Ellen changed, during the week, so noticeably that Di commented: "Your father certainly is good for you." Partly it was an effect of his presence and the prospect of his return, with his ship, every fortnight throughout the summer, but chiefly it was a consequence of her admission that she loved. She had cleared away conflicts in herself by declaring it; but she had made her dependence on Jay only more complete.
She dwelt on his promise to her: "I'll be back," after he had told her that he expected his wife would not return here. Then Ellen came upon an account of his social doings in New York; for that was news.
Lida Haige and Jay Rountree had run away and married and, after a few weeks, had separated, the New York correspondent recalled, but now they were reunited. He had "rushed" to the seaboard to meet her and she had abandoned her friends at Caracas "to hurry home to him." So now they were reunited; they were appearing everywhere together. What did it mean?
Ellen at night sat on the low seat before her dresser, brushing her hair; she kept at it, not looking in her mirror, feeling the draw of the brush. Di stepped behind her, gathered up her hair, suddenly slipped the kimono from Ellen's shoulder and bared the white, smooth skin over which Di let drop in a shower the lovely, chestnut hair.
"You'd stand one type of man on his head," announced Di, glancing into the glass, "if you did your work this way."
Di retreated and raised her hands, satisfiedly, to her shorn, auburn locks. "I stand the other types on their thinning topknots," she observed, complacently.
In her usual plain blue dress, with her hair wound round her head, Ellen was in her usual place beside Mr. Rountree when the door opened with the impulsive push which had heralded Jay. She started, looked up and there he was, alone!
Of course he'd come alone to the office; his wife never had visited the building, yet Ellen was sure, at sight of him and before his father obtained statement of the fact, that he had returned alone.
His hand, withdrawn from his father's, was grasping hers.
"Lakes are wide open," he was saying. "Saw the ore-boats from the train."
"Yes; father's come and gone." Was she clinging to his hand? She pulled away suddenly but he looked at her a moment longer before he answered his father's inquiries of his sister and Ralph.
When he stepped out, Ellen improvised an errand to her own little room for refuge to compose herself before she resumed with pad and pencil at his father's side. "Not reunited," drummed in her head and she all but wrote it down. "Not reunited here."
Jay, seeking the sales department, did not immediately intrude upon Lowry; he wanted a few minutes to settle down after this return to Ellen Powell. But his excitement stayed. It was not that excitement which he had lost with Lida; scarcely that sort at all. That had overswept him shortly, violently, with a sudden onset which aroused within him resistance, very differently from this.
He avoided Ellen during the day until their old, usual time together, when he looked into the office and, finding her alone, entered as casually as he could and dropped upon a chair.
"Anything new from Lew," he inquired.
"He's in Stanley," said Ellen, arising, "but he hasn't been here."
"Isn't he due?"
"Oh, yes; he's due," replied Ellen, with cheek and forehead deeply stained.
Why was that? thought Jay and proposed to her abruptly, "Would you care to go to New York?"
"New York?" said Ellen. "I?"
"To run our office. Mr. Armiston has asked for you. He needs you like the devil," explained Jay, overurging the matter as he felt how little he wanted this girl away. "You're exactly the person for the place; the only right person," he said. "Mr. Armiston thinks you've the best head of any girl he's seen. Of course you have."
Ellen ignored this praise of her competence. Appreciation of the skill of her hands, the clearness of her head! She wanted value as girl; as woman.
"Father'd send you on, if you asked it," said Jay.
That was true, she knew. Beneath Mr. Rountree's mask of impersonality was a sensitive pride which never would permit him to detain her if she, who worked at his side, wished to leave him. And Jay, she thought, was indifferent whether she was here or there.
"We started something in New York," he told her. "It broke so that I was able to put my brother-in-law in with the Howarth people so that something big may develop. In New York, Howarth is a sizable account, you know."
Ellen nodded, aglow with the idea that Jay, so far from being indifferent, perhaps urged her to go east because he would be at work in New York.
"Is Mr. Armiston . . . adding to his office," she inquired.
"He wants to add you; that's all," said Jay.
"Oh," said Ellen and looked away, aflame; so he had not thought at all of her.
"That account is not only sizable," continued Jay, "but it's the only one in sight which can make up to us for Alban, when Lew leaves us; but we've got to get it before we lose Alban."
Ellen, saying nothing, gazed at Jay with impulses in possession of her of the very nature against which her father had warned her. Because Jay disregarded her (she thought), because she was (she thought) to him no more than a competent and useful business girl with a good head, she would . . . she would . . . what had Di said? She'd stand a man on his head!
Not Jay—for he would send her off; but she'd stand on his head, for Jay, Lew Alban!
She had not known how she was to proceed with Lew, for she had thought of having to "hold" him indefinitely; but this chance at the Howarth business laid, perhaps, a limit for her. It required her only to hold Lew for a time, and that she might do. But her face burned furiously and she bent her head from Jay and turned away.
So she said nothing to Mr. Rountree in regard to New York; so she received in the office, at the first of the week, Lew. He had chosen not to herald his arrival. He walked in and greeted Mr. Rountree, with not a glance immediately for her, and except that he kept her aware as never before of her body, he did nothing which she had anticipated.
He did not even wait for an interlude alone with her, but was satisfied with a moment when Mr. Rountree stepped into the general office.
"I'm sending for you at eight," Lew then informed her.
"To-night?" said Ellen, her eyes on his.
"Eight," repeated Lew, returning her gaze, and after a few minutes more with Mr. Rountree, he departed without another word for her and did not reappear during the day.
Di was not about when Ellen dressed. Flowers had come, flowers which she could not this time cast upon the rear porch, for they were violets in corsage bouquet sent to her to wear, and the accompanying card, initialed, read: "I like to dance."
Ellen had a black, chiffon dress; she had gunmetal stockings and black satin slippers; and she laid them—all out upon her bed, she banished them and laid them out again before at last she put them on.
Di always dressed with deliberation and before a glass; Ellen, having finally decided, dressed quickly and did not delay at the mirror. How white seemed her arms and shoulders beside the black of her dress!
Lew sent for her, as he had said he would do; a cowardly, unoccupied cab called for her, such as had often sought Di at this door; and Ellen, after answering the driver's summons, drew on a coat and ran out. In another cab, a couple of blocks away, Lew was waiting. He changed to hers, and there she sat bareheaded beside Lew Alban.
Of course she never had worn a hat in the office, but it was different, bareheaded in a cab with a man looking at you; and, under her cloak, her shoulders were bare.
"You're pretty," Lew praised her. "By God, you're pretty."
He wanted to see her shoulders; he wanted to see her white skin. He pulled at her cloak. "Let's see your dress," he said. "Black," he approved. "I like black on you. By God, you're beautiful." And he looked down at her feet. "You've little feet," he said with satisfaction, "pretty little feet."
Her cheeks and shoulders and her toes in her slippers prickled, but not with fear; it was the excitement of power prickling her like pin points.
The car was on a boulevard caught in a current of cabs and chauffeur-driven limousines hired or bought and maintained by men for women. Within them were girls, and women, sought by men, courted and indulged by men. Ellen had glimpses of faces. She saw not a competent feminine face; with head and hands, these girls did and could do nothing. They neither needed nor cared to do anything with head (the inside of it) or with hands (the skill of them), but for them spun this stream of cars; for them had been built this city!
"You dance," said Lew. "Of course you dance with your lovely little feet."
"I dance," Ellen replied.
Seated beside him at a little table, near the edge of a dance floor, Ellen quivered in her black chiffon and looked about uneasily at the other couples. It was a dine-and-dance club, so called, but only an admission and cover charge regulated the membership.
"You've never been in a place like this before," observed Lew, with satisfaction.
"Never," admitted Ellen; and he ordered dinner, extravagantly.
"Chicago has a few early evening clubs," said Lew, patronizingly, "New York has the night clubs. New York is the place. I'm moving there, you know."
"I didn't," said Ellen, turning her cocktail glass.
"Yes. No reason in God's world I should stay at Stanley because my father stuck to the prairie and we manufacture there. Manufacturing is nothing any more; a foreman can see to that. My office must be in the city."
"Why not Chicago?" asked Ellen.
"Why play a second?" replied Lew. "New York is the first city in the world. My office will be on Fifth Avenue. I'll run everything from there." He touched his glass to hers: "To New York!" he suggested and she sipped the cocktail: "To New York!" she said.
"Ever seen the first city?" he asked her.
"Never."
"You will," he promised her.
"You dance," pronounced Lew, his arm about her, "like a dream. Who have you been practicing with?"
"Paul Denny, mostly," Ellen told him. "A few other friends."
"What sort of a friend of yours is Denny?"
"He used to be on the boat with my father. He was here for a year and a winter, but he's gone back to the boat. He didn't like the city."
"Some don't," said Lew, satisfied with the tone of her explanation. He grasped more closely her soft, flexible body. She made persistent resistance. He danced not at all like Paul, who had held her with a bit of awe and always with respect. Lew Alban knew, in his grasp of a girl, neither awe nor respect; to dance with him required Ellen to duel, subtly, against him.
He liked, for a while, to make attempt, to feel her repulse; truce for a moment, then attempt; repulse; attempt. Then he tired of it. "Let's go somewhere else," he proposed.
"I must go home," said Ellen, positively.
He laughed and bid her: "Get your coat."
In the dressing-room, her sensation of power which had sustained her early in the evening, utterly forsook Ellen. She wanted nothing so much as escape and to work hereafter, never upon her womanliness, but with her hands and head. She wanted nothing, nothing in common with these girls about her, re-rouging and re-arraying themselves to proceed "somewhere else" to-night with their men. But she had to go out to Lew Alban.
He was awaiting her by the entrance, where he eyed the girls bound elsewhere, eagerly and gigglingly, with their escorts. Lew had obtained much from Ellen Powell. Her dread of him, her resistance to him, her excitement with him had supplied him with a pleasurable stimulus which he never could have received from these eager girls. The look of her gray eyes questioning him, the feel of her slight, supple body and her little, persistent repulses of him kept him stirred, but he had proceeded with her as far as he could to-night.
"No hurry," he had written her, after he had made his definite start with her. It would not be short and sudden, the obtaining of this girl. Indeed, he did not want her easily obtained. At any time he could pick up a girl to accompany him, eagerly and gigglingly, elsewhere. Accordingly, when Ellen rejoined him with a steadfast request to him to take her home, he surprised her by soon complying. On the way, he kissed her; but he took her home.
When she was applied again to the office tasks of her head and hands, Lew sauntered in with no apparent memory of the previous evening; and she tried to betray none. To Mr. Rountree and Jay, he volunteered his intention in regard to New York, much as he had imparted it to her last night.
"So I'll be located East," he concluded, coolly, shaking hands.
He left no doubt, as he parted from Mr. Rountree and Jay, that he felt no regrets over the distance he was to put between them. He shook hands also with Ellen, but his fingers admonished hers very differently.
"Have you ever seen New York?" he asked her, ignoring last night.
"Never," she repeated her reply.
"That's an answer you can change."
Jay said to Ellen, when they were left alone: "I wish I could see my brother-in-law liking Lew; or Lew, him. But I've had them together; they look upon each other like a pot of poison."
Ellen remained silent, though inwardly she seethed with her secret.
"Speaking of Mr. Armiston," she said, as though he had reminded her of the matter, "I might like it with him in New York, A little later," she qualified hastily.