to work to pack her little trunk with furious energy, cramming everything in, wishing only to be gone forever from that place. In hat and jacket, she went out into the hall and telephoned for a taxi.

The driver came up after her trunk; he was just dragging it along the hall to put it into the lift, when Miss Eppendorfer came rushing out, in a kimono, her face raddled and tear-blistered, her wisps of hair in a wild tangle.

“No! No!” she screamed. “Stop! Frances!”

Her voice reverberated shockingly in the stone corridor. The lift boy and the chauffeur stared at her. Frances felt ready to faint.

“Frances! Come back and let me explain!”

“I can’t!” said Frances in a low voice. “Please don’t make such a noise!”

“Come back! I can’t let you go like this! I didn’t mean what I said! You know I didn’t!”

Already the doors of two apartments had stealthily opened.

“Oh, please hush!” entreated Frances. “I can’t come back. I’ll write.”

Suddenly Miss Eppendorfer turned to the two men.

“Can’t you beg this hard-hearted girl not to leave me like this, without a chance to explain?” she sobbed, in a torrent of tears. “Can’t you say a word for me? I’m alone in the world. I haven’t——”

“Hush!” commanded Frances. “I’ll come! Please take the trunk in again.”

When the front door was closed Miss Eppendorfer flung her arms about Frances.

“I know you can’t forgive me,” she moaned. “But, oh Frances!... You don’t know what love is! You don’t know how I love that man! I know I’m a fool, but I can’t help it. Oh, Frances, just stand by me till it’s over.”

“I don’t understand you. I thought you were going to marry him——”

“No! No! Never!... Only stand by me till I get over it. It won’t last. He’ll go away soon. It’s madness; I know it. But you don’t know how I suffer. I can’t help myself. Oh, Frances, you’re so cool and reasonable, you don’t know!”

The flood of her confession was not to be dammed. Frances had to hear it all and to learn its lesson, as well as her unready mind permitted. And all the time she listened, in shame, pity and disgust, her adventuring spirit was eagerly and thirstily drinking this new knowledge, this experience, precious even if vicarious.

She really understood very little of it. Miss Eppendorfer, although protesting constantly how she “loved” Kurt, seemed actually to display more hate than affection. She bore him a bitter grudge for this “love.” She was full of stories of his sneers, his taunts; how he had pulled the pins out of her hair and then laughed himself sick at the bleached and scanty locks. How he compared her to other women whom he had seen in the course of the day; how he had asked her to sing, and then mocked her. How he wasted her money and forever demanded more. She knew that he ridiculed her to his friends. He encouraged her to drink and then got her to sign cheques....

The end of her recital left her stripped of all decency, all honour, showed her a weak fool destroyed by a vice, something to shudder at: yet her honesty, her lack of self-justification, the eternal and naked humanness in it all, touched even the fastidious young girl.

“This awful thing is I!” the woman seemed to say. “This is my soul. May God help me, and Man pity me!”

Frances sat beside her till she fell asleep, wiser, kinder, better than she had ever been before.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I

Mr. Naylor telephoned the next morning.

“I’m waiting downstairs in the hall,” he said. “I don’t care to come up.”

Frances hurried into her hat and jacket and went down. She got into the motor-car beside him, indescribably relieved to get away from the flat for a while. She looked at him with a smile.

“Well!” she said.

“Well!” he repeated. “Upon my word, that was a jolly little party last night! That German chap!”

“You don’t know how sorry I felt, bringing that on you. But, of course, I never imagined——”

“You know, though, it’s no place for you, Miss Defoe. That woman’s not——”

“Please! You really can’t understand her as I do. She—really, she’s....”

She stopped, at a loss, but quite determined to protect the poor wretch who had begged for pity the night before.

“She has so many good points,” she went on, “Oh, I’m not quite an idiot, Mr. Naylor.... I see her as she is. Only—I’d rather dwell on her good qualities. She’s been very kind to me.”

Not for worlds would she have told anyone of the two dreadful scenes. She enlarged on Miss Eppendorfer’s friendliness and good humour and the excellence of her work.

“That’s all very well,” said he, “but I stick to it that it’s no place for you.”

They didn’t talk much more on the way down; Mr. Naylor was too much occupied with his driving, which was minutely careful. He took no risks, and he muttered furiously against those who did. He seemed to Frankie unnecessarily prudent; she would have liked to go faster, as lots of other cars did. However, a look at his frowning face reproved her; she felt that this driving business must be more difficult, more perilous than her inexperience imagined.

As soon as they reached the beach he proposed taking their swim at once, and she very readily agreed. Poor girl! She hadn’t been in the sea for years, since those long gone days, those happy days when she had been a school-girl. She was, it must be admitted, rather eager to “show off” to her Englishman, for she was a good swimmer, and not at all an unpleasant object in a bathing suit. She came out of her bath-house and walked down on to the beach, conscious of her splendid symmetry, her strong, straight limbs, her face gay and boyish under a tight rubber cap. It was obvious to both of them at once that Mr. Naylor was physically not at all her equal. Gone his chic, his superiority; he was thin, fragile, rather wretched. Within her stirred faintly an old, old instinct, perverted and crushed out through generations of false training, the instinct of the woman to seek for strength and beauty in her mate. Her smile was artificial.

“Beastly cold!” he grumbled.

But Frances dashed by him, through the breakers, and began swimming out in strong and beautiful strokes, her bare arms flashing up rhythmically, her white teeth showing in a broad smile. She looked back, and saw Mr. Naylor moving slowly near the shore; after ten minutes or so he came out on to the sand, and lay in the sun watching her. And presently began to wave.

She came inshore reluctantly.

“What is it?” she asked. “It’s glorious in the water to-day. I never want to come out!”

“It’s time to come out now,” he said.

“Oh, it can’t be! I’ll have to stop longer!”

“But, I say, I want my lunch. This isn’t much of a lark for me, you know, roasting out here like this.”

“Why don’t you go back into the water again?”

“I can’t. It gives me a chill.”

“A chill!” said Frances, and couldn’t keep a faint contempt out of her voice. “You’d better go and dress. I’ll be out presently.”

“I shouldn’t think of leaving you; you’re so rash. Go ahead, enjoy yourself; I’ll wait.”

His good nature conquered Frances; she gave one more look at the glittering sea and went back into her bath-house.

She had to wait quite twenty minutes for him.

“You’re quick, aren’t you?” he said, artlessly.

“Or is it that you’re slow?” she returned. Now he was his own self again, the imperturbable, the superior. She wished to forget the shivering, frail being who had for a time supplanted him.

He ordered an amazing lunch, in the old “Oriental,” which was still standing then, with its unique flavour; he saw people whom he knew by sight and could point out to Frankie. He ordered champagne, which she had never before tasted. He was like a prince, or rather, like a millionaire....

After this meal, which was nothing less than a banquet, Frances said she would have to go home.

“The awful cook’s gone out,” she explained, “and I’ll have to help poor Miss E. to get something ready.”

“What!” he cried. “Do you mean to tell me you’re going to cook!”

“And eat,” she answered, cheerfully. “Please don’t be mediæval.”

“I don’t like it. A girl of your class—and your ability——”

They were spinning along the road by the marshes, passed by an incessant stream of motors going down.

“It’s a confounded shame to go home now anyway,” he said. “If we could only have had the evening!”

“Another time,” she said, before she thought, and was rather confused at her own forwardness.

“I hope so,” he answered gravely, “I can’t tell you how much I—like to be with you. I—altogether—I’ve old Horace to see you.... Do you suppose you could meet him some time? Without his wife, I mean? It’s irregular, I know, but you’re not conventional.”

She said no, that she wasn’t.

“Could you set a time? Next Wednesday?”

And she said she thought that would do.

II

“You don’t mind if I go out to tea on Wednesday, do you?” Frances asked Miss Eppendorfer the next morning.

“Not a bit!” said she, cheerfully. “I like to see you enjoy yourself like a human being. Is it your English friend?”

“Yes. The only trouble is, I haven’t a thing fit to wear, and it’s at a hotel,” she said. “Couldn’t you come down town with me and help me pick out something?”

Miss Eppendorfer was only too pleased; it was one of her good days and she was cheerful and energetic. She led Frances from shop to shop, imperiously rejecting every suggestion.

“I know what suits you,” she insisted, “I’m a wonderful judge of value, too. You leave it all to me.”

At last she was pleased by a grey broadcloth suit.

“Oh, yes!” cried Frankie, ironically. “A hundred and fifty dollars is just what I always pay!”

“I’m going to get it for you.”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t!” she protested, shocked.

“You must. To make up for all I said that night,” whispered the authoress. “Be generous, Frances! Don’t be petty!”

She allowed herself to be persuaded, accepted the suit and with it a new hat and blouse. She felt guilty and ashamed and yet delighted. She was so very anxious to make a favourable impression on this brother Horace.

She started off, very nervous and still more ashamed. The whole exploit seemed wrong, meeting the man without his wife, and wearing clothes she could never have bought for herself.... It was common.

“Cheap,” she reflected.

But Horace would have made a supper-club respectable. They were waiting in the corridor; she saw her Mr. Naylor at once though he didn’t see her; slender and drooping, quietly conscious of his impeccable British elegance, he was watching the wrong door. Near him was a heavy, bull-necked, red-faced man with a black moustache and melancholy, bilious eyes, who smoked a big cigar and stared nowhere. This was Horace.

He surprised Frances by his lack of everything that pleased her in his brother. He was altogether the merchant, not a hint of the man-of-the-world. He shook hands with her and smiled, but it was a sad, dull smile. He was distrait, and couldn’t conceal it.

“Well,” he said, with a sigh, “Lead the way, Lionel, my boy!”

They entered an engaging little tea-room with shaded lamps and sofas. Lionel took charge of everything, chose a table, and ordered the cocktails, but the management of the conversation was evidently beyond him. There was a long and awkward silence, while the drinks were coming. No one looked at either of the others.

It was Horace who first revived, after two cocktails.

“Well,” he observed again, “He’s a handful. You’ll have to keep an eye on him, I can tell you.”

Frances was startled; was he talking to her?... She looked up and caught his gaze, melancholy and kindly, fixed on her.

“You’ll have all you can manage, with him,” he continued.

She was alarmed and confused. It wasn’t possible that he thought.... And yet, very evidently, he did think so, for he went on, with a sort of gloomy archness:

“I hope he won’t be too much for you.”

She was anxious to refute the suggestion of any responsibility for Lionel, to tell this brother, subtly and politely, but unmistakably, that he misread the situation. But she could not, on the spur of the moment, think of anything that would do.

“I don’t really know Mr. Naylor very well,” she attempted.

Horace smiled.

“Plenty of time!” he said.

And this time his glance wandered to his brother, and was curiously altered, rested upon that futile young face with limitless fidelity and affection——

“Yes,” he said again, fatuously, “You’ll have your hands full.”

Frances had a horrible feeling of being caught in a net.

“I’m afraid I can’t undertake such a responsibility,” she said, with a sickly smile.

Horace smiled indulgently at her. After a third cocktail, he was becoming a little garrulous on the subject of his brother; partly because he thought it would interest Frankie and partly because it was his great topic anyway. His pride in his brother was rather surprising to Frankie; she couldn’t know, of course, from what a stodgy, obscure family this charming irresponsibility had sprung, couldn’t imagine how audacious his extravagances appeared, how remarkable his social progress; in fine, she couldn’t see him as a Naylor.

It was not until much later that she divined something of the relations between these two. Sons of a well-to-do manufacturer, they had both “received advantages” in the way of education and so forth, but while Horace remained immutably the son of a wealthy manufacturer who had had “advantages,” Lionel in some mysterious way, not unusual in this world, had turned out to be aristocratic, elegant, fashionable. His brother took a naïve pride in this; he admired Lionel as he did royalty, not very useful, but immensely valuable in his place. He never urged him to go into business; he was quite satisfied that he should go his own dazzling way. For Horace was not the classic business man of stage and story, who despises and berates the idler; he was something much newer, the money-maker who is apologetic and secretly bewildered; who feels called upon to justify his activity. Lionel was what he would have liked to be, only that he knew it to be impossible. He acknowledged that they were of different clay.

He told Frankie how Lionel had no idea of time, and was always late.

How he kept the most exclusive people waiting for him and never had a proper excuse.

How he spent preposterous sums on handkerchiefs, his hobby.

How altogether idle and rude and popular he had been “at home.”

In spite of her common-sense, Frankie began to feel that the attentions of such a man were something to boast of, to treasure. He wasn’t rude to her, ever.

After a fourth cocktail and a minute sardine sandwich, Horace said he was obliged to go.

“Au revoir!” he said to Frankie, with a very bad accent. “If this boy gives you any trouble, you let me know, eh?”

He clasped her hand in his warm, moist one with genuine good-will, slapped Lionel on the shoulder, and went out, edging his way clumsily among the little low tables.

Lionel gave a sigh of comfort, and leaned across the table.

“May I have another cup?” he asked.

Frances was looking at him sternly.

“Mr. Naylor!” she said, “You have given your brother a false impression.”

He was startled.

“I ... so it seems,” he said, weakly, “I ... he does seem....”

“It isn’t fair,” she went on, “I’m surprised at you! What could I do? Or say? Mr. Naylor, really, it was not right of you!”

“I know it.... But I give you my word I never exactly said—anything. I dare say I was—oh, enthusiastic.... I suppose he drew his own conclusions.”

He went on, after a pause:

“I did talk a lot about you.... You see——”

He tapped his cigarette nervously on his plate.

“I say!” he said. “Couldn’t it be true, you know?”

She understood him well enough, and a bright colour surged into her face.

“What?” she asked, disingenuously.

“I mean—what Horace thinks.... I mean—do you think you could——”

She faltered.

“I don’t know.... It’s been such a short time——”

“You know that doesn’t matter. Time! Why, the first minute I saw you, there in that beastly school, I knew I was done for. You looked so lovely and so dignified. Such a lady. Just the sort of girl I’d always thought about. My lovely girl! My dear, beautiful girl!”

For some reason her eyes filled with tears. His voice touched her so, moved her so profoundly. She couldn’t pretend, couldn’t hesitate. Because she knew, too, perfectly well. She looked up at him with a trembling smile.

“It’s silly!” she said. “We don’t know each other.”

“I know you, darling, as well as if I’d seen you every day for a year.”

“But, really, we must be sensible,” she said, seriously. “We’ll have to wait—not commit ourselves to anything definite. We’ll be friends——”

“Not I! I want to commit myself as much as possible. Won’t you commit yourself just a little bit, darling girl? Just go so far as to say you like me?”

“You know I like you,” she said, smiling.

He could laugh now, tease her; he knew she was won.

They left the tea-room and began to stroll down Fifth Avenue. And at every crossing he took her arm and their eyes met, and a ridiculous and passionate happiness filled them both.

“My girl!” he whispered.

Frances was almost ashamed of being so happy; she was anxious to appear practical and reasonable. She said she had shopping to do, and that Lionel might come with her, if he liked. He insisted upon augmenting her little purchases, choosing very expensive things, and things he had realised she wanted. In spite of her independence, all this was delightful to her; she hesitated, refused, accepted....

A shop girl looked after them, was amused at their long, long glances and their unwarranted smiles: she thought them a well-matched couple, both so tall and so nice-looking and so well-bred. And she was very right; they were well-matched, by God Himself, Who had filled Lionel’s need of a strong and sober and honest lover, who had given to Frankie the gay and careless companion her heart required, the clinging and exigent affection she could so well support. Lionel had the power to soften the touch of austerity latent in her, the hint of priggishness; she had the nobility and the resoluteness which he needed as an example, a stimulus to his plastic soul. They had, in each other’s company, a sense of absolute completeness and satisfaction; they knew that this love was altogether right.

Frances inspected the new pocketbook he had bought her, so unnecessarily and unsuitably costly, and then again at Lionel’s happy face. And she would have liked to cry out what she and all women know enough to conceal:

“Oh, my love, I want to protect you, to care for you, to shield your raw pride, forever and ever to stand between you and the world!”

And that mustn’t be said. She knew she must call his weakness strength, or she would destroy him. No man must ever see his true self mirrored in a woman’s eyes. He could not endure it.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I

“But don’t worry, my dearest girl!” said Lionel.

“I can’t help it,” said Frances. “It’s such a waste. We could just as well take a train. Or anyway the taxi needn’t wait. We could always find another.”

They were on the veranda of a hotel at Long Beach, on a Sunday afternoon, part of the crowd that Lionel liked so much.

“We might not,” he said. “There’s such a mob here. Better take no chances. As for the train—no, thanks! Now, do be a nice kid, and not scold me. Don’t you want me to have any pleasures at all?”

“That’s not the question. Oh, Lionel, we could have just as nice a time without being so dreadfully wasteful. It’s ... why, Lionel, it’s mad!”

She had a genuine dislike for extravagance and frivolity. Old traditions from remote Defoe ancestors urged her always toward prudence and restraint. She really couldn’t enter into Lionel’s mood, couldn’t for a moment be careless, and would never pretend to be. She wanted dignity and purpose; she was fond enough of fun, but it wasn’t his kind. She could not enjoy watching other people spend money. Lionel didn’t care to swim, or to walk; he was quite happy to sit on a crowded veranda, drinking cocktails and chaffing his serious girl. He was happy now, in watching the streams of people going in and out of the hotel, over-dressed, over-perfumed, over-fed, over-stimulated. But there was nothing here for Frankie.

All this life that Lionel had pulled her into distressed her. He had urged her to give up her business course, and instead they went out somewhere every evening. Miss Eppendorfer was always ready to let her go, as long as she wasn’t left alone. She absolutely approved of Lionel. From her point of view, he was the ideal lover, attractive and lavish. He was continually bringing presents to Frankie, flowers, chocolates and books. He refused to believe that she was not very fond of sweets, and was deaf to her hints that her taste in reading was not his. She felt like a prig, a bluestocking, with her perpetual advice and rebuke. Her serious soul was in revolt against this waste of time; often when they were at some blatant cabaret, she would be longing for her quiet room and a good book. She was really weary of this ceaseless pleasure-hunt, disgusted, and yet hadn’t the heart to deny his pleasures to Lionel. He never read a book, and was no more capable or desirous of quiet than a small boy.

She took it for granted that he was more or less a rich man, and that as his wife she would be obliged to endure a good deal of this sort of existence. She did ask him, though, if he wouldn’t just as soon live out of town, and he said, whatever she liked. So she was able to picture herself in one of those charming suburban houses on the Sound, with a fine garden, and horses, and dogs. And undoubtedly children; lovely, happy children.

He had started to work in his brother’s office, which pleased Frankie, for she had the American woman’s dislike for an unoccupied man. He said he was doing well, and talked of an early marriage. But that, too, was against Frankie’s principles. She wanted to wait, not because she wasn’t sure of herself or of him, but because a hasty marriage appeared somehow indecent to her. She even refused to tell her own people.

“Wait till I’ve known you a little longer,” she said.

Taken all in all, this “being engaged” was not what Frankie had expected, was by no means the happiest time of her life, as she had always been told it would be. With Lionel, per se, she could find no fault. If he had been made to order for a Defoe he could not have been more satisfactory. He was almost like a brother in his manner, never too ardent, too pressing, or in any way offending her squeamishness. It was for this she really adored him, for his delicacy and genuine kindliness. She was too ignorant fully to appreciate it; she was simply vaguely thankful that he was not like “some men” of whom she had read and heard.

Moreover, she had a little of Horace’s absurd admiration for Lionel’s social graces. All the solid, substantial, serious people in the world have it, this irrational and somewhat pathetic regard for the others, the spenders, the wasters, the ones who refuse to conform to their righteous code, the gay and audacious good-for-nothings. She knew that she wouldn’t have dared to do as he did, live after his style. Sometimes she had misgivings, fancied her ideas for the future were sordid and petty, her hope for an orderly, self-respecting sort of existence, the house in the suburbs, with books and lectures and intellectual friends.... An existence that had no place for the poor fellow’s febrile excitements.

Characteristically she got Lionel into the picture by assuring herself that he would change.

II

There came one day a careless little note, scrawled in huge letters on a bizarre card with a purple and gold monogram:

“Won’t you come for dinner on Thursday?

“Julie Naylor.”

Lionel explained it to her when he arrived that evening.

“Horace made her,” he said. “If she had her own way, I don’t think she’d ever ask a woman into the house. Of course she’s out of the question. Impossible. But for Horace’s sake, I wish you’d come. He’s a decent old boy. And he likes you. Thought you were the prettiest thing he’s seen—— You’ll go, won’t you?”

Upon reflection, it seemed the correct thing to do, and she consented.

Miss Eppendorfer helped her to get ready on the very important evening. She took the greatest interest in the whole affair, was very arch about it. Frances persisted in her “nothing really settled yet,” but Miss Eppendorfer refused to believe it.

“Oh, I know all about such things!” she said.

This evening was to mark the end of the feeble pretence, anyway. Lionel came for her a little early, and Miss Eppendorfer undertook to entertain him until Frankie was ready. She heard them talking gaily together, in their usual vein of preposterous flirtation. She surmised the customary brandy and soda, and she felt her invariable shade of annoyance at their camaraderie. If Lionel would only be—not condescending of course, but—oh, a little more——

An unusually loud shriek from the authoress startled her.

“Oh, you extravagant boy! What a beauty! What a perfect beauty!”

She hurried a bit then, and entered the room, looking her very best and loveliest, dignified, concealing her curiosity. They were on the sofa side by side, a little table before them holding the siphon and the brandy bottle, their heads together over something in the authoress’s hand. Directly she saw Frankie, she thrust the thing back at Lionel.

“You must show it to her!” she cried, in great excitement.

Lionel extended his hand, proffered her her ring——

It was the conventional single diamond, set in platinum, a stone so pure and beautiful and of such a size that Frances almost gasped. Her face showed no pleasure at first, nothing but blank dismay. She barely stopped herself in time from saying:

“But oh, how terribly expensive!”

He put it on her finger, and she smiled in duty bound. But secretly it terrified her. It was so much too splendid. Perhaps she had a premonition that it was an unlucky ring——

Lionel was disappointed. He looked into Frankie’s face as they sat in the taxi, and waited for her to praise it.

“Don’t you like it?” he asked, at last, as she said nothing.

“Oh, yes, dear,” she answered, touched by his wistful tone, and, as she very rarely did, kissed him. “It’s beautiful. Too beautiful!”

III

Horace lived in an overwhelmingly grand apartment house on Riverside Drive. His private door was opened by a man servant, and Frances was conducted to a boudoir where a French maid waited to assist her. She was a little nervous at the unexpectedly sumptuous tone of the establishment; she wasn’t accustomed to rich people. She dreaded meeting the mistress of such a household, not only on account of the unfavourable reports she had had from Lionel, but also on account of her richness. A most ignoble awe, from which no living soul is immune.... It might be too that she felt a warning shudder, could divine the shadow of the pain she was to suffer here. She never again entered that house, but she remembered always every detail of what she had seen there. It was the setting, the stage of such an unforgettably bitter scene.

She was glad to find Horace alone, although she was not pleased by her hostess’s delay. He was in the “library,” a panelled room, dimly and richly lighted by Oriental lamps and crowded with massive furniture. (She didn’t see any books.) He was very cordial and kind, though melancholy. He apologised for Julie.

“She was late getting in,” he explained, “and it takes her the deuce of a time to get herself ready.”

It certainly did, for it was quite half an hour more before she appeared.

“I’m sorry, people!” she cried, running into the room, and swept them all with a smile.

This Julie, the impossible, the cruel, the vulgar! This sparkling lovely thing, with her piquant dark face and the figure of a nymph! Frances found it hard to believe.... Except that she was over-dressed, in a glittering sort of ball gown, and that her voice was not at all agreeable.

“I shouldn’t call her ‘impossible,’” she thought. “In fact, I think she’s fascinating.”

And so long as she confined herself solely to looking at Julie, she did find her fascinating. She was very young—years younger than Horace, and filled with an ardent vitality. She produced an extraordinary effect of brilliancy, although her conversation was far from clever. She was one of those people who absolutely take one’s breath away; her glances, her gestures, her gipsy vividness wrought a spell; one could watch her in a daze, indefinitely.