Part 14

"It's the truth. Perhaps later, when I've studied more, seen more, I can meet them and not shame you--"

"Shame me, Jean! If you realized how proud I am--"

"Then don't put me in a position where you may feel anything but proud. Don't make me go."

He reasoned with her laughingly, but without real understanding of her reluctance.

"Besides," he concluded, "you can't decline. The dinner is really for you."

Her cup of misery brimmed over.

"For me!"

"In a way, it's in honor of our engagement, even though it isn't known."

"Your sister wrote nothing of this."

"But she told me. She said she wanted you to meet some of our friends. Don't be afraid of them, Jean. You're as clever as any of them, while in looks not a woman Julie knows can hold a candle to you."

"But their clothes! Don't you see it's impossible? I've absolutely nothing to wear."

The man flicked this thistle-down airily away.

"Dowds, half of 'em, Julie's crowd," he declared. "You don't need anything elaborate. Just wear some simple gown that doesn't hide your neck. Simple things tell."

"And cost," she added, smiling ruefully at his nebulous solution. "I have never owned a dinner-gown in my life."

Atwood had an inspiration.

"Why, the studio is full of them," he cried.

"Your sister's--every one. Could I wear one of her dresses to her dinner?"

"Hardly. What inferior intellects men have! But is there any objection to your wearing one of _my_ gowns? None of the properties fit the scheme of illustrations I've planned for that last novel, and I've decided to have one or two things made. Now, if you'll choose the material and bother with the fittings--"

Jean's laugh riddled this improvisation.

"I'll go if I must," she promised, "but I'll wear my own clothes. After all, I know something about dressmaking."

Nevertheless, the dress problem was serious when she came to marshal her resources, and she still vacillated in a choice of evils, when Amy happened in with a fresh point of view and an authoritative knowledge of the latest mode, which cleared the muddle magically.

"Put those away," she ordered, dismissing with a glance the alternatives arrayed despairingly on the bed. "Wear white or a color, and you'll have every old cat there rubbering to see how it's made. Where's your black net?"

"Here," said Jean, producing it without enthusiasm. "It's hopeless."

"It is a sight by daylight," agreed Amy, candidly. "That cheap quality always gets brown and rusty. But under gas it will never show. Cut those sleeves off at the elbow and edge them with lace. The forty-nine-cent kind will do, and you'll only need two yards."

Jean's spirits rebounded under this practical encouragement.

"I might turn in the neck about so much," she suggested, indicating an angle by no means extravagant.

Amy snatched the garment away.

"Scissors!" she commanded decisively. "This yoke is coming out altogether. Can't you see, Jean Fanshaw, that if you give your shoulders a chance, people won't think twice about your dress? I'd just give millions for your shoulders. The black will set them off as nothing else could. If you want a dash of color, I don't know anything smarter than a spray of pink-satin roses. Fred thinks I twist them up almost like real."

Jean evaded the artificial flowers with tact, but otherwise let herself be guided by Amy, under whose fingers the transformation of the black net went forward rapidly.

"It's a treat to have something to do," Amy avowed, declining aid. "I get awful lonesome over at our boarding-place. You never have time any more to run in, and, excepting Saturday afternoon and Sunday, I don't see anything of Fred. This is his busiest time, he says. Fred's a crackerjack salesman. Last month he sent in more orders than any man the firm ever put on the road. He just seems to hypnotize customers, same as he did me. I know you would like him, too, Jean, if you would ever come over while he's home. He spoke about that very thing the other day. He said it looked as if you were trying to dodge him. He wanted me to ask you to go down to the Coney Island opening last Saturday, but I was afraid you'd say no and hurt his feelings, so I told him you were sure to be at your art school. I was glad afterward you didn't come, for we met Stella Wilkes."

The name failed to stir Jean as of old.

"I don't fear Stella now," she said.

"I do," Amy rejoined. "It gives me the creeps to be anywhere near her. Fred says he can't see why. Men are queer that way. She came up to us on the Iron Pier, where we were having beer and sandwiches, and in spite of all my hints, he asked her to have something, too. She told us she was singing in one of the music-halls down there, and nothing would do Fred but we must go that night and see what her voice was like. She spotted us down in the crowd and waved her hand at us as bold as you please. I was so mad! Fred didn't care. He thought she had a bully voice. It did sound first-rate in 'coon songs,' and I really had to laugh myself at some of her antics when she danced a cake-walk. Wouldn't it be a queer thing if she got to be well known? Fred says there's no reason why she shouldn't earn big money, and he's a dandy judge of acting. You ought to hear him spout some of the speeches from 'Monte Cristo.' We always go to a show Saturday nights, when he's home, and generally Sundays to sacred concerts and actors' benefits. I wouldn't go Sundays if the rest of the week wasn't so dull. If I only had a flat, it would help pass the time away. I tease Fred for one all the time. Maybe I can pretty soon. He's to have Long Island and North Jersey for his territory, and that will bring him home oftener nights. Haven't you a better drop-skirt than this?"

"Drop-skirt?" The transition caught Jean daydreaming over a contrast between Amy's drummer and an illustrator not unknown to fame.

"This one is so scant it spoils the whole dress," explained the critic. "I always said so."

"I know; but it's the best I have. Does it matter so much?"

"Matter!" Amy mourned over the offending detail with artistic concern. "There's nothing I'm so particular about. A drop-skirt like this would spoil a Paquin gown, or a Redfern, let alone a--a--"

"Rusty black net?" Jean prompted. "Aren't you forgetting my wonderful shoulders? Nobody is to look at anything else, you know!"

Amy ignored the implication.

"It won't be so funny if they do," she reproved. "I do wish I had something to lend you, but since I left the store, I never wear black. Fred likes lively colors. Isn't there anything at the studio you could borrow?"

There was, though Jean forbore to mention it. As certain as her need, was the knowledge that from the third right-hand hook of the studio wardrobe depended its easy satisfaction. She had told Atwood with almost rebuking emphasis that she must wear her own clothes, but in the befogging nervousness which the bugaboo of the dinner wrought, the temptation to make use of at least this discarded trifle of Mrs. Van Ostade's plenty assailed her with waxing strength, till success or failure seemed to hang on her decision. The garment had its individuality, like most things belonging to Julie, who, Atwood said, had her own notions of design; but Jean told herself that it need not be flaunted.

To assure herself whether, after all, she might not be overrating its importance, she wore the silken lure home under her street-dress the evening of the dinner. This candid course was most efficacious. In the light of the miracle it worked, consistency troubled her no more than Amy. Its influence transcended the material; it fortified her courage; and when at last the admiring maid brought word that a gentleman waited below, she gave a final glance mirrorward, which was almost optimistic, and went down for Craig's verdict with starry eyes.

No faintest premonition prepared her to confront in the dim-lit room, not Craig, but Paul.

The dentist took an uncertain step toward her.

"I had to come, Jean," he said defensively. "There hasn't been a more miserable cuss in the city. I--" Then, seeing her clearly under the flare of the gas-burner nearest the door, which her hand sought instantly, he stood a moment, wide-eyed and mute, in fascinated survey of her unwonted garb. No tribute to its effectiveness could be more sincere. As if it spoke for her like a symbol, answering a question he could no longer put, he made a simple gesture of renunciation, the pathos and dignity of which sounded the very well-springs of her pity. "Excuse me for butting in," he added. "I can see now it was no use."

Jean put out her hand. The mystery of her dead affection--she could not call it love--for this man was never more baffling. The woman she was seemed as far removed from her who pledged herself to Paul, as that girl in turn was remote from the mutinous rebel of Cottage No. 6; but the dentist's gesture, his words, his shabbiness--so different from the half-dandified neatness of old--touched her where a direct appeal to their common past would have found her flint.

"It was no use in the way you mean, Paul," she said gently. "But sit down. I am sorry if you have been unhappy."

Whereupon an inconceivably subdued Paul Bartlett sat down beside her and with a gush of mingled self-pity and remorse poured the tale of his manifold sorrows into an absorbed and--her wrongs, her sex considered--sympathetic ear. Life had fared ill with the dentist. He had not been able, he said, to swing the enterprise of the new office quite as he had hoped. The location was all right, the equipment was all right, but for some reason, perhaps the election-time flurry, perhaps because he himself may not have pushed things as he did when feeling quite up to par, patients had not flocked his way. The hell he had been through! To know there wasn't a more up-to-date office in Harlem, not one that paid a stiffer rent, and yet, for a month, six weeks, two months, to see almost nobody drift in except "shoppers"--Jean would remember their sort!--who haggled over dinkey little jobs such as amalgam fillings, or beat him down on a cheap plate to a figure that hardly paid a man to fire up his vulcanizer--well, he'd sooner handle a pick and shovel than go through that again.

"But it's better now?" she asked.

"Shouldn't have showed my face here if it wasn't," Paul retorted, with a flicker of his old spirit. "The luck changed just when I'd about decided to go back to Grimes. Yes, I'm doing so-so. Nothing record-breaking, but I'm out of debt."

"I'm very glad."

"Thanks," he said gratefully. "You've no call to be, God knows! When I think--but what's the good? I've thought till I'm half crazy. Just to look into the little place at the Lorna Doone queers a whole week for me. It stands about as it did, Jean. All the time the pinch was hardest, I had to carry the flat, too--empty. I couldn't live there, and nobody else wanted it. I missed my chance to clear out when the building changed hands--I tumbled just too late, not being on the spot. The new owners would make trouble, and I've had trouble enough. I just _can't_ sell the things--leastways some of them--and I thought perhaps you--they're really yours, you know--perhaps you--No? Well, I don't blame you. If folks were only living there, I guess I'd feel different. I would sublet for a song."

Amy's consuming desire flashed into Jean's mind to relieve a situation too tense for long endurance, and Paul thankfully made note of the drummer's address. This mechanical act seemed to put a period to their meeting and both rose; but although they shook hands again, and exchanged commonplaces concerning neither knew what, the man continued to imprison her fingers in an awkward solemnity which, more sharply than words, conveyed his sense of a bitter, yet just, finality.

So occupied, Atwood's hurried entrance found them.

"I'm late, very late," he said from the hall, at first seeing only Jean; "but the cab-horse looks promising, and the driver says--I beg your pardon!"

Acutely conscious of a burning flush, which Paul's red-hot confusion answered like an afterglow, Jean made the presentation.

"Bartlett--not Barclay," Paul corrected Atwood's murmured greeting, with the footless particularity of the embarrassed.

"I beg your pardon," said Atwood again.

"Often mixed, those two names, Bartlett and Barclay," babbled the dentist, with desperate stage laughter. "Half the people who come to my office call me Barclay. Feel sometimes as if it must be Barclay after all. Dare say Barclay is as good a name--that is--"

Jean stilled the parrot cry with an apology for running off, and the trio passed down the steps together. Atwood glanced back curiously as they whipped away.

"Who is Mr. Bartlett--not Barclay?" he smiled.

"A dentist I knew when I worked for the Acme Company," she answered, and then, with a generous impulse added, "He was very kind to me once when I needed kindness."

"So?" Atwood's interest livened. "Then I have double reason not to forget his name. I don't dare picture what Julie's thinking," he went on, peering at a jeweller's street-clock. "We're undeniably late. But I have the best excuse in the world. Guess!"

Jean tried, but found her wits distraught between the scene just past and the trial to come.

"No; tell me," she entreated.

He drew a full exultant breath.

"It's the Joyce-Reeves commission," he said. "I received the order to-night."

XXIII

They were not unpardonably late, yet were tardy enough to render their coming conspicuous to what seemed to Jean an ultramodish company which peopled not only Mrs. Van Ostade's drawing-room, but the connecting music-room and library as well.

Julie, her dark good looks set off by yellow, met them with observant eyes, nodded "Yes, Craig; I know" to Atwood's great news, murmured a conventional word of regret to Jean that both their calls should have been fruitless, made two or three introductions to those who chanced nearest, and with the lift of an eyelid set in motion the mechanism of a statuesque butler; whereupon Jean found herself hazily translated to her place at table between a blond giant, who took her in, and a shadowy-eyed person with a pointed beard, who languidly quoted something resembling poetry about what he called the tinted symphony of Mrs. Van Ostade's candle-light.

"How clever!" said Jean, at a venture, and welcomed the voice of her less ethereal neighbor.

"Corking race," remarked the giant, beaming at her over the rim of his cocktail.

This was concrete, if indefinite.

"You mean--"

"Yesterday--France. Wonderful! Gummiest kind of course--two days' hard rainfall, you know. I've been saying 'I told you so' all day. Didn't surprise me in the least. I knew her, d'ye see, I knew her."

Jean looked as intelligent as she could, and hoped for a clew. The big man checked his elliptical remarks altogether, however, and, still beaming, awaited her profound response.

"Is she French?" she hazarded, jumping at an inference.

"But it was a man won. The sporting duchess, you mean, drew out."

"I'm speaking of the horse," Jean struggled.

"Horse! What horse?" ejaculated the giant. "I'm talking automobiles."

She judged frankness best.

"There is nothing for it but to confess," she said. "I know nothing about automobiles. I never set foot in one in my life."

Her companion wagged a large reproachful finger.

"Don't string me," he begged. "Didn't Julie Van Ostade put you up to this? I know I'm auto-mad and an easy mark, but--Jove! I believe you're serious. Why, it's--it's incredible! Just think a bit. You must have been in one of those piffling little runabouts?"

"Never."

"Well, then, a cab--an electric cab?"

"Not even a 'bus."

He shook his head solemnly and besought the attention of the petite guest in mauve on his left.

"What do you think?" Jean heard him begin. "Miss Fanshaw here--"

Then the shadowy-eyed seized his chance.

"I hail a kindred spirit," he confided softly. "To me the automobile is the most hideous, blatant fact of a prosaic age. Its coarsening pleasures are for the few; its brutal sins against life's meager poetry touch the unprivileged millions."

"Rot!" cut in the giant, whose hearing was excellent. "The motor is everybody's servant. As for poetry, man alive! you would never talk such drool again if you could see a road-race as the man in the car sees it. Poetry! It's an epic!" Wherewith he launched into terse description, jerky like the voice of his machine and bestrewn with weird technicalities, but stirring and roughly eloquent of a full-blooded joy in life.

While the battle raged over her--for the man with the pointed beard showed unexpected mettle--Jean evolved a working theory as to the uses of unfamiliar forks and crystal, and took stock of her other fellow-guests. It was now, with a start of pleasure, that she first met the eye of MacGregor, whom she had overlooked in the hurry of their late arrival. His smile was encouraging, as if he divined her difficulties, and she took a comfort in his presence, which Atwood's, for once, failed to inspire.

Craig seemed vastly remote. He was in high spirits and talking eagerly to an odd-looking girl with a remarkable pallor that brought out the vivid scarlet of her little mouth and the no less striking luster of her raven hair, which she wore low over the ears after a fashion Jean associated with something literary or theatrical. She caught a word or two of their conversation, and it overshot her head, though the talk at MacGregor's Oasis had acquainted her with certain labels for uncertain quantities known as Nietzsche and George Bernard Shaw. She perceived a sophisticated corner of Atwood's mind, hitherto unsuspected, so deceptive was his boyish manner; and the anæmic girl, juggling the Superman with offhand ease, became clothed with piquant interest. She wondered who she was, what Atwood saw in her, and whether they knew each other well.

Of his own accord her neighbor with the beard enlightened her.

"Pictorial, isn't she?" he said. "Pre-Raphaelite, almost, as to features; hair Cleo de Merode. I hope Mrs. Van Ostade pulls the match off. They're so well suited; clever, both of them, and in different ways. Then, her money. That is a consideration."

"Is it?" groped Jean.

"Rather! Wealthy in her own name, you know, and virtually sure of her uncle's fortune. They're very soundly invested, the Hepworth millions. But it's the psychological phase of it that interests me. I'm curious to see what effect she'll have upon his work. For the artistic temperament marriage is twice a lottery. I've never dared risk it myself."

His tone offered confidences, but Jean found his celibacy of slight interest beside Miss Hepworth's. She was conscious that he was permitting her glimpses into the lone sanctities of what he termed his priesthood, as she was aware of a whir and rush of motor-maniacal anecdote on her other side, and of a ceaseless coming and going of courses amidst the generally pervasive fog of conversation. She made the automatic responses which seemed all her immediate fellow-guests required of her, and masked her face with a smile, into which she threw more spontaneity after the bearded one said it suggested Mona Lisa's and belied her glorious youth.

"For she is 'older than the rocks among which she sits,'" he quoted. "You remember Pater's famous interpretation?"

Jean knew neither quotation nor writer, but she was familiar with Leonardo's picture and turned the personality with a neutral question, which served the man as a spring-board for fresh verbal acrobatics, amusing to him and restful for her. He was shrewder than she had thought. In truth, she felt both young and old; young, if this dismal futility could be the flower of much living; old, if by chance it should be, as she questioned, merely puerile.

She sighed for the dinner's end, but when it came and the women, following a custom she had read about without dreaming she should yet encounter it, left the men behind, she sighed to be back with her loquacious seat-mates, talk what jargon they would. Her sex imposed no conversational burden upon any one here. She fitted naturally into none of the little clusters into which the rustling file dissolved; and, after some aimless coasting among these groups where women to whom she had been presented smiled upon her vaguely and chattered of intimacies and happenings peculiarly their own, she cut adrift altogether and grounded with feigned absorption by a cabinet of Chinese lacquer. If Julie meant her kindness, she told a remarkable golden dragon, this was the time to show it, but her hostess remained invisible, and the dragon's gaze, though sympathetic, seemed presently to suggest that the social possibilities of lacquer had their limits. In this crisis, she made a lucky find of a portfolio of Craig's sketches, none of which she had ever seen.

While turning these drawings, she was approached by some one, and, looking up with the expectation of seeing Mrs. Van Ostade, met instead the gaze of a very old and excessively wrinkled lady, who, without tedious formalities, calmly possessed herself of the sketch Jean had in hand.

"They're amazingly deft," she said, after a moment. "Even the academic things have their charm. Take this charcoal, for instance," she went on, selecting another drawing. "It's not the stereotyped Julien study in the least. They couldn't extinguish the boy's individuality. Somewhere here there is another still better."

"You mean this, don't you?" Jean asked, delving into the portfolio for a bold rendering of a human back.

"Ha!" said the old lady, staring. "Of course I do. But what made you think so?"

"It was the only one of the Julien studies you could mean," returned Jean, promptly. "He did not draw like this till the year he exhibited."

The explosive "Ha!" was repeated, and the girl felt herself thoroughly assayed by the shrewd old eyes.

"You are a close student of Mr. Atwood, my dear," came dryly. "Perhaps you are a critic of contemporary art?"

Jean reddened, but, surprising the twinkle behind the sarcasm, laughed.

"Is it probable?" she asked.

"It's possible. Half the celebrities I meet seem young enough to be my grandchildren. But you are telling me nothing. Are you one of Julie Van Ostade's discoveries? She collects geniuses, you know. What is your name?"

Jean told her.

"It means nothing, you see," she smiled. "I am only a student."

"Of painting?"

"No; sculpture."

"Are you! But you look original. Where are you at work? I hope you don't mind my questions? I'm an inquisitive old person."

Jean named her school and mentioned Richter.

"But I have accomplished nothing yet," she added.

"Ha!" said the old lady. "Then it's time you did. I shall ask Richter about it. If I forget your name, I'll describe your eyes. There is something singularly familiar about your eyes."

The men and Mrs. Van Ostade made a simultaneous entrance, and the latter at once bore down on Jean's catechist.

"Peroni will sing," she announced with a note of triumph. "He volunteered as a mark of respect to you."

"Really!" The octogenarian's smile was extraordinarily expressive. "Yet they call him mercenary."