PART III

Julia and Laurence were to dine with Mr. and Mrs. Hurst. Of late Laurence had shown an unusual measure of social punctiliousness. Julia realized that his new determination to see and be with people was a part of his resistance to suffering. She thought bitterly that his regard for the opinions of others was greater than his regard for her.

Julia put on a thin summer gown, very simply made, a light green sash, and a large black hat. Her misery had pride in itself, but when she looked in the glass she was pleased, and it was difficult to preserve the purity of her unhappiness. As she descended the stairs at Laurence's side she felt guiltily the trivial effect of her becoming dress. She wanted him to notice her. "I'm afraid we are late."

His fine eyes, with their sharp far-away expression, rested on her without seeming to take cognizance of her. "I hope not. Mrs. Hurst is a hostess who demands punctuality." He spoke to her as to a child. There was something cruel in his kindness. For fear of exposing himself he refused her equality.

If he would only love her—that is to say, desire her—Julia knew that she would be willing to make herself even more abject than she had been, and that it would hurt her less than his considerate obliviousness. Laurence had ordered a taxi-cab. The driver waited at the curbstone in the twilight. He turned to open the door for the two as they came out. Julia was avidly, yet resentfully, aware of his surreptitious admiration. She told herself that her sex was so beggared that she accepted without pride its recognition by a strange menial.

It was a beautiful cool evening. The glass in the taxi-cab was down. The cold stale smell of the city, blowing in their faces, was mingled with the perfume of the fading flowers in the park through which they passed. The trees rose strangely from the long dim drives. Here and there lights, surrounded by trembling auras, burst from the foliage. Far off were tall illuminated buildings, and, about them, in the deep sky, the reflection was like a glowing silence. The wall of buildings had the appearance of retreating continually while the cab approached, as if the huge blank bulks of hotels and apartment houses, withdrawing, held an escaping mystery.

Laurence scarcely spoke. Julia's sick nerves responded, with a feeling of expectation, to the vagueness of her surroundings. Her heart, beating terrifically in her breast, seemed to exist apart from her, unaffected by her depression and fatigue. It was too alive. She cried inwardly for mercy from it.

Mrs. Hurst's home was a narrow, semi-detached house with a brown-stone front and a bow window. From the upper floor it had a view of the park. When Julia and Laurence arrived, a limousine and Mr. Hurst's racer were already drawn up before the place. There were lights in one of the rooms at the right, and, between the heavy hangings that shrouded its windows, one had glimpses of figures.

Laurence said sneeringly, "Hurst has arrived, hasn't he! Affluent simplicity in a brown-stone front. You are honored that Mrs. Hurst is carrying you to glory with her."

Julia said, "But they really are quite helpless with their money, Laurence. Mrs. Hurst has a genuine instinct for something better."

"How ceremonious is this occasion anyway? I don't know whether I am equal to the frame of mind that should accompany evening dress."

"There will only be one or two people. Mrs. Hurst knows how we dislike formal parties."

Mr. Hurst, waving the servant back, opened the front door himself. He was a tall, narrow-shouldered man with a thin florid face. His pale humorous blue eyes had a furtive expression of defense. His mouth was thin and weak. His manner suggested a mixture of braggadocio and self-distrust. He dressed very expensively and correctly, but there was that in his air which somehow deprecated the success of his appearance. His sandy hair, growing thin on top, was brushed carefully away from his high hollow temples. The hand he held out, with its carefully manicured nails, was stubby-fingered and shapeless. "Well, well, Farley! How goes it? I've been trying to get hold of you. Want to go for a little fishing trip?" He was confused because he had not spoken to Julia first. "How d'ye do, Mrs. Farley? Think you could spare him for a few days?" Mr. Hurst's greeting of Laurence was a combination of bluff familiarity and resentful respect. When he looked at Julia his eyes held hers in bullying admiration.

Julia had never been able to say just where his elusive intimacy verged on presumption. Feeling irritated and helpless and sweetly sorry for herself, she lowered her lids.

"My—dear!" Mrs. Hurst kissed Julia. "How sweet you look! How do you do, Mr. Farley? It was nice of you to let Julia persuade you to come to us. We really feel you are showing your confidence in us. Julia, dear girl, tells me you have as much of an aversion to parties as Charles and I have. This will be a homely evening. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson are here, and there is a young Hindoo who has been giving some charming talks at the Settlement House. He speaks very poor English but he's so interested in America. He's only become acquainted with a few American women. I want him to meet Julia. I think he'll amuse her too." Mrs. Hurst's short little person was draped in a black lace robe embroidered with jet. She squinted when she smiled. Minute creases appeared about her bright eyes. Her expression was gentle and deceitful. Her arms, protruding from her sleeve draperies, were thin, and their movements weak. Her wedding ring and one large diamond-encircled turquoise hung loosely on the third finger of her left hand. Her hands were meager and showed that her bones were very small and delicate. About her hollow throat she wore a black velvet band, and her cheeks, no longer firm, were, nevertheless, childishly full above it. Though she said nothing that justified it, one felt in her a sort of affectionate malice toward those with whom she spoke. In her flattering acknowledgment of Julia's appearance there was something insidiously contemptuous. "Come away with me, child, and we'll dispose of that hat. Williams!" She turned to the Negro servant whom Mr. Hurst had intercepted at the door. She nodded toward Mr. Farley. The Negro went forward obsequiously.

"Yes, Williams, take Mr. Farley's hat," Mr. Hurst said. Then, in humorous confidence, sotto voce, "How about a drink, Farley? My wife has that young Hindoo here. This is likely to be a dry intellectual evening. That may suit you, but I have to resort to first aid. Want to talk to you about that fishing trip. Come on to my den with me."

Shortly after this, Julia, descending the stairs with her hostess, found Laurence and Mr. Hurst in the hall again. Laurence, his lips twisted disagreeably, was listening with polite but irritating quiescence to Mr. Hurst's incessant high-pitched talk. Mr. Hurst, who had been surreptitiously glancing toward the shadowy staircase that hung above his guest's head, was quick to observe the approach of the women. He had always found fault with what he considered to be Julia's coldness, but he admired her tall figure and her fine shoulders. "Hello, hello! Here they are!"

"Charles!" Mrs. Hurst was whimsically disapproving. "Why haven't you taken Mr. Farley in to meet our guests? You are an erratic host."

Mr. Hurst moved forward. "That's all right! That's all right! Farley and I had some strategic confidences. You take him off and show him your Hindoo. I want Mrs. Farley to come out and see my rose garden, out in the court. I'm going to have a few minutes alone with her before you conduct her to the higher spheres and leave me struggling in my natural earthly environment. I won't be robbed of a little tête-à-tête with a pretty woman, just because there's an Oriental gentleman in the house who can tell her all about her astral body. Did you ever see your astral body, Mrs. Farley?"

"Boo!" Mrs. Hurst waved him off and pushed Julia toward him. "Go on, if she has patience with you. But mind you only keep her there a moment. I've told Mr. Vakanda she was coming and I'm sure he's already uneasy. Rose garden, indeed! It's quite dark, Charles! Come, Mr. Farley. Put this scarf about you, dear." She took a scarf up and threw it around Julia's shoulders.

"Ta-ta!" Mr. Hurst came confidently to Julia, and they walked out together across a glass-enclosed veranda that was brilliantly lit. Descending a few steps they were among the roses. "Autumn roses," said Mr. Hurst. The bushes drooped in vague masses about them. Here and there a blossom made a pale spot among the obscure leaves. Where the glow from the veranda stretched along the paths, the grass showed like a blue mist over the earth, and clusters of foliage had a carven look. The dark wall of the next house, in which the lighted windows were like wounds, towered above them. Over it hung the black sky covered with an infinite flashing dust of stars. Julia's face was in shadow, but her hair glistened on the white nape of her neck where the black lace scarf had fallen away.

Mr. Hurst had made a large sum of money from small beginnings. He would have enjoyed in peace the sense of power it gave him, and the indulgence in fine wines and foods and expensive surroundings for which he lived, but his wife prevented it. He had married her when they were both young and impecunious. She had been a school teacher in a mid-western city. She had managed to convince him that in marrying him she conferred an honor upon him, and she succeeded now in making him feel out of place and absurd in the environment which his efforts had created, which she, however, turned to her own use. Instead of flaunting his success in boastful generosity, according to his inclination, he found himself compelled to deprecate it. He had a secret conviction that he was a man to be reckoned with, but openly, and especially before his wife's friends, he ridiculed himself, perpetrating laborious and repetitious jokes at his own expense, just as she ridiculed him when they were alone.

Mrs. Hurst was chiefly interested in what she considered culture, and in welfare work, and among her acquaintances referred to her husband affectionately as if he were a child. She had no connection which would give her the entrée to socially exclusive circles, and she was wise enough not to attempt pretenses which it would have been impossible for her to sustain. Her husband's friends were mostly selfmade and newly rich. She was affable to them but maintained toward them a mild but superior reserve. She expressed tolerantly her contempt of social ostentation and suggested that among Mr. Hurst's play-fellows she was condescending from her more vital and intellectual pursuits. Men who drank and played golf or poker between the hours of business considered her "brainy," but "a damned nice woman". She was generous to impecunious celebrities of whom she had been told to expect success. On one occasion when she and Mr. Hurst were sailing for England she was photographed on shipboard in the company of a popular novelist. The picture of the novelist, showing Mrs. Hurst beside him in expensive furs, appeared in a woman's magazine. She had never seen the man since, but she always referred to him as "a charming person". She was frequently called upon to conduct "drives" for charity funds. At masquerade balls organized for similar purposes her name appeared with others better known and she could honestly claim acquaintance with women whose frivolous occupations she professed to despise. She was an assiduous attendant at concerts and the public lectures which were given from time to time by men of letters or exponents of the arts. References to sex annoyed her. The vagueness of her aspirations sometimes led her into fits of depression and discouragement, but she had a small crabbed pride that prevented her from allowing any one—least of all, perhaps, her husband—to see what she felt. She was conscientiously attentive to children, but actually bored by them. She seldom thought of her own childhood, and she sentimentalized her past only when she reflected on her early girlhood and the instinctive longing for withheld refinements which had led her away from a sordid uncultured home into the profession of a teacher. Often her husband irritated her almost uncontrollably, but she never admitted that the moods he aroused in her had any significance. She was ashamed of him and called the feeling by other names.

Mr. Hurst's frustrated vanity consoled itself somewhat when he was alone before his mirror, for even his wife admitted that he was distinguished looking. He consumed bottle after bottle of a prescription which, so a specialist assured him, would make his hair come back. Always gay and affectionate and generally liked, he had a secret sensitiveness that he himself was but half aware of, and which no one who knew him suspected. He had never abandoned the romantic hope that some day he would meet a woman who would understand him. It was his unacknowledged desire to have his wife's opinion of him repudiated that made him perpetually unfaithful to her. Years ago he had been astonished to discover that even the women whom his wife introduced him to, who looked down on his absence of culture, and whose intellectual earnestness really seemed to him grotesque, were quite willing to take him seriously when he made love to them. He was bewildered but elated in perceiving the vulnerability of those he was invited to revere. Once he learned this it awakened something subtle and feminine in his nature and tempted him to unpremeditated cruelties. Though his sex entanglements were, as a rule, gross and banal enough, and quickly succeeded one another, he treasured at intervals a plaintive conviction that some day he would meet the woman who had, as he expressed it, "the guts to love him". Musing on this, he found in it the excuse for all the unpleasing episodes in which he took part. Outwardly cynical, he was sentimental to the point of bathos. He had one fear that obsessed him, the fear of growing old, so that the woman, when she met him, might not be able to recognize him.

He had always been a little afraid of Julia and had a secret desire, on the rare occasions when they met, to hurt her in some way that might force her to concede their equality. He called himself a mixture of pig and child and when he met any of his wife's "high-brow" friends he envied them and wanted to trick them into exhibiting something of the pig also. Julia was young and pretty. He sighed and wished her more "human". He had never found her so charming as she seemed to-night. Under the accustomed stimulus of alcohol he relaxed most easily into a mood of affectionate self-pity. Without being drunk in any perceptible way, he loved himself and he loved every one, and his conviction of human pathos was strong. Julia's tense yet curiously subdued manner showed him that she was no longer oblivious to him. He fancied that there was already between them that sudden rapport which came between him and women who were sexually sensible of his personality. "You aren't angry with me for taking you away like this?"

Julia said, "How could I be? I wish all social gatherings were in the open. It seems terrible to shut one's self indoors on these beautiful nights."

Charles Hurst was impelled to talk about himself. He did not know how to begin, and coughed embarrassedly. He imagined that Julia was ready to hear, and already he was grateful for the regard he anticipated. "Don't mind if I light a cigar?"

"I should like it."

"Don't smoke cigarettes, do you? Some of the ladies who come here shedding sweetness and light are hard smokers."

Julia shook her head negatively. "I don't. But you surely can't object, as a principle, to women smoking?"

"No. I think my objections are chiefly—chiefly what my wife—what Catherine would call esthetic. I'm not strong on principles of any sort. Don't take myself seriously enough."

Julia could make out his nonchalant angular pose as he stood looking down at her. As he held a match to his cigar the glow on his face showed his narrow regular features, his humorously ridiculing mouth, and his pale eyes caught in an unconscious expression of fright.

Julia said, "I'm afraid you take yourself very seriously indeed, or you wouldn't be so perpetually on the defensive." Poor Mr. Hurst! This evening she could not bear to be isolated by conventional reserves, even with him. It flattered her unhappiness to feel that he was a child. And this evening it seemed to her desperately necessary that she touch something living which would respond involuntarily to the contact.

Mr. Hurst was disconcerted. He took the cigar out of his mouth and examined the glowing tip which dilated in the dark as he stared at it. Tears had all at once come to his eyes. He wondered if he were drunker than he had imagined. The moment he suspected any one of a serious interest in him it robbed him of his aplomb. "Don't read me too well, Mrs. Farley. You know I'm not really much of a person. Coarse-fibered American type. No interests beyond business and all that. Good poker player. Hell of a good friend—when you let him. But commonplace. Damn commonplace. Nothing worth while at all from your point of view."

They strolled along the path further into the shadows. Julia was astonished by the ill-concealed emotion in Mr. Hurst's humorous voice. His transparency momentarily assuaged the tortures of her self-distrust. "How can you say that? My human predilections are not narrowed down to any particular type, I hope."

"Oh, well, I know—you and Catherine—miles over my head, all of it. Lectures on the Fourth Dimension. Some girl with adenoids here the other night been studying 'Einstein'. Damned if it had done her any good. Yes, what that gal needed was somebody to hug her." Julia was conscious that he was turning toward her. "Crass outlook, eh?" He laughed apologetically.

"She probably did," Julia said. They laughed together.

Mr. Hurst felt all at once unreasoningly depressed. He wanted to touch her as a child wants to touch the person who pleases it. But the sophisticated element in his nature intervened. He despised his own simplicity. "Do you find yourself getting anywhere in the pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful? Honestly now, Mrs. Farley. I've had the whole program shoved at me—not that Catherine isn't the best of women, bless her little soul. You know the life we tired business men lead pretty much resembles that of the good old steady pack horse that does the work. We dream about green pastures and all that, but never get much closer to it. And when you get to the end of things you begin to wonder if your plodding did anybody any good—if anything ever did anybody any good. I've got no use for cynicism—consider it damn cheap. Wish some time I was a little bit more of a cynic. But I'm lost. Hopelessly lost. I take a highball every now and then because my—I think my mind hurts." He halted suddenly and they were looking into each other's vague faces. "This talk getting too damn serious, eh? Something about you to-night that invites a fellow to make a fool of himself."

"I hope not," Julia said. "I like you for talking frankly."

"Oh, I'm not too damn frank. We can't afford it in this world of hard knocks. Now to you, now, I'm not saying all that I'd like to, by a jugful."

"Then you don't make as much of a distinction between me and the crowd as I hoped."

Charles had let his cigar go out. He kept turning it over and over in his stiff fingers that she could not see. He felt that only when he held a woman in his arms and she was robbed of her conventional defenses could he speak openly to her. With other attractive women he had come quickly to a point like this where he wanted to talk of his inner life. He imagined it would give him relief if he could touch Julia's dress and put his head in her lap. The terrible fear of revealing himself before his wife and her friends had stimulated his imagination toward abandon. When he was a child his mother had not loved him. She was a defiant person. She was ashamed of him because he allowed himself to be victimized by all the things against which she had futilely rebelled. He had felt himself despised though he had never understood the reason. His mother found continual fault with him and never petted him. One day a girl cousin much older than he had discovered him in a corner crying and had comforted him, and had allowed him to put his head in her lap. As he had never gotten over considering himself from a child's standpoint, his adult visions always culminated in a similar moment of release. Whenever he became sentimental about a woman he imagined that he would some day put his head in her lap. He had been, in his own mind, so thoroughly convicted of weakness that the development of strength no longer appealed to him as a means of self-fulfilment. He abandoned himself to an incurable dependence for which he had not as yet found a permanent object. It eased him when he could evoke the maternal in a mistress. "Aren't we all—somewhat on the defensive toward each other?" he said after a minute.

Julia was reminded again of what she thought to be her own tragedy. She felt reckless and wanted some one into whom to pour herself. She imagined herself lost in the dark garden, crushed between the walls and bright windows of the houses. In some indefinable way she identified herself with the million stars, flashing and remote in the black distance of the sky that showed narrowly above the roofs. "Yes," she said. "And so uselessly. People are so pathetic in their determination not to recognize what they are. If we ever had the courage to stop defending ourselves for a moment—But none of us have, I'm afraid." She carried the pity which she had for herself over to him. She had noticed how thin his face was, that the bold gaze with which he looked at her was only an expression of concealment, and that there were strained lines at the corners of his good-tempered mouth. Yes, in the depths of his pale eyes with their conscious glint of humor there was undoubtedly something eager and almost blankly disconcerted.

Charles could not answer her at once. He threw his cigar aside. His hand trembled a little. I wonder how drunk I am, he said to himself. He decided that he was helpless in the clutch of his own impulses. He thought, A damn fool now as always. Have I got this woman sized up wrong? She's a dear. Here goes. Poor little thing! Gosh, I know she can't be happy with that self-engrossed ass she's married to! In his more secret nature he was proud of his own temerity. "Damn it all, Mrs. Farley—Julia—" He hesitated. "I've queered myself right off by calling you Julia, haven't I?" His laugh was forced and unhappy. He glanced over his shoulder toward the house.

Julia was alarmed by the unexpected immanence of something she was trying to ignore. She kept repeating to herself, He's a child! Her thoughts grew more disconnected each instant. She wanted to go away, yet she half knew that she was demanding of Charles the very thing that terrified her. "Of course not. Mrs. Hurst calls me Julia, why shouldn't you?" Her tone was intended to lift their talk to a plane of unsexed naturalness.

"Yes, by George, why shouldn't I! She calls you that a good deal as if she were your mother." He paused. "Did you know I'd reached the ripe old age of forty-one?" (He was really forty-two.)

"It doesn't shock me."

"Well, I wish it did. I don't like to be taken so damn much for granted." (He wanted to tell her that Catherine was three years older than he, but his sense of fair play withheld him.) "An old man of my age has no right to go around looking for some one to understand him, has he?"

"Why not? I'm afraid we do that to the end of time, Mr. Hurst."

"Say, now, honestly, Mrs. Farley—Julia—I can't lay myself wide open to anybody who insists on calling me Mr. Hurst. I feel as if I were a hundred and seven." He tried to ingratiate himself with his boyishness.

"I haven't any objection to calling you Charles." (Julia thought uncomfortably of Mrs. Hurst and, remembering her, was embarrassed.) "Don't feel hurt if I'm not able to do it at once. Certain habits of thought are very hard to get rid of."

"And I suppose you've been in the habit of considering me in the sexless antediluvian class!"

"You've forgotten that Laurence—that my husband is as old as you are."

When Julia mentioned her husband, Charles's impetuosity was dampened. It upset him and made him unhappy. However, he was determined to sustain his impulses. "Yes, I had."

Silence.

Charles wanted to cry. "You know I appreciate it awfully that you are willing to enter into the holy state of friendship with an obvious creature like myself. Catherine says you're a wonderful woman, and she's a damned good judge—of her own kind, that is."

"I'm afraid she's flattered me. I wish you weren't so humble about our friendship. I am as grateful as you are for anything genuine."

"Yes, I'm too confounded humble. I know I am. Always was. You know I'm not really lacking in self-respect, Miss Julia."

"Of course you aren't. You seem to me one of the most self-respecting people I know."

Charles was silent a long time. He knew that he was being carried away on a familiar current. By God, she means it! he said to himself. He would refuse to regard anything but the present moment. "How does it happen you and I never came together like this before? I'd got into the habit of thinking you were one of these icy Dianas that had an almighty contempt for any one as well rooted in Mother Earth as I am."

Julia laughed uncomfortably. "That's a mixed metaphor." Then she said seriously, "I want to understand things—not to try to escape. It seems to me we must all go back to Mother Earth if we try to do that." She added, "I'm afraid we are making ourselves delinquent. We mustn't abandon Mrs. Hurst and her guests altogether."

They turned toward the veranda. They were walking side by side and inadvertently Charles's hand brushed Julia's. He caught her fingers. She made a slight gesture of repulsion which he scarcely observed. Then her hand was relinquished to him. "Confound these social amenities! I thought you were going to be my mother-confessor, Miss Julia." Until he touched her hand he had been conscious of their human separateness and his sensuous impulses had been in abeyance. With the feel of her flesh, she became simply the woman he wanted to kiss, the possessor of a beautiful throat, and of mysterious breasts that compelled him familiarly through the dim folds of her white dress. His acquisitive emotion was savage and childlike. Here was a strange thing which menaced and invited him. He wanted to know it, to tear it apart so that he need no longer be afraid of it. Already he annihilated it and loved it for being subject to him. He leaned toward her and when she lifted her face to him he kissed her. He felt the shudder of surprise that passed over her. "Julia—don't hate me. Child, I'm going to fall in love with you! I know it!" His voice was smothered in her hair. He kissed her eyes and her mouth again. Trembling, Julia was silent. He wondered recklessly if she despised him, but while he wondered he could not leave her. He felt embittered toward her because she awakened his dormant sensuality and he supposed that women like her were superior to the necessities that left him helpless.

"Please!" Julia said. When his mouth was pressed against hers she was suffocated by the same thrill of astonishment and despair which she had experienced when she first allowed Dudley Allen to take her. When she was able to speak she said, "Oh, we are so pathetic and absurd—both of us! It's so hopelessly meaningless."

He was excited and elated. In a broken voice, he said, "So you think I am pathetic and absurd? I am, child. I don't care! I don't care!" He thought that she was referring to the general opinion of him. He hardened toward her, while, at the same moment, a wave of physical tenderness enveloped him. Stealthily, he exulted in the capacity he possessed for sexual ruthlessness. He knew she could not suspect it. He would be honest with her only when it became impossible for her to evade him.

They heard footsteps and turned from each other with a common instinct of defense. Mrs. Hurst was descending the steps from the lighted porch. "I have a bone to pick with that spouse of mine," she called pleasantly when she could see them. Charles had taken out a fresh cigar and was lighting a match.

"Hello, hello! Am I in trouble again?" Charles fumbled for Julia's hand, and gave it a squeeze, but dropped it as his wife drew near.

Mrs. Hurst's figure was in silhouette before them. "You'll spoil my dinner party, Charles! Julia, child, I'm afraid you need reprimanding too. You have to be stern with Charles." Her tone was truly vexed, but so frankly so that it was evident she suspected nothing amiss.

"I'm sorry if I am in disfavor." Julia's voice was cold. In her nihilistic frame of mind she wished that her hostess had discovered the compromising situation.

Julia's reply was irritating and Mrs. Hurst's displeasure inwardly deepened. She felt stirring in her a chronic distrust and animosity toward other women, but would give no credence to her own emotion. "Come, child, don't be ridiculous! I suppose I can't blame Charles for trying to steal you from me. I'm sure he wanted to talk to you about himself. It's the one thing he cannot resist." She laughed, a forced pleasant little laugh, and caught Julia's arm in a determined caressing pressure. "Come. We're all going to be good. Mr. Vakanda is waiting to take you in to dinner." Julia followed her toward the house. "Come, Charles!" Mrs. Hurst commanded him abruptly over her shoulder. The manner in which she spoke to him suggested strained tolerance.

Charles's immediate relief at not having been seen was succeeded by complacency. To deceive his wife was for him to experience a naïve sense of triumph. Poor little Kate! He could even be sorry for her.

Julia more than ever wanted to feel that Laurence's refusal of her was forcing upon her a promiscuous and degrading attitude toward sex. She said, "I'm sure the fault is mine. I couldn't resist the night and the roses."

"Now don't try to defend him. The roses were his excuse, not yours." Mrs. Hurst wondered how they had been able to see anything of the roses in such a light. She wished to forget about it. "Mollie Wilson has been telling us how difficult the role of a mother is these days. She says she envies you May with her amenability. Lucy has some of the most startlingly advanced conceptions of what her mother should let her do."

Charles, walking almost on their heels, interrupted them. "It would be an insult to Ju—to Mrs. Farley if I needed an excuse for carrying her off for a minute." He cleared his throat. "Say, Kate, damn it all, will you and she be upset if I call her Julia? I like her as well as you do."

Again Mrs. Hurst was irritated and inexplicably disturbed. It was Charles—not Julia—of course. Any woman. He's always like that! "Then I shall expect to begin calling Mr. Farley Laurence," she said acidly. She spoke confidentially to Julia. "He can't resist them, dear—any of them. Pretty women. You'll have to put up with his admiration. All my nicest friends do."

"The dickens they do!" Charles grumbled jocosely. His wife's tone made him nervous. He was suspicious of her.

When they came up on the lighted veranda a maid passed them, a neat good-looking young woman in black with inquisitive eyes. Julia caught on the servant's face what seemed an expression of inquiry and amusement. Charles, who had often tried to flirt with the girl, glanced at her shamefacedly and immediately lowered his gaze. Damn these women! Julia, feeling guilty and antagonistic, observed Mrs. Hurst, but found that she appeared as usual, sweet and negatively self-contained, yet suggesting faintly a hidden malice.

They walked through a long over-furnished hall and entered the drawing room. The men rose: the Hindoo, good-looking but with a softness that would inevitably repel the Anglo-Saxon; Mr. Wilson, stout and jovial, his small eyes twinkling between creases of flesh, the bosom of his shirt bulging over his low-cut vest; Laurence, clumsy in gesture, kind, but almost insulting in his composure.

During the evening Julia could not bring herself to meet Laurence's regard, nor did she again look directly at Mr. Hurst. Charles, after some initial moments of readjustment when he found it difficult to join in the general talk, recovered himself with peculiar ease. Indeed his later manner showed such pronounced elation that Julia wondered if it were not eliciting some unspoken comment. When he turned toward her she was aware of the furtive daring of his expression, though she refused to make any acknowledgment of it. He laughed a great deal, made boisterous jokes uttered in the falsetto voice he affected when he was inclined to comicality, and, when his jests were turned upon himself, chuckled immoderately in appreciation of his own discomfiture. The Hindoo, whose bearing displayed extraordinary breeding, had opaque eyes full of distrust. His good nature under Charles's jibes was assumed with obvious effort and did not conceal his polite contempt. During dinner and afterward Charles plied every one, and particularly the men, with drink. Mrs. Hurst had always been divided between the attractions of the elegance which demanded a fine taste in wines and liqueurs, and her moral aversion to alcohol. She never served wines when she and Charles were alone, and to-night she was provoked by his ill-bred insistence that the glasses of her guests be refilled.

When the meal was over and the men had returned to the drawing room, Charles seemed to be in a state of fidgets. His face and even his helpless-looking hands were flushed. He walked about continually, and was perpetually smoothing his carefully combed hair over the baldish spot on the top of his head. Mrs. Wilson, who was florid and coarsely good-looking, with her iron-gray hair, admired his distinguished figure in its well-cut clothes. His flattering manner when he talked to her made her feel self-satisfied. Julia, though she had honestly protested to Charles that she did not smoke, indulged in a cigarette. Mrs. Wilson also lit one and expelled the smoke from her pursed mouth in jerky unaccustomed puffs. Mrs. Hurst's dislike of tobacco was equal to her repugnance to alcohol. She refused to smoke but was careful to show that her distaste for cigarettes was a personal idiosyncrasy. She made little amused grimaces at the smokers and treated them as if they were irresponsible children. Mrs. Wilson, in talking to Mr. Vakanda, contrived many casual and contemptuous references to her recent experiences in Europe. She was divided between her genuine boredom with European culture and her pride in her acquaintance with it.

Charles, observing Julia in this group, appreciated the distinction of her simpler, more aristocratic manner; and the clarity and frankness of her statements seemed to him to place her as a being from another world. Damn me, she's a thoroughbred! Makes me ashamed of myself, bless her soul! His emotions were too much for him. He went into his "den," which was across the hall, and poured himself a drink. Fragments of the evening's conversation buzzed in his head. Julia and Mr. Wilson had disagreed as to the validity of certain phases of the newer movements in art. Mr. Wilson scoffed blatantly at all of them. Mr. Vakanda was more reserved, but one suspected that he looked upon Westerners as adolescent and treated their art accordingly. Charles, without knowing what he was talking about, had come jestingly to Julia's rescue. When he remembered how often he had joined Mr. Wilson in ribald comment on subjects which she treated as serious, he felt he had been a traitor to her. Damn my soul, I'm hard hit! I never half appreciated that girl until to-night! Don't know what the hell's been the matter with me! Overcome by his reflections, he walked to a window and stared out into the quiet dimly lit street. His suddenly aroused sensual longing for Julia returned and made him embarrassed and unhappy. He set his glass down on the window ledge and passed a hand across each eye as if he were wiping something away. Damn it all, I'm in love with her all right.

When the time for the Farleys' departure arrived Charles was talkative and uneasy. He clapped his hand on Laurence's shoulder. "You're one of the few men who's fit to fish with, Farley. Most of 'em are too damned loud for the fish. We'll fix that little trip up yet. I suspect you of being the philosopher of this bunch anyway."

"I can furnish the requisite of silence, but I'm afraid it requires some peculiar psychic influence to attract fish. I haven't got it."

Charles's manner was self-conscious to a degree. He spoke rapidly and unnecessarily lifted his voice. His wife watched him with a cold kind little smile of disgust. She wanted to create the impression that she understood him, but her resentment of him rose chiefly from the fact that he was incomprehensible to her. "That's all right. I'll catch the fish. I'll catch the fish. Damned if I haven't enjoyed the evening. Say, Farley, Kate and I are coming over some evening and I'm going to talk to your wife. I believe she's just plain folks even if she can chant Schopenhauer and the rest of those cranks. You know I admire your brains, Miss Julia. By Jove, I do. You can give me some of the line of patter I've missed. Kate, now—Kate's got it all at her finger tips, but she's given me up long ago. Have a drink before you go, Farley? No! You know I'm a great admirer of Omar Khayyám's, Miss Julia. The rest of you high-brows seem to have put the kibosh on the old boy. He's the fellow that had some bowels of compassion in him. Knew what it was like to want a drink and be dry." Charles smoothed back his hair. His hand was trembling slightly. He looked at Julia now and then but allowed no one else to catch his eyes.

Laurence, holding his silk hat stiffly in his fingers, moved determinedly toward the front door. His smile was enigmatic but his desire for escape was evident.

Julia said, "I'll talk to you about Schopenhauer, Mr. Hurst, and convince you that he was very far from a crank." She smiled.

"Yep? Well, guess I'm jealous of him. I'm willing to be taught. This business grind I'm in is converting me into pretty poor company. Not much use for a meditative mind in the stock market. Eh, Farley? The women have got it all over us when it comes to refining life."

Laurence said, "I imagine I know as little of the stock market as my wife, Hurst."

"And you must remember I'm a business woman, too."

"So you are. Working in that confounded laboratory. Well, I've got no excuse then."

"Know thyself, Charles!" Mrs. Hurst shook her finger playfully.

"Yep. Constitutional aversion to knowing myself—knowing anything else. Looks to me as if you had picked a lemon, Kate."

"We must really go." Julia held out her hand.

Mrs. Hurst shook hands with Julia. "So delightful to have had you. I'm glad you impressed Mr. Vakanda with the significance of America in the world of art, dear." Mrs. Hurst, at that instant, disliked her guest intensely, but she preserved her smile and her delicate tactful air. Laurence shook hands with her also. His reserve appealed to her. She could be more frankly gracious with him.

Charles pressed Julia's fingers lingeringly, in spite of her efforts to withdraw them. He was suddenly depressed and gazed at her with an open almost despairingly interrogative expression. "Yep, damn me, Kate's right. You put the Far East in its place, Miss Julia. Did me good to see it." He giggled nervously, but his face immediately grew serious. Seeing her go away into her own strange world depleted the confidence he experienced while with her. He was oppressed by the company of his wife, and his pathetic feeling about himself returned. For the moment the hope that Julia would understand him—like him and exculpate his deficiencies, even see in him that which was admirable—was more poignant than the passing desire to touch and dominate her body. There was a helpless unreserve in his eyes.

Julia could see the tired lines in his face all at once peculiarly emphasized. His lips quivered. She thought he looked old but for some reason all the more childlike. She could not resist his need for her.

It was with an acute sense of disgust that Laurence left the house.

Mr. Hurst did not communicate with Laurence in regard to the fishing trip, but one morning soon after the dinner party Mrs. Hurst called Julia on the telephone and invited her to come with Laurence to an all-day picnic in the country. "This is just the sort of thing Charles delights in," Mrs. Hurst explained, in her hard pleasant light-timbred voice. Julia heard her polite laugh over the wire. "I shan't blame you if you refuse us. It's really too absurd. We shall probably be consumed by mosquitoes."

"Why, I'm afraid we can't go," Julia said. "Laurence is very busy and you know I have my work, too."

"I suppose you can't get off for a day—either of you? Charles is quite determined to see you and your husband again."

"It wouldn't be possible. It's nice of you. I really would enjoy it but it wouldn't be possible for either of us."

Again Mrs. Hurst's confidential amusement. "Well, I'm sorry. Though for your own sake I'm glad. Charles has rather a boy's idea of fun. Well—don't be surprised if we arrive at your front door some evening in the near future."

"I shall be very glad," Julia said.

On a Monday evening while the Farley family were at an early dinner they heard a laboring motor in the street. Bobby, who could not be restrained when the prospect of diversion was at hand, ran out to see what it was and, on his return, reported that Mr. and Mrs. Hurst were at the front door.

Laurence laid his napkin wearily aside. "To what do we owe the honor? Have you been to see them since the other night?"

Julia said she had not.

When Julia arrived in the hallway Mr. and Mrs. Hurst were already there, having been admitted by Bobby. Julia could not look at Charles's face. With an effort she smiled at his wife.

Mrs. Hurst, with one of her pleasant, mildly reducing grimaces, said, "How are you? You were dining? There! I told you so, Charles!"

Julia imagined that there was constraint in Mrs. Hurst's manner. Their hands barely touched.

"How do you do? How do you do, Mrs. Hurst?" Laurence's expression was polite but not agreeable. For some reason he spoke to Charles with more cordiality.

"How d'ye do, Farley? How d'ye do, Miss Julia! Bless my soul, I'm glad to see you! Kate couldn't keep me away from here. Yes, I confess it. All my fault." He was uneasy as before, and adopted the falsetto tone of his comic moods. He wrung Julia's hand for an instant and looked greedily into her face. But he could not sustain the gaze. He turned to Laurence and began to joke about the speed of his motor car.

"Please go on to your dinner. I'm really ashamed that I allowed Charles to bring me here now." Mrs. Hurst, smiling, preserved the inconsequential atmosphere of the group. At the same time she felt a repugnance to Julia which she had never experienced until recently.

Julia, also, disliked the furtive intentness with which Mrs. Hurst, continuing to smile, occasionally scrutinized her.

"We dine so much later."

"But we've quite finished—unless you will have a cup of coffee with us?"

"Coffee? What say, coffee?" Charles could not keep from listening to what Julia and his wife were saying, though he was trying, at the same time, to talk to Laurence. Now he interrupted himself. "Shall we have some coffee with them, Kate?" Just then he caught Julia's eyes and a flush spread over his face. "I think we'd better forego the coffee and take these people for a little ride. That's what we came for." He kept on gazing steadily and sentimentally at Julia who was embarrassed by this too open regard.

"Shall we? Perhaps we had. Our own dinner hour will come all too soon," Mrs. Hurst said.

"Won't you come in here?" Laurence motioned toward an open door.

Julia was vexed by her own mingled depression and agitation. Frowning and smiling at the same time, she added abstractedly, "Yes. How ridiculous we are—standing here in this chilly hall. Please come in here. I will have Nellie make a fire for you."

"Who wants a fire this time of year!" Charles followed his wife, who entered the half-darkened room with Julia. "Farley, you and Miss Julia get your wraps and we'll wait for you. Don't waste your time making yourself lovely, Miss Julia."

After Laurence had turned up the lights he and Julia went out. Charles and his wife, who had seated themselves, waited in silence. Charles stretched out his long legs in checked trousers and crossed them over one another. He stared up at the ceiling and pursed his mouth in a soundless whistle.

Catherine said, "We can't stay with these people long. You know the Goodes are coming over after dinner."

Charles started. "What's that?" He sat bolt upright. "Goodes, eh? No. All right. Plenty of time." He did not relax his posture again, but drummed on the arm of his chair, tapped his feet, and for a few moments half hid his face in the cupped palm of his hand.

Mrs. Hurst looked bored and tired. Her small sardonic mouth was very precisely set. Her gaze was both humorous and weary. Now and then she glanced at Charles and forced a twinkle to her eyes, while, at the same moment, her features showed her repressed irritation. Mrs. Hurst had suspected, after the previous meeting with the Farleys, that Charles was interested in Julia. Suspicion sharpened her observation of him but her policy toward him demanded of her that she be amused by all he did. Otherwise the situation between them might long ago have precipitated a crisis which she, at least, was not ready to face. In a moment of impetuosity Charles would be capable of heaven-knows-what regrettable and irretrievable resolution. He had so often shown the same kind of frank admiration for a pretty woman that she made the best of things by appearing to tolerate, if not to encourage, his folly. She was certain that his infatuations were so illusory that a little enforced acquaintance with the intimate personalities of her successive rivals would dissipate his regard for them. In this case, too, she had no fear that a woman of Julia's poise and enlightenment would make any serious response to Charles's naïve overtures. If Mrs. Hurst could convince herself that a situation was sufficiently grotesque (viewed, of course, from the standpoint of manners) it became unreal to her, and she could no longer believe that such a vague and ridiculous cause would produce any effect in actuality.

Waiting for Laurence and Julia to appear, Charles, even when he was not looking at her, was conscious of his wife's personality. Though he could not analyze the impression, he was, as he had been repeatedly before, disconcerted by the cold understanding which he saw in her small, humorously lined face. He was startled by the boldness of her evasions. All his mental attempts to capture a grievance were diverted when he considered her demure gentleness and good breeding. He had, at the outset, to accept the fact of his inferiority. Now his pale eyes, fixed intermittently in an upward gaze, were startled and perturbed. His mouth twitched. He felt boisterous, and suppressed his laughter, though he did not know whether he should direct it against her or against himself. She was so visually real to him: her withered small hands, the flesh under her plump throat—flesh that fell away and somehow failed to soften the contour of her little chin. At these moments when she connived, or so it might almost seem, to further his betrayal of her he felt a sentimental affection for her, and decided that it was only because of the physical repulsion which her ageing gave him that he did not love her completely and lead an ideal life. He was sorry for himself and for her too because he could not conquer his aversion.

Catherine said, "Julia is particularly handsome to-night."

Charles, with the blank innocence of a self-conscious child, glanced at his wife. "You're right. She is. You dare me to fall in love with her, do you? Think when she gets a good dose of me—"

"Sh-h!"

Charles eyed the door. "Somebody 'ull hear me? Say, Kate, for a manhandler I've never seen your equal." He jumped up, walked twice around the room, and stopped, gazing down at Catherine with a vacant deliberate amusement. Each felt the other the victor in some stealthy unconfessed combat. "All the spice goes out of forbidden fruit when your wife hands it to you on a gold platter with her compliments. That it?" Charles asked. He was wondering if his presentment about Julia as the great thing in his life had been an illusion. He would accept his wife's joke recklessly but that did not prevent his timidity in regard to himself from returning and influencing his acts.

Julia sat beside Charles while he drove. Laurence and Mrs. Hurst were on the back seat. Julia listened to what Charles said, but half understanding him. Nothing was real to her but the self from which she wanted to escape, this self which she knew would always deceive her. When the car veered at a corner Charles and she were thrown together so that their shoulders touched. She knew that he leaned toward her to prolong the contact. The warmth of his body gave her no clear consciousness of him, and was a sustained reminder of inscrutable things with which he was not concerned. She despised the humility of his intellect. What attracted her was a kind of primitive cruelty which he tried to hide. She wanted to be consumed by his weakness, to be left nothing of herself. His lovemaking repelled her. She perceived his sentimentality toward womankind. All that he said was false because unrelated to his fundamental impulse which was to take without giving anything equivalent. She had somehow arrived at the conviction that only the things which hurt her were true. Charles's conception of beauty was childish. But she would not be afraid to abandon herself to the things in him he was ashamed of, which he could not control. When he was conquered, as she was, by the desires his intellect sought to evade, he would be caught in actuality. Neither of them could be deceived. She was impatient with Charles's deference to what he considered her finer feelings. There she found herself insulted by the shallowness of his respect.

Charles made the drive as long as he could, though he knew that his wife, with her prospect of guests at home, must be growing impatient. He kept, for the most part, in the park where it was easier to imagine that he and Julia were alone. In one place a hill cut off the city and dry grass rushed up before them against the cloudy sunset. Then there were masses of trees, green yet in the half darkness. The branches stirred their blackish foliage, and the copse had a breathing look. The last light broke through the shadowy clouds in metallic flames. When the city came into view again Julia thought that the tall houses were like the walls of a garden flowering with stars.

Every one but Charles was glad when the drive came to an end.

Under her large black hat the strange girl's eyes, deep with a shining emptiness, gazed into Paul's. Paul, glancing at her cautiously, felt that the eyes were filled with a velvet dust into which he sank without finding anything. It was as if he were falling, leaden and meaningless, through them.

She had a snub nose with coarse wide nostrils. Her mouth was thick-lipped and over red. She was given to abrupt hilarity when she showed her strong teeth in a peculiarly irrelevant laugh. Her voice was hoarse. When she threw back her head her amusement made her broad white throat quiver. Then her prominent breasts shook heavily. Her arms, bare below the elbow, looked as though they were meant to be powerful but had grown useless. Her insolence was stupid, but Paul envied it—even though it irritated him that she was so bored with him. They had sat on the same bench in a public square, and after they had fallen into conversation he had asked her to go to dinner with him. Her name was Carrie. She called him "son". She was "out for a good time," she said, but she was "broke".

Paul invited her to the working men's restaurant where he was going himself. To dramatize his isolation from his own group, he wore old clothes, brogans, and his school cap. His appearance suggested a mechanic's assistant. He was ashamed of his secret desire to admit his disguise to her. His uncle was a corporation lawyer who was becoming prominent. Paul had constantly to fight against an ingrained class vanity. Petty bourgeois! Not even snobbishness of the first order! When he had to face it in himself he wanted to die. No use! Hell of a world! Any disillusionment with himself strengthened his bitterness toward those of his own kind.

When Paul left Carrie he walked into the dark park and seated himself on a bench. The city seemed miles away, sunk in light. There was an iron stillness in the black trunks of the trees that rose about him. Over him the thick foliage hung oppressively in dark arrested clouds.

Despair. He wanted Carrie to admire him. He saw himself strong and bitter in the possession of all that Carries understand. He wanted to be kind. He was a great man, alone, a little proud of his madness. Child! He wanted to go far away—to die. Hate. I can't die! His heart beat loudly and the memory of Carrie was remote again.

In the hidden street Salvationists were passing. He heard hymn tunes and the beat of drums.

Dark angel. I want to save men. He thought of the women, strange in their tight dark dresses. He wanted to save them. Emotionalism. Rot. He tried to remember the working class and economic determinism. Facts. They kept things out. There was a dramatic pride in being outcast, in feeling himself definitely against his aunt and Uncle Archie. That kid, May. Dead. He gave himself to a sense of loathing that was gorgeous and absolute. His relaxation was drunken—like a dream.

Once more, when he could not but remember May, he recalled Julia instead. He did not explain to himself why he hated her so. It was as though she had done the world some terrible hurt and his was the arrogance of justice in leaving to her nothing of the self she wanted him to believe in. Whenever he saw falseness in women, he felt that he was seeing Julia at last. He wanted his thoughts to destroy her, or at least to leave her utterly beggared. He must prove to himself that it was women like Julia, women of the upper classes, that he had to fight. He could no longer bear the recollection of May going before him through the park in her short dress with her hair a silver paleness over her shoulders. Because of Julia, everything wounded him. He conceived a physical image of Julia in her ultimate day of degradation. When he thought of stripping everything away from her, it was to show a physical ugliness to a deceived world. In anticipation he purged his own soul of all that horrified and confused it. Then he saw her body—that he had never seen—lie before him like a beaten thing with used maternal breasts, and knew that he had destroyed forever the virginal falsehood of her face. No woman who belonged to a man as Julia belonged to Laurence had the right to a face like hers. He despised his aunt, but she was frankly a part of the hideousness of sex and his contempt for her was negative. Toward Julia he was positive, for he felt that when he had proved everything against her he would not be burdened with May. When he imagined Julia lean and hideous of body, the sense of intimacy with her made him gentle. He was strong and liberated.

However, when actuality presented itself, and he realized that if he met her she would be as he had always known her, kind and a little motherly toward him, his heart grew sullen, and, again, he was helplessly convicted of his youth. His defiance was so acute that he wanted to write her an obscene letter and tell her of what he had done and the women he knew. But he was trapped, as always, in the fear of appearing ridiculous.

It was difficult for him to justify his certainty that she was so much in need of the cleansing fire of truth; yet he would not abandon his conviction. When he had not dared to hate her he had been at loss before her. Now his hate permitted his imagination complete and unafraid abandon. He dared to relax in the intimacy of dislike because he fancied that he saw her clearly at last.

At times his hate grew too heavy for him, and he could have cried for relief in admitting his childishness to some one. He was shut into himself by that horrible laugh which surrounded him, which he seemed to hear from all sides.

It was a cool afternoon in September. May walked through the park between rows of flowering shrubs. Here the grass had died and the petals of fallen blossoms were shriveled ivory on the black loam. Overhead the treetops swung with a rotary motion against the rain-choked heavens. The heat of the clouds gathered in a blank stain of brilliance where the swollen sun half burst from its swathings of mist. The wind ceased for a moment. A clump of still pine tops glinted with a black fire, and behind them the sun became a chasm of glowing emptiness, like a hole in the sky, from which the glare poured itself in a diffusing torrent.

For a long time May had not dared to walk in the park. When she did go, at last, she told herself that she was sure Paul would not come. She felt herself inwardly lost in still bright emptiness. Cold far-off heat. She was a tiny frozen speck, hardly conscious of itself on the burnt grass, walking toward the tall buildings that receded before her. Tall roofs were like iron clouds in the low sky. She wanted to be lost, going farther and farther into emptiness. Now when she said Paul it was no longer Paul she meant. She would have been ashamed before him, tall, looking down at her. Paul was something else, something in which one went out of one's self into infinite distance. Where one went forever, never afraid. Where one ceased to be.

She passed women and children. A child stumbled uncertainly toward her, jam on its face, its dress torn. May was conscious of a part of herself left behind that could see the child running to its mother, the white dress brilliant, fluttering victorious. She knew how her own hair blew out in separate strands from the loosened ends of her braid, and how soft separate strands clung drily against her moist brow under her red cap. Going out of herself, it was as if her blood flowed coldly out of her into the cold sunlight, cold and away from her body. She was happy. There were tears in her eyes. She wanted to go on forever saying Paul and not thinking what it meant.

The sun went out of sight. The wind lifted the pine boughs and they moved as if in terror against the torn clouds. The sound that went through them died away in peace, in the happiness of being lost. May felt as if something of her had gone forever into the wide still sky and the dead shadowless park. She wanted to feel, not to think. When she thought, she was caught in her body as in a net. The separate parts of her were like pains where she thought Aunt Julia would loathe her.

When Laurence was apart from Julia and remembered her look of humility that asked for something she dared not state, he experienced an almost sickening pity for her. There was something in her suffering which he identified with his own. Yet he did not feel nearer to her in attributing their unhappiness in common to the futile and inevitable circumstances of human life. The pain of each of them, he told himself, was in realizing the isolation in which every human ultimately finds himself when he recognizes that his inner life cannot be shared. Laurence somehow exulted in seeing Julia forced to accept a condition of existence which had been plain to him for a long time. His despair was so complete that he imagined himself ready to abandon his defenses before her. But when he was actually in her presence she was only the thing that hurt him, and he was against her in spite of himself. Then her cruelty seemed monstrous, because she appeared to understand so little of what she had done. He knew that he bewildered her by showing no resentment toward Dudley Allen. Laurence despised her when she could not see the working of his pride that forced him to be superior to her lover's influence.

Often he said to himself, I'll go away. I can't bear it! But, while he believed in nothing outside himself, what was there to seek? He visited his parents more frequently. To be with them was a fulfilment of his humiliation. He would end where he was born, as every one else did.

Though he was certain that everything which developed through initiative was foredoomed to failure, his pride in Bobby increased. He wanted to keep his pessimism from contaminating his son. Bobby knew his power. When he encountered his father coming in from the laboratory alone it was a time to make a demand. "Hello, Dad! Say, Dad, am I too much of a kid to run a motor cycle? Jack Wilson says I can't run his motor cycle because I'm too much of a kid! Say, Dad, I've got some money saved up. Can't I buy me a motor cycle? I can run it. Honest, I can!" He had been playing in the street, his face dirty and smeared with sweat, his shirt torn in front, and his collar askew. His look was rapt and self-intent. He had the air of pushing his father aside to reach some hidden determination.

Laurence was self-conscious when talking to Bobby. He lowered his lids to conceal the too lenient expression of his eyes. "You're not an experienced mechanic, you know. Only have one life to lose. Better wait a while before you risk it."

Bobby stared with an intentness that obliterated his father's pretense. "Aw, say, Dad, honest, now! I've taken Jack Wilson's machine to pieces. I can run a motor cycle all right. Go on and say I can get it!"

Laurence glanced up, and his smile was hard and cautious, but when his face was averted his features softened immediately. "We'll see, son. I don't think a brat like you could get a license. Time to talk about it later." He put his hat on a hook and, turning aside, began to mount the stairs.

Bobby, vexed and excited, gazed after his father, regarding Laurence's hesitation as an annoying but inevitable formula which had to be gone through before one could get what one wanted. "Oh, gol darn it!" he said, and ran out into the street again. He tolerated his father.

Laurence wished that he had sent May away with Mr. and Mrs. Price, the parents of his first wife. They had recently gone on a trip to Europe. When they had asked to take Bobby with them, Laurence had resented it.

Julia met Laurence in the upper hall. "Did you tell Bobby to come in and dress for dinner? Isn't he a ragamuffin!" She smiled, imagining that her pleasure in Bobby pleased her husband.

Laurence smiled also, but coldly. He would have preferred to ignore her relationship to Bobby. It had come over him strongly of late that he must take Bobby away from the home environment. "I'm afraid I encourage him in the spontaneity of bad manners." He walked past her with an agreeable but remote expression that put her away from him.

Julia experienced a familiar pang which contracted her breast with an almost physical surprise. It was as if a touch had made her guilty. Why, she could not say. He doesn't want me to show an interest in Bobby! She was robbed of another—almost her last—certainty.

At dinner she watched the father and son stealthily. Their attitude toward each other seemed to confirm her unknown guilt.

"I've sent off your first quarter's tuition at Mount Harrod, young man. You haven't much time left with us."

Bobby was secretly resigned but confident in his petulance. "Gee, Dad, I don't want to go to that place!"

"It's about time you began your initiation in the subtler forms of self-defense," Laurence said sardonically.

May, ignored by everybody, sat very straight in her chair and was over dainty with her food, as if timid of her enjoyment of it. Julia, withdrawing all attempt at contact with Laurence and Bobby, could not bear to look at the girl.

Laurence was uncomfortably admitting to himself that, in some subtle way, his desire to have Bobby out of the house was directed by a feeling against Julia. He wondered how much of his motive she had perceived. The sooner he gets away from the hoax of home, the better, Laurence told himself. He tried to exculpate himself by a generalization. It was the false ideal he wanted to destroy for Bobby. Julia was a part of the myth, though she had not created it.

Julia was wounded without knowing just what her wound was. She said to herself, unexpectedly, If I had a child! My God, if I had a child! The thought, which had been strange to her for a long time, seemed to illumine all of her being. It was as if something warm and secret were already her own. She was on the point of weeping with terror of her longing for the child that did not exist. It was something she wanted to take away to herself which no one else should know of. She considered how she might get herself with child without any one becoming aware of it. She wanted a child that would be helpless with her, that she could give everything to.

But she could not bear the thought of definite responsibilities connected with a child. It was wrong to want a child like that. It was like robbing a thing of its life to want it so completely. It had a right to itself. She felt virtuously bereaved already, as if the child that had never been born had grown to manhood and she had given it up.

There was no peace except in the abnegation of all positive desire. She invited the peace of helplessness. When her emotions were formless she felt immense and lost in a waking sleep. The whole world was her own dream. She could feel her physical life fade out of her and imagined that her hair was growing white.

Charles Hurst had not been so happy for a long time. To evoke one of his moods of glowing pathos, he had only to gaze at himself in a mirror and think of Julia. She had committed herself but very little, yet he was mystical in his certainty of their future relationship. When he recalled the way she looked at him as if asking him not to hurt her too much he was confirmed in his belief that she had laid aside the subterfuges of more commonplace and less courageous women. "Damned if I look as young as I did!" He studied his reflection ruefully. He had a hazy perception of his outward defects and regretted them. "Growing old's hell all right! Poor little Kate!" He was ashamed of the comfort of seeming less his age than she. His sense of advantage made him tenderly apologetic. When he was near her he wanted to pet her. "Rum deal women get. Life after forty-five not worth much." He almost wished it possible for her to console herself as he did, but he could not quite bring himself to accept the logic of his imagining. Catherine with a lover! Women not the same as we are. Men are a lot of —— donkeys. Pity the girl never had a kid.

His pale eyes grew grave and retrospective again, and he seated himself on the edge of his bed just as he was, in socks and trousers and undershirt, burying his face in his curiously formless hands. "By God, I love that girl!" He threw his head up and shrugged his shoulders with a shivering motion, as if what he felt were almost too much for him. "She may think I'm a senile idiot and a damn fool—all the things Catherine does." He smiled, talking aloud. "But she loves me! She loves me! By God, she loves me! She's got to!" He ended on a playfully emphatic note as though he were disposing of an invisible argumentator. When he went into his bathroom to shave he whistled Musetta's Waltz from La Boheme. There was an expression of innocent complacency on his thin good-humored face. For a time he was absorbed in his music and his sense of completeness and well-being.

Julia Farley. Too good. That Goode family. Bills. Fellow runs a car like—Fast. Fast women. I hold her fast. I—

When his jumbled thoughts had proceeded to I-hold-her-fast, something welled up as if from the depths of him, and he was physically blinded by the dim intensity of his emotion. He frowned painfully. He began to speak aloud again. "Too much, Charles, my boy. Too old for this kind of thing. Damn! She's too good—too lovely—"

There was a knock at the door. Johnson, Mr. Hurst's man, was never allowed in the room while his master was dressing, since Charles was frankly embarrassed by the presence of a valet.

"Hello! Hello, Johnson."

"Telephone, sir. Mrs. Hurst wanted me to ask if you'd like to come, or if I was to tell them to call later."

Julia! The mad hope that it was Julia.

"It's Mr. Goode, sir. He says he can't give me the message."

God, but I'm ridiculous! "Mr. Goode, eh?" Charles, very abstracted, buttoned on his shirt. "Well, you tell Goode I'll call him later, Johnson." As Johnson, assenting in his delicately servile manner, was turning away, Charles beckoned him back. "Eh, Johnson, just between you and me, while the madam isn't looking. Suppose you bring me up—just a little, you know—Old Scotch. God damn this collar button!"

Johnson, who was a blond young man with a wise subdued air, smiled a little. Finding it flattered his employers, he had cultivated the sad manner of a professional mourner. "Very good, sir."

As Johnson disappeared, Charles's ruminations broke forth afresh. "'Very good, sir!' Damn little son-of-a-gun! He'd do well in a play. Got a fine contempt for the old man, Johnson has. Yep, by God, Catherine has got me on breeding. Servants never bat an eye at her. Might have been born with a gold spoon in her mouth. Well, she's a pink-face and the old boy's a rough-neck. Tra-la-la—" He resumed Musetta's Waltz.

"That Blanche—that damned little hyper-sexed, hyper-sophisticated, hyper-everything—By Jove, she'd pinch the gold plate out of a mummy's tooth!" When Charles talked he allowed his voice gradually to mount the scales until it broke on a falsetto note. It was part of the horseplay with which his dramatic sense responded, in self-derision, to the attitude of those about him. Catherine insisted on his occasional attendance at the opera, and Pagliacci, which he heard first, was his favorite piece. He identified himself with the title part, though it was a little confusing for him to imagine himself a deceived husband. He felt that the author of the libretto had confused the issue. "Blanche, by God, that Blanche!" He referred to a young woman who took minor parts in cinema plays. He wanted to be rid of her. She was statuesque and theatric, but as his intimacy with her had grown she had relapsed into habitual vulgarities which grated on him. Charles revered a lady. Besides, since becoming interested in Julia he wanted to forget everything else. Blanche was realizing that she had destroyed an illusion through which she might have furthered her ambition, and she was growing recklessly spiteful and crude. Only the day before Charles had sent her money which she had kept, though she reviled him for sending it. His humility made it impossible for him to condemn any one, except in extreme moments of self-defense. "Poor little girl! By Jove, I wonder if she did love me a little after all!" He shook his head, and smiled with an expression of sentimental weariness. He put Blanche away as incongruous with the thought of Julia which filled him with happiness.

"Sick o' the whole mess of 'em. That fellow, Goode, making a damn jackass of himself every time a chorus girl winks at him. The whole damn cheap, sporting, booze-fighting lot of nincompoops. Goode's a grandfather and he looks it."

The door moved softly, there was a light rap, and Johnson re-entered with a tray. Charles laid his hair brushes down. "Looks good to me, Johnson." Johnson smiled his sad, half-perceptible smile. "Shall I mix it, sir?"

"No—Johnson. No." With an air of ostentatious casualness, Charles poured whisky into a glass and held it up to the light. "Good stuff." Johnson kept his still smile, but did not speak.

Charles drank with deliberate noisiness. When he set the glass down he drew a deep theatric sigh. His face was solemn. "Better try some, Johnson."

The man flushed slightly. "Anything else?"

"No, no. Coming downstairs. The madam had her breakfast yet?"

"I don't know, sir. That is, I think so, sir." Johnson turned away and the door swung soundlessly across his rigid back.

Charles gave himself a little more whisky that brought the tears of relaxation to his eyes. He wondered if he were mistaken about Julia. He dared not consider future potentialities too definitely, though he told himself that, whatever came, he was ready for it. Would she ever let him put his head in her lap? He felt good and complacent when he imagined it. The pose it represented was assumed with such sincerity and was so remote from the aspect of him with which his wife was acquainted, or even the guise he bore to his sporting friends. It was pleasant to him to recognize this secret and not too obvious self. "Well, Charles, you old rooster, you may have broken most of the commandments, and you can't talk Maeterlinck and Tagore with the old lady, but there's something to you they all miss. The dear!" he added, thinking of Julia.

It was Saturday afternoon. The holiday crowd moved in endless double lines along an endless street. As Julia walked with it there was a hill before her and the stream of motor cars floated over the crest against a pale sky hazy with dust. Men stared at her and, feeling naked and unpossessed, she demanded their look.

"Miss Julia!" She glanced up, hearing a car whirr to a standstill beside her. Mr. Hurst was driving a gray racer. He was bareheaded. The wind had disarranged his sleek hair, revealing his baldness. He smoothed back the locks. He gazed at her a little fearfully, but his face was happy and intent. "I've caught you. Going anywhere? Let me take you for a ride?" He saw her eyes, the outline of her breasts, her cloth dress blown against her long legs, her ungloved hands with their beautiful helpless look. "You are tired." Tender of her fatigue, he was grateful to her because she allowed him this tenderness. His heart beat so heavily that he fancied it must be fluttering the breast of his silk shirt. She must think me a fool, dear girl! I love her! He was conscious of being a little mad in his delight, and wanted to lay his faults before her. "How's this? I'm going to run away with you—take you off to the country." Julia was beside him. The car glided on.

"I can't be long." Julia stared into his eyes with a calm smile, and tried to be simple and detached. She told herself that she could do nothing for him, but that she wanted him to understand her loneliness.

"Well, we're going to be long—ever so long." Her hair is all in a mess—clouds about her eyes. Her little feet walking on clouds. Oh, Julia, my darling, I love you! She's not like other women I have known. If she gives herself to a caress it means something to her. "I've been looking forward to this—longing for it," he said. "You know that ever since that night I kissed you I've thought of almost nothing but you?"

Julia said, "I'm sorry."

"Why?" All at once everything confusing was being swept away in the nakedness of the wind they rode against. "Going too fast for you—dear?"

"No. But you mustn't think of me so much."

"Why?"

"Because—I'm not worth it." Hypocrite. She wanted to be beautiful. She had a horrible sense of her own spiritual leanness and ugliness. If he would take me away—kiss me—anywhere—in darkness. She wanted to belong to some one so utterly as to make her oblivious of herself.

They turned a sharp corner. They were in the park now. Pale leaves, yellow against the light, floated, and fell upon them in a shower of silk. "I'm in love with you, Julia."

"Are you?"

"Don't ask. You know it. Don't you want me to be?" Goode—too good. Hadn't meant to say that yet!

"I don't know. I'm afraid I'm a disillusioned person. I'm tired watching people try to live through others. It can't be done."

"I think I could live in you—through you—if you'd let me, Julia."

"You don't know me."

"How can I if you won't let me, Julia?" He drew the car nearly to a standstill. He grasped her fingers with his free hand. "I'm going to kiss you, dear." It was lonely here. She felt his mouth over her face and was ashamed of her distaste for him. "You're unhappy, Julia. Why are you unhappy?"

She withdrew herself. "I am—horribly."

Charles, hardening, felt relieved, and imagined himself stronger. Farley don't treat her well, he said to himself. In his mind was a furtive expectation, with which was mingled an unadmitted thought of divorce. "Don't be, darling. You make me too happy. It's not fair. Can't I be anything to you—even a little?"

Julia laughed pathetically. "You must be. I'm here."

"Yes, thank God, you are. And you're not going to be disgusted with me because I'm such an unpretentious human animal? My taste in music runs about as high as The Old Oaken Bucket, and I suppose if I'd been left to myself I'd have canned those Dudley Allen productions you persuaded Catherine to buy, and hung up Breaking The Home Ties instead. You know all this new art stuff goes over my head, child. Hate me for it?"

"Not very much. Perhaps it goes over my head too."

"Wish it did, but Kate's told me all about you. You're so damned clever." He wanted her, yet, even if she offered herself to him now, he could not touch her. Her little feet. As a matter of fact they weren't small. Little feet just the same. Must be white. White feet. Lovely things walking over his heart. Beautiful things hurt him with their pride. He had felt this before about women. It was always wrong. Afterward only the pain and the longing remained. She's different. Mine. I can't have her. "You won't hate me when—" His eyes misted. He gave her a blurred look. His lips were humorous and self-contemptuous.

"Won't hate you when?" Julia was still motherly.

It hurt him to speak. His face was flushed. He stared at her fixedly an instant, as if something stood between them. She observed his unsteady mouth, that was weakly unconscious of itself like a desperate child's. "Am I going to have you, Julia? Are you disgusted with me, child?"

She would not consider clearly what he meant, but she wanted him to shut Laurence out of her mind. "Yes. I think so." Her voice was unsteady.

The car went on, they were out of town among suburban roads and vacant lots. Charles drew up again. "Let's get out and walk a bit."

The dry pinkish grass moved before them like a cloud over the field. It rustled stiffly about their ankles. The low sun was in their eyes. Double lines of gnats rose into the light. They passed an empty house with glaring uncovered windows.

White feet that hurt. Charles was afraid of her. He imagined her hands touching him. Oh, my dear! He said, "We must find a way to see each other."

Julia said nothing. He took hold of her arms hesitatingly. "Look at me!"

She was ashamed for him. When their eyes met, hers filled with tears. She seemed to herself dead, and wanted him to be sorry for her. I can't live. I'm dead already. No use. I'm dead! I'm dead! She wanted to be dead. Something kept alive, torturing her.

"Take your hat off, won't you?" She took her hat off. Clouds. "Now I can look at you." She wondered if she looked ill. She was ashamed for him when he trembled. Her eyes were gentle, and at the same time there was something desperate in them. It seemed to him that she was asking him to hurt her, and he wanted to say, Don't, don't! Her face, that he could not bear to understand, was just a blur of sweetness. He believed that her tenderness for him was something which must be tried by the grossness of his pleasure in physical contact with her. He thought his pleasure in her body would make her suffer. Afterward he meant to show her how little that was, and that what he was giving her—what he was asking of her—was really something else. "I want to be your lover, child." It was done. He was conscious of desperation and relief. She's different! My God, she's different! Blanche. All of them. He pitied himself with them.

Julia said, "I know it."

Why does she smile like that? Forgive me. He felt their two bodies, hers and his, pitiful helpless things. His shame was for her too. "Life, child! It's got us," he said. "Now I'll kiss you just once." He gathered her up in his arms. She's trembling too. She loves me! I want to make her happy. He wondered why everything hurt so. She's too fine.

Julia was cold. Frozen all over. It seemed he would never be done kissing her. She despised him, and enjoyed the bitterness of her gratitude in being loved. When she could speak she said, smiling yet, "We'd better be starting back. It's late. Look at the sun." The meadow was filled with cold light that lay on the grass tops and made them burning and colorless. The sun, as if dissolving, was formless and brilliant on the horizon.

"Have you had enough of me? Do you want to leave me, Julia?"

"No. It's only that when I left home it was for a little while."

As they walked back to the car, Charles, holding Julia's hand, pressed it apologetically. "I want to take you to a place I have, Julia—a cabin I go to sometimes for fishing trips. We could motor there and picnic for a day. Could you be with me as long as that without becoming more disillusioned?" He tried to joke. His thin face jested, but his pale eyes were anxious.

Julia said, in a smothered voice, "You mustn't love me too much. You are the one who will be disillusioned."

He wanted to talk to her about Laurence, but as yet did not dare; so he pressed her hand again. "Darling!" She returned the pressure and was piqued by his abstracted glance. I'm alone, she said to herself.

On the following Saturday Julia went with Charles to the cabin he had spoken of. It was on the shore of a small lake, only a few feet removed from the water's edge. It was a still cloudy day, and the lake, choked with sedges, had a heavy look, like a mirror coated with grease. There were pine woods all around that, without undergrowth, seemed empty. The still trees were like things walking in a dream. Julia felt them, not moving, going on relentlessly and spurning the earth. It seemed as if everything in the landscape had been forgotten. It was a memory held intact that no one ever recalled. A little group of scrub oaks were turning scarlet. They were like colored shadows.

Charles drew up his motor car in the half-obliterated roadway, and helped Julia to alight. He felt sinful, as he always did when he was about to enjoy anything. He wished that he might beg Julia to condescend to him as to an inferior being. He would be grateful for her contempt which, if it were tempered by affection, would allow him to be himself.

She went ahead of him, and waited in the dusty portico of the small house while he covered some cushions that might be wet if it rained. When he came toward her his eyes were uncertain. "Here we are. Damn it, Julia, I'm so happy I'm afraid! You aren't going to mind being here?" He carried a picnic basket.

"Of course not. Why should I have come?"

He set the basket down. "Hands all grimy. Why should you! God, I don't know. I'm going to love you." He swung her hands in his delightedly, but there was something stealthy and embarrassed in his manner. He could not bring himself to kiss her. "At least you're not going to try to make a new man of me!"

"I know my limitations."

"You haven't any, darling."

Julia's mouth was happy, but her eyes were dark and unkind. "It makes one uncomfortable to be thought too well of." She knew that she was about to give herself to him and resented his confidence. He was a crude childlike man. At the same time, she sensed a simplicity in him that was almost noble. Her self-esteem could not endure thinking of a possible debt to him.

"Shall we go in?" He opened the door and went in ahead of her. The place was crowded with camp beds, piled one on top of the other, and numbers of more or less dilapidated chairs. There was a thick coating of dust over everything, and films of spider web across the window panes yellowed the light. "Isn't this a disgrace, child? I ought to have had a house-cleaning before we came out."

"I like work. We'll clean up together." She removed her hat and laid it on a table. Charles took off his coat. He found an old broom, swept up the trash that littered the floor, and began to pull the furniture into place. Julia discovered a torn shirt and used it to clean the window glass. Charles felt the morning was passing grotesquely. I love her. What shall I do! "Jove, I wish we lived here!" he said. When he had laid a fire in the stone chimney, he pulled out one of the camp beds and made a divan with blankets and pillows. "Come sit down here and warm yourself, child." He turned his back to her and began warming his hands. "It's damp in here."

Julia came to the fire. She did not seat herself. He knew she was beside him. He put off the moment when he must look at her. As he finally turned, his suffused eyes avoided hers. He was smiling miserably. "Have I made a mistake?"

Julia felt blind inside herself. "Mistake?" She laughed nervously.

He fumbled for her hands. "Julia!" His emotion could no longer distinguish between her and himself. His face was in her hair. "I can't help it, child! I can't help it!"

Finding herself futile and inadequate, it seemed to Julia that her pity for herself must include all the things that surrounded her, and that she must embrace them in the mingled agony of self-contempt and pride. It was because she did not love him that it liberated her so completely to give herself to him. She tried to abase herself utterly so that she might experience the joy of rising above her own needs.

Her tears were on his hands and he was bewildered. The contagion of her emotion overpowered him. He was equally astonished at her and at himself. For a moment he was unable to speak. "Oh, Julia—my Julia—I love you!" He could not comprehend himself. Why was it that even now, when she surrendered herself to him, he continued to feel helpless and almost terrified. He had not imagined that she loved him as deeply as this. His desire to abase himself, though it arose from a different motive, was as complete as hers. "Julia," he kept repeating, "don't! What is it, Julia? Don't!" He wanted to kiss her feet. What is it? What have I done? He found himself at the mercy of something unknown that was cheating them when they should have had happiness. "Do you love me, Julia?" He observed her expression of tenderness and suffering. Yet, while she was telling him that she loved him, it seemed to him that he was ignored and obliterated by what she was feeling.

Julia sat on the camp bed and, as he had promised himself, he knelt beside her and buried his face in her lap. Still, though he did not admit it, he knew the gesture was false. He was embarrassed by his hostility to her pity. He believed now that he loved her far more than he had loved her before. He could no longer articulate his situation or his intentions, or anything practical connected with his life. He decided that, though she made him unhappy, life would only be endurable if he saw her more frequently and in a franker relationship. How this was to be brought about he dared not reflect. When Laurence's name was on his lips he recalled Catherine and the pain of indecision made him dumb.

Julia felt that even this last attempt to lose herself was a failure. While she stroked his hair, she was furtively considering whether or not she dared see him again.

Laurence knew now that his attitude regarding Bobby was apparent to Julia, and that it caused her pain. Why he punished her by keeping her apart from his son and making her ill at ease when the child was present he could not have said. However, though he realized absurdities in himself, he would not renounce his sense of righteousness. What he suffered through compunction was to him the pain of virtue. He hurt Julia in order to convince himself of her depth of feeling. While he observed her misery, he could believe that she would not betray him again. Her agony was his, but it showed him that she was not callous and indifferent to the consequences of her acts. He could not yet allow himself to express any love for her. He would not even admit his desire to do so. In the meantime, without understanding his expectation, he waited and withheld himself. When she looked at him there was always in her eyes the demand of self-pity. When she would accept, as he did, the recognition that there was nothing, that there could be nothing, he would not be afraid to give himself. He struggled with his tenderness for her. It was always tearing at him. He was never at rest. Because he put the thought of her out of his mind, he seemed to have no thoughts at all—only an emptiness consuming him. He tried to comfort himself with generalities and reverted to the illusory finality of the positivist philosophy which he had at one time professed.

Julia decided that self-loathing was the inevitable outgrowth of profound experience. Others, who were as fully self-aware as she, were filled with the same nausea of futility. She had several times talked to Charles Hurst on the telephone, and the sound of his voice always exhilarated her. When she sensed his emotion in speaking with her, a kind of iron seemed to enter into her despair. Her distaste for contact with him only convinced her of the pride of her recklessness. The more intimate their relationship became, the more voluptuously she scourged herself by her accurate perceptions of his deficiencies. Only by seeing him at his worst could she preserve her gratification in being tender to him and careless of her own interest.