IN Keble's new car, purchased with a recent birthday cheque from the family, Louise was driving swiftly over the lumpy road that wound its way down the hill, beside the river, across sage plains, around fields of alfalfa, toward the distant Valley. There was an autumn crispness in the air, and the rising sun made the world bigger and bigger every minute. She rejoiced in the freshness of the earth; and the fun of goading a powerful motor over deserted, treacherous roads made her chuckle. Most of all, she was excited by the element of adventure in the journey. She welcomed most things in life that savored of adventure. What mattered chiefly to her was that she should go forward. And this morning's exploit was a leap. If she were ever to get out of her present impasse it would be thanks to the unknown woman she was hastening to meet.
As she swung into the long main street, passing the post office and the drug-store, the bank, the hotel, and the hospital, scattering greetings among stragglers, she was conscious of the wide-eyed interest in her smart blue car. The inhabitants made capital of their intimacy with her. In the old days she was "Doc. Bruneau's girl;" nowadays she was, in addition, the wife of a "rich dude" and a liberal buyer of groceries and hardware.
"As though that made me any different!" she reflected, and drew the car up before the doctor's white-washed garden fence, sending a bright hallo to an old schoolmate, Minnie Hopper, whom she had once passionately cherished for their similar taste in hair-ribbons and peppermint sticks, and who was now Mrs. Otis Swigger, wife of Oat, the proprietor of "The Canada House" and the adjoining "shaving parlor and billiard saloon." For Minnie marriage was nine-tenths of life. She was the mother of two chalky babies; she had an "imitation mahogany bedroom set"; and her ambition was to live in Witney, beyond the mountain pass, where there was a "moving picture palace" and a railway station.
Even Keble,—Louise pursued the thought as the gate clicked behind her,—seemed to think marriage nine-tenths of life. For her!
She was burning with curiosity.
A tall, lithe, solid young woman was standing before a heaped bookcase,—a fair-skinned, clear-eyed woman of thirty-two or three, with a broad forehead over which a soft, shining, flat mass of reddish-brown hair was drawn. She wore a rough silk shirt with a brown knitted cravat; a fawn colored skirt, severely simple but so cunningly cut that it assumed new lines with the slightest motion of her body; brown stockings and stout brown golf shoes of an indefinable smartness.
Louise had never seen a woman so all-of-a-piece, and of a piece so rare. As a rule, in encountering new personalities, she was first of all sensitive to signs of intelligence, or its lack. She could not have said whether this person were excessively clever or excessively the reverse. It was the woman's composure that baffled her. The wide-set grey eyes and the relaxed but firm lips gave no clue. She swiftly guessed that in this woman's calculations there was a scale of values that virtually ignored cleverness, as such; that cleverness was to her merely a chance intensity that co-existed with other more important qualities in accordance with which she made her classifications, if she bothered to make classifications; and something suggested that for this woman classifying processes were automatic. What her mechanical standards of judgment were, there was no gauging: degrees of gentility, perhaps. That was what Louise would have to learn.
The lips, without parting, formed themselves into a reassuring smile, which had the contrary effect of making Louise acutely conscious of a necessity to be correct, of marshaling all the qualities in herself that had aroused approbation in the most discriminating people she had known.
The stranger replaced a book she had been inspecting and took a step in Louise's direction. Louise shook herself, as if chidingly, and let her natural directness dispel the momentary awkwardness. She went forward quickly with outstretched hand.
"You are Miss Cread, of course. I am Mrs. Eveley. I'm so sorry to have kept you waiting overnight here."
"Your father has been more than hospitable. He delighted me last night with his quaint ideas."
"Oh dear,—about priests and things?" Louise was inclined to deprecate her father's penchant for assailing the church in whatever hearing.
Miss Cread laughed. "Partly. I dote on this little house, and all its things."
"Papa suggests that after he dies I transport it to a quai on the left bank of the Seine in Paris and knock out the front wall. He says it would make a perfect book stall. . . . Papa once won a scholarship to study medicine in Paris. It rather spoiled him for a life in these wilds. I do hope you won't die of boredom with us. I've never been to Paris. Indeed I've never been farther than Winnipeg, and that seemed thousands of miles. Of course you've been abroad."
"A great deal."
"You're not a bit American." Louise was thinking of camping parties that sometimes penetrated the Valley in cars decorated with banners bearing the device "Idaho" or "Montana." She had motioned her new friend to a chair and was leaning forward opposite her. "Do you know," she suddenly confided, "I'm terribly afraid of you."
"Good gracious, why?"
"You'll laugh, but never mind. It's because you're so distinguished looking."
Miss Cread reflected. "A distinctive appearance doesn't necessarily make one dangerous. It is I, on the contrary, who should be afraid."
"I'm sure nothing could frighten you!"
"Oh, yes. Responsibility. You see, this is my first post. I'm quite inexperienced. I do hope Mr. Windrom made that clear."
"Oh, experience! Why, you're simply swimming in it,—in the kind that matters to me at this moment. I mean your life, your surroundings, all the things that decided Mr. Windrom in his selection of you as a companion, have done something for you, have made you the person who—bowled me over when I entered this room. My husband is brimming over with the same,—oh, call it genuineness. Like sterling silver spoons. I don't know whether I'm sterling or not, but I do know I need polishing. . . . It may be entirely a matter of birth. Papa and I haven't a crumb of birth, so far as I know,—though I have a musty old aunt who swears we have. She endows convents, and her idea of a grand pedigree would be to have descended from a line of saints, I imagine. . . . For my part I have no pretensions whatever, not one, any more than poor Papa. He thinks it rather a pity to be born at all, though he's forever helping people get born. . . . I was rash enough to dive into marriage without holding my breath, and got a mouthful of water. Sometimes I feel that my husband wishes I could be a little more sedate, a little more,—oh, you know, Miss Cread, what I called distinguished-looking, though I could feel that you disapproved of the phrase. One of the very things you must do is to teach me what I ought to say instead of distinguished-looking. That's what Minnie Hopper would have said, and at least I'm not a Minnie Hopper."
"You're like nobody I've ever seen or heard of!" This was fairly ejaculated, and it gave Louise courage to continue, breathlessly, as before.
"It is for my husband's sake that I'm trying this experiment. At least I think it's for his sake: we never quite know when we're being selfish, do we? He will soon be a rather important person, for here. He's getting more and more things to look after: I can hardly turn nowadays without running into some new thing that sort of belongs to us. We shall have guests from England later on, and I can't have them dying of mortification on my threshold. . . . When I married I was blind in love, and somehow took it for granted that I'd pick up all the hints I should need. But I haven't. . . . Am I talking nonsense?"
"Not at all. Please go on."
"If you have any pride you can't ask your husband to instruct you in subjects you should know more about than he,—don't you agree? I'm sure I know more about baking bread than any of the Eveleys back to Adam, but I don't know a tenth as much about when to shake hands and when not to, and that's much more important than I ever dreamed.
"It may be silly, but I've made up my mind to be the sort of person my husband won't feel he ought to make excuses for. Not that he ever would, of course! I've never admitted a word of all this to a soul. I hope you understand, and I hope you don't think such trifles trivial!"
"My dear! . . . . Aren't you a little morbid about yourself? I know women of the world who are uncouth compared with you. . . . As for creating an impression, you are rather formidable already! There are little tricks of pronunciation I can show you, and I shall be delighted to tell you all the stupid things I know about shaking hands and the like. . . . I'm already on your side; I was afraid I mightn't be. One can never depend on a man's version, you know, even as discerning a man as Mr. Windrom; and a woman usually takes the man's part in a domestic situation."
Louise had a sudden twinge.
"There is only one thing that worries me now."
Miss Cread waited, with questioning eyebrows.
"How am I going to pass you off? I've told my husband I knew you when you taught at Harristown! I went to Normal School there for a year, you know. He'll see with half an eye that you're no school teacher. What are we to invent? I can't fib for a cent."
"Well. . . . Shall we invent that my family lost its money and I had to work for my living? And that things are better now, but my family have all perished, and I've come here for a change. That statement doesn't do serious violence to my conscience."
"There's a little two-room log cabin you can have to retire to whenever you get bored with us. . . . And of course we'll have to call each other by our first names. You don't mind, do you?"
Miss Cread smiled sympathetically.
"She's nice," decided Louise, in relief, then said, "I'll go out and help Nana now. After lunch, en route la bonne troupe!"
This phrase, more than anything Louise had said, afforded Miss Cread the clue to their relationship. Louise had reverted into French with a little flourish which seemed to say, "At least I have one advantage over you: I am bi-lingual." Miss Cread saw that it was characteristic of Louise to underestimate her virtues and fail to recognize her faults, and for her, who had spoken French in Paris before Louise was born, Louise's accent was unlovely, as only the Canadian variety can be. She would let her pupil make the discovery for herself. Miss Cread was pleased to find that her mission was going to be a subtle one.
"I shall be fearfully nervous for a few days, until we get into swing," said Louise at the table.
"Then my first task is to restore your composure."
"Your second will be to keep it restored. . . . I'm growing less and less afraid of you. Wouldn't it be funny if I should get so used to you I answered you back, like in school?"
"There's no telling where it will stop. You're a venturesome woman."
Louise laughed merrily. "Don't you love adventure?" It was an announcement rather than an inquiry.
Late in the afternoon they reached the fields where the men were cutting the scanty crops. Keble on his buckskin mare was in consultation with the superintendent, and on hearing the honk of the car wheeled about, came toward the road, and dismounted.
"Miriam dear, this is my husband. His name is Keble, and he's frightened to death that you'll notice, though not call attention to, the muddy spot on the breeches that Mona cleaned this very morning. Keble, this is Miriam Cread, who is coming to stop with us as long as I can force her to stay."
Keble took a firm white hand in his. The stranger's smile, the confident poise of her head, the simple little hat whose slant somehow suggested Bond Street or the Rue de la Paix, amazed him. It was as though Louise had brought home a Sargent portrait and said she had bought it at the Witney emporium.
"What I can't forgive you for, my dear," he said blandly enough, "is that you should have kept me so long in ignorance of such a charming friend's existence." He turned to the guest. "I've heard all about Pearl and Amy and Minnie, but next to nothing about you. Don't you think that's perverse? My wife is sort of human feuilleton: something new every day."
He was surprised to hear himself using a term which would certainly have conveyed nothing to Pearl or Amy or Minnie, but he knew the allusion had registered.
"I suppose that's the first duty of a wife," Miriam laughed. "Besides, Louise Bruneau is nothing if not original. All her friends recognize that." She patted Louise ever so gently on the shoulder.
The modulation of the voice, the grace of the little pat, the composure, the finely-cut nostrils, the slant of the hat!
They chatted, then Louise started the engine, and in a moment the car was zig-zagging up the long hill that lay between them and the lake.
Louise was conquering an unreasonable pang. To herself she was explaining the freemasonry that existed among people of Keble's and Miss Cread's world; there was some sort of telepathic pass word, she knew not what. It was going to be the Windrom atmosphere all over again: permeated by exotic verbal trifles. But that was what she had bargained for; the stakes were worth the temporary disadvantage. Walter needn't, of course, have sent quite such a perfect specimen.
What "stakes"? Well, surely there were objects to live for that outweighed the significance of petty jealousies, petty possessions, the rights of one person in another. She brought the car around to a point from which the lake spread out under them in all the glory of deep emerald water and distant walls of sun-bronzed rock. The cottages and farm buildings grouped themselves beneath, and along the pebbly shore a rich league of grey-black and dark green pine forest linked the buildings and the mountains. Two frantic sheep dogs came barking to meet them.
An exclamation of delight escaped from the travel-weary guest.
"I'm glad you like it," remarked Louise, relenting.
"It's superb," Miriam replied. Again she gave Louise's shoulder a discreet pat, as the latter began the winding descent. "You very lucky woman!" she commented.
Riding, fishing, and hunting for the winter's supply of game enlivened the autumn months, and when the snow arrived, drifting through the canyons, obliterating all traces of roads and fences, there were snow-shoe and ski-journeys, skating on a swept portion of the lake, and dances before the great fireplace. Self-consciously at first, but soon without being aware of it, Louise reflected the sheen of her companion, and acquired objective glimpses of herself. There had been long discussions in which tastes and opinions had been sifted, and Louise's speech and cast of thought subtly supervised. Throughout the program Keble made quiet entrances and exits, dimly realizing what was taking place, grateful for, yet a little distrustful of the gradual transformation. It was as though, in an atmosphere of peace, unknown forces were being secretly mobilized. There was a charm for him in the nightly fireside readings and conversations. When he was present they were likely to develop into a monologue of daring theories invented and sustained by Louise,—a Louise who had begun to take some of her girlish extravagances in earnest. In the end Keble found himself, along with Miriam Cread, bringing to bear against Louise's radicalism the stock counter arguments of his class.
This was disconcerting, for he had been in the habit of regarding himself as an innovator, with his back to the past and his gaze fixed upon the future; and although it was pleasant to find himself so often in accord with a highly civilized and attractive young woman just appreciably his senior, it was a set-back to his illusion of having graduated from the prejudices and short-sightedness of conventional society. For the sum total of his mental bouts with Louise was that she serenely but quite decisively relegated him to the ranks of the safe and sane. And "safe and sane" as she voiced the phrase meant something less commendable than "safe and sane" as he voiced it. For Keble "safe and sane" was of all vehicles the one which would carry him and his goods most adequately to his mortal destination. He had always assumed that Louise had faith in the vehicle. Now he seemed to see her sitting on the tail-board, swinging her legs like a naughty child, ready to leap off at the approach of any conveyance that gave promise of more speed and excitement.
During his later school-days, Keble, by virtue of an ability to discriminate, had arrived at a point of self-realization that rendered his conformity to custom a bore to him but failed to provide him with the logical alternative. For this he had consulted, and responded to, the more refined manifestations of individualism in contemporary literature and art, to the extent of falling under the illusion that he himself was a thoroughgoing individualist. A victim of a period of social transition, he, like so many other young men of his generation, made the mistake of assuming that his doubts and objections were the effect of a creative urge within himself, whereas he had merely acquired a decent wardrobe of modern notions which distinguished him from his elders and, to his own eyes, disguised the inalterably conservative nature of his principles. Hence the almost irreconcilable combination: an instinctive abstemiousness and an Epicurean relish.
Whenever Louise, after some brilliant skirmish with the outriders of orthodoxy, came galloping into camp with the news that a direct route lay open to the citadel of personal freedom and personal morality, Keble found himself throwing up his cap in a sympathetic glee, but then he fell to wondering whether the gaining of the citadel were worth the trampling down of fields, the possible breaking of church windows, the discomfort to neutral bystanders.
At such moments he suspected that he was in the wrong camp; that he had been led there through his admiration for daring spirits rather than a desire for the victory they coveted. It alarmed him to discover that the topsy-turvy fancies that had endeared Louise to him were not merely playful. It alarmed him to discover that she was ready to put her most daring theories into practise, ready to regard her own thoughts and emotions as so many elements in a laboratory in which she was free to experiment, in scientific earnest, at the risk of explosions and bad odors, all for the sake of arriving at truths that would be of questionable value. Certainly, to Keble's mind, the potential results, should the experiments be never so successful, were not worth the incidental damage,—not where one's wife was concerned. For him "safe and sane" meant the avoidance of risk. For Louise he suspected that "safe and sane" smacked of unwillingness to take the personal risks inevitable in any conquest of truth. That brought him to the consideration of "truth," and he saw that for him truth was something more tangible, and much nearer home, than it was for his wife. And he was in the lamentable situation of feeling that she was right, yet being constitutionally unable, or unwilling, or afraid, to go in her direction.
Miriam caught something of the true proportions in the situation, and it was her policy to remain negative in so far as possible, pressing gently on either side of the scales, as the balance seemed to require. She had a conscientious desire to help the other two attain a comfortable modus vivendi, but as the winter progressed it became increasingly evident to her that her efforts might end by having a contrary effect. Reluctantly she saw herself saddled with the rôle of referee. Furthermore, it seemed as though the mere presence of a referee implied, even incited, combat. Their evenings often ended on a tone of dissension, Louise soaring on the wings of some new radical conclusion; Keble anxiously counseling moderation; and Miriam, by right and left sallies, endeavoring, not always with success, to bring the disputants to a level of good-humored give and take.
On two or three occasions she had been tempted to withdraw entirely, feeling that as long as a third person were present to hear, the diverging views of husband and wife would inevitably continue to be expressed. But on reflection she realized that her withdrawal could in no sense reconcile their divergences. From Louise she had derived the doctrine that views must, and will, out, and that to conceal or counterfeit them is foolish and dishonest. As Miriam saw it, these two had come to the end of the first flush of excited interest in each other. Their ship had put to sea, the flags had been furled, the sails bent. They had reached the moment when it was necessary to set a course. And they might be considered fortunate in having a fair-minded third person at hand to see them safely beyond the first reefs. It hadn't occurred to Miriam that she might be a reef.
With Louise nothing remained on the surface; the massage that polished her manners polished her thoughts, and with increasing facility in the technique of carrying herself came an increasing desire to carry herself somewhere. As a girl she had too easily outdistanced her companions. Until Miriam Cread's advent there had been no woman with whom to compete, and her intelligence had in consequence slumbered. Keble had transformed her from a girl into a woman; but Miriam made her realize the wide range of possibilities comprised under Womanhood, and had put her on her mettle to define her own particular character as a woman. Now her personality was fully awake, and her daily routine was characterized by an insatiable mental activity, during which she proceeded to a footing on many subjects about which she had never given herself the trouble to think. She had read more books than most girls, and had dined on weighty volumes in her father's library for the sake of their sweets; but under the pressure of her new intellectual intensity she found that, without knowing it, she had been nourished on their soups and roasts. The unrelated impressions that she had long been capturing from books and thrusting carelessly upon mental shelves now formed a fairly respectable stock-in-trade. Every new book, every new discussion, every new incident furnished fuel to the motor that drove her forward.
But there was one moment, during the Christmas festivities, when the boldness of her recent thoughts, the inhibitive tightness of her new garments of correctitude, the fatigue of standing guard over herself, became intolerably irksome, when she looked away from Keble and Miriam and the Browns towards her tubby, bald-headed, serene little father, twinkling and smoking his beloved pipe before the fire: a moment when she longed to be the capricious, dreamy girl who had curled up at his feet during the winter evenings of her first acquaintance with the English boy from Hillside.
If Keble had divined that mood, if he could have stepped in and caught her out of it with an expert caress, if he had read the thought that was then in her mind,—namely that no amount of cleverness could suppress the yearning that her conjugal experience had so far failed to gratify,—if his eyes had penetrated her and not the flames, where presumably they envisaged the air castles he would soon be translating into stone and cement, then the yards of the matrimonial ship might have swung about, the sails have taken the breeze, and the blind helmsman have directed a course into a sharply defined future. At that moment Louise might have been converted, by a sufficiently subtle lover, into a passionate partner in the most prosaic of schemes. All she needed was to be coaxed and driven gently, to a point not far off. It was too personal to be explained; and if he couldn't see it, then she must do what she could on her own initiative, at her expense and his.
The dreamy girl faded out of her eyes, and a self-contained, positive young woman rose from her seat with an easy directness, crossed the room to switch on the lights, and said, "Keble, I've just decided how I shall dispose of my Christmas present." For the benefit of the Browns she explained, "I had a colossal cheque in my stocking from a father-in-law who doesn't know what a spendthrift I am."
"What will you do with it?" asked her husband.
"Something very nice. You're sure to object."
"Is that what makes it nice: my objecting?"
"That makes it more exciting."
"Then let me object hard, dear."
Louise withstood the laughter that greeted Keble's score. "Do it immediately," she advised, "and have it over with; then I'll say what it is."
"Why not spare us a scene?" suggested Miriam. "We know what a brute he is."
"You're concerned in it," Louise replied. "I hope you won't object, for that would be fatal."
This gave Keble his opportunity for revenge against Miriam's "brute." "Mayn't we take Miriam's compliance for granted? We know what a diplomat she is."
Louise was now seated on the opposite side of the table, facing them. "Do you object, Papa?"
"On principle, yes, because it's sure to be something rash. As a matter of fact, no, because you're the only sensible rash person there is."
Louise was delighted. "It's Papa's stubborn belief in my common sense, more than anything else, that gives me the courage of my enlightened rashness," she proclaimed.
At this Keble turned with a smile to Miriam. "Now I see what you meant by brute. It's because I won't always acknowledge the enlightenment of rashness."
Miriam colored a little, to her great annoyance. "Really, you mustn't seek meanings in my random words."
"Oh, then it wasn't meant literally?"
"There aren't any literal brutes left; only figurative ones. Must I do penance for a levity I admit to have been uncalled for?"
"I'll let you off,—with the warning that I shall watch your remarks more closely in future."
"Then I can only defend myself by becoming the objectionable thing you called me!"
"Diplomat! Is that objectionable?"
"Rather. It implies the existence of things to be connived at. Once you've admitted diplomat you've admitted stakes, and rivalry."
Mrs. Brown was on what she called tender hooks. Her husband was waggishly of the opinion that the cheque would end by being spent on wagon loads of sugar for Sundown, that pampered circus beast.
"Has everybody finished objecting?"
Everybody had.
"Well, then, Miriam and I are going on a jaunt,—to New York and then South where it's warm."
"It's a sort of holiday from me, I gather?" said Keble when the others had done exclaiming.
Miriam's eyes turned in warning towards the speaker, whose lips broke into a smile, in relish of the "brute" which, diplomatically, was merely flashed across the room. This little passage arrested Louise, who had been for the twentieth time reminded, by Keble's detachment, of the inexplicable poem.
"Or yours from me," she replied. "What's sauce for the gander—"
Keble judged the moment opportune for bringing forth his best Port, and while the three men took a new lease of life, the women chatted excitedly about resorts and itineraries.
Louise's announcement had been especially welcome to Miriam. It promised an escape from umpiring,—from neutral-mindedness. Her cheeks burned a little.
The doctor was drifting back, along with Keble's superintendent, into the rigorous pioneer days of the Valley, the days before the branch line had been built into Witney, contrasting the primitive arrangements of that era with the recent encroachments of civilization. The logical development in the talk would be some reference to Keble's ambitious designs, which the spring would see well under way. Miriam glanced up to see how he would receive the cue, which usually roused him to enthusiasm. He allowed it to pass, and she was intrigued to see on his face a look of boyish, wistful abstraction, and loneliness.
He felt her eyes on him, and turned as she looked away. She knew he disliked to be surprised in a self-revelatory mood, and she had time to notice his features assume their usual impersonal cast. That she regretted; the wistfulness had been ingenuous and touching. At times she felt that he deliberately submerged his most likable traits. That was a great pity, because it gave Louise new incentives to go off on her independent courses. Miriam felt that his self-consciousness had begun by hurting Louise, driving her to protect herself against a coldness she couldn't understand. The unfortunate result was that Louise had rather more than protected herself: had gradually attained a self-sufficiency that took Keble's coldness for granted, even inducing it. That was a moral advantage which Miriam's femininity resented, though nothing could have drawn the admission from her.
She was glad when Louise, by a new manoeuvre in the talk, gave her an excuse to go into the next room. For there were times when nothing sheathed the sharp edges of life so satisfactorily as a half hour at the piano.
Only when she had waved Keble farewell from the back of the train at Witney did Louise allow herself to dwell on the significance of the step she had taken. Keble's generous acquiescence in her plan merely underlined the little question that kept irritating her conscience. For all her skill she hadn't known how to assure Keble that she wasn't turning her back on him; for all her love she couldn't have admitted to him that she was setting out for a sanatorium, to undergo treatment for social ignorances in the hope of returning to him more fit than ever. With the train now bolting east, she had the nervous dread of a prospective patient.
Yet as province after province rolled by, and the dreary prairie began to be broken first by lakes and woods, then by larger and larger communities, graduating her approach into civilization, her natural optimism asserted itself in a typically vehement reaction. Now that there was no turning back, the obvious thing to do was to wring every possibility out of the experience to which she was committed. Nothing should be too superficial for her attention. To Miriam's relief her despondency gave place to a feverish activity of observation. She began to notice her fellow-travelers and to tick them off mercilessly, one by one, with all their worths and blemishes.
"Let's leave no stone unturned, Miriam," she said, imperatively, as they neared their first halting place. "I won't go home till I've done and seen and had one of everything. Then for the next eighty years I shall be able to out-small-talk the most outrageous dude that ever dares cross my threshold."
She kept rein on the excitement caused in her by the hotels, shops, museums, and theatres of Toronto and Montreal, for from Miriam's lukewarmness she divined that they were at best but carbon copies of the hotels, shops, museums, and theatres of New York. So she contented herself with watching the movements of her companion, marveling at Miriam's easy way with porters and chambermaids, her ability to arrive on the right platform ten minutes before the right train departed, to secure the most pleasant rooms at the least exorbitant rate and order the most judicious dinners, all without fuss or worry. Having learned that traveling was one of the major modern arts, she added it to the list of subjects in which she was enrolled as student. By the time they had reached Fifth Avenue and put up at a hostelry that was still imposing, though it had been half forgotten in the mania for newer and gayer establishments, Louise was imperturbable.
During the next few days the experience that made the deepest impression on her was the religious earnestness with which one was expected to cultivate one's exterior. On a memorable, but modest visit to Winnipeg with her father,—who was attending a medical conference,—she had "gone in and bought" whatever she had been in need of. Never had she dreamt that so much art and science could be brought to bear on the merely getting of oneself groomed. But after a few seances in the neighborhood of Fifty-Seventh Street, Louise threw herself into this strange new cult with characteristic fervor. This was partly due to the fact that Madame Adèle, the dressmaker, and Monsieur Jules, the hairdresser, had accomplished what good portrait painters often accomplish, and thrown into relief properties of body and soul of which she had never been aware.
At the end of a fortnight she had mastered many rites, and when the last frocks, hats, gloves, and slippers had arrived, and she had adapted her steps and gestures and rhythms to the unbelievable new picture she made, Miriam, for the first time since their association, expressed herself as satisfied.
"I've been waiting to see you dressed," she announced as they sat in the tea-room of a fashionable hotel. "It's the final test. And you pass—magna cum laude. Opposite you I feel dull and not at all what you would once have called distinguished-looking."
"Don't be absurd, Miriam," returned her pupil in an even tone, with a purified articulation that would have made Minnie Hopper stare. "I may cost eight hundred dollars more than you at the moment, but I look new, and you know it. Whereas you will always look good, without looking new, no matter if you're straight out of a bandbox. If I've made any progress at all, the proof of it is that I recognize the truth of what I've just said. . . . Not only that, but you can console yourself with the knowledge that if you sit opposite me till Doomsday you'll never utter a syllable that couldn't be printed in a book of etiquette. Whereas I,—well, the mere fact that they've pulled out my lopsided eyebrow doesn't mean that before the sun sets I shan't do and say some inadvertent bêtise that will proclaim the pit from which I was digged and make you say to yourself, 'Why does she?'. . . . One comfort is that most of these expensive people here are even more plebeian, at least in their souls, than I am, and you're almost the only person in the world whom I can't fool. . . . Fancy not having you there to be genteel to, and to shock,—especially to shock! At any moment I may deliberately say something vulgar, dear. The temptation often comes over me in hot waves."
"The 'deliberately' redeems you. Most people are vulgar without knowing it; they would bite off their tongues if they knew. . . . As for inadvertence, you've made only one faux pas in days."
"Oh, dear! What?"
"Yesterday, at that awful house."
"Mrs. Pardy's? Why, darling, you took me there yourself, as a treat."
"Yes, but it was Elsa Pardy we went to leave cards for. Elsa was one of the nicest girls in Washington when I knew her there. I would never have looked her up in that casual way if I had foreseen such a fulsome sister-in-law."
Louise laughed at the recollection, snuggling into the thought that Mrs. Pardy could not be laid at her door. Then came the thought of her alleged remissness. "I hope I didn't out-faux Mrs. P. . . . I wonder how Keble would like me to call him Mr. E."
"No wonder Elsa doesn't stay there."
"But, Miriam, my faux pas! I won't be done out of my daily correction."
Miriam smiled indulgently. "It was the merest trifle. Indeed if Mrs. Pardy had made it, it would have done her credit. For that matter she did, effusively, and if we hadn't been such fastidious folk we should have lauded her for it. And I do!"
"Miriam . . . before I throw a bun at you!"
"Well, my dear, you invited the woman to pay you a visit."
"Jolly kind of me, too. Is that all?"
"Heavens, it's enough!"
"I was merely returning a hospitality,—the hospitality of your friends."
"Don't tease."
"After all, what less could I do when she practically gave us her house and her chauffeur and her marble staircase and diamond bracelets and ancestral lemon groves in California."
"None of which we wanted, you see. Nor asked for a thing! Nor accepted a thing except under compulsion. The mere fact that one strays into a house that looks like a glorified Turkish bath and has it, as you say, given to one, doesn't put one under the slightest obligation. We merely sat on the edge of her golden chairs, regretted Elsa's absence, heard about Mr. P.'s kidneys and sundry organs, and drank a cup of tea."
"And ate a cream puff. Don't slight that delicious, cordial, luxurious, fattening, vulgar cream puff. I ate two and longed for a third. That made it a grub-call, and I had to invite her back. I'll never outgrow that primitive custom. Besides, I took care to say, if she was ever in my part of the world. That made it pretty safe."
"Ah, that's just what made it an error. Not only because it was gratuitous, but because Mrs. Pardy is the sort of woman who would charter a private train to be in your part of the world in order, accidentally, to drop in on a young woman who makes the sort of impression you make,—for you do, you know. Especially when she finds out,—and be sure she'll investigate,—who the Eveleys are."
"Well, darling, let her come. She didn't bother me a bit. It would be rough on Keble, I suppose."
"Rough and warm," said Miriam a little testily. "She had the effect on me of heavy flannels in midsummer."
Louise gleefully pounced on her opportunity. "Fi donc!" Miriam Cread conjuring up such incorrect things as flannels,—and it isn't anywhere near Doomsday!"
"It's near dressing time. And we must pack a little before dinner. After the theatre we'll be too tired."
"How shall we explain our sudden departure to Mrs. Pardy? Before she sends out invitations to all her friends to 'meet' us!"
"We can have the measles. Or you're moving to Alaska."
"And if ever she and Mr. P. are in the Arctic Circle. . . . Measles wouldn't do the trick. She would come right in and nurse us. And give us her doctor and her florist. Frankly, dear, I rather like Mrs. Pardy; she's so hearty. I thought that was going to rhyme but it didn't."
"Come along. We're going to walk home, for exercise."
"In these heels? . . . Is fifty cents enough to leave the waiter?"
"Enough, good gracious! Leave the brute a quarter."
They made their way through a thronged corridor towards the street, and Miriam felt a proprietary pride in her companion, whose present restraint was as instinctively in keeping with her tailored costume, unostentatious fur, and defiant little hat, as her old flamboyance had been with her khaki breeches and willow switch.
"Since I've begun to spend money," Louise reflected, "I've been more and more oppressed by the unfairness of my having access to so much,—though of course it's nothing compared to what one sees flung about in this bedlam. But all these exaggerated refinements, and people taking notice,—while it excites me, I don't honestly care for it. There's something as uncomfortable about it as there would be about 'boughten' teeth. Sartorial hysteria; the rash known as civilization; I keep saying phrases like that to myself. . . . After about the fifth time I think I'd bite that beauty woman. I like my face too well to have it rubbed out once a week!"
They turned into Fifth Avenue and joined the hordes let loose at this transition hour of the day. Against the grey buildings women were as bright as flowers, fulfilling, as Miriam reflected, the decorative function that trees fulfil on European boulevards.
"I had a cheque from Keble to-day," Louise continued. "As if we hadn't heaps already! It came in a charming letter. Keble in his letters is much more human than he is in the flesh. If I stayed away long enough I might forget that and fall romantically in love with him all over again. Which would be tragic. . . . He says he's happy, poor lamb, to know that I'm beginning to take an interest in life! But I wish he'd be candid and say he's miserable. Then I'd know what to do. When he so obstinately pretends to be happy and isn't, I'm lost. Miriam, look at that creature!"
It was a bizarrely clad woman, so thoroughly made over in every detail of appearance that there was scarcely a square inch of her original pattern left: a weird, costly fabrication that attracted the attention of everybody within range of vision or smell.
"Do you know who it is?" asked Miriam, amused at the startled look in her companion's eyes.
"No, do you? She looks Japanese."
"Merely East Side. It's Myra Pelter, the actress we're to see to-night in 'Three Blind Mice'."
Louise yielded to a temptation to turn and stare. "Now there you are, Miriam: the reductio ad absurdum of hectic shopping and beautifying. Isn't it enough to drive one into a nunnery! I'm glad we're on our way to the seashore, where there are at least 'such quantities of sand' and sky and water."
Miriam smiled doubtfully, a little wearily. "There will be quantities of transparent stockings and French perfumes, too, my dear."
"Well, I like frivolities, as such,—but only as such, mind you. From now on I ignore them the minute they try to be anything more. I think I'm going in for human souls. I'm already tired of looking at people as Adèle looks at them, or as if they were books in a shop window. I'm going to open a few and see what they're all about. . . . The worst of it is, you can't look at the last chapter of people and see how they end. You can only read them, as you can only read yourself, in maddeningly short instalments. They're always on the brink of new doings when you come to a 'to be continued'. And I've reached a point where I must have gists and summaries, must see what things are leading to, what's being driven at in this infuriating universe,—this multi-verse."
They had by this time reached their rooms, and Miriam was making a preliminary sorting of objects to be packed. "Don't you think," she ventured, "that you are inclined to be a little headlong as a philosopher?"
Louise was deftly choosing the articles of her toilette for the evening. "Oh, no doubt of it! But I'm too deep in my sea now to care. I simply swim on and on, after a shoal of notions."
"And splash a little," commented Miriam, with an abstracted air that saved the remark from being censorious. She was wondering whether she had been over-scrupulous in refusing the gown that Adèle had privately offered her by way of commission. And a little resentful that Adèle should dare offer it to her. Miriam was old enough to remember a day when such transactions were considered off-color, and it bothered her that she should be so old-fashioned as to be unable to accept the place assigned her in the callous new order, as some of her former friends, with the greatest complacence, seemed to have done. Suddenly, bereft of credit in a society to which she had once felt herself a necessary adjunct, catching occasional glimpses of faces that recalled school-days to her, and Newport and Paris, faces now hard, bright and mercenary, Miriam felt abandoned.
Her thoughts strayed westward and hovered. In Alberta she had been an exile; but not so acutely alone as here. The remaining weeks of their holiday accomplished even more towards Louise's worldly initiation, for she found herself dining and dancing and matching opinions in private palaces among an anomalous assortment of men and women. Before proceeding to Florida they paused in Washington, where friends of Miriam and Walter Windrom whirled them into the routine of that unique conglomeration of the provincial and the sophisticated. Left alone among them, Louise might for a while have been awed by pompous ladies whose husbands were senators from western states, and unimpressed by young men whose shoulders bore no trace of the burdens laid upon them by foreign governments. But Miriam's polite negativity towards the conspicuously grand, and her full and ready response to some of the unassuming furnished Louise with useful cues, and when Walter was of the party she was even more secure, for he had a faculty of accepting everything at its face value, while privately adding to or subtracting from the offering, with a twinkle in his eye, or a twinkle in his speech.
Walter's good-natured technique, Louise reflected, was more nearly akin to her own temperament than were Miriam's precisely graduated coolness and cordialities. Certain importunate people Miriam simply ignored, as though declining to give them a seat in her coach. Walter, while he was equally exclusive, got over the necessity of inviting them into his coach by stepping out and walking a short distance with them. This method seemed to Louise not only more humane, but also braver than Miriam's, and certainly no less dignified. It was gentlemanly, too; and she objected, as only a woman can object, to feminine tactics.
At Palm Beach they were greeted by a free, open, careless life that suited Louise's mood better than anything their excursion had afforded her. She had decided that there was no hurry about "going in for human souls" and consequently spent many hours in roaming through deep-chaired hotel lounges, marble and wicker sun parlors, porches, pergolas, and terraces; and in strolling along the hot sands or across lawns shaded by flowering trees and edged with lotus pools. She also swam, played tennis, and chatted ad libitum with strangers.
On her return to Canada, under the escort of Keble, who had accepted her invitation to come and fetch them, she was brimming over with ideas for the embellishment of their projected home. Yet, though she knew Keble was eager to have her offer suggestions, she deliberately held them back. By declining to participate in it she would lessen its hold on her. It should be his castle, not hers.