Book II THE BALANCE OF POWER

CHAPTER ONE

Anita used to have an instinct to make herself very small and very blank when she first visited Grace's house. She was such a weird phenomenon to Mrs. Kline. Rack her mind as Mrs. Kline would, and she often would, staring at Anita out of her round blue eyes, a little bloodshot, shaking her head almost imperceptibly from time to time, she could not remember anyone in her experience who had not come to New York to, at least at first, stay with relatives. This younger generation that one read about in the papers! But even Mrs. Kline, whose imagination on some points was lascivious enough to bring the blush to Grace's cheek, offered no hints about Anita.

"You're plain-spoken, Anita," Mrs. Kline would say to her after she had decided to approve of her and to permit her to cultivate a friendship with Grace which was already thriving. "Just like me. That's what I like in a person. You wouldn't hide anything, least of all from your mother, would you?"

Grace would retaliate to Anita with some remark meant for her mother. And thus Anita would sit at table, feeling like a ghost, while both spoke through her person, that obviously was only a little less intangible to Grace than to Mrs. Kline. And yet Anita came to the house more and more often, partly because of her own isolation, partly because of Grace's soft reaching toward her. All these months Grace had been to her simple, sad, clinging, and obliging. When, through some mood of her own, Anita sent an occasional rebuff, Grace accepted in silence, seemed to understand, forgot it. Each discovered certain ideas in the other that no longer needed to be solitary. When Anita wished to dislike Mr. Milford articulately, Grace listened; with her Grace mulled over ways out. Grace offered suggestions for a mitigation of loneliness which made Anita grateful though they were suggestions which would suit Grace's temperament and which were highly inapplicable for Anita. In turn, Anita, modest though she was and not altogether naïve, considered that the reason for Grace's friendliness could only be that Grace liked her. She was not of the least importance, she thought, and there was nothing of the least importance she had to offer anyone. And though, when Mrs. Kline, who was not subtle, showed a patronizing concurrence in this opinion, Anita might feel humiliated, she was not exactly hurt. She liked to watch Mrs. Kline and she liked to watch Grace. Long ago she had formed the habit of focusing her observations and her interest outside of herself on things which she humbly granted were more exciting.

Even when in a burst of final, desperate irritation she threw up her job with the Dress Daily, she did not deceive herself that the event, disastrous enough in her life, would cause much of a ripple when narrated in the Kline household. Blake's baby had been born and nothing could vie with that in Grace's mind. Anita would not bother to inform her. She lay about her room for a few days moping, thinking, till Grace sent a wire after her. Grace had a cold. Would Anita come up to see her and explain what had happened?

Mrs. Kline opened the door for her and at once began in her jarring voice a discourse on a dress that Anita had spoken of ordering.

"I'm not busy now, Anita; I could even buy the goods for you at a discount, and I'd make it up for you very cheap. Don't be afraid, I'd keep everything down for you like for my own child. You better speak up if you want it because soon I won't have the time."

Anita said shortly that it was out of the question as she had lost her job. She did not expect Mrs. Kline to be affected. But Mrs. Kline was—in a different sense.

"Grace never told me a word," she cried in consternation. "She never tells me a word." She tramped along with Anita up the hall to the small sewing room where Grace lay on a couch. "You never told me that Anita here lost her job," she shouted accusingly.

Grace looked out of wide, patient eyes and did not answer. The telephone, which the Klines kept in the sewing room, had been moved to the floor within reach of her hand.

"Don't you worry, Anita," cried Mrs. Kline, putting an arm about her. "There's plenty jobs around. If you want me to make that dress you know I could make it up for you and you don't have to pay me right away, you don't have to pay me till you like. And if God forbid anything should happen, you know you can always come up here with Grace and me." She patted Anita's shoulder, regarding Grace with an air of challenge. Then, with an effort, she added, "Now I guess you girls want to be left to yourself. I guess you have things to talk about," she said heavily, "you don't think I'm smart enough to hear. In my day, girls weren't too smart for their mothers, but nowadays they are and we mothers got to make the best of it." She lingered. Both girls kept still.

After she had straightened whatever in the room could be straightened and otherwise delayed her departure, Mrs. Kline had at last no choice but to keep her promise. She banged the door to, anyhow, as a slight expression of her feelings. A shudder passed through Grace; she placed a quick finger on her lip, signing silence to Anita. And, to be sure, there was a certain interval of time between the closing of the door and the retreating clamp clash of Mrs. Kline's feet.

"Anyhow, it's kind of her," murmured Anita.

"Yes," said Grace. "She means it, too, and she'd remember any kindness she did you to the bitter end."

As she lay staring at the ceiling, the telephone rang. She answered it in a low, cautious voice. She named no names, every word was noncommittal, a series of "ohs," one "better," some "yeses" and at length a phrase which Anita had heard from Grace before and which always made her smile with its unjustified consequence: "Well—what are—your plans?" Anita reflected that, while highly diplomatic, while perhaps necessary for secrecy, such conversations must provide a further diet of exasperation for Mrs. Kline.

She could not help noticing, too, how Grace had marshaled her illness, as it were; had arranged it, dramatized it. When Anita was sick she did not think how she looked or what were the conditions of comfort or discomfort about her, and as for how the outside world might be affected, that naturally never entered her mind. She was ill and paid as little heed to her illness as possible and wished to hide and get it over with. But Grace had dressed her hair as best became a sick person, very simply, brushed back from her nicely balanced smooth forehead and clasped with a barrette. Her dressing-gown had that fine symmetry, settled about her as evenly, as gracefully, as her clothes always did. There was a small atomizer on the table and a new book. The telephone rang. Grace's friends had apparently been informed or took the trouble to inform themselves. There was even a vase of red roses. Grace saw her looking at them.

"My baritone sent them," Grace said with her deep snigger. "It seems his heart is like a red, red rose. But tell me what happened."

When Anita began her story under Grace's attentive eyes she found that even less had happened than she supposed. She was so annoyed by Mr. Milford; she had fallen into the habit of revising his silly stories into some sort of sense, had been taxed with it, had foolishly argued—as if it mattered a whit to her—and before she knew it, she had heard herself saying, "I think I'd better leave."

Grace made only one comment. "If you had to leave, why didn't you get yourself fired and leave with two weeks' salary?"

Anita had never thought of this.

"You're not very good at business, are you?" said Grace, sighing. She considered. "Have you any money?"

Anita laughed.

"Then what will you do?"

Anita shrugged.

"But what will you do?" insisted Grace. "You must do something. Do you know anyone who might help you? Didn't you meet lots of people at the Dress Daily?"

"No one I'd ask for favors," said Anita stiffly.

Grace sighed again. "You're so proud. Pride's all right if you can afford it. But it's a question of choice. Wouldn't you rather give up a little pride—and get a job? What can you do otherwise?"

"I can go home," said Anita. "I can rest and think it over."

Grace opened her eyes. "To Trenton? Aren't you afraid?"

They understood each other, but Anita replied with a frown, "Why? My home isn't a prison."

"Well, mine is," said Grace. And suddenly she added, "Anita, I wish you wouldn't go. I'll miss you, truly I will."

She continued softly, with many pauses, as if she were feeling her way, testing with care for a response. "You know—I thought if I could ever really leave Ma—I could if I only made a little more money—we could—take a place together—maybe."

Anita did not quite know. Anyhow, it did not bear thinking of at present. She said in haste, "Well, that's a long way off. I haven't any money, you know, and I'm not likely to have."

But she appeared to satisfy Grace, who put an arm under her head and said with assurance, "We could manage that."

"Something's up in my own job," Grace added, moving and sighing on her couch. "I don't know just what, but I can feel something. To tell the truth, I haven't been paying much attention to it lately. I guess they see it—but—I can't help it. I—there've been other things." She fell silent.

Suddenly she began the motions of her laugh and searched Anita's face. "Do you know how I got this cold?" she said. She concluded, "Looking for rooms with Blake—for his wife."

She attempted to justify herself to the expression of withdrawal on Anita's face. "I suppose that—shocks you. But it was very natural. Their place isn't big enough with the baby and she can't go house hunting. Blake had to—so—I took the afternoon off and accompanied him, in the rain and all."

There was a pause. She added with a curved, one-sided smile, "I hope she's grateful."

The telephone rang again and Grace was upon it almost before the ring. She used the same formula, a little lower perhaps. "Oh.... Oh." A deep, "That's good!" Then, "What are—your plans for to-morrow?"

Grace hung up. She smiled a firm, a victorious smile, pressing her lips together.

"They've named the baby James," she announced to the ceiling, smiling up at it. "After her father."

She turned upon Anita a face bereft of the smile and said grimly through her set teeth, "He isn't a junior anyway. That's my little victory." Her cheeks had grown haggard and after a while she felt for a handkerchief under the pillow and dabbed at her eyes.

CHAPTER TWO

Every day young people came to Harry Strauss's office, armed with letters, fortified with introductions, to ask for work. Grace saw them all without appearing to see; nor had it escaped her that there seemed to be more of them, that they entered more expectantly and departed more hopefully. One would have thought that she had nothing to fear. She had got her raise, she had hinted for another. But she was well aware of and knew that Harry Strauss and Al were aware of a relaxation of the tight net of effort that she had at first spread over her job. She argued with herself that this was but natural; not even race horses were expected to keep up the pace with which they started. In any case she could not help herself. All she seemed to want now was to sweep away her work somehow so as to be free to meet Blake in the afternoons.

Something was in the air, something which had spread abroad and attracted these increasing numbers of job hunters, like the mysterious word that goes forth to crows or jackals that there is a carcass for the picking. One morning Grace saw Miss MacAlister with this obscure word in her eyes, watching her. Al was very quiet this morning. He sat at their table in the outer office and mulled over photographs, destined for the women's pages, of an opera singer who had been using some reduction method. This was strange. The opera singer belonged to Grace.

As she too bent over the table, Al said to her very low, "Did you have any words with Harry?"

"No. Why?"

Al murmured, "When I call you from Harry's office, come in and don't shut the door. Look out, she tells him everything."

They made perfunctory motions of work. Finally Al bustled into Mr. Strauss's empty office, and as he had planned, when he called her, Grace followed as casually as possible. They stood by the window, pretending to look out of it, while Al kept an eye on Miss MacAlister and on the door.

"You know I'm your friend here," began Al with emphasis. Grace said nothing. He hurried on. "Harry was asking for you yesterday afternoon. Where were you?"

"I can't do my work and be here every minute," said Grace sharply.

"I know that. I told him so. But Harry's a funny guy. He got mad and he said, 'That girl never shows up in the afternoon, she's never around when I want her.' I guess he was playing bridge the night before and lost a couple of dollars, so—Then he started talking about how he'd let you handle Madame Tallifer all by yourself to show what you could do—and you hadn't done so well with her, she's putting up a holler."

It was true. Grace hadn't done so well with the opera singer, Madame Tallifer. There were a thousand good reasons. There was little interest and no novelty to Madame Tallifer. She would complain in any event. But then, neither Grace nor anyone else was expected to heed reason in this business, this "racket," as Al called it. She was silent.

"So then he asked me what I thought," went on Al, "and I told him, I said, 'You know how it is, Harry. Grace hasn't got the experience you and me have. She's still learning. You got to go a little easy with her.'"

"You told him that!" exclaimed Grace. "You know very well and he knows too that I've done a lot better for the money he pays me——"

"I know all that, I know all that," said Al. "Sh! Listen, I had to tell him that, give him his way, you know, smooth things over. I'm your friend, see?"

Grace gave him an acute look and turned slightly away.

"Listen, think I want you to go? Wha'd'y'think I got to gain by it? It's no fun for me to break in a new girl," cried Al. "Listen, if you think I ever did or said anything against you, just ask Harry, that's all I want. Just ask him."

"Oh, let's drop it. Is that all you have to tell me?"

"Well, I was just going to finish. Just give me a chance. So a while after that Harry calls me in again and he's got a girl there. I didn't even catch her name, never heard of her, don't know her," he declared hastily, seeing Grace's eyes. "And he said to her, 'Would you work for thirty-five dollars a week?' And she said, 'Yes!' So then he said, 'Al, Miss—Whatshername—'ll be working with you next week.'"

Grace stared out of the window. After glancing at her once or twice Al began to fumble with papers on Mr. Strauss's desk. "Why don't you speak to Harry?" he suggested nervously. "Maybe you can fix things up."

But Grace shook her head and said, "No. I have to see Tallifer this morning." She picked up her coat, in passing, and went out.

Instinctively, she would not take impetuous steps across a bridge until she came to it. And she had to get out to think. This time she did not look at streets or shop windows or at the bright sky where even the clouds were a glittering, not a fluffy, white. The situation arranged itself like a chess game in her mind. Al wished to get rid of her. This girl was a friend perhaps. Or Al was afraid that she, Grace, might rise to some importance in the office. Well, she had never trusted Al. Just the same, he was sorry for her, too, sorry that it had seemed necessary for her throat to be cut. He had for her the futile, patronizing pity of sentimental people. She need not make an enemy of him. And Mr. Strauss—he would save fifteen dollars a week. It had been a mistake to suggest another raise—no chance there at all. But, if she knew Harry Strauss, he would not fire her (unless she begged for it) till Saturday, so that he might get the last ounce of blissfully ignorant effort out of her. Nice of Al to tell her—a small sop to his conscience perhaps—though perhaps he had planned that she would be disgusted enough and proud enough to leave pronto, of her own will, and save them the annoyance of a dismissal.

Anyhow, she had three days till Saturday. Of these she would make doubly sure by keeping out of Mr. Strauss's way. She had also an idea that she could manage to get a week's extra salary out of him by appealing to his particular vanity, which she had noted: his wistful desire of the born liar to be considered fair, square, to be believed. So she had nine working days of grace. She might not even have to tell Ma, if she began to angle at once.

She considered her problem skillfully, conscientiously, from every side, as a scientist might probe a new disease. She planned her procedure in her mind with swift instinct, a bold, logical poise, as a great general might plan a campaign. All other thoughts were excluded; ironic comparisons, the weakening, defeating insinuations of humor could not find a loophole. This was her trouble, her problem. For the time it encompassed her like the entire universe; for the time it was alone, itself, her universe; but it was a universe from which she did not shut everyone else out. No—it was rather a universe which it did not occur to her everyone else would not be pleased to share.

She had no intention of seeing Madame Tallifer. She went into a telephone booth.

Like any good general, Grace had never lost sight of her reserves. No matter how such she might be of the present, this did not prevent her from keeping herself alert for new opportunities, for ascertaining where, in an emergency, these might be more plentiful, for acquainting herself as much as possible with the people who had them to bestow. There were certain persons, too, as she realized—not perhaps entirely consciously—who, though not important themselves, might be used as keys to unlock the sources of opportunities beyond them. Mr. Milford was such a person. He could do nothing for her himself but he knew many people whose attention he could focus by means of a letter or a request. Grace was too shrewd to apply to Mr. Milford again; there were others, however, whom she had marked. Some might clamber up the rocky, direct road to strange offices and appear, scared and out of breath, to ask for work. Grace preferred the less simple, the roundabout, the easier way. She wanted a path prepared ahead of her, an entrance staged; a few laudatory wreaths strewn before, provided one's person seemed to become them, as hers did, always helped.

There was Tommy Manship, the assistant dramatic editor, who admired her, who had a job that forced press agents to pay court to him, and who could give her letters and suggestions. She arranged to see him first. Then there was her old boss, McTavish, at the Brooklyn Press. These were people with whom she could be frank. There were some women, too, women with money, women with valuable "contacts," of whom she had made friends from time to time. She had not been pleasant to them definitely because of their uses. At this time she was in general pleasant and, when necessary, obliging, partly because she liked to be so. She had never needed to shrink from people. From childhood she had been accustomed to the power of soothing and softening which her looks alone had, her great eyes, the glowing clarity of her skin. She enjoyed seeing the initial receptive expression on the faces of strangers; she preferred them to retain their admiration if possible. Besides, she understood without ever being told, without ever even thinking about it, how much of comfort and success, so desired by her, rested in the hands of other people.

When she left the telephone booth her routine for that day lay clearly ahead of her.

The next morning Grace came to the office early so as to avoid both Al and Mr. Strauss. She sorted a folder of Madame Tallifer's pictures in front of the stenographer and departed with it, remarking cheerfully that she had "planted" some woman's page features. Thus she hoped to record with Miss MacAlister her happy ignorance and her absorption in Mr. Strauss's affairs. She then walked over to the studio of a writing friend of hers, made herself at home, and carefully examined her toilette. She had an appointment with a Mr. Williams at the M.A.N. Film Company.

"Drop in to tea this afternoon," said her writing friend, Diana Porter Reece. "The man who runs the Enterprise Feature Syndicate is coming. He might help you."

Diana Reece was supported chiefly by a husband but did not let this interfere with her career. She did not care whether the men in her train were useful or futile, but inevitably, among the dregs, some would emerge who were worth knowing. Grace promised to come, though she had to see Blake at tea time too. She meant to overlook neither.

The way to Mr. Williams brought memories of her first day of job hunting—how she had worried over the sealskin coat, worn too early in the season, how her mind had been in conflict between Blake and work. This last year, in which she had fought no longer, in which she had succumbed to his invasion of her mind, seemed to have had an exactly opposite effect from what she might have supposed. Her mind was like a surrendered city which the conquerors believe they have at the moment of its defeat, only, upon settlement, to find themselves absorbed by an alien, negative host. The single thought of Blake was no longer in her mind, intruding on it, harassing her to eject it. It had become part of every thought there, and so it was no longer bitterly, distinctly there, apparent at all. She could not be distracted by the idea of Blake any more than she could be distracted by the idea of herself.

She looked very well; she owned a fall coat now. She was all in brown, a clear, pale brown of hat, dress, and chiffon stockings, a velvety brown of coat and shoes. And so with the feeling of light, easy, bounding power that seems to bring success in its wake, as its due, she went in to see Mr. Williams.

When she walked out she had her job. So simply! She almost wished to snap her fingers and walked along aimlessly, smiling, letting the light blue air of Indian summer, hazy as spring but without the springlike quiver, with a faint death-weariness in it, caress her face. Mr. Williams was not like Harry Strauss. He was a tall young man with a browned face and eyes as soft as Grace's own. He was susceptible and did not attempt to hide it. "Must have been a newspaperman," thought Grace. And so easy! He had merely told her what she would do and what he could pay, and that was sixty-five dollars a week. If Harry Strauss only knew! Really she had to gloat and declare holiday.

As she had expected, at the moment of handing her her check Saturday Mr. Strauss said: "Sit down a moment, Grace. I have sad news for you." That was one point in Harry Strauss's favor, Grace thought. Whatever he might do underneath, on the surface he wasted no oily sentiment, no hypocritical blather.

He now continued: "I suppose you see things are dull now. We've got to cut down. I asked Al about you and he said the work you were doing could be done just as well by an inexperienced girl——"

"Did Al say that?" cried Grace in spite of herself. "It's very unfair of him!"

Mr. Strauss sent her a keen, comprehending look.

"Well, I asked him and that's what he said. I can't keep track of you, you know."

"It was very unfair of him," repeated Grace, flushing. "In spite of the way you divided the papers, we've worked together on everything, as Al seemed to prefer. He can't claim any more credit for what we've done than I can."

Mr. Strauss nodded a number of times. "I know, I know all that. But that's what Al told me. If you don't agree, don't go out till Al comes and we'll have it out. Al is inclined to misrepresent things." He waited.

But a sudden idea shot through Grace's mind. Could they be working in unison? Was it a plan to get her to cut her own salary perhaps? Would people plot and counterplot with such narrow, shrewd subtlety for a few dollars? She felt highly superior to Harry Strauss and to Al. She brushed the matter aside with a curl of her lip.

"N-no," she said remotely. "I never could argue. If Al thinks that and you believe him——"

"I didn't say that, my dear," put in Harry Strauss. "I know nothing about your work. I have to ask Al and that is what he told me."

"Well, if Al feels that way about me——" She turned her eyes to the window.

"Well, what do you want to do?" said Mr. Strauss after a silence. "Do you want to leave?"

Grace lowered her eyes and took a deep breath. "Is that—the sad news you have for me?" she said in a very small voice.

"From what Al told me, I thought that would be best."

"If you're firing me," began Grace, "I have to go, of course." She spoke with dignity, but low, bowing to the greater force. She raised her eyes frankly to Mr. Strauss's face. "I can't afford to leave," she said. "As you know, it's not so easy—to get a job. And—I have my mother to support. It's very hard on me—without any notice." Her eyes, without a hint of a tear in them, took on the deeper pathos of tears just behind.

Mr. Strauss fussed with his papers. "Well, I'll tell you," he said at length. "I want to be fair to you. I'll give you a week to look around—and keep on with your work here. At the end of the week you come in and collect your pay as usual, but that doesn't mean you're to neglect your work here, you understand. Is that fair?"

So she had won. She had what amounted to a week's much-needed vacation with pay. It would be all right with Mr. Williams since she had thoughtfully arranged with him for this interval. It was hard to hide her elation. She got up and paused by the desk.

"I hope we—part good friends," she murmured with that curious advance of her eyes and retreat of the rest of her face. "I've liked—working here, and I'm sorry that you haven't found my work—entirely—satisfactory."

"That's all right, my dear," said Mr. Strauss. "You may have been lying down on the job here of late—I only know what Al tells me—but all the same I think you're a bright girl. After you're through here, drop in now and then. I might hear of something."

She thanked him. In the corridor, she met Al on his way back to the office.

"Well?" he inquired.

"Well?" she said haughtily.

"What happened? How'd you get along with Harry?"

Grace looked him over from top to toe before she replied. "He gave me a week in which to look around."

"I'm glad he did that anyhow," cried Al. "I'll see you around here then, but I want to wish you good luck right now, Grace." He put out his hand. "If I hear of anything—you know, I'm your friend."

Grace had a sudden moment of unguarded rage. She could and would permit herself to ignore the hand. She sneered. "Yes. I know what a friend you are to me."

"Jesus Christ! What's the big idea?" cried Al. Grace went on. "Women—! Women—!" called Al to Heaven, clutching his head and shaking it from side to side. He retreated into the office.

Still, some days later, Grace heard that Al was speaking of her as a "sweet girl," and when they next met they greeted each other as if nothing had happened. Neither cared or dared to make an open enemy of the other. Each had learned the Christian lesson of forgiving and forgetting, though not from motives of high magnanimity. To fight those who harm one and cherish those who aid one, to be proud, to be dangerous, and to be loyal is too primitive and difficult a process for this civilized world. It taxes the mind and emotions far less and is altogether better business to forgive and forget.

CHAPTER THREE

When Anita returned to New York winter was in full possession—a wet winter, a sickly winter, chilling the blood into sluggish mounds, turning a gray snow into slush and mud among the morass of cobblestones by the station. She had come to New York an energetic novice, had left it as a cool, experienced resident. She returned a stranger. New York did not recognize her, and in the midst of its docks and cobblestones, its trucks and wagons splashing mud to either side, foggy, gray with the drizzle, on the way to its markets, she was lost, very small, uncertain. A porter, noticing her in her brown coat by the cheap valise, indicated the Travelers' Aid Society. This made her laugh, though it hurt too. She felt like a person who had been cut dead by an old friend. And though she had resolved not to trouble Grace till she was settled, she went eagerly to a telephone booth and asked to see her at once.

On the way to the M.A.N. office she stopped by her old rooming house. A sign announced its sale; the wreckers had set their seals on its door and walls. With small-town faith, Anita had counted on this dreary house, the greetings of her landlady, on her old room or one just like it. Now there remained between her and complete disassociation only Grace.

She had to wait for Grace amid the heavy consequence of carpets, plush and oak. She was announced and ushered into the presence by a devious way through a great main office and short passages that made no attempt to keep the elegant promise of the reception room. Grace's desk in the Publicity Department was one of a number lost under pictures, papers, and telephones. Grace was typing and waved her hand. "Sit down a minute, Anita. I have to finish this."

She seemed to have taken on an impressive amount of assurance and a soft sheen, partly of grooming, partly of well-being, by which Anita, as she watched her, was more and more abashed. Her own shoes were sensible in rubbers, her gloves were not too fresh, and her hat bore traces of the drizzle. Grace, in a dark blue suit perfectly attuned to her like all her clothes, with the pale light of amber beads falling over the delicacy of her blouse, with her skin that appeared to have a richer glow over cheeks that had lost their hollows—this Grace was so aloof from her that no words and no attempted kindness could possibly reach across the space between them. Of course, Grace had to be polite for the sake of old times, old confidences—how old those times seemed suddenly!—but how could she have expected concern, the warmth of intimacy? She had better go, she thought. She was on the point of rising and going forthwith when Grace at last turned to her.

"Do you know what I'm doing?" she said. "I'm justifying my college education. I figured out a way to connect George Bernard Shaw's Superman with Babe Jean, the baseball player, who's under contract to us for one picture. They call him the Sultan of Swat. So I suggested—why not cable G.B.S. and ask if we might not advertise Babe Jean as the—Superman of Swat. Shaw is always good for loads of newspaper space. And luck was with us! To-day we got a cable from Shaw: 'Never heard of her. Whose Baby is Jean?' And Mr. Williams thinks we'll make every front page in the country."

At this moment Mr. Williams hurried out of the inner office and leaned over Grace with a marked gallantry. "Are you through, Grace? Would you let me have the stuff, then? I want to hold it over for the morning papers. I'll plant it myself. That was certainly one swell hunch of yours!"

He ran his eyes swiftly over the page and a half, came to a point that pleased him and nodded vigorously. "Yop. You made your sale fine!"

"I'll see that you get full credit for it," he assured her, and hastened away.

When the door of his private office had shut Grace said to Anita with a small, sly smile, "He likes me." She stretched in her chair, a gesture of voluptuous weariness after enjoyed and appreciated effort. "I'm having a grand time," she confided. "I've even stopped—worrying so much. Roy Williams is awfully nice to me. I'm supposed to do mostly woman's-page stuff for the press books, fashions, and feature stories, but he lets me try my hand at anything that comes up. It's lots of fun and so much easier than the Strauss job."

She had not yet asked about Anita. Now she looked her over, seeming abstracted, and remarked, "You look well. Have you decided what you'll do?" She rose as she said this, took her coat from the back of a chair, picked up a pale amber-colored hat and various possessions from the desk. "Come out with me. We can talk better outside." Anita followed unwillingly.

She went with Grace to buy a pair of stockings. On the way she was regaled with such bits of gossip as Grace felt she would surely wish to know. Letty was engrossed with Paul. Harold had gone into the lace business with a friend. He was also growing more docile.

"He's even got to the point where he'll make lunch dates with girls," announced Grace triumphantly. "And he no longer turns up his nose at me—so much."

"How's Blake?"

"Very well," said Grace in a cool voice. "You know, it's interesting," she added reflectively, as if repeating an explanation that had often been in her mind, "to watch the—er—balance—waver between us. At first—Blake was the chief person and I was a nobody. I cared for him more than he cared for me. But gradually I've been watching the balance sort of—even up. And now on this job I've been doing so well and making so many new friends, I can see—the balance swing slowly over to my side."

Anita listened without much interest and wondered how she could leave, and where to go when she left. They turned a corner.

Grace urged her: "Come up to Diana Reece's place. It's right here. She's away but she gave me the key. I want to see what you think of it. You know—I was thinking—Dee's place is only thirty-five a month. I'm starting a feature for the Enterprise Syndicate on Wives of Famous Men, and if I could only make enough out of it to pay the rent—I'd be ready to leave Ma. Dee's awfully sweet to me; she said if I took over the place she'd let me have her furniture. So you see—I'm almost set."

Yes, Anita saw, and the contrast between their conditions depressed her more than ever. Not for the first time, this talent of Grace's for ranging and consolidating trifles to form a stable background, a stable shelter, a stable footing seemed to her enviable. With Grace, one thing always led to another and more profitable thing.

Diana Reece's studio was a tiny front room in an old house off Fifth Avenue. This house, soon to suffer the fate of all old houses, stood far back from the street in a courtyard decorated with plaster statues that belonged to the shop next door. The statues of lions and angels were ghostlike in the gray mist; the house, black stairs after black stairs of which they climbed, smelled of mold and ancient woodwork, and Diana Reece's room was icy.

Grace turned on an electric heater and sat by it, drawing fresh, sheer stockings over her white feet. The room took on an air of graciousness from her movements, of comfort, of animation. The stockings, with their fragile smoothness of new silk, just reward for Grace's labors, struck Anita with the full force of her own idleness. She felt the darns on her own heels and toes. And she was even a little older than Grace. And here she sat, idle, with a cheap valise checked at a station, little money, and no home. She got up.

"I really have to go now. I ought to find a room to-day anyhow."

Grace contemplated her out of startled eyes that grew deeper, larger, softer. "Haven't you a room?" she exclaimed. "Why didn't you tell me? Do you mean to hunt for a room in this weather?"

"Well, I have to," said Anita miserably. "Unless I want to go to the Y.W. And I don't care for that."

After a long pause Grace started to plan in her deliberate accents. "You're so funny, Anita. I suppose you'll turn on me for suggesting this, but—you know you could stay here for a while. I wanted to tell you, but I thought... Anyhow, Dee never uses the place except to work. If you got out before ten and came back around five, I know she wouldn't mind your staying here. I sleep here myself now and then. It's—convenient. All I have to do is walk down Fifth Avenue to the office. This couch is very comfortable, and see, you have a heater, and it wouldn't cost you a cent."

"It's awfully decent of you," murmured Anita. "I don't know..."

"Oh, don't be proud! Just this once, don't be proud—please. It doesn't mean a thing to Dee. Keep your suitcase under the couch, and she won't even know you've been here!"

With relief, Anita yielded.

"Er—I saw Mr. Milford the other day," added Grace carefully. "He asked about you. You wouldn't want your old job back, would you?"

"No!"

"Well. I only asked. And you know—I'll look around for you, if you like."

"Not if it's a bother to you," said Anita. "It's ever so kind of you. I thank you and all that."

She was grateful, some of the burden slipped from her mind, and as a small, immediate token of gratitude, she now gave deep attention to Grace's talk.

"I have a lunch date with Tommy Manship," Grace was saying. "Did I tell you about him? He's on the dramatic staff of the Times. He's a cute lad and we are progressing by leaps and bounds, you might say."

"How's your baritone?"

"Oh! My baritone! I can't get rid of him. The latest development is—that he wants to marry me. I almost think I would, too, if he weren't so—Italian and so jealous. That's not so good. But I'd like to marry someone, then get divorced right away. Blake, as you can imagine, doesn't think much of the idea. But really, if you've once been married it's such—an advantage. An old wedding ring is a sort of—ad that you're no longer a virgin, and no one cares to check up on you further. If I had my life to live over again, as the saying goes, I'd marry at the earliest possible moment, at sixteen, when it's easy because you can fall for practically anybody, and be divorced, naturally, pretty soon, and then I'd have that behind me. I could always say I'd been married and I could do just as I pleased. That's the advice I'm going to hand on to my daughter, if I ever have one, which seems—unlikely."

Anita smiled. "What's the matter with this Tommy Manship person?"

"Oh. He's too smart. He guesses about Blake, I think. Not that I take any great pains to hide the fact. By the way, I have another man—too. He sells plate glass and reads poetry. Honest. I like him. But—he's married, separated from his wife. They're all married and separated," said Grace with a sigh. "The older you get, the more married and separated they are."

Anita began to laugh.

"Wait," said Grace darkly. "You'll see. Unless you can get interested in children. I can't. Walk over to the Algonquin with me."

In the lobby of the Algonquin, with its air of hush and velvet duskiness, the pale lights being lost among the somber shadows of deep armchairs, like candlelights in a cathedral, Grace resumed her former preoccupation. Drawing herself up in her sealskin coat that shone in the dimness, she seemed to set herself apart within an intangible circle of cool importance as she nodded here and there from a height and called remote hellos to girls whose coats likewise shone, to men who walked briskly here and there, nowhere, deigning to greet others of their kind. As her luncheon partner rose she turned to Anita in an attitude of dismissal.

"I'll think about a job for you. I'll let you—know," she said, her eyes fixed elsewhere.

And these words, trite and chilly congé to the job hunter, spattered from Grace's lips like so many hard, cold drops of rain, one by one, on Anita's new mood of hope, made her shrink and huddle into herself as she walked back along the foggy streets to her room.

CHAPTER FOUR

Thus began some weeks of existence, almost without substance or foundation, like the existence of a haunting wraith. In the morning it was necessary to leave the studio bearing no traces of her presence. It was not safe to return before evening. Then Anita, like a ghost, would look wistfully at the marks impressed on it by less immaterial lives, teacups on the desk, the curtains drawn, the wicker chairs grouped cosily about the heater, a box of candy, a few flowers. She felt that she had sunk far beyond the reach of this other region, where people bought flowers and chatted over teacups, and when, now and then, a ray of kindliness struck from this world into her nether sphere, she was disproportionately touched. Sometimes Grace left word for her to see such and such a person who might "know of something." Once she found a note from Diana Reece urging her to eat breakfast at the Reece table as often as she cared.

It was generous of Diana Reece, but it never could have occurred to Anita to accept. She had discovered a cafeteria where, for exactly twenty-two cents, she ate baked beans, cornbread, and coffee every day at eleven o'clock. This served both as breakfast and lunch. Dinner at the same cafeteria cost no more than fifty cents if she chose sparingly. She got to know very well the park, the museums, the reading rooms and stone benches of the Public Library, and all the streets within walking distance.

Although she followed Grace's suggestions, nothing ever came of them and Anita, in spite of her predicament, was secretly glad. Grace counseled her to do as she, Grace, would have done—to take, if one had to, any job, no matter how unsatisfactory temperamentally, and unflinchingly mold either herself or the job into some sort of suitability, meanwhile keeping an eye on other mouseholes, or, as Grace put it, "waiting for something—to turn up." To Grace everyone was playing cat; you had to in order to get along and of course one wished to get along. There was no choice. Anita, however, knew that for her there were distinct limits to the amount of endurance she would invest in any undertaking; inevitably there would confront her the question as to whether the undertaking was worth so much irritation and so much effort to her; if the answer were negative, off she would go, not even stopping to choose a sensible exit.

In the end, Grace did not succeed in understanding; she succeeded only in being patient with what she considered a stubborn whim. Anita sometimes wished that she had not accepted Grace's aid in the first place, and often she wished with all her heart that Grace had not permitted her a glimpse of Grace's world. In spite of her suspicions, it seemed to be the only world in which she could and should strive for a foothold, a successful world. Moreover, it was enticingly open to her; it was Grace's helpful determination to keep it open for her, not to permit Anita to sink into the obscurity of, say, a factory hand or a waitress, as Anita might otherwise have chosen to do. Anita felt grateful; she felt the conscientious person's obligation to do her best to live up to what was expected of her, and yet somehow she was not so grateful after all. Emulation of Grace, a sort of competitiveness, the restlessness with which her first meeting with Grace had left her, the feeling which she had had in Diana Reece's studio when she thought that here she was even a little older than Grace and yet in so much more uncertain a position—such comparisons made a rope about her neck, strangling her initiative.

It was Grace who finally remembered that Harold Moses had once sympathized with Anita's interest in factories.

"He might know of a job you'd like," she said. "He used to do all the hiring for his firm. He knows a lot of employment people. And he's a cousin of Ella Alvyn, the one who's so mixed up in charities and child labor and that sort of thing. Be sure and get a letter to her."

So Anita went to see him. She found that, as Grace had indicated, his training as a husband had awakened Harold to his first close observation of women as people. A year ago he had thought her a little peculiar. Now, though he knew too much about factories not to laugh at her tentative remark that she would like to work in one, yet there was sympathy in his laughter for, underneath the suggestion, impossible enough as he saw it, there lay a feeling which they had in common, a feeling indefinable to him which had often come to him unreasonably in the midst of swarming, clacking, zooming power machines, the whirling black belts overhead, the Italian and Jewish operators singing—wailing rather—long and monotonous chants as the soft lengths of silk grazed their fingers. A feeling which he only realized through its resultant satisfaction. A sense perhaps of brushing through layers of cobwebs that clung to eyes, ears, and mind and at last seeing under his feet the worn yet still unwearied earth of toil—the least common denominator of toil—and he himself in it, sunk in that earth and drawing power from it, like everyone else. Ugly it was and smelly in a workroom, yet, as often happens with real ugliness, there was a weird harmony in its distortion—the features of beauty, placed, as it were, upside down—which equaled the charm of beauty for the fascinated and reconstructing imagination.

Now, one day in the week, he would borrow his partner's car and drive out to the cottages of the lace makers in New Jersey, ostensibly to collect their product but really to rid himself of the boredom of that work which, difficult though it was, yet seemed unreal—approaching buyers, showing samples, taking orders, outwitting competitors—and to stand again in the midst of a toil felt, smelt, heard and seen. Anita could understand this. Half-amused, he asked her if she would like to ride out with him that day.

It was the first afternoon since her return to New York on which she had felt alive. With work, the common, veritable substance of it all around her, she forgot that she was hunting for work herself. She forgot that she existed only by sufferance and through other people's occasional benevolence.

In New York the snow had melted into sodden remnants and was being shoveled away. Here, on the Jersey side, it covered gray streets with a robust splendor, reflecting the ice-blue sky; safe even in the sunlight which was accompanied by a beating wind. Anita waited in the car during the first calls, outside of low, long outbuildings like garages, that vibrated with the hum of the Schiffli machines. As they rode farther into town Harold pointed out cottage after cottage with its wooden structure beside it, sealed tightly without, warm and active within.

She was permitted to enter one at last and met the lace maker, a stooped German, all one color like the warped walls of his shed. With a sort of tender pride he exhibited the sweep of his Schiffli, he showed her the pattern, like a scroll of dots and dashes for a player piano, attached to a part of the machine, which thereafter repeated it time after time, mingled it in magical fashion with the threads of the net base. She did not care to ask many questions, just to see the wheels go round, the fine threads stretched on the framework of the machine that went the length of the building, the threads being picked up with a precise, an unceasing subtlety, and intertwined. The lace maker's young son walked back and forth on the ledge, watching the web. At a table in a corner his daughter threaded bobbins, while his wife sat in the sunshine under a closed window, skillfully patching places where the machine had not functioned. They all worked quietly, evenly, while the Schiffli droned in the background seeming to weld them also together. Each time the wife caught Anita's eye she smiled and Anita smiled; step by step the lace maker explained the processes of his machine, how it did not really make lace at all but embroidery on a net base, which base was later removed by a chemical bath. As they reached the end his boy looked up with a bashful grin.

Harold had his last order wrapped up in heavy brown paper and gave them a fresh design and a new order. When they got outside Anita asked what a family like that could earn.

"After they pay for the thread and the instalment on the machine they do well to clear say fifty or sixty a week in good times," said Harold.

He started his car. The little cottage, disappearing down the length of the street, looked tiny between two banks of snow. Against the brilliance of the snow its lines were etched clearly, if lightly, and its sides were smoothed with a patina of its own, all of one color, like the lace maker's face, the humble color of use.

They hardly spoke on the way home. Anita was immersed in re-tasting the afternoon, bit by bit, and wished to be left alone. She set out to walk from Harold's office under the now dark sky, through the peopled streets with their round lamps that gleamed at intervals, and reached the studio ruddy, bounding with cheer and vigor. She found Grace and Blake there. "Hello," said Grace. "Look," she said, rising and slowly revolving. "How do you like my new outfit? Letty and I changed clothes for to-night."

Against a rough tweed suit of the blue that madonnas wear in ancient paintings, her skin shone warmly, and the same lucid blue glowed in beads about her throat. Excitement had tinged her cheeks the faintest, pearliest pink and the pupils of her eyes hid like great, dusky shadows beneath a thin glaze of brilliance. Never, Anita thought, had she seen her so lovely.

"Hul-lo," she said wonderingly.

Blake, sitting over the heater, pale, with a wry twist to his lips, remarked, "I have had the merits of that shade of blue analyzed for me in detail within the past half hour. We have considered the question from every angle, together with sidelights upon the virtues of black, brown, orange, amber——"

Grace began her special laugh.

"As a matter of fact, we've been talking mostly about Blake's play. Do you know Blake has met a man who writes music—and they're all set to do a musical comedy together? Blake is going to do the book and lyrics. Really it sounds awfully good."

He would not be diverted. "——and the detestable properties of cerise," he continued. "Cerise is a loathsome color. It is a vulgar color. It is a color that fat women choose by instinct. Tell us exactly what should be done with cerise, Grace."

Grace paid him a due tribute of amusement before she turned to Anita.

"Well," she said, "did you get that letter?"

"What letter?"

"To Ella Alvyn. Or did he call her up for you? What did you do this afternoon?"

With a sinking heart, Anita stood looking down at the futile débris of her afternoon, feeling helpless. What had she done? She had not advanced her purpose; one thing had not led to something better. She had seen a machine and defined the color of a cottage.

"I—there wasn't a chance to ask him," she said slowly. "He never mentioned her so——"

"For goodness' sake!" exclaimed Grace. She shook her head and sighed. "Why would he mention her, unless you asked? Then—then nothing happened?" Seeing Anita's face, she went over and took her arm. "Never mind," she said, "I'll call him first thing in the morning. I could speak to Ella Alvyn myself, even. She's the president of our alumni association and she knows me. But Harold would be better. He's a first cousin, you know.... I'll—I'll speak to him. Let's have dinner together, shall we? There's a nice place across the street—not expensive," she added to Anita's frown.

Blake put in suddenly, "I'll go with you."

"Aren't you due home?"

He did not answer.

"I don't want to—interfere—with your arrangements," said Grace with a dignity more measured than usual. "Besides—I have an engagement after dinner, you know."

In silence they walked across the street. Blake went to a wall telephone. He spoke too low for their ears, but when he returned his pale face had grown more pallid, his lips were dry and tight. He took up the menu as a shield, swallowing behind it, so that the eyes of the two girls should not pick him out, should not strip him more raw than he already felt.

"I suppose she was very much upset," remarked Grace. She spoke to Anita. "I don't blame her," she said with feeling. "I can imagine how—it must be—to wait for someone with dinner on the table, and all at once—to have him call up and announce—he won't be home."

She chatted on, seeming ever lovelier, gayer, less concerned, subordinating them, rising far above them on the wings of her beauty and serenity. When it came time to pay the check Grace ostentatiously placed a dollar on the table; Anita did the same. It was understood that Blake never had any money. He flushed, drew out his dollar, and, without looking, thrust the bills at the waitress. Grace glanced toward him expectantly, repeating that she had a date. He rose and left them.

Anita had to accompany Grace to Grand Central to meet, as Grace confided with a complacent smile, the plate-glass salesman who read poetry. People turned to survey Grace, poised by the train gate, drawn by the power of her glowing face, of her dominant mood, of her feet moving so buoyantly that they seemed fluent over the stone, and Anita watched her, feeling heavy by her side, very poor, very dull. When the train arrived she said a hasty good-bye. This time she would not wait for dismissal.

CHAPTER FIVE

Row after row of sedate brownstone houses met Blake in his part of Brooklyn and stolidly followed his homecoming. There was no shaking them off. When he left one behind, a similar house rose beside it. In summer a few hotels before whose doors lines of taxis churned, along whose tops roof gardens sparkled in the sky, sent a thin trill of vivacity through the surrounding section; in winter even the hotels were quiet. He chose his own home by number instead of by recognition and, noting his baby carriage behind the stairs, he knew that he had made no mistake. All the circumstances of his daily return: the evidence of the child; the bell ticking eagerly to his ring; the door opening to his footsteps; the shaft of light in its angle, ready to embrace—all these details, a source of cheer and comfort perhaps to his neighbor returning like himself, he never failed to find oppressive. He just brushed his wife's cheek, so softly extended, and went by.

Edith spoke of the weather, carefully circling his defection from dinner. They never quarreled. She was determined that he should have no fault to find with her, not realizing that, with a person one should love and doesn't, the very lack of faults is in itself the most alienating fault.

She hung up the coat he had thrown over a chair. There was nothing more to do in the kitchen so she sat down near him. She was tall, graceful, had always carried herself with dignity, and a strain, a weariness about her, the first hint of the erosion of her daily life, could not destroy the perfect balance of her features, the peculiar charming shade of her red hair, firmly coiled. All her gestures remained calm. When she wheeled the baby carriage, thinking—thinking of Blake and of their child and of herself—people would take her for a nice-looking young matron, a little pale perhaps, a little tired from household duties.

"I guess I'll lie down," said Blake. "Will you leave some coffee for me?"

He preferred to work from midnight to dawn, then to sleep till afternoon, a schedule to which his wife had adapted herself with distinct doubts of its irregularity. Especially now, since the birth of the baby, she found the custom trying. But she would not say much. Only...

"Is Jerry coming again?"

"No. He can't work without a piano."

She looked relieved. Jerry was to write the music for the play, and when he and Blake collaborated, clicking a typewriter and humming portions of songs, the baby stirred, Edith was afraid the neighbors might complain. Someone had already spoken to the janitor about the noise of the typewriter in the small hours. She mentioned this to Blake without comment.

He glanced up quickly. "I could work in Jerry's room," he said, "I'll have to anyhow, once in a while. He can't do much here because there is no piano."

"Where would Jerry sleep then?"

"Oh, well..." He did not feel that he cared to explain the various ways in which Jerry whiled away his nights.

"It won't be very pleasant for me, to be alone," said Edith softly.

"Well, we don't have to work together yet. I thought, if you had rather..."

"No. Only—the baby—but I think he's grown used to it."

Blake said no more.

It was this indifference, an impenetrable neutrality of action, word, expression, that defeated her time after tune as the smooth back of a duck defeats drops of water. With a man who ignored the past and would not glance at the future, she found fewer and fewer loopholes to evoke past tendernesses, to envisage future plans. She watched him from under her lids. He sat on the couch, turning the sheets of a newspaper and, though he uttered no word, it was apparent that he waited for her to relinquish him so that he could go to sleep. He sat there, sober, thin-faced, with his mouth in a tight line. Of late he held his mouth in a glummer, closer line than ever and spoke as if it were a trouble to open it.

She observed—but it was so impossible to feel, to know what he thought. The effort to concentrate and seize his mind behind the pale, high temples only drained her own mind of every idea, of every hope, and left her dry, her body taut, and within her, her nerves, the muscles of her heart fluttering in a disordered measure, frightening, unrestrainable. She made a grimace, attempting to control them, concluding, as she always did, that she had been weakened by the birth of the child. She was not able to rise just yet.

To justify her presence she asked with a certain timidity, though it was such a natural question from a wife to a husband, "Are you worried over anything?"

A fresh line cut itself between his brows. He shook his head.

But this gesture was not colorless as usual; there was a distinctness to it, a harshness, that seemed to her to offer a clue. "Would it be about money?"

"Do you need any money?" he said briefly.

"I shall soon."

Now he pondered above the paper, studying the wall and keeping very quiet. This silence cut her to the heart. In the past she had perhaps laid too much emphasis on his pursuit of an alien will-o'-the-wisp, on the snapping of those moorings which she could see no sensible reason to loosen. She was sorry for that, even if she still saw no reason and still longed for the moorings. In spite of herself, she often tried to impress upon him subtly the harassment of their present life in contrast to their old life, hoping the difference would become as clear to him as it was to her, certain that once it was clear it would also be abhorrent. At the same time she could not bear to see him thus struggling with his eyes on the opposite wall. And at the same time it was true that she would soon need money, and it was Blake she had to look to for its provision.

"I'll have to ask Fred," he muttered, more to himself than to her. "He ought to have some ready for me now."

"I can't see why he doesn't pay you regularly," ventured Edith.

"Oh, it's the way they do things. The acts don't always pay regularly. It's show business." He emphasized the last words by a sneer and Edith glanced at him with a sudden, swift hope.

"Blake," she said, "I have a letter from your mother. Wouldn't you like to go back home for a short visit and look around? Perhaps you would like it so much better now." In her eagerness, she was leaning over and looking wistfully into his eyes.

He withdrew them. "No!" he said.

"It wouldn't be giving up. It would be just a visit."

"No."

But they were talking now, they were discussing their common life, and even negation was more cheerful than a return to silence.

"You know I'm not so well, Blake," she went on gently. "It's my heart."

He could not help a pale smile behind the paper. He looked to see whether she, too, had noticed. But no, she was entirely unaware, entirely serious, as she continued, "Having the child has strained my heart, the doctor says."

Now he looked her straight in the eye. "Whose fault was that?" his eyes challenged her, and, flushing, she would not lower hers and answered them with pride.

"Well?" he said.

"The rest would do me good."

He rustled a sheet of his paper while she waited. She had some moments to imagine the elation with which she would return home, the relief at having removed him, at least for a while, from this environment which had so changed him, so that his next words struck her with twice the force of surprise.

"Well, why don't you go, then?" he said quietly. "I guess I can raise the fare, if that worries you."

She was speechless. She stared at him, searching his immobility with a last intense and useless effort, like a searchlight attempting to probe a stone wall. Every line of his face was obvious to her; she saw the tight-shut lips, the pale brows drawn together, the cheeks too thin for their squareness, and a light lock of hair falling over the temples, and that was all. For a second his neutrality had vanished; a rift had appeared in the wall, offering a glimpse of what lay behind it, and had closed in that second, too swiftly for her to see. Why had she not been alert? Now, search as she would, scan every detail of his expression, no trace remained of where the rift lay, much less of why it lay there, if it did. She rose at last. At the door she paused, trying to get less than an idea, merely a hint of some idea.

"Would it relieve you," she asked, "if I went home for a time?"

"What do you think?"

She went into the kitchen and set about making fresh coffee with many small busy movements, so as not to think at present. When she looked into the room again the light had been put out and she could not see his face where he lay on the couch. But she thought that he slept.

CHAPTER SIX

Not till the plant has forged through the ground can we see that the seed was fertile and events ripe for its blossoming. Thus, too, our lives are made up of accidents, chance seeds of the residue Nature provides against barrenness, blown by the wind of every-day, taking no root in our existence; and of coincidences which are accidents that find the soil receptive and come to fruition. Without specific design on Blake's part, the conjunction of a certain mood of his and certain words of Edith's had caused to happen that which he and Grace had so much desired. Edith had withdrawn voluntarily. She went home on what she thought was a long visit. Blake had merely now to keep her there, which was simpler.

The sunshine of the noons to which Blake opened his eyes that summer stroked his lids with a special zest. He had divested himself of the apartment in Brooklyn and gone to live with Jerry. From the first moment of waking he felt the hum of the street outside, a midtown Manhattan street that repeated like a second, fainter chorus the shining song of Fifth Avenue, mingled with the troubled, grimier notes of Sixth, where men stood with eyes glued to employment lists, where the El roared and small shops jostled each other and clamored. Blake's bed was soft and wide. It was part of the bedroom suite brought from St. Louis via Brooklyn, and in the midst of the dark blue hush of a semi-sacred parlor set which Edith had once chosen with such care, Jerry sprawled, his clothes neatly folded and himself sunk in a red, torpid slumber.

Their place and the house itself had the quietude of sleep, in spite of the sunshine, the sound of wheels sizzling up the black, hot street, the hoots of cars and a light zigzag of some work far off that rose, that ebbed, that never ceased. Negro maids were treading the carpeted stairs, clicking keys in doors closed upon a similar silence, and outside the black porter applied luster to the banisters with a languid hand.

When the telephone buzzed Blake dragged it into bed with him by its cord and spoke sleepily to Grace. "Hello," he said, and "Yes," he said with a yawn, "I'm just getting up." A more distinct effort of gallantry greeted the next call. Nearly every day this female voice, which had phoned to ask about one of his vaudeville playlets, continued to pursue him with semi-mysterious and flattering banter.

"Who'z'at?" called Jerry drowsily from the living room. He made his entrance, rumpled, opening and shutting gelid lids to the motes of sunshine, as if in a sort of exercise, and in his brief glimpses expressing disapproval of the tossed state of the room. In contrast with his genial disposition and life of easy concurrence, Jerry was a stickler for the tidiness of material objects. He picked up things; he straightened things; ashes on the carpet turned his face wry as much as a false note or a piano out of tune. "Who'z'at?" he said, and sitting down on the bed, "I got to cut this out."

"No one for you. You want to train your lady friends not to call you at 3 A.M. There was some girl ringing this phone every half hour from three to five."

"Same girl? Mm. Musta been Madalynne. You got yours trained, haven't you?" said Jerry sadly.

In leisurely fashion, Blake's day unwound ahead of him. He walked up his street which pleased him with its width, the houses having long ago been built back so that they, too, seemed to have leisure. On Sixth Avenue he passed the groups of men who stood before the employment bulletins, their hands hanging loose, their mouths dully open, peering at each letter and still irresolute whether to enter or leave, as if they knew that, no matter which action they chose, it would come to the same thing in the end. The air, brilliant with heat, picked out each spot of wear, each harsh line, awkward bones, and coarse hands, weaving in and out and about the groups in a nimble grotesquerie of light and more light and in final, swift rays not ignoring the stocky ankles of women, the cheap glazed fibers of a stocking, a smudge of a face, dingy, blemished, under the inquiring eye of the sun. Blake moved around them. Turning the corner, he went by the Friars' Club. Here was another knot of men loath to leave the sunshine that stroked their sleek shoulders and polished boots and tinged full cheeks and fleshy cheeks. Blake sent a cool glance through this group. He knew some of the men by sight.

When he reached the restaurant on Broadway he opened his mail and lost some of his tranquillity. He had a letter from his wife, three pages of small, even words, upon which a few bulbs, burning high in the chandelier even at noon, cast a weird, too-naked light. It was as if this room could not exist without some promise of the glittering night. Its chandeliers were gilded and its walls were adorned wherever possible with the same grimy gilt. The raucous blonde hair of his waitress remonstrated harshly with long, dusty rays of sunlight creeping in—and so did her gold teeth.

He wished to tear the letter up but there was no place to throw the pieces, so with a frown he restored it to his pocket. He had formed the habit of sending his wife money with merely a line of enclosure, but her small, even words continued to groove a path to reach him, each word wearing as a drop of water, each containing a minute part of the energy of its sender, and each to be evaded by the intangible negation of its recipient.

Afterward Blake went to the theater where his show was to be rehearsed. At the press agent's suggestion they had sent out a call for chorus girls with long hair. Blake found a few reporters; Jerry, with his coat off, haranguing the orchestra which he was to conduct; and the bare lines of the stage, its bare steps, even its bare floor, hidden by the soft bodies, the pale arms, long legs, the bright clothes of girls. Most of them had taken off their hats, and a few had even loosened their hair, spreading triumphant, delicate fans of gold and auburn, of dusk and chestnut about them.

The press agent was counting the long-haired ones. He returned in disgust.

"This is Mother's Day in the Old Ladies' Home," he said. "Not a long-haired dame under forty, I swear."

"There's a little blonde over there," suggested a reporter.

"Yeh—go look at her close and you'll find she has a grandchild. If you can pick anything out of this lot——"

The producer lowered himself into a front-row seat, resting a short arm on either side and his jowls on his chest. The director, on the other hand, was a tiny, gnarled person who wiped the back of his neck with a bandanna and cursed legs and girls. The theater was choked with heat. The girls said, "Whew!" and waved bits of handkerchiefs and rubbed and powdered their noses without respite.

"Now, you girls stand up and come to the center of the stage. No. Not all at once. Say, you Bill, you get them into line. A dozen at a time, Bill. Goddamn this heat. Goddamn everything above two inches."

Some of the girls thought fit to smile. Others held grave faces and looked loftily up to the dome of the theater. Others drew themselves up in the line, took a dancing pose, gyrated slowly round like models. And each dozen, clad in varying plumage—in summer silk that clung to hips and breasts, in organdy with great, crisp hats, in practice bloomers that exposed pink flesh, dimples, the slim bones of ankles in businesslike nakedness, leaving the girls as pathetically unhidden as long, plucked fowls—each dozen moved with sealed faces, with indifferent faces, with open giggles before the lidded eyes of the producer and the sneering inspection of the director, before Blake to whom they all looked flawed for his show, who was disappointed in all of them, before Jerry who was touched by each pretty face, before the reporters who were pleased to be in the presence of so many chorus girls.

"Here, you with the Dutch cut—no, not you—that girl there." A girl seemed startled, said, "Me?" and stepped to one side. "You with the blue bloomers. Yeh. That one. And that one. Step back you with the hair and let me see the others. Yes, I mean you. Goddamn it, dear, will you step back?"

The producer whispered to the director.

"That little girl with the curls, didn't I see you around the Savoy in London?"

The others cast sharp looks from her to the men. "Why, I've been to England," said the girl haughtily.

Someone snickered.

"Just stop that noise, now, just stop that noise," shouted the director. "Whaddye think this is, a tea party? You girls, what are you waiting for? If your names haven't been taken, go on home. Go on. Get them out, Bill."

A girl called, "You haven't even looked at us."

"Oh, I haven't looked at you, haven't I? All right, step forward, I'll look at you now."

She stepped forward hardily, pirouetted, kicked out and would have continued.

"That's all right," snapped the director. "You don't have to go into your dance for us. We know you're a Pavlowa. But I'll say that for you, dear," he added, "you're worth looking at. Take her name, Bill. Any others we haven't looked at? Come on. Step forward or go home."

Those who had not been chosen lingered about the stage. The youth named Bill, his collar open at the throat, a pad in his hand, dispersed group after group into receding fragments, only to have them congeal again, murmuring, with eyes on the men who had not yet gone, opposing to his hoarse shouts the massed immobility of their hope. Drive them as he would, they moved forward, they moved back, unheeding, passive, according to some pattern of their own instinct.

"Only two in the bunch with long hair," said the press agent to the reporters. "That's a hot one for you."

"These babies look all right, but can they sing and dance? That's what I'd like to know," said the director. "Bill, tell 'em to come here same time to-morrow. Hey, you, all of you whose names we got, same time to-morrow. And no use any of you others coming—hear me?—no use!"

He added pessimistically, "Better send out a call for another batch."

When Blake turned the corner of his street again the retreating sun had strewn the sky with minute pink clouds, crisping one within the other like rose petals across one side of heaven. Lucent the air lay over the brownstone houses and bright summer awnings of tea rooms and over the bodies of limousines before the smooth shop windows. And in his house, where the windows were open, the light swam over Grace's pure skin as in another ether, in tiny bounding motes of light and shade. There was a mote on her nose and one that fled along her cheek and he kissed these, searching them out to the reward of her deep amusement. They made a circuit of the room in an embrace exaggerated so as not to come within the terms of sentimentality, an improbable embrace, a travesty on embraces, which yet could not conceal the force and persistence of their arms about each other, their utter absorption in each other, as, like great actors immersed in their parts, they set up a dais for themselves and swept below, aside, the audience of Jerry and his exuberant Madalynne.

Madalynne was a girl with a superfluity of everything—of flesh, of hair, of clothes, of complexion, of voice, and of the love which she lavished on Jerry. Even her name was over-spelt. With Grace she had felt it necessary to adopt a superfluity of dignity, matching, she thought, Grace's own, but in the presence of this embrace she felt that the barriers had been let down. She cast herself on Jerry's bosom, exuding baby talk at every pore.

Grace and Blake laughed into each other's eyes with a mute laughter, with a derisive understanding. "The perfect hot momma," murmured Grace, and aloud, taking pity on Jerry, she said to him, "Does Blake's mysterious lady still call every day?"

"Does he tell you that?" said Jerry. He freed himself by a number of shakes and pats, good-natured and indifferent, much as one does with an over-fond dog. "I'll never understand you two."

"And you stand for it?" demanded Madalynne. "My God! How can you bear it?" she cried. "Why, if such a thing happened with Jerry I'd never rest till I settled it. And Blake, how can you act that way to your girl friend? Shame on you! Jerry wouldn't do that to Momma, would'ums? Yum-yum."

Grace quickly put her hand up to her mouth. "I want him to ask her to the opening," she said.

"So you can meet her and judge what you're up against?"

Blake could not hide a certain gratification and Grace said to him, "I can meet her without you. Dee knows a woman who knows her."

"I knew I shouldn't have told you her name."

"Always keep your girls separate," declared Jerry solemnly. "Take it from me——"

"What! What girls are you keeping separate, Jerry Barker?"

"Not a one, hon. Honest-to-God, dear. I'm just advising Blake. You're the only girl for me."

"That's what you say. But I'd like to know about this. How come you know so much about keeping girls separate? I tell you I won't stand for any of that. I don't like the idea of girls being free to chase in and out of this place—I don't mean you, Grace. You tell Momma, Jerry, you 'fess up, you naughty boy, what've you been up to?"

"I swear to you, hon, I've had enough of—I mean—I've got you and that's enough for me."

"Jerry lov'ums his momma?"

"Absolutely, hon."

Outside, Grace remarked, "Does she really think Jerry'll marry her? She told me he promised her a diamond ring if the show went over."

"She can think what she likes," said Blake. "So he promised her a diamond ring?" He smiled sardonically. "The more fool he. He's got his hands full."

Grace sent him a strange, fleeting look. How men did resent a woman who concluded that the most heart-easing satisfaction she was likely to obtain from a man was money or its equivalent! Was it because she was a proof, which even they could not overlook, of the insufficiency of their own irresistible charms?

However, she kept quiet.

CHAPTER SEVEN

On the night Blake's play opened, as she entered the theater, the first person Anita saw was Grace. She stood at the head of the center aisle, within a little group of which she was acting as heart and core. To her throat, held aloof, as if beyond the reach of glances from the inflowing and anonymous crowd and almost beyond the reach of friendly nods, she was folded in a shawl of ivory silk. And her very soul had sheathed itself in silken hauteur, as she stood with eyes that wandered deeply over the lighted theater and the faces agog for pleasure, over silken shoulders and bare shoulders and shoulders black and gray jostling down the aisles and across the aisles toward pleasure. Now and then she murmured some preoccupied reply, not deigning to lower her eyes, to one of the group surrounding her.

Now and then she emerged from this group, swooped from her height with a sudden nod to an entering person, a greeting of unexpected cordiality, a fastening of her eyes upon him.

As Anita was about to approach she issued entirely from her circle and, with no move of seizure, with her arms close under the ivory shawl, she seemed to assume possession of a man just passing by, to spiritually clutch his coat-tails and bring him to a halt.

"I'm so glad—you could come, Maurice," she said with her significant pauses.

To the girl who had loosed his arm and moved ahead of him she gave no attention at the moment. However, without waiting for notice, this girl carelessly turned her face. It was fair as a spring morning. She drawled to Grace, "H'are yuh? Gettin' along?"

And she added with a derisive sweep of her hands up from her nose, "I see yuh're comin' up in the world—yup-in-the-world," and swayed down the aisle.

Imperceptibly, the group drew near Grace again and imperceptibly drew nearer, as if there was that in her shadow which separated them from the anonymous inflow. They kept close under her wing—Letty and Harold, the Lindens, who were friends of theirs, and some persons Anita did not know—staring about over the theater, mantled by her importance, individualizing themselves again as the friends of the author.

Anita attracted a vague "hello" from Grace. In spite of motions from Letty, she went on to her seat. She had not wished to come, but Grace seemed to find her lack of excitement annoying and she did not like to offend Grace. The latter had been so kind about getting her her job. She was alone. She had never been to an opening night and watched with solitary interest a hocus-pocus of ceremonial new to her.

In the first rows, among which she sat, everyone seemed to perform the ritual of knowing one another. As soon as a person reached a seat, he or she would search the surrounding faces for signs of recognition and attempt to form alliance with some portion of the scattered inner circle who were making this opening their festive and intimate occasion. All the other undifferentiated faces, tiers and tiers, on the balcony, up and down the rows, pressed heavily forward; a shower of undifferentiated chatter and laughter splashed the theater like a shower of bright raindrops. One mustn't let oneself be swamped by these other faces. And every nod, every acknowledging glance, every knowing remark was a slight thread to grasp with which to outline the boundary between those within and the other undistinguished mass without. It was as if the more nods, the more smiles they collected, the more exchanges of specialized gossip, the more assurance they gained that this boundary was defined. It was as if each nod, each smile, each familiar greeting slowly brought their individualities into shape from formlessness, like chemicals etching on seemingly blank paper inch by inch the outlines of a secret script. It was as if, in the widening scope of these nods, these smiles, these familiar greetings, they could see their individualities expand and gauge their bulk, as one may gauge the bulk of a stone by the widening ripples in the water.

In the anticipant hush after the first lights had been dimmed Grace advanced down the aisle. Blake would not sit with her. Sleek in evening clothes, he spoke quietly and did his best to suppress excitement or suspense. But his voice gave him away. He was quite hoarse. Grace was saying, "Considering that it's a musical show and there are two other openings, what can you expect? The critics would naturally choose Toreador. Maurice Lensky came anyway—that's something. And I saw Edmond Edmonds, too. Really—if you get two of the second-string critics, that's doing very well, with two—more imposing—shows opening the same night."

Blake frowned and moved away. Her eyes looked after him in some surprise, while a smile rose to her lips, and seeing Anita near her she whispered, "He hates me to say any show is more important. I never dreamed he would take this—so seriously." She passed, smiling to herself, and was followed by Diana Porter Reece with her husband and a man who, Anita noticed gratefully, also wore his every-day clothes.

"You go sit by Anita," said Diana Reece.

Somebody shushed her. The last lights went out and left this man, whose red hair was plastered every which way on his neck and forehead, fumbling at his seat. He grinned at Anita. The curtain rose.

Soon after the play had started a whisper fluttered along the row from Grace through Diana Reece and reached Anita. She saw a man proceeding down the aisle, followed by a blonde woman who dragged tennis rackets. The man took his seat first, then drew himself away so that he hung over the aisle, in order to let the woman pass. He continued to sit in this fashion. It was a colyumnist with his wife. From time to time Grace craned her neck to see whether he smiled or applauded.

The play was a neat little play, neither as lavish as most musical comedies nor quite as vapid. Blake had permitted himself the boast that there was not one scene in which the hero dreamed of chorus girls portraying anything, whether the Spirits of Bituminous Coal or the Fashions of Yesteryear. His boast was justified. The curtain fell on the mild glow of a neat little melody, "Your Kisses Are Blisses." The audience hummed it and the orchestra plugged away at it. All the people who knew each other rose and hurried to the lobby. "Come along," said Diana Reece kindly. So Anita came along, too.

The confusion of the lobby under yellow lights gradually resolved itself into groups of people, smiling, nodding, exchanging specialized gossip, asking each other how they liked the show and answering with an aplomb that would mark them for the initiate. "Well, what do you think of it?" "Not so hot, huh?" "Think it'll go?" "Why not?" "Got one good song." "And one set. It won't take 'em long to work off the nut, anyhow." "Good chorus. Not a bad idea, a specialty chorus."

"Well, how do you like it?" said Grace, coming up with warm cheeks of excitement and enormous eyes. "I don't know where Blake has disappeared. Everybody wants to see him."

"It's swell so far," declared Diana Reece. The bronze flesh of her shoulders shone above a blazing wrap.

Her husband added in his heavy, slow voice, "That's a good tune."

"'Your Kisses Are Blisses.' Yes. I think—that should be a hit."

The third man kept a solemn silence. Anita thought that he looked like the Irishmen in the comic strips, square with a wide, almost lipless mouth, a stubby nose and, yes, freckles. He had, moreover, their very expression, subtly naughty and unblinkingly solemn. Grace was looking at him, too, with a coy lift of her brows that Anita understood meant she was aware of him.

"How did you like it, Dennis?" she asked.

"O.K.," said Dennis through his nose.

Diana's laughter rippled broadly. "That's all you'll ever get out of him. Look, Grace," she said. "There's your mysterious telephone lady. There's Renie Harrington, large as life and just as permanent, if you can figure out what I mean."

They all saw Blake approaching with a little golden-haired woman, all in white, lavishing animated hands, animated eyes, and an animated, pointed face entirely on him, while his own countenance showed, in spite of itself, a pale tinge of pleasure.

"Try dynamite," advised Diana. "That may dislodge her, but, mind you, I make no promises."

Grace moved toward them at once, wrapped in her ivory shawl, cool. "I've been out—gathering opinions," she said to Blake. "Everyone is crazy about that song."

The other woman paused and, in several glances, they considered each other. She made a slight retreat. "I've just been telling Mr. Andrews how charming my husband and I think it is. And we really do know quite a bit about the theater, in spite of being amateurs. Even Mr. Andrews has heard of our little theater." Eyes, hands, lips, and the pointed chin all assisted in a crescendo of admiration, now discreetly including Grace.

Blake had no choice but to introduce them, so that they could measure each other in full politeness, reconnoitering with their eyes, with soft words, along each other's soft, self-contained faces for the exact situation. "You must all really come and see our little theater," said Mrs. Harrington. "At the Peck Settlement."

And, "Are you—coming to Blake's party after the show?" said Grace.

"If Mr. Andrews asks us," said Mrs. Harrington coquettishly. So Blake, glancing at Grace with a rueful amusement, asked her. The bell tinkled.

Again the curtain rose. This time the colyumnist's seat was empty, causing Grace's face to fall and whispers to circulate between her and Diana Reece. Only Anita and the red-haired chap remained unaffected by this discovery. Soberly, they watched the stage upon which creatures dazzling in light made no secret of a business-like exhibition of wares. Neither said a word. Each applauded conscientiously at the proper moments. At one such moment, as they caught each other's eye, Dennis became almost articulate. Pressing one half of his mouth over the other in a slow grin, like a small boy closing his lips over stolen jam, he winked. It was an expression that could not be answered by a smile; it engendered a similar grin. Anita began to laugh, feeling with surprise that she was happy for no reason.

The second closing chorus seemed brighter and the finale poured forth in an urgent volume of vari-colored melody, light, and noise, rising as high as it could or dared on the highest of high notes. The orchestra played, "Your Kisses Are Blisses." The audience rose humming, "Your Kisses Are Blisses." And out in the lobby they were selling it: "Get the music of the show—'Your Kisses Are Blisses.'"

The crowd moved slowly, unsnarled itself from the tangles at the exits, out into the summer air which no blatancy of electric lights could harden or speed. Anita had meant to slip away, but she was caught tight in a group formed by Grace, who cast her eyes everywhere, and by other people who were going to the party. Grace's eyes were somewhat shadowed. Turning to Anita, who stood nearest, she seized her arm and made a more eager effort to get out. "I'd better go home," murmured Anita, and Grace looked at her in amazement. "You won't come to the party? You're silly! You must come with me. I don't know what's happened to Blake." She was no longer remote. The outline of her face, always quick to reflect inner commotion, had hardened. It had a sudden tragic emphasis as her eyes widened, grew deep and obscure with whatever momentarily troubled thoughts engaged her. What these could be Anita did not understand, but she was caught up and swept along.

They found Blake already at his apartment, playing host to the Harringtons and to some individuals who were devoted exclusively to the cocktails. Blake strewed cheer like beams of sunshine about him. He poured drinks for people, hastening here and there almost on the balls of his feet, and patting Anita's arm, to her great surprise. Grace seemed almost as surprised, seemed at a loss. With her all-encompassing gaze, with a serene demeanour in which lurked a hint of challenge, lovely in chiffon whose rose-hued pallor was differentiated only by a shade from the glowing pallor of her skin, she moved about under the watching eyes of Renie Harrington, defining her place as hostess. Renie Harrington's dashing eyes rested on her from time to time, sensing, retreating, adjusting. Grace went to sit by her. They engaged in animated conversation. Anita, passing by, heard Grace suggest, "Let's—have a lunch date sometime, shall we?"

Shortly, the entrance of the rest of the party was heralded by Diana Reece. She had thrown off her flaming shawl. She burst upon them from the doorway in sequins that shimmered and dazzled and glittered sinuously with each step, in bracelets that clinked, in a bar pin whose diamond sparkle went clear across the room and stabbed the eyes of a youth between cocktails and reality. He had had a deal to drink, and, blinking in this brilliance composed of scintillas that flashed before his eyes unseizably in his condition, bewildered by the rays of diamonds, the shine of golden bracelets, the fleshly luxuriance of rich dark skin and a red mouth, he had one of the sudden inspirations of the inebriate. He stalked across the room to Dee and took her hand and faced the company.

"Produced by Morris Gest," he said with due solemnity. And retired amid the ensuing plaudits and seemed to vanish and was heard of no more that night.

For a time, Anita and Dennis managed to sit very cheerfully together by a window open into warm and misty air. They attracted no attention. They said almost nothing, unless a series of grins and answering grins could be considered talk. She did not even know his name. There was between them the curious unrestraint of strangers meeting with no background but that of the particular time and the particular space, and sure to part there. But when Anita saw Grace stare at them with an amused and dawning comprehension in the depths of her eyes, saw Grace advance toward them, like a mutual friend breaking in upon the unbounded sympathy of strangers, enclosing it at once within the restrictions of the social order, she felt a qualm of uneasiness and wished to retreat. Dennis, however, had now managed to drink enough to simulate articulateness. He grasped her hand in alarm, pulling her back. "Ah, no! Don't go!"