CHAPTER XII

Fliss--still Fliss despite the dignity of the name of Allenby--was, after two years, still attracting attention. She reacted to it exactly as she had reacted to her own popularity at the High School dances. It enhanced every sparkling quality.

She had been busy. After her marriage, enforcedly quiet because it would never do to draw unnecessary attention to the social unimportance of her family, she and Matthew had gone traveling. They had had a good time. She hung on his arm and petted him; she begged for things and was enthusiastically grateful for them when he gave them to her. She kept him laughing and herself in constant good temper and in every fresh extravagance of silk or fur or velvet she was prettier than before. Matthew laughed at her and let her pet him and expanded. He called her a little crook and she admitted it, but he never had the bad taste to ask her if she would have married him if he had been poor. They were frank with each other, but never moved much below the easy surface of things. Never had Matthew really played before, and under her skillful leadership he learned a good deal about play. He learned the fun of extravagance. His mother had not been a person to accept money or presents easily. Fliss rose resplendent from a shower of them. And from the depths of her little savage heart she was grateful for presents, for relief from sordidness; and grateful most of all for the sheer content with the life he made possible.

“Don’t we have _fun_?” she would say in her strongest italics, every now and then, with a swift little caress that was perfectly honest in its affection as far as it went.

“We do,” he would acknowledge with smiling, amused understanding--more than that, with pleasure.

He had his second glimpse of his wife’s remarkable adaptability when they visited his mother. His mother had been duly written of his marriage, had duly written to say she expected to see them while they were on their wedding trip, and, moved by some impulse, Matthew had deliberately sandwiched a week in the little Indiana town between the more brilliant points on their itinerary. They arrived in Peachtree about nightfall, stepping from the jumpy local train to a station platform dripping with rain and lit only by the dingy glow from a quick lunch counter window. Fliss, well acclimated by this time to waiting red-caps and taxis, looked about her and then at Matthew with amusement.

“You are completely out of the picture,” said Matthew. “You look shockingly resplendent up against Peachtree. Don’t look about you for cabs; there are no cabs. No one needs cabs here.”

His mother rounded the corner of the station house, driving her umbrella before her. Matthew seemed to recognize her by the swish of her skirts in the rain. He took her umbrella and kissed her gravely.

“Good boy,” she said. “Is this Florence?”

Fliss reached half way up on Mrs. Allenby’s spare, tall form. She was silhouetted for a moment against the black dress of the older woman. Then Mrs. Allenby inspected the bags.

“Dave Johnson can bring up your grips. You can’t manage the four of them in this rain, even if it is only a step.”

They left the bags and Fliss, as they went along together, had a consciousness of wooden sidewalks in indifferent repair, of the stillness of a country village after the train has gone through, of a town gone to bed unreasonably early.

Up a little path which crunched under their feet, on a tiny porch where a rocking chair stood grotesquely upside down so that its seat might be protected from the rain, through a low door. Matthew struck a match and, moving familiarly in the darkness, lit a lamp. They were in the parlor.

Fliss had known poverty and shabbiness. This was different from anything she had ever known. It was the acme of thrift, of cleanliness, of economy and respectability, and pride. The very glow in the Franklin stove, coming through the isinglass, was stiff and correct. The furniture, the prideful Brussels rug with its over-pink central cluster of roses was clean to extremity. The tidies on the chair backs were straight. The Bible, flanked by an imposing parlor table volume, margined the white cover on the center table. The young Mrs. Allenby, standing in the midst of the intensity of order, felt as exotic and out of place as she looked. But her mother-in-law, quickly divested of coat and hat, was on her own ground. She gave Fliss a moment to gain her impression and then led her upstairs to a bedroom which carried out the spirit of the parlor. Fliss looked dubiously at the white crocheted bedspread so perfectly wrinkleless, at the smooth chair tidies and then at Matthew.

“If I should soil something!” she exclaimed in mock terror. “I shall die if I do, Matthew! Where did your mother keep you when you were home? Not in here?”

“No, I slept in the back room. Can you make yourself comfortable?”

“Well, I’m frightened.”

“Little liar! I want you to behave yourself.”

“Behave? I’m a model of decorum. But, oh, for a gingham dress! How long are we going to stay--how long will your mother keep me?”

“A week is about the shortest.”

“Well,” sighed Fliss, inspecting her face in the mirror, “this mirror makes humps in my face, but I’d do a lot for you, Matthew. If your mother can stand me--all right, down we go.”

The supper was laid in the tiny dining-room off the living-room. A polished china lamp in the middle of the table was the centerpiece, and the dishes and linen were as spotless as everything else. Matthew and his mother talked casually about local gossip and Fliss watched Matthew, totally unfamiliar in this aspect, in his pleasant interest in the lives of the grocer, the new druggist and the business of the church. Mrs. Allenby, it seemed, was religious. Fliss decided, as she listened to her mother-in-law, that Matthew’s business ability must have come from his mother. She faced a picture of Matthew’s father, hanging over the low door. It was an enlarged photograph, done in cruel colors, but even the glassy blue which the enlarger had given to the eyes of Mr. Allenby, senior, could not disguise the fact that their expression was mild and guileless. Perhaps he, too, had an undeveloped taste for French poetry.

“Have you furnished your house?” asked Mrs. Allenby.

“We aren’t going to take a house at once. There’s an apartment hotel where we shall live for a while.”

“Hotel?”

“It’s not a traveler’s hotel, mother,” said Matthew. “It is a place where the apartments are furnished and there is a common dining-room where you can take your meals if you like.”

“Later we can find a house,” supplied Fliss, “but rents are high.”

“I should think you’d buy a house, now that you’re well off, Matthew.” The sharp, questioning eyes of the old lady flashed from her son to his wife. “Don’t you like housekeeping, Florence?”

“I don’t know a thing about it,” said Fliss, with her usual frankness. She seemed to have hit the right note with Matthew’s mother.

“Well, most girls don’t until they marry. But after you’re married, it comes natural--like taking care of children.”

There was no embarrassment in the face of her daughter-in-law, only a trace of distaste. She was silent, and the older woman did not pursue the subject. They talked of the price of food and of Mrs. Allenby’s gooseberry jam. Then Matthew smoked in the little parlor and Fliss insisted, in the human way she could, upon swathing her broadcloth suit with one of Mrs. Allenby’s aprons and helping with the dishes. Mrs. Allenby eyed her a little grimly as Fliss stacked the dishes one on top of the other without scraping off the left-over food, and Fliss caught the look.

“I’m a shock as a daughter-in-law,” she said flippantly, and yet without impudence.

“Well,” answered Mrs. Allenby, “I might not have picked you out for Matthew, but he might have done a lot worse. You’re pretty and a man likes a pretty woman. I always wished I’d been prettier. Matthew’s father was a gentleman, but he did like pretty things. And then you’re honest with my boy.”

“I am honest; I’ll always be honest. I promise you, Mrs. Allenby. I’m silly and I haven’t much brains and I suppose you can see that in most ways I’m not in Matthew’s class, but I’m going to try to give him a good time and I’m honest with him.”

She meant more than that, but it was hard to say and, after all, unnecessary. Mrs. Allenby gave her a little approbative tap on the shoulder.

“Good girl,” she said. “Don’t you worry. I can see things. It isn’t always the useful woman a man likes. I can see you aren’t much for housekeeping--and babies. Some women aren’t. But just so as you make him happy”--she paused and finished on a beautifully soft note--“he’s a lovely boy.”

It was rarely that Fliss felt that some one understood her. She felt it now. But both of them being very practical and unsentimental, they carried the discussion no further. Mrs. Allenby cloaked herself in her sharp efficiency and Fliss airily polished the plates. She told Matthew that night that she was going to get on well with his mother. It was then that he told her that she was adaptable.

“I shall never forget how you acted that night Cecily’s baby was born. That was the first time I guessed how adaptable you were.”

“That was a funny time,” said Fliss, somewhat coldly.

They stayed a week with Mrs. Allenby and by the time they left Fliss had begun to be very jocose and free with her mother-in-law. She showed her how she was teaching Matthew to dance, she rendered popular vaudeville songs on the wheezy old piano, she exhibited all her trousseau lingerie to the old lady with a running fire of absurd comment, and tried to bestow a lace trimmed boudoir cap upon her.

Then they left Peachtree for Chicago and spent a few weeks there, Matthew doing business while Fliss soaked her pagan soul in the luxury of hotels. Fliss loved hotels, their over-deep porcelain baths and the little breakfast tables with shiny silvered dishes and wasteful expanses of white linen, always immaculate. She liked having nothing to do with the machinery of her comfort, to have a telephone at her bedside which could whisk servitors out of space to do her bidding. And she liked the great hotel lounges and parlors, with their heavy commercialized luxury of velvet and gilt, their desks with low lights at which one might sit and write letters while engaging the attention of any good-looking men who might be passing. Padded corridors, handsome men and luxurious women, dining-rooms pompous with elaborate service, the ceaseless flow of people who might be coming from anything and going anywhere--it all completely captured that roving spirit of excitement which was Fliss’s imagination. She watched with ecstasy, copying here, adapting there, learning every minute.

The nervousness of buying which always accompanies a small, overworked purse, had disappeared. Fliss had money and she bought with glory, with a certain amount of dignity and restraint too. She passed, as cheap and tawdry, things which she had formerly coveted, but she penetrated the French millinery shops, the dressmaking establishments with a new air, head held high, demanding service like a barbaric princess. It seemed to her that all she had needed to give her complete content was a husband and money. She had no discontents now. She sparkled and glowed and enjoyed from morning until night.

The glow was at its best when they returned to Carrington, hurried by the long-pending declaration of war with Germany. From the apartment hotel, where Matthew had rented a friend’s suite temporarily, Fliss dashed up to see her mother. She knew exactly how she meant to deal with her mother. Mrs. Horton must not obtrude or be tedious, and if she were not she would share in Fliss’s good fortune. She entered the dreary little flat, infinitely more dreary after the glories of the wedding trip. Her mother came to meet her, kissing her affectionately and admiringly.

“I would have come to the train if you hadn’t especially said you didn’t want me to, Flissy.”

“We got in too late. It was nearly midnight and we were too tired to talk.”

Her mother surveyed her with an unconfident look as if not sure of the propriety of her own interest.

“Is everything going nicely, dearie?” she ventured.

“Of course. I had the time of my life. Such fun!” Her glance swept the tawdry walls and furnishings. “I never knew there were such lovely things in the world as I’ve seen.”

“And how is Matthew?”

“Matthew is a darling. He gives me everything, mother. Of course, he’s got it to give, but he’s such a dear about it. Oh, you just watch me make this town sit up and take notice. Mrs. Matthew Allenby! This fur alone cost Matthew a cool eight hundred. And you should see the things he bought me in Chicago.”

“Are you going to live in the hotel?”

“Just until I look around. I want a place of my own, but I don’t want to make any mistakes. There’s a lot to plan and you and father must come to see us. By the way”--and here she was for once a trifle shamefaced--“I want you to take this. Buy yourself a suit--no, I’ll come with you--and a fur (it should be mink, I think).”

“No, Flissy, you spend it on yourself.”

“I’ve gobs of money, mother, and it would help me if you fussed up a bit. I’ll want you and dad for dinner, and you see I want you to look nice.” So it was settled and the principle established. Fliss dressed her mother handsomely, and upon that rather protesting lay figure descended certain duties of chaperonage, occasional appearance with Fliss, so that no story could be started regarding Fliss’s neglect of her parents. She regulated her mother’s appearances, painted in a background. Mrs. Horton was obviously to the world a quiet woman of no social pretensions who had no worse fault than obscurity, and that was no doubt traceable to lack of money. Plain, but nice. In suppressing her parents Fliss would have done herself harm. Bringing them forward in her seemingly ingenuous, but actually deliberate way, she helped herself, and gave them a certain amount of uncomfortable pleasure.

But she gave her mother no intimacy. At first Mrs. Horton took advantage of her daughter’s married state to make several leading statements about men and matrimony and was even curious as to the possible plans for a baby. But Fliss repressed such attempts at intimacy ruthlessly. It became very apparent to her mother that as far as Fliss had planned it there were to be no grandchildren, and other domestic confidences were never made.

Fliss established herself and Matthew, after a few months in a hotel, in a house. There had been a few bad weeks when Matthew had told her he was going into the army and she had been compelled to look up the advantages of being left alone so soon after her marriage. But it had come out all right. Matthew was rejected on examination. Some leaky, treacherous valve in his heart cheated him out of his war service. That, coupled with his age, put him out of the running, and a little depressed, but quite controlled, he had accepted as his personal war service the chairmanship of the Carrington draft board. He cautioned Fliss about the propriety of economy, but he gave her her house. It was a very new house and its only sins were its newness and its rather elaborate interior decoration. Fliss had not quite learned the restraint of the inner circles of the wealthy. She could imitate them in lavishness, but to pin herself down, hold herself in--that took more careful discipline. Her house was a bit too complete and it showed that Fliss carried nothing over from the past. There was none of her mother’s furniture which Fliss could use and though she had coveted some of the things in Matthew’s rooms, she found to her dismay that she was not to be allowed to ransack his bachelor apartments. In regard to those Matthew told Fliss that he thought he would keep the furniture for his rooms on the third floor of the new house.

“Of course I have the office, but that is crowded and noisy and impossible to get to after the elevator stops running nights, unless I want to die of heart failure after the tenth flight of stairs. I think I’d like a place where I could study a bit by myself now and then. Let me have my sanctuary upstairs and then when you are entertaining people I don’t care about or too many of them I’ll sneak off there and not bother you.”

Fliss had that divine gift of being able to leave a man alone. She puckered her brow a bit, sized up the fact that his wish was very real, and agreed.

“You are a very satisfactory person to have married,” he finished.

“Do you like this place at all?” asked Fliss, looking around her breakfast-room with its old blue curtains, painted furniture and long windows at which two canaries sang charmingly.

“I like it a lot. I like to charm my eyes with it. It suits you exactly, but it’s young and there may be times when I’ll feel my age. Then the old furniture will rest me. Understand?”

“Yes,” said Fliss, quite truthfully.

So it was arranged. And sometimes when the crowd of people who flocked to Fliss’s house--an ever-increasing crowd, whether they came for Red Cross work or for amusement--were too noisy or too heterogeneous for Matthew’s taste, he undoubtedly found it sanctuary indeed. It kept him from getting tired of his home, too, kept him able to appreciate its color, its spirit, its accord with a gay, fashionable time. With all these things it was also always comfortable. Fliss could not cook, but she had discretion enough to hire a good cook, to spare no expense on her table, even though she conformed to war regulations outwardly, to have a housemaid who knew how to keep bedrooms fresh and clean and sweet smelling. Matthew’s home was orderly; he was subject to no discomforts and he had good food, as well as a wife who carried no flavor of the domestic side of living around with her. Matthew used to like to come into her room, morning or night, and see her, elaborate in negligees, always pretty, always light, always with a smile for him. He called her a good investment and he never criticized her expenditures.

Matthew came first. Fliss was thoroughly honest about that. She attended to his wants with ungrudging pleasure. Then came her next interest, the business that intrigued her greatly and aroused less kindliness and perhaps a slight feeling of revenge--establishing her position in Carrington society.

It was not nearly enough to be counted smart and fashionable by the public who read the society columns and sighed for them. Fliss could gain that end easily enough, but she wanted to be genuinely accepted by the inner circles as well--to have none of the finer lines of distinction drawn against her. She was armed with a thorough knowledge of the city. She knew who was merely rich and who combined riches with social standing approved not only in Carrington, but in New York, Florida, California. In those rather cruel years between her school and her marriage she had studied little else except the shadings of people’s importance. That was to stand her in good stead now, as was her consciousness of her own best weapons in any attack on social citadels--her frankness, her power of deference and her brilliance of manner.

She gave little parties that were very gay and bright and somehow different from other people’s little parties--probably because Fliss gave individual attention to each of her guests, in selection and entertainment. She struck the note between the amusing and the risqué and never wavered as she held it. People responded by forgetting that Fliss Allenby had anything to gain by playing her social game well, having too good a time in her company to keep recalling that her steps were premeditated.

To gain an end, she was willing to be bored indefinitely. She went to the war time charitable affairs of older women, if they were important enough, and made a bright spot of color in the company, always deferential to the elder ladies, a little simple in her talk (she avoided pretense of intellectuality like the plague and played up a certain ingenuousness of ignorance that aroused the protective, educative instinct in others). She gave Matthew’s money lavishly. She was backed by his real importance and the solidity of his war work. Also she was willing to spend any amount of time on planning her clothes. She was always different from every one else, never fading into the inconspicuous, but always managing to avoid being called cheap or tawdry, even when, like every one else, she made a fashion of economy.

In her own way she was soon unassailable. She became a figure on the social lists. She became important. Then, to crown her luck, just as the war was beginning to make Matthew always unsmiling, always worried; just as she was beginning to see that the world was veering shockingly towards pain and horror--the war was over suddenly. In the reaction from the seriousness, the reaction shared largely by people who had suffered from no strain, Fliss knew how to lead. She led. After more than two years of marriage she was still a person to brighten the public eye with interest. Matthew had taken her traveling several times and it had improved her confidence. She knew pretty largely now what people were talking about when they referred to things they had seen and places they had been outside of Carrington.

* * * * *

Forced out of the City Club one October day by an influx of visiting salesmen come to some convention, Dick Harrison met Fliss at the Lennox restaurant. It occurred to him as he nodded to her that he had not seen much of her lately and, taking a second look which was really due the green feathered turban which closed so piquantly down on her black fringe of hair, he saw that she was apparently alone and crossed at once to sit opposite her. She told him that she was alone and only down town at all because she had been delayed in her shopping.

“It’s an awfully busy week. There’s such a lot going on that if I don’t get my shopping done to-day I’ll not have another chance.”

“Is it awfully busy?”

“Don’t you really know, Dick?” She rattled off a list of functions to him. “Where are you and Cecily anyway these days? Aren’t you just a bit too domestic?”

“With three babies you’re apt to be a bit domestic. You haven’t any, have you, Fliss?”

Fliss laughed at his thrust. “Don’t be nasty, Dick. You know well I haven’t. You and Cecily have probably decided I’m a vicious wretch because I haven’t. People with children are always so much holier-than-thou to those who haven’t. They insist not only on the fun of having them, but on making the world unpleasant for the rest of us because we aren’t sharing the fun. Isn’t it a curious attitude?”

Fliss was decidedly more sophisticated.

“How’s Cecily?”

“Busy--struggling with servants.”

“Has she a lot of trouble?”

“Some. Of course we always have the faithful Ellen, but it isn’t nearly enough.”

“I remember Ellen,” said Fliss.

“She’s a regular member of the family now.”

He ordered his lunch and Fliss, eating hers slowly so that he could catch up, contemplated him gravely.

“You haven’t been in my house for six months,” she said.

“My Lord, Cecily’s baby’s only three months old. We haven’t been able to go about.”

“I know, but sometimes you surely could. When you and Matthew got so tied up with that mining business last winter I supposed it meant seeing a lot more of you. Instead it’s been less and less.”

“Well, Cecily and I are going through the baby phase now.”

“I know--but isn’t it possible that you are overdoing it?” Dick flushed a little, and Fliss leapt over his embarrassment. “It’s really bad for Cecily to be so tied down, you know.”

“How can she help it?”

“She should help it for her own sake. Don’t tell her I said so. It’s impudent enough to say it to you. Cecily has come to think I’m anathema.”

“What nonsense!”

“Truly. It began during war time. She couldn’t take the things I was doing seriously. Well, some of them weren’t too serious, but somebody had to do the cheering up! And now that the mess is all over she thinks we still ought to be long-faced. I won’t! I think we’re in for a good time. It isn’t going to help any of the poor boys who got theirs to be gloomy now.”

“How do you know?” asked Dick, teasingly, lighting his cigarette.

Fliss leaned on two unwrinkled elbows and looked at him. “Look here, Dick, if you’d been killed over there----”

“Instead of hanging around on this side nearly killing myself.”

“Poor Dick! It was rotten luck. But it wasn’t your fault they wouldn’t send you over. Or maybe it was; you were too useful on this side. But listen! If you had gone over and been killed do you think your soul would still be hanging around glooming because a few people were trying to amuse themselves? You would not!”

“I would not!” grinned Dick cheerfully.

“That’s what I told Cecily once. Cecily is in grave danger of getting too serious. With all those babies----”

“Don’t over-count, now.”

“Oh, Dick!” said Fliss, patting his hand ever so lightly with her slim glove. “Come on and play once in a while! You really mustn’t drop us, Dick, even if I am frivolous. For Matthew’s sake you ought to stand by. He considers you and Cecily the high spots in our whole list of friends.”

“Oh, I see Matthew every day,” protested Dick.

“I suppose you do, but Matthew doesn’t see Cecily and he misses it when he doesn’t. He says so. He likes to talk to her. I’ve always been jealous of her and rather glad you saw her first.”

“Don’t be foolish, Fliss.”

“As you say. Well, it’s been nice to see you. No, I must pay for my own lunch. It makes our lunching together so definitely respectable.”

It ran through Dick’s mind that afternoon at intervals that perhaps he and Cecily were getting a bit too domestic. He decided to take the matter up with her. There had been a time, immediately after his disappointing war service--a service which had kept him from going overseas because he was found to be immensely useful in training camps on his own side of the ocean--when Dick had felt like plunging into society a bit more deeply than he had ever done since his marriage; when the allurement of light talk and loose manners had been strong for a few months.

But the imminent coming of their third child had been announced and Cecily herself was too thoroughly out of sympathy with moods of lightness to even have him suggest that she join in them. She herself had been willing to make any necessary sacrifice during the war. She had waited, during the year and a half when the United States was at war, to see Dick go at any moment to France and to death. She had maintained herself in a continual state of sacrifice. The evils of the world and the crusading spirit had pressed upon her. That she had not been called upon for personal sacrifice did not mean that she could alter the attitude in which she was ready for sacrifice. And the seriousness of childbearing again had weighed her down. “Yes,” thought Dick, “we’re getting a bit heavy.”

The impression lasted until he went into his house that night and then he felt suddenly absurd. Upstairs he could hear the sounds of the babies being put to bed. Around him everything was orderly and still, waiting for him. It was comfortable and quiet and the sense of possession which so often came over him as he entered his home quite destroyed that vague feeling that he and Cecily weren’t quite getting all they might be getting out of things. And a sense of shame at even this slight disloyalty to all she had done to make him happy put extra devotion into his greeting of her.

She came down the stairs a little abstractedly. In two years she seemed, like Fliss, to have changed little--very pretty, very young still--only where the magnetism of Fliss had increased, Cecily’s had perhaps somewhat diminished. The constant day by day responsibility of caring for her babies had weighted her manner. Her mind was on the business of being a mother and a housekeeper--not on Dick, even when she kissed him.

“They are all quiet now,” she said. “If you must go up, don’t disturb them, will you?”

“No,” he promised. “Did the new housemaid come?”

“Yes, she’s here. I don’t think she’s going to be very good, though.”

“Don’t be critical, if she’s just here.”

Dick went past the nursery door, looking in to call to the two older children, then to Cecily’s room to see the new baby, so pink and well-cared for in its bassinet. Finally he went to his own room. He felt a little lonesome and would have been amazed if he had analyzed his feelings far enough to know what it was that he felt. But that was it. He wanted to be singled out for attention, and all he was getting was general care.

Cecily and Ellen were in quiet conference when he went down. They were talking in the hall about the merits of the new housemaid. He gathered that they were very disparaging and felt that their standards were over-high.

“I had lunch with Fliss Horton to-day--Fliss Allenby, I mean,” he told Cecily when she faced him as usual over the pleasant table.

“Lunch with Fliss? How did that happen?”

“I ran into her at the Lennox Restaurant. The Club was crowded and I went there at noon. She was kicking about not seeing more of us. Rattled off a bunch of talk about this and that engagement she had for this week. Are we asked to the things that go on--the Harris’s reception and this big dance Leonard Pollen is pulling off?”

“Of course we are. I don’t bother to show you the cards because we decided that we couldn’t do that sort of thing now.”

“Fliss said that she thought we were getting too domestic.”

“Fliss would think so.”

“Did you and Fliss ever quarrel?”

“Why, no, Dick. Why?”

“I just wondered, after she called it to my attention, why we hadn’t seen them in a long while. Not that I wanted to especially,” he added unnecessarily.

“We haven’t seen them for a long while. I miss Matthew, too. We used to have the finest talks. He had a way of making me think about things. I don’t know why I haven’t seen them, but I really haven’t seen anybody. For a while you know I was a bit down--low in my spirits, after----”

“Poor old Cecily. You certainly had every right”

“We mustn’t, Dick. It doesn’t sound as if we wanted the baby. I feel so guilty when I look at him to think I ever didn’t. Well, when I was feeling like that I didn’t want to see Fliss. She was so awfully gay--and so pretty and slim, you know. It used to irritate me. So I didn’t ask her here any more. And that meant not asking Matthew, of course, though I did miss him a lot.”

“Well, you’re slim enough now--and a lot prettier than Fliss ever was or could be--and with something to show for your trouble.”

“I know. But we don’t somehow jibe in ideals--Fliss and I. She likes that endless party-giving and party-going. I don’t think she wants any children.”

“Well,” said Dick, tolerantly, “she’s hardly the type.”

Cecily became a little rigid. “She hasn’t any right to dodge responsibilities. And I’m sure Matthew would like children. He is so fond of Dorothea and Leslie.”

“It’s hardly our business, dear.”

“Of course it isn’t. But I was fond of Fliss, especially after she was so fine when Dorothea was born. You know we did entertain for her and tried to make her know a few more people when she was just married, until we went to war. But she doesn’t seem to have much depth. Do you like a person who hasn’t more depth than Fliss?”

“I have all grades of liking,” pleaded Dick. “She’s amusing.”

“Well, if you feel so keenly about it,” said Cecily, “I’ll ask them to dinner next week. I’ll be glad to see Matthew and we’ll have an old time party.”

“Theater afterwards--maybe the Orpheum? We can get home early from there.”

“If you like,” assented Cecily.

Dick felt as if a point had been conceded to him when he was not in the least anxious for a personal concession. He went a few mental steps backward to see just where he had gone off the point, but it was an idle chase and he abandoned it after a moment.

Their evenings now had become rather of one pattern. They talked or read; Mrs. Warner came in; they went driving in the Warner’s big car or in Dick’s small one; they went to a moving picture or made a call on Dick’s mother--but always with the need of getting home early to the baby--always with the fear that Cecily was getting overtired hanging over them. Even their pleasures, their diversions, were never carefree. There were times when Dick felt that nurses and doctors and precautions about health had surrounded them rather unpleasantly long. But any such thoughts were always suppressed by the feeling that it was immensely selfish to feel any personal repressions when he had three healthy children and Cecily had been through so much. Three babies in four years! He had come to know and abhor the tone in which people, especially women, made that statement.

His talk seemed to bother Cecily. She brought it up again later in the evening when they had come home from a ride in the country and were giving the children a final inspection for the night. Dorothea and Leslie, in their white cribs, sturdy little bodies outlined under the miniature coverlets, were very pleasant to look at. It was a rite with Cecily--this last look--a reward for all the care they caused her and a further prayer for their health and safety.

“Don’t you think,” she said softly, as she stood looking at them, “that they are much more important than all the fun we might have had playing like Fliss?”

“You can’t compare two such dissimilar things,” said Dick, and then knew immediately that his remark had been true, but inadequate.

“But you’d sooner have these?”

He became a little irritated that she should have to ask such a question. Merely asking it assumed that he was hankering after things that he was not even wanting--that he wasn’t a devoted parent.

“Wouldn’t you?” he countered, rather cruelly.

Cecily merely looked at him in high reproach.

Then, because he felt a little conscience-smitten at the fact that Cecily was hurt, he followed her into her room and played with the little baby, who had waked up for his supper. He was a very gay father and ordinarily Cecily loved this mood and joined him in it, but to-night she was wrapped in seriousness.

“Of course they’ll be older soon, and then I can leave them to a nurse, but while I am still nursing the baby, I don’t see how I can manage a lot of society.”

“For Heaven’s sake, Cecily, don’t be so absurd. Who wants you to do society? I wouldn’t let you if you wanted to. Who could be happier than I am just as I am?”

Cecily sighed. “I know you’re happy,” she said, “and I’m happy. But this thing that came up to-night isn’t new. I hear it from other people--people who talk about my being ‘tied down’ and say I ought to enjoy myself while I’m young; people who say that they never see you about any more and talk about how you used to enjoy dancing and such things; women who say they don’t intend to have babies. You’ve no idea how they talk.”

“Haven’t I? Don’t I get the looks from the women who imply I’m some sort of monster because you have three children at your age?”

“I love the children. I couldn’t not have them.”

“Now, look here, Cecily, you’re tired out to-night. The worry of that new maid and the change in the baby’s feeding have left you flat. You just stop worrying about all this. We’ve been over it before, you know, lots of times, and we like our way of doing things. We may be a little out of fashion--we may not do things just as other people are doing them, but we are doing them the way we want to do them and that ought to satisfy us. I’m absolutely with you and I’m not hankering after any gay society. I do think we ought to get out as much as we can--for your sake--but while these kids are small and with the damned lack of servants--or lack of damned servants--we’ll just have to stay by the ship. And you mustn’t worry.”

All of which was very logical and straight. Only Cecily had developed a little taste for virtue and the praise of virtue and the fact that they had chosen their own way was not enough. She wanted to be reassured that they had chosen the higher and better way and Dick should not have qualified by saying that they should go out as much as possible. However, he had stated the case, and Cecily was reasonable enough to know it.

She lay awake rather late, pondering things--whether things weren’t a bit unjust, since Fliss and her kind (she wanted to pin the problem down to Fliss somehow) had such a good time without responsibilities--what men liked in women and why Fliss looked so well in flame colored things--whether Matthew wanted children and wasn’t secretly unhappy. Finally, catching herself in the midst of a picture of Fliss miserable in a childless old age while she herself--she laughed, proving that she had that sense of humor which her stepfather had questioned once, said aloud, “Can this be the fair Wendy?” and went to sleep.