KAY never told Katherine about Clare, but gradually, little by little, she learned some of the details of those missing months. She saw the little ranch house, the struggle to live, and between the lines the attempts at adjustment. She saw the town on the Reservation: the loneliness, the dust and heat of summer, the work; but in none of these things did she find the reason for the tragedy which was written on Kay's face. She lay still and thought: "There is something else, something else she won't tell me. There is something else."
But she learned that Kay was staying indefinitely. It comforted her, while at the same time it worried her. She liked to have her coming in, to listen for the click of her high heels outside, and then see her enter in one of the dinner frocks from her trousseau.
"That's really a sweet dress, Kay. Do you remember how Louise fought to put pink on it? It's much better as it is."
That the dress hung looser than it was meant to she never mentioned.
She even went downstairs more often, sitting behind her tea table with a delicate pink flush on her face. People came and went, sedate well-bred people who greeted Kay as though she had never been away, and waited until the door of their limousines were closed before conjecturing. Although it was already almost winter on the high plateau Kay had left, it was only autumn in the East. A few leaves still clung tenaciously to the trees, there were days almost as warm as summer. Socially the city was taking its fall respite, between summer resorts and the opening of the season the first of December. The houses of the neighborhood were being gradually opened. One day their wooden shutters would be up, and a card, "Deliver mail and parcels to the caretaker in the rear." The next the windows would be open, an advance guard of servants would take possession, and house cleaners, paper hangers, painters, upholsterers come and go.
Bessie was in New York. Kay never saw Herbert; once, passing the library door, she heard his voice beyond it, and saw his car at the door. She went upstairs as quietly as she could. She could not see Herbert; not yet anyhow.
But the news of her return gradually spread. The telephone would ring, and some excited high feminine voice would call her.
"Why, Kay, I've just heard you're here! I absolutely must see you."
They came in, in their short skirts, their thin legs in sheer stockings, their plain little hats which were somehow so costly. They opened gold or platinum vanity cases and worked over their smooth faces, or lit cigarettes stuck in jeweled holders; early as it was they were usually going somewhere. Sometimes they demanded a pick-up, and Kay rang and ordered cocktails for them. They put their arms around her so that the scent they used smothered her, after her months of the pure air of the back country. They admired her clothes, her hair, her hands. Her hands! And underneath it all they were avidly curious. If she turned suddenly she found their eyes on her.
"I do think that frock's too divine!"
But they were not thinking about her frock, but about her. She had been married. She was one of the initiate. Moreover, she had married dramatically. "A cowboy! Imagine! I didn't see him, but they say he's the handsomest thing!" Had she really left him, or was she—they examined her figure furtively.
"Tell us about your ranch. You have a ranch, haven't ou?"
"It's a little place. Very lonely. On an Indian Reservation." She would smile over the teacups, her lips a trifle stiff.
"And do you really raise cattle?"
"They raise themselves, rather. Of course they have to be worked."
"Worked? Do you hitch them to things?"
And when they departed they were still avidly curious, unsatisfied.
"It's my belief she's left him."
"Well, she'll never tell you!"
She seldom left the house. They came to her, these girls, and when they did not come she did not miss them. Their small affairs seemed trivial and frivolous to her, against the great adventure of living and dying as she began to see it. Sometimes when they came jn to luncheon and sat around the table in their bright frocks, she saw instead of them Mrs. Mallory's party. The tired capable faces, the worn capable hands. And she felt nearer to those older women than she did to these young ones.
Her tumultuous inner life she buried always. For a time she had expected to hear from Tom; even on the train East the entrance of a boy with a telegram had set her heart beating fast. But as the days went on and no letter came she abandoned the hope. He had meant what he said; he would never ask her to go back.
At the end of three weeks she wrote him a letter. She wrote in a discouraged hour, and the letter was not particularly calculated to heal the breach between them:
"I have found my mother very ill. She may live a few months, but that is all. I am glad now that I came. It has made her happier, and of course I shall stay until the end.
"What else can I say? I know now that although I did my best, it was not enough. I could not even hold you for six months. There is no reproach in this. Maybe all men are unfaithful to their wives, or at least disloyal at times. I don't know; I find there is so much I don't know. Of course you know that if you send for me I shall come back, not now but when I can. But you must realize that you must want me and ask me first. I came to you once; I cannot do it again.
"I am not happy here; even without mother's illness I would not be happy. I am spoiled for this life. I miss—" she hesitated there—"the mountains and the open country. I feel shut in."
She found that she was crying, had to get up and find a handkerchief, moved about the room before she could compose herself to go on. She was homesick for the West, heartsick for Tom. She dabbed at her eyes angrily. How weak and childish she was still to care so much for a man who did not care for her! She was one of the hopelessly faithful. It was awful, it was degrading, but there it was. She went back to her small desk:
"And I did love you so dreadfully, Tom! I must have, to do what I did do. If I have been unfair I am sorry, and when you want me—and I can come—you know I will."
He never answered it.
One day without warning Bessie Osborne wandered in. She went upstairs, opened Katherine's door, sauntered past the scowling nurse, and kissed the invalid.
"You're looking better," she said, lying as unconcernedly as she did everything else. "I hear Kay's back."
"Yes. She came some time ago."
"Has she left him?"
Katherine cast an agonized glance toward the nurse.
"Nora wrote her I was not well, and you know the winters out there—why, Bessie, whatever have you done to your hair?"
Bessie had taken off her hat, and not only revealed an evident intention to remain, but a head of a hue closely resembling orange.
"New color," said Bessie calmly. "I've tried everything else; this was all they had left. Well, how is Kay?"
The nurse had recovered her voice.
"Excuse me," she said, "but the doctor's orders are against visitors."
"I'm not a visitor," said Bessie, glancing at her coldly, "and if there is anything you can do conveniently for the next ten or fifteen minutes, I should like to talk to my sister-in-law."
The nurse went out defeated, and Bessie moved her chair closer to the chaise longue.
"How is she? How does she look?"
"I think she is a little thin."
"I daresay!" said Bessie dryly. "Hasn't she told you anything? Was it a fight, or another woman?"
Katherine flushed.
"Really, Bessie!" she said. "I can't ask her, and she has told me nothing. They have had this small ranch, and"
Bessie listened as she went on. She had never had any opinion of her sister-in-law's brains, and before her ten minutes were up she rose and picked up her hat.
"Where is she?"
"In her room, I imagine. She seems rather tired. She doesn't care to go out much."
In the hall Bessie stopped and made a few faces to relax the rigidity she felt about her mouth, and then she tapped at Kay's door. She had always been fond of Kay; there had been something of old Lucius in her. But if she had let this scatterbrained marriage of hers go on the rocks so soon, then perhaps there was something of her mother in her too. Some softening of fiber, some It was probably another woman.
She opened her attack abruptly, almost the moment she entered the room.
"So it didn't go?" she said, standing inside the door.
"Not as well as it might."
"And whose fault was it?"
Kay shrugged her shoulders.
"I don't know. Both, I suppose."
Nevertheless, in the end she told her story fully. One could do that with Bessie. And Bessie sat with her long cigarette holder between her long fingers with their pointed nails, and listened uncompromisingly. She never spoke until the end.
"Then you simply walked out and left him to that girl!"
"If he wants her he can have her."
"Oh, don't be such a little fool! Men always want somebody else, at intervals. It's the woman's business to see they don't get her."
Kay looked at her.
"If they do it isn't love."
"Nonsense! They're a polygamous lot. They can't help it; God made them that way. It has nothing to do with love, really. It's" she hesitated. Kay was married, but how could she discuss the occasional volcanic passions of men with her? "It's the nature of the beast," she finished lamely.
"Then you believe in infidelity?"
"You don't even know he was unfaithful. And of course I don't believe in infidelity; a clever woman keeps her husband faithful. That's all."
"I'm not clever, not that way."
"You're young," said Bessie. "You have a lot to learn."
She was puzzled, nevertheless. Where did happiness lie for this child-woman before her? To send her back to that dreadful little ranch house and poverty, was that the answer? If Henry only had an ounce of sense and would finance the man—but then Kay had said he would not accept help from them. That made it difficult, but also it showed that McNair had what Bessie had referred to before, namely, guts. Again, did the man want Kay back? His long silence, this cheap girl out there
"Have you seen Herbert?"
"Not yet. I daresay I shall have to, some time."
"But you're through with that?"
"Yes. I've spoiled his life, among the rest, but I"
"Spoiled his life!" said Bessie, getting up impatiently. "You have a lot to learn. Men can spoil women's lives; women enjoy unrequited affection. They hold on to it, dream about it. But men! Men don't remember anything unpleasant if they can help it. They wipe off the slate and start over again. It may please them for a while to think they are injured, but when that ceases to please them they stop."
"Then Herbert—?"
"It still pleases him, but he'll get over it."
She sauntered over to the dressing table, rouged her lips thoroughly, put on her hat. She could see Kay's face in the mirror.
"Don't let any one influence you," she told her. "It's your life. If you want to go back to your cowboy, go. If you want Herbert, stay and get busy. He's on the branch now, but he won't hang long."
And with that she went away.