Left to herself in her little room, Ellen put up no pretense of working; she had felt again, and more undeniably, a flow of response from Jay, and the tasks of her head and hands were become of no importance to her.
She could not be calm or still under the excitement of his notice of her; it had been brief and constrained but overwhelming in its separation from every other sensation. It set her supposing. Suppose it increased! Jay would be about the office daily and in and out with his father; he and she would be frequently together; and now he noticed her as a woman.
She glanced over the business letters heaped upon her desk, only to ignore them. Where was he gone? To his wife?
"His wife," Ellen whispered to herself, in reminder that he had married. He had done it without love, she believed, yet for whatever reason he had taken Lida Haige, she was his wife.
Ellen had become a city girl too recently to have exchanged, with her clothing, her ideas. She had substituted, even in winter, silk for wool overwear and underwear. Outwardly she conformed to metropolitan appearance; she went about in short fur jacket, offering silk stockings and oxfords to the winter wind, showing as trim an ankle and as slender a leg as any girl of the Avenue; but she clung to dreams about marriage which had been dreamt first in the hillside home where one woman waited upon and waited for one man with whom, God sparing him, she would go to the end of her life.
The land of her home was fashioned for fidelity—a sparse, sandy farmland settled by couples who had little company but each other, who had to bear with each other and count upon each other, whatever happened, if they were to survive at all. Marital faithfulness was, therefore, no pretty bit of virtue for them; it was necessity; and they scorned and cast out transgressors.
A city of three millions made no such rigorous requirements; city people prospered according to a different code, as Di swiftly had discovered. Di was adapting herself; Ellen was not and would not. To her, marriage must remain a permanent relation, entered into once and for all. It formed, incomparably, the transcendent act of a girl's life. She came in contact with, only to deny, the idea of it held by girls born and bred like Lida under conditions which never made of constancy anything more serious than a matter of choice and where marriage was only one of the innumerable expedients of a girl's social career.
Accordingly Ellen did not think of Lida's relation with Jay from Lida's point of view; she thought of Lida as likely to claim Jay for life. Yet in spite of this—indeed while feeling it—Ellen went to her mirror in the coat closet to see how she had looked to Jay this morning when he had gazed so at her. She needed powder and, opening her compact, she was reminded of Di, who had not returned to their room before Ellen left for the office.
Nor had Di been located when Ellen had phoned an hour ago; however, now she was in.
"She's asleep; and she'd best be left to sleep; she needs it," reported the landlady over the wire.
Ellen agreed that Di should not be disturbed; and when she learned from Mr. Lowry that Mr. Sam Metten was absent from his office, she assumed that Jello, also requiring rest, was profiting from a similar respect for sleep. The situation, whatever it was, evidently paralyzed progress on the issuance of orders.
"Anything new?" Mr. Rountree inquired of Ellen, when he returned from the plant late in the afternoon; and she was sure that he meant, "Is the Metten order in?" but he would not admit his anxiety over it.
"Nothing," said Ellen.
"Where is my son?"
"He's in the stockroom. Do you want him?"
"No. Put him on the payroll; fifty dollars a week. Make out the slip."
While writing, obediently, the memorandum of the amount to be paid Justin Rountree, weekly, Ellen's fancies flew again to the hotel on the Lake Shore Drive where Jay and his wife dwelt.
Jay had lunch with Lowry and he had spent the afternoon, at the salesmanager's direction, in the stockroom picking up a casual acquaintance, at least, with the more important shapes, sizes, weights, patterns and prices of the articles which he had sold to Phil Metten, to an amount totaling twenty thousand dollars on the two-weeks order, in total ignorance of the practical details.
Of course Phil was completely familiar with the stock; he had known exactly what he was buying, upon the material side of his transaction. This was all standard stuff, indistinguishable (except for the trademark) from the stock upon the Slengels' shelves. The prices of the Rountree company and of the Slengels and of the other chief competitors differed not by a penny, Jay learned; and he thumbed some of the things, not to test the quality, but while thinking over them and himself—and Lida.
As Lowry had suggested to him in a frank interchange during lunch, there was no good reason in God's world why Phil Metten or any one else should come for these things to Rountree rather than to Slengels, except for what went to Phil with the goods. For a time, Lida and Jay Rountree had been going with this stock; Lida and he had been giving Mr. and Mrs. Phil Metten, and the Misses Metten, something which the Slengels could not supply; he had been including rights of society with Lida and himself as a sort of premium with the order . . . Nucast had reached his original association with Lida in a similar fashion.
Jay recoiled from the stock shelves; yet, as he gazed about, he was surprised with the force of a conflicting sensation. As long as he could remember anything, he had known the look of these neat, precise piles of "parts." His first expedition into the city, of which he had any recollection, had been to the plant and to the whir and hum of marvelous machines at which stood countless men, in straight rows, working. Upon that unforgetable occasion, and nearly always afterwards, a switch-engine tooted outside pushing and pulling at cars which were loaded with Rountree goods. Big boxes slid and tumbled, most thrillingly, down long, shiny chutes.
Jay had been allowed to "work" in the shipping room, sometimes hammering long nails into box covers, sometimes delightfully and proudly daubing black paint through the stencils; but put on his honor, consequent to the discovery of certain private experiments, not to ride crates down the chutes.
Here upon maps of the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia were the spots of bright-headed pins showing Rountree shipping points. Here, that impulse of proprietorship stirred unwittingly by Lida, when she had laughed at him in Tryston, whipped up in him at the thought of a definite threat to these things.
"There's no way to figure the factory running without the Alban order, or the Metten order to replace it," Ellen Powell had put the threat into words for him.
The plant closed and silent; the shiny chutes empty; the switch-track deserted by the tooting engine; no boxes and crates, in shipment to New York, London, Paris, Buenos Aires, Singapore, or Tokio. The pins in the map of the two hemispheres would represent past performance only in the Rountree family; the Slengels, in their map, would thrust fresh, triumphant pins.
Jay's pulses pricked with the instinct of fight for these things; it was the feeling that Lida summed up in her epithet of the "Chicago" in him. It was amusing and irrational, when you got outside yourseli—if ever you really got outside yourself—to assert that Jay Rountree should stay in Chicago, because he had been born here, and set to selling these things, because his father and grandfather had made them. The Jay Rountree on the train on the way home from Harvard would have denied it emphatically.
The day was over; it was time to go home—home to his wife in their hotel rooms and tell her how he had started work.
He recollected how at Tryston, she had told him of Anaconda, in which she owned stock, but she hadn't the slightest idea where Anaconda was, she had said; and Jay wondered if she knew for certain what it was—a mine or a snake farm. But she knew exactly where to find it on the ticker.
She would sell out, or some one would sell out for her, the instant an attack endangered the stock. She would call any one crazy who held on for sentiment and offered to fight for the company, instead of selling as swiftly as a broker could offer her shares. Then she would buy, with total lack of sentiment, stock in a railroad or a bakery or a cement plant, well located on the ticker.
Lida certainly was not sentimental when money was at stake. That was New York in her.
He found her dressed for dinner, with white shoulders, white arms, white cheeks and red, red lips.
"Dinner is at six-thirty," she informed him, coolly. "We are expected at six."
"Father phoned you?" asked Jay.
"Some one 'speaking for Mr. Rountree,'" quoted Lida, and Jay recognized the mimicry of Ellen's restrained, quiet voice.
"Oh, she talked to you," he said and quickly added, glancing at his wife's décolleté: "It's a family dinner."
"I want to rise," returned Lida, "to my father-in-law's expectations of me."
"Put on a sleeved dress," said Jay. "I'm going as I am."
"To the opera?" inquired Lida.
"Is father taking us to the opera?"
"'Mr. Metten has bought a nice box at the opera; for six people,'" replied Lida and again Jay recognized a quotation, this time in imitation of Mrs. Philip Metten's best diction. "'He got it to-day for to-night. It is a good opera, with four fine singers.' She asked us also to dinner," Lida slipped into her own speech. "I told her dinner was impossible."
"So is the opera," said Jay, a little impatiently.
"Is it?" inquired his wife, innocently. "I didn't know at what time one retired after six-thirty dinner."
Jay took no offense; the jeer was, too clearly, a bit of protective armor for Lida against his father's opinion of her.
"By the way, my pay was fixed to-day," he said and waited for his wife to ask its figure; but Lida confessed not the slightest curiosity. So he told her: "It's fifty a week."
"Cents?" inquired Lida.
Jay looked at her and smiled. "I'm going to take a shot at living on it; but I'm not supposing you will."
"I?" repeated Lida. "I?"
"Your money," said Jay, "of course is yours to spend on yourself; but I can't spend it. We've got to agree on that. We can take diggings somewhere where I can manage the rent; I'll handle my personal expenses and also whatever we do together."
"What a lot you must be planning to do with me!"
"It can't be much—at first, Lida," he said.
"You don't care!"
"I do. D'you suppose I'd not like to bring you money, tell you to do what you please, live where you please?"
"With you, Jay?"
"Of course with me."
She approached him and seized his hands with her tingling touch on his fingers. "D'you want me with you here? If you loved me, Jay, what'd I care about Chicago? Damn the smoke, damn the dull, slaving people here—if you love me! There'd be a kick in diggings with you on fifty a week! Shall we try it? . . . But you got to love me! You got to love me! Grab me! Like you had to! . . . God, I knew it. You're no good in this place. You belong here." She thrust back from him. "I'll put on my sleeved dress. You change to a clean collar and we'll go to dinner."
She slammed the door of her room, shutting him out, and he stood gazing after her, aware of the collapse of his response to her and his inability to re-arouse it. She assigned it to Chicago, to his submission, upon this return, to the dominion of made and sold things.
Lida's phone rang and he heard her answer. She was speaking, he suspected, to Mrs. Philip Metten, who would be following up her invitation to the opera, and he realized that consequences to be counted by hundreds of thousands of dollars, in the dominion of made and sold things, might hang upon the nature of Lida's response; upon whether or not she affronted Mrs. Philip Metten. But he did not interfere. Lida's voice reached him, not in articulate words, but in tones of refusal and refusal more positive again. Then it ceased.
When she emerged, in her sleeved dress, she was coolly oblivious to the call, and Jay did not bring himself to question her about it. He took her to a taxi before he recollected that he could not afford it for transportation of a few blocks on a clear, dry evening.
He had looked in at home a couple of days before and he had driven Lida past the house, but she had not cared to enter; accordingly, when Beedy opened the door, she paid her first visit.
Beedy was faultless, bearing himself with more dignity, indeed, than did the man in Lida's home in New York. This and the sombre melancholy of the big hall surprised gud slightly constrained Lida. The place felt older, far, than a Park Avenue apartment and over the wide hallway presided two portraits. Jay took Lida's coat and handed it with his own to Beedy while Lida examined the serious countenance of a handsome, black-haired man, portrayed with a lilt of life for all the dogged earnestness of set lips.
"Who hired Sargent?" inquired Lida.
"That's grandfather," said Jay, a bit proudly.
"Heaven, I suppose," observed Lida, "was quite a locality with him." And she turned to the solid likeness of a gray-haired, bearded patriarch. "That's Stanley Alban," explained Jay. "My grandfather's best friend."
Lida dipped into her husband's pocket for a cigarette and, lighting it, she completely cleared away her momentary oppression. "California by covered wagon in '49?" she inquired, peering over the match at the portrait.
"No," said Jay. "Just Illinois."
"Of course," apologized Lida, "Now I have him. He knew Lincoln."
Upon the signal of his father's step, Jay plucked the cigarette from his wife's lips and put it between his own; after his father caught sight of them, he snapped it into the fireplace.
"This is Lida, father," he said; and under the look in his father's eyes, his pulses leaped. Lida spoke quickly, but John Rountree deliberately studied her.
"I have been expecting you," he replied, "you both."
"We'd have been earlier," offered Lida coolly, "but I dressed for the opera; when we gave it up, I changed back."
John turned toward the drawing-room, motioning to them to precede him. Lida went ahead but Jay delayed, watching his father, whose eyes followed her, estimating* her. Even in her sleeved dress, she contrasted with any wife or daughter of John Rountree's friends entertained in these rooms. Of course, girls of Jay's acquaintance never frequented the house. John glanced at Jay, who held breath briefly.
"Go in with your wife," John said and Jay drew toward her, with an idea of defending her; but Lida was more than equal to the requirements of the moment.
"How had you planned on the opera for to-night?" John asked her.
"The Mettens invited us; they bought a box for us to-day," explained Lida.
"To-day," repeated John and betrayed to his son the momentary flight of his mind to his day of vain waiting for a hint of the disposition of the half million dollar business, at the bestowal of the Mettens and which had become essential to him.
He tried to ignore it but he could not; and his daughter-in-law perfectly appreciated the point of vantage she had asserted.
"Mrs. Metten was just talking with me; I got out of her party to-night. But they have the same box for next week and the rest of the season. She asked us for next week," Lida related coolly, "and every week, for the opera and dinner. Shall I be nice to her?"
John had to hesitate before this girl, married to his son, who had come to him in the very contrary of contrition. He was entirely upset, having expected to dispose an advantage over her; instead, she held it over him and displayed it.
"Do you want to accept her invitation?" he asked.
"It's nothing to me," returned Lida. "But one can't slide out of a blanket invitation like that—and leave much behind to be picked up. What do you want me to do about her?"
"How did you leave the matter with Mrs. Metten?" John asked.
"I left it open," said Lida.
Jay interfered. He wanted her to win but not inflict too much humiliation. "That's your and my affair, Lida," he said, saving his father.
Soon Beedy announced dinner and the second-cousin dependents of the house, the Dills, appeared.
Before the table, set with five places, everyone but John delayed. He went to the head. Ann Dill's customary seat was opposite, except when guests were at the table, when John always honored the woman with the place. Ann led Lida to it but Jay discerned that his father did not approve of this implication of preference.
"Set that place on the side," he directed Beedy.
Jay warmed. "It's Lida's," he protested; but she laughed.
"Sit on the side with me, Jay," she bid him. "You know I've just dropped in."
Beedy was waiting and, not being re-commanded, he left things as they were; so, finally, Ann Dill went to the disputed place and Jay and Lida sat side by side.
John repeated grace, and Beedy, faultlessly, served dinner, without wine and without cigarettes at the table. The talk turned into the question and answer of people bent on avoiding the real matter in their minds, but now and then some one skirted it.
"I haven't known how to make ready your room," Ann Dill addressed Lida.
"Mine?" said Lida. "Where?"
Jay explained quickly. "Father asked us both to move in," he told his wife for the first time and, watching the slow stain of color in her cheek, he knew that more fully she felt the incident of the change of the chair.
Jay found himself with little appetite, and his father had none. Here in this room, as long ago as Jay could remember, he had sat with his father alone often, the two of them, at this big, sober table, morning and evening. Here at breakfast, sometimes with the sun streaming in, his father would admonish him upon the elements of success in life; from this table, he would send Jay to school and himself depart to his solemn mystery of money-making called business.
Early hours and long days, hard work and unflagging industry were the very stuff of success, his father had assured him; and certainly his father had practiced through life those virtues; but here he was after all his years of early rising and late laboring, with his business at the mercy of Lew Alban's caprice (when old Stanley died) and of a nineteen year old girl's decision as to whether she should affront or flatter the wife of Phil Metten.
The world was changing too fast for him; but, following his momentary halt before Lida's surprising challenge as to her course with Mrs. Metten, he was gathering himself, Jay knew. After dinner he would tell his daughter-in-law what he thought of her and no count of business consequences would modify his moral duty in dealing with her.
Jay drew his wife aside, when they all rose from the table. "Come see my room," he suggested and he led her upstairs.
Upon the walls of his room, once the nursery, lived always in Jay's memory the bright band of Jack and hll and the Cow jumping over the Moon. Actually they were there, under the new, adult paper, for they had been painted upon the plaster. He told Lida of them, and, telling, he remembered how his eyes had followed them from his small bed in the last light of dusk and the first of dawn.
Often, when he was's awake at daybreak, his door would open. (He was not relating this.) His father would come in; Jay would call to him and leap up with arms out. When he had had to go to bed, before his father was back from the office, he used to try to keep awake (and often succeeded) so as to have his arms about his father's neck, his kiss on his father's cheek. How had so much dropped away? And who had been to blame? Indeed, when had it happened? Gradually, too gradually for Jay to assign so much as a time to it; too gradually, indeed, for him to have realized, at the time, what was going on.
Never had he felt the force of it so much, when his father had been holding the whip over him; but to-night, he—Lida and he—held a certain power over his father; and he did not want it used.
"Lida," he said—he had closed the door—"father means to go for us."
"Have you a drink here, Jay?" she asked.
"Not here," said Jay. "I made an agreement with him not to bring it into the house—outside me."
"Then give me a cigarette, Jay, and kiss me."
He kissed her, quivering under his hands at her shoulder blades; he kissed her again; and he lit her cigarette.
"You can make him, Lida, a lot of trouble."
"Make it for you, too!"
"Yes," said Jay, "of course for me."
"I don't want to. Damn it, Jay, I'd stick it and grin in that opera box every night of the week for you, if I could."
"Lida!"
She thrust back his arms. "No; listen to me. You love this room, don't you?"
"It's been mine; that's all," said Jay.
"You love this house; you'd be back here, but for me."
"No," denied Jay, stupid in his excitement, not thinking. "I'd be at Harvard."
She went whiter. "Yes; I've smashed you up! You'd take everything your father said and what he'd think of you, wouldn't you? That's you! You'd take it all with me without a word for yourself! . . . Well, you won't!"
He tried to grasp her but she slipped to the door and was out, running down the stairs. The strong smoke of his father's cigar floated from the drawing-room; and she reached sanctuary there. Jay followed and joined her where his father had waited, prepared to deal with them.
"Sit down," John ordered; and Lida instantly obeyed him.
Jay apprehensively remained standing, near her.
"You have become my daughter," John delivered at her.
"Then Jay's mother's son, too," retorted Lida quickly.
"What?" asked John, halted.
Lida repeated and in the same breath explained it: "If you're entitled to me living by your family ideas, she's entitled to him by ours."
It was solely to discomfort his father, Jay realized. Lida's wits were spinning far faster than his. This had flashed to her and she had flung it out to confuse him; but it was nothing to her.
She was on edge for another opening; of what sort, Jay could not anticipate, for she flashed one irrelevance after another, while his father arraigned him and her.
His father told how, long ago, he had found Jay failing in duty and responsibility; how he had battled with Jay's idleness, godlessness, extravagance, drinking—and worse.
"Worse, I feared, from the company he kept," charged his father; "I feared, but did not prove until this . . . episode with you."
Lida started to speak but at this Jay touched her; and his father silenced her by raising his voice: "I am not charging that chiefly to you. Adam's excuse to God never made, to a man, Eve the chief sinner. I blame my son far more than you; but I blame you."
Lida sank back.
"Yet I know you are young to blame; the lack in you rose with your rearing and from your idle, profligate friends, your circle never brought up to revere work or know the meaning of self-respect."
It was at this, when his father was embarked again on generalities and Jay was off guard, that Lida unexpectedly struck.
"There isn't much of a code left in my crowd, father Rountree," she admitted to him and he listened, "but there's this much; a man doesn't make the girl run all the risk. If she needs a new name, he comes through for her; he gives her a married name for a year or so, anyway."
She was on her feet and she thrust herself away from Jay.
"That's not much of the ten commandments but it's something; and something else goes with it! Nobody in my crowd puts up a man of a different sort to make money out of him. That's what I ran across when Jay left me in your daughter's house. You see, her husband had a house guest. He wasn't your sort but there was business for them in him. I didn't allow for that; Jay didn't either. I supposed they thought something of him and had reason to. I found out when I needed a name for a while . . . and his was no use to me.
"So Jay came through for me, do you see? That's it; God's truth. All your son ever did was stand before a minister with me. . . . Now I've told you. Take me home, Jay; quick, to the hotel!"
He had his arms about her and she ceased to fight him off. His father played no part in their struggle; his father stood apart from them, silenced.
"Justin," he objected, "Justin!" when Jay led Lida out; but Jay paid no attention to him.
In the cab, Lida kept to a corner. She held his hand; she clung to it constantly and she asked: "Let's not talk about it."
At the hotel, in their suite, she opened the door from his room to hers; there he came to kiss her.
"Don't kiss me again, Jay," Lida said. "I've kissed you good-by; and I want to keep it."
"Good-by, Lida?"
"Yes; in your room at home, where you were a little boy. That was good-by; didn't you feel it?"